Speaking truth to power: The academic as jester stimulating management learning

The jester embodies an ancient social institution, which serves a paradoxical purpose: to mitigate the excesses of power, while serving and supporting the ruler through a license to jest. The metaphor of the jester, used constructively, offers a unique window on the contradictions of organizational studies and their paradoxical role in relation to corporate practices. We explore how jesting may inform academic work through using humour and laughter to deconstruct organizational taboos and convey truth to power. We suggest that academic jesting constitute a wise and undervalued way in which management learning can occur.

The Enablers

The COVID-19 pandemic will forever be remembered as a pivotal event in American history. Written by one of the world's foremost experts on leadership and followership, this book centers on the first six months of the pandemic and the crises that ran rampant. The chapters focus less on the former president, Donald Trump, than on his followers: on people complicit in his miserable mismanagement of the crisis in public health. Barbara Kellerman provides clear and compelling evidence that Trump was not entirely to blame for everything that went wrong. Many others were responsible including his base, party, administration, inner circle, Republican elites, members of the media, and even medical experts. Far too many surrendered to the president's demands, despite it being obvious his leadership was fatally flawed. The book testifies to the importance of speaking truth to power, and a willingness to take risks properly to serve the public interest.

Abigail of Maon and the Wise Woman of Abel: Speaking Truth to Power

In 1 Samuel Abigail of Maon and then in 2 Samuel the Wise Woman of Abel dare to Speak Truth to Power. Each woman employs the wisdom of a moral appeal to the male aggressor’s better inclinations to deescalate a situation where her community is seriously threatened with violent and immediate annihilation.

Politics and Ethic of Care of the Self in Albert Camus’s The Plague

Albert Camus’ The Plague articulates a new aesthetic of existence that resists biopolitical normalization. It means cultivating one’s self and not attempting to discover an authentic and hidden self because it entails a continual process of becoming. The sudden eruption of plague in Oran, signifies a rupture in history of its people as the “bored populace is consumed by commercial habits aimed at making money”. In The Plague, if some people become more self-centred and insensitive, characters such as Rieux, Rambert, Peneloux and Joseph Grand show concern for the suffering people and stand in solidarity with them. Their characterization as ordinary individuals who assume responsibility for others’ existence in times of disaster reflects Camus’ hermeneutic of care of the self as an ethical project. Camus aptly asserts that “ordinary acts of courage and kindness are more helpful than the illusion of superheroes”. Deriving a cue from Foucault, Heidegger and Levinas, the paper attempts to explore how care of the self is intertwined with ethics and politics. It is argued that without spiritual discipline and caring for others, the ethical transformation of self cannot take place. It indicates fashioning of the self more freely and self-reflexively and thus speaking truth to power and sacrificing for others. The paper examines this poetics of self which shares an ethical relationship with truth, freedom and kindness.