On Management and Systems

After having spent more than one week within the Australian higher education system, it really is the time for an update. This weekend I attempted writing a highly critical entry on the mechanistic, Cartesian conception of management put forward by Anglo-Saxon business schools, but one lecture yesterday put my skepticism to shame. I am enrolled in a unit on comparative international management - an academic endeavor which seeks to map out the structural and cultural differences in management traditions and styles across the Rhineland-inspired, Anglo-Saxon, and Asian cultures. That said, I will now try to explain my obligations against the conception of management as a highly disciplined, conscious process of rationality.

Modern management taught to business scholars is highly influenced by the writings of Michael Porter, a famous researcher who explored the competitive facets of macroeconomics. Look up the words 'competitive advantage' in any textbook on management and economics published after 1990 and you shall look no further. As Mintzberg writes, Porter was one of the first researchers to provide management scholars with a toolbox of statistical analysis models delivering immediate and concrete results. With a cogent offset in mathematics and economics, Porter convinced managers and consultants alike to dust off the old calculator or open up yet another Excel spreadsheet in order to derive the next optimal strategic direction of a firm. Porter provided us with tangible toolchains that brought order into chaos.

Now, the criticism proposed above is absolutely nothing new. Both Mintzberg and Weick have published several writings on the Cartesian fallacies of management as a managerial system, let alone the fact that 40 years of studies in industrial sociology made several attempts to clean up the mess triggered by Taylor's scientific management. What is yet to be written is why and how Porter's school of management is an autopoietic system in itself, and how Luhmann's operative constructionism may shed new light on contemporary management and strategic thinking. Such questions may - in my opinion - open the doors to a fruitful interpretation of the ghost of Economic Man within modern management.

Now, how is this to come true? I have yet to elaborate on these thoughts, but allow me to put forward a set of proximate propositions:

1. Management science, as constituted by Porter's school of strategic positioning and strategic planning, is a system in itself. Now, be this system defined as The Management System, the system first and foremost strives to persist in a complex system of theories and bodies of knowledge.
2. The Management System is a social and thus autopoietic system seeking to maintain self-referentiality -- and hence theoretical and academic survival -- through its own communication. The communication comprises the ongoing creation, modification, and distribution of rationalistic theories that comply with their common Cartesian backbone -- that is, the notion that the business environment (and the physical world in general) is stable, mechanistic, and predictable. The communication presumes that knowledge, predictability, and empirical justification increase with the amount of data collected, hereby drawing upon a substantial amount of presumptions from physics and mathematics.
   
3. The Management System's ongoing selection and retention of physicalism as its alleged scientific foundation occur due to the inherently strong discursive resource of the physicalistic reductionism in itself. Physicalism and Cartesianism reduce management and organizations into a mechanistic interplay between perfectly rational actors that carry an infinitely detailed knowledge about the environment, whereas socio-political and psychological factors are reduced to environmental complexities in order to preserve simplicity and predictability. In the end, this selection occurs in order to preserve self-referentiality.
4. Self-referentiality is preserved by drawing upon these discursive resources, which in terms of Imre Lakatos creates an allegedly protective belt of strong scientific assumptions around management as a discipline of calculative coolness, rationality, and deduction.
5. In order to further improve and sustain its self-referentiality, The Management System communicates through the medium truth (one of Luhmann's symbolically generalized media of communication). Rationality, predictability, and stability are conceptualized, reified, and exposed as the universal truth of management science, hereby urging other social (e.g. firms, institutions, and governments) and psychic systems (managers, scientists, researchers, business scholars) to adapt to the communication. Drawing on the unquestionable, though strictly reductionistic truth of physicalism 1) improves the ability to further sustain the system's autopoiesis and 2) increases the probability for the system's communication to interpenetrate with other systems in the environment.
6. The Management System's selection of rationalism furthermore serves as an efficient tool for reducing complexity. By reducing the environment into a physicalistic though tangible model of people, businesses, and organizations, the system greatly reduces the environmental complexity. Likewise, psychic systems (e.g. managers and employers) draw upon the same discursive resources in order to bring order and stability to their perception of the environment.
   

Luhmann's generalized systems theory may eventually lead to new questions and answers in our collective search of management. My background is within Enterprise Architecture and IT Management -- a cross-disciplinary field greatly dominated by the Cartesian fallacies and criticisms proposed in this blog entry. I will in my future blogging attempt to shed a Luhmannian light on these particular topics and further elaborate on the above propositions.