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Notes 241 Chapter10 1. Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009): 56. 2. It didn’t take people long to lose patience with Taylor and his methods. In spite of growing disenchantment with the man and the realization that his methods were impractical, the field of time and motion studies grew apace, as did the man-agement consulting profession; and people remained enamored of Taylors ideas. In an exceptionally well-told story, Hugh Aitken explores Taylor’s work at the Watertown Arsenal, writing about the disenchantment with his methods. See Hugh G. J. Aitken, Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908–1915 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Meg Wheatley exam-ines the new science of quantum mechanics and complexity and explains how it changes our thinking about management. See Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe (San Franscisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1992). 3. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participa-tion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). As a book about professionals (learning) trajectories, situated learning complements the work of Patricia Benner. See Patricia E. Benner, From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice (Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1984). 4. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Also see Wenger, “Communities of Practice: The Social Fabric of a Learning Organization,” The Healthcare Forum Journal 39 no. 4 (1996) and “Knowledge Management as a Doughnut: Shaping Your Knowledge Strategy through Communities of Practice,” Ivey Business Journal January/February (2004). 5. “High performance teams” (HPT) started in the emerging discipline of organization development. The term originated at the Tavistock Institute, London, with Eric Trist’s ideas and practices based on his observation of self-organizing teams at work in an English coal mine. Subsequently, HPT came to be associated with the process-improvement movement (“better, quicker, cheaper”) and to be seen as a management objective. See Marc Hanlan, High Performance Teams: How to Make Them Work (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004). 6. On the early history of knowledge management and its antecedents, see Lawrence Prusak, “Where Did Knowledge Management Come From?” IBM Systems Journal 40, no. 4 (2001): 1002–6; and Patrick Lambe “The Unacknowledged Parentage of Knowl-edge Management,” Journal of Knowledge Management 15, no. 2 (2011): 175–97. Both authors refer to the leading role that management consultants played in the emer-gence of knowledge management, while acknowledging a wider set of influences and antecedents that go back to the 1960s. It is not difficult to read into both contributions that knowledge management marks the arrival of knowledge-work and the recogni-tion that, prior to the 1990s, neither management thinking nor practices had anything substantial to say about knowledge at work, or knowledge in work. While some writers, like Verna Allee, recognize that knowledge and knowledge-work ‘changes everything,’ undermining traditional management completely, the field of knowledge management today is dominated by the belief–perpetuated by consultants and vendors of IT products–that you can add knowledge (actually “information”) to management 242 Notes and continue to manage organizations using Taylorist principles and practices, as if nothing fundamental has changed. 7. Wenger, Communities of Practice: ch. 2. 8. The World Bank, for example, used the name “thematic groups.” Often, a budget is what makes a group and its activities legitimate. Having a budget is evidence that, as far as top management is concerned, what they’re doing is acceptable and the group has permission to exist and to operate in the organization. Without a budget, whatever they are doing isn’t real work. 9. Studies include Scott D.N. Cook and John Seely Brown, “Bridging Epistemologies: The Generative Dance between Organizational Knowledge and Organizational Know-ing,” Organization Science 10, no. 4 (1999); Wenger, Communities of Practice; Julian E. Orr, Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). In order, they look at flute makers, insurance claims clerks, and technicians who service office copiers. 10. Orr, Talking About Machines: 17. 11. Ibid.: 23. 12. Ibid.:76–7. 13. Etienne Wenger has various, essentially similar definitions of communities of prac-tice. I particularly like this one, from “Communities of Practice: a brief introduc-tion”(2006), at www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm. It is simple and elegant. 14. Asking what is “community,” Zygmunt Bauman refers to the ideas of Ferdinand Tönnies and, more recently, of Göran Rosenberg: “‘Common understanding’ ‘coming naturally’[is]thefeaturewhichsetscommunityapartfromtheworldofbitterquarrels, cut-throat competition, and log-rolling . . . Human loyalties, offered and matter-of-factly expected inside the ‘warm circle’ [Rosenberg’s expression for community], ‘are not derived from external social logic or from any economic cost–benefit analysis.’” Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2001): 10. Wenger has a more technical view of what constitutes the community in a CoP, but these ideas are consistent with his emphasis on meaning making and cooperation. They also seem to be consistent with the way field-service technicians may regard their community. 15. I’ve borrowed the phrase from Hugo Letiche, “Meaning, Organizing, and Empower-ment,” in Empowering Humanity: State of the Art in Humanistics, eds. Annemie Halsema and Douwe van Houten (Utrecht: De Tidjstroom Uitgeverij, 2002): 217. 16. See www.ubuntu.com: “Ubuntu is a community developed, Linux-based operating system.” One part of “the Ubuntu promise” is that “Ubuntu will always be free of charge, including enterprise releases and security updates.” 17. Lovemore Mbigi, Ubuntu: The African Dream in Management (Randburg, South Africa: Knowledge Resources, 1997). 18. Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid (London: Mandarin, 1990): 14. 19. The ethos of performance and rewards requires us to be self-centered: even though you focus on others (how well they are doing their work) it is ultimately because that reflects on you (“I”). Chapter11 1. In The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), Matthew Stewart does a particularly good job of highlighting the fact Notes 243 that the father of scientific management’s views were completely unscientific: they were just prejudices. 2. No matter how you look at it, economists’ claims about the merits of competition are completely unfounded and entirely unwarranted. As neoclassical economics only has models of competition, it is impossible to compare competitive with cooperative actions. The concept of competition in economics has nothing to do with what we understand by competitive behavior: i.e. rivalry. See Mark Addleson, “General Equi-librium and ’Competition’: On Competition as Strategy,” South African Journal of Economics 52, no. 2 (1984). If this isn’t enough, economists use an extraordinarily limited set of criteria to assess the goodness or effectiveness of competition. Their claims about competition, which are meant to be universal, applying to production activities in general, rest on models (e.g. “perfect competition”) of cost and revenue functions of theoretical “firms” that are interpreted as industrial concerns. To make a case for the benefits of competition for society, you’d surely want to know how com-petition fares in other situations and you’d want to consider the consequences using a wider set of criteria than cost and revenue. 3. On the connection between the officers’ training at the West Point Academy and management practices, see Keith Hoskin and Richard Macve, “The Genesis of Accountability: The Westpoint Connection,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 13, no. 1 (1988); “Writing, Examining, Disciplining: The Genesis of Accounting’s Modern Power,” in Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice, eds. Anthony G. Hopwood and Peter Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 4. I’m not underestimating the role of formal authority in organizing. But the value of formal authority stems largely from the combination of competition (adversarial relationships) and hierarchy. Having on your side someone whose position counts is important only as long as rank is a way of “keeping everyone in their place,” sepa-rating leaders from the rank and file (or managers from workers), and determining who gets to talk to whom. One way of gauging activists’ success in moving to new organizing practices is by the extent to which they’ve taken formal authority out of the picture. 5. In retrospect, it is clear that managers and consultants have struggled for years with the limitations of industrial era management structures; especially the linear line of authority advocated so strongly by Henri Fayol. Four of his fourteen “general princi-ples of management” are “unity of command,” “unity of direction,” “centralization,” and “scalar chain,” leaving no doubt about the necessity of a single, clear-cut line of authority. See Henri Fayol, General and Industrial Management, trans. C. Storrs (London:PitmanPublishing,1949).The“solution”togettingawayfromalinearchain of command, the matrix structure, created headaches all around and, with hindsight, it is relatively easy to understand why. Operating under standard rules of management, a matrix multiplies everyone’s exposure to the limitations of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and competition but does nothing to change the way people think about working together and their attitudes to collaborating, sharing knowledge, and aligning. 6. Donella Meadows has an illuminating article on where to intervene in a system to produce change. Approaching this question from a systems dynamics perspective, she argues that the place of most leverage is at the level of paradigms: the way peo-ple think and see things. Unfortunately she doesn’t say much about the question that plagues people advocating paradigm change: what does it take to change a paradigm and where do you begin. See Donella H. Meadows, “Places to Intervene in a System (in Increasing Order of Effectiveness),” Whole Earth, no. 91 (1997). 244 Notes 7. “Unmanaging”isTheodoreTaptiklis’sword.TheodoreTaptiklis,Unmanaging:Open-ing up the Organization to Its Own Unspoken Knowledge (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 8. This is the theme of Gordon MacKenzie’s book, in which he encourages profession-als to find ways to escape the “Giant Hairball” of corporate culture. See Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace (New York: Viking, 1998). 9. I have to thank Anthony Joyce for this analogy (personal communication). 10. There may be almost as many definitions of best practice as there are best practices. This one, from Gurteen.com (www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/best-practice), is very similar to the definition in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_ practice). The National Cancer Institute, which draws its definitions from a variety of sourcesthatareregardedasreputable(thusemployingabestpracticeintheuseofdefi-nitions), defines “best practices” as “standard operating procedures that are considered state-of-the-science consistent with all applicable ethical, legal, and policy statutes, regulations, and guidelines” (http://biospecimens.cancer.gov/bestpractices/got/). 11. The seminal work on language, metaphor, and meaning includes contributions by George Lakoff, including George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Although the themes have only come to prominence in the last decade or so, there is a large and growing academic literature on the importance of meaning-making, language, and stories or narratives in organizations and organi-zational life. Barbara Czarniawska has been a leading light in applying postmodern thinking on narrative to organizations, explaining that organizations are a web of nar-ratives. A small sample of contributors to this field includes: Barbara Czarniawska, Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Tom W. Keenoy, Cliff Oswick, and David Grant, “Organiza-tional Discourses: Text and Context,” Organization 4, no. 2 (1997); Richard L. Daft and John C. Wiginton, “Language and Organization,” The Academy of Management Review 4, no. 2 (1979); Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001); Lloyd Sandelands and Robert Drazin, “On the Language of Organization Theory,” Organization Studies 10, no. 4 (1989); Robert Westwood and Stephen Linstead, eds., The Language of Organization (London: SAGE, 2001); Bing Ran and P. Robert Duimering, “Imaging the Organization: Language Use in Orga-nizational Identity Claims,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 21, no. 2 (2007); Susanne Tietze, Laurie Cohen, and Gill Musson, Understanding Orga-nizations through Language (London: SAGE, 2003); David Grant, Tom W. Keenoy, and Cliff Oswick, eds., Discourse and Organization (London: SAGE, 1998); Cliff Oswick, Tom W. Keenoy, and David Grant, “Managerial Discourses: Words Speak Louder Than Actions?” Journal of Applied Management Studies 6, no. 1 (1997). See, too, the references in Chapter 6, Note 10 on the interpretive tradition in social theory. 12. As another example of how context influences people’s receptiveness to a narrative, Sarah Palin and other conservatives used the slogan time “drill baby, drill” to pressure lawmakers into passing legislation that would allow companies to drill for oil in the wildlife refuge in Alaska and elsewhere. It appears that lots of people agreed with the sentiment while “dependency on foreign oil” was uppermost on their minds. When in 2010, the BP-leased drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded and sank and the Notes 245 ruptured pipe spewed millions of gallons of crude oil and natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico, however, their receptiveness to this idea changed. 13. Quoted in Michael Schrage, No More Teams: Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1995): 148–9. 14. Vuvuzelas are the plastic horns that anyone listening to or watching the 2010 World Cup football matches in South Africa got to know intimately. Although most are made in China, these have become a kind of South African national “musical” instrument because they are so popular with spectators at local soccer matches. 15. In a personal communication, Mark Leheney, a consultant, put it this way: When rais-ing the topic of employees doing the organizing, you can feel the temperature in the room drop by 30 degrees. 16. When faced with threats that may demand quick action, the intimate relationship between language and action can be a source of inaction or an obstacle to action. The debate over “climate change” is one example of how language is called to the service of whatever cause people wish to champion. What began as concerns about “global warming” has become a minefield of language, as different sides try to portray the situation either as a potentially disastrous problem which many scientists agree needs urgent attention or as a story that has been completely overblown by irresponsible, sensation-seeking media, but which has no “hard science” to support it. 17. Perhaps one of the reasons why the field of organization development (OD) hasn’t had much impact on the way organizations work is that it hasn’t changed the way people think about organizations and, in fact, there hasn’t been a serious effort by OD practitioners to do so. 18. David Abram explains better than anyone I know how speaking about the world— what we say and how we say it—brings it alive: that the world as we know it lives in our language and conversations. See David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Language and Perception in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). 19. For more on “zing” and “zation,” see Mark Addleson and Jennifer Garvery Berger, “Putting ‘Zing’ Back into Organizational Consulting,” Journal of Professional Con-sulting 3, no. 1 (2008). 20. Peter Block makes a compelling case for stewardship over traditional leader-ship. Stewardship and accountability, which is another theme in his work, are closely affiliated. See Peter Block, Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1993). Chapter12 1. Something that happens quite often, especially in hierarchies, is that people who wish to connect with others in order to organize, perhaps to have their questions answered by someone higher up, find they are unable to do so. For whatever reason, they are rebuffed in their effort to “open a space” with a superior, frequently by a “gate keeper” who knows nothing of the specifics of the situation and little about the inter-ests and inclinations of either party. With their concept “peripheral participation,” Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger explain why it is so important to encourage and con-sciously facilitate these kinds of interactions. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 2. See pp. 133–4. ... - tailieumienphi.vn
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