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Issue 1 proposed a new field for
philosophy and provided examples of work in the area. Articles
addressed management's apparent disregard of history, business
judgements, meaningful work, and the management of land.
Managers were offered a substantial introduction to Socratic
dialogue Socrates
Comes to Market, the first English extracts from Socrates op de markt, Filosofie in bedrijf,
the latest book from the leading Dutch consultant philosopher Jos
Kessels. The issue also launched Reason as Performance: A
Manager's Philosophical Diary by Sheelagh O'Reilly from Vietnam |
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Issue 2 used philosophy to make sense of
some central notions in management. Frits Schipper
challenged the gurus' claim that creativity opposed
rationality, James Connelly and Debbie Blackman drew on
Collingwood to question how organisations learn from
the past, and Michael Fielding subjected Peter Senge's view of
organisations as communities to critical scrutiny. Chris Provis investigated why trust is
important at work, Doris Schroeder put 'economic man' on trial
before a virtual jury and Nathan Harter reported his reflections on
leadership after reading The Accursed Share of Georges
Bataille. |
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The theme
of issue 3 was articulate action. Ruth Abbey interviewed
Charles Taylor, described by Richard Rorty as "among the dozen most
important philosophers writing today" and one of North America's
"most thoughtful politicians". Robin Attfield unpacked the
precautionary principle - primum non nocere - and Jeremy Moon
explained how businesses create social capital. Ashly
Pinnington assessed Charles Handy's claims to be a social
philosopher, Hans Bolten described how bank managers
learned moral accountability, James McCalman reported on
the ethics of organisational politics and Richard
McKenna and Eva Tsahuridu set out a research agenda into
the impact of an organisation's values on the moral
autonomy of managers. |
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Year
2: Volume 2 2002 |
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Volume 2 Number 1 presented work
dealing with issues that arise when managers seek to know and
decide.
Sandro Limentani -
a doctor, philosopher and senior healthcare manager -
describes the impasse between the values of expert paternalism
and patient autonomy. Defending managerialism, he calls
for a ‘renewed ethic of medical practice’ which better
recognises ‘the needs of the patient’ when decisions are made.
Michael Bokeno challenges the beliefs that lie behind the
widespread conduit model of communication and meaning and
offers a new paradigm, Communicating Other/Wise.
In Deciding on Violence, Bevan Catley and Campbell
Jones question whether we know what workplace (and other)
violence is. Johannes Lehner offers a framework -
Metaphors, Stories, Models - for describing how managers
decide in all contexts and how they use these three devices in
decision-making. Sheelagh O’Reilly resumes her Manager's
Diary with some reflections on reflection.
Christopher Cowton offers a health warning for one of the most
widely-used tools for shaping management concepts: On
Two-by-Two Grids. And Norma Romm’s Responsible
Knowing: A Better Basis for Management Science calls for
researchers to be transparent about their methods and
answerable about them to those using the knowledge on offer.
Link to article summaries and author profile
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Volume 2 Number 2 presented work defining
and crossing frontiers in management and philosophy.
Juan Fontrodona and Domènec
Melé from the Business Ethics department at IESE in Barcelona
propose philosophy as 'the guiding science par excellence' for
management in Philosophy as a Base for Management: An
Aristotelian Integrative Proposal. Johannes Lehner defines
the boundaries in management decision-making and in part 2 of
Metaphors, Stories, Models offers a unified account of
the field as a whole, describing how managers use stories and
metaphors as well as formal models. Constituting Business
Ethics: A Metatheoretical Exploration brings order to the
apparently chaotic diversity of business ethics in terms of
four modes of engagement in it: prescriptive ethics,
descriptive ethics, postmodern ethics, and critical ethics.
Cara Nine of the University of Arizona argues in The Moral
Ambiguity of Job Qualifications that the morally loaded
notion of qualifications for a job cannot provide a basis for
resisting discrimination in employment. Ron Beadle contends in
The Misappropriation of MacIntyre that Alasdair
MacIntyre's ideas must be treated as embedded. They cannot be
used shorn of the political economy in which they make sense.
From Australia Terence Collins and Greg Latemore invite
managers facing 'answers' that so often disappoint to draw on
philosophy. In Philosophising at Work: An Agenda for
Discussion they set out a framework to enrich managers'
understanding, practice and sense of meaningful engagement at
work.
Link to article summaries and author profiles |
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The theme of Volume 2 Number 3 was knowing how
to manage - how managers know and what they need to know.
Michael Luntley, Professor of
Philosophy at Warwick, offers a new philosophical model of how
managers know. Knowing How to Manage: Expertise and
Embedded Knowledge argues that their expert knowledge is
embedded in interactions with the environment and cannot be
fully specified in or by procedures. He concludes that
trying to manage managers by imposing detailed targets ignores
both the dynamic and contextual nature of their expertise and
the level at which it functions.
In Doing Justice to Solidarity:
How NGOs Should Communicate, Juan Luis Martinez urges NGOs
to understand and stay true to their unique status and align
their marketing with their mission. Negative images of
recurrent disasters amount to 'demagogic sentimentalism' and
produce 'a superficially informed compassion or guilt' leading
to 'compassion fatigue'. Outlining a communication strategy
that respects the rationality of its audience, he offers NGO
managers the prospect of making their marketing more productive
and their income stream more stable. The long-debated notion
of economic rationality is tackled by Duncan Pritchard in
Are Economic Decisions Rational? Path Dependence, Lock-In and
'Hinge' Propositions. His new account of path dependence
draws on Wittgenstein's notion of the 'hinge' proposition and
offers the hope of progress in settling whether path
dependence is genuine and economically significant.
Sheelagh O'Reilly’s continuing
Manager's Philosophical Diary reflects on how technology
is applied in development contexts. She urges managers to
acquire greater self-knowledge and respect for local
knowledge.
Understanding
and dealing with failure in management is the concern of John Dixon
and Rhys Dogan. In Towards Constructive Corporate Governance: From
'Certainties' to a Plurality Principle they present four contending
accounts of corporate governance, each fundamentally flawed in its
underlying premises. Each posits a set of corporate governance
‘certainties’ incompatible with the others and when a failure of
governance occurs, trench warfare between governors and governed
follows unless the competing interests and desires are confronted
and integrated.
In Systems Thinking: A Philosophy of Management,
Paul Dearey shows how philosophical interpretation of the
practice of systemic intervention can help those who manage
such interventions in organisations to better understand the
nature and potential of what they do.
Link to article summaries and author profiles
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