The Theory and Practice of Utopia in a Total Institution: The Pineapple Panopticon

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2012 33: 1735Organization StudiesStewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha and Arménio Rego

The Theory and Practice of Utopia in a Total Institution: The Pineapple Panopticon

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The Theory and Practice of Utopia in a Total Institution: The Pineapple Panopticon

Stewart CleggUniversity of Technology, Sydney, Australia and Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, Portugal

Miguel Pina e CunhaNova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, Portugal

Arménio RegoUniversity of Aveiro, Portugal

AbstractGenocide has been a constant presence in the history of humanity throughout the ages. Recently, calls to study the organization of genocide and genocidal organizations have been increasing. In this paper we study the functioning of the S-21 extermination camp, an instrument of Ângkar, ‘The Organization’, which imposed genocide on the Cambodian people in the 1970s. We analyse the conditions that enable the organization of genocide, showing that three pillars seem to play essential roles: a utopian vision; support of this vision by total institutional spaces, and the control commitments of the people caught in the utopian vortex. Genocide appears as a potential outcome of the particular type of organization combining these three processes.

Keywordsduality, genocide, Kampuchea, power, total institutions, utopia

Introduction

The extremity of genocide as an organized – sometimes ‘highly organized’ as Adelman (2000, p. 431) remarks – and recurring process should invite scholars to include it in research agendas rather than to ignore it (Clegg, 2006). In the past, dualistic explanations have emphasized either the agency of the monstrous person (Arendt, 1963) or the structure of the monstrous context (Bauman,

Corresponding author:Stewart Clegg, University of Technology, Nova School of Business and Economics, P.O. Box 123, Broadway, Sydney, 2007, Australia Email: [email protected]

464611OSS331210.1177/0170840612464611Organization StudiesClegg et al.2012

Article



1736 Organization Studies 33(12)

1991). The latter, in particular, has framed recent contributions to organization studies (Clegg, Courpasson, & Phillips, 2006). Conventionally, the organization of genocide has been seen as pri-marily an effect of either specific agents or specific structures.

In the first case, using a micro focus, participants in genocides are viewed as psychological outliers or as ordinary people engaged in ‘unreflective obedience’ (Nohria & Gurtler, 2004, p. 3). However, genocides are not necessarily the result of psychopathology (Wilson, 2010) and the notion of ‘unreflective obedience’ is not theoretically persuasive. This is the case because to obey is to follow a rule: rules cannot be followed without understanding them, in such a way that meaning is assigned to the rule guiding, and thus producing, the action in question, otherwise action would be completely random rather than rule-guided. It would display no pattern. Patterned action demonstrates the existence of a rule being applied to produce social action rather than random behaviour. Thus, application entails reflection. Empirical evidence of obedi-ence distress supports this position (Hinton, 2005; Milgram, 1974). Additionally, orders may be followed, not only because alternative courses of action are unavailable that constitute an escape from the situation, but also because there is active or passive support for the order (Babiak & Hare, 2007; Kellerman, 2004).

Second, macro explanations can lose sight of agency through structural over-determination (Goldhagen, 1996; see Hinton, 1998, for a critique), as Lukes (1974) argued. The justification of actions as the ‘following of orders’, as if the order being produced in doing so is some sort of causally antecedent device to which action is a necessary response, constitutes the ‘structure’ as the necessary condition of action. Imagine a marionette pulling its own strings to picture this representation. Macro explanations that deny agency by turning individuals into mere puppets of history, culture or structure are unsatisfactory. Meso organizational explanations may be necessary to articulate macro and micro types of explanations.

In this paper we ask ‘What are the organizational conditions of genocide?’ and question the basis of dualistic thinking about genocidal organized actions. We conduct an historical case study focused on the S-21 extermination camp and its role in the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) revolu-tion, as the central and most important political prison of the regime, showing that three pillars seem to play essential roles in imagining and organizing genocide: a utopian vision; total institu-tional spaces, and control commitments. We organize the paper, first, by developing the conceptual background, focusing on utopia. Second, we characterize the contextual background in terms of the attempt by the Khmer Rouge to create a new utopia. Third, we elaborate the method and the sources that we have used. Fourth, we develop the argument that what made the Khmer utopia pos-sible was a specific combination of utopia, total institutions, and control commitment. Implications for organizations are considered.

Genocide, Utopia, and Organization

Genocidal contexts are under-theorized in the organizational literature (Goldhagen, 2009; Stokes & Gabriel, 2010; Whiteman, 2009; in passing, Sims, 2005), which is unfortunate for two rea-sons. First, extreme cases are not only a potentially rich source of data for organizational studies but also display the ‘pathologies of normalcy’ in a heightened manner. By the ‘pathologies of normalcy’ we mean a heightened form of everyday tendencies that become ethically transgres-sive (see Clegg et al., 2006; also see Abel, 1951; Cohen, 1954). Single case research of such pathologies ‘exploits opportunities to explore a significant phenomenon under rare or extreme circumstances’ (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007, p. 27). Ignoring single case processes may thus be an obstacle to theory development (Siggelkow, 2007; also see Gerring, 2004). Second, from



Clegg et al. 1737

a moral standpoint, organizational scholars should be interested in genocides as complex, organ-ized processes. It is our responsibility as a community not only to consider how to contribute to the creation of better organizations but also to analyse the organization of those spaces in which genocide incubates.

Kavanagh (2004) suggests that it is not only conservative thought that has

linked the totalitarianism and fascism, which have punctuated the 20th century, with the Romantic pursuit of utopian visions … Romanticism leads not to utopia, but instead creates Hitlers and the dystopias of Nazi Germany, ethnically cleansed of those that do not fit the perfect vision. (Kavanagh, 2004, p. 455)

In circumstances of totalitarian rule the dominant political organization often adopts a mission framed by the creation of a future utopia, such as a Third Reich or a Workers and Peasants’ state. Utopia, in its literal Greek, is ‘‘No-place’’. Rather than a concrete somewhere or other, a utopia is an imagined political community, where the emphasis is on the fact that its imaginary is defined by a restricted set of membership categorization devices constituting it (such as including only Aryans and excluding Jews). In such an imaginary, the ends formulate the perfection of life on Earth as the exclusion of that which potentially pollutes it: in such a context, by definition, no one fit to dwell there could or would want to deny these conditions of existence. Hence, any resistance to the uto-pia, real or imagined, is evidence of unfitness. Only the means for achieving utopia can be ration-ally negotiable, not the destination. The most pervasive means are those of a total institution.

A total institution, as defined by Goffman (1961), is an institution where all parts of life of the individuals under the institution are subordinated to and dependent upon the authorities of the organization. Organizations that assume totalitarian control of a state and society while negating pluralism are a major mechanism for the creation of ‘total institutions’ (Goffman, 1961). Goffman (1961) has been criticised by commentators such as Ritzer (2011) for constructing an ahistorical formal concept, devoid of considerations of political domination, ideology and power. The re-appropriation of Goffman’s concept of total institution by Clegg et al. (2006) and its deployment to analyse a number of cases of 20th-century ‘heart of darkness’ goes some way to rectifying this oversight, as does the recent overview afforded by Scott (2010, 2011). From these more histori-cally and case-driven accounts we can draw the conclusion that not all total institutions (which are extreme forms of organizations in and of themselves) are, or become, genocidal, even though they operate through mortification processes that produce subjected subjects. The argument of our paper is that it is only where there is a singular utopian vision, combined with processes that induce ‘control commitment’, whether authentic or not, within a total institutional space in which there are no ‘free spaces’ similar to those that Goffman described, that such genocidal tendencies occur.

The totalitarian variant of utopian political philosophy postulates an identity between individual and collective goals that embeds the goals of every single individual in the structure of the society, ideal human being, and actual history. ‘An individual cannot dance out of tune, but can only con-form’ (Gadshiev, 2010, p. 286). Lübbe (2010, p. 237) makes the point that such situations ‘are either fortified within the inner being of their subjects, or they collapse … Mere supporters are not enough. The moral mechanism of totalitarian rule consists precisely in not being satisfied with mere support.’ Kanter (1968, p. 501) calls the achievement of such a situation one in which there is ‘control commitment’.

In Kanter’s case, control commitment occurs where actors uphold norms and obey authority because of their positive evaluations of what they are doing. In situations that seek to create control commitment, demands made of one are constituted as right, moral, just and harmonious with the




values that one upholds and which define utopia, and which authorities have every right to sanction if these demands are not followed. As Kanter (1968, p. 502) notes, where members have formed evaluative control commitments one would expect less deviance, challenge to authority or ideo-logical controversy. We cannot use the notion of control commitment in quite the same way: Kanter assumes an authenticity to control commitment; we do not. For us, whether control commitment is authentic or not, is immaterial: rather, we see displays of such commitment as staged dramaturgy. Many props support this staging: Marxist-Leninist and Khmer Rouge ideology prepared the scripts; the years of struggle forged a severe discipline hardened in hatred of all enemies of the revolution. Reality was made to fit the imaginary that these props constructed by dehumanizing alleged ene-mies, extracting confessions, and rounding up ‘strings of traitors’. What is important is the fact that the Khmer Rouge actors were under pressure to show commitment in terms of revolutionary zeal and that they should espouse this commitment. In fact, the work of S-21 was dedicated to demon-strating the inauthenticity of such commitments in those within its grasp; additionally, self-worth and regard for Ângkar, the omnipotent Khmer Rouge organization, were shown by the extreme zealousness used in interrogating and annihilating victims. Our argument will be that it was the combination of pressures creating interrogation of control commitments with the total institutional structure of S-21 that created an extreme and genocidal context. The strength of displays of control commitments minimized the possibility of new interpretive horizons opening, diverting old canali-zations of action.

The Kampuchean utopia

Utopia, as ten Bos (2000) notes it, is first and foremost rational in its own terms. The Khmer Rouge utopia would be one in which the evils and miseries of Khmer feudalism had vanished, to be replaced by peace, harmony and happiness by subordinating the individual to the collective; reckoning a-historically, and de-contextualizing human beings so that the collective will is total and controls individuals in detail, unavoidably using violence and power to keep everything under control and to ward off foreign influences. The work of S-21 was above all systematically rational in its interrogation of perceived obstacles to the creation of a better world.

Although utopia has been widely discussed generally (Manuel & Manuel, 1977; Nozick, 1974) as well as in previous organization studies contributions (such as Grey & Garsten, 2002; the contributions in Parker, 2002, as well as Parker, 1998), there has been little systematic discussion of the organizational aspects of utopian projects, other than Kanter (1968), Kavanagh (2004), and Sillince and Barker’s (2012) account of the ‘imaginative function’ of utopian metaphors about ‘what-could-be’, drawing on Scott (1990, p. 169).

In what follows, we start by representing the fundamental traits of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) in terms of a political organizational apparatus, the Ângkar (or The Organization). One might think of the Ângkar as equivalent to ‘The Party’ in other contexts. The Ângkar was the overall political organization that seized the state and sought to redefine civil society; the empirical focus of this paper, S-21, was one of the specific organizations established in order to achieve that part of its mission that entailed dealing with deviant categories in the overall schema of things in the new society being created. For those imagined to be opponents of reform there were the powers of one crucial element of the Ângkar, whose purpose was purification: S-21.

S-21 was an organization dedicated to cataloguing error. S-21 was devised as a total institution (Clegg et al., 2006; Goffman, 1961) whose function was to weed out deviance in pursuit of utopia, through incarceration, confession and death. In the total institution in question, practice was con-fined, dominated, impersonal and rigid; its institutional purpose was to extract a confession from



Clegg et al. 1739

those who were categorically deviant, before their execution (Scott, 2010, p. 215). Confession by the inmate functioned as a means of signalling acceptance of the institution’s view of them, thus legitimating for the regime the treatment they received as that befitting a traitor to the envisaged utopia that promised release from the iniquities of the past in a presently conceived future perfect. We might say that the macro structures of Ângkar underlay the contingently derived substructures that were instantiated in the small spaces within specific organizations such as S-21 in which inter-rogation, torture and confession were wrought. Through these practices the state sought to attain utopia by eliminating deviance.

The Khmer Rouge, a Maoist-inspired political and military movement, emerged as the victor of a civil war that took place in the context of a very unstable geopolitical condition and region. Cambodia was involved in the political struggles taking place in Southeast Asia, mostly in Vietnam, where the interests of major powers, namely China, the US and the USSR, were strug-gling for supremacy. The Khmer Rouge, as a political movement, promised an escape from the corruption, poverty and institutionalized degradation that had characterized Cambodia histori-cally (Brinkley, 2011). The Vietnam War, in which 600,000 Khmer perished as a result of American bombings on the Cambodian side of the border, in illegal and secret action taken against Viet Cong supply trails, hastened the end of this society. The Khmer Rouge took power with first Vietnamese and then Chinese support, after deposing the Lon Nol government on 1 April 1975, in the final days of American involvement in Vietnam, which ended with the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. Led by a French-educated clique who had been exposed to Communist ideals, the Khmer Rouge embarked on creating an agrarian, egalitarian, anti-professional, anti-technology and self-sufficient society – a primitive communist utopia (Kiernan, 2008). The revolutionary process used to try and create utopia was to achieve a measure of radicalism never witnessed before, even in other communist regimes.

To build this new society, the pillars of the old were destroyed: families were disbanded, meals became communal, and the village, with its sense of community, gave place to cells organized around work projects devised and controlled by the government, while Buddhism, with its moral and educational guidance, was prohibited. The new society would be a classless society of peasants, with no money, no markets, no schools, no religion, nothing ideologically or politically ‘incorrect’. It would be a wholly new form of social organization, radical even in Chinese Maoist terms. In this peasant society, all the ‘new people’ (a broad label encompassing all non-peasants) were, to paraphrase Mary Douglas (1966), matter out of place; hence the need to either transform or eliminate these human obstacles to utopia. Initially, transformation con-sisted of emptying the middle classes from the cities and forcing them into re-educative hard labour in the fields.

There was a strong collective sense of identity in the Khmer Rouge movement. The Khmer Rouge was a distinct group with a deep sense of dislocation from and humiliation by the prior state and society. Their vision promised a way out, a ‘cure’ for their society’s ills. The cure – to turn the total population into peasants – was drastic and it was assumed that its consequences would ‘eradi-cate’ the problem of bourgeois domination. The idea of DK was thus utopia founded upon an ideol-ogy of purity. It was meant to create ‘The cleanest, most fair society ever known in our history’ (Hinton, 2005, p. 8). The search for purity is one of the principal reasons that genocides and ethnic cleansing occur. Violence and bloodshed are unleashed to eliminate those unworthy of utopia, those whose past commitments threaten the creation of conditions for a cleansed peace that those whose worth has been proven would enjoy. In the case of DK, those who were seen as enemies were conceived of as ‘microbes’ whose eradication was likened to a public health campaign (Hinton, 2005, pp. 154–155): it was proposed that ‘diseased’ elements should be removed from the




societal organism in a process of ideological cleansing so that the revolutionary body could grow healthily. Organized genocide became the instrument of ideological cleansing.

The process of genocide in Cambodia followed the same steps as other genocides (Hinton, 2005; Stanton, 1998). For genocide to unfold, several organizational requisites need to be created just as others are destroyed: (a) bureaucratic instruments that provide rules for assigning the popu-lation to categories of worthiness and unworthiness need to be constructed that serve to create distanciation of actions – actions that flow not from the exercise of agency so much as being the consequence of application of objective rules for testing worthiness – much as the Inquisition func-tioned; (b) confessions needed to be extracted, and recorded, from the unworthy who, it is assumed, must be guilty of something, with which they would ‘out’ themselves; and (c) an organizational capacity created that could centralize and legitimate power relations as well as the categorical dif-ferences establishing unworthiness, and the actions that flowed from these categorical distinctions. An autocratically fused ideological and repressive apparatus is the most perfect organization for undertaking this process as only such an apparatus can claim a monopoly on both the means of violence and legitimation. S-21 was the centre of such an apparatus, a microcosm of the revolution as state of exception (Cunha, Clegg, Rego, & Lancione, 2012).

Method

DK provides an extreme case of a total institution, and as such is a ‘salient event’ and a rich context for bottom-up theory building via qualitative methods (Bettis, 2012; Lee, Mitchell, & Sablynski, 1999, p. 179). As Flyvbjerg (2006, p. 229) pointed out, ‘the extreme case can be well-suited for getting a point across in an especially dramatic way’ (original italics). The case suggested itself after a visit by two of the authors to Tuol Sleng, the current name for the museum situated in the precinct that was S-21.1 The site was impressive and the references by a local guide to a terrible and deadly ‘Organization’ attracted our professional attention as organization scholars. We began to read and write about the case in an exploration that has lasted for several years (Cunha, Rego, & Clegg, 2010, 2011).

After immersing ourselves in the literature on DK we turned to David Chandler’s book on S-21 as our central data source. Secondary sources are appropriate when direct access is not possible which, for obvious historical reasons, is the case here. Despite the indirect evidence, the extremity of the phenomenon under review renders it valuable for analysis. We used Chandler because this is a work that is fully dedicated to S-21 and that is well respected, thus serving as a legitimate source for the case. His investigation is deeply researched, resulting from interviews with participants of various sorts (see column 3, Table 1), as well as extensive archival work in Tuol Sleng. Chandler is a significant Cambodia scholar (Short, 2004, p. 290); major authors on Cambodia’s DK regime and Cambodian authors on S-21 cite his book (e.g., Ea & Sim, 2001; Hinton, 2005; Short, 2004). All these reasons give us confidence in the resources used to study S-21. Other sources included books on the Khmer Rouge regime and consultation of available works in the Documentation Center of Cambodia (www.dccam.org), used especially in interpreting the findings.

To analyse the data, we employed semiotic clustering, a technique that allows researchers to uncover successive layers of meaning, from surface signs to an underlying and conceptually abstract structure, using data to interrogate theory and theory to interpret data in the process (Manning, 1987). In this clustering, data are organized into a table or figure with three columns. One column refers to direct textual evidence (Table 1, column 3). It includes the main ways in which informants approached the concept of interest (Table 1, column 2; Figure 1, left-hand col-umn). Another column identifies a pattern underlying the denotative meanings and builds new



Clegg et al. 1741

meaning via thematic association (Table 1, column 1; Figure 1, middle column). The last column involves an interpretation effort similar to the transposition of data from first-order concepts to second-order themes, synthesizing data in a deeper structure. The overarching structure (Figure 1, right-hand column) provides a plausible interpretation of the process rather than a final, authoritative and exclusive interpretation.

Table 1. Representative data for each theme/concept (in parentheses: page numbers, Chandler, 2000)

Second-order themes First-order concepts Representative first-order evidence

a. Utopia as totalitarian liberation

a1. Liberation through apocalyptical utopia

• ‘If the Ângkar arrests everybody, who will be left to make a revolution?’ (76)

• ‘Schizophrenic regime … at once terrified and terrifying’ (51)

• ‘Torture was a tool’ (114) Explanation: Revolution intended to liberate

people from the shackles of the old regime. Terror was critical to attain liberation. It intended to empower the oppressed

a2. DK as totalitarian project

• [Doeun, an officer] ‘planted fruit trees without permission’ (64)

• ‘People feared being wrong unconsciously’ (87) Explanation: Anything anyone did could be

constituted as errorb. Perpetrators as

victims, victims as perpetrators

b1. Inflicting terror to ‘clean’

• ‘A full scale reign of terror’ (82)• ‘Humane treatment of the prisoners was

almost always out of the question’ (39) • ‘Prisoners were often covered with blood’ (82) Explanation: Terror to detect error b.2. Receiving terror • ‘I was losing some of the people who were

working with me. One day we were working together and then they were taken away’ (87)

• ‘And I thought: ‘Today it’s their turn. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow’ (87)

Explanation: Error in the terrorc. Subjected subjects c1. S-21 as vanguard of

revolution• ‘One hand is for production, the other for beating the enemy’ (41)

• ‘Interrogators at S-21 had been taught that the party’s enemies were to be ‘smashed’’ (129)

Explanation: S-21’s role as part of the liberation; staff as liberators

c2. S-21 as oppression • ‘Every act could be construed as political’ (87) • ‘People were insecure psychologically’ (87) Explanation: Political correctness is always able

to find devianced. The eye of the

pineappled1. Ângkar as

panopticon• ‘The Organization knows what is good and

what is evil’ (58) • ‘Their [the prisoners’] weak point is that they

are in our hands’ (85)

(Continued)




The derivation of the second-order themes and overarching dimensions is thus an interpretive, not a mechanical process (Langley, 1999); iteration occurs between the data, existing theories and the authors’ efforts to make sense of what the data ‘tell’ about the research problem. Reliability checks were hard to obtain, given the nature of the case. To address the acceptability of the interpretations, we followed a different path. The first author organized the data and was subsequently questioned and interrogated by the co-authors to test the plausibility of the interpretations (Mantere, Schildt, & Sillince, 2012). From this process, a gestalt emerged (Garud, Gehman, & Kuramaswamy, 2011) that was judged by the interpreters as plausible. Plausibility is an important criterion in this approach as there is no one correct way of conducting the succession of iterative cycles. Our account should thus be viewed as one possibility of interpretation. As an exercise in induction we were led to three over-arching organizational dimensions that enable the process of organizing genocide.

Second-order themes First-order concepts Representative first-order evidence

Explanation: The Ângkar knows everything. Being associated with the Ângkar as source of power

d2. Ângkar as synopticon

• ‘We were all spying on each other’ (87)• ‘Everybody was accusing everybody else’ (76)Explanation: The Ângkar knows about everyone. The Ângkar takes power

e. Identity as inclusion and exclusion

e1. Good life stories as good identity

• ‘Purges intended to purify the Party and the nation’ (46)

• ‘Life stories must be good’ (91) Explanation: The revolution as a vehicle for

societal purification e2. Narrative identities

could change• ‘Once infected anyone can infect others’ (44)

• ‘We all carry vestiges of our old class character’ (44)

Explanation: The revolution as a detergent of the impure that should later be eliminated. Vestiges of old class could, however, re-emerge at any moment

f. Slavery as liberation f1. Work as pride • ‘I made myself concentrate on work, work and again work’ (146)

• ‘The pleasures they derived from cruelty … enhanced their satisfaction’ (136)

Explanation: Genocidal work as a job that needs to be done

f2. Work as slavery • ‘The organization orders us like cows or buffaloes’ (95)

• ‘My life is completely dependent on the Party’ (65)

• ‘We live like animals in cage’ (95) Explanation: Genocidal work as murderous

slavery

Table 1. (Continued)



Clegg et al. 1743

Case Analysis

Figure 1 presents the data structure, depicting on the right-hand side the three overarching dimen-sions that resulted from analysis to offer a theoretically abstract and parsimonious analysis of the organizational dynamics of S-21, the central prison of the DK regime.

After codifying the data, we grouped 12 first-order organizing categories (a1, a2, … f1, f2). These correspond to the inner tensions of six different themes (a to f). The first has to do with ideol-ogy. DK was an intense and explicitly ideological environment. The utopia of a clean, classless society appeared in two forms: as liberation intended to empower the people, and as a project that

• Liberation through apocalyptical utopia a1

• Ideology as agency

• DK as totalitarian project• Ideology as coercion

• Inflicting terror to “clean”• Mission as agency

• Receiving terror• Mission as coercion

a. Utopia as totalitarian

liberation

b. Perpetrators as victims, victims as perpetrators

a2

b1

b2

Utopia

• S-21 as vanguard of the revolution• Mission as agency

• Ângkar as panopticon

• Control as agency

• Ângkar as synopticon

• Control as coercion

• S-21 as oppression• Mission as coercion

c. Subjected subjects

d. The eye of the pineapple:

being under the gaze

c1

c2

d1

d2

Total institution

• Identity:good life stories as good identity e1• Identity as agency

• Narrative identities could change• Identity as coercion

• Work as pride

• Commitment as agency

• Work as slavery

• Commitment as coercion

e. Identity as inclusion and

exclusion

f. Slavery as liberation

e2

f1

f2

Control

commitment

First-order concepts Second-order themes Overarching dimensions

Figure 1. Data structure: from direct evidence to conceptual abstraction




excluded those who, according to the Party line, did not fit, who were not worthy of membership in the new order of things. The result, as expressed in Figure 1, column 2, theme (a), is the creation of a totalitarian form of liberation. The ideology both invested powers in distant and mysterious figures such as Pol Pot, who were constructed as if they had special insight, wisdom and courage, and was reinforced by the physical and social isolation of the Khmer Rouge leadership from the rank and file as well as by the rationality inherent in the processes of interrogation: if the people being interrogated were not guilty of something they would not be under interrogation.

A second conceptual pair (b) referred to the role of DK agents as instruments of correction. Their mission was to inflict terror and, in the process, with respect to those deemed incorrect, to ‘cut their hearts off’. Killing in the name of the revolution was honourable. Even these instruments of correction, the disciples of the new order, would have to be sacrificed if they were tested and confessed to involvement in anti-revolutionary activities. Inflicting terror incorrectly, for example, could be the prelude to becoming oneself a target of terror. Perpetrators could easily become vic-tims if they did not follow specified procedures established in a strictly specified daily routine of rules that had to be followed.

The mission of the organizations established to frame the ideological vision constitutes a third conceptual pair. On the one hand, for their members these organizations were sources of empower-ment as the vanguard of the revolution and, on the other hand, they were brutal and oppressive elements of constraint. Theme (c) captures this paradox by classifying these organizations and their members under the label of ‘subjected subjects’. There is considerable similarity in this finding with the emphasis that Kanter (1968) placed on mortification, a concept originally derived from Goffman (1961), emphasizing the smallness of the individual before the greatness of the organiza-tion, in this case, Ângkar: ‘Mortification processes provide a new set of criteria for evaluating the self, and they transmit the message that the self is adequate, whole and fulfilled only when it con-forms to the model offered by the collectivity’ (Kanter, 1968, p. 512). Under such conditions, any sense of a member’s autonomous identity is subsumed to the norms of The Organization: only through following its norms can one have any self-esteem.

A fourth dual category refers to the control exerted by the Ângkar. The Organization was omni-present and each DK soldier embodied it. At the same time she or he was under the Ângkar’s gaze. In theme (d) we refer to this as being the fusion of a synoptical gaze with a panoptical gaze: watch-ing significant others watching self, watching soon-to-be-not-only-insignificant-but-also-extin-guished others. The dual sense of being watched while watching creates the conditions for surrender of identity: one’s identity is constantly being composed in the gaze of the overall system of ‘insti-tutionalized awe’ (Kanter, 1968, p. 514), combining pervasive inspection and surveillance with minute regulation of actions in the institution.

A fifth conceptual pair (e) refers to identity. The revolution was an attempt to liberate the coun-try and its oppressed through new identities, which ‘old’ identities constantly threatened to sabo-tage. In the new country, there was no space for the old identities. New identities were signalled by collective devices such as the black uniform, communal living, eating and sleeping, and were reinforced by mortifying sanctions, such as torture and capital punishment for perceived deviance on the part of cadres within ‘The Organization’, rather than expulsion from it. Those included could soon find themselves excluded and extinguished if they failed tests of worthiness (Chandler, 2000, p. 121, notes the case of a cadre who had previously acted like a king, the type of person whose face no one dared look at, who was shackled like a monkey by the Khmer Rouge).

The final pair (f) refers to the need to express commitment. The revolution demanded fervour. People were expected to be enthusiastic about their work and to show a genuine intention to improve themselves, even in work endured as a form of slavery. Re-education consisted of



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labouring in the fields. Through hard physical labour, one could reform the unworthiness of those grown soft, far from the toils of the soil. Only through this test could bourgeois deviation be elimi-nated. Consequently, a mass of virtual slaves was expected to celebrate their liberation from the old system by being forcibly indentured and bonded in the new system.

We see the first three elements in each pair (ideology, mission and control) as channels for peo-ple to express their action through identity work in the context of the all-encompassing ideology, contributing missionary work as disciples of the new order, and displaying commitment (Figure 2). Individuals enacted rule-guided actions that reproduced the structures whose domination was sig-nified by their choice of enactment. What is revealing from our final conceptual leap is the inter-play between utopia, total institutions and control commitments as organizational enablers of genocide. We elaborate these issues next.

Utopia as totalitarian liberation

April 17, 1974, was the day ‘two thousand years of Cambodian history ended’. These were the words of Ieng Sary, one of the top cadres of the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia was to become a new society in an alternative to the colonial domination that had ‘mummified’ the country for 90 years (Kiernan, 2008, p. 4) as well as an alternative to the repressive rule of both monarchs and republi-cans. As Sary added, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) would lead the nation along roads ‘no country in history has ever gone before’ (Short, 2004, p. 7). By January 1979, after almost four years of the journey, the final destination of the mission being accomplished was interrupted but not before a great deal of the project had been enacted.

Utopian projects aimed at liberation are not uncommon. As Gray (2007) observed, since the French Revolution, political life has been transformed by a succession of utopian movements. The method of such projects is not uncommon, either: ‘the usual desire of the poor to improve the mate-rial conditions of their lives became transfused with fantasies of a world reborn into innocence through a final, apocalyptic massacre’ (Cohn, 1977, in Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 992). DK provides a radical case study of total institutions constructed to create the preconditions for utopia

Coercion E

nabling Coercion E

nabling Coercion E

nabling

Ideology

Identity

Mission

Missionary zeal

Control

Commitment

Coercive dynamics

Enabling dynamics

Figure 2. The interaction of enabling and coercive processes




by eliminating deviants, supported by an ideology of total revolution (Jackson, 1989). No country in modern history has ever gone so far in the development of a regime based on total institutionali-zation. All citizens became objects for and of the state’s apparatuses in ways idealized by ultra-radical utopian ideology. At least 1.7 million people died in the pursuit of utopia (Short, 2004, p. 350). Not surprisingly, the Khmer regime figures prominently among the major human tragedies of the 20th century.

The Khmer Rouge vision for Cambodia was utopia through apocalypse:

to plunge the country into an inferno of revolutionary change where, certainly, old ideas and those who refused to abandon them would perish in the flames, but from which Cambodia itself would emerge, strengthened and purified, as a paragon of communist virtue. (Short, 2004, p. 288)

The process, as someone observed pragmatically, was unfolding in such a way that it did not seemed ridiculous to ask ‘If the Ângkar arrests everybody, who will be left to make a revolution?’ (Chandler, 2000, p. 76).

The DK regime sought to collectivize sensemaking through the imposition of an ideologically correct political line on all. For citizens to try and grasp the meaning of this new era in any other terms was both difficult and risky, which helps to explain the ease with which the new rules con-verted the whole nation into a total institutional space governed by organizations such as S-21. Under an ideology of total control, the regime’s representatives were not only terrifying but also terrified: they were people who feared the possibility of being found out, of being wrong, in the terms of the regime. The explosion of liberation unleashed multiple types of subjugation that rein-forced one another, as will be considered below.

Perpetrators as victims/victims as perpetrators

To understand the inner workings of S-21 and the persistence of Ângkar, it is relevant to return to the demography of the guards. Most of them were young soldiers from rural areas. Ideologically, the Khmer Rouge saw dark-skinned and non-educated people as least corrupted by bourgeois sentiments and as the most malleable to re-education. Thus, in DK, children and young adults were used by the regime not only for practical or functional but also for ideologi-cal reasons because of their lack of contamination by bourgeois influence. They therefore con-stituted the most adequate force for the implementation of the radically new country of Kampuchea. These young people were, in Maoist terms, ‘the poor and blank’ pages on which the revolution would be inscribed. They were also the ones best able to ‘cut off their hearts’ and dare to kill the enemy.

The dynamics of violence that marked daily life in S-21 did not result so much from bureau-cratic indifference but rather functioned as an effect of bureaucratic disciplines and training, pro-ducing what was referred to as ‘hot violence’. The ideology aimed for was not sophisticated. Instead, it was focused on producing primitive emotions of rage and a capacity to suppress fellow feeling by systematic labelling of victims in terms that both defined them as ‘other’ to the base people and as opponents of its noble aims. Defined as both enemy and other, they were easily placed outside the fold of membership: membership in Ângkar, membership in society and mem-bership in the new humanity that was being built.

Rage, by itself, was insufficient; the process of ‘othering’ was produced by rules that placed the others on the wrong side of local history. In the production of rule-guided actions that constituted otherness, the lack of a role, other than as one being made to confess, and a lack of understanding



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of why they had been chosen, was essential to the process, further demonstrating their otherness. The same people that produced organizational violence could become the victims of this violence, however. Being a guard was not much of a guarantee. As one of them observed, ‘And I thought: “Today it’s their turn. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow”’ (Chandler, 2000, p. 87).

Subjected subjects

As would soon become apparent, the vision for DK defined what constituted people’s happiness, despite individual needs and desires (which could only ever be interpreted by the revolution as signs of bourgeois deviation), using an ideology promising the end of all injustice. The whole soci-ety was to be subordinated by the state, using monopoly control of all aspects of individual life, especially the ideological and repressive apparatuses, to achieve this situation (Althusser, 1971; Schwartz, 1987).

The application of rules that defined deviance consigned subjects to S-21. Once there, ideology was operationalized via techniques for extorting confession. The subjects who managed this soci-ety were not produced by customary methods of training, induction and socialization but were young, uneducated people with low levels of literacy. For such people, sophisticated ideology was hardly necessary to animate their agency. Ideology could be condensed into significations: black uniforms, being either the children of the revolution or the ‘others’, being either guards or inmates, being either confessors or becoming the confessed, ultimately being alive or dead, killer or killed. The whole society became a context in which abstract organization premised on very simple cat-egorization devices, disciplinary practices and supporting bureaucratic rules was practised.

Once inside S-21, no ultimate action other than to confess was scripted for inmates, and the tools for eliciting confession were well understood by the guards. The manner of one’s confession made little difference: while actual confession signalled guilt of deviance and deviance had, liter-ally, to be destroyed, failure to confess signified bourgeois stubbornness, which was deviance of a high order. Failure to confess once in the grasp of S-21signified a guilt that had yet to be extirpated, a process still incomplete, for which further instruments, designed to elicit confession, were the only option. Ultimately death was the only end.

The eye of the pineapple

Once in power, the Khmer Rouge instituted a system of control corresponding to the Foucauldian notion of the panopticon (Foucault, 1977), led by Ângkar, whose gaze sought to cover everyone all of the time, in such a way that it was impossible to escape surveillance. Ângkar, omnipotent and omnipresent, a complex, multiform institutional actor, was the central locus of the regime that was established after the seizure of Phnom Penh in 1975. In DK, as the slogan said, ‘Everything for the Party!’ (Hinton, 2005, p. 62). Consequently, Kampucheans always had to behave in an obedient and proper manner. The rule of ‘The Organization’ was absolute:

Ângkar determined who lived and who died. Soldiers and cadres like Grandmother Yit, Rom, Reap, and Boan were the local embodiments of state power and were described accordingly by the populace – as having ‘despotic power’ (amnachphdachkar), ‘hard power, ‘potent saliva’, and the rights of power. (Hinton, 2005, p. 157)

‘Ângkar has the eyes of the pineapple’ it was said: it was reified and made transcendent, described as a supernatural, enlightened being, as ever vigilant, as the perfect model of a




metaphorical panopticon. The ‘many eyes’ were constantly looking for ‘microbes’ infiltrated by the CIA, KGB and/or Vietnam. Nobody escaped the gaze of the pineapple in its scrutiny of the ideological good and bad in Kampucheans. Soldiers and leaders lived in fear of being accused of some form of anti-revolutionary behaviour and of being subsequently arrested (for a first-hand account see Tat, 2009). Soldiers in places such as S-21 were the eyes, both biologically and meta-phorically, of the pineapple but as they gazed at the watched they were also constantly under the synoptic gaze of each other, constituting the gaze of the watching Ângkar.

The panoptical eye found no rest. Children spied on their parents in the name of Ângkar and the glorious revolution. In this panoptical world, everyday life, even at the centre of the Party, became increasingly performative, with every word and action acquiring a meaning of its own, as a sign of political consciousness (Hinton, 2005). Everyone tried to align with the party line, being constantly under the assessment of others – while assessing them at the same time. Signs of ‘regressive con-sciousness’ were extremely dangerous. The best strategy was to act according to a Buddhist proph-ecy: in a time of infidels only the deaf and dumb will manage to survive.

The Ângkar was simultaneously a transcendent entity, the central committee of the CPK, Pol Pot, or any one of the members of the new society. ‘Who is the Ângkar? All members of the new society, sometimes the leadership, other times Pol Pot. But, as one cadre put it: “It is everyone; it is you”’ (Hinton, 2005, p. 127). As such, Ângkar was both an external entity, distant and inscruta-ble, but also close and corporeal, living in and through beings such as Yit, Rom, Reap and Boan. All these people incarnated ‘The Organization’.

Cadres such as Grandmother Yit, Rom, Reap and Boan embodied the state locally, acting as despotic powers (Hinton, 2005). As representatives of the Ângkar, they were positioned in the central network of relations of power.2

Identity as inclusion and exclusion

DK was a paranoid space, opposing the revolutionaries to enemies of the revolution, who were seen as being clustered in ‘strings of traitors’. The difference between one condition and the other resided in the official identity of each individual as formalized in his or her file. Identities played a very important role in DK: a good/clean identity meant life, a non-revolutionary identity with traitorous associations meant death. Identity associated some people with the revolution and condemned oth-ers who were thought to be ‘impure’, owners of bad stories. ‘To keep you is no gain; to destroy you is no loss’ was the Khmer Rouge postulate (Hinton, 2005, p. 86) that explained the fate of those whose identities did not fit the new era. The ‘eradication’ of traitors was crucial because ‘once infected anyone can infect others’ (Chandler, 2000, p. 44). And, it was said, everyone carried ves-tiges of the previous class that could degenerate at any given moment. Purification bred paranoia.

Signs of political paranoia were abundant in the CPK before and after DK, from the guerrilla to the clandestine period after 1979. The Party centre was constantly searching for ‘traitorous activi-ties’ and uncovered plots, real or imaginary, even at its very core. Initially, the fear and suspicion was directed outwards to the oppressing classes and the functionaries of the former regime. Later, it focused inwards. Powerful and popular zone secretaries were viewed as dangerous, and purged after investigations that ‘proved’ their involvement in plans to combat the revolution.

Identity work was a crucial and formal part of life in Kampuchea. Pure identities and clean cre-dentials were a precondition for survival. Linkages outside the new order were especially suspect. The tension between Vietnam and Cambodia, ever present historically, grew with DK. Cadres with connections to Vietnam became suspect; however, most senior cadres had worked in the past with the Vietnamese communists, something sufficient to make them suspect, accused of spying for Vietnam. Eventually this paranoia triggered real resistance. As often happens, the very processes



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that sought to consolidate power relations also produced the germs of their own destruction (Padgett & Ansell, 1993). The fight against the diseased necessarily produced part of the disease in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sao Phim, Eastern Zone secretary, who was condemned as a ‘traitor’ and com-mitted suicide before being arrested, left the legacy of thousands of soldiers fighting the party centre for months after the capture of their leader. They eventually regrouped in Vietnam, and established the core of the future PRK regime (Hinton, 2005, p. 167). Identities were unstable in DK, requiring a great deal of identity work to preserve the good looks of one’s ‘purity’ (Goffman, 1959).

Slavery is liberation

George DeVos (1973) coined the notion of role narcissism to capture cases where people display identification with their role and organization by performing duties in an enthusiastic, devotional and unquestioning way. In the past, role narcissism has been associated with ritual suicide in Japan (Fusé, 1980). In the case of DK, it led to the death not of self but of others (the enemies of the revo-lution). Narcissistic association with something as big and powerful as Ângkar was not a burden but a source of pride, identity and power to some of its cadres, as well as to ‘old’ people. As pointed out by Bandura (1999, p. 197), ‘a strong sense of responsibility, rooted in ideology’ was required ‘to be a good functionary’ in a genocidal process.

The commander of S-21, Comrade Duch, provides an example of the good functionary. He showed no compassion for the prisoners. He was head of the prison when his former teacher and mentor, Kim Huot, was arrested and eventually executed, just like any other prisoner. Witnesses suggest that when confessions were not detailed enough, Duch would return:

to interrogate the prisoners himself. If the prisoners still gave him the same answers, then he would explode into a rage, kicking and beating them. Most of the time, Prak Khan’s team used rods or tree branches to beat the prisoners, but Duch always shocked the prisoner with electrical wires. (Dunlop, 2005, p. 146)

Even the guards were ‘terrified’ of their commandant. And there were good reasons: about a third of the guards of S-21 were also ‘purged’. As Dunlop (2005, p. 126) described it, ‘Duch enjoyed playing with the prisoners as a cat plays with a mouse before killing it.’ As Scheffer (2009, p. 38) wrote of Duch:

he made the choice to be part of the CPK rather than to withdraw from it. As chairman of M-13 [another Khmer Rouge prison] for four years prior to Pol Pot’s rule of Cambodia, Duch knew what role was expected of him – to arrest, detain, interrogate, torture, and execute CPK enemies. Indeed, he personally tortured many times himself during those years.

As the previous discussion suggests, Duch displayed intentionality and zeal in his job. The sol-diers, of whom he was one, comprised an army of liberators in thrall to the system: ‘The Organization orders us like cows or buffaloes’ (Chandler, 2000, p. 95). In DK slavery was liberating, and libera-tion meant slavery.

Relations among the categories: utopia, total institutions and control commitments

We now explain the relation among the categories extracted to ‘“lift” data to a conceptual level’ (Suddaby, 2006, p. 636). We identify three overarching characteristics pervading the tensions of our second-order themes (see the right-hand column of Figure 1).




First, there is a utopian dimension that critically energizes the entire organization of genocide, articulating two categories: liberation through totalitarianism and the role of individuals as victims and perpetrators. In the path towards utopia, terror was unleashed so intensely that it terrified almost everybody, including the armed forces of the Khmer Rouge movement. In utopia, even the liberators might find themselves trapped in the trail of liberation. Second, utopia is imposed as the single interpretive possibility by means of total institutions. These institutions existed as exterior entities, controlling the entire Kampuchean socio-political landscape, and as psychological forces for repression, subjecting the subjects to the narrative of the Ângkar. Third, control commitments worked towards the internalization of utopia. They gained expression as clean narratives and in manifestations of pride in doing revolutionary work. These control commitments, however, could not be contradicted: commitment was not voluntary.

In revolutionary Kampuchea, one could find ingredients that, once aligned, enabled the organi-zation of genocide on a massive scale, with little effective resistance. Genocide should be viewed as a concerted and sophisticated effort, containing elements of the symbolic, the technological and the bureaucratic, all articulated in a powerful choreography of death by organization.

The socio-material agents of this choreography – the Party, poverty, prisons, uniforms and weapons – were all crucial for the unfolding of genocide. A poor, illiterate peasant, wearing a black uniform, holding a weapon and belonging to an army, becomes something other than an illiterate peasant, especially in a regime that glorifies class purity. For guards at S-21, Ângkar provided a utopian frame, genocidal artefacts, such as the infamous arrangements of skulls, and an organiza-tion that legitimated the power and processes needed to improvise genocide with crude weapons such as a cart axle. Thus doing, they willingly reproduced the organizational and institutional context of DK and S-21 instead of resisting it and undermining it.

Discussion

Making sense of the main findings

From both a human and organizational point of view, one of the disturbing aspects of the operation of total institutions such as S-21is their creation of followers who present themselves as partici-pants in processes that overwhelm them – defenceless cogs in brutal machines. As Arendt (1963) argued in her famous book on Eichmann, such people portray themselves as merely following orders. The same reasoning was applied in Kampuchea. Consider the emblematic case of Comrade Duch: executioners were ‘ordered to kill the prisoners. They were ordered from the top. If they didn’t kill, they would be killed’ (Duch’s lawyer, quoted in Dunlop, 2005, p. 283). Participants in genocidal processes follow orders but, as we discussed, there is more to it than mere obedience. One needs to consider the interaction between what Hinton (2005) calls macro/situational and micro/mental model causes in producing obedience. The macro causes include, as the standard justification goes, obedience to an irresistible external force. Micro factors are also complex. Consider the following explanation:

Even perpetrators are active meaning makers who, when put in a position to kill, make their own ‘individual level response’ based on the situation, their prior experiences and personal mental models, the meaningful interpretive frames available to them, and their immediate feelings and goals, although these factors may be strongly influenced by state-level initiatives and situational constraints. (Hinton, 2005, p. 30)

In the context of a totalitarian environment, the march to history’s telos, positioning elements of personal and collective identity simultaneously perfects a process that blends the individual and the



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institutional in a grand narrative that can admit no flaws: hence, all error, all deviance, all defects must be reduced to zero. DK practised zero degree defects total quality management of identities.

The Khmer Rouge transformed their utopian vision into practice, with the political movement, Ângkar, as the main instrument. Ângkar was visible in multiple manifestations: in its pervasive panoptical presence, in the black-uniformed soldiers, the extermination camps, the new social order, as well as in its absences, such as the vanishing Buddhist monks, the end of money and the closing of schools, temples and markets. Ângkar, in other words, was a material presence that revealed itself in the determinate absences of the former society: family, religion, commerce and the monarchy. It established a whole new material order as evidence of something radical in the making in which its main technologies of the self became the death of the other in a genocidal process. Ângkar wrapped genocide in a utopian frame and provided resources, including secret and isolated facilities, torture manuals and instruments, all of which lent legitimacy to its agents in organizations such as S-21. Soldiers were conditioned to connect their individual identity with that of the greatness of Ângkar and its noble cause, creating a narcissistic identification that neutralized their inhibitions and giving them licence to kill (Hinton, 2005).

CPK/Ângkar conjured up an imaginary that, as with most utopian projects, demanded the capacity of people to commit totally to the future imagined. Within S-21 Duch observed in a staff meeting on 18 February 1976: ‘You must rid yourselves of the view that beating the prisoners is cruel. Kindness is misplaced [in such cases]. You must beat [them] for national reasons, class reasons, and international reasons’ (Chandler, 2000, p. 152). While genocidal authority and gen-ocidal procedures were common to other centres, a higher degree of importance was given to them at S-21 because of its central role as the most important prison in the country. Life in Tuol Sleng, with is extreme and quotidian violence, intense and frequent indoctrination practices, including self-criticism sessions, strict discipline and a climate of fear, was institutionalized as a liminal space (Hinton, 2005) in which the party and the revolution were protected from numer-ous enemies and where violence became ‘normalized’ and its perpetrators accustomed to it.

In genocide, followers may participate in a passive way – for example, by tolerating violence. However, such people rarely attain leadership positions. There is volition involved in genocide that is rather more than mere bureaucratic work or the labour of ‘thoughtless cogs’ (Stokes & Gabriel, 2010, p. 466). There is means-ends rationality, bureaucracy and the banalization of evil but, as we discussed, there is also intentionality, hate, power, revenge and a desire for subjugation. Interrogations were a combination of propaganda (‘doing politics’) and violence (‘imposing tor-ture’). Duch and the interrogators could make decisions with regard to the balance between ‘poli-tics’ and torture: why, to what degree and in which manner to use one tactic or the other. S-21 records suggest that interrogators abused torture to the point that a memo was issued warning of the need to avoid unnecessary torture that was motivated by individual anger and sadistic self-satisfaction. It is true that resistance was almost impossible. But even in environments as struc-tured as S-21, perpetrators had leeway rather than being merely rational automata, cogs in a machine run on a rational calculus.

The previous discussion highlights several points of theoretical relevance. First, as reflected in Figure 2, every building block in our case contains both coercive and enabling elements. The coer-cive and the enabling, thus, are part of the same processes; they coexist and are mutually consti-tuted. In this sense, to divide designs into the enabling and the coercive is to simplify the fabric of organization. Second, we view genocide as an organizational outcome, and not only a consequence of ethnic or political divides. Third, it is because the line splitting the enabling and the coercive is thin and unstable that individuals are both guilty and innocent, helping to explain how they may move from one position to the other. There is no distinction between innocence and guilt when one




joins in the power relations that define the structuring of structure: the guilty are, in a sense, inno-cent, but even the innocent were guilty of misplaced obedience. Fourth, to study organizing involves considering the way subjects create the conditions to whose constraints they submit. The structure gains human qualities in an anthropomorphic process via identity, culture and ideological intentionality.

Boundary conditions

We consider some boundary conditions of the present argument. Despite the existence of common processes, all genocides represent a singular inhumanity and every genocidal organization is unique in some respect. In this sense, the lessons to be taken from S-21 and DK for other organi-zational contexts may be limited. However difficult and unique, processes of mass killing, as Snyder (2010) observed, need to be studied to help us make sense of them. In this respect, study of this case should be seen in the context of other standard accounts of organized mass slaughter, such as mass warfare (e.g. Strachan, 2001). While victors may claim the spoils, the most precious of these, legitimacy, faces the future as an open question. In matters of organized killing on a large scale, there is a thin line between ordinary slaughter and extraordinary genocide. Claims to be merely an obedient subject rarely serve to differentiate the guilty from the innocent.

Limitations, generalization issues and future research

The main limitation of the study is obvious. As Davies (1989, p. 84) pointed out, some total institutions are ‘much more total than others’. S-21 is certainly more total than most other total institutions. Its extremity renders the case both problematic and relevant: problematic because, fortunately, there are not many similar organizations. The relevance occurs because extreme cases make features of less extreme organizations more salient. Other limitations could be con-sidered, namely our use of secondary data, but there are not many alternatives in studying S-21.

In terms of generalization and future research, we see at least three important possibilities. First, we suggested that some organizational characteristics enable powerful forces of destruction. Combining powerful visions with strict designs and psychological coercion can facilitate the incu-bation of organized evil (Jurkiewicz, 2012). Management and organization scholars should beware the recent attraction of organizations to the power of missions and visions, the growing sophistica-tion of culture management practices, and the pressure for commitment in terms of their identity effects (Willmott, 2003). The organizational infrastructure of revolutionary Kampuchea offers potent ethical lessons on what such combinations can produce.

Second, and given the above, the idea that it is individuals who misbehave organizationally should be problematized. Organizational misbehaviour is often co-produced by wholly engaged individuals rather than those operating at the margins of legitimacy. For example, when a trader inflicts huge losses on a bank, he or she is only partly responsible for the fraud. The organization is also critical in this process. Previous evidence from Barings to SocGen shows that the attribution of responsibility to individual traders (say Leeson or Kerviel) may be a good strategy from a legal perspective but is conceptually flawed.3 Promoting organizational missions and goals may induce people to follow strange paths (Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky, & Bazerman, 2009).

A third contribution comes from the consideration of the collapse of DK. On 7 January 1979, the panoptical regime collapsed like a house of cards, victim of a Vietnamese invasion. The tight organizing of DK suddenly failed and was substituted by generalized turmoil. Tight coupling, the total lack of polyphony and the politics of fear seem to produce rigid organizations condemned to



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fail violently (Letiche, 2010; Weick, 1976). When tight-knit structurings collapse they do so because they lack the resilience that survival of the system requires: only looser coupling and toler-ance of a degree of polyphony is robust enough to withstand major exogenous shocks.

Conclusion

Some people were attracted to the Khmer Rouge because of its ideology; others wanted to take revenge (Hinton, 2005), while others joined the Khmer Rouge in search of a better future. Once a member, it is difficult to unsubscribe to that which one signed up for. For some participants, the ideology may result in nightmarish decisions; for others, they matter little because the revolution works as an opportunity to right a past of exploitation and misery. To understand the regime of DK and the action of individual participants, one needs to consider the radical duality of agency and structure in a light that differs from established accounts of the dialectic of agency and structure. DK, ‘The Organization’ and S-21 constitute an extreme case where the study of the existential and the structural features of organization, as O’Doherty and Willmott (2000) put it, coexist in a reveal-ing way (Flyvbjerg, 2006, p. 229). ‘This interplay’, they added, ‘takes place within an ontologically elusive space of organization – its “structuration”, “medium” or “fabric”’ (p. 129). That is why it is more adequate to speak about structurings, with their immaterial and material parts, than about structures. It is the combination of conditions that renders the unimaginable possible.

The tensions and paradoxes between coercion and volition favour the adoption of what Dooley and Tsoukas (2011, p. 732) described as a radically relational understanding of organizational pro-cesses. Institutions and humans constrain one another over time in ways that, in the end, may lead to extremist organizing. Once extremist organizations are set in motion, arguments of innocence are delegitimized: perpetrators claim to be innocent because they were ‘possessed’ by the utopia as if it was the utopia and its structures pushing them to act. On the other hand, the structure existed because of the effort of people like Duch, people who fused their identity with the structure to such an extent that they no longer existed independently of the identity of the organization: they were the organization. The potential for common interest between powerful organizations and relatively powerless members can explain the persistence of dysfunctional and inhuman forms of power and control. Where agents appropriate the power of the structure as their own, they sustain the perver-sity of the organization. Members themselves are as likely to be the next victims in such a scenario of over-identification. Duch and the guards were certainly more than ‘thoughtless cogs’ (Stokes & Gabriel, 2010, p. 466) in the machinery of the death camp. Many of them joined the revolutionary group voluntarily and the utopian machine they served was partly sustained because of the zeal of some ‘cogs’ able to work in the service of the cause. Hinton’s (2005) representation of perpetrators as ‘genocidal bricoleurs’ portrays them in a light that is more granular than the standard justifica-tion of perpetrators as homogeneous automatons: they expressed agency and used their material conditions (the resources at hand, as in bricolage).

While situational power is an explanation for extreme obedience (Milgram, 1974), it is not nor-mally stressed that in Milgram’s experiments some participants refused to obey. Therefore, we should probably invest equally in explaining why some people decide to obey whereas others decide to disobey. In line with Hinrichs (2007), we suggest that more needs to be known about the factors, organizational and individual, that stimulate functional disobedience and work in favour of open societies supported by open organizations (Armbruster & Gebert, 2002). The case of S-21 is highly informative about the dynamics that create spaces in which resistance is futile. Ingredients such as utopian purity and the consequent separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the search for con-formity, the non-existence of channels for dissent and disagreement, the lack of checks and




balances, the intertwining of power and identity, and the diffusion of responsibility that it creates – none of these are uncommon in organizational settings. We need to depart from the idea that people obey ‘unreflectively’, like homogeneous automatons, android-like (Srinivas, 1999), and that the adherence to organizationally destructive processes is a result of either passivity and pow-erlessness or individual organizational misbehaviour. The dynamics of utopian vortices not only in DK but also in places such as Srebrenica, and Homs, Syria, stipulate the need for organizational and not just psychological analysis.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1 The other author had long had an interest in the case since the 1970s, when radical sentiment was some-times sympathetic to the Kampuchean line as it was somewhat romantically (mis)understood at the time.

2 When the regime ended, these powerful individuals could be seen to be common people. S-21 survivor Vann Nath confronted one of his captors in the Tuol Sleng Museum (Nath, 1998) with his responsibil-ity and culpability, for example. However, during the regime, confronting a representative would have meant confronting Ângkar.

3 As asked by Olivier Metzner, lawyer of former trader Jérôme Kerviel, whose actions led to losses of €4.9 bn to the French bank, ‘Who are you Société Générale? How do you create men like this?’ (Daneshkhu, 2010). Of course, the opposite can also be asked: who are you Jérôme Kerviel? How do men like you create organizations like this?

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Author biographies

Stewart Clegg is Research Professor and Director of the Centre for Management and Organization Studies Research at the University of Technology, Sydney and a Visiting Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics. A prolific publisher in leading academic journals in social science, management and organization theory, he is also the author and editor of many books.

Miguel Pina e Cunha is Professor of Organization Studies at Nova School of Business and Economics. His research interests include: process-based views of organizations; the paradoxes of organizing; virtuous and toxic leadership; and the unfolding of positive and genocidal forms of organization.

Arménio Rego is Assistant Professor at the Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal. He has published articles in journals such as Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology and The Leadership Quarterly. His research deals mainly with positive organizational scholarship.



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