Ruth Abbey The Articulated Life: An Interview with Charles Taylor

Robin Attfield Meaningful Work and Full Employment

Robin Attfield To Do No Harm? The Precautionary Principle and Moral

Values

Deborah Blackman & James Connelly Learning from the Past:

Collingwood and the Idea of Organisational History

Hans Bolten Managers Develop Moral Accountability: The Impact of

Socratic Dialogue

Alan Bray Why Is It That Management Appears to Have No History?

Robin Downie & Jane Macnaughton Must Business Judgements Be

Self-Interested?

Michael Fielding Learning Organisation or Learning Community? A Critique of Senge

Nathan Harter Luxury, Waste, Excess and Squander: Leadership and The

Accursed Share of Georges Bataille

Jos Kessels Socrates Comes to Market

Nigel Laurie & Christopher Cherry Wanted: Philosophy of Management

James McCalman But I Did It for the Company! The Ethics of

Organisational Politics

Richard McKenna & Eva Tsahuridu Must Managers Leave Ethics at

Home? Economics and Moral Anomie in Business Organisations

Jeremy Moon Business Social Responsibility: A Source of Social Capital?

Sheelagh O’Reilly Reason as Performance: A Manager’s Philosophical

Diary

Sheelagh O’Reilly Reason as Performance: A Manager’s Philosophical

Diary - Part 2

Ashly Pinnington Charles Handy: The Exemplary Guru

Chris Provis Why Is Trust Important?

Frits Schipper Creativity and Rationality: A Philosophical Contribution

Doris Schroeder Homo Economicus on Trial: Plato, Schopenhauer and the

3

1

3

2

Gregg Elliott Limits to Management: A Philosophy for Managing Land

Yvon Pesqueux Philosophical Perspectives on the Company

John Charvet The Art of the State by Christopher Hood

Paul Griseri Popular Management Books by Staffan Furusten

David Lamb Managing the Human Animal by Nigel Nicholson

Editorials

'One of the greatest discoveries’

Making Sense

It was one of the very first Western philosophers who remarked that people ‘do not notice what they do when they are awake, just as they are oblivious of things when asleep’.  The issue of grasping what it is we in fact believe, know and can do has remained alive ever since. It informs the Socratic call to the examined life. Perhaps - as Charles Taylor citing Wittgenstein suggests in this issue - we can never be fully aware of all that we take for granted. But, as he notes, we can retrieve elements of what we take for granted, make them explicit and reflect critically on them.

This issue contains papers that reflect on aspects of management often left in what Charles Taylor calls ‘a tacit background of assumptions, practices and abilities’. In his interview with Ruth Abbey he explains the notion of this background and sets out the importance of what so often remains unarticulated.

The spirit of the precautionary principle has informed much ethical thinking and practice. From the doctors’ Hippocratic Oath to the spiritual ideal of harmlessness to the UN Global Compact Principle Seven of 2000, the ideal has endured. Robin Attfield in To Do No Harm? The Precautionary Principle and Moral Values makes the principle explicit, exploring its meaning and status and what it implies when we manage the earth’s resources. Hans Bolten reminds us that being willing to give reasons for what we decide and do is implied by the very idea of moral action. Managers Develop Moral Accountability: The Impact of Socratic Dialogue explains how Socratic dialogue equips managers to act accountably and teaches the skills to articulate and follow moral guidelines. In Business Social Responsibility: A Source of Social Capital? Jeremy Moon articulates the relationship for business between seeking profit and engaging with communities in not-for-profit ways. He argues that any business can do both and that corporate not-for-profit engagement can augment our social capital, the ‘resources created by social bonds’ which make it possible for all members of society ‘to achieve otherwise unattainable ends’.

Management gurus provide a background to management even as they crowd the celebrity foreground. They create tacit expectations for what will count as useful thought. In Charles Handy: The Exemplary Guru, Ashly Pinnington explains how one ‘world-class guru’ enhances his perceived authority by using mythic structures and mediaeval exempla. In doing so, Pinnington offers us means to articulate a more coherent response of our own to the guru as a phenomenon.

Managers pursuing change often engage in politics. But how they justify it - to themselves and others - depends on their background concept of ethical behaviour. In But I Did It for the Company! The Ethics of Organisational Politics, James McCalman reports on criteria typically employed and draws attention to what they tacitly ignore. Richard McKenna and Eva Tsahuridu in Must Managers Leave Ethics at Home? Economics and Moral Anomie in Business Organisations set out the thesis shaping research to explore why the tacitly accepted split between ethics at work and ethics outside comes about. Their thesis is stark and findings have yet to appear. But what are we to make of the reported ‘reluctance of senior managers and selected organisations to participate’ once the research topic was indicated? As Charles Taylor notes, when elements of the background are retrieved they can be problematised. That is perhaps one of the best reasons for rescuing them from tacit obscurity and enabling us to face them constructively.

Charles Taylor is one of the most prolific and wide-ranging philosophers in the English-speaking world today. He writes with authority in the fields of moral theory, political philosophy, theories of language, the history of western thought, epistemology and hermeneutics.  Currently an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, he has enjoyed a distinguished academic career which includes being Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University. He has also been active and influential in the politics of his native Quebec, arguing passionately for recognition of Quebec as a distinct society, but against the province’s secession from Canada. For many years he has been a member of the New Democratic Party. The American philosopher Richard Rorty described him as ‘among the dozen most important philosophers writing today’ and one of North America’s ‘most thoughtful politicians’. He is interviewed here by Ruth Abbey.

Charles Taylor: This argument about the importance of what is unsaid or presupposed is most apparent in two main areas of my thinking: epistemology and moral theory. In both of these domains I draw attention to the importance of the tacit background of beliefs and practices. What this phrase refers to is the often unarticulated, unacknowledged, but vitally important assumptions, abilities and practices that underlie any activity. All knowing, and indeed all activity, takes place against, and draws upon, a tacit background of assumptions, practices and abilities.

Yet modern epistemology - that which has descended from the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century – forgets or denies the importance of this background milieu. It seems blind to how indebted all human knowing, no matter how abstruse or abstract it might seem, is to our basic orientation to the world, which is one of practical coping….

Ruth Abbey

Robin Attfield

How can organisations ‘manage for integrity’? Two differing approaches have been called the compliance strategy and the integrity strategy. While the first seeks to instil compliance with externally imposed standards, the integrity strategy seeks to teach ethical decision-making and values as well, so that ‘ethical thinking and awareness...[are]...part of every manager’s mental equipment’. In this paper the Dutch consultant philosopher Hans Bolten reports on how Socratic dialogue has helped managers develop ethical capacities and responsibility. Drawing on research with dialogue members he concludes that organisations that care about ethics cannot rely on abstract moral codes and rules. He argues that they need Socratic dialogue as an instrument if their managers are to shape moral guidelines they both agree upon and can apply in practice. And he shows how dialogue can foster in managers the readiness to give an account of their actions, a readiness implicit in the idea of moral action itself. Thus Socratic dialogue can help create a culture in which morally accountable action is the rule, not the exception, and in which the responsibility to give an account of one’s actions has its rightful place. 

Hans Bolten

Hans Bolten, born in the Netherlands in 1958, works as a facilitator of Socratic dialogues and as a management trainer in profit and non-profit organisations in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. He trains philosophers and non-philosophers to facilitate Socratic dialogues in the Netherlands and abroad. In recent years he has developed and implemented integrity-programmes for the Dutch Tax Department. He is currently training managers from the Department to facilitate Socratic dialogues within the organisation.

The widespread association of business with maximising profit has tended to obscure its social dimension. Indeed some writers doubt whether business can ever be socially engaged and others claim that it should not. This paper seeks to show that besides seeking profit businesses can properly practise social responsibility, defined as involving themselves in their communities and engaging in non-profit activities. It explores the ways in which business social responsibility can contribute to social capital, the resources created by social bonds which members of a society can draw upon and which make it possible to achieve otherwise unattainable ends.

Thanks to the well-understood association of business with profit-maximisation, interest in the social imperatives, opportunities and possibilities of business has tended to be over-shadowed. Indeed, many are sceptical about the possibility of business social responsibility. Theorist of democracy, Benjamin Barber captures the widely-held view on the left of its oxymoronic character:

Whereas Barber assumes that business is incapable of being socially engaged, the neo-classical economics view goes that it should not be. Hayek warned that firms taking social considerations would acquire ‘undesirable and socially dangerous powers’.  Likewise, Friedman argued that:

In contrast to these views, this paper demonstrates that in addition to pursuing profit, business can also contribute to social capital by practising social responsibility. In the current political context of criticisms of the state as a social provider combined with unease about the extent to which neo-liberal market models can contribute to social provision, the question of business sources of social capital is of special interest….

Jeremy Moon

Among many managers Charles Handy might well be described as a ‘world class’ management thinker. He is certainly the first British management author to have achieved international guru status. The author of widely-commended management best-sellers and MBA set texts, known through broadcasting and management videos, he has presented himself more recently as a self-styled ‘social philosopher’. But just how philosophical is he? Does he offer genuinely new ideas? And what explains his vast appeal? Ashly Pinnington considers three works from Handy’s social philosopher period. He argues that they are conservative and focused on the interests of managers and business owners rather than employees or society as a whole. Like a mediaeval friar seeking converts, Handy uses mythic structures and exempla to invest his claims and propositions with plausibility and authority. Drawing on research into management gurus as a phenomenon, Ashly Pinnington concludes that when we read authors like Handy we should attend not merely to the ‘philosophy’ but also to the way narrative techniques are used in conveying ideological and moral messages.

Ashly Pinnington

Organisational politics traditionally gets a ‘bad press’. It has generally been under-researched mainly because of concerns about image. Managers dislike discussing subjects such as organisational politicking, believing that it reflects badly on themselves as managers and on their organisation and they cling to a purely rationalist model of decision-making. Sometimes, even the presence of politics is denied. But, as this paper argues, while some managers may claim to have no taste for politics they readily engage in it and justify it. The processes of managing organisational change more often than not result in conflict and resistance, requiring political engagement in response. This paper analyses political activities in the context of change, using an ethical decision-tree to examine practical cases. It presents them in the managers’ own terms and assesses them against three criteria: utility, rights and justice. The findings raise questions about how managers themselves construe ethical behaviour and about the adequacy of the criteria they use. There is room for further research in this area and analysis of the ethical frameworks used to evaluate what managers do.

James McCalman

Why is it that some business managers appear to behave differently in private and at work? How, if at all, are the decisions managers make affected by the nature of their organisations? What impact do organisational values have on the moral autonomy of managers? A research project into these questions is now under way in three disparate Australian business firms and this paper sets out the premise underlying it. For purposes of research the general premise is that the moral character of a business influences the moral judgements and actions of its members. More specifically, it is suggested that the economic paradigm renders a business organisation amoral rather than moral or immoral, and as a result moral responsibility comes to be assigned to individual members. However, the socio-cultural nature of such firms interferes with the ability of managers to exercise moral autonomy. Governed as it is by the market or laws of economics, the amoral organisation is likely to transform its members into individuals without moral standards.

Richard McKenna

Richard J McKenna is a senior lecturer in the School of Management, Faculty of Business and Public Management at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He teaches management, business ethics and strategic management. His research interests include business ethics, identity of individuals in organisations, learning and management education. He is the author of New Management, published by McGraw-Hill Australia in 1999, and of articles in recent editions of Journal of Business Ethics and Journal of the Australia and New Zealand Academy of Management. He has also contributed chapters to four books and presented papers at national and international conferences. Richard completed his B.Econ and MBA at The University of Western Australia and worked in the public sector and banking before turning to academia.

Eva E Tsahuridu

David Lamb

David Lamb is Honorary Reader in Philosophy in the Department of Biomedical Science and Biomedical Ethics in the University of Birmingham. He was previously Reader in Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Manchester.

He is the author of Language and Perception in Hegel and Wittgenstein (1979), Hegel: From Foundation to System (1980), Multiple Discovery (1984), Death, Brain Death and Ethics (1985, 3rd edition 1991), Explorations in Medicine (with T Davies and M Roberts) (1987), Down the Slippery Slope: Arguing in Applied Ethics (1988), Il Confine Della Vita (1997), Organ Transplants and Ethics (1990, 2nd edition 1995), Discovery, Creativity and Problem Solving (1991), Etica e Trapianto Degli Organi (1995), Therapy Abatement, Autonomy and Futility: Ethical Decisions at the Edge of Life (1995), L’etica alle fronteire della vitta (1998), and Philosophical Problems and the Exploration of Outer Space (2001). He has edited several books and contributed to numerous books and professional journals.

Some people expect or gain much from philosophy. In Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, the arrested Volodin turned to philosophy in the face of death. In A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe's imprisoned hero finds the Stoics an antidote to the rigours of prison. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the condemned cell declared in Letters and Papers from Prison that the value of a liberal education (including philosophy) was that it equips one to deal with life's extremes. Set against these claims, the account of philosophy given recently by Bernard Williams may seem unduly modest: philosophy is "part of a more general attempt to make the best sense of our life, and so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves ". It is an attempt to avoid that incoherence in our thinking which, at its extreme, produces "a crisis of explanation".

Modest the account may be or not - and we think not - but managers can surely gain much from philosophy which seeks to make sense. It was Peter Senge, after all, who noted that 'the quality of our thinking affects the quality of everything we do' and managers continue to grapple with challenges that require clear and cogent thinking. As they attempt this they are not always well served by popular gurus. When ideas are another commodity in a marketplace whose pockets are very deep, the half-life for the latest 'wisdom' is often staggeringly short.

This issue offers examples of how doing philosophy can help managers make better sense of and think more effectively about some of their tasks such as encouraging creativity, fostering community, learning from experience and thinking realistically about motivation.

In Creativity and Rationality, Frits Schipper questions the gurus' invitation to abandon reason in favour of creativity. His account explores the relationship of the two notions and argues that rationality can foster creativity. Michael Fielding begins a two-part series about community and organisation, arguing that Peter Senge's influential account fails to deal with crucial facts of organisational life. Managers who pride themselves on working in the real world and seeking to build learning communities should find it helpful in avoiding false starts. An alternative model follows in the second article in the next issue. Chris Provis tackles trust, a core concern for managers seeking to replace adversarial relationships with partnership. He sets out the paradoxes managers will need to live with if they are to retain the trust of others. Deborah Jackson and James Connelly in Learning from the Past explore some of the hazards of taking the idea of 'experience' for granted and Sheelagh O'Reilly continues in Reason as Performance to report on her reflections in the present. Doris Schroeder subjects the idea of economic man to philosophical and empirical scrutiny while noting the morally debilitating effects on some of those who work as if the idea is valid. Richard Norman reviews a book for managers whose assumptions about human nature are open to question. Paul Griseri offers insights into the guru phenomenon in his review of Staffan Furusten's Popular Management Books. Nathan Harter invites us to consider leadership from an alien perspective that disturbs utilitarian assumptions. Jim Platts responds to Jos Kessels Socrates Comes to Market (Issue 1), and Yvon Pesqueux offers some thoughts on the relationship of philosophical notions to companies.

Nowadays creativity is fashionable. Writers on management and organisation, for example, mention creativity as vital to entrepreneurship. They consider it to be as important as land, labour and capital, which form the traditional factors of production. And related terms such as 'genius' are in use again. An example of this is the widely read book Built to Last. Moreover, creativity and rationality are presented as alternatives. To be creative, managers are urged to put rationality aside: 'being reasonable does not win the day' they are assured and 'all progress depends on the unreasonable man'. This view that rationality and creativity oppose each other is, however, unsatisfactory involving, as it does, a form of epistemological schizophrenia. One excludes the other only if we adopt a simplistic concept of rationality and an esoteric view of creativity. This article, therefore, sets out to clarify the relationship between the concepts of creativity and rationality. Three ideal-type concepts of rationality will be introduced (algorithmic, judgemental, reflective) and their tolerance of novelty discussed. Then two modes of creativity (explorative and transcendentive) are distinguished, followed by a discussion of whether rationality can enhance creativity. I conclude by reviewing some factors involved in creativity, such as tolerance for ambiguity, playfulness and attentiveness, and with a short discussion of the relationship of creativity to power.

Frits Schipper

Frits Schipper studied physics and philosophy and, after being active in the philosophy of science, now teaches philosophy of management and organisation at the Free University of Amsterdam. He is a member of the editorial board of the Dutch/Flemish journal Wijsgerig Perspectief op Maatschappij en Wetenschap (Philosophical Perspectives on Science and Society). In cooperation with others he founded the Prato Centre which aims to promote philosophical reflection on practical issues of management and organisation. Recently, proposals were submitted to establish a Masters Programme in the Philosophy of Management & Organisation.

During the past two years Frits Schipper has worked for the consultancy firm Mazars Paardekooper & Hoffman (Rotterdam) on philosophical problems concerning their own practice. 

This paper takes a close look at a central aspect of the work of Peter Senge, namely his advocacy of the learning organisation and the ‘Communities of Commitment’ that he suggests are its central dynamic. Echoing strands of the liberal-communitarian debate, Senge argues for 'the primacy of the whole' and 'the community nature of the self' as two of the three Galilean shifts, which have the potential to enable business to accomplish fundamental changes in our ways of thinking and being which have thus far eluded other agencies of social and political transformation. My concern is that Senge is not at all clear about the relationship between organisation and community, or, indeed, what community actually is. Arguing that his account is disappointingly partial and damagingly flawed, I then suggest a number of sites for future philosophical work for those who wish to develop an emancipatory notion of community. I end by advocating the work of John Macmurray as a major source of philosophical insight and human wisdom, both with regard to community and the development of a person-centred philosophy of work. A second paper will explore some of his ideas on these matters more fully.

Michael Fielding

There is now a bewildering array of literature about trust, written from a variety of disciplinary orientations. However, much of the literature skirts around the fact that trust is closely tied to some ethical judgements. When we discuss trust and trustworthiness, our language spans the gap between fact and value, and that is sometimes forgotten when emphasis is given to the instrumental benefits of trust and trustworthiness. It is important to remember that sometimes trust is good not as a means to an end, but as something that is intrinsically important. Similarly, trustworthiness is inherently part of being a good human being, and focussing on trustworthiness as a means can impede attaining it either as an end or a means. A ‘balanced scorecard’ approach to evaluating organisational performance needs to take account of trust and trustworthiness as components of performance, as something of inherent value, not just as means to it. Further, in many contexts the assessments we make in coming to decisions require us to make judgements about trust and trustworthiness as a basic consideration, without coming to prior judgements about distinct ‘factual’ issues. This emerges in workplace negotiation, when negotiators have to make decisions about how frank and open to be with other parties.

Through a consideration of the views of R.G. Collingwood on historical knowledge and conceptual change, this paper addresses organisational issues such as history, culture and memory. It then subjects the idea of ‘learning histories’ to critical scrutiny. It concludes that, because of their potential to become framing mental models, they may be in danger of failing to achieve the purposes for which they are used.

‘Exploring the question brings more wisdom than having an answer’

So long as the past and present are outside one another, knowledge of the past is not of much use in the problems of the present. But suppose the past lives on in the present: suppose, though encapsulated in it, and at first sight hidden beneath the present’s contradictory and more prominent features, it is still alive and active; then the historian may very well be related to the non-historian as the trained woodsman is to the ignorant traveller. ‘Nothing here but trees and grass’, thinks the traveller, and marches on. ‘Look,’ says the woodsman, ‘there is a tiger in that grass’. The historian’s business is to reveal the less obvious features hidden from a careless eye in the present situation. What history can bring to moral and political life is a trained eye for the situation in which one has to act. This may seem a small gift. Surely, some one will say, we are entitled to ask for more than that. There is not much use in showing us the tiger unless you also give us a rifle with which to shoot him. ...There were two things...which needed to be said in answer to that...The first is this. You want a rifle? Then go where rifles are to be had. Go to the gunsmith’s. But do not expect the gunsmith to sell you a rifle which can see tigers as well as shoot them. For that, you must learn woodcraft....The second is this. If you are sure that the thing you are going to see in the grass is going to be a tiger, and if your only idea about tigers is that they are things to shoot, take a rifle with you. But are you sure? What if it turns out to be your own child playing Indians?

(Robin Collingwood An Autobiography Oxford, Clarendon Press 1939 pp100-101)

The Value of History

It is increasingly common to assert that the study of history matters to an organisation - but why should this be, and what does it mean? And by ‘history’ do we mean the past (what happened) or do we mean historiography (our representation of what happened)? Presumably we mean both, and regard history in both senses as important because we think it matters to an organisation that it knows where it comes from. An organisation needs a proper understanding of itself, its place in the world, its dynamics and its potential, in order to make strategic decisions and move forward. History and historical understanding are thus related to practice and, by implication, good history is related to good practice. What is sought is not historical knowledge for its own sake, but historical knowledge for the sake of learning and development. Successful development requires an understanding of the present and this can only be gained from an understanding of how the present came to be what it is.

Unfortunately, the emerging practice of using history as a basis for decision making may be seriously flawed.…

Deborah Blackman

Debbie Blackman is Senior Lecturer in the Southampton Business School, Southampton Institute where she specialises in organisational theory and the management of change. She is the editor with P Park and G Chong of Environmental Education & Training (1998) and has published articles and book chapters on environmental education, business ethics, knowledge acquisition and transfer, and social architecture.

Since writing the first instalment of my ‘Philosophical Diary’ from Vietnam I have been involved in a number of activities which have given me food for thought. These range from working on the use of indigenous fodder for cattle production amongst the Hmong in Meo Vac District, Ha Giang Province through to helping develop a logical or project framework - a Logframe - for a possible Forestry Sector Support Programme to be funded through a Government- Donor Partnership. (Logframes are often used by international donors to help conceptualise and structure proposed projects and programmes.) I have also, as a result of a visit to Japan and Hong Kong and through the services of Amazon been able to develop my reading in ‘Oriental’ philosophy as well as making a more detailed acquaintance with the work of Johan Galtung and Alasdair MacIntyre.

I find that reading work that argues from a different perspective challenges my assumptions. This makes me evaluate my current positions and whether they are coherent or not. The difference creates a tension which can be utilised to develop new ideas and to synthesise modes of thinking which can assist in the practice of management. As I suggest later, some of the concept put forward by Galtung and MacIntyre have important consequences for managers. The challenge described by Galtung concerning the 'Structures of Violence' seems to me to be very important for managers as we may be implicitly colluding with structures that are dysfunctional in many ways for us as individuals, for our organisations and, more importantly, for the wider community as well.

During this instalment I will attempt to work out a number of thoughts provoked by my reading, both to develop one of the issues that I raised in the previous instalment, and to introduce some more areas where philosophical thinking has relevance for the practice of development both now and in the future. I will focus on the first of the two challenges that I put forward in the last instalment. This challenge raised questions of Western Theory and Third World Reality although it might perhaps have also raised some questions about First World Reality as well - especially in the agricultural sector….

Sheelagh O'Reilly

Sheelagh O'Reilly been in Vietnam since September 1999 as 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. It is implemented through the Vietnam Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) and the provincial authorities.

The concept of Homo economicus, one of the major foundations of neoclassical economics and a subset of the ideology of laisser-faire capitalism. was recently charged and tried in the island high court. Using the island's virtual jury system for the first time, the accused was tried before a jury of three - Plato, Schopenhauer and feminist economists - chosen by him while under a veil of ignorance of the charge. All three returned guilty verdicts. Plato's was prescriptive: 'One ought not to be like Homo economicus'. Schopenhauer's verdict was descriptive: 'Human nature is not Homo economicus'. The feminist verdict was both. Following the trial - described as a thought experiment - the island's resident philosopher put forward two claims: (a) Neoclassical economists base their theories on a deficient depiction of humankind (descriptive misconception) a claim supported by a witness expert in experimental economics; (b) The depiction holds a dominant but unjustified position in various discourses such as. welfare state debates because it is promoted by a small but highly influential group of economically privileged, university-educated whites, namely graduates of economics, a claim supported by the sociology expert witness.

Doris Schroeder

Doris Schroeder is Lecturer in Philosophy at Lancaster University and Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Bioethics at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Work Incentives and Welfare Provision - The 'Pathological' Theory of Unemployment (Ashgate, 2000) and co-editor (with Ruth Chadwick) of Applied Ethics in six volumes (Routledge, 2001, forthcoming). Her research focuses on philosophical issues in employment, welfare economics, business ethics, international justice and German politics.

Part of the Renaissance genius was to look at familiar things in unfamiliar ways. Although a variety of approaches to the study of leadership are becoming familiar, it still helps to consider new ones. Of use in such moments are the works of unfamiliar writers who have spent considerable energy thinking from an alien perspective. One does not have to accept their assertions uncritically in order to profit from reading them, yet it does take courage sometimes to start down a strange path.

In the spirit of applying new ideas to familiar themes, this article interprets volume one of Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share in the light of the phenomenon we refer to as leadership. Bataille, born in 1897 and died in 1962, certainly qualifies as a writer with an alien perspective. He has the potential to offend. At times, he becomes positively cryptic, as in asserting 'that the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space'. Nonetheless, the book itself develops a plausible line of reasoning.

Society, it argues, is determined by how it disposes of energy. And since energy that cannot be used will be squandered, it matters how a society chooses to do this. Bataille argues further that moments of true 'sovereignty' occur when we squander what would otherwise have been useful. This paper summarises the argument of The Accursed Share and applies it to the outpourings that followers make to leaders. Rather than regard these uneven relationships as examples of utilitarian reciprocity, perhaps we can tap into the idea that attentiveness to leadership is more in the form of an offering or sacrifice to something that expresses us, as an excuse to display exuberance. This approach promises insight into issues of charisma, followership as self-denial, and mass psychology. It also pertains to the tendency of followers to turn against leaders in ritual sacrifice as meaningful superfluity.

Without decrying what Jos Kessels has presented in 'Socrates Comes to Market' (Vol 1 Number 1), which is very useful, I propose to extend it because, whilst pointing towards something important, he simultaneously misrepresents it.

He makes a mistake when he calls Socrates the father of Western philosophy….My comment on Kessels’ work as represented by the Reason in Practice translation is thus that it focuses too much on the idea of Socrates’ approach as a methodology and does not follow the guidance Socrates gave, which was to develop competence....

Philosophy is as old as humanity. In Western civilisation the earliest recorded philosophic ideas can be traced back to 600 BC.

In itself philosophy never sets out to change the world - an attitude condemned by Marx. It confesses, somewhat facetiously, to serving no purpose yet claims to be disinterested, concerned neither with action nor with gain.

Philosophers are thus a small group of men who, sheltered from the commotion and temptations of the world, observe, think and communicate with their distant predecessors, write for their contemporaries and bequeath their works to distant successors.

The company on the other hand is a relatively recent institution…

Yvon Pesqueux

Whether you are a philosopher, manager, theorist or practitioner, welcome to Reason in Practice. If you know Theodore Zeldin’s Intimate History of Humanity you may recall that he credited Socrates with ‘one of the greatest of all discoveries...for ideas to be born, a midwife is needed...if two unsure individuals were put together, they could achieve what they could not do separately...’ Elsewhere he portrayed managers as intermediaries and catalysts, uniquely placed to ‘create new situations and transform people’s lives by bringing them together, without having any arrogant pretensions themselves’. And he noted that ‘most advances in science have been the result of intermediaries venturing beyond the boundaries or the paradigms of their disciplines, uniting insights which come from different kingdoms of knowledge’.

This launch issue shows how Reason in Practice seeks to be catalyst, midwife and intermediary. It argues the need for philosophy of management and suggests how it can be practised. Professional philosophers and consultant philosophers write on work, learning, judgement and the philosophy of management itself. They are joined by a doctor, a development specialist, a renaissance historian and a zoologist all writing from a philosophical perspective. Most have also worked as managers. They write from the United States, Europe and Asia and offer analysis and first-hand experience. We hope this range will excite philosophical thinking about management across disciplines and bring more philosophers themselves to work in the field. We aim to keep the Journal clear; in Einstein’s words, as simple as possible and no simpler.

The first article, ‘Wanted: Philosophy of Management’, sets out our view. Robin Downie and Jane Macnaughton probe the role of self-interest in business decisions and whether managers can rationally take other interests into account. Alan Bray counsels caution to those persuaded that management is something new and outside history. Gregg Elliot offers an opinion piece about the limits to management in the face of complexity. Sheelagh O’Reilly begins a diary reflecting on her approach to development with a Western mindset in an Asian setting and how philosophy can help make sense of the challenges she faces. Robin Attfield explores the concept of meaningful work. And Jos Kessels, the Dutch consultant philosopher, argues for the use of Socratic dialogue at work and shows how it helped managers develop redundancy policy. In Reviews John Charvet considers an important work on public management and Robin Attfield commends an overview of genetics and evolutionary biology which challenges the notion of selfish genes.

We welcome contributions from all traditions and in many forms: papers, brief opinion pieces to provoke debate, first-hand accounts, translations of important work, interviews, reviews, responses to published articles. This Journal, however, is just one of the ways we intend to perform our intermediary role. Subscribers will be offered further ways to join us in the months ahead.

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…….

Besides founder of Reason in Practice with Christopher Cherry, Nigel Laurie is a management consultant and Chair and founder member of the Society of Consultant Philosophers. 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

Judgement is traditionally seen as applicable in two spheres of human endeavour: the theoretical (or the sphere in which we consider both what must be the case and what is likely to be the case) and the practical (or the sphere in which we consider what we ought to do, either because it is in our interests or because morality requires it). Now insofar as we are speaking of ‘judgement’ two conceptual assumptions are being made. Firstly, we are assuming that there are imponderables and complexity, and secondly, despite the imponderables and complexity, that there is still room for the exercise of reason. Granted this view of judgement we can state our two main theses. Firstly, we shall argue that, despite the pressures of market forces, employee needs, and shareholder interests, there is still room in business practice for judgements so understood.  Secondly, we shall argue that these judgements need not inevitably be directed down the single track of the financial interests of the company and its shareholders. The second thesis can be understood as a moral thesis in either of two ways. Either it can be seen as the thesis that companies have broad social responsibilities extending well beyond the immediate interests of the company, or as the thesis that companies share the social interests of the communities to which they belong; they are citizens writ large, to gloss Plato…..

Robin Downie

The starting point for this paper is the question that forms its title. Why is it that management seems to have no history? In making this bold claim I am not of course suggesting that historians have not written about management, as of course they have. The question I am posing is rather one about the practice of management, its received status as an amalgam of technical insights and administrative expertise perceived to stand objectively, and necessarily so, a corpus of skills analogous to those an engineer or a chemist might have: management as a transferable technology unclouded by competing values. Nor am I suggesting that the practice of management has been perceived as unproblematic. Rather, I aim to probe the degree to which its nature as an objective ‘know-how’ renders it as in some way anterior to ethics. It is that proposition that I am attempting to investigate here, indirectly as it were, by posing this question - a question initially about history. This question it seems to me is underlined by the assumption that the history of management is necessarily circumscribed in a way that, say, political history or the history of religion is not. Is it the story of how this expertise was acquired, the intellectual equivalent of a Brunel or a Napier, building bridges or constructing log tables? Or is it something more? Religion and politics clearly have a more problematic history than this, while management appears not to do so; and it is that question I propose to probe in this essay…..

Alan Bray

This is the first in a series of ‘diary reflections’ written, initially, from Vietnam where I work as an adviser to the Vietnam-Sweden Mountain Rural Development Programme (MRDP). This instalment will give the background to my work and highlight some of the areas I will cover in later entries. In doing so I will reflect on how my own philosophical work informs and is informed by my work on the practical management of natural resources and community development. The process will, I hope, take in issues around the practical application of philosophical thinking - mainly to the environment and development. This reflection takes place in the context of work that involves a high degree of exchange across cultures, mainly Vietnamese (Kinh and several ethnic minorities), Swedish and British.  The questions and challenges raised in this instalment may (or may not) be resolved over the remaining phase of my work with MRDP during 2001. In doing so I hope to provoke debate. Many of the issues raised within this programme are not unique but often occur within donor funded aid programmes in the natural resource and poverty alleviation arena. Later instalments will outline some practical matters and the theoretical issues raised by them.

Reflecting in Practice

Reflection is not uncommon, of course, amongst academics involved in development activities. What is perhaps unusual in this diary is the direct reflection on issues from a philosophical perspective while they are being worked on practically, rather than coolly after the event. My view of thinking might be summed up in the words once used to describe that of Confucius:

Thinking for [Confucius] is not to be understood as a process of abstract reasoning, but is fundamentally performative in that it is an activity whoseimmediate consequence is the achievement of a practical result…..

This paper affirms the continuing importance of full employment, as the best prospect for most people of the goods of meaningful work and of self-respect, and welcomes the failure of new technology in Western societies to engender mass unemployment, despite predictions to the contrary. It also replies to criticisms from John White (in Education and the End of Work) of a previous paper of mine, ‘Work and the Human Essence’ (1984). Employing a different sense of ‘meaningful work’ related to agents’ major goals in life, White claims that little work is meaningful, or capable of becoming so, and that social policy should recognise this and exonerate most people from expectations of employment. His argument embodies a distinctive understanding of human flourishing, and a critique of my earlier argument from the human essence. This paper defends that argument, plus a separate argument of my earlier paper from self-respect, which White apparently ignores, for meaningful work as crucial to human flourishing. Most employment, I maintain, is capable of being modified so as to become meaningful work, and since this is most people’s best prospect of that good, policies of full employment should not be discarded, either in the West or in the Third World…...

Robin Attfield

Socrates op de markt, Filosofie in bedrijf was first published in the Netherlands in 1997 and reprinted in 1999. It was translated into German and published in Germany in late 2000. The book covers the need today for Socratic dialogue, its methods, its uses and related concepts. These include elenchus (the refutation of what one thought one knew); maieutics (Socratic midwifery making latent knowledge conscious); the relationship of knowledge to feeling, virtue and the formation of personality; and the distinction between three types of knowledge: scientific (episteme), professional (techne) and practical wisdom (phronesis). Our extracts - the first in English - set out Kessels’ arguments for using Socratic dialogue today, his account of its unique role in organisational learning, and a case history: a dialogue with a top management team in which elenchus plays a signal part as they seek to define a policy for handling redundancies.

Imagine that Socrates, the founding father of Western philosophy, had lived in our age. What would he have done? Would he, as in the past, be found in the marketplace every day, conducting conversations about illusion and reality, about what has value and what does not, about quality and expertise and training and anything at all connected with our views on how to live? Would he even challenge passers by to reveal their ideas about such things and render an account of their activities, regardless of whether they were schoolchildren, students, administrators, managers, politicians or professors?

I believe that he would have done precisely that, just as he did 2500 years ago. Except that the marketplace is no longer a square in the middle of the city, as it was in his time. In those days the ‘agora’ was not only the physical but also the cultural, political and economic centre of the city.  It was where Athenian democracy was born, where meetings were held and policy formulated, where magistrates addressed the citizens, where speeches were made, debates took place and festivals were celebrated. And because so many people assembled there it was also the place where the merchants, bankers and traders could be found, running their businesses. It was the place to enter into dialogue with people. Nowadays, of course, meetings are held in quite different places: in company boardrooms, government buildings, conference rooms in educational institutions. Or in a hotel by the motorway, in a room adjoining a restaurant, a conference centre in the countryside. With modern communication and transport we no longer have to be physically present in a city centre square. The marketplace is wherever people need to meet for discussions, negotiations and exchanges of views. And in our age those are the places Socrates would seek out.

So, the location is different. But the people in the marketplace are the same: policy-makers, entrepreneurs, advisors, civil servants, financiers, private citizens and all the others actively involved in social life. The topics of conversation with Socrates would also be the same. Discussion would still centre on what is illusion and what truth, what has value and what does not, when something has quality, who has the expertise to decide an issue, what training is appropriate; in brief, what is good in life and what is the good life. And likewise his aim would be unchanged: now too Socrates would try to get to the truth in such matters through a joint weighing up of arguments. Joint weighing up of arguments takes place in a dialogue. Socrates wrote no books, published no articles, and gave no lectures. They can provide only second-hand knowledge, book learning, knowledge of words. To gain real insight it is necessary to investigate a question for oneself, to reflect for oneself. And the most fruitful and natural way of exercising our powers of thought is the dialogue: in a dialogue you learn and practise at the same time.

The Need for Dialogue

Why should we immerse ourselves in conducting dialogues in the Socratic way today ? What is the point of dusting down his dialogue technique, his investigative method, his style of asking questions? There are several reasons for doing so: we need to address fundamental questions, to turn a glut of information into knowledge and to develop the capacity of organisations to learn....

Jos Kessels