Article Summaries and Author Profiles Volume 5

¨	Editorial: Business, Legitimacy and Community
	‘Authority without legitimacy’, wrote Peter Drucker in 1974, ‘is usurpation’ and went on to ground managerial legitimacy in what he termed the sole available ‘principle of morality’, that of making human strength productive so that ‘personal strengths make social benefits’.1 And yet, long after the end of history, the debate on managerial legitimacy runs on. We still wrestle with the results of the shift to a society of organisations whose emergence and features Drucker so percipiently mapped.2 He may have woken us from dogmatic slumber but we still await a managerial Kant. Like a chameleon the issue presents itself under a range of concepts which bear witness to the tensions and confusions we have still to resolve: business and society, organisation and community, shareholder return and sustainability, wealth and profit, organisations and stakeholders, organisation and environment, ethical issues and practical problems, lifeworld and system, and so forth. This issue offers further contributions to this continuing conversation. In The Legitimacy of Business George Lodge inspects how business managers do and can justify their social position and authority in terms of ideology. He finds that, in spite of recent triumphalism, capitalism has withered along with the communism it was heralded as displacing. The world now is converging on ‘various mixtures of communitarianism’. Wise managers will understand the nature and role of ideology, come to terms with communitarianism and align their practice with its values so that the values of society become the values of business.
	Stakeholder theory has influentially framed the purpose of business - and other organisations - in terms of satisfying not just shareholder interests but a wider range. In Can Corporations Be Morally Responsible? Aristotle, Stakeholders and the Non-Sale of Hershey Stephen Gimbel argues for a different approach. Discussing the aborted sale of the US Hershey Foods company to Wrigley he notes that in the case of Hershey the argument against the sale of the company appealed not to stakeholder interests but to ‘the internal structure of the goal of the corporate institution’ – an Aristotelian argument in place of a utilitarian one. He contends that the debate around the decision suggested that corporations are themselves morally responsible agents no less than their managers and members. Alongside the debate about the moral status of corporations runs another about their potential to be communities. In Communities at Work? The Concept of ‘Community’ in Organisational Analysis Christopher, Michael and Stephen Bennett assess community as an ideal-typical model for evaluating organisations and their managements. They ask whether the idea of community can survive several objections: that it ignores issues of power and the presence of disparate interest groups within organisations; and that attempts to develop communities at work fall prey to managerialist strategies of control. They conclude that, beset as it is with practical and ideological problems, the idea of ‘community - like friendship - can exist in the face of fierce disagreement over what common interests or values are’. We need, they suggest, ‘a version of community that recognises the existence of power and conflict and doesn’t claim to achieve reconciliation simply by telling workers what their real interests are’. So understood, it can articulate ‘the ideal of a work organisation as something to which its participants can be genuinely committed’. Perhaps it is a failure to see organisations as potential communities that has contributed to some of the destructive and self-destructive decisions managers have made. They surely exexmplify a broader failure of moral imagination, the theme of John Alexander’s Metaphors, Moral Imagination and the Healthy Business Organisation: A Manager’s Perspective. Drawing on his own career, he offers the overall health of an organisation as a core metaphor to help managers develop their moral imagination and avoid those unsound decisions which flow from its absence. The metaphor provides a ‘straightforward and reasonably clear criterion for deciding which systemic and personal virtues, practices, and goals we want…in our organisational culture’. Taking up themes from an earlier paper Eva Tsahuridu reports on how managers in three different organisations identify and resolve ethical issues. In Do Managers Leave Ethics at home? Influences on Ethical decisions in Organisations and their Implications for Moral Autonomy, she concludes that if ethics and ‘ethics in business’ are to be reconciled and the separation thesis finally abandoned, organisations will need to ‘develop philosophies and practices that go beyond egoism’ and embrace personal moral responsibility and the value of benevolence. Responding to Bob Brecher’s earlier Against Professional Ethics, Paul Griseri explores the possibility of professional ethics in The Ideal of Professionalism: A Discussion of Bob Brecher’s ‘Against Professional Ethics’. Bob Brecher offers a brief reply. Like the paper on communities, they contrast current practice with an idea - here professionalism – and debate its feasibility and relation to morality. Management’s notion of identity is at the heart of Muayyad Jabri’s Narrative Identity Achieved Through Utterances: The Implications of Bakhtin for Managing Change and Learning. Starting from Ricoeur’s work on narrative, he urges managers to move beyond it and think ‘in terms of identities and relationships realised through utterances...rather than in terms of identity based on order and coherence’ achieved through narrative. They would then attribute more importance to other active speakers and foreground the activity of ‘meaning-making as a joint production invovling centrifugal forces’. This, he argues, is particularly important in managing change where change agents need to see narrative identity as a ‘joint production’, to ‘return the discovery of meaning to the communication process’ and to make sense of the need for change from within a shared context. It matters, too, in organisational learning. For, he argues, ‘team learning is in effect fully dependent on utterances (speech), rather than on langue’. Stephen Sheard explores the impact of metaphor on e-commerce theory in management thought. In the second of a pair of papers, Managers and the Heavenly City: How E-Commerce Metaphors Shape Strategic Thought, he suggests that metaphors shape our thinking about e-commerce by linking features of a pre-modern cosmology to modern conceptions of reality. Metaphors, drawn from the High Renaissance and relating to Neo-Platonism and Renaissance occult philosophy, point to unresolved tensions within consumerism. And metaphor itself, he observes, ‘provides a means of shaping management thought in that it provides a locus which enables literary and philosophical themes to reach the status of imaginal life within the psyche of the manager’. In Beyond All Reasonable Doubt? Epistemological Problems of the Learning Organisation Deborah Blackman, James Connelly and Steven Henderson uncover assumptions the learning organisation literature embodies about knowledge itself and the capacity of organisations to evaluate ‘new knowledge’. They appraise five approaches: empiricism, rationalism, constructivism, pragmatism, and scepticism. They propose the notion of single and double loop doubting and argue in Popperian mode that organisational learning and knowledge should be ‘based upon a pragmatic acceptance of working hypotheses and conjectures that can be falsified, rather than a stock of beliefs in the form of shared mental models that are accepted as true’. Christopher Cherry You will see from the Editorial Board listing that Christopher Cherry has stepped down as Chair. He made a unique and indispensable contribution to the development of Philosophy of Management. With his colleagues he formed the nucleus of the Board at launch, guided in setting a direction and standards, and contributed to and was instrumental in securing early papers. In his teaching career he taught your editor and several members of the Editorial Board and in unforgettably affirming and liberating style lit a spark which will continue to animate all that this Journal stands for and becomes. Whether reader or contributor, you owe him a very great deal.
¨	George C Lodge The Legitimacy of Business
	As the world moves into the 21st century, business managers face new and daunting challenges to their legitimacy. Those who run the world’s 72,0000 multinational firms and their 828,000 subsidiaries face special difficulties. These firms constitute a global economy that has produced much that is useful, including wondrous technologies and great wealth for many. Nevertheless, one in five of the world’s six billion people lives in extreme poverty, surviving on less than $1 a day. Half the world lives on less than $2. In spite of roughly $1 trillion that has been spent to fight poverty around the globe in the last 50 years and vastly increased trade and investment, most people in Latin America, the Middle East and Central Asia are poorer today than they were ten years ago, and most Africans were better off 40 years ago. Environmental degradation increases, as do disease and violations of human rights. Unreasonable as it may be to blame business for the world’s ills, the blame sticks, because the ills – like multinationals – transcend national boundaries and are in many ways beyond the power of existing governments to affect. And global government has yet to evolve. Furthermore, the governments of many countries lack either the will or the ability to reduce poverty within their jurisdictions, meaning that if MNCs do not do it, it won’t be done. In addition to the undesirable costs of the globalisation they have helped to create, managers are concerned also with the greed, crime and scandal in their own ranks. So it is appropriate to help them inspect the assumptions that have been used to justify their power and authority, and to consider whether those assumptions need renovation. This I shall do in Part I of this essay. In Part II I shall seek a historical perspective, because in many ways the criticism of business and globalisation today echoes the debate in the 1930s about which economic system was best, communism, socialism or capitalism. Capitalism, we suppose, has won, but if so, what is it? Is it the same everywhere – in China, Japan, Europe, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere? If not, is the very word not misleading? George C Lodge George Lodge is Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, Harvard Business School and has been a member of the Harvard Business School faculty since 1963. He teaches Business, Government and the International Economy in HBS executive programs, and has also taught Human Resource Management; Leadership, Values, and Decision Making; and Business History in the Master’s Program. After service in the U.S. Navy (1945-46), he graduated from Harvard College cum laude in 1950, and became a political reporter and columnist on the Boston Herald. In 1954 he joined the United States Department of Labour as Director of Information, and four years later was appointed Assistant Secretary of Labour for International Affairs by President Eisenhower; he was reappointed by President Kennedy in 1961. He was the United States Delegate to the International Labour Organisation and was elected chairman of the organisation’s Governing Body in 1960. At the end of his government service in 1961 Lodge was named one of the ten outstanding young men in the United States by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce. He also received the Arthur S. Fleming Award as one of the ten most outstanding young men in the federal government and the Distinguished Service Award of the Department of Labour. He wrote of his government experiences in Spearheads of Democracy: The Role of Labour in Developing Countries (Harper and Row, 1962). In 1961 he was appointed lecturer at Harvard Business School. He left the following year to become the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. He returned to the School in 1963. During the 1960s Lodge played a major role in the establishment of the Central American Institute of Business Administration (Instituto Centroamericano de Administracion de Empresas-INCAE). His research during those years took him to Veraguas Province, Panama, where he studied the introduction of political and economic change. This work resulted in several articles in Foreign Affairs and a book, Engines of Change: United States Interests and Revolution in Latin America. These in turn led in 1970 to the establishment by Congress of a new government agency, The Inter-American Foundation, of which Lodge was vice chairman for seven years. He was named associate professor of business administration at Harvard in 1968 and received tenure in 1972. He played a leading role in the design and development of several courses relating to the global political and economic environment of business, comparative business-government relations, and comparative ideology. He has published more than 40 articles -12 in the Harvard Business Review, two of which received the McKinsey award for the best article of the year - and a number of books besides the two mentioned above: The New American Ideology (1975) and The American Disease (1984), published by Alfred Knopf; U.S. Competitiveness in the World Economy (1984) ed. with Bruce R. Scott and Ideology and National Competitiveness: An Analysis of Nine Countries (1987) ed. with Ezra F. Vogel, published by Harvard Business School Press; Comparative Business-Government Relations (1990) published by Prentice Hall; Perestroika for America: Restructuring Business-Government Relations for World Competitiveness (1990), published by Harvard Business School Press; and Managing Globalization in the Age of Interdependence (1995) published by Pfeiffer & Co. His most recent book, written with Craig Wilson, an economist with the International Finance Corporation in Bangladesh, is The Corporate Solution to Global Poverty: How Multinationals Can Help the Poor and Invigorate Their Own Legitimacy (Princeton University Press 2006). In 1991 Lodge was named Lee Kuan Yew Fellow by the Government of Singapore, and in 1994 received an honorary doctorate from INCAE. In 1995 The New American Ideology received the annual book award of the Academy of Management. He is a Trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a member of the board of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has taught executives in a number of companies including IBM, AT&T, and the World Bank.
¨	Stephen Gimbel Can Corporations Be Morally Responsible? Aristotle, Stakeholders and the Non-Sale of Hershey
	Stakeholder theory is a significant development in the drive to provide a foundation for intuitions concerning the moral responsibility connected to corporate decision making. The move to include the interests of workers, consumers, the communities and biological environment in which the corporations instantiations are located run counter to the view in which shareholders’ interests are paramount. The non-sale of the Hershey Foods company to Wrigley1 was the ultimate result of a massive call by stakeholders to put other interests before shareholder financial stakes, yet the discussion was notably not held in terms of stakeholder theory. Rather, the discussion was explicitly Aristotelian with opponents of the view arguing that the sale was improper because it ran counter to the essence or telos of the organisation. This case is no doubt unusual in that the founding documents of the organisation were appealed to in order to justify the claim that the essence of the corporation was to do more than enrich the shareholders. This paper intends to examine whether, in spite of this anomaly, the Hershey case has anything general to say about the foundations of corporate responsibility. Steven Gimbel Steven Gimbel is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Research interests include ethics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. His most recent book with Anke Walz is Defending Einstein: Hans Reichenbach’s Early Writings on space, Time, and Motion Cambridge University Press, 2006. He has also published papers in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.
¨	Christopher Bennett, Michael Bennett and Stephen Bennett Communities at Work? The Concept of ‘Community’ in Organisational Analysis
	In this paper we assess the adequacy of the idea of community as an ideal-typical model against which real organisations and their management might be critically evaluated. Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on practices suggests that some forms of work activity require something more than contractual relationships within organisations: if he is right then perhaps we should acknowledge the importance of some notion of community at work. However, among the criticisms of the community approach are that it ignores issues of power and the inevitable existence in organisations of interest groups based on different values and pursuing different objectives. It can also be seen as ineluctably managerialist and hence incapable of producing a coherent and sustainable account of organisational life. Is ‘community’ just a strategy of social, political or organisational control? Does it assume a particular discourse of political subjectivity, to do with the nature of subjects who exist in communities? We assess the extent to which the idea of community at work is fatally damaged by these objections. Christopher Bennett Christopher Bennett is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield. Michael Bennett Michael Bennett is Assistant Director General of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE). Stephen Bennett Stephen Bennett was formerly a lecturer in the Department of Human Resource Management, University of Strathclyde.
¨	John K Alexander Metaphors, Moral Imagination and the Healthy Business Organisation: A Manager’s Perspective
	In this paper I outline an approach to managerial decision making that incorporates the important role that metaphors and moral imagination play in our moral reasoning coupled with an organisational moral concept I call the Health of the Organisation. I have used this concept in my managerial (and philosophical) career to interpret and evaluate potential, and actual, courses of action. I have concluded that this concept fits in nicely with Mark Johnson’s analysis of the metaphor of morality is health, which he argues is one of the central moral metaphors in the conceptual framework that we use to interpret and evaluate actions from a reasonable moral point of view. He argues that metaphors are the essential components in defining the rational mental framework utilised in interpreting, evaluating, predicting likely outcomes from various alternatives, and choosing morally acceptable courses of action. I argue that the metaphor morality is health explicated as the Health of the Organisation can serve as an antidote to the unimaginative moral decision making processes that Patricia Werhane has shown can result in bad moral decisions. I do this by demonstrating that a healthy organisation is one that is optimally functional. This means that the components that make up the organisation are so structured that there is no better possible organisational arrangement available for achieving the goals designed to ensure successful performance in the marketplace. John K Alexander John K Alexander is currently adjunct instructor at Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids Community College and Baker College. Areas of interest include Socratic philosophy, Business and Organisational Ethics, and applied philosophy. He has published papers in HEC Forum, Teaching Philosophy, Business Ethics Quarterly and Philosophy of Management (Volume 3 Number 3). Prior to becoming a Visiting Professor at Grand Valley State University in 2001, he had thirty-five years experience in manufacturing in positions ranging from hourly paid to Director of Operations.
¨	Eva E Tsahuridu Do Managers Leave Ethics at Home? Influences on Ethical Decisions in Organisations and their Implications for Moral Autonomy
	A previous paper in this Journal, Must Managers Leave Ethics at Home? Economics and Moral Anomie in Organisational Decisions1 explored the scope for moral decision making in organisations and developed the concept of moral anomie, the absence of moral awareness and judgement in organisational decisions. We suggested that the industrial economy developed within a framework of neoclassical economics and scientific enquiry to the exclusion of ethics. This paper reports on a subsequent exploratory research project in three disparate Australian organisations. It sought to establish whether individuals acting in and for organisations find themselves able to exercise moral autonomy in making organisational decisions or are likely to make morally heteronomous or anomous decisions. Eva E Tsahuridu Eva E Tsahuridu is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Greenwich Business School in London, UK. She is Programme Leader for the Masters in International Human Resource Management and her main research interests include moral autonomy, anomie and ethical leadership.
¨	Paul Griseri The Ideal of Professionalism: A Discussion of Bob Brecher’s ‘Against Professional Ethics’ Philosophy of Management (formerly Reason in Practice) Vol 4 no 2, 2004 pp 3 - 8
	Bob Brecher raises a critique of professional ethics on the basis that it is less concerned with the protection of the public and is more a legalistic device that protects professionals from being accountable, often by defining certain issues out of court. His argument is criticised on the basis that it focuses upon the existing professions, and does not address the general idea of professionalism. This paper presents professionalism as being based in the idea of a job well done, which in turn has to be understood in the context of the long-range needs of the full person, not in narrowly defined task terms. Supplementary arguments of Brecher, such as the primacy of morality, and his adaptation of Kant’s third formulation of the categorical imperative, are also commented upon and critiqued. Paul Griseri Paul Griseri has a PhD in Philosophy, lectures in Management at University College London and is a visiting Professor at BPP Business School. Besides articles in philosophical and management journals, he has published four books (two co-authored with Jonathan Groucutt) and is currently completing a fifth.
¨	Bob Brecher Morality, Professions and Ideals: A Response to Paul Griseri
	Paul Griseri’s generous response to my ‘Against Professional Ethics’1 offers an interesting point of view and there is much on which we agree. But we continue to differ about the nature of the primacy of morality, the possibility of a ‘general idea of professionalism’ and - perhaps - about Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Bob Brecher Bob Brecher is Reader in Philosophy in the School of Historical & Critical Studies at the University of Brighton and Director Designate of its Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, was Founding Editor of Res Publica, a journal of legal and social philosophy, and is now a consulting editor. He is the author of Anselm’s Argument: The Logic of Divine Existence (Gower 1984), Getting What You Want? A Critique of Liberal Morality (Routledge 1998) and Torture and the ‘Ticking Bomb (Blackwell forthcoming). He co-edited Liberalism and the New Europe (Avebury 1993), The University in a Liberal State (Avebury 1996) and Nationalism and Racism in the Liberal Order (Ashgate 1998). His many journal articles and book chapters address questions of liberalism, ‘the liberal individual’ and related conceptions of ethics, issues in healthcare ethics and material related to Holocaust Studies. He is a former President of the UK Association for Legal and Social Philosophy, has been a Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of St Andrews and is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Politics & European Studies at Palackého University, Olomouc, in the Czech Republic.
¨	Muayyad Jabri Narrative Identity Achieved Through Utterances: The Implications of Bakhtin for Managing Change and Learning
	Ricoeur’s work on narrative has been instrumental in moving the conception of identity from the rational mind (Cartesian) to a text of narratives of meanings, desires, and aspirations. But his effort to question the Cartesian certainty came at a price, namely an excessive emphasis on personhood. This paper explicates the relevance of Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue for management by arguing for a critical examination of Ricoeur’s centripetal superiority of narrative order in favour of centrifugal encounters based on a Bakhtinian (dialogical) tension, one between an active addressor and an active addressee, rather than an active reciter and a passive listener. Adopting Bakhtin’s ideas has clear implications for the management of change and development of learning organisations. Muayyad Jabri Muayyad Jabri is Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Head of the New England Business School, University of New England, Australia. He holds an MSocSc in Social Sciences (Birmingham) and a PhD in Business Administration (Manchester Business School). He has been a Visiting Scholar at Lingnan University and Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. His consulting work in China has focused on executive development and the management of change using the work of Bakhtin as a framework. He is a member of several professional associations and an inaugural member of the British Academy of Management. He is on the editorial Board of several journals and has acted as a frequent reviewer for academic journals including the Academy of Management Review. His most recent publications have appeared in international journals, including the Journal of Management Development, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Journal of Management Education, British Journal of Management, and the Journal of Organizational Behaviour.
¨	Stephen Sheard Managers and the Heavenly City: How E-Commerce Metaphors Shape Management Thought
	This paper draws a correlation between the experience of consumerism portrayed in the critique of Alexander and Baudrillard and in the theory of plenitude derived from Renaissance literature. It draws parallels between features of the modern and antique sensibilities. It suggests that the e-commerce practitioner manipulates a modern economy informed by a cosmology which depicts imagery capable of interpretation in terms of conceptions derived from archaic themes. These are drawn from the High Renaissance and relate to Neoplatonism which is in turn linked to Renaissance occult philosophy. E-commerce metaphors display these aspects; and thereby both hook into, and valorise – rendering liminal - the experiential dimension of the consumer, and its incipient tensions between desire anticipated and that achieved. The article suggests how the populist magic of consumerism is not only facilitated by e-commerce but how that magic arose at a pre-modern, intellectualist level. From a philosophical perspective, readers will note the inter-relationship of earlier bodies of thought to contemporary management theories of e-commerce. Academics or practitioners interested in e-commerce or e-business are offered a fresh and radical interpretative perspective on these areas, which expresses a novel role for metaphor in terms of linking features of pre-modern and modern conceptions of reality, aslant the subjective absorption of figurative images of a textual derivation. Stephen Sheard Stephen Sheard gained a PhD at the University of Kent in 1999. This is the second of a pair of articles in this Journal, White Mythology: From Linear to Virtual Value Chains in E-Business appearing in Issue 5.3. A further article is in preparation. He has recently published three articles in E: CO (formerly Emergence), with a book chapter on Intellectual Capital and Complexity forthcoming. He has special interests in continental philosophy and organisational theory, especially metaphor, and is employed at the University of Bradford.
¨	Deborah Blackman, James Connelly and Steven Henderson Beyond All Reasonable Doubt? Epistemological Problems of the Learning Organisation
	The extensive literature on the Learning Organisation proposes that a competitive advantage can be achieved through the systematised generation and application of knowledge. Consequently, much of the debate concerns the processes, routines and organisational features that a firm should adopt to learn more, and faster, than its competitors. Less attention is given to understanding the nature of the knowledge that is created by these Learning Organisations. We hold that the topic is more important than its current weight in the literature because the performance claims of the models proposed critically depend upon the newly acquired knowledge replacing ignorance or knowledge with less utility. In this paper we explore the nature of knowledge that Learning Organisation theory seeks to create by articulating implicit epistemological assumptions found within the literature. We show that the capacities of each epistemology to help an organisation reject falsehood and make greater use of its knowledge are critically undermined by these very routines. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of a sceptical epistemology and outlines a process that would strengthen doubting behaviour. Deborah Blackman Deborah Blackman is Associate Professor of Human Resources at the University of Canberra. She moved to academia after working in the hospitality industry. Deborah’s doctoral thesis explored why learning processes might hinder rather than help knowledge creation. This interest is maintained in her current research work, which includes interests in organisational learning and knowledge, social architecture and the potentially limiting aspects of mental models. She co-authored (with James Connelly) Learning from the Past: Collingwood and the Idea of Organisational History in Volume 1 Number 2 of this journal. James Connelly James Connelly is Professor of Politics at the University of Hull. His research interests lie in political theory, philosophy and environmental politics. He has recently published Politics and the Environment; Metaphysics, Method and Politics: The Political Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood and several articles on the philosophy of history and environmental ethics. He has recently co-edited a revised and expanded edition of Collingwood’s An Essay On Philosophical Method, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2005. Steven Henderson Steven Henderson is Reader in Management at the Southampton Solent University. He has published on, and subsequently lost interest in, a number of fashionable management topics and is currently trying to derive the ontology of strategic management from Heidegger.
Number 2 Marx, Marxism and Global Management
¨	Guest Editor Introduction: Marx, Marxism and Global Management At first sight, the ideas of Marxism and management seem to have not much to do with each other - even to be antithetical. Nevertheless, with the increasing complexity and scope of the productive forces during the twentieth century, there has been much interaction between the two. After all, the Soviet Union was a very (ill) managed society, and both Lenin and Gramsci were enthusiastic about Taylor’s ideas of ‘scientific’ management of the labour process. And, on a wider scale, many writers (and many of them Marxist) in the mid-twentieth century analysed the all-persuasive increase in bureaucracy and sometimes predicted the emergence of managers, whether in capitalist or communist societies, as a new ruling class. James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution is but the most extreme example of this trend. The basic idea here is that, whereas in Marx’ s day the owners of business enterprises directly controlled their operation, with the rise of the joint-stock company, there has been a separation of ownership and control. The ownership is dispersed among relatively powerless shareholders: the people with the power are the invisible managers accountable, if at all, only to the laws of the market. All the above propositions are controversial. But it does show that the Marxist tradition does have something to say about management. And, given that Marx has been voted in a recent BBC poll Britain’s favourite philosopher, it seems appropriate to ask what he and his followers have to say about contemporary management. The contributions which follow sketch out possible answers in different fields.
	In a wide-ranging historical survey, Kieron Smith, a manager himself, discusses Marxist views about the position of managers in the class structure of society and the altering role of the manager based upon economic and social changes in capitalist economies. He stresses the ways in which Marxist thinking can help managers to do a better job by understanding the broader economic context in which they operate. John Luhman’s article on McDonaldization strikes a different note: in a punchy and innovative style, that the advent of global rationalization à la McDonald, although almost universally lamented, he claims might turn out to be progressive with its very repulsiveness producing an equally global aversion to capitalism and its effects. The next four contributors are more specific: Bryan Evans adopts a Gramscian perspective on how neoliberal ideas have become embedded among public sector managers - in this case, Ontario; Alan Tuckman takes us back to Marx’s discussion of the ‘commodification of time’ and then explains its relevance for understanding the changing role of managers in contemporary global capitalism; Matthias Varul uses Marx’s theory of value to launch a wholesale critique of Human Resource Management whose approach he sees as both specious and potentially totalitarian; and Ernesto Gantmann looks at how the development of the Argentinian economy has changed the nature of management training. Returning to a wider perspective, Kevin Young presents a Marxian theory of management by looking at the changing nature of consumption and the growth of the small business sector to illustrate how neoliberalism can effectively reproduce itself by removing politics from economics. And finally Nesta Devine gives us a sharp dissection of the attempts of some Marxists to use Public Choice Theory, normally associated with anti-Marxists such as Hayek, to express their own strategy. Thus the contributions below, taken in their entirety, do show that large sections of contemporary management, both in the public and private sector, could benefit from more self-analysis and an attempt to locate themselves more clearly in contemporary economic development. Such a self-awareness can only help the contribution of managers to a more humane society. And the contributions to this issue show that the types of Marxist approach demonstrated in them can help in this process. David McLellan David McLellan is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He was educated at Merchant Taylors School and St. John’s College, Oxford. He has been Visiting Fellow at the State University of New York and at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla. He has also lectured widely in North America, on the continent of Europe, and throughout Asia. His numerous books have been translated into thirteen languages and include Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973, 3rd ed 1996), Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (1990), and Unto Caesar: The Political Relevance of Christianity (1993).
¨	Kieron Smith Marxism: Finding the Maestro in Management?
	A survey of Marxist approaches to management theory reveals some shallowness in approach and little in the way of critiques of modern theory, either macro or micro. By moving through stages of looking at the class position of managers, Marxist interpretations to date, including that of Lenin as an advocate of Taylorism and the crystallising of management theory in opposition to Cold War communism, the paper sets the scene for an argument that Marxists should address management theory today and that management theory would be better for it. Kieron Smith Kieron Smith is a senior manager, currently working for a UK retail chain. He recently completed his MBA with the Open University Business School and studied Politics and Government at Kent University, and attended Professor David McLellan’s course on Marx & Marxism. He was co-founder of e-command.co.uk, a new media networking group, and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Management. He has previously written for The Bookseller magazine. Kieron.Smith@CriticalManager.com
¨	John Teta Luhman Marx and McDonaldization: A Tropological Analysis
	McDonaldization is usually seen as a ‘tragedy’ as humans become more rationalised in their everyday life, but from the view of Marx’s theory of historical change, I suggest that it might be seen as a ‘comedy’. As the world’s labour force becomes culturally the same it may finally gain an ironic awareness that is required for radical social change, thus, global rationalisation may create the conditions for a ‘global Proletariat’. The comedy of McDonaldization is that its repulsiveness as a way of life may actually lead to the possibility of achieving liberation from the domination of global capitalism. John Teta Luhman John Teta Luhman is an Assistant Professor of Management in the Department of Business Administration at the University of New England. A founding Board Member of the Standing Conference of Management and Organization Inquiry, and an Editorial Board Member for Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, his research focuses on the historical development of organisational social structure and how narratives (i.e. stories, drama) are related to organisational issues such as culture and change.
¨	Bryan Evans How the State Changes Its Mind: A Gramscian Account of Ontario’s Managerial Culture Change
	Neoliberalism’s relationship to New Public Management is well known but less is understood of how these ideas have become embedded in the state. This article explores one dimension of ‘how the state ‘ changes its mind’ by exploring the ideological and cultural transformation within the senior management ranks of Canada’s largest provincial state, Ontario. A broadly Gramscian framework is used to develop greater insight into the process of cultural change within the state and the specific role of senior managers as the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the neoliberal revolution. Bryan Evans Bryan Evans is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Prior to joining Ryerson in 2003 he held several senior policy and management positions within the Ontario government. He co-authored, with John Shields, Shrinking the State: Globalisation and Public Administration Reform (1998) which offers a critique of neoliberal restructuring of the public sector.
¨	Alan Tuckman Employment Struggles and the Commodification of Time: Marx and the Analysis of Working Time Flexibility
	This paper explores new working time arrangements around a critique of the ‘commodification of time’ to illuminate the contradictions of such new flexibilities. Two features of these new arrangements are seen as relevant for evaluating the Marx/Engels analysis. Firstly, it roots the examination of time in commodification, although, as criticised in this paper, some authors have seen this as the generality of time rather than that within the exchange of labour power. Significantly – and central in all working time arrangements – it is labour power that is sold, be it for a particular period of time, rather than the time itself. Hence, working time arrangements set boundaries against ‘free’ time or time in which labour power is not sold as a commodity, that ‘free’ time which was recognised in the traditional arrangements – fought over in early industrialism – which set premium payments against anti-social hours within ‘overtime’. New working time arrangements tend to blur the boundaries between ‘free’ and ‘working’ time, assuming an availability of labour power to capital. While much of the promotion of flexibility stresses the possibility of making adjustment to suit social and domestic requirements it is more usually the means for altering working time to meet the demands of capital. The much-vaunted case of Volkswagen has led to ‘working time accounts’ becoming the established temporal arrangement within the German car industry and increasingly becoming the norm for other European auto producers. The name given to these new working arrangements within the motor industry suggests that time has indeed become further commodified. For workers within these new time regimes, the hours owed to their employer is displayed along with their earnings – and deductions – on their wage slip. As indicated, such systems of flexible time were also apparent to Marx in the changes instituted by industrial capital to ameliorate the impact of the regulation imposed by the Ten-Hour Bill. He offered the metaphor of the actor on stage and in the wings which seems useful for understanding our contemporary arrangements. In practice we now must distinguish between the operational time and time in which individual workers are engaged. Previously, premium payments – of ‘time and a half’ and so forth – recognised time as heterogeneous, as ‘social time’ with a value beyond exchange of labour power. The uniformity of flexible time represents a qualitative move towards a homogeneous measure of clock-time now stored in a system of exchange of time for money, allowing capital to increasingly control labour time through extending and accumulating ‘time debt’. Alan Tuckman Alan Tuckman teaches employment relations and organisational studies at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University. As well as research on working time, where he has contributed (along with Emma Bell) to a recent collection edited by Whipp, Adam and Sabelis, he has published widely on trade unions and employee representation, and on management ideology. He is currently researching ‘Europeanisation’ across the British, German and Czech motor industry as well as, recently, representative mechanisms of employee voice outside collective bargaining. alan.tuckman@ntu.ac.uk
¨	Matthias Zick Varul Marx, Morality and Management: The Normative Implications of his Labour Value Theory and the Contradictions of HRM
	It will be argued that, by reading Marx’s theory of value not as an explanation of capitalist development but as anthropology of capitalism’s moral implications, certain ethical contradictions of HRM can be identified. The main areas of conflict are seen in HRM’s pretence to equitable exchange relations in the workplace, its propensity to replace material with symbolical recognition through corporate culture and ideology, and in its tendency to lay claim not only on the employee’s labour power but on his or her whole personality. Matthias Zick Varul Matthias Zick Varul is lecturer of sociology at the University of Exeter. His research interests include social theory, consumerism, health and illness and the sociology of work. His most recent publication is a book on the normative background of health consumerism Geld und Gesundheit. Konsum als Transformation von Geld in Moral Berlin, Logos 2004. m.z.varul@exeter.ac.uk
¨	Ernesto Gantman Structural Change in Emergent Markets and the Management Knowledge Industry: The Argentine Case (1989-2003)
	This essay examines the impact of the structural reform of the Argentine economy on the country’s management knowledge industry, in terms of the Marxian distinction between the economic base and the superstructure of capitalist society. By reconstructing the micro foundations of the process of knowledge creation, I explain how certain changes at the level of the economic base influenced the type of knowledge generated by Argentine scholars. Ernesto Gantman Ernesto Gantman received his MS and PhD degrees from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina). At present, he is a Professor and Researcher at the Facultad de Cs Económicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires. He also teaches at the Escuela de Economía y Negocios Internacionales, Universidad de Belgrano (Argentina). His current research interests are the evolution of management knowledge and the study of underdevelopment in Latin America with special reference to the Argentine case. He has recently published Capitalism, Social Privilege and Managerial Ideologies (Ashgate 2005).
¨	Kevin Young How Neoliberalism Reproduces Itself: A Marxian Theory of Management
	This paper explicates a Marxian theory of management that suggests that the social relation to be managed in capitalism is the separation of the political from the economic. While it is commonly understood that this must be an active process of management taken up on behalf of modern capitalist states, this paper suggests that the market mechanism itself also assumes this role without the active intervention of any managerial direction. The intensive expansion of the market facilitates a management function of subverting the political deliberation which challenges the political-economic separation that could otherwise be expected in neoliberal restructuring. Both the changing nature of consumption and the growth of the small business sector are cited as examples of ways in which neoliberalism reproduces itself in the presence of social contradiction but in the absence of any actively planned strategy of management to deal with those contradictions. Kevin Young Kevin Young is a PhD student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Steering Committee member of the Canadian Progressive Economics Forum. A Deputy Editor of the journal Millennium: Journal of International Studies, his previous publications can be found in Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research and Oeconomicus. He gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Kerstin Priwitzer and Gabriel Seifert for their helpful comments.
¨	Nesta Devine Is Analytic Marxism Possible? A ‘Socialist’ Interpretation of Public Choice Theory
	Much management literature depends on the philosophical writings of F A Hayek and James M Buchanan. As such it is recognisably not Marxist but is in fact antithetical to Marxism. But there is a small, significant body of literature which attempts to recruit the ideas of writers in the field of ‘Public Choice’ (pre-eminently Buchanan) to the service of updated Marxist thinking about management. In this paper I argue that this endeavour, although it illustrates the common origins of neoliberalism and Marxism, cannot succeed without doing violence to the original and perhaps fundamental concepts of Marxist thought. Nesta Devine Nesta Devine is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Her academic background is in history and philosophy. She was at one time a secondary school teacher, and became interested enough in the politics and theory behind the reforms in school management to undertake a PhD in the area. Her book Education and Public Choice, A Critical Account Of The Invisible Hand In Education was published in December 2004 by Praeger. She has also contributed to various journals on issues relating to education, politics, and ethics. Currently she is engaged on research concerning the experiences of minority teachers in New Zealand schools.
	________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
	Number 1 Real Worlds
¨	Editorial: Real Worlds
	‘In the real world it’s like this…’ In Whose Reason? Which Rationality? Understanding the ‘Real Worlds’ of Hong Kong’s Public Managers, Brian Brewer, Anthony Cheung and Julia Tao explore the limits of New Public Management (NPM) as a realistic guide to management. Reporting research from Hong Kong they find that, even after 15 years, NPM still cannot do justice to the complex politics, policies and service delivery issues that arise in public organisations. In the real world of work, public sector managers cannot make sense of their roles or resolve conflicts by resorting merely to the ‘menu of management tools and approaches’ and the instrumental rationality that underpin NPM. Aware of the gap between its universalist paradigm and their reality, these managers temper their decisions with ‘a broader orientation to reason’. Brewer, Cheung and Tao conclude that with its ‘homogenised’ notion of management, ‘single mindedness’ and grounding of decision making in efficiency, NPM is ‘seriously flawed’. They suggest that we need to draw on ideas of procedural and expressive - as well as instrumental - rationality if we are to grasp both what public management is about and what it needs to be effective in Hong Kong - and perhaps elsewhere. In Rewards for Results? Equity in a Society of Capitalists, Robert McLaren also suggests that in a market-based society a market fundamentalist pursuit of efficiency is not enough. He argues that reward systems should be subject to the test of equity. For him, too, managers cannot in practice pursue results or outcomes without taking account of the side-effects on relationships, trust and fairness. Arguing that ‘all people in a market-based society can be called capitalists’, he offers ‘a framework for organising the possibilities for achieving equity that would be based on the actions and characteristics of the different citizens in a society of capitalists’. The framework provides choices for distributing shares of a society’s wealth to citizens on the basis of either their actual production or their consumption needs, and in equal or unequal shares. McLaren sets out what each option presupposes and argues that all four options must be reconciled if a society is to achieve an ‘equitable compromise, a reconciliation between basic capitalism for the individual and universal conditions for the collectivity’. ‘What Leaders Really Do’ by John Kotter was the title of a notable Harvard Business Review article in 1990.1 Arthur Krentz and David Malloy offer an ‘alternative model’ of leadership, one which draws on Heidegger’s notions of calculative and reflective thinking and his philosophy of ‘being’ to make a distinctive contribution to our idea of empowering leadership. For them the leader is ‘an enabler who releases fellow workers for their authentic individual and communal possibilities in their corporate context’. Accepting that ‘the terms ‘authenticity’ and ‘organisation’ may, at first existential glance, appear to be mutually exclusive’, they insist that any organisation has ‘an ethical, existential obligation...towards all...who share in its life’. Achieving authenticity entails facing up to challenging aspects of reality which managers will surely recognise: ‘the limitations inherent within social organisations, the finitude of our individual and collective resources, the temporal limits of our own lives and our lives together, and the resistance of the natural world to the imposition of our plans for the control and mastery of it’. Krentz and Malloy spell out the tasks and responsibilities of authentic leaders and in two case studies - Johnsonville Foods and the Body Shop - show what it means to them in practice. In his 1990 paper, John Kotter had argued that ‘the function of leadership is to produce change’ by setting direction through ‘vision and strategies’.2 For him ‘what’s crucial about a vision is not its originality but how well it serves the interests of important constituencies – customers, stockholders, employees’.3 So perhaps Kotter, Krentz and Malloy are in words not so far apart even though philosophically worlds divide them. Leadership is just one of those terms whose meaning is still debated by managers and theorists. Other terms, however, come into use and remain vague and ambiguous, as if by tacit agreement that their meaning will not be probed too sharply. In Vague and Attractive: Five Explanations of the Use of Ambiguous Management Ideas, Anders Örtenblad explains why this is so and indeed why ambiguous ideas exert the hold they do. His two-dimensional model offers five explanations in terms of concretising ideas, using ideas to confer symbolic legitimacy on their users, using ideas to seduce stakeholders, unwitting use and, finally, a response to the attraction and challenge posed by the vagueness or mystery of the ideas. Recognising the value of vague ideas, he calls on managers and researchers to think through their own stance towards them and the ethical issues raised by their use. And he urges all involved in management to challenge the widespread use of vague ideas to confer symbolic legitimacy on managers and organisations, a use which ‘decouples talk and practice’. Özlem Öz in Fuzzy Logic and Strategic Management: An Application of Ragin’s Fuzzy-Set Methods shows how Ragin’s approach to social science based on fuzzy logic can help management researchers carrying out case-orientated research overcome their ‘fundamental dilemma’ and both ‘capture the complexity of social phenomena’ and ‘document generalities’. She argues that Ragin’s methods can enable ‘qualitative and historical researchers to formalise the methodological structure of their work’ and strengthen the analytic power of in-depth knowledge gained from qualitative inquiry. Ragin’s techniques are applied to three cases in strategic management: studies of Turkey, Greece and Canada conducted using Michael Porter’s diamond framework, itself the product of qualitative study. Öz concludes that the techniques can be used in theory building in management more generally to help compare qualitative evidence gained from case-study research. They can thus help narrow what Ragin termed the ‘ever-widening gulf’ between qualitative and quantitative methods and so provide a ‘much-needed methodological window’. In White Mythology: From Linear to Virtual Value Chains in E-Business, it is Porter’s concept of the value chain that gives Stephen Sheard his starting point. Drawing on Derrida, he argues that Porter’s apparently analytic writing embeds ‘a global structure of metaphors’, a white metaphoric structure of thought which hides its status as metaphor. Later writings on the virtual value chain, he suggests, extend Porter’s white metaphors and their features can be interpreted ‘in terms of earlier mythographic and symbolic modes of thinking’ such as those of the Elizabethan Great Chain of Being. Overall, Stephen Sheard offers a new perspective on ‘modes of management rhetoric and discourse’ often presented in value chain literature as if they are exclusively rational. Sheard goes on to associate the development of the virtual value chain concept with a ‘textual mania’ accompanying the dotcom stock market mania, and perhaps a contributor to it. Writing also about theories, Miriam Green explores how representations of them can give rise to the same concerns about meaning as do the theories themselves. Are Management Texts Produced by Authors or by Readers? Representations of a Contingency Theory takes as an example the contingency theory expounded by Burns and Stalker in The Management of Innovation. It traces how different theoretical perspectives adopted by readers expressed themselves in different interpretations of the text, some even ignoring preceding ones. She finds explanations for these differences in three factors: ‘different positions within the spectrum of the positivistic, functional paradigm’, professional considerations and pragmatic ones. Questions about interpretation lay behind a review article in an earlier issue.4 Commenting on it, Colin McArthur cautions against its ‘excess of textualism’. In Organisational Writing and the Lust for Combination: One Reader’s Reception he foregrounds the role of reader reception - ‘what people do with texts in concrete historical situations’ - and posits a dynamic and inevitably social interplay between individual readers and texts, shaped by their life experiences and sense of group identity. Finally Doris Schroeder reviews The Truth about Markets by John Kay, the one-time Director of Oxford’s Said Business School. Managers working in markets - external or internal - will surely find that what Doris Schroeder describes as Kay’s ‘ingenious explanations’ of phenomena such as competitive advantage and the invisible hand give food for thought. Contexts and methods for thinking are described in Free Spaces - Philosophy in Organisations by three Dutch consultant philosophers. The book applies approaches inspired by classical philosophy, such as Socratic dialogue, to the modern organisation and presents case-studies of their workings. In his review, Eric de Haan, himself a consultant, welcomes Free Spaces and invites the authors in a future edition to accommodate the ‘hubris and haunting furies’ whose reality in the workplace is as sure now as it was in the era of the classical philosophies that inspired the book.
¨	Brian Brewer, Anthony B L Cheung and Julia Tao Whose Reason? Which Rationality? Understanding the ‘Real Worlds’ of Hong Kong’s Public Managers
	Based on empirical data from a qualitative study, this paper explores the complexity of ‘real world’ management in Hong Kong’s public sector, as contrasted with various paradigmatic claims under ‘new public management’ (NPM). A plurality of sub-worlds within the broad public sector is identified, which makes the management roles and responsibilities much less ‘homogenised’ than depicted in NPM exhortations. The instrumental rationality underpinning NPM is identified as too restrictive in understanding the way in which public managers reach decisions. When the daily challenges of reconciling values and practices arising from the complexities of politics, policies and service delivery are considered it is necessary to incorporate ideas related to procedural and expressive rationality to fully appreciate the nature of management in public organisations. Brian Brewer Dr Brian Brewer is an Associate Professor at the Department of Public and Social Administration, City University of Hong Kong. His research interests are: comparative public management, and strategies for effective public management. His recent publications include: ‘The impact of differentiation and differential on Hong Kong’s career public service’ International Review of Administrative Sciences Vol 69 (2003) pp 219-233. sabrian@cityu.edu.hk Anthony Cheung Professor Anthony B L Cheung is a Professor at the Department of Public and Social Administration, and Associate Director of the Governance in Asia Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong. His research interests are: public sector reform and comparative administrative reform. His recent publications include: Governance and Public Sector Reform in Asia: Paradigm Shift or Business As Usual? London, Routledge 2003. sabltony@cityu.edu.hk Julia Tao Dr Julia Tao is an Associate Professor at the Department of Public and Social Administration, and Director of the Governance in Asia Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are: applied philosophy, Confucian ethics and public policy. Recent publications include: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the (Im)Possibility of Global Bioethics Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002, and ‘Confucian and Liberal Ethics for Public Policy: Holistic or Atomistic?’ Journal of Social Philosophy Vol34:4 December 2003 pp 572-589 (with Brennan) . sajulia@cityu.edu.hk
¨	Robert McLaren Rewards for Results? Equity in a Society of Capitalists
	Managers and others have long debated the merits of different reward systems, such as piecework, hourly rates, bonuses, stock options, and the like. They have usually focused on the efficiency of these systems, but they have also had to consider their side effects on relationships, trust, and calls for fair treatment. Such debates local to every organisation play out the issues of rewards and equity in market-based societies as a whole. This paper examines the concept of equity in the distribution of resources in a society of capitalists. It begins with a discussion of the nature of individual capitalism in modern societies. Then, using production and consumption as the two basic functions of a society, it presents a schema for analysing equity. It concludes with a suggestion for overcoming income inequity. Robert McLaren Dr Robert McLaren is a professor of public and international administration in the Faculty of Administration, University of Regina, Regina, Canada. He is the author of Civil Servants and Public Policy: A Comparative Study of International Secretariats (1980), Organisational Dilemmas (1982), and The Saskatchewan Practice of Public Administration in Historical Perspective (1998). He has also published articles on various facets of public sector management in both Saskatchewan and the United Nations system. His most recent article is ‘UN reform through coordination by the ACC: the continuing saga of the king and the barons’ International Review of Administrative Sciences (June 2001). One of his current research interests is the nature of capitalism for the development process of individual citizens. robert.mclaren@uregina.ca
¨	Arthur Krentz and David Cruise Malloy Opening People to Possibilities: A Heideggerian Approach to Leadership
	In the realm of corporate leadership and organisational theory, the work of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, has received little if any attention from scholars and practitioners alike. We argue in this paper that Heidegger’s work has an important message to convey with regard to the ability and perhaps the obligation of leaders to enable the ‘releasement’ and ‘opening up’ of the members of an organisational community to their ‘authentic possibilities’ within the realm of the work environment. We apply the Heideggerian concepts of calculative and reflective thinking, as well as his philosophy of ‘being’ to the role of authentic leaders and their leadership possibilities. And we distinguish this approach to leadership from that which we identify as ‘inauthentic’ in which both leaders and members of organisations are alienated from their possibilities. Arthur A Krentz Arthur A Krentz, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at Luther College, University of Regina, Canada. In his teaching and research his principal philosophical interests are in Greek philosophy, the Philosophy of Religion, and Existentialism/Phenomenology. His philosophical orientation focuses on the important connection between thought and action, theory and practice, and on the application of philosophical ideas and thinking to human life in the contemporary world. He has presented papers and published articles on dialectical philosophy in Plato’s dialogues, on existential thinkers such as Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and he is currently completing a monograph on Plato’s Sophist. Arthur.Krentz@uregina.ca David Cruise Malloy David Cruise Malloy, PhD is the Associate Dean in the Faculty of Graduate Studies & Research and a Professor of Philosophy & Ethics in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina, Canada. His research focuses upon applied ethics and philosophy in administrative contexts. Specifically his interests include ethical decision-making, codes of ethics, leadership, and ethical climate/culture. He has published two texts in applied ethics, is funded by two national research agencies in Canada, and published over 90 articles and international presentations. david.malloy@uregina.ca
¨	Anders Örtenblad Vague and Attractive: Five Explanations of the Use of Ambiguous Management Ideas
	This paper reviews the literature on the diffusion and popularity of vague management ideas. Is it the vagueness in itself that makes them so popular, or are there other explanations? Five possible explanations for the attraction of ambiguous management ideas are suggested: (i) concretising; (ii) symbolic legitimisation; (iii) seduction; (iv) unknown use; and (v) challenge. Some of the explanations are explicitly suggested in the literature, whereas others are explanations offered by the present author on the basis of a review of the literature. The five explanations are categorised according to the level of consciousness of the use of vague ideas among the users, and according to whether the ideas are implemented in actual practice or used only in talk. The present paper also discusses what management research