Management Theory

A Critical and Reflexive Reading

Nanette Monin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134347865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Narrative approaches to organisation and management studies are very much in vogue. Offering a new challenge to management scholarship, Management Theory: A Critical and Reflexive Reading exposes the subtexts of five influential texts by Taylor, Follett, Drucker, Mintzberg and Kanter. In doing so, it encourages readers to recognise the stories that

1 Writing what I have written

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Hamlet, II, ii, 259

I read poetry and I read management theory. Sometimes I read poetry in search of a good theory and sometimes I read management theory as if it were a poem.

The poetic texts I read speak to me across centuries of human inquiry in the words of authors who are sometimes profound and sometimes clichéd, but whatever their aesthetic quality, these texts also seem to me to speak to each other as they contribute to the social construction of my world. In sixteenth century blank verse, for example, when I share Hamlet’s perception that his agonized relationship to the world of affairs is the product of his own imagination, I feel that I am also sharing both Shakespeare’s intuition of the ‘social construction of reality’, and an echo of Descartes’ existential ‘cogito ergo sum’ (I think therefore I am). So I, the reader, become the ‘writer’ of my own text: I see myself as a co-producer, with the author, of textual meaning because my reading can only connect with the life I have lived, the thoughts I have felt, and the emotions I have experienced.

If it is ‘thinking’ – our perception of the way the world is – that is the rational force that constructs our values, ‘good or bad’, then the texts that create and convey that thinking have a key role to play in our constructions. If it is through our texts that we make sense of our experiences, then these same texts become the progenitors of the shared values that knowledge-making in our communities presumes. And because throughout the twentieth century the discipline of management has had exceptionally wide-ranging influence on the thinking and living of people all around the globe, management theory texts have had a particular role to play in the shaping of communal values and knowledge. It is for these reasons that I see the exploration of meaning in the theory texts of management, and the textual strategies that might persuade readers to identify with these meanings, as an important task.

If it can be demonstrated that management theory texts are more multi-layered and plurivocal than is commonly recognized, then it seems to me that the discipline of management will be the richer for knowing itself a little better. The authors of these texts too might wish to more fully recognize the personal worldview that determines the world that they represent, and they might wish to better understand the strategies that they have employed in promoting it. Their readers may wish to unpack the messages they receive, and to decipher the persuasive strategies in which they are couched.

My quest and questions

My interest in conducting an inquiry into the functioning, and the reading effects, of management texts stems from several different but converging strands of engagement. It was first sparked by my bringing to my reading of management theory a critical approach transported from my understanding of the theories of literary criticism, and practice in reading literary texts. Initially, as I read, for example, Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organizations (1986), and then turned to some of the debate on the role of metaphor in the writing of theory that preceded it,¹ I sensed a vacuum: where, in discussions of management scholarship generally, was there any hint of the vast contribution that the philosophy of language and literary criticism might make?

As management scholarship progressed through the 1990s, and critical approaches to management theory based in a postmodern sensibility developed, I noted that although this movement established a growing confidence in placing texts at the centre of a small, but significant, body of management inquiry, it was not yet supported by accessible methods of text analysis. It seemed that close text analysis was in danger of being dropped into the ‘too hard basket’ or the ‘not relevant basket’ before being allowed to enjoy its brief outing.

But, as we approached the third millennium, another strand of the interests that, for me, came together in this research project was growing. A number of academic publications began to appear which took as the subject of their critical inquiry, the popular writings of management gurus. During the same period I was teaching business and society classes. Management students participating in these classes, where much of our discussion returned in one guise or another to values, personal, organizational and societal, spoke of course in a multitude of voices conveying numerous worldviews. But perhaps because I had moved from the humanities to a business faculty, I began to wonder about the formative impact that readings of management theory might be having on the learning experience of these students. I began to pose questions such as: Why are some theorists more fashionable than others? Is there always a clear distinction between a management fad and a management theory? Might readers of these texts be absorbing the worldview conveyed by them without overt awareness of its fuller import?

As I began to pursue these ideas and questions, I recognized that any inquiry that stemmed from them would be premised on the notion that scholars write rhetorically. Management inquiry is rhetorical because all texts are rhetorical. In the world of management, our texts include sales talk and statistics, definition and declamation, explanation and anecdote. Our texts are the interchanges and exchanges of our human interactions and actions, from the casual and the ephemeral to the concretized foundations of the discipline itself, and our texts are language dependent.

In a constructivist worldview,² it is generally understood that the image of reality to which we subscribe, and that we therefore experience, is created and maintained in the language of our texts. Our texts, spoken, written and enacted, from the social and pragmatic to the scholarly and poetic, are the communications through which we live the life of humankind.

Nelson and Megill capture this worldview in a paragraph which I think demands more attention and emphasis that they have given it, so I have chosen to reformat their words as below:

Our world is a creature and a texture of rhetorics:
of founding stories and sales talks,
anecdotes and statistics,
images and rhythms;
of tales told in nursery,
pledges of allegiance or revenge,
symbols of success and failure,
archetypes of action and character.

Ours is a world of
persuasive definitions,
expressive explanations,
and institutional narratives.
It is replete with figures of truth,
models of reality, tropes of argument,
and metaphors of experience.
In our world, scholarship is rhetorical.

(Nelson and Megill 1986: 36)

Management texts of every flavour and hue are mixed through Nelson and Megill’s smorgasbord. They function in a multiplicity of contexts: in the workplace and across stakeholder relationships, in the popular literature of the ‘business books’ marketplace, and in the scholarly books and journals produced by management academics. The new millennium has opened on to a table of texts in which the ideas and social norms that inform an increasingly global society are increasingly sourced from the discipline of management. For business books are big business. Classroom texts, based on both foundational and contemporary management theories, are bought in vast numbers to feed the masses who enrol in business college courses, and business practitioners everywhere line their bookshelves with the latest promotions. If as widely read as bought, these texts might well be as powerful an influence on the development of societal values, practices and mores as they are on the working environment of people in all the diverse roles of organizational life.³ To the extent that management theory continues to influence society’s assumptions and values, it also inspires the actions on which these beliefs are based. So it seems to me that the more completely we understand our management texts, the better equipped we are to debate, and to accept or reject, the ideas and beliefs that they promote.

If we accept that management texts influence the shaping of values, individual and societal, then the first issue of concern that interests me revolves around our ability to distinguish multiple layers of meaning and a diversity of voices, heard and unheard, in our texts. If, for example, what the text has popularly been assumed to say has been concurred with in any measure because of the way the message has been expressed, because of how the message has been conveyed, then an inquiry that provides a means of identifying this link would be useful. At the same time, if there are subtexts, meanings that act in disguise beneath the most accessible layers of the text, and that may be absorbed into the worldview of the unwary receptive reader, along with the more easily recognized surface meanings, then these too would provide a quarry of interest.

It was primarily from these two considerations that questions which have shaped and directed this book emerged. My first exploratory question, ‘How can text analysis and an interpretation of management theory texts reveal and explicate subtexts previously unrecognized in standard interpretations?’,⁴ immediately presented itself as suggesting two very broad directions. If read with an emphasis on the ‘how can’ then the question would challenge me to discover a method of text analysis that would enable management scholars to recognize previously unrecognized meaning in management theory texts. This I saw as dependent upon an acceptable importing of literary epistemology into the halls of management scholarship. If read as emphasizing the discovery of ‘more’ meaning in management theory texts, then I would find myself in the ‘what’ territory of meaning-making, intent upon a search for buried treasure, for meaning encased in the creases, the linings, and the folds of language that has been ironed smooth by the familiarity of repeated readings.

At this stage of my inquiry I had no preconceived conceptualization as to which critical approach to text analysis would be the most appropriate to import into the environment of management. Nor had I envisioned what, as yet undiscovered, meaning my inquiry might reveal, so I decided to explore both roads, the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ routes to textual meaning. I would search for, develop if necessary and apply an approach to text analysis in management. Then I would read management theory texts following the described approach in order to see if more meaning would emerge from my analysis.

My thinking was very focused on the connections and/or ambiguities that I might discover linking the expression and the interpretation of meaning. I planned to explore the ways in which how something is said or written contributes to what is understood. I wondered if there might be discernible patterns of rhetorical persuasion in the texts of management theory that might be influencing the interpretation of meaning in them.

But I also saw that the notion of texts about management theory is very broadly inclusive. As already noted, management texts are not designed to be read only in the theory-driven cloisters of academe: they also act in the world of affairs. Management theorists write texts which academic teachers promote, and which may guide the values and actions that students take out into the workplace and the community. Management scholars provide the research publications on which teaching texts are based; and some of them also write or orate ‘guru’ texts that are the bases for the books and presentations that feed the hunger of the business practitioner world.

As I reflected on my interest in the worldviews that management texts portray, I became curious about what possible links or differences there might be in the subtexts of a wide range of this influential theory. If there is more meaning than has yet been recognized in these texts, then what common assumptions and values might I find in their spaces, their margins, and their hushed-down voices? So I saw my exploratory path building up on a three-tiered foundation. First I wanted to discover whether there are subtexts, assumptions and values, embedded in management theory. Then I wanted to determine whether there are previously unrecognized subtexts common to a range of influential management theory texts and to note intertextual links that span a range of classical and contemporary theory. Finally I was looking to discover examples of common rhetorical strategies that might bring about reader identification with the worldviews discovered in these texts.

I saw these explorations as being important in the context of both management scholarship and management practice. If there is meaning in management texts that has not been previously recognized, then the discovery of this meaning would contribute to our knowledge of both our classroom scholarship and of the worldviews in the workplace that it has played a role in constructing.

In a final step my thinking on these issues came back to the ‘how’ of a still overarching question: ‘How can text analysis and an interpretation of management theory texts reveal and explicate subtexts previously unrecognized in standard interpretations?’ I saw that I would need to seek out or develop a critical approach to reading management theory texts that I could share with my management readers, and so I added a further, and quite distinct goal to my quest: to explain, perhaps discover a method of critical analysis that I could make transparent to the management community.

As I completed the first draft of my thinking as outlined above, I was painfully aware of the potential enormity of the inquiry I planned to begin, and it seemed that I was embarking on an inquiry with few signposts in the scholarship of management.

I wondered if this territory was largely unmapped because, as Kilduff, one of the few management scholars who have deconstructed a management theory text, suggests, many of our theory texts tend to ‘give the appearance of straightforward objectivity’ (Kilduff 1993: 13). I wondered if classical theory texts in other disciplines had, like management, largely escaped the scrutiny of the textual critic and so I began to read across the disciplines. I was reassured to find that researchers in a wide range of disciplines other than management have published rhetorical analyses of their own theory texts: papers on, for example, science, philosophy, anthropology, mathematics, psychology, history, law and economics. There were pioneers out there, some of whom have had a profound impact on the scholarship of their own disciplines,⁵ and I was encouraged by the excitement generated by their work.

Mapping my way

I have already begun to shape this research narrative around a journey metaphor. While the chronology of ‘what happened’ inevitably drives the narrative action forward, this ‘plot’ also allows me to look back and look forward, to move out from, and back in again, to the determining time-frames. It provides me with the opportunity to reflect on readings from the distant as well as the more recent past, to make connections across the disciplines and to dialogue with my readers, through every step of the process of my decision-making and discovery.

Moreover, and of seminal importance to me, as both the narrator of, and the protagonist in, this research narrative, I find that this mode of report allows me to speak in all of my own diverse voices. Some of the stopovers in my journey occur when my mode is expositional, some when my research role seems to call up a certain distancing of my analyst-self and my author-self, and some when the images and metaphors of my writing seem to dance beyond my rational narrative. All of this I planned to signpost so that my readers could follow the roads taken and not taken.

Retrospectively, my own image of my research experience in undertaking this journey is that of a tourist who sets out to explore two vast pyramids: the theory of literary criticism is the base of one, and foundational management theory the base of the other. They are quite distinct pyramids and yet, as I explored the mazes within their giant architectures, and surveyed their monolithic outlines from distant vantage points, I began to note the refracting shadows and illuminations, the kaleidoscopic shades of meaning discovered in the play of thought on thought, image on image, image on thought and thought on image – until I sensed a substantive commonality at work. With this intuition, I saw that perhaps I could move these two vast structures a little closer to each other, to a point where, as their giant sides meet, and boundaries blur, the theories and practices of literary criticism and management theory would be more accommodating of the interdisciplinary dialogue I have enjoyed.

The metaphor of the journey is one that many qualitative researchers adopt when reporting on an inquiry. Though it is the overarching (it is so conspicuous I hesitate to describe it as embedded!) metaphor in which I am writing, many other metaphors play through my words. There is intent in this. Oswick and Grant⁶ in a summing up of metaphor research in organization studies, have suggested that we should consider ‘using metaphor as a vehicle for, rather than target of, research’. Alth...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Management Theory
• Management, Organizations and Society
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Writing what I have written
• 2 Pre-cedents in management theory
• 3 Pre-scripts in literary theory
• 4 Scriptive reading: A method of text analysis
• 5 Scriptive readings
• 6 Performance, perspective and persuasion
• 7 A metanarrative of management theory and a differing voice
• 8 Post-scriptive reading
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index