Managing with Modernity
Professor Barbara Townley
Chair of Management and Organization
EH8 9JY
Tel. no. 0131 650 4307 (work)
0131 556 7957 (home)
Email: Barbara.Townley@ed.ac.uk
Note: I would like to thank Alan McKinlay and participants at the ‘Rediscovering history in studying organizations’ seminar, EGOS, Lyon 2001, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Managing with Modernity.
Abstract
This paper critiques an increasingly abstract management that is being advocated in organizations. It locates the foundations of an abstract management in what Foucault and others have identified as the epistemic foundations of modernity. Using the example of a strategic performance management system it shows how these systems have such epistemic assumptions as their foundations. The paper concludes by considering the role of practical reason in guiding management practice.
Key words: Foucault, rationality, modernity, performance measures, abstract management.
Managing with Modernity.
The central role of ‘management’ in organizational life is now taken for
granted. Management has spread to areas previously considered beyond its
province, and to individuals previously without the formal title or status of
managers (du Gay, 2000; Grey, 1999;
Just as the public school headmaster, the explorer and the engineer were characters of Victorian England, so the manager is the dominant figure of the contemporary scene. As MacIntyre (1984) has identified, the manager is the character of modernity, furnishing society with a cultural and moral ideal.
But what is the nature of management that is being promulgated?
The model of management that is being constructed is an abstract management
(Armstrong, 2001). Following Armstrong (2001), the distinction has to be drawn
between expertise in a process or practice that informs its co-ordination and
management, and an abstract and generalized conception of management to be
applied to any process. The latter constitutes abstract management. It is
disembedded (Giddens, 1990), abstracted from a context, and presented as an
homogeneous and universal management for any organization. It is ubiquitous in that
it ‘can be applied in any time and place and activity setting…’ (Meyer,
1994:53). As such ‘Management becomes a portable technical skill, divorced from
specialized experience and knowledge about particular subjects, applicable to
the private and public sectors, and primarily concerned with the efficient use
of resources’ (Self, 1993: 169 quoted in Power, 1997). It is a construction
that prompts one observer (Meyer, 1994: 54) to lament ‘an older world’ where
‘schools were managed by educators, hospitals by doctors, railroads by railroad
men (sic).’ These are now labeled organizations, ‘and it is this that produces
a great expansion, almost everywhere, of management…One can now discuss what
constitutes the proper basis of organization without much mentioning the actual
substantive activities that the organization will do’.
This disembodied and disembedded management is supported by a proliferation of techniques. Techniques again that have a universal relevance and applicability, and may be introduced in any organization, anywhere. Buchanan and Badham (1999: 155) identify the ubiquitous three letter acronym (TQM, BPR etc.) as the ‘indispensable accompaniment to any best practice doctrine’. Often solutions looking for problems, these are commodities looking for markets. They are sold and administered by management ‘experts’, organized to tell actors ‘what they should do rather than to take action themselves, a world of second guessers and advisors with little action responsibility’ (Meyer, 1994:54).
But how may we explain how abstract management becomes constituted as management? How may we account for this increasingly abstract or context-independent, disembodied and disembedded model of management being promulgated as management? Put simply, what makes abstract management the ‘how’ of management?
Various institutional pressures have been identified to explain the generalized models of management and the proliferation of context-independent techniques that have sustained this. Factors include the role of management education, the growth of business schools, and the prevalence of a training in techniques of analysis (Oakeshott 1994; Carter et al. 1992). Others identify the growth in consulting firms; the nature of managerial labour markets; and the legitimacy and assumed supremacy of the private sector model; and the growth of managerial fashions (Armstrong, 2001; Grey, 1999; Meyer, 1994; Abrahamson, 1996).
These factors may account for those who might be interested in propagating a type of knowledge and why. They address the supply side of the contemporary management market. But what about the other element of the circuit of capital—demand? What explains the demand for this type of knowledge? What makes this form of knowledge legitimate such that it sustains the supply? The intellectual origins of a body of knowledge—here, the assumed nature of management—lies deeper than the above explanations permit.
Explanations in terms of vested interests do not offer a complete explanation because they fail to address the issue of credibility. As Barnes and Edge (1982: 10) explain:
As Foucault (1970) notes, whilst membership of a group can explain why such a person chose one system of thought rather than another, the condition enabling that system to be thought never resides in the existence of a group. ‘Types of practice are not just governed by institutions, prescribed by ideologies, guided by pragmatic circumstances—whatever roles these elements may actually play—but possess up to a point there own specific regularities, logic, strategy, self-evidence and ‘reason’ (Foucault, 1981:5).
The failure to consider the demand for knowledge is partly a consequence of
the failure to deal with the content of knowledge (Latour and Woolgar, 1986).
It is also a consequence of method. As Foucault states ‘in analyzing power
relations from the standpoint of institutions
We return to the original question why is abstract management accepted as constituting management? What makes it the ‘how’ of management?
In order to understand this let us return to MacIntyre’s (1984)
identification of the manager as a character of modernity. Management is, in
MacIntyre’s (1984: 28) view, the moral representative of a culture ‘because of
the way in which moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume through
Drawing upon the work of Foucault (1970), Bloor (1991) and Toulmin (1990), the following section considers these questions. From this, key concepts informing abstract management are identified, and their relevance in understanding an aspect of abstract management are illustrated before considering the question of what may counter abstract management. What follows is thus somewhat different from the historical analyses that are presented here, i.e., taking history as past actions, or adopting a conscious strategy of looking at a particular historical period or event. Rather it is to use history to make sense of the present (Foucault, 1989).
An Excursus: The Epistemic
Foundations of Modernity
Addressing the question of how may we characterize modernity has engaged many (for example, Giddens, 1990; Dupre, 1993; Taylor, 1991), from Kant’s search for the principles of reason and the capacity of humanity to perfect itself through the power of thought (Cooper and Burrell, 1988); to Bauman’s (1991) depiction of modernity as a war against ambivalence and fragmentation, or the view of modernity as a purifying practice (Latour, 1993). Here I will mention very briefly the work of three authors who have explicitly considered the nature of knowledge in modernity: Foucault (1970), Toulmin (1990) and Bloor (1991). Foucault because The Order of Things—‘in many ways his major work’ (Gutting 1990: 4)—is an attempt to give a comprehensive account of the development of modern knowledge. Bloor, because his work and the Social Studies of Science school have explicitly analyzed the content of knowledge, for example, mathematics (Bloor, 1991), and derivatives (MacKenzie 2001). Toulmin’s analysis of a cosmology or cosmopolis attempts to relate discursive change to a non-discursive analysis. All three explicitly engage with the foundations of modern reason.
In presenting Foucault as being principally concerned with a critique of modern reason I am following the work of Gutting (1990), who identifies Foucault’s project as an archeological history of reason. He identifies the historical critique of reason as being carried out in Germany through historical and political reflections on society and manifest in the work of Nietzsche, Weber and the Frankfurt School. In France, engagement with the Enlightenment was through the history of science. Gutting sees Foucault’s work, following Bachelard and Canguilhelm, as rooted in the French tradition of the history and philosophy of science. However, rather than see the limits of reason derived from a priori structures, for Foucault, the structures of reason may only be understood in the concrete employment of reason, including technologies that are rationalities materialized.
‘my basic preoccupation isn’t rationality…I don’t believe one can speak of an intrinsic notion of ‘rationalization’ without positing an absolute value inherent in reason…One isn’t assessing things in terms of an absolute against which they could be evaluated as constituting more or less perfect forms of rationality, but rather examining how forms of rationality inscribe themselves in practices or systems of practices, and what role they play within them. Because its true that ‘practices’ don’t exist without a certain regime of rationality’. (Foucault, 1981:9)
The foundations of reason are contingent, analyzable through historical, practical critique and as such open to possible transgression. Critiques of reason must be directed to specific applications, the norms of rationality that are constituted in the process of applying thoughts to particular problems. Reason is a historical phenomena, whose norms are always open to challenge through critical analysis that must be situated in the discursive and non-discursive practices of a particular age.
Although there are various regimes of rationality, The Order of Things (Foucault 1970) is based on an investigation of the epistemic foundations of ‘reason’, which he saw as a more fundamental level of conceptual history. An episteme is a system of concepts that specifies the nature and structure of knowledge for an intellectual era—‘In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge‘ (Foucault, 1970:178). Conceptual developments in one discipline are based on deeper concepts shared by other disciplines and subject to transformation over time that are not controlled by one discipline. An episteme governs thought and experience—determines the seeable and the sayable. It is ‘a system of possible discourse which underlies a body of knowledge and determines which group of statements are susceptible of being true or false’ (Rajchman, 1985:25). The links to non-discursive practice are not established, although these bodies of discourse are seen as being relatively independent.
A given epoch’s conception of knowledge is ultimately grounded in its experience of order, the fundamental way in which things are seen as connected to one another. Foucault identifies three discrete epistemes. From the end of the Renaissance episteme in the 16th century, the Classical episteme (from the mid 17th century to the end of the 18th) and its successor the modern episteme (from the beginning of the 19th to the mid 20th century) there were fundamental shifts in the conceptions of knowledge. The Renaissance epsiteme is based on resemblance; the Classical on representation; and the Modern on systems, which saw the Birth of Man, in which man constitutes the world and all that is in it as objects. It is the classical and modern epistemes that constitute the dominant foundations of Modernity. Foucault presents developments from the classical to modern epistemes in relation to the study of grammar, natural history and an analysis of wealth to the modern disciplines of philology, biology and economics.
In the Renaissance, things were ordered through relations of resemblance or similarity. The Classical episteme, by contrast, is premised on the denial of ambivalence. Whereas resemblance opens up the possibility of assigning an object or event to more than one category, the classical episteme promotes strict identity and difference based on the absence or presence of particular properties. It is based upon strict categories of classification and segregation, and structures the world into discrete and distinct entities, facilitated through the function or role of language as a transparent, neutral representation. Order is found in the structuring of elements into a series analyzed and determined by precise criteria. To classify means to set apart, to segregate. It ‘means first to postulate that the world consists of discrete and distinct entities, then to postulate that each entity has a group of similar or adjacent entities with which it belongs’ (Bauman 1991: 1). An important consequence of this is that things are not drawn together based on resemblances but are separated through their differences. The emphasis is not connection but discrimination which, as Bauman (1991: 2) notes, ‘…invariably the operation of such inclusion/exclusion is an act of violence’. Chaos, rather than ambivalence, becomes posed as the polar opposite or order.
The foundation or order of the modern episteme lies in functional and organic structures, systems. Things have a role independent of and prior to taxonomic classification. Thus, for example, gills and lungs, previously discrete, may be grouped together on the basis of a function in relation to the organism as a whole and its connection to an environment. Function is based on connection to environment and linked to temporality. In this episteme, the study of wealth or exchange develops into the study of labour needed to produce a commodity; the study of language emphasizes the importance of verbal roots and changes from the study of things perceived, to the active subject. Functions and system now become the defining motifs. These changes have important implications for agency, temporality and notions of causality. They lay the foundation of knowledge of man who lives, works and speaks. Although Foucault identifies important changes between the classical and modern epistemes, following Canguilhelm, he also identifies the importance of continuities, the embedded traces that endure. Both constitute the episteme of modernity.
Bloor (1991) and Toulmin (1990) also recognize underlying competing epistemes that inform modern knowledge, although with different interpretations of their origins and rationales. Bloor (1991) identifies two contrasting implicit methodological styles of thought, the Enlightenment and the Romantic, that he sees linking debates in the philosophy of science, political, social, economic, ethical and legal theory. He sees these as responses to the acceptance or rejection of major social events of the late 18th, 19th and early 20th century. For Toulmin (1990) the contrast between the forms of knowledge that inform modernity lie slightly earlier in the contrast between 16th century humanism and 17th century rationalism. Whilst the high Middle Ages saw these two forms of knowledge co-existing, Toulmin sees the need for certainty and stability in response to the social upheaval of the Wars of Religion resulting in the growing predominance of the 17th century rationalism.
For Bloor (1991), the methodological style of Enlightenment is characterized by four aspects. First, it is atomizing and analytical; wholes and collectivities are unproblematically equivalent to sets of individual units. Second, historical variation is subordinated to a concern for the timeless and universal. In this sense it has a static quality. Third, the unchanging and the general are extracted from the contingent and the concrete, promoting an abstract deductivism and explanation in the form of abstract general principles. The fourth characteristic is its strong prescriptive and moralizing flavour. The stress on reason, calculation, simplicity and intelligibility are central themes of Enlightenment thought. Bloor (1991: 63) comments ‘the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment style enables it to hold up clear, general principles, whose very distance from reality can serve as a reproach to the latter and a goal for action.’
Bloor (1991) contrasts this with the ideology and methodological style of Romantic thought. Here, social wholes are recognized as having special properties. The concrete and the historical are more important than the universal and the timeless. Individuals may only be understood in context, and the locally conditioned variation of responses and variations are stressed, as is the importance of the individual case. The emphasis is on the wholeness, intricacy and the inter-connectedness of social practices.
For Bloor (1991: 75) ideological opposition is ‘widely diffused through our culture and is a prominent and repeated pattern…the two archetypes will settle down in each of us and form a foundation and a resource for our thinking’. The balance of power between the two varies over time and from place to place. Each has a naturalistic and mystified reading. The mystification of the Romantic stresses complexity, the irrational and incalculable aspects, the tacit, hidden and inexpressible. While the mystification of the Enlightenment ‘endow logic and rationality with asocial and transcendent objectivity’ (Bloor, 1991:77).
Toulmin (1990) sees the modern world and modern culture as having two distinct origins, the first, a tolerant, sceptical attitude from the literary and humanistic phase of the Renaissance, and the second, exactitude and rigour reflecting the scientific and philosophical focus of 17th century rationalism. The earlier period reflected a concern for the four different kinds of practical knowledge, revolving around the oral, the particular, the local and the timely; while the latter focused on the written, the universal, the general and the timeless. Local and timebound practice is contrasted with universal and timeless theory. The 17th century saw the move to abstract, timeless methods of deriving general solutions to universal problems; a rejection of the local, timely and practical.
These two traditions derive from different intellectual origins: the Platonic and the Aristotelian (Flyvbjerg, 2001). From Aristotelian understandings that different kinds of argument, i.e. their degree of formality and certainty, was relevant to different issues, dependent on the nature of the issues involved, i.e., ‘reasonable’ was context dependent; following Plato, the 17th century limited rationality to theoretical arguments. In doing so, the language of reason was changed, there developed a calculative idea of rationality. ‘Calculation was enthroned as the distinctive virtue of human reason’ (Toulmin, 1990: 134).
Modernity’s Construction of
Management
These archeologies of modernity vary in what they identify, and the extent to which they define distinct knowledge epochs. What they do allow us to identify, however, are certain epistemic frameworks that inform our engagement with the world, and so the nature of ordering constructs and practices. What are the fundamental organizing concepts that may be identified from the above presentation and what are their implications for understanding management? Foucault (1970), Bloor (1991) and Toulmin (1900) all identify the dominant epistemic characteristics of modernity and from this five principal organizing categories may be identified—rationality, causality, agency, certainty and sovereign power.
Rationality: Rationality is an ambiguous word.
Reflecting the double meaning of logos, it refers to that which is measurable
or accountable and also to the furnishing of accounts or reasons. The latter is
context dependent—being reasonable; the former lies in formal procedure or
order—being rational. Rationality does not require a particular social setting,
nor does it deal with substantive issues. Rationality has been informed by the
mind/body split inaugurated by Descartes and the Kantian principle of
universality. Rationality is an abstract process, engaged in by a
transcendental subject, a socially disembodied being. It is a property of
individuals apart from and prior to their entry into social relations. It is
abstracted from any subject matter and independent of circumstance. In being
rational the most effective ways of stating and solving problems is to
decontextualize them (Lloyd 1995; MacIntyre, 1988). Universalizable,
formal principles transcending contingent (historical) circumstances and
particularities are the foundation of a formal rationality. As MacIntyre (1988:
4) notes it ‘ignores the inescapably historical and socially context-bound
character which any substantive principles of rationality, whether theoretical
or practical is bound to have’.
Modern reason speaks only of means. It is the matching of means efficiently to ends. Action is judged in relation to consequences as compared with alternative, possible courses of action and their consequences. No action is right or wrong as such. One may be fully rational without being just, fully rational without being reasonable.
This refined notion of reason as rationality has implications for other core concepts, tied as it is to a particular construction of causality and the depiction of a particular model of the individual. As Elster (1993) notes, rationality becomes constructed or characterized in terms of a capacity to relate to the future. It constructs the problems that Hume recognized as the ontological unity of the self over time, one that is capable of recognizing ties both to a former and future self, as the individual decides upon a course of action over time based on declared preferences.
Causality: From explanations of action that were held to be a matter of outlining physiological and physical mechanisms that underlie action (material and formal cause), understanding of human action is seen in mechanical terms (efficient cause). The latter understands cause as antecedence. However, seeing the natural world in mechanical terms also dissociates cause from reason, where the latter is associated with tradition, custom etc., the material and formal causes of social organization. Cause becomes associated with rationality, i.e.. the absence of tradition, custom etc. thought to infringe free choice and antecedent action, and thus therefore not rational.
Social and political thought were infused with ideas as to whether it was possible to organize society following ideas about nature. Mechanical explanation transferred from physics to an understanding of human behaviour by English and French thinkers in the 17th and 18th century and informed an understanding action seen in mechanical terms (MacIntyre 1984; Mirowski, 1994). For Kant physics and maths form a prior structures that define the limits of reason and conditions of knowledge. Understanding antecedent causes is understood as understanding efficient causes (MacIntyre, 1984: 82). Event A causes event B. Event B is proportionately related to A. Euclidean geometry constructs the world in lines and points and has heavily influenced a linearity of thought, viz., leadership style affects productivity, ‘motivators’ increase satisfaction.
Motion and change were the products of rational agency. Without conscious, rational intervention, material things would be merely passive (Toulmin, 1990:111). Without any intervening agency there could be no action at a distance. Force is required for change or development, whether in the form of an incentive or a threat. Integral to this image is the implication that in the absence of direction and control little or nothing would be produced, people’s potential would be unfulfilled. The picture is of a stable cosmos governed by laws. With certainty comes stability, identified as the chief virtue of social organization. Matter is inert; cannot set itself in motion; and can generate physical effects only if set in motion by a higher agency. This style of thinking provides the foundation for incentives and encourages linearity. As stability comes to dominate, instability is the consequence of temporary disruptions to equilibrium.
Agency: The creation, Foucault would say invention, of the individual is a fundamental category of thought and practice of modernity (Foucault 1984; Lukes 1990; MacIntyre 1984). It is a period that heralded the modern individual, the image of the self as autonomous and objectified, an atomistic and static concept of autonomy. It also heralded methodological individualism.
With its inheritance of the transcendental subject, the modern self has capacities and an identity prior to, and apart from, membership of a particular political and social order. As MacIntyre (1984: 32) warns ‘this democratized self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing’. The modern individual is able to pass judgment on a situation from a detached, universal, abstract point of view devoid of all social particularity (MacIntyre, 1984). The autonomous subject is created by being subject to self-created and self-imposed obligations. Abstraction has resulted in a further autonomous/objectified presentation of the individual—Sen’s (1977) rational fool. Economics does not explore the causal tangle of motives or feeling behind real human choices, rather it explores the rational choices of ‘ideal’ producers or consumers.
Modernity’s dominant model of rationality also has implications for the concept of agency. Within a context dependent, practical reasoning, the individual reasons qua member of a particular type of practice or political society, in relation to the specifics of the situation. But ‘in the practical reasoning of liberal modernity it is the individual qua individual who reasons’ (MacIntyre, 1988: 339). Consequently there is a disjuncture between the attitudes someone expresses and their actions. In a formalistic rationality the individual evaluates alternative sets of potential actions from an external standpoint. This may or may not lead to a decision, but not necessarily result in action. There is neither immediacy, necessity nor causal regularity in the relationship between decisions and action (MacIntyre, 1988: 341). Whereas in reasoning grounded within a practice or a polis, there is knowing who one is in terms of a social role and therefore knowing what should be done; in reasoning qua individual there is the assumption of this being a two stage process: knowing what to do and then doing it. A range of possible intervening factors that may come between practical judgement and action. This results in a culture, and a concept of agency, dominated by the making and unmaking of decisions. It is this that provides the foundation of management as decision-maker and has privileged the logic of calculation over the logic of appropriateness (March, 1981). However, as Flyvbjerg (2001: 17) notes, ‘in normal, familiar situations, real experts do not solve problems and do not make decisions. They just do what works’.
Not only was a particular image of the individual introduced, a particular model of human nature also gains dominance. At the centre of agency theory are assumptions about the nature of humans that are based in two centuries of neo-classical economic thinking (Zey, 1998: 46). From Hobbes’ state of nature as a war of each against all, some contemporary organizational theory, based on the principal/agency model and rational choice theory, rests on ideas about the nature of man and of social organizations that originated in the 17th and 18th centuries. There are parallels of Hobbes in Williamson’s theories of transaction costs and market failures. Organizations are populated by individuals guided by the rationality of Bentham’s greatest happiness principle and hedonic calculus, inter-related by chains of low trust relationships, linked by contracts or contractual processes.
Certainty: From Aristotelian thought that identified the circumstantial character of practical issues, recognizing the diversity and contextual dependency of human affairs, the 17th century framed questions that rendered them independent of context. For Aristotelian thought the intent was not to aim at certainty, necessity or generality beyond the specifics of the case (Toulmin, 1990: 29-30). From the 17th century there is a rejection of the humanist readiness to live with uncertainty, ambiguity and the acceptance of pluralism. There is the ‘Quest for Certainty’ (Dewey, 1929).
From the acceptance of Fortuna, and the recognition that ‘the bitch goddess of unpredictability’ (MacIntrye, 1984: 92) is ineliminable, there is, in modernity, the attempt to eliminate unpredictability. The modern concept of risk ‘replaces what was previously thought of as Fortuna’ (Giddens, 1990:30).
This Classical foundation of knowledge is instrumental in this. From the incomplete and merely probable knowledge of resemblance, knowledge becomes refocused to be completely enumerated and exhaustively understood. It is an approach to knowledge that sustains order and suppresses randomness. It also has implications for the construction of agency and agency’s relation to time. ‘To classify is to give the world a structure, to manipulate its probabilities; to make some events more likely than some others, to behave as if events were not random, or to limit or eliminate randomness of events.’ (Bauman 1991: 1). Whereas the ambivalence or fluidity of Renaissance thought creates a world where links between certain situations and the effectivety of certain actions confounds the calculation of events, classical knowledge is more constant. Past success is a greater guide to future action.
In this the classical episteme also lays the foundations of a particular construction of management. Management becomes defined as the reduction of ambivalence. The denial of ambivalence—‘the alter ego of language, its permanent companion’ (Bauman 1991: 1)—because of its associated anxiety and indecision, creates management and defines managerial problems. Through the discovery and application of a proper technology management becomes the ‘relentless war against ambivalence’ (Bauman 1991), a purifying practice engaging in the denial of hybrids (Latour 1993), the denial of an inherent undecidability (Derrida 1978). Through classification or fragmentation management has the basis for action—‘the world that falls apart into a plethora of problems is a manageable world’ (Bauman 1991: 12). The possibility of attaining, at least in principle, complete certitude becomes management’s credo. Only resistance to definition sets the limits to sovereignty.
The entire cognitive apparatus is an apparatus for abstraction and simplification—not directed at knowledge but at the control of things: ‘end’ and ‘means’ are as far from essence as are ‘concepts’. With ‘end’ and ‘means’ we control the process (—invent a process that is comprehensible) with ‘concepts’ we control the ‘things’ which make the process occur…This compulsion to form concepts, genera, forms, ends and laws…should not be understood as though we are capable through them of ascertaining the true world but rather as the compulsion to adapt ourselves to a world in which our existence is made possible. Thereby we create a world that is calculable, simplified, understandable etc. for us (Nietzsche quoted in Habermas, 1971: 295-6).
Sovereign power: Although not explicitly engaged with by Bloor and Toulmin, but addressed by Foucault, the sovereign view of power has also dominated analysis. From Hobbes’ view of power as the precondition of social order and peace, there is the equation of a co-ordinating function with hierarchy and control. Hierarchy and control are so entrenched that they become an obligatory passage point for interpretation and the basis of action.
This model is ingrained in many disciplines. As Fox Keller (1985) notes of genetic research there is a search for the ‘master molecule’. She cites the example of cellular slime mold that can function alternatively as single cells or as a multicellular organism. When there is enough food the organism remains as single cells. When its starved the cells undergo internal changes that lead to aggregation into clumps and cellular differentiation, and the clumps crawl off as slugs. The question was what triggers aggregation? In trying to explain this there was a widespread belief that special founder cells, central cells, cells with special properties that govern the behaviour of cells around them, were needed to initiate aggregation. In DNA and gene research there are similar stories about the search for the central actor in cells that governs cellular processes. Fox Keller uses this example as a warning of the role prior commitments, here to hierarchy, play in the development of theory.
We still operate with rationalistic, mechanical models, sovereign, economistic concepts of power and the world. We have not absorbed analyses that are sustained from a micro-physics of power. There is an implicit assumption that managerial intervention, especially when defined as decision-maker/problem-solver, will provide equilibrium. But most problems confronting managers at local levels are the outcomes of higher level problem-solving activity. Problems are created by problem solving. New areas of chaos are generated by ordering activity. Organizations are complex, interactive and dynamic, consisting of complex interactions, circular causality and multiple interactions. Different disturbances that constantly arise lead to new patterns that supersede the old; not the re-establishment of persistent equilibrium (Blau, 1955: 56). Innovation is a function of the system; the nature of networks and interconnections. An organization owes its properties not to the characteristics of any one kind of organizational group but to the functional inter-relationships of these groups. What is important is the relationship among units, the dynamics of the system.
Modernity has structured our understanding of a calculative rationality; it has constructed a particular depiction of the individual and of agency; and it presumes a concept of causality based on efficient cause, antecedent conditions and constant conjunction. Rationality, agency and causality are necessarily intertwined, especially if one takes Elster’s (1993) definition of thick rationality, which links rationality to causality and has within it a particular construct of the individual, as opposed to the more usually circumscribed, ‘thin rationality’. It is this holy trinity—rationality, agency and causality—that influences models of management and organization that are promulgated.
Beneath all this is a classical physics, a dominant model of science (Mirowski, 1994), ‘science’ not as the modern positivists understand it, but as a cosmology, or cosmopolis, to use Toulmin’s (1990) term: a comprehensive account of the world, that binds things together. From the 1600s onwards there was an overall framework of ideas about humanity and nature, the rational mind, and causal matter that gained the standing of common sense until the early years of the 20th century. It is this that forms the framework of management and modernity.
Modern management and organization theory is wrapped in the legacy of old debates about causation, equilibrium and reductionism. It reflects battles fought out over the last few centuries to substitute rationality for God. Management and the debates within it are yet one branch, or one manifestation, of a continuing post-Enlightenment dialogue. Understanding this requires an archeology.
Why is it important that we understand the intellectual origins of management? Firstly, we need a history of the past to make sense of the present. ‘The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression’ (Foucault, 1984:45). Secondly, despite the calls for, and identification of, new forms of management that underlie conditions of post modernity and increasing ambiguity and indecidability, the models that are proffered fail to fundamentally engage with these basic underlying suppositions.
Abstract Management: Strategic
Performance Management Systems
And how can this help our understanding of contemporary management? Let’s turn to an example beloved of new public management (NPM) initiatives, a strategic performance management system (SPMS). A strategic performance management system is the practice by which the organization, and every level within it, defines its purpose; clearly defines strategic and operational objectives; identifies key functions; measures performance in key functions; and sets performance targets. Results based budgeting may provide the link between performance and funding. Annual management plans specify department objectives and key result areas and targets. Annual reviews measure success in achieving targets. The organization is modeled into a well conceived layer of measures and targets cascading throughout the organization, linking individual, unit and organizational objectives.
Why is SPMS accepted as constituting management? Why is management constructed that this becomes a necessary part of what it is to manage and what it is to be a manager? What is the understanding of management that sustains this as a legitimate management practice? What makes SPMS the ‘how’ of management?
Explanations of both the appeal and failure of these techniques are generally offered in institutional terms. Explanations of their use usually refer to some variation on state restructuring in late 20th century capitalism in the face of growing welfare demands, globalization and the requirements of unfettered financial capital. Failures refer to lack of management support, inadequate process etc., although to be fair, Mintzberg (1994) also identifies some fundamental fallacies that underlie the content of these approaches. But SPMS epitomizes an abstract management technique, a technically rational system, whose foundations were laid several centuries ago.
The classical episteme heralds division, order, classification, codification, categorization, precise calibration, tables and taxonomies. For classical knowledge:
‘the overall project of knowledge is the achievement of a general science of order—a linguistic representation of things that places them in a series according to identities and differences existing among their properties. The appropriate expression of such a representation is a table that lays out all the categories of being and places each thing in its proper place’ (Foucault, 1970: 155).
‘Geometry…is the archetype of the modern mind. The grid its ruling trope’ (Bauman 1991: 15). A classificatory table makes an arena known in a particular way rendering it amenable to be acted upon. It also constructs the purposeful rational actor that once armed with knowledge is able to take decisions for the benefit of the whole.
This may be seen in the many stages of establishing an SPMS. As Bauman notes ‘Performance is measured by the neatness of divisions between classes; the precision of their definitional boundaries and the unambiguity with which objects may be allocated to classes’ (Bauman, 1991: 2). This is achieved through various linguistic functions: attribution, articulation, designation and derivation. ‘A proposition can connect (via attribution) representations only if they have been named; articulation is a process of generalizing proper names; designation relates a name to an object and derivation changes the meaning of names’ (Foucault, 1970: 161). The introduction of a specialized vocabulary is a process of articulation. It objectifies, it creates administrative objects: core business; mission, vision, goals, outcomes, strategies, performance measures, performance management. Everyday activity has to be reconstructed using this vocabulary. The ability to, if not control then adeptly comprehend and use terms is a crucial element in the political positioning of those involved (Oakes, Townley and Cooper, 1998). Despite this, in SPMS, language is portrayed as a transparent, neutral representation.
SPMS is premised on articulation, the abstraction of social relations to categories; and decomposition, the reduction of entities to predefined component parts. The assumption is that analysis can provide synthesis, that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts.
As Mintzberg (1994) notes ‘the product of planning–the plans themselves, after being carefully decomposed into strategies and substrategies, programmes, budgets and objectives must be clearly and explicitly labeled by words and preferably by numbers’. Performance measurement generates a profuse vocabulary: activity-based measures–level of demand for services; efficiency measures–costs of performing the activity on a per unit basis; intermediate measures or short-term outcome measures; and outcome measures, each with their own targets. The asymptotic nature of activity explains the multiplication of performance measures as attempts are made to translate or reduce activities to a single signifier.
Performance measures also introduce subtle changes in the experience of time. Emphasis is placed on future events, outcomes, results. As Bauman (1991:11) notes, ‘to set a…task means not to endear the future, but to devalue the present. Not being what it ought to be is the presents’ original and irredeemable sin’ .
Technologies are presented as neutral instruments for the representation of the real, they re-present ‘pertinent’ features of a realm. There is an implicit assumption of an objective knowledge readily accessible through observation. Stress is placed on quantification, hard data and facts. Objective measures reflect what is ‘out there’. Performance measures are meant to be transparent, merely reporting an aspect of the organization. That measurement is contextual is denied, as is the knowledge that once figures become formally recorded they ‘take on a life of their own’.
Specifying results is a process of rendering explicit means-ends relations. It requires making processes and consequences unambiguous, establishing a set of causal relationship between inputs and outputs, monetary expenditure and accomplishments. It is a statement of causality. Performance measurement and management promise control and easily identifiable causal relationships. Its technologies are heavily mechanistic, with an implicit assumption of the inevitable linear progression along a causal chain from inputs to outcomes, of cause and effect. It is assumed that it is feasible to develop a meaningful specification of means-ends relations, the failure to do so is the result of an incorrect techniques, not cause for questioning basic assumptions. Feedback is based on a stimulus response model, antecedent cause producing linear effect. Organizational integration is achieved through rules and procedures. Organizations stay tied together by means of controls in the forms of incentives and measures.
Measures are consciously conceived as forming a tiered relationship with other measures. Their inter-relationship provides the articulation of means-end relations that are seen in NPM as underlying all government activity. Core government measures are an aggregation of lower level measures; key ministry measures support core government measures; management measures provide programme specific information for higher level measures. The final result is the creation of an articulated and integrated matrix or map which combines all the disparate elements together. Units of government are linked by a fixed system of reports and measures which themselves are hierarchically ordered, structuring the content of reports and plans at the adjacent level. Through this hierarchical structure the action plans of all employees may be linked to measures of government.
SPMS presents management as a series of carefully delineated steps, executed in sequential order. Optimal decisions are made by careful planning and rational logic. ‘Management’ is defined as detachment, not being immersed in the details of the task. It becomes separated from operations management. It is the ‘steering not rowing’ of Osborne and Gaebler’s (1993) mantra. Management is based on aggregation, but with this comes the denial of the importance of local knowledge. These systems facilitate action at a distance. SPMS allows for the production of a league table whereby things are placed in a series according to identities and differences among properties. League tables that result act as self-fulfilling prophecies that benchmarking is possible. This formalization, abstraction and simplification is a paean to decidability.
The formal rationality of performance measures is taken to require no particular type of social setting. Its rationality lies in order or formal procedure not in substantive issues. It is the disembedded knowledge that typifies high modernity (Giddens, 1990). SPMS is premised on: formalization, detachment, decomposition, analysis, objectivity, quantification, aggregation, abstraction, simplification, articulation, decidability, stimulus-response causality, combination. It is the sovereignty of technique and the apparent certainty of technical knowledge (Oakeshott 1994). From incomplete and probable knowledge of resemblance, the ‘best in the circumstances’, knowledge becomes refocussed to be completely enumerated and exhaustively understood. There is, in principle, the possibility of attaining complete certitude.
This is the methodological style of Classical and Enlightenment thought, a 17th century rationalism (Foucault, 1970; Bloor, 1990; Toulmin, 1991) with its atomizing, analytical tendency, whereby wholes and collectivities are unproblematically equivalent to sets of individual units; the subordination of historical variation to the universal; abstract general principles favoured over the contingent and the concrete. Abstract management offers an epistemic and ontological security. It is this that perpetuates these systems and the faith in the refinement of techniques. One may agree with Shenhav (1999: 198) that management offers a canonized body of knowledge with a ‘self-sustaining structure and self-propagating logic’.
From his injunction of Sapere Aude, the courage to make use of one’s own understanding, Kant laments the ‘laziness and cowardice’ that encourages people to ‘remain minors’, that makes it easy for others who have ‘graciously undertaken the superintendence of mankind’ to ‘set themselves up as their guardians’ (Kant, 1784/1979:250). Citing examples of the curate who acts as a conscience, a physician who guards diet, Kant (1784/1979: 250) also identifies ‘ordinances and formules, the mechanical instruments of a rational use’ that may also act as ‘the fetters of an everlasting minority’.
These mechanical instruments of rational use are in danger of leading to a shadow rationalization (Meyer, 1992), or learned ignorance (Power, 1997). Local learning processes, systems for self reflection on practice, under the control of practitioners and those who are affected by the work, become harnessed to regulatory initiatives. In an abstract management system, system wide controls take the place of a practitioner or self-control of quality. From an embodied practical evaluation that relates purpose, values and administrative systems, a bureaucratized system take over the regulation of actions (Callahan, 1962). And subtly the basis for identification with activity changes. Accountability, the assurance that something is being managed well, practices are achieved effectively and efficiently, becomes transformed into audit (Power, 1997). As Habermas (1987: 184) notes, the effect is to ‘connect up interactions in time and space into more and more complex networks that no-one has to comprehend or be responsible for’.
Conclusions
By problematizing taken for granted practices or technologies the aim is ‘to show how this way of doing things…was capable of being accepted at a given moment…as an altogether natural, self-evident and indispensable part of it’ (Foucault, 1981:5). Through a ‘historico-critical’ reflection on concrete practices, the intention is to shake ‘this false self-evidence, demonstrating its precariousness’, with the recognition that its contingency allows the possibility of know longer following it.
There is a need for critical analysis to engage directly with the content of managerial knowledge, and an archeology of its construction. Whilst goals and interests help understand cognition or concept application, they ‘do not inspire the creation of knowledge ab initio’ (Barnes and Edge, 1982: 195). Explanations of variations in methods require detailed genealogical examination. There is an archeology to be excavated the way that the concept of the decision, again as an example, constitutes an agent, a genealogy from Kierkegaard’s emphasis on choice after the project of the rational vindication of morality has failed, to its incarnation in managerial decision-making in the work of March and Simon and beyond.
In ‘orthodox’ organization theory is it perhaps Bloor and Toulmin’s two traditions that Barley and Kunda (1992) identify in their analysis of the dialectic between normative and rational control; or Thompson (1967) reflects in his contrast of closed and open systems as reflected in the rational and natural models of organizations? For Thompson (1967), the former, associated with scientific management, administrative management and bureaucracy, is contrasted with work on the informal organization, and the organization as a unit in interaction with the environment. He writes of the logics associated with each ‘one avoids uncertainty to achieve determinateness, while the other assumes uncertainty and indeterminateness…each leads to some truth, but neither alone affords an adequate understanding of complex organizations’ (Thompson, 1967: 10). This ... leads to an either/or: ‘One alternative…is the closed system approach of ignoring uncertainty to see rationality; another is to ignore rational action to see spontaneous processes…’ (Thompson, 1967: 10). More interestingly he writes, ‘The two strategies reflect something fundamental about the cultures surrounding complex organizations—the fact that our culture does not contain concepts for simultaneously thinking about rationality and indeterminateness’ (Thompson, 1967: 10). Whilst maintaining that ‘our theme throughout has been one of reduction of uncertainty and its conversion into relative certainty’ (Thompson, 1967: 148), the terms Thompson uses remain sufficiently ambiguous than just contrasting rationality with uncertainty and perhaps reflect deeper echoes of epistemic conflicts. These traces have been lost in subsequent debates that have been reduced to sterile positivist/non-positivist agenda.
On a broader level, however, what undermines the sovereignty of reason becoming the sovereignty of technique? Toulmin (1990: xi) calls for the need to reappropriate the wisdom of the 16th century humanist and develop a point of view that combines the abstract rigor and exactitude of the 17th century new philosophy with a practical concern for human life in its concrete detail. Foucault (1970) notes that we are either at the completion of the modern breakup of classical order or at the dawn of a new era, a new episteme. He identifies what he terms the counter-sciences—linguistics, ethnology and psychoanalysis—as models that call the concept of man into question, and by not taking man as a fundamental category, offer alternative ways of conceiving ourselves.
Major challenges to modernity come from quantum physics. This poses the need for a new cognitive structure radically different from the existing one. A calculative rationality is a moot point when causality is poorly understood. Agency is reframed when causation is non linear and too complicated to be controlled. Hierarchy and control are de-stabilized when knowledge may be located anywhere is the network. But as Fox Keller (1985: 140-41) notes, ‘discussions about the meaning of quantum mechanics are stymied as the result of the failure…to formulate a cognitive paradigm adequate to their theory…What is being evaded is the need for a cognitive structure radically different from the prior existing structure’. In this she is echoed by Bachelard (Tiles, 1984) that the new rationality in twentieth century physical science constitutes an epistemological break that introduces a new way of thinking. The real challenge for management thought is to engage with the implications of this new cognitive model for traditional managerial assumptions (Tsoukas, 1998; Griffin et al. 1998; Chia, 1998; Kallinikos 1998; Marion 1999).
The outcomes of this are far in the future but, in the meantime, one step towards a critique of the disembedded and disembodied nature of management indicates the importance of an embedded (Granovetter, 1985) and embodied (Dale, 2000) management. Not an abstract rationality central to the development of managerialism, but a concrete management and a substantive practical rationality. Abstract management can be a form of avoiding management. If standard methods produce standard results then management does not need to interfere. Judgement is replaced by laws principles and rules. Management becomes management through an abstract system.
An embedded and embodied management allows for uncertainty, ambiguity and an acceptance of pluralism. It allows for the recognition of local diversity and the relevance of particularity. But more particularly it recognizes a role for practical reason. The term originates with Aristotle and can best understood through its relation to modern formal rationality. While the latter is individualized, decontextualised, and removed from tradition, practical reason is based on the Aristotelian tradition of rationality located within a polis.
Practical reason is constituted through integration into a social structure
and is exercised solely in relation to membership of a particular community.
This provides a knowledge of self and others, and an awareness of substance,
obligations and duties. It recognizes that individuals are part of a set of
social relationships and members of a social group. It recognizes the
importance of tradition and custom, of experience as being collective and
cumulative. Too readily devalued and dismissed, practical reason is a grounded
rationality, one that is linked to a narrative history and to a concept of the
‘goods’ of a tradition, understood as a subset of public goods. Informed by
practical reason, management is a set of practices that organize work efforts
such that the goods of the tradition are enhanced (Townley 1999; 2002). This
emphasizes the role of a moral community that drives the organization as a
purposive entity. Practical reason acknowledges the embodied and context-bound
nature of managing and it is when this comes into conflict with an abstract
rationality central to managerialism that conflict and resistance is generated.
The implications of this for management are quite fundamental. I relate an anecdote which displays the contrast, and concerns a friend who was invited to be the Chair of a National Health Trust. When faced with issues relating to the management of the Trust the principle criterion informing her decisions was ‘how would I feel if this was a member of my family, what would I want for them?’ In relating the story, she then became apologetic for the criteria she had used to aid her decision making, indicating that she felt sure this would not, and possibly should not, have been the criterion for decision-making, and was in this sense not ‘correct’ management. But that this, for her, was an important criterion. For me this anecdote typifies the application of the specific other, not the generalised abstract other of modernity, in guiding decision making (Benhabib, 1987). Whilst it might not have been ‘rational’, it was reasonable. It located management in a polis and was guided by values. All other decisions stemmed from this. As Toulmin (1990: 185) notes, one ‘must evaluate practical matters by their human reasonableness’
This relies on an understanding of context and the practical understanding of the managed process. Its concern with the particular allows for the recognition that sound moral judgments respect the detailed circumstances of specific kinds of cases, and the particularity of human action. It recognizes a localized rationality, from Aristotle, that human life does not lend itself to abstract generalizations. It recognizes the importance of the timely, i.e., that the rationality of a decision depends on when it is effected. Its analysis is reflected in detailed ethnographies of management (Watson, 1994; Boden 1994).
Aristotle recognized three levels of knowledge: the intellectual grasp of a theory (episteme), the mastery of arts and techniques (techne), and the wisdom needed to put techniques to work in concrete cases dealing with actual problems (phronesis). Conventional managerial education has tended to focus on the techne, understood as technically rational systems. Techne governed by value rational deliberation is not so well developed (Forester, 2000).
Perhaps it is time also to pay attention to the epistemic foundations of management knowledge and phronesis. One measure of the former may be a fuller engagement with the concept of rationality, a fundamental concept in management literature but one which is assumed rather than debated (Halpern and Stern, 1998). The attack on rationality has been mounted through the elevation of emotions. Although useful, what is required is a more sustained overhaul of the concept of rationality itself. Shenhav (1999) has begun this in his history of competing rationalities in engineering and management.
As Foucault (1984a: 249) states:
I think the central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the 18th century has always been, still is, and will, I hope, remain the question: What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic changes? One should remain as close to this question as possible, keeping in mind that it is both central and extremely difficult to resolve’
It is here, perhaps, that we should begin.
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