Norma Romm Responsible Knowing: A Better Basis for Management Science

Reviews

Keith Grint Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking? by Ralph D Stacey, Douglas Griffin and Patricia Shaw
Sandro Limentani Books on managing healthcare
Martin Parker Management Knowledge: A Critical View by Paul Griseri
 

Over a decade ago Peter Drucker was arguing that for managers in the developed world 'the single greatest challenge…is to raise the productivity of knowledge and service workers'.  He had in mind the likes of lawyers, teachers, salespeople, research scientists, strategic planners, nurses, cardiac surgeons - and, of course, managers themselves.  But knowing how to manage managers requires a grasp of what and how they know so that the direction and control they receive allows them to put their expertise to work.  As Michael Luntley notes in Knowing How to Manage: Expertise and Embedded Knowledge, their expert knowledge is embedded in interactions with the environment and cannot be fully specified in or by procedures, and this has clear implications for practice.  He offers a philosophical model of what it means to say that knowledge is embedded in practice and concludes that trying to manage managers by imposing detailed targets ignores both the dynamic and contextual nature of their expertise and the level at which it functions.  As he puts it, 'managers need goals, they do not need targets, for they need the flexibility to adjust targets in order to stay on goal and there is no recipe of targets that defines goals cross-contextually'.  We know from practice in the UK - and perhaps elsewhere - just how counterproductive control through targets can be.  Those who grasp this surely have a better chance of raising the productivity of the managers they direct.  For managers too, as Drucker put it, 'the workers' knowledge is the starting point for improving productivity and performance'.

In Doing Justice to Solidarity: How NGOs Should Communicate, Juan Luis Martinez urges NGOs to understand and stay true to their unique status and align their marketing with their mission.  Using negative images of recurrent disasters amounts to 'demagogic sentimentalism' which produces 'a superficially informed compassion or guilt' leading to 'compassion fatigue'.  NGOs, he maintains, should make clear their mission to carry out development in the name of human solidarity, spell out what they achieve and build an informed and committed body of supporters.  Pursuing 'the logic of relational marketing' they can look forward to lasting support.  With a communication strategy that respects the rationality of its audience, NGO managers can hope to make their marketing more productive and their income stream more stable.

The claim - in neo-classical economics - that decision-makers can make purely rational decisions has long been challenged.  Decisions, it is said, are always made in historical settings and are therefore 'path dependent', leading a market to settle on an inefficient equilibrium even over the longer term.  Duncan Pritchard offers in Are Economic Decisions Rational? Path Dependence, Lock-In and 'Hinge' Propositions a new account of path dependence in terms of Wittgenstein's notion of the 'hinge' proposition.  Because it is clearer about the kind of empirical data needed to settle the debate, his new account holds out the hope of progress in settling whether path dependence is genuine and economically significant.

Sheelagh O'Reilly reflects in her continuing Manager's Philosophical Diary on how technology is introduced and applied in development contexts.  She urges greater self-knowledge and respect for local knowledge, needs and diversity in those pressing for its use.

Understanding and dealing with failure in management is the concern of John Dixon and Rhys Dogan.  In Towards Constructive Corporate Governance: From 'Certainties' to a Plurality Principle they present four contending accounts of corporate governance, each fundamentally flawed in its underlying premises.  Each posits a set of corporate governance ‘certainties’ incompatible with the others and when a failure of governance occurs, trench warfare between governors and governed follows unless the competing interests and desires are confronted and integrated.

Finally, Paul Dearey presents an overview of systems thinking as an interdisciplinary approach to managing complexity in organisations.  Questions remain, as he points out in Systems Thinking: A Philosophy of Management, but the philosophical interpretation of the practice of systemic intervention holds out the promise that those managing such interventions in organisations will better understand the nature and potential of what they do.

Michael Luntley

Knowing How to Manage: Expertise and Embedded Knowledge

The expertise of managers, as with other professionals, consists in what they know and their particular knowledge base is knowledge that is embedded in practice.  In spite of what some practice assumes, management expertise is situated, experiential and cannot be codified. We lack, however,  a clear philosophical model of what it means to say of  knowledge that it is embedded in practice.  This paper seeks to address this need, presents a theory of expertise and explores a key element of the theory concerning the role of judgement in perception.   The theory articulates a number of key concepts and gives explanatory power to talk of situated knowledge.  It also provides sufficient theoretical structure to bear upon practical policy issues such as how to teach, develop and assess expertise and how to deploy knowledge in setting management goals.

Michael Luntley

Michael Luntley has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick since 2000.  He has taught at Warwick since 1991 and was previously Lecturer in Philosophy at the LSE 1989-91 and a British Academy post-doctoral research fellow at University College Oxford 1986-89.

Juan Luis Martinez

Doing Justice to Solidarity: How NGOs Should Communicate 

Much NGO fund-raising and publicity concern disasters, emergencies and the immediate relief of suffering.  Donations and support may follow but they are prompted all too often by a superficially informed compassion or guilt with donors having little understanding of the results of their action.  For all their impact, such campaigns can amount to demagogic sentimentalism leading to 'compassion fatigue' and lack of sustained support once media attention moves elsewhere.  They thus undermine the unique mission of NGOs themselves.  This paper urges a different and more strategic approach to communication by NGOs, one which takes account of their unique status and their mission to promote solidarity.  It argues that as well as solving problems of underdevelopment, NGOs need to remain independent and to shape public opinion if they are to flourish.  And for this they need stable funding from informed donors giving in a spirit of solidarity to support development carried out explicitly in the name of human solidarity.  The paper sets out guidelines for NGOs to communicate in ways likely to gain the support of such donors.  And it describes the al Florida project in Columbia as an example of how the beneficiary can - in the spirit of solidarity - be brought to the centre of NGO action and communication.

Juan Luis Martinez

Juan Luis Martínez is Professor of Marketing and Head of the Marketing Area at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid.  He has a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Navarra, an MBA from the Instituto de Empresa and a first degree in Physics from the University of Granada. He previously held different positions at the University of Navarra and founded his own consultancy company, Arete Consultora.  His current research areas are cause related marketing and social responsibility policies in companies. He is the author of several books and publications on these and other marketing-related subjects.

Duncan Pritchard

Are Economic Decisions Rational? Path Dependence, Lock-In and ‘Hinge’ Propositions

According to neo-classical economic theory, free markets should eventually settle at the most efficient equilibrium. Critics of the view have claimed, however, that even if the idealised conditions demanded by the theory were met (such that the markets in question were completely ‘free’) one would still not find those markets settling at the optimally efficient equilibrium because of the ‘path dependent’ nature of economic decision-making. Essentially, the claim is that economic decision-making is always informed by the historical setting in such a way as to prevent those decisions from generally tending towards an optimally efficient equilibrium.

It is argued that this debate has been hampered by the fact that the usual three-tiered way of understanding path dependence offered by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis fails to capture what proponents of the view have in mind. By examining the way in which the notion of path dependence is often described in terms borrowed from the philosophy of science, this paper contends that we can gain a more accurate understanding of this notion by recasting it in the light of the Wittgensteinian conception of a ‘hinge’ proposition. This new account has the advantage of being clearer about the kind of empirical data that is relevant to the issue of whether path dependence is a genuine and economically significant phenomenon. Furthermore, it is argued that this modified account of path dependence may be able to resist some of the key objections that have been levelled against this notion.

Duncan Pritchard

Duncan Pritchard completed his PhD in philosophy at the Department of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of St Andrews in 2000, where he was supervised by Crispin Wright. Since then he has been a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, where his research interests are primarily concerned with issues in epistemology, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of religion. He has published in a number of major international philosophy journals including American Philosophical Quarterly, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and Synthese. In the summer of 2002 he began a two-year Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship, held at the University of Stirling, on the topic of ‘Epistemic Luck’ that he hopes will result in a book.

Sheelagh O’Reilly
Reason as Performance: A Manager’s Philosophical Diary - Part 4

This instalment of my diary was initially provoked by some experiences during a 2 week visit to China to participate in a field visit and the 3rd Montane Mainland South East Asia (MMSEAIII) Conference workshop on ‘Indigenous Knowledge, Sustainable Livelihoods and Creative Means of Resources Governance: Concepts, strategies and action on Mountain Cultures and Biodiversity in Montane Mainland South East Asia.[1]  The choice of topic was reinforced when a friend visiting Hanoi from The Netherlands brought me a copy of an article in The Independent about a visit to a Welsh island, Ynys Enlli (Bardsey in English).  As I had been very involved in the management of Ynys Enlli for several years prior to my departure to Vietnam she thought that I would be interested in it.  I was, but not necessarily for the reasons that she had thought. 

Please look at the pictures below and consider your reactions, both emotional and intellectual.  We will return later to the pictures and what they might represent.   Also consider the following comment made by the journalist Simon Calder about his visit to Ynys Enlli:

The land rises towards the north-west, and the bulge of Mynydd Enlli – barely a mountain, but tall enough to wipe out the 21st–century pilgrims’ necessities, a mobile phone signal and Radio 4 FM.

Sheeagh O'Reilly

Sheelagh O'Reilly has been in Vietnam since September 1999.  Recently (January 2002) she has  started work as the Local Government Capacity Building Adviser for DFID.  This is part of the Technical Assistance funded by DFID for the new World Bank/Government of Vietnam Northern Mountains Poverty Reduction Programme. This programme is implemented through the Ministry of Planning and Investment.  She was formerly the Natural Resources Adviser for the Vietnam-Sweden Mountain Rural Development Programme. Jointly funded by the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) and the Government of Vietnam.  Before leaving for Vietnam she worked at the University of Wales where she was Course Director for the MSc programme in Rural Resource Management at the Centre for Arid Zone Studies (associated with the School of Agricultural and Forest Sciences). Her work in the Centre included research in Kenya, consultancy in Vietnam and travel to Sri Lanka, India and Ethiopia.  Her doctorate examined the linkage of issues raised by the development of the discipline of environmental ethics to productive land management and subsistence rights.

John Dixon and Rhys Dogan
Towards Constructive Corporate Governance: From 'Certainties' to a Plurality Principle
 

This paper explores corporate governance failure by drawing upon contemporary perspectives in the philosophy of the social sciences to identify four contending perceptions of corporate governance. Each posits a set of corporate governance ‘certainties’ that derive from incompatible contentions about what is knowable and can exist in the social world in which corporations conduct their affairs. The broad conclusion drawn is that corporate governance processes must be seen as environments where failures of governance lead to one of two possible outcomes.  Either trench warfare takes place between the corporate governors and those they seek to govern and with whom they disagree, resulting inevitably in victory of one over the other; or competing governance interests and desires are confronted and integrated. The latter requires tolerance on the part of both corporate governors and the governed, and a willingness to settle competing governance truth-claims with consistency and without self-deception and self-delusion.

John Dixon

John Dixon is Professor of International Social Policy at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom, where he is the Director of the Governance of State-Society Interactions Research Centre. He has published extensively in the filed of public and social policy administration and management. His latest book is Responses to Governance: Governing Corporations, Societies and the World (Praeger, 2002).

Rhys Dogan

Rhys Dogan is Principal Lecturer in Politics at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. He has published in the field of European integration theory, and the philosophy of the social sciences.

Paul Dearey

Systems Thinking: A Philosophy of Management

Paul Dearey

Paul Dearey is lecturer in ethics in the Department of Humanities, the University of Hull. He is a researcher in the Centre for Applied Ethics, and the Centre for Systems Studies, both at the University of Hull.

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The more than 100 delegates from 20 countries who attended our conference crossed frontiers between states, cultures, disciplines and roles. In plenary sessions they heard Robin Blackburn present his account of Anglo-Saxon shareholder capitalism and its ethical problems on the day WorldCom reported difficulties, Michael Luntley report on his research into the nature of embedded knowledge and management expertise and Ed Freeman present a story-based account of stakeholder theory 'from the ground up'. Other papers and workshops spanned the full range of philosophical concerns including: the nature of organisations; public and private-sector management practices; whether public services can be said to be businesses; the role of management in international development; political issues such as the rights of managers and employees and notions of community, authority and justice in organisations; the impact of IT and AI systems on personal autonomy; the self in management; ethical codes, competences and programmes; using philosophical notions to make sense of careers and inequality at work; management information, learning, knowledge, decision-making and dialogue; learning from Karl Popper; management education; theorising and researching management; sustainable development and organisation integrity. In many cases, the implications for practice were clear. And the workshops - where practice was uppermost - treated the use of stories to help senior executives clarify and communicate their values, a procedure for wise decision-making, approaches to building a culture of trust and 'the fruitful use of silence'. You can look forward to reading selected papers in future issues.

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Philosophy as a Base for Management: An Aristotelian Integrative Proposal

Juan Fontrodona is Assistant Professor of Business Ethics at IESE Business School (University of Navarre, Barcelona, Spain). He holds an MBA and a PhD in Philosophy. He has been Visiting Professor at Francisco Marroquín University (Guatemala) and the Elkin B. McCallum Graduate School of Business (Bentley College, USA) and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Business Ethics (Bentley College) and Visiting Fellow at Harvard Business School. He is a member of several professional associations of business ethics, and General Secretary of the Spanish branch of the European Business Ethics Network. He has authored or co-authored several books. His latest are Pragmatism and Management Inquiry (Quorum Books, 2002), and, as a co-author, Tras la euforia (After the Euphoria) (Prentice-Hall, 2002), a book about ethics in the new economy. He is co-Director of IESE’s Research Priority Area on ‘Anthropological and Ethical Foundations of Management and Organizations’.

Domènec Melé

Domènec Melé is Professor and Director of the Business Ethics Department at IESE Business School (University of Navarre, Barcelona, Spain). He has doctorates in Industrial Engineering (Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain) and Theology (University of Navarre). He has served as a consultant on Corporate Values and Codes of Conduct, and published three books on Managerial Ethics, as well as numerous articles and contributions to books. In addition, he has edited seven books on business ethics issues including topics such as the market economy, work and unemployment, business and family life, business policy, finance, marketing and advertising, and family business. Professor Melé is Director of the International Symposia on Ethics, Business and Society at IESE Business School and co-Director of IESE´s Research Priority Area ‘Anthropological and Ethical Foundations of Management and Organizations’. 

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Johannes M. Lehner

Metaphors, Stories, Models: A Unified Account of Decisions
Part 2 What Managers Do
 

Johannes Lehner is Associate Professor of Management at the Institute for Organisation and Management, University of Linz. His major work has been in methodological issues of the social sciences and he has been trained in personnel development. After working as the head of IT in a commercial firm, he joined the University of Linz, since when he has held visiting posts at universities in North and Southern America. He has consulted to various industries and regularly teaches executives. Many of his papers and books are in German, of which the latest is Praxisorientiertes Projektmanagement, but he regularly presents his research to English-speaking audiences at conferences such as those of the Academy of Management and in journals such as Management Science.

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Phil Johnson and Ken Smith

Constituting Business Ethics: A Metatheoretical Exploration

Phil Johnson

Ken Smith

Dr Ken Smith BA, MA, PhD is a Senior Lecturer in Organisation Behaviour and a research fellow in the Change Management Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. He has previously published primarily in the area of business ethics and is co-editor with Phil Johnson of Business Ethics and Business Behaviour published by Thompson Business Press. 

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Cara Nine

The Moral Ambiguity of Job Qualifications

Cara Nine

Cara Nine is a graduate student of Philosophy at the University of Arizona specialising in social and political philosophy. She has published an article on epistemology co-authored by Keith Lehrer. Her experience teaching business ethics has inspired her interest and work in this area.

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Ron Beadle

The Misappropriation of MacIntyre

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This paper considers discussions of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre in management literature. It argues that management scholars who have attempted to appropriate his After Virtue as a supportive text for conventional business ethics do so only by misreading or by ignoring his other work. It shows that MacIntyre does not argue for a reformed capitalism in which individual virtue overcomes institutional vice. Rather he argues that capitalist businesses are inherently vicious and that therefore individual virtue cannot be realised within them. The job of the virtuous is to resist them.

The paper first presents an account of MacIntyre’s position on management and introduces some of the critical and supportive uses of his work in management scholarship. It focuses on two papers3 typical of the approach taken by conventional business ethicists to his work. These have attempted to deploy concepts developed by MacIntyre while denying the account of management and organisation of which they form a part.

The paper provides some tentative hypotheses as to why management scholars have approached MacIntyre in this way. It argues that these attempted appropriations not only have failed but also must fail as conceptual coherence is sacrificed when the account within which those concepts make sense is denied.

Ron Beadle

Ron Beadle is Principal Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Northumbria University, England. He teaches management, organisation theory, reward management and business ethics. His research interests include the development of the idea of the good employer, reward management and the application of the work of major philosophers to management. He is the author of a series of publications for the London based Social Market Foundation think tank in addition to publishing in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, British Journal of Industrial Relations and the New Psychologist. Ron undertook undergraduate and post-graduate work at the London School of Economics and worked in the gas industry before turning to academia.
 

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Terence Collins and Greg Latemore

Philosophising at Work: An Agenda for Discussion

Terence Collins

Terence Collins holds a PhD (1989) in Philosophy from the Gregorian (Jesuit) University in Rome, a B.D. (1978) from The University of Queensland and an MBA (1998) from the Queensland University of Technology. Terry has taught philosophy for 10 years at tertiary level including at the Australian Catholic University and the Brisbane College of Theology. He now works as Manager of Strategic Planning with a large IT organisation in Brisbane. He has consulted to managers on ethics and codes of conduct as well as fostering management education within the Queensland public sector.

Greg Latemore

Greg Latemore is Director of Latemore & Associates Pty Ltd, Organisational and Management Consultants, which was established in Brisbane in 1993. Greg also has a background in philosophy. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (1978) and the inaugural Master of Management (1988), both from The University of Queensland. He specialises in executive coaching, leadership development and strategic management. He has lectured part time in organisational behaviour and strategic management (Masters level) at The University of Queensland.  

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Editorial: Knowing and Deciding

Details of our first international conference in Oxford this June Developing Philosophy of Management - Crossing Frontiers come in this issue. The programme includes nine speakers from the Journal editorial board, researchers, teachers, consultants and managers from many countries. They address exciting questions through papers, panels, interviews and workshops. Do join us if you can. Full details are on our website: www.managementphilosophers.com

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Sandro Limentani

From Paternalism to Managerialism: A Healing Shift?

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Michael Bokeno

Communicating Other/Wise: A Paradigm for Empowered Practice

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Bevan Catley and Campbell Jones

Deciding on Violence

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Johannes Lehner

Metaphors, Stories, Models: A Unified Account of Decisions

Part 1 Making Sense of the Decision Context

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Christopher Cowton

On Two-by-Two Grids: Or, the Arkaeology of Management Thought

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Sheelagh O'Reilly

Reason as Performance: A Manager's Philosophical Diary - Part 3

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Norma Romm

Responsible Knowing: A Better Basis for Management Science

Review

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Sandro Limentani

Books on managing healthcare

The approach taken by the Government challenges clinical freedom and introduces structures to control clinical practice. These two volumes contain a collection of 23 different views on these NHS reforms and demonstrate extremely well the complexity and variety of issues that are relevant to the debate on the proper place of management and clinical freedom in medicine. They implicitly address issues that surface for managers in many contexts besides healthcare.