When Management and Organization Came to the Village of Jante

Abstract

For many, the question who do we think we are? connotes a very specific moral, the Law of Jante: You are not to think that you are anything special. As formulated by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (1933/2010), this law was once a satirical description of the social norms that Sandemose meant governed the behaviours and attitudes of working-class Norwegians and Danes into conformity and hostility towards individual success in the fictional village of Jante. Over the years, however, it has come to depict the egalitarian Scandinavian cultures as well as to acquire a kind of proverbial resonance both within and outside these cultures. In this chapter, it is argued that life in academia historically has represented quite the opposite of the Law of Jante, but that it is increasingly imbued by the moral of Sandemose’s satire. This development is fuelled by an assemblage of different ideas and phenomena such as the postmodern demise of science as a grand narrative, the expansion of higher education, the neoliberal university, and the Bologna reform. Each and every one of these changes, we argue, in different ways and to different extents, forms a fertile soil for the Law of Jante, and together contribute to the vulgarization of the academic scholar’s (dis)position. We then trace how the Law of Jante has been enacted by business schools, struggling to strike a balance between business and academia or, as (Engwall, Mercury meets Minerva: Business studies and higher education: The Swedish case. Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, 2009) has put it with reference to Roman mythology, between Mercury and Minerva. Finally, we problematize the Law’s (de)moralizing consequences for scholars in the fields of management and organization.