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41. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Anders Bordum Managing Innovation Potential: Revisiting Plato and Reading John Dewey as a Philosopher of Innovation Management
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In this article I will interpret John Dewey’s account of reflective thinking as if he were a philosopher of innovation management. From his pragmatist starting point, the problems involved in knowledge-processes relevant to innovation are analysed and re-conceptualised. By revisiting Plato and using the Deweyan analysis it identifies some categories of general applicability for understanding, designing and managing radical innovation processes. These categories are useful for conceptualising and talking about innovation, when knowledge is taken seriously, and when managing innovation is also understood as managing the production of new knowledge, that is of making the unjustified justified, and the unknown known.
42. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Willard F. Enteman Managerialism and the Transformation of the Academy
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As we enter the twenty-first century, a new set of unexamined assumptions that may be labelled managerialism is coming to dominate university life. In spite of the changes that have been taking place, semantics have largely remained stable. As a result, there has been little recognition of a need to examine the transformation carefully and critically. This paper seeks to explicate the changes, show how they express a common managerialist philosophy and critically analyze them. It does so by dividing the topics to be discussed into two sections: People and Program. The first section shows how conceptual assumptions in regard to central components of the university have changed. Students are now thought of as consumers, administrators as managers, trustees as directors and faculty as employee stakeholders. These conceptual renderings are consistent with and support a managerialist philosophy. The second section shows how apreviously accepted bright line between education and training has broken down so that what we thought of as education has become little more than ornamentation for what are basically training programs. In addition, the training programs have achieved a semantic victory by persuading us to refer to them aseducation. The program change is fully consonant with the people changes. The academy has become one more instance of the general management philosophy that dominates our societies. We have lost our role as autonomous critics and uncritically become a component of the larger arrangement.
43. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Kazem Chaharbaghi, Victor Newman Cruel Comforters: Management Gurus as Outsourced Thinkers
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The influence of popular management gurus derives from two factors: the willingness of their management audience to outsource or subcontract thinking and the ability of gurus to deliver apparently relatively simple messages to an audience that probably does not want or need to think deeply, while retaining their leadership status. As managers look to management gurus to provide them only with reasons to be, to behave or act as opposed to reasons to think, per se, the nature of a popular guru’s output can never address the unseen innovating process which true leadership demands. As a result, popular management gurus are not in a position to promote insights, awakening or higher consciousness in others and cannot fulfil the traditional raison d’être of a guru as an enlightened being. The output of popular management gurus probably communicates more about their audience than it usefully communicates about the guru’s thinking.
44. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Michael L Barnett, Gloria Cahill Measure Less, Succeed More: A Zen Approach to Organisational Balance and Effectiveness
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Over the last decade, managers have increasingly emphasised the creation of tangible measures of intangible organisational properties. Many major corporations now include measures for intellectual capital, knowledge capital, reputational capital, and other such intangible assets on their financial ledgers. Counter to the rubric that ‘If it doesn’t get measured, it doesn’t get done,’ we argue that some intangibles are truly intangible, and attempts to apply tangible measures to them creates undue organisational stress and harms the underlying asset. Instead, managers may better foster the growth of intangible assets by placing less emphasis on outcome measurement and more emphasis on the process. Using New York University’s Office of Community Service as a case study, we illustrate how a Zen approach can augment tangible measures to create a truly ‘balanced’ organisational strategy. American firms have widely adopted the strict measurement practices of Japanese firms, but few have adopted the Eastern practice of Zen. A Zen approach fosters trust and provides flexibility that allows organisations to better achieve success in the long run.
45. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Philipp Dorstewitz, Shyama Kuruvilla Rationality as Situated Inquiry: A Pragmatist Perspective on Policy and Planning Processes
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Rationality bashing has become a popular sport. Critiques have quite rightly challenged models of rational planning that follow a linear progression from predefined ends to achieved goals. There have been several alternative theoretical and empirical developments including incrementalist projects, networktheories, critical communication approaches, and heuristic models.Notwithstanding critiques of linear models of policy-making and planning, rationality as a general idea remains an important reference point for designing and evaluating policy-making and for orientating planning projects. We suggest that the concept of rationality needs to be revised rather than abandonedand this article discusses how rationality in decision making may be reconstructed.We first review and critique some of the main preconceptions of rationality in policy-making and planning. We then discuss the nature and purpose of rationality from the perspective of John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and in light of contemporary theoretical and empirical analyses. We position rationality as a procedural standard of excellence that evolves and informs practices in the context of problematic situations. We propose that a theory of rationality, as a guide for planning and policy, should be developed for application in concrete problematic situations and at the same time should play a normative role and be orientated to moral, socio-historical, and ecological considerations. Dewey’s pragmatist theory is a promising source for such considerations.In this article we identify four ‘pillars’ of pragmatism to support such a revised rationality construct: (i) situationality, (ii) normativity, (iii) philosophical via media between foundationalism and relativism, and (iv) democratic inquiry. We discuss the application of a pragmatist rationality, that we refer to as ‘situational transactive’ rationality, using a model of decision making that builds on current understandings in planning and policy science. Finally, we discuss some of the possible advantages and challenges of undertaking such a pragmatist revision of rationality.
46. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila, Eero Vaara Reconciling Opposites in Organisation Studies: An Aristotelian Approach to Modernism and Post-modernism
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In view of the current fragmentation in management and organisation studies, we argue that there is a need to elaborate techniques that help reconcile contradictory and superficially incommensurable standpoints. For this purpose, we draw on ‘pre-modern’ Aristotelian epistemological and methodologicalsources, particularly the idea of ‘saving the appearances’ (SA), not previously introduced into organisation studies. Using SA as our starting point, we outline a methodology that helps to develop reasonable and acceptable intermediary positions in contemporary debates between ‘modernism’ and ‘post-modernism’. Weillustrate the functioning of SA in the case of three issues in the philosophy of science where ‘modernist’ and ‘post-modernist’ scholars seem to have incommensurable standpoints: the nature of scientific knowledge; the conception of causality; and the epistemology of practice. We show in particular how to use the logics of ‘qualification’, ‘new conception’, and ‘complementary combination’ to form the basis for mediating positions which could then be accepted by less extreme proponents of both ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’.
47. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Michael Williams Is Managerial Intuition Rational? The Case of Long Term Capital Management
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Modelling agency in economics rests primarily on the assumption of instrumental rationality. Managerial agency is more often analysed with a more complex ‘behavioural’ approach. This has led for years to a sterile debate about the usefulness of the abstract rationality postulate between those who think that it is all but sufficient and those who doubt if it is even necessary. This paper argues that positing an abstract (but real) rational core to managerial agency that is then ‘concretised’ towards actual managerial behaviour is the way forward. Rationality is a necessary but not sufficient characterisation of managerial agency. The theoretical argument is supported by reference to the case of the ill-fated Long Term Capital Management built around the Black, Merton and Scholes Nobel Prize-winning derivatives pricing model. It is argued that the 1998 failure of the portfolio was not the result of a failure of rational agency but of the complexities of its implementation.
48. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
A Scott Carson Should a For-Profit Corporation Own and Operate a University?
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For-profit universities are degree-granting institutions that are owned and operated by business corporations. This paper addresses two related public policy questions about for-profit universities. First, should governments and appropriate regulatory bodies permit for-profit universities to grant degrees in their jurisdiction? Second, should higher education policy be developed to create for-profit universities? In this paper, a property rights argument is presented to demonstrate that a corporation should have the right to offer degrees if certain regulatory tests can be met. In limited circumstances, governments might consider establishing for-profit universities, but only if they promote public goods.
49. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Axel Seemann Strategy: Rationality, Intuition, and Accountability
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In this paper, I explore the nature of strategic decision making. In particular, I am concerned with the interplay of rational reflection and intuitive insight in strategic contexts. I argue that it is in the very nature of strategic situations that they cannot be exhaustively analysed in terms of the available evidence, and that hence there always is an intuitive element to strategic decision making. I consider a variety of ways to explain the notion of intuition and conclude that intuition and rationality ought not to be conceived as incompatible with one another. It follows, I claim, that the intuitive component of strategic thought allows for at least some degree of public accountability.
50. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Pia Bramming Immanent Philosophy: The Consequences and Concepts of Human Resource Management
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In this paper I present a philosophically-inspired approach to the field of human resource management (HRM). Such an approach demands a certain kind of reader and a certain kind of HR professional: readers and professionals who are less occupied with the application and implementation of new HR technologies and more with the complex impact of HRM technologies and practices on individuality and sociality. I argue that concepts, technologies and practices of HRM are in practice elements in an immanent philosophy, which reproduces and transforms how individuals and organisations can come into being. Two seemingly contradictory, simultaneous tendencies are discussed. First, the practices and technologies of HRM can and have been seen as disciplining, conservative forces, creating egoistic individuals with little or no interest in sharing a common responsibility towards the organisation. Second, a new kind of sociality arises from the openings that practices and technologies are creating, as the social does not so much disappear as take on new forms. I will discuss these different kinds of beings through a case example involving a group performance appraisal system in a major financial institution. I conclude by reflecting on the matter-of-fact spirit in which HR technologies and practices are implemented and the vast power which the ‘Resource Management’ exercises in creating the ‘Human’.
51. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Michael Williams Towards a Better Understanding of Managerial Agency: Intentionality, Rationality and Emotion
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It is time to transcend the arid debate between rationality and ir-, a-, or non-rationality as our basic assumption about human agency.1 There are powerful arguments and extensive evidence both for and against the rationality assumption, with heavily defended entrenchments on both sides. Managers andmanagement scholars continually make at least tacit assumptions about how they expect others to behave. If only we could have in both theory and practice the coherence and precision of rational models as well as the descriptive richness of ‘behavioural’ approaches. The message of this paper is that perhaps we can. The advent of consciousness studies and, more recently, neuroeconomics would seem to indicate the way forward to transcend the opposition in some kind of synthesis.This paper investigates rationality in the light of Daniel Dennett’s thesis that it is at the core of all intentionality that is the defining characteristic of mental phenomena. Neuroeconomics seeks to enhance understanding of agency by investigating new insights on the materialist basis of mental phenomenologyin the neurophysiology of the brain and nervous system. Experimental evidence mapping intentional states onto neurophysiological states is emerging, some researchers even claiming to have found a ‘neurophysiological utility function’. Dennett closes the circuit by locating the existence of brain-hardware supporting satisficing intentional choice and action as the output of evolutionary ‘design’. The dichotomy is transcended: satisficing models (of which normative optimising rational choice models are a reasonable abstraction) are a good basis both for statistical prediction of the behaviour of large numbers, and as the first base on which to construct and refine a model of expectation-formation about particular types of agent and then of individual agents. Using both the old (‘external’) and the new (sub-individual) behaviourism as well as work on unpacking the abstract notion of rationality, we can concretise optimising rational choice both generally, for epistemic theory-building purposes, and specifically for understanding and deploying models of managerial agency. Such models will need to incorporate emotion with cognition in an integrated approach.
52. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Cynthia Dereli, Peter Stokes Reconceptualising Modernity for Management Studies: Exploring the Tension Between the Scientific and the Spiritual in the Age of Modernism
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Contemporaneously, management studies have focused considerable attention on postmodernity. This engagement is premised on a particular reading of modernity and this paper identifies the frequent implication that spiritual and anti-rational aspects cannot be located in modernist experience and thus seek responses within post-modernism. However, the paper suggests that the spiritual and the anti-rational are integral to modernity through modernistic constructions in the arts. While a tension between the rational and the anti-rational within modernity is occasionally acknowledged, art studies discussed underwrite the dominance of science as illustrated particularly through Greenberg’s account of abstract art. Alternative accounts of abstract art foreground the spiritual in the lives and work of some leading artists and the Theosophy Movement during the High, Modernist period (1890 - 1930). The surfaced tensions between the scientific and the spiritual at the heart of Modernity are related to management theory and its engagement with postmodernity.
53. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Murray Sheard Corporate Responsibilities and Property Rights in the Management of Natural Resources
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Businesses interface with the natural world through rights to property. The shape of these rights and the responsibilities we assign to managers are important determinants of both patterns of resource use and pollutant levels. Consequently, conflicts have arisen between regulating bodies, indigenous groups, andcorporations over the entitlements of businesses in the use of their property when that property is ecologically sensitive or significant.In this paper I develop an account of the ethical responsibilities of managers regarding their treatment of the environment and their use of natural resources. This account is based on a philosophical examination of the nature of property rights. After a tour of traditional arguments employed to defend the institution ofprivate property, I develop a new conception of property rights over objects that have a high natural resource component. I show that in today’s world, ethical concerns that motivated John Locke will yield property rights that are insufficiently strong to override a democratic say in overall use patterns and mustbe sensitive to factors such as need, scarcity, and the interests of stakeholders. I show a similar result for utilitarian arguments for property.On this foundation I develop a conception of property in key environmental resources that includes a stewardship element. To embody this, I suggest a set of ethical responsibilities for managers over certain natural resources that springs from it. I argue for obligations restricting harmful use patterns as a way ofincluding the other goals (eg public participation, sustainability) that we care about, in a manner which clashes least with the liberty of owners and the efficiency of production. The outcome is a set of rights and responsibilities that take global environmental interests into account, but preserve the thrust of what is good about the institution of private property: that it rewards labour and facilitates a stable and efficient free exchange system. As a version of private property, it retains many of the advantages of global capitalism while attaching responsibilities to business decision makers.
54. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Kok Leong Choo Presumptions and Presuppositions in Management Education: The Case of Three UK Business Schools
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This paper sets out and examines the presuppositions and presumptions of management educators. It is based on an empirical study of 25 management educators from three UK Business Schools who are responsible for management education and development. The aim of the study is not to generalise thefindings but to adopt an interpretive methodology to identify and question the hidden and unexamined presuppositions and presumptions of management educators that underlie management programme development and design. The author finds the presuppositions and presumptions problematic, inaccurate and uncritical, and they are responsible for producing and re-producing the practices of management for contemporary organisations and wider society. The author articulates these concerns in a philosophical manner in order to raise questions and challenge the embedded fads and wisdom. This paper concludes by inviting management educators to rethink management education and development and examine their own presuppositions and presumptions underpinning programme development and design.
55. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Lionel Boxer Sustainability Perspectives
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Various stakeholders approach sustainability in their own way. How they do this is reflected in their discursive behaviour. The stakeholder groups explored here include Traditional Shareholders, Incentive-Coerced Management, Pro-Sustainability Corporate, and Activists. Each of these stakeholder groups is shown to engage in a unique discourse, which provides insight into how each approach sustainability. This paper draws on Foucault’s ideas to help understand these discourses in terms of a framework based on Harré’s positioning theory. A new level of understanding is derived about the different points of view about sustainability. Business leaders can harness this to improve how they approach sustainability.
56. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
David Love A Philosophy of Maintenance? Engaging with the Concept of Software
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Although reducing the costs of software maintenance has long been held as an important goal, few researchers have studied software maintenance - except in the context of software design. However, thinking in software design is itself muddled by the frequent confusion over the term ‘software’ and ‘programs’. In this paper we argue for a re-examination of the underlying philosophical foundations of programs, in order to establish software as a phenomenon in its own right. Once we understand the basic structure of software theories, we will be in a better position to understand how theories of software relate to theories of programs. This might finally provide the insight needed to achieve the long awaited reduction in the cost of software maintenance.
57. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Betina Wolfgang Rennison Intimacy of Management: Codified Construction of Personalised Selves
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‘Individualisation’ is a well-known societal phenomenon of late modernity. At the organisational level it shows up in different managerial forms and HRM technologies that focus more and more intensively on the employee as an individual person. In order to assess an employee’s personal contribution andcommitment emphasis is put on the characteristics of individuals: their talents, performance and personality. Reporting on research on an individualised pay system in Denmark, this paper illustrates the empirical complexity of this personalisation process. It shows how the employee is created and ‘codified’ as an individual person. It occurs in three different ways according to the codes of learning, love and the moral. It indicates that the postulated regime of individualisation follows a variety of trajectories to reach its target making for a quite subtle way of intimately managing human relations.
58. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Axel Seemann Rational Trust: An Interview with Onora O’Neill
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Onora O’Neill was Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge from 1992 to 2006. She studied philosophy, psychology and physiology at Oxford and earned a PhD from Harvard, with John Rawls as supervisor. She taught at Barnard College, the women’s college at Columbia University, New York, before taking up a post at the University of Essex, where she became Professor of Philosophy in 1987. She lectures in the faculties of Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, and has written widely on ethics and political philosophy, with particular interests in questions of international justice, and in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
59. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Martin Kelly, Graham Oliver Wisdom and Ethics in Management: The Educational Society and Sustainability
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In this paper we discuss ‘sustainable management’ which is being advocated by some in the business community. It may be that a professed commitment to sustainable development is merely a way for contemporary businesses to continue with ‘business as usual’ behind its façade. We believe that if businesspractices are to change, then education must change to allow students to live the ‘good’ lives promoted both by early philosophers and now by those professing the merits of sustainable development. The sustainable development paradigm, if adopted fully, may result in the best of business decisions being made; it may provide humankind with a way to avoid the self-destruction which has been threatening throughout the 20th Century. Sustainable management requires business decision makers to consider how their decisions will affect the social and natural environments as well as their organisations’ profitability. It encourages a moral approach to business decision making and requires managers to recognise that genuinely long-term decision criteria will ultimately benefit their businesses, their societies, the natural environment and humankind. Although sustainable management is promoted as a ‘new’ paradigm, we argue that its principles should have been promoted through our educational systems for many centuries; they have not been.
60. Philosophy of Management: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Esther Roca Rethinking Aristotelian Communities as Contemporary Corporations
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This paper investigates two trends which propose an approach to organisations and ethics different from those advocated by the modern tradition. It firste analyses the re-surfacing of the moral and social thinking of Aristotle in the work of a growing number of organisational theorists. It argues that Aristotle’scontemporary resurgence has been partly within the framework of corporate culturism.With this in mind, we reinterpret some elements of the Aristotelian social-moral system in such a way that it can be applied to contemporary organisations. Recognising that some Aristotelian concepts can limit its applicability, we then draw on Levinas’ insights. His approach sheds some post-modern light on thesocial-moral Aristotelian system, by allowing the emergence of a more human and up-to-date vision of organisations and employee management. We contend that the fusion of both discourses results in a more complete understanding of organisations and its articulation with ethics.