Giving Management the Flick
Technologies, particularly the technology of knowledge, prejudice our reasoning in preference to perceiving the world a certain way. A blackboard encourages deletion, continual modification, exploratory thinking. Pen and paper requires attention to syntax, neatness, orderly thinking. Online hypertext inspires discontinuity, non-linearity, collective, flexible thinking.
Thus, the way we construct our thinking space happens to be the way we orchestrate our ideas. But there is a problem. Over time we come to believe our particular model represents the way the world itself is organized. Extreme myopia results - and from that, separation.
Essentially, each paradigm shift in technology changes what we mean by ‘knowing’. In effect human cultures can be construed as vast thinking spaces - complex semiologies of idiosyncratic structures and symbols. And, just as our culture is moving from the printed word to the electronic text, so are we shifting from hierarchical social orders (of empire) to more dynamic network cultures. Such shifts challenge the most well-worn ‘truths’ and alters, sometimes quite significantly, those embedded conventions and traits of thought that produce for us a sense of reality and purpose.
A paradigm shift of this ‘reality-altering’ kind occurred at Cambridge University in 1792. A tutor by the name of William Farish suggested that student papers be graded. This novel proposal - that a numerical value be assigned to the expression of human thought - was a breakthrough in our acceptance of numerical measurement as an authenticator of knowledge and of our formulating a mathematical impression of reality.
A simple idea changed the entire experience of meaning and learning. By instituting fierce competition among students through the provision of sharply differentiated symbols of attainment, grading provided what was assumed to be a more 'objective' measure of human performance. It created the illusion that accurate estimations can be made of worthiness. In Foucault’s phrase, the human being became ‘a calculable person’.
The concept quickly spread for if a number could be given to the quality of a thought, then it could equally be given to other qualities such as mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, personality, intelligence - even sanity. Seriously!
This concept still permeates our thinking today. Just try to imagine a world in which there are no clocks, no timetables, no accountants - most of us would find it quite impossible to do our work without resorting to mathematical calculations of some kind. We have been thoroughly indoctrinated into a mode of numerical patterning (of counting, measuring and calculating) in order to perceive the world in this way.
There is nothing inherently incongruous with that, of course, so long as we understand that our awareness of what is ‘real’ is being shaped, and our choice of what is important significantly preordained, by such ingrained partiality. We should not assume the absence of (or deficiencies in) other, strange, dated, indigenous, even contrasting - yet equally valid - ways of comprehending the world.
Secreted within every technology is an ideological bias - a predilection to construct meaning as one thing, rather than another. We are easily seduced by such ideological biases. But that is not all. Those who become adept in the use of a new technology quickly become part of an elite information monopoly, accumulating power and influence in such a way that they are then granted authority, status and prestige by those lacking in such competence.
For well over 500 years, for example, teachers and academics have been part of such a monopoly created by the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Now, however, with the advent of new communication technologies, we are witnessing the inevitable disintegration of that dominance. A similar fate awaits most other 'status' professions, from lawyers, teachers and accountants to medical practitioners. When technologies shift, knowledge monopolies crumble.
As it matured, industrial society spawned its own self-referential ideology, becoming a totalitarian technocracy and purging alternatives to itself. This was accomplished, not by rendering substitutes illegal, immoral or unpopular, but simply by making them imperceptible, and therefore irrelevant. In the process of fashioning modern society, new meaning was ascribed to old linear concepts, as diverse as religion, culture and progress, so that our definitions still made sense within the new context. And we devised new instruments - among them management, bureaucracy and production.
Innovations like these, grouped under the umbrella of industrial economism, spread rapidly through developed societies, formalizing and cementing the new ideology in place. Based implicitly on the appropriation of notions of calculability, along with the authority of written words - which led inevitably to ideas such as detailed accounting mechanisms, inventory control, and productivity norms - these new techniques became the bedrock for ‘scientific management' systems. Indeed, by adopting such principles, American business established the modern corporation. W. H. Galbraith maintained that, More perhaps than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestations of advanced technology.
Like any other technology, however, management gradually operated independently of the system it was supposed to serve. The technology of management is comprised of rational protocols, reductionist controls and precise regulations, all designed to achieve clarity and efficiency while standardizing behaviour and dampening down unwanted perturbations in the system of industrial production and consumption. It has become sanctified, fixed - ruling out any possibility for other, more appropriate, alternatives taking its place.
Only now, poised in a liminal moment in history when the depleted frameworks of modernism are breaking down in so many different ways, while the new have yet to fully manifest, are we discovering that our identity is not fixed, but provisional and fluid. We have become multiple communities of mind. In that context, management as currently preserved is as anomalous as a fly in amber.
Chaos and complexity theories both assert that the world is essentially unknowable and unpredictable. All we can do is engage in moments of transient meaning-making. In this bewildering and unfamiliar context, the prevailing ‘science’ of conventional management is irrelevant.
And so our cultural memory adjusts (at times painfully) to the new materialism - shimmering with new possibilities, confusing yet exhilarating. Everything in this new world is infused with new meanings. There is no central authority, no keeper of wisdom or knowledge here - only fiduciaries of particular ephemeral points of view.
The art now is to find appropriate models for a new society and then trust sufficiently in these models to let go of the old ones. This is easier said than done of course.
Just as leadership lost relevance and became extinct in a conventionally recognizable form, so management filled the void, becoming deeply ingrained in our consciousness as the sole mechanism for effectively coordinating and directing the institutions of governance, work, schooling, production, and every other aspect of modern life. We came to regard management as an unquestionable imperative. Indeed, it has now so analogous with getting things done that it is difficult enough to make changes to the institution of management, let alone devise alternative methods for achieving our various purposes.
Effectively eviscerating leadership, management has become an ‘invisible technology’ working subversively but convincingly to insinuate itself into a cultural state of mind; a chimera of contemporary humanity.
And yet, painful though it might be to imagine, management did not evolve from the 'big bang'. It was not pre-ordained to become indispensable. Indeed, it is entirely possible for schools, companies, bureaucracies, governments, societies, and most other institutions, to operate effectively, in autopoiesis, without the burden of a technocratic management structure or oppressive managerial elite.
Most predictions regarding the 'future' of management are nothing short of absurd: at best they are neatly consistent sets of observations, commonly extrapolated from current trends - no more about the actual 'future' than the latest stock prices or economic forecasts.
Modern management - as a ‘technospheric solution’ to running every aspect of our society - is increasingly hamstrung by conditions that make it increasingly immaterial. Almost any attempt by a professional management elite to 'manage' as it has done in the past now risks serious damage to the viability of their enterprise as a whole.
Besides it is unnecessary. The complexity found within the abundant fecundity of natural ecosystems - such as rain forests and the oceans, for example - show us that organizations and communities would be wise to consciously adopt comparable phenomena to those found in nature in order to endure in the longer term.
Within this context, the development of 'management' becomes nothing less than the creation of new social ecologies for engagement and interaction. Out of these imaginal cells, perhaps a new form of leadership will re-emerge as the literacy most urgently needed by a civilization in a state of managed decline and collapse.