Wanted: Philosophy of Management
Nigel Laurie and Christopher Cherry
We attempt in this paper to define a new field of study for philosophy: philosophy of management. We
briefly speculate why the interest some managers and management writers take in philosophy has been so
little reciprocated and why it needs to be. Then we suggest the scope of this new branch of philosophy and
how it relates to and overlaps with other branches. We summarise some key matters philosophers of
management should concern themselves with and pursue one in some detail. We conclude with an
invitation.
A Two-Way Street?
For some time managers have deferred to philosophy in practice as well as theory. They have
sought to recruit philosophy graduates in preference to MBA graduates to work in artificial
1
2
intelligence. In Glasgow executives have sought to acquire the skills of Philosophical Inquiry.
Health Service managers study medical ethics. And, of course, many managers take programmes in
‘business ethics’, a subject with its own Society of Business Ethics and journals such as Business
3
Ethics Quarterly and the Journal of Business Ethics. As long ago as 1924 Oliver Sheldon published
The Philosophy of Management, an account of the purposes and responsibilities of industrial
4
management, an area widely treated within business ethics.
The social psychologist and
management consultant Charles Hampden-Turner has applied existentialist concepts to business
5
organisations and the work of their managers. The economist, consultant and writer Peter Drucker
is sometimes described as a management philosopher and credited with ‘discovering’ the modern
6
7
discipline of management. One management guru describes himself as ‘a social philosopher’.
When the economist John Kay gave his inaugural lecture as the first Director of Oxford’s Said
8
School of Business he drew explicitly on Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of work as a practice.
And one of the current stars of the U.S. management lecture circuit pulls in the crowds by
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1
A report in The Economist in the 1970s. We have been unable to locate the precise issue.
Under the aegis of the European Philosophical Inquiry Centre at the Department of Education, University
of Glasgow.
3
The London Business School offers MBA students an option in Modern Business Ethics covering issues
arising within companies and between companies and their human and natural environments. Harvard
Business School provides a Leadership, Ethics and Corporate Responsibility programme and its Press has
published titles like Good Intentions Aside: A Manager's Guide to Resolving Ethical Problems and Can Ethics Be
Taught? Perspectives, Challenges and Approaches at Harvard Business School. According to one writer over 500
business ethics courses are taught on American campuses and 16 business ethics research centres operate in
the USA. (See: Andrew Stark, ‘What's the Matter with Business Ethics?’ Harvard Business Review May-June
1993, pp 38-48.) An established textbook in the field is Business Ethics by Richard T De George, first
published in 1982 by Macmillan. It covers moral reasoning, the morality of economic systems, moral issues
within business (eg environmental protection, privacy, workers' rights), and the obligations of various groups
(eg nations to other nations, one generation to later ones).
4
Published by Sir Isaac Pitman, London 1924 and reprinted in 1965. The (British) Institute of
Management's library copy was last borrowed in 1992 but back in 1966 intending borrowers had to join a
waiting list.
5
See eg Charles Hampden-Turner Charting the Corporate Mind: From Dilemma to Strategy Basil Blackwell,
Oxford 1990
6
See, eg, J Micklethwait & A Wooldridge The Witch Doctors p 71 Heinemann, London 1996
7
Charles Handy. See, eg, the Financial Times 24 May 1996, p 15. We owe to him a variant on the Liar
Paradox which we would christen the Guru Paradox: ‘We are entering...a time when the only prediction that
will hold true is that no predictions will hold true’. (C Handy, The Age of Unreason p 4 London1989) The
US Business Week and Fortune magazines named the book one of the best business books of the year. Another
apercu in the text is ‘The future is not inevitable’, inspired perhaps by Zeno.
8
Reprinted in adapted form as ‘Good business’ in Prospect Issue 28, March 1998 pp 25-29
2
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Nigel Laurie and Christopher Cherry
9
explaining what would happen If Aristotle Ran General Motors, the book he published in 1997.
These are just some of many possible examples.
Why, by contrast, have philosophers interested themselves so little in the entire field of
management and managers? To be sure, Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue deals directly with
management. The Prato Centre at the Free University of Amsterdam offers degrees in Business
Philosophy through the Faculty of Philosophy. There is a Dutch journal Filosofie in Bedrijf
(Philosophy in Business) founded in 1990 whose concerns overlap with ours. At IESE in Barcelona
the Business Ethics Department is researching the epistemological, anthropological and ethical
foundations in classic management authors. Philosophical practitioners in several countries work
10
with diverse groups including managers. And as long ago as 1977, the British philosopher Tony
11
Skillen provided a critique of management – and philosophers - in his Ruling Illusions.
If our philosophers of law and punishment show little signs of having been near a gaol, let alone in
one, the walls of our factories are equally remote from the thought and experience of our philosophers
of justice, freedom, ‘human action’...and bodily sensation...John Rawls..(and)..Robert Nozick illustrate
in different ways the structural blindness I am talking about.
In similar vein, the ideas of contemporary philosophers – typically Continental European – have
been invoked increasingly in the study of management and organisations by those working in the
12
field of critical management studies, founded on social theory. In Copenhagen, the Business
School hosts an Institute of Management, Politics and Philosophy. The British Academy of
Management has a Special Interest Group on the Philosophy of Organisation and The European
Group for Organisation Studies has a Standing Working Group on the same subject.
So why do many philosophers appear to exhibit what Tony Skillen terms ‘structural blindness’,
working as if management does not exist? Is the reason snobbery or distaste engendered by the
frequent conflation of ‘business’ with ‘management’ which reduces management to the role of
midwife for profit? Is it sheer ignorance born of the fear of boredom even though more and more
philosophers find themselves being managed? Could it be that they judge that the issues they want
to, even should, pursue can be better treated in other terms or areas of inquiry without recourse to
13
managerial discourse? Or is it a criticism voiced in a refusal to engage? The philosophical
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9
Thomas V. Morris If Aristotle Ran General Motors:The New Soul of Business Henry Holt and Company,
1997. The author, a philosophy professor for 15 years, urges business to follow the teachings of the classical
philosophers and not Aristotle alone.
10
Members of the growing philosophical practice movement are philosophers who practise philosophy with
individuals, groups and, increasingly, organisations. They conduct socratic dialogues with groups of adults,
philosophical enquiries (typically with schoolchildren) and offer philosophical counselling to individuals. See,
eg Jos Kessels Socrates Comes to Market in this issue, Wim van der Vlist (ed) Perspectives in Philosophical
Practice Voor Filllosofische Praktijk, Groningen 1997 and Ran Lahav & Maria Tillmanns (ed) Essays on
Philosophical Counselling University of America Press, Lanham-New York-London 1995, third edition 1997.
Professional societies include the Society of Consultant Philosophers (Britain), the Society for the
Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education (SAPERE, Britain), Vereniging voor
Filosofie Praktijk (the Netherlands) and the American Society for Philosophy, Counselling and
Psychotherapy. There is a Centre of Philsophy for Children within the Australian Council for Educational
Research and in America an Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State
University, New Jersey.
11
Harvester Press, Sussex 1977. The extract quoted is from Chapter 2 The Politics of Production pp 42-44.
Perhaps it is significant that a second edition was called for in 1993.
12
For a recent account of the origins and scope of critical management studies (CMS) see: Valérie Fournier
and Chris Grey ‘At the critical moment: Conditions and prospects for critical management studies’ Human
Relations Vol 53(1) pp 7-32. The authors discuss the differing relationships CMS thinkers have to managerial
practice. For a recent account of a new course for management students and an attempt to define what counts
as a critical approach see: John Mingers ‘What is it to be critical? Teaching a critical approach to management
undergraduates’ Warwick Business School Research Papers No 284.
13
Cf. This exchange from the 1970’s:
Politician: And what are your politics, if I may ask?
(continued)
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Wanted: Philosophy of Management
tradition, however, has always engaged with issues which in our time have emerged as problematic
in the field of managed organisations. Management, we argue, merits philosophical study because
the ways in which managers and their theoreticians conceptualise their own roles and activities are
philosophically loaded.
Thus, for example, managers talk about ‘our people’ (ie employees), the need for sound decisions,
the importance of measurement and of their ‘right to manage’. In doing so they rely on
presuppositions about, for instance, the self, rationality, ontology and legitimacy whose intellectual
origins may go unidentified and unquestioned. Furthermore, the very expressions ‘business ethics’
and ‘managerial responsibility’ cry out for critical inspection. And many of the issues arising from
management practice cannot be adequately resolved within the discipline, for example the
legitimacy of management and the ethics of incentives. These limitations become all the more
critical as management values and practices spread out from the capitalist industrial sector in which
so many originated to organisations in fields such as healthcare, schooling, public broadcasting, the
advancement of knowledge, artistic performance, government and religion. Sometimes, of course,
organisations are privatised to move them closer to market disciplines and, we suspect, in the hope
of bringing them to adopt what are thought of as authentically managerial practices.
It will already be clear, we hope, that philosophy of management is no more merely business ethics
than philosophy of science is scientific methodology.
The Scope
What, then, would a philosophy of management contribute to existing management theorising,
research, analysis and practice? We suggest its scope would include attention to at least the
following themes:
(1)
Presuppositions of management theory and practice: implicit theories of knowledge, language,
nature and human nature, and of the legitimacy of managerial power and the rights of
managers
(2)
Concepts at the core of management such as manager, leader, organisation, role, responsibility,
stakeholder, effectiveness, vision, mission, judgement, creativity, motivation, culture, value
and risk.
Some of these notions concern individuals and their behaviour. Others relate to organisations
through which managers function; and first it is essential to explore the relationship between
the two kinds of concepts and to seek to define which is the more fundamental.
(3)
Representations of management and the managerial myths informing management theory and
practice. These commonly point to tensions and contradictions within management.
(4)
Management methodologies: decision-making, control and organisation-design (for instance
14
Birt, McKinsey and managerialism at the BBC; the British NHS reforms). Designing
organisations that link service providers to users through internal markets rests upon
assumptions about the place and efficacy of trust in organisational functioning and about
how needs differ from wants and how each is best established and met.
Journalist: I’m not interested in politics. (Continued)
Politician: I should take an interest in politics before politics begins to take an interest in you.
The politician was Denis Healey, one time British Defence Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
14
Managerialism is, of course, nothing new at the BBC. McKinsey & Co management consultants were first
called into the BBC in the 1960's. ‘It showed publicly that the BBC was in earnest in its endeavours for selfimprovement, to the point of using a popular managerial detergent...’ Tom Burns The BBC. Public
Institution and Private World p 230 Macmillan, London 1977.
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Nigel Laurie and Christopher Cherry
(5)
The relevance and applicability of philosophical techniques and skills to management practice:
dialogue, enquiry, conceptual analysis and moral reasoning.
(6)
The application of philosophical disciplines to issues facing managers: for instance, the purpose of
an organisation and the responsibilities of management; performance measurement; the
status of ethics in management; the ethics of public relations, sponsorship, incentives and
contracts; employee privacy; and the proper restraints on management’s freedom of action.
These issues arise on several levels. At the immediate practical level are issues such as: what are
managers responsible for?; what is a business for?; what makes for a good hospital, school, library,
company?; what exactly is an equal opportunity employer? At the meta level are questions like the
following: are things you can’t measure real?; what does it mean to treat people as ends?; what status
and priority should managers assign to ethics?
Now, philosophy of management - like political philosophy - needs to be analytic and at the same
time prepared to be prescriptive. It should describe how management works and prescribe how it
should be practised. It should help ultimately to improve the practice of management by resisting
the temptation to be immediately practically helpful. ‘The philosophy that is concerned to be
15
helpful cannot be separated from the philosophy that aims to help us understand.’ If managers
know where they stand philosophically and where they have come from the quality of their thinking
and therefore practice should be enhanced.
The remainder of this paper will be devoted, illustratively and to a degree polemically, to a
consideration of just three elements in (1) above - presuppositions in management - after a brief
preliminary exploration of that general area
Presuppositions
The idea of management rests on presuppositions which could be said to form management’s
unspoken philosophy. This philosophy needs to be articulated and examined to reveal its history,
the sources of its appeal, its strengths and its limitations. Differences between cultures need to be
reviewed and evaluated. For example, Japanese management’s concept of the self appears to differ
from that presupposed by American management. Where Americans might stress the essentially
separate individual Japanese managers emphasise belonging and reciprocating; the intrapersonal is
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15
‘Plato thought with increasing sternness as he got older, that philosophy could not help anyone unless it was
true to itself. Its truthfulness meant, too, that it could not tell in advance what would help; and since that was
so, it could not hope to find things that would help if it thought that it knew in advance what kinds of things
they would be...the philosophy that is concerned to be helpful cannot be separated from the philosophy that
aims to help us understand.
‘There is an illustration of this in...the question of the value of free speech...one of the most practical
questions of political value, (it) leads, if one takes it seriously, to basic issues in the philosophy of science and
metaphysics. Those issues simply are hard, technical, and not immediately helpful. Those who work at them
may well not have a hand free to stretch out to the ordinary person, to help him confront the moral morass.
In philosophy, at least, a truthful style is not likely to make it immediately obvious what the work has to do
with our most urgent concerns, because its interest is in the less obvious roots and consequences of our
concerns.’
Bernard Williams ‘On Hating and Despising Philosophy’ London Review of Books Vol 18 No 8 (18 April
1996) pp 17-18. While in sympathy with the thrust of Williams' argument, we think there is scope to build
bridges between exploration of the basic issues and illumination of managerial life.
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Wanted: Philosophy of Management
set against the interpersonal. From such unexamined constructs very different managerial behaviour
16
and organisations arise. Which are better founded?
There are several trends forcing presuppositions above ground. Japanese industrial success in global
markets once challenged Western managers to seek the reasons for it, just as the growth of Asian
economies prompted Western politicians of all persuasions to reconsider the proper role of the state
in directing the economy and the optimum share of GDP it should take in taxation. Now the
silicon valley phenomenon appears to be pressing the claims of another model on managers seeking
economic success. Such spectacles lead them to question basic assumptions. Moreover, global
corporations have faced cultural differences in the various places where they operate and have their
markets. Communication advances and new technologies have removed the time-buffers that
softened the impact of those differences. But noting the differences is only the beginning
philosophically.
Besides cultural shocks, other trends are exposing presuppositions. Competitive pressures and the
facilities offered by new technologies combine to encourage radical shifts in the organisation of
work. Traditional assumptions about how knowledge comes to be produced and about where work
belongs in the scheme of an individual’s entire life have been challenged and, arguably, overturned.
There is much talk of ‘paradigm shifts’ and ‘work as conversation’.
By way of illustration, we discuss three core presuppositional themes of Anglo-Saxon traditional
management practice. To some observers these are of interest insofar as they lead to a distinctive
style (or ‘art’) of management with certain social consequences. For the philosopher of
management the interest is not aesthetic and economic but epistemological and metaphysical.
Cross-cultural studies may, for example, help illuminate the different assumptions on which
organisations can be managed. They do not, however, take us beyond a pragmatic relativism.
The presuppositions we discuss concern the self, language and rationality. It should be noted that
these are only three of many philosophically significant areas of presuppositions made by managers.
1. Selves
The self enters into management in at least three guises: managers, we suspect, conceive in very
different ways of their own selves, those of their employees and of persons outside their
organisations. Thus different concepts of self lie behind differences in managerial communication
practices and remuneration philosophies. Differences in relationships certainly influence behaviour
but we suspect the ways different relationships are constructed by the participating managers flow in
turn from differences in the concept of the self that is being related to.
Many managers construe themselves as calculating, purposeful and future-orientated. Experience is
described in teleological terms. They might argue, if challenged, that this is practically desirable
even if it does not stand up in theory. But there are several problems with this.
First, the calculating, teleological model of how we experience ourselves and how we think tends to
be ontologised into an account of how we are. This account then informs management thought
and action. It may also transform the sense of identity of some employees into one defined in terms
of an organisation’s goals, with an attendant loss of identity on redundancy or retirement.
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16
See: R T Pascale and A G Athos The Art of Japanese Management pp 121-123 Penguin Books,
Harmondsworth 1983. Also: Sheelagh O’Reilly ‘Reason as Performance’ in this issue.
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Nigel Laurie and Christopher Cherry
Second, at the level of value it marginalises those with other senses of the self. And, if mistaken, it
prompts managers to strategies (such as ‘incentivisation’, the structuring of time and the imposition
of time management practices) that may work with only limited success.
What are managers to do about employees or colleagues whose sense of themselves is very different?
Consider, for example, the following passage:
Some people live in narrative mode, and wrongly assume that everyone else does the same... Some of
them...are great planners, and knit up their lives with long-term projects...I have no sense of my life as
a narrative with form...I make plans for the future....But I experience this way of thinking of myself as
remote and theoretical, given the most central or fundamental way in which I think of myself, which is
as a mental self or someone using ME to express the way in which I think of myself. I can accurately
express my experience by saying that I do not think of ME as being something in the future.17
How are managers to value such persons when their normality is denied by the management
construct? They may know the reality, legitimacy and even practical value of such ways of
experiencing. But, conceptually, they may be driven to behave in ways that seek to ‘manage’ it.
There is a further aspect, too, where management beliefs about the self may underpin practices.
Western managers conceive of the self as separate from the roles it plays and relationships in which
it engages. It is thus perceived as able to stay morally intact through the role demands of
organisational life. The manager in a media organisation who confessed on breakfast television in
the 1980s that he asked his journalists covering British royalty to behave in ways he would not
allow from his children appeared to subscribe to two incompatible views of the self. (Perhaps the
essentialist view of the adult self derived from the Protestant origins of capitalism.) In the case of
the adult employees, the distinction between ‘real personal self’ and the ‘professional role-bound
self’ was treated as unproblematic. The manager’s ontology dissolved the ethical issue. But what if
the self exists only through its roles? Or what if it is nothing but its roles? On a different ontological
view the ethical issue for managers would now be acute. They cannot rely on an employee’s
putatively insulated self remaining unaffected by the morality of the roles they demand the
employee fills. Nor, of course, can they leave their own work roles so completely behind them
when leaving the office. They are an indissoluble part not only of their public performance for
whose consequences they may be held professionally accountable; they are part, too, of what they
think of as their ‘private moral self’ as well.
2. Language
In practice managers as managers tend to treat language as an unproblematic tool. It is parole, not
langue. Language is conceived of instrumentally as a tool for exerting control by stating,
speculating, directing, arguing, persuading and the like.
However, a paradox lies at the heart of management’s concept of language. Managers use language
to shape beliefs, attitudes and behaviour - and to ‘impose a culture’ (as one chief executive put it).
In short, managers trade on the unacknowledged fact that language functions as langue, creating a
pool of possible identities, feelings and meanings on which language users draw. Yet many betray
no grasp that for them, too, their parole presupposes langue. It is as if the elephant supporting the
world believes that it is independently suspended in space.
The extent to which the identity of managers is constructed by the language they inhabit needs
more scrutiny. And with this scrutiny could go an explanation of the extent to which and in what
sense managers are free agents shaping the future of their organisations. In The Age of Unreason,
Charles Handy insisted that for those who manage organisations ‘it is their hands that rest on the
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17
8
Galen Strawson ‘The Sense of the Self’ London Review of Books Vol 18 No 8 (18 April 1996) pp 21-22
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Wanted: Philosophy of Management
levers of social change’ (p vii) while conceding the shaping power of language: ‘When our language
changes, behaviour will not be far behind’ (p 13). Since then he has, surely rightly, called for ‘a new
language to release our thinking’ about corporations (in the Harvard Business Review, SeptemberOctober 1997, p 25). But how language controls managers as opposed to being amenable to their
control remains problematic.
Such issues suggest managers’ presuppositions about meaning would also be well worth exploring.
They would seem to have elements in common with Austin’s speech-act theory and with certain
theories of moral language. Management utterances occur always in a context of relations defined,
at least in part, in terms of authority; prescription is latent and approval or disapproval is implicit in
even the most innocent utterance. We might say that every management utterance carries with it
permanent possibilities of prescription subject only to the audience’s perception.
Here we touch on a crucial entry point to the debates on the responsibilities of managers and on
their ‘right to manage’. For if the right to manage is to be allowed there needs to be a justifying
ground; the right of management to prescribe requires justification. Typically this derives from
management’s contractual authority grounded in (the intended) economic performance or other
outcome, an extrinsic matter. Perhaps, however, the right to prescribe should rest on a formal
intrinsic ground, analogous to the logical properties which some would maintain confer on moral
statements their right to be taken seriously
A further argument for deriving management’s right to manage from the internal characteristics of
management utterances is one from the existence of irreducibly social goods. If these exist then
management’s responsibilities cannot be exhaustively described in terms of results. Managers are
responsible, too, for the cultures they bring into being through the relationships they create through
their utterances. If this is so, we need to work out an ethical theory of management utterances.
Work on these issues would help towards an ethic of communication for managers. Is a utilitarian
ethic acceptable? What of the place of absolutism in management communication? Or the
existence of discrepancies between managerial utterances and behaviour? What of non-disclosure,
deception, economy with the truth? ‘Management speak’ has spawned an Orwellian vocabulary of
its own: ‘letting go’ (firing or making redundant), ‘rightsizing’ (reducing employee numbers) and
‘the real world’.
It is surely philosophically instructive that there has been a shift in the way management writers use
language. As our culture has become increasingly infused by commercially motivated language and
iconography, so popular management writing has become increasingly rhetorical in style, and
explicitly persuasive in tone and content: it has become hortatory. Compare the following passages
from some noted management writers of different periods. The tone of the first two is of writers
seeking to persuade a colleague by expressing what is a personal view and a recommendation. By
passage three we are among writers whose tone reveals an intent to declare what they take to be
unassailably the case. A knowing hustling might not be too strong a description of the style of the
later gurus.
The chief thing I have to say to you in this paper is that I wish we could all take a responsible attitude
toward our experience - a conscious and responsible attitude. Let us take one of the many activities of
the business man, and see what it would mean to take a responsible attitude toward our experience in
regard to that one thing. I am going to take the question of giving orders: what are the principles
underlying the different ways of giving orders, which of these principles have you decided to follow?
Most people have not decided, have not even thought out what the different principles are. Yet we all
give orders every day. Surely this is a pity. To know what principles may underlie any given activity
of ours is to take a conscious attitude toward our experience.18
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18
Mary Parker Follett ‘The Giving of Orders’ in Elliot M Fox and L Urwick (ed) Dynamic Administration:
The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett p 21 Pitman, London 1973 (The paper was presented in 1925)
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With all the thought that has been turned upon the unrest of the present day in the literature of social
reform one finds practically no reference to formal organization as the concrete social process by which
social action is largely accomplished. This concrete process is ignored almost completely, even as a
factor in any social condition or situation. For example, in the current literature on labor conditions,
policies, organizations, etc., almost nothing is said, by any of the various groups discussing the subject,
about the necessities of the organization of work, or about the executive functions and their
organization as related to it. If one examines Sir Josiah Stamp’s recent book, The Science of Social
Adjustment, a stimulating and penetrating inquiry into the causes of the disturbance of social
equilibrium, one will find scarcely a line to indicate the existence of formal organizations, despite the
author’s active connection with them; nor a single suggestion regarding the study of them as one of
the important fields of scientific exploration looking toward the most apt adjustment of society to
changing conditions.
To me, this failure of attention is like leaving a vital organ out of anatomy or its functions out of
physiology. Careful inspection of the observable actions of human beings in our society - their
movements, their speech, and the thought and emotions evident from their action and speech - shows
that many and sometimes most of them are determined or directed by their connection with formal
organizations.19
The final function of management is to manage workers and work. Work has to be performed; and
the resource to perform it with is workers - ranging from totally unskilled to artists, from wheelbarrow
pushers to executive vice-presidents. This implies organisation of the work so as to make it most
suitable for human beings, and organisation of people so as to make them work most productively and
effectively. It implies consideration of the human being as a resource - that is, as something having
peculiar physiological properties, abilities and limitations that require the same amount of engineering
attention as the properties of any other resource, e.g., copper. It implies also consideration of the
human resource as human beings having, unlike any other resource, personality, citizenship, control
over whether they work, how much and how well, and thus requiring motivation, participation,
satisfactions, incentives and rewards, leadership, status and function. And it is management, and
management alone, that can satisfy these requirements. For they must be satisfied through work and
job and within the enterprise; and management is the activating organ of the enterprise.20
The Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte painted a series of pipes and entitled the series Ceci n’est pas une
pipe (This is not a pipe). The picture of the thing is not the thing. In the same way, an organization
chart is not a company, nor a new strategy an automatic answer to corporate grief. We all know this;
but like as not, when trouble lurks, we call for a new strategy and probably reorganize. And when we
reorganize, we usually stop at rearranging the boxes on the chart. The odds are high that nothing
much will change. We will have chaos, even useful chaos for a while, but eventually the old culture
will prevail. Old habit patterns persist.
At a gut level, all of us know that much more goes into the process of keeping a large organization vital
and responsive than the policy statements, new strategies, plans, budgets, and organization charts can
possibly depict. But all too often we behave as though we don’t know it. If we want change, we fiddle
with the strategy. Or we change the structure. Perhaps the time has come to change our ways.21
From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently
makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can
no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger
whole. When we then try to ‘see the big picture,’ we try to reassemble the fragments in our minds, to
list and organize all the pieces. But, as physicist David Bohm says, the task is futile - similar to trying
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19
Chester I Barnard The Functions of the Executive Chapter 1 Harvard University Press, London 1938
Peter F Drucker The Practice of Management p 11 William Heinemann, London 1955
21
Thomas J Peters and Robert H Waterman In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best Run Companies
p 3 Harper and Row, New York 1982
20
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Wanted: Philosophy of Management
to reassemble the fragments of a broken mirror to see a true reflection. Thus, after a while we give up
trying to see the whole altogether.
The tools and ideas presented in his book are for destroying the illusion that the world is created of
separate, unrelated forces. When we give up this illusion - we can then build ‘learning organizations,’
organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire,
where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and
where people are continually learning how to learn together.22
Counter-examples could, of course, be found. But we suggest the drift would be confirmed by
detailed research.
3. Rationality
Managers confront a tension and paradox in their presuppositions about rationality. Rational
decisions are calculative, rule-based and future-orientated. Such decisions are thus bounded by an
assessment of how interests will be furthered (in terms of acquisition or gratification) rather than in
terms, say, of the expression of moral values or ideals. And yet managers speak often of the need
for vision to guide action and do so in terms which imply visions express transeconomic values.
Moreover, they stress the need to ‘think out of the box’ and shift from long-established paradigms
to cope better with an increasingly complex environment.
A similar paradox afflicts management in its approach to managing people. Management leaders are
said to enlist people to share a common vision having inspirational force. And yet people are
assumed to be rational in the sense of calculative and seeking to satisfy their needs. A classic
guidebook to organisational theory setting out this mainstream view includes the following:
This [motivation] calculus is the heart of the whole problem. It is the mechanism by which we decide
how much ‘E’ [effort, excitement, time, money, passion, etc] we expend on any particular activity or
set of activities....The act of calculation can range from unconscious all the way to totally conscious or
deliberate. The unconscious we label ‘instinct’, the conscious ‘calculating’. When the calculus is
unconscious or instinctual the individual will react to the most immediate need....It is possible that
psychological maturity in an individual shows up in a more conscious calculus and in a lengthening
time-span for the pay-off of expenditure....Occasionally, for the highly analytical or the emotionally
insecure, the possible variations of ‘E’, of obtainable results, and of differing time-spans, result in a
paralysis of the calculus, which shows up as inertia, withdrawal or breakdown.... (However) most
decisions in life are based on precedent. Similar situations call forth similar reactions without the need
for a deliberate activation of the calculus. We are concerned here with the precedent-setting decisions,
the new decisions, the decisions to change or to do something for the first time, to leave or join a
group, to double one’s efforts or cease trying.23
Note that instinct is defined as unconscious calculation. Is this anything more than a felicific
calculus in a suit? And isn’t it a calculus with a - claimed - epistemological value ontologised into
an account of how people allegedly decide preconsciously how to behave? If this ontology informs
the ways in which managers make decisions about the motivation of employees it demands
philosophical investigation of its adequacy as an account of motivation and its appropriateness as a
basis for managerial attempts to influence the behaviour of others. These matters are of moral and
practical as well as philosophical import. It’s hard to believe that a false ontology could lead
managers to achieve the optimum outcome.
The calculational model of rationality privileges disengaged knowing that over knowing how. The
rationality displayed by the skilful, engaged but unreflecting practising manager - the one with flair
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22
Peter Senge The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization p 3 Century Business,
London 1992
23
Charles Handy Understanding Organisations (Fourth Edition) pp 40-43 Penguin Books, London 1993
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Nigel Laurie and Christopher Cherry
or talent - has no place in this account. And asking him or her to spell out how it is done is
unlikely to help us much. General Practitioners asked many years ago in Glasgow to describe their
diagnostic strategies to computer system designers invariably found it hard to do so, even though
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observation showed that the logic of their strategies was sometimes relatively simple.
Here we face one of the life’s mysteries: how talent operates and why some people invest in work
the energy that they do. Since the calculational model is taken to embody rationality, a
calculational procedure is insisted upon as the basis for a rational person’s decisions, if need be at
the level of the unconscious. But perhaps an unconscious calculation is no calculation at all. Or if
it is, it is a calculation only from the standpoint of the observer who reads into another’s behaviour
the necessity for calculation to have occurred for the behaviour to make sense. We can see why this
appeals to managers charged with motivating others: since in organisational performance measure
25
is the essence, so employees need to be calculating for their motivation to be effectively managed.
In the foregoing we have tried to define and describe what we believe is a new field of study for
philosophers: the philosophy of management. We have sought to show, through very selective
illustration, what form it might take, and how it might be progressed. Almost everything, of course,
remains to be done. We hope that we have set things going and to hear from those whose interest
26
we have excited.
Nigel Laurie
Besides founder of Reason in Practice with Christopher Cherry, Nigel Laurie is a management
consultant and Chair and founder member of the Society for Philosophy in Practice . He trained as
a philosopher at the Universities of Glasgow and Guelph and his earlier career included university
lecturing, publishing management and seven years in systems and management posts with IBM.
His consultancy clients have included major organisations in the public and private sectors and he
has conducted assignments throughout Europe, in the United States, the Middle East and Asia. His
experience includes management and leadership development, coaching, team building and
facilitation. In recent years he has pioneered approaches using philosophical techniques and
concepts to make dialogue effective in support of organisational learning and change. He has
published in this field, has been a frequent conference speaker and is working on a book.
He is a member of several philosophical and other associations and is a Fellow of the Institute of
Management Consultancy.
Christopher Cherry
Christopher Cherry is Reader in Moral Philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury where
he is Director of postgraduate studies in Philosophy and served as Master of Eliot College from
1990-95. He taught previously at the University of Glasgow and has given presentations and papers
_____________________________________________________________________________________
24
See: C R Evans An Automated Medical History-Taking Project - A Study in Man-Computer Interaction
National Physical Laboratory, Division of Computer Science 1972
25
Of course much more remains to be said about rationality and management. We have, for instance, ignored
differing conceptions of rationality and the relationship between rationality and power. On the former see, for
instance, a recent discussion: Susan Khin Zaw ‘Is Reason Gendered? - Ideology and Deliberation’ Res Publica
Vol IV No 2 (1998) pp 167-197. For the latter, a recent and very suggestive study is Brent Flyvberg's
Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice University of Chicago Press, London 1998. Our thanks to
Alasdair MacIntyre for drawing this book to our notice.
26
Our grateful thanks to John Mallinson for most helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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2001
Reason in Practice Volume 1 Number 1
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Wanted: Philosophy of Management
at many other Universities in the UK, United States and Europe. In particular, he has presented
papers to the Royal Institute of Philosophy, the Mind Association and Aristotelian Society, of
which he is a member. He has published over 100 articles on a wide range of philosophical issues in
many philosophy journals, both British and other, and made contributions on a variety of topics to
many books. His most recent book (with others) is Values and the Person and he is currently
working with Johnathan Westphal on a book entitled The Sense of Life.
His administrative experience includes a period as an Assistant Principal at the Ministry of Health
and he has held a wide variety of administrative offices at the University of Kent at all levels as well
as being associated with numerous other Universities, in examining, validating and consultant
capacities. In 1995-96 he served as Specialist Assessor for Philosophy for the Higher Education
Funding Committee for Wales. He has served on many academic and other public bodies,
including, since 1992, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advisory Group on Medical Ethics.
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