Book Review: The Triumph of Emptiness: Consumption, Higher Education, and Work Organization

Abstract

At the turn of the 19th century, American humorist Benjamin Franklin King became famous for a poem called The Pessimist in which he wrote “nothing to do but work, nothing to eat but food, nothing to wear but clothes, to keep from going nude.” King’s bleak poem evoked the disaffection of his generation that emerged from the chaos and trauma of the Civil War and expressed his grim worry that humanity may have reached the end point of human progress. I was reminded of King’s weary poem while reading Mats Alvesson’s The Triumph of Emptiness. Alvesson’s book analyzes the growing weight of modern organizational life. Each chapter of the text focuses attention on a particular aspect of how consumerism and modern management practices have eroded our sense of human progress. Alvesson methodically details our collective disenchantment with decaying standards of quality in higher education, work, professions, leadership, and organizations. Alvesson’s overarching thesis is that we have become absorbed into a lifeworld of commodity capitalism in which the “puffery of modern marketing has replaced the concrete and traditional aspects of economic exchange with illusory substitutes.” The result is an economy of persuasion where the superficial trumps the substantive and the spectacle subsumes the real. Ultimately, Alvesson concludes, we are left with the triumph of emptiness—a term that describes the alienation, disaffection, and disenchantment with the world that arises from the increasing rationalization of everyday life. The Triumph of Emptiness is organized into 11 chapters. The first chapter begins with the end. Here, Alvesson describes the unanticipated long-term effects of consumerism which are characterized by a heightened state of social comparison, which he terms a zero-sum game, a tendency toward a heightened sense of self, which he terms grandiosity, and an increasing erosion of our ability to understand the various ways in which we construct a sense of value, which he terms illusion tricks. The second chapter describes the causal source of the loss of value in society and our tendency toward social comparison. The perversity of social comparison is that we do it in order to feel good about ourselves, but it inevitably has the opposite effect. Social comparison, Alvesson reminds us, is the foundation of consumerism. The third chapter describes the ironic consequence of the loss of value that arises from a consumer culture that constantly demands social comparison—the loss of satisfaction that comes from 1163860 MLQ0010.1177/13505076231163860Management LearningBook Review book-review2023