Archive for the ‘General Management’ Category
Objectivity and the ethical dimension of organisational decision-making
When making decisions, some people follow a structured process that involves gathering data, identifying options and analysing them to arrive at a decision. Others prefer an approach in which they seek to understand the diversity of perspectives on the issue and then attempt to synthesise a decision based on their understanding. To be sure these are stereotypes and, like all stereotypes, are somewhat exaggerated. Nevertheless, most decision-makers in organisations fall into one of these categories, at least as far as their preferred decision-making mode is concerned. Of course, people may change from one mode to another, depending on the situation. For example, a person who is predominantly an objective decision maker in his or her professional life might not be so objective when it comes to making personal decisions.
The differences between the two approaches roughly mirrors the divide between those who believe in an objective reality and those who believe that reality, or at least our perception of it, is a subjective matter. This is akin to the difference between CP Snow’s Two Cultures: the scientists and the artists. At the risk of making a gross generalisation, those who have a scientific or technical background tend to fall into the first category whereas those who lean towards the arts or humanities tend to fall into the other. Like all generalisations this one is, again, not strictly correct, but I think it is fair to say that a person’s training does have an influence on what they deem as the right way to make decisions.
The physicist and polymath Heinz von Foerster summed this up nicely when he noted that the difference between the two types of decision-makers is akin to the differences between discoverers and inventors. The objective decision-maker (the discoverer) attempts to discover the objectively correct decision based on what he or she believes to be true. On the other hand, the subjective decision-maker (the inventor) constructs or creates the decision based on facts and opinion (or even emotion) rather than facts alone.
The conventional view of decision making in organisations – that decisions should be made on the basis of facts – does not recognize this difference. To be sure, matters that can be decided based on facts should be made on the basis of facts. For example, a decision regarding the purchase of equipment can (often) be made based on predetermined criteria.The problem, however, is that most important decisions in organisations do not fall into this category – they have wicked elements that cannot be resolved by facts because the “facts” themselves are ambiguous. Unfortunately, decision-makers often do not understand the difference between the two types of decision problems. A common symptom of this lack of understanding is that when confronted with a wicked decision problem, many decision-makers feel compelled to clothe their reasoning and choices in a garb of (false) objectivity.
The above is not news to observers and scholars of organisational life – see this post, for example. However, a not-so-well-appreciated dimension to the objective/subjective debate on decision-making is that wicked decision problems invariably have an ethical dimension. I elaborate on this briefly below.
In a paper on ethics and cybernetics, von Foerster noted that the objective approach to decision making is but a means of avoiding responsibility. In his words:
…objectivity requires that the properties of an observer be left out of any descriptions of his (sic) observations. With the essence of observing (namely the processes of cognition) having been removed, the observer is reduced to a copying machine with the notion of responsibility successfully juggled away.
Objectivity…and other devices [such as rules and processes] are all derivations of a choice between a pair of in-principle undecidable questions [See Note 1] which are:
“Am I apart from the universe?”
or
“Am I a part of the universe?”
Although von Foerster may be accused overblown rhetoric in the quote, he raises a critical question that we all ought to ask ourselves when confronted with an undecidable issue:
When making this decision, am I going to avoid involvement (and responsibility) by hiding behind rules or processes, or am I going to take full responsibility for it regardless of the outcome?
An honest answer will reveal that such decisions are invariably made on ethical grounds rather than objective ones. Indeed, the decisions we make in our professional lives tell us more about ourselves than we might be willing to admit.
An undecidable question is one that cannot be decided on logical grounds alone – a wicked problem by another name. See my post on wickedness, undecidability and the metaphysics of organizational decision making for more on this point.
On the decline and resurrection of Taylorism
Introduction
A couple of years ago Paul Culmsee and I wrote a post on the cyclical decay and recurrence of certain management concepts. The article describes how ideas and practices bubble up into mainstream management awareness and then fade away after the fad passes…only to recur in a morphed form some years later.
It recently occurred to me that this cycle of decay and recurrence is not restricted to good ideas or practices: ideas that, quite frankly, ought to remain consigned to the dustbin of management can also recur. Moreover, they may even do better the second time around because the conditions are right for them to flourish. In this post I discuss how the notion of scientific management, often referred to as Taylorism, after its founder Fredrick Winslow Taylor, has ebbed and flowed in the century or so since it was first proposed.
Taylorism and its alleged demise
The essence of Taylorism is summarised nicely in this quote from Taylor’s monograph, The Principles of Scientific Management:
This paper has been written…to prove that the best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules and principles, as a foundation. And further to show that the fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all human activities, from our simplest individual activities to the work of great corporations, which call for the most elaborate cooperation. And briefly, through a series of illustrations, to convince the reader that whenever these principles are correctly applied, results must follow which are truly astounding…
According to standard storyline of management, Taylorism had its heyday in the first few decades of the 20th century and faded away after the notion of the worker as an individual emerged in 1920s. In his wonderful paper, Understanding Taylorism, Craig Littler summarises this mainstream view as follows:
From 1900-20 Taylorism provided the dominant ideas about the worker and worker motivation. But money was not enough and ‘a great new ideas was taking root. The view of the worker as an individual personality emerged strongly around 1920 to command the stage.’ From 1920-1940 the worker was seen as a psychological complex, but then ‘Psychological Man’ (sic) faltered and sociology entered industry: Man (sic) had neighbours!
In short, the official story is that Taylorism was declared dead, if not quite interred, some ninety years ago.
But as we shall see, its ghost still haunts the hallways of the modern, knowledge-based corporation…
The ghost of Taylorism
The standard storyline views Taylorism as a management ideology – a set of ideas that guide management practice. However, as Littler tells us, it is more instructive to see it primarily as a means of organizing work, in other words as a management practice. As Littler tells us,
If we look at Taylorism as a form of work organization then we can proceed to analyse it in terms of three general categories: the division of labour, the structure of control over task performance, and the implicit employment relationship.
To elaborate: Taylorism emphasised a scientific approach to enhancing worker productivity through things such as time and motion studies. In practice this lead to a rigid fragmentation and division of labour coupled with time/effort measurements that enabled top-down planning. Although these efforts were focused on increasing production by improving worker efficiency, they also had the effect of centralising control over task performance and skewing the terms of employment in management’s favour.
…and its new avatar
Even from this brief summary one can see how Taylorism sneaks into the modern workplace. As Martha Crowley and her co-workers state in the abstract to this paper:
The last quarter of the twentieth century has seen an erosion of job security in both manual and professional occupation…employee involvement schemes in manual production and the growth of temporary employment, outsourcing and project-based teams in the professions have influenced working conditions in both settings…these practices represent not a departure from scientific management, as is often presumed, but rather the adoption of Taylorist principles that were not fully manifested in the era of mass production.
Indeed, there is a term, Neo-Taylorism, that describes this newly resurrected avatar of this old ideology.
The resurrection of Taylorism is in no small part due to advances in technology. This is indeed an irony because the very technology that gives us “cognitive surplus” (if one believes what some folks tell us) and enables us to inform the world about “what we are doing right now” also makes it possible for us to be monitored at the workplace in real time. A stark manifestation of this the call centre – which Phil Tailor and Peter Bain refer to as an electronic panopticon and, in a later paper an assembly line in the head.
Of course, one does not need to work in a call centre to see Neo-Taylorism at work; the central ideas of scientific management permeate many modern workplaces. The standard HR cycle of goal-setting, review and performance evaluation, familiar to most folks who work in organisation-land, is but a means of evaluating and/or ranking employees with a view to determining an appropriate reward or punishment. This often does more harm than good as is highlighted in David Auerbach’s critique of Microsoft’s stack ranking process: there is nothing more effective than the threat of termination to ensure a compliant workforce…but engendering team spirit and high performance is another matter altogether.
Concluding remarks
To conclude: the resurrection of Taylorism is no surprise. For although it may have become an unfashionable ideology in the latter part of the first half of the 20th century, its practices and, in particular, the forms of work organisation embodied in it live on. This is true not just in industry but also in the academic world. Indeed, some of the research done in industrial engineering departments the world over serves to burnish and propagate Taylor’s legacy. Taylorism as an ideology may be dead, but as a management practice it lives on and flourishes.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Greg Lloyd for his pointer to David Auerbach’s critique of Microsoft’s stack ranking process.
Towards a critical practice of management – a book review
Introduction
Management, as it is practiced, is largely about “getting things done.” Consequently management education and research tends to focus on improving the means by which specified ends are achieved. The ends themselves are not questioned as rigorously as they ought to be. The truth of this is reflected in the high profile corporate scandals that have come to light over the last decade or so, not to mention the global financial crisis.
Today, more than ever, there is a need for a new kind of management practice, one in which managers critically reflect on the goals they pursue and the means by which they aim to achieve them. In their book entitled, Making Sense of Management: A Critical Introduction, management academics Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott describe what such an approach to management entails. This post is a summary of the central ideas described in the book.
Critical theory and its relevance to management
The body of work that Alvesson and Willmott draw from is Critical Theory, a discipline that is based on the belief that knowledge ought to be based on dialectical reasoning – i.e. reasoning through dialogue – rather than scientific rationality alone. The main reason for this being that science (as it is commonly practiced) is value free and is therefore incapable of addressing problems that have a social or ethical dimension. This idea is not new, even scientists such as Einstein have commented on the limits of scientific reasoning.
Although Critical Theory has its roots in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, its modern avatar is largely due to a group of German social philosophers who were associated with the Frankfurt-based Institute of Social Research which was established in the 1920s. Among other things, these philosophers argued that knowledge in the social sciences (such as management) can never be truly value-free or objective. Our knowledge of social matters is invariably coloured by our background, culture, education and sensibilities. This ought to be obvious, but it isn’t: economists continue to proclaim objective truths about the right way to deal with economic issues, and management gurus remain ready to show us the one true path to management excellence.
The present day standard bearer of the Frankfurt School is the German social philosopher, Juergen Habermas who is best known for his theory of communicative rationality – the idea that open dialogue, free from any constraints is the most rational way to decide on matters of importance. For a super-quick introduction to the basic ideas of communicative rationality and its relevance in organisational settings, see my post entitled, More than just talk: rational dialogue in project environments. For a more detailed (and dare I say, entertaining) introduction to communicative rationality with examples drawn from The Borg and much more, have a look at Chapter 7 of my book, The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices, co-written with Paul Culmsee.
The demise of command and control?
Many professional managers see their jobs in purely technical terms, involving things such as administration, planning, monitoring etc. They tend to overlook the fact that these technical functions are carried out within a particular social and cultural context. More to the point, and this is crucial, managers work under constraints of power and domination: they are not free to do what they think is right but have to do whatever their bosses order them to, and, so in turn behave with their subordinates in exactly the same way.
As Alvesson and Willmott put it:
Managers are intermediaries between those who hire them and those whom they manage. Managers are employed to coordinate, motivate, appease and control the productive efforts of others. These ‘others’ do not necessarily share managerial agendas…
Despite the talk of autonomy and empowerment, modern day management is still very much about control. However, modern day employees are unlikely to accept a command and control approach to being managed, so organisations have taken recourse to subtler means of achieving the same result. For example, organisational culture initiatives aimed at getting employees to “internalise”the values of the organisation are attempts to “control sans command.”
The point is, despite the softening of the rhetoric of management its principal focus remains much the same as it was in the days of Taylor and Ford.
A critical look at the status quo
A good place to start with a critical view of management is in the area of decision-making. Certain decisions, particularly those made at executive levels, can have a long term impact on an organisation and its employees. Business schools and decision theory texts tells us that decision-making is a rational process. Unfortunately, reality belies that claim: decisions in organisations are more often made on the basis of politics and ideology rather than objective criteria. This being the case, it is important that decisions be subject to critical scrutiny. Indeed it is possible that many of the crises of the last decade could have been avoided if the decisions that lead to them had been subjected a to critical review.
Many of the initiatives that are launched in organisation-land have their origins in executive-level decisions that are made on flimsy grounds such as “best practice” recommendations from Big 4 consulting companies. Mid-level managers who are required to see these through to completion are then faced with the problem of justifying these initiatives to the rank and file. Change management in modern organisation-land is largely about justifying the unjustifiable or defending the indefensible.
The critique, however, goes beyond just the practice of management. For example, Alvesson and Willmott also draw attention to things such as the objectives of the organisation. They point out that short-sighted objectives such as “maximising shareholder value” is what lead to the downfall of companies such as Enron. Moreover, they also remind us of an issue that is becoming increasingly important in today’s world: that natural resources are not unlimited and should be exploited in a judicious, sustainable manner.
As interesting and important as these “big picture” issues are, in the remainder of this post I’ll focus attention on management practices that impact mid and lower level employees.
A critical look at management specialisations
Alvesson and Willmott analyse organisational functions such as Human Resource Management (HRM), Marketing and Information Systems (IS) from a critical perspective. It would take far too many pages to do justice to their discussion so I’ll just present a brief summary of two areas: HR and IS.
The rhetoric of HRM in organisations stands in stark contradiction to its actions. Despite platitudinous sloganeering about empowerment etc., the actions of most HR departments are aimed at getting people to act and behave in organisationally acceptable ways. Seen in a critical light, seemingly benign HR initiatives such as organizational culture events or self-management initiatives are exposed as being but subtle means of managerial control over employees. (see this paper for an example of the former and this one for an example of the latter).
Since the practice of IS focuses largely on technology, much of the IS research and practice tends to focus on technology trends and “best practices.” As might be expected, the focus is on “fad of the month” and thus turns stale rather quickly. As examples: the 1990s saw an explosion of papers and projects in business process re-engineering; the flavour of the decade in the 2000s was service-oriented architecture; more recently, we’ve seen a great deal of hot air about the cloud. Underlying a lot of technology related decision-making is the tacit assumption that choices pertaining to technology are value-free and can be decided on the basis of technical and financial criteria alone. The profession as a whole tends to take an overly scientific/rational approach to design and implementation, often ignoring issues such as power and politics. It can be argued that many failures of large-scale IS projects are due to the hyper-rational approach taken by many practitioners.
In a similar vein, most management specialisations can benefit from the insights that come from taking a critical perspective. Alvesson and Willmott discuss marketing, accounting and other functions. However, since my main interest is in solutions rather than listing the (rather well-known) problems, I’ll leave it here, directing the interested reader to the book for more.
Towards an enlightened practice of management
In the modern workplace it is common for employees to feel disconnected from their work, at least from time to time if not always. In a prior post, I discussed how this sense of alienation is a consequence of our work and personal lives being played out in two distinct spheres – the system and the lifeworld. In brief, the system refers to the professional and administrative sphere in which we work and/or interact with institutional authority and the lifeworld is is the everyday world that we share with others. Actions in the lifeworld are based on a shared understanding of the issue at hand whereas those in the system are not.
From the critical analysis of management specialisations presented in the book, it is evident that the profession, being mired in a paradigm consisting of prescriptive, top-down practices, serves to perpetuate the system by encroaching on the lifeworld values of employees. There are those who will say that this is exactly how it should be. However, as Alvesson and Wilmott have stated in their book, this kind of thinking is perverse because it is ultimately self-defeating:
The devaluation of lifeworld properties is perverse because …At the very least, the system depends upon human beings who are capable of communicating effectively and who are not manipulated and demoralized to the point of being incapable of cooperation and productivity.
Alvesson and Willmott use the term emancipation, to describe any process whereby employees are freed from shackles of system-oriented thinking even if only partially (Note: here I’m using the term system in the sense defined above – not to be confused with systems thinking, which is another beast altogether). Acknowledging that it is impossible to do this at the level of an entire organisation or even a department, they coin the term micro-emancipation to describe any process whereby sub-groups of organisations are empowered to think through issues and devise appropriate actions by themselves, free (to the extent possible) from management constraints or directives.
Although this might sound much too idealistic to some readers, be assured that it is eminently possible to implement micro-emancipatory practices in real world organisations. See this paper for one possible framework that can be used within a multi-organisation project along with a detailed case study that shows how the framework can be applied in a complex project environment.
Alvesson and Willmott warn that emancipatory practices are not without costs, both for employers and employees. For example, employees who have gained autonomy may end up being less productive which will in turn affect their job security. In my opinion, view, this issue can be addressed through an incrementalist approach wherein both employers and employees work together to come up with micro-emancipatory projects at the grassroots level, as in the case study described in the paper mentioned in the previous paragraph.
…and so to conclude
Despite the rhetoric of autonomy and empowerment, much of present-day management is stuck in a Taylorist/Fordist paradigm. In modern day organisations command and control may not be obvious, but they often sneak in through the backdoor in not-so-obvious ways. For example, employees almost always know that certain things are simply “out of bounds” for discussion and of the consequences of breaching those unstated boundaries can be severe.
In its purest avatar, a critical approach to management seeks to remove those boundaries altogether. This is unrealistic because nothing will ever get done in an organisation in which everything is open for discussion; as is the case in all social systems, compromise is necessary. The concept of micro-emancipation offers just this. To be sure, one has to go beyond the rhetoric of empowerment to actually creating an environment that enables people to speak their minds and debate issues openly. Though it is impossible to do this at the level of an entire organisation, it is definitely possible to achieve it (albeit approximately) in small workgroups.
To conclude: the book is worth a read, not just by management researchers but also by practicing managers. Unfortunately the overly-academic style may be a turn off for practitioners, the very people who need to read it the most.
Eight to Late 