Foundations of Management Knowledge: Assumptions and Limitations

Paper number 01/04

Robert Chia University of Exeter

Abstract

Modern management knowledge relies overwhelmingly on the written word and it’s disseminated through print. Writing in general and alphabetic writing in particular facilitated the development of abstract thinking and the linear logic necessary for the systematic framing of individual activities into purposeful functions. In so doing it precipitated the necessary future goal-orientation required for a rudimentary form of organization and management to emerge. With the invention of typography the printed word reached far beyond the spatial confines of a particular established social order enabling the aspirations, cultural attitudes and lifestyles of those both far and near, and across time, to be influenced and shaped according to the priorities of modernity. Printing thus freed thought and aspirations from the shackles of local knowledge and inspired a visual emphasis that led to the advent of the Enlightenment with its obsession with rational analysis, systematic empiricism, representationalism and causal determinism. These four epistemological imperatives continue to underpin the foundations of management knowledge.

School of Business and Economics Streatham Court, Rennes Drive Exeter EX4 4PU Tel: +44 1392 263241 Email: R.Chia@exeter.ac.uk

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ISSN No: 1473 2939

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Introduction

'We inherit an observational order, namely types of things which we do in fact discriminate; and we inherit a conceptual order, namely a rough system of ideas in terms of which we do in fact interpret….Observational discrimination is not dictated by the impartial facts. It selects and discards, and what it retains is rearranged in a subjective order of prominence'

A. N. Whitehead

Adventures of Ideas (1933: 183-184) The origins of management knowledge lie in the background of a dim consciousness

slowly but almost inexorably sapping the base of some established cliff of instinctual

habit. Like a phantom ocean beating upon the shores of life in successive waves of

specialization, evolution as a whole is characterised by a net increase in the rate at

which expandable energy is harnessed and used in organic maintenance (Sahlins,

1960). Living things, especially humans, have an inherent tendency to increase their

'thermodynamic accomplishment': that is, their capacity to trap and utilise such forms

of energy to raise their level of existence from lower to higher forms. This is what

makes 'a crab superior to an amoeba, a goldfish to a crab, a mouse to a goldfish and a

man to a mouse' (Sahlins, 1960: 21). Evolution is, thus, an interminable process that

works from a start of more or less randomness towards increasing coherence, and that

moves from amorphousness towards definiteness, from fumbling trail-and-errors to

purposeful decision. Humans, in particular, evolve not by physical changes in our

bodies but by advances in our mindsets and by our expanding capacity for stockpiling

knowledge. Thus, the cultivated impulse to impose some systematic order and

coherence on our otherwise amorphous flux of lived experience provides the first

clues to the development of the kind of problem-solving orientation that we have

come to associate so much with effective management practice. Our almost insatiable

need for differentiating and fixing parts of experience, for situational clarification, and

causal attribution, as well as the ongoing attempt to successfully predict future

courses of events, stems from what McArthur (1986: 32) calls our primordial

‘taxonomic urge’. It is by now a well-documented fact that the ability to ask questions

relating to these key domain of concerns is what accounts for the impressive artefacts

of modern civilisation and underpins almost all of its outstanding discoveries and

achievements particularly over the last two thousand five hundred years. What is less

well appreciated is the fact that the basic principles and assumptions of modern

management, formulated and developed within the context of contemporary concerns

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and preoccupations, are inextricably linked to these wider–ranging survivalist patterns

of thought.

The history of management thought is, therefore, also the history of how humans have

learned to develop and operate systems of recording, reference, information retrieval

and methods of analyses that are increasingly more and more abstract and external to

the brain. This capacity for externalising, objectifying and systematizing thought in

order to aid comprehension and control is a central feature of mankind's rise into

prominence over the other species. It is what underpins the more modern economic-

administrative practice of management. Managing, in its most fundamental existential

sense, is, therefore, the ongoing refinement of methods, means and mechanisms for

fixing, portioning, externalising and objectifying aspects of our lived experiences in

order to render them more amenable to manipulation and control, and to thereby attain

a desired level of predictability in affairs of the world. Understood thus, management

and organization are, in effect, reality-constituting and world-making activities

intrinsic to the survivalist instincts of the human species and not just a specialised

technique applicable to economic-administrative activities designed to achieve profits,

growth, market share, or global dominance in the world of affairs.

The purpose of this chapter is to trace the foundational roots of modern management

knowledge and to relocate their origins in the broader civilisational processes that

have taken place especially over the last five millennia. In particular, it will be shown

that contemporary management knowledge owes much to three major

transformational events occurring in the history of Western civilisation, namely; the

invention of writing; the alphabetization of the world beginning some three thousand

years ago; and the rapid rise of the printed word from the latter half of the fifteenth

century. These three civilisational milestones have irretrievably changed the course of

human history in that they have precipitated the necessary asymmetries in our sense-

ratios such that visual knowledge have come to predominate over all the other senses.

Such an intellectual pre-disposition has, in turn, fundamentally shaped contemporary

attitudes towards management and its priorities and practices. Indeed, it has instilled a

set of instinctive 'readinesses' (Vickers, 1965: 67) amongst management academics

and practitioners to construe the vague, the instinctive, the tacit and the contextual to

be perennial 'problems' that need to be overcome in the establishment of management

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knowledge. This metaphysical preference for visibility, clarity and precision, for the

individual, the explicit, the articulate and the expressible owes much to the formative

influences that language, and in particular the alphabetic system, has had on our

thought processes. It is argued here that without such a historical appreciation of the

material events in human history and their effects on contemporary modes of thought,

the foundational principles of modern management knowledge and, more importantly,

their hidden preferences and limitations cannot be fully appreciated. This chapter

seeks to make a small contribution towards this deeper understanding of the

foundational forces shaping the establishment of management knowledge and to re-

framing it in terms of the wider historical-shaping of modern civilisation.

Material Foundations: Externalising, Representing, and Containerising

According to popular estimates, the species Homo has been in existence for some two

million years yet it may not have become properly sapiens up until a mere 100,000

years ago. Civilisation, a dynamic complex of collective purposeful practices

including especially organised agriculture, centralised authority, socially coherent

communities and some kind of established system of communication, therefore, make

up only a very small percentage of the much lengthier process of human evolution.

For much of this early civilising period, there were little or no external systems of

reference to speak of and hence to systematically organize collective effort. The

human brain, with its erratic memory, was the only available apparatus for knowing,

referring, recording and problem-solving. As a consequence, learning and the capacity

for adaptation was contingent and limited and survival always a question.

Somewhere in this early period of human evolution, however, tool making emerged as

the first indications of the attempt to externalise thought and to exert some kind of

proactive influence on our surroundings. Tools are prosthetic devices that help

'extend' human influence across space by substituting an artificial part for a human

limb, an eye or a tooth. Tongs, for instance, may be used in inhospitable

circumstances such as a fire in place of our hands which are frail and hence unable to

deal with the intense heat a fire generates. Tools are, therefore, technologies of

representation in that they stand for or represent a part of the human body. Such 'real'

tools created have, in turn, served as models and templates for the tools of the mind as

Richard Gregory (1981) so vividly points out. Tools produced for effective use in

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dealing with physical nature inspired a parallel urge to create similar efficiency-

saving tools of the mind. Thus, 'Just as long ago, we learned to cut up the carcasses of

animals and name the varieties of plants, just as we acquired the ability to make

shapes out of pieces of skin sewn together, so we transposed "ideas" from the physical

world and "cut up" and "stitched together" parallel artefacts inside our heads, creating

mental dissections, mental classifications, mental frames and mental bags or

containers' (McArthur, 1986: 4). It is this impulse which has led to the eventual

development of language and systems of representation over five thousand years ago.

Language and systems of representation are convenient containers or tools for

thought. Thus, just as a box, cupboard, or goblet is a tool of the world, a 'noun' is a

tool of the mind in that it 'contains' an enormous number of other words and images

that are immediately brought to mind by its usage. The word 'church' for instance is a

powerful container in that it invokes a rich variety of thoughts and images with its

use. Nouns facilitate habituation and help to orient us in particular ways by narrowing

semantic connections and hence the range of choices available for conception and

action. Moreover, conventionalised language as a tool of communication, 'by

providing a stable background in which human activity may proceed with a minimum

of decision-making…frees energy…(and) opens up a foreground for deliberation and

innovation' (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 71). Language and systems of

representation are thus routinising devices that help to conventionalise meaning and

hence establish certain preferred connections. Thus, the image of a skull almost

immediately evokes a sense of danger and death. But even in the basic elements of

language as Saussure (1966) argued, the meaning of a word does not depend upon a

direct correspondence with a part of concrete reality. Instead the meanings of words

are arbitrary but conventionally established. Thus the word 'tree' evokes almost

instinctively an image of a tree even though there is no necessary resemblance or

connection between the word 'tree' and the physical object in the woods1. It is through

this ongoing process of languaging (i.e., the routine connecting of a word/sound with

an object visualised or a phenomenon experienced) that social reality is forged and

sustained. Thus, the social order and the seemingly organized character of modern

societies that we find so familiar and reassuring are human products, or human

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productions made possible by language and systems of objectification and

representation that belie a certain precariousness and uncertainty in the human

condition. They have to be constantly 'managed', updated and adjusted to retain their

legitimacy and coherence. This is something that has been going for the best part of

the last 30,000 years.

Some 30,000 years ago the Cro-Magnon peoples of Europe began, for the first time

ever known, to produce on rock surfaces, figures and shapes that resembled other

shapes that lived and moved in the real world. As far as we are able to ascertain, they

were the first representations of actual living things in which three-dimensional

moving creatures were translated into static two-dimensional outlines. In a basic

sense, the Cro-Magnon peoples were the original producers of the containers of

knowledge as we understand it today. These rudimentary pictograms' or 'writings'

have helped create what the philosopher of science Karl Popper (Popper, 1987: 58-74)

calls 'World 3'. World 1, for Popper is the world of material effects: storms, heat,

cold, sticks, stones, teeth, claws etc - the flesh and bone of 'reality'. World 2 describe

our inner landscape of images, sounds and unspoken words. It is the mindscape within

which our thoughts and ideas are registered and processed. World 3, on the other hand

is the cumulative 'stockpile' of the richest fruits of human brainpower. It represents

the outcome of our collective attempts at 'externalising' thought and containerising

them into more permanent forms of register by embedding them in physical

inscriptions. It makes libraries, databanks, art, science, and social institutions far and

away more important than the knowledge of any single individual at any point in

time. Such externalised forms of thought constitute the basis of what we now call

'information'. It makes of it a 'commodity' suited for handling, assembling,

manipulating and transferring either from one form to another or from one point to

another. This is how much of contemporary management knowledge is basically

perceived.

However, the transformation of systems of representation from the crude

shapes etched out on rock surfaces in caves to the complexity and sophistication of

modern forms of written knowledge and information-storage has been a long and

tedious journey. It is a story of the emergence and refinement of tallying, recording, 1 This is less true for the Chinese language where the written character for 'tree' does bear a resemblance to the physical object. This is because, unlike the alphabetic system which is an abstract

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referring and then classical writing as aide memoirs, supplementary and external to

the brain. This attempted externalising of memory may take a simple form such as the

notched sticks adopted by the Maoris for aiding the process of story-telling or the

rosary bead used for jogging the memory of the Catholic devotee. Alternatively, it

may take the form of modern computers the most modest of which has an enormous

capacity for data storage and retrieval and which now threatens to even render

obsolete the printed word. Bill Gates, the founding Chairman of Microsoft for

instance, suggests that with the new developments in computers, it will very soon be

possible to purchase electronic books on the Web and to store a personal library of

some 34,000 books in an ordinary PC. If this materialises, electronic books are likely

to replace paper and print as the dominant form of information storage. These

developments form a part of the ongoing search for the creation of more and more

sophisticated and dependable tools to assist our rather feeble and erratic human

memories and to help extend our influence over our environment. Rudimentary

devices, such as the tally sticks, however, unlike the printed word or computerised

information storage, have a rather limited informational value. They, cannot be 'read'

as such for separate existing information. Instead they are simple memory joggers and

reflect the beginnings of this interminable attempt to externalise and compactify data

in such a way as to assist in structuring, regularising and 'managing' social existence.

Tallying devices remain very much part of an oral tradition and continue to be used

even in modern times by the less literate peoples particularly in Africa and the East

Asian regions. Like the 'talking drums'2 which help amplify voice in predominantly

oral cultures and hence aid communication over large distances, tallying devices help

retain memory over longer stretches of time. They are management tools in the most

rudimentary sense of the word.

In the mid-West and in China, however, written inscriptions as a system of recording

and referral took off some five thousand years ago each very much in its own ways.

As systems of representation that facilitated communication and control, and hence

enabled an economising of effort, writing ranks as perhaps the most important

invention ever. Christopher Evans, in a panoramic survey of the impact of computers

writes in The Mighty Micro (1979: 104):

language, Chinese characters are basically ideographic in nature. 2 For a fascinating discussion of this feature of African 'talking drums', see Ong (1977) pp. 92-102.

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'The invention of writing was the most revolutionary of all human inventions, for in one great blow it severed the chains which tied an individual and his limited culture to a finite region of space, to a restricted slice of time. Through the act of writing, one human being could express ideas or facts which were communicated to another individual. These facts could then remain as a permanent record after the originator had forgotten them or had passed away into dust. The significance of permanent data storage is the principal and perhaps the sole reason why Man is so absolutely the dominant creature of the planet. All non-human animals carry their knowledge and experience with them when they die. Man can preserve the richest fruits of his brainpower, and stockpile them indefinitely for his descendants to feed on'

In developing the capacity for such recording and transmission of knowledge and

experience humans have ceased to be slaves of transience. As McArthur (1986) puts it

succinctly, it is the intellectual equivalent of 'storing up the harvest for later

consumption' (p. 7).

Writing as a Generic Tool of Management

Writing is essentially a generic system of representational ordering that developed

differently in different locations and was contingent upon the means available at each

geographical site. Thus, the clay-and-cuneiform technology developed by the

Sumerians was contingent upon the abundance of soft argillic mud found in the

irrigation ditches which could be easily shaped, flattened and used as a writing surface

whilst the reed Papyrus cyperus was extensively used by the Egyptians to produce a

form of pictorial writing that we now know as 'hieroglyphs'. Similarly, in China,

tortoise shells and bamboo plates and then subsequently a silk-based surface inspired

the kind of ideographic writings we commonly associate with Chinese writings.

Despite their vast differences, however, writing is a serial phenomenon and the means

we employ for arranging information such as numbers and letters can only be used

because they are basically invariant series, however much we shuffle them about.

Moreover, there are common universal features present in all forms of writing. All

writings involve practices of 'listing, display, hierarchy of arrangement, edge and

margin, sectioning, spacing, contrasts' (McArthur, 1986: 23) whatever their

contingent origins. These practices provide the foundations for all forms of modern

knowledge including especially management knowledge. They underpin the concerns

and preoccupations of that economic-administrative activity that we call management.

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What these micro-organizing practices, intrinsic to all languages, are, in turn,

dependent upon is the initial act of division and separation.

Division breaks up phenomenal experiences into manageable parts so that each piece

can be dealt with effectively and in isolation. Efficiency is one major consequence of

this method of dealing with the world. Thus, the specialization that Adam Smith, in

his Wealth of Nations, observed in the pin-making factory is one generalised outcome

of this process of division. Division, however, is not just about the benefits of the

division of labour. It is a far more basic reality-constituting activity involving an

active effort of separating and dividing: a labour of division. The function of division

is thus not so much about the portioning out of a fixed quantum of work but about

making 'the invisible visible, to sort out what's confused' (Cooper, 1998: 164) or

entangled. Division makes what is amorphous and unclear into tidy visible categories

so that they can be dealt with expediently and efficiently. This is the function of

'vision' in di-vision. It is, as Whitehead (1929) astutely observed, associated with the

ontological act of 'decision-making' and the establishing of an observational and a

conceptual order3. Our established forms of knowledge, he writes, 'is formed by the

meeting of two orders of experience. One order is constituted by the direct, immediate

discrimination of particular observations. The other order is constituted by our general

way of conceiving the Universe' (Whitehead, 1933: 183). These two orders are shaped

by an 'unconscious metaphysics' which provides the basis for legitimising

contemporary forms of knowledge, including especially management knowledge.

Thus, just as management knowledge, in its economic-administrative sense

presupposes and hence begins with the division of labour, the foundations of

management knowledge presupposes and hence begins with the labour of division.

This is especially the case with written inscriptions. In this sense writing is a meta-

management process.

Writing, is firstly and fundamentally, a dividing and separating activity. It is a

technology that restructures thought in a fundamental way because once established it

has a tendency to interact with all sorts of social structures and practices in a

bewildering variety of ways. Stock's (1983) analysis of the effects of literacy in

Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries shows that the spread of the 3 For a discussion of this ontological view of 'decision-making', see Chia (1994)

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written word affected marketing and manufacturing, agriculture and stock-raising

activities, religious life and thought, family structures, social mobility and so on in

deep and fundamental ways. Fundamentally, writing is diaeretic (Ong, 1986). It

divides and distances all sorts of things in all sorts of ways. Firstly, it separates the

knower from the known. It makes knowledge a 'commodity' separate and distinct

from the knower. All writing systems do this but the alphabetic system in particular

does this most since it thoroughly dissolves individual sounds into spatial equivalents

(i.e., into alphabetic characters) before reconstituting them phonetically. Secondly,

writing 'distances the word from the sound, reducing oral-aural evanescence to the

seeming quiescence of visual space' (Ong, 1986: 39). Thirdly, writing distances the

author from the reader, both in time and space. It is therefore possible to read a book

written several centuries ago or by someone several thousand miles away. Fourthly,

writing isolates and distances words from the contexts within which they are spoken

or used. Spoken words, in particular, always take place within a social context which

extends far beyond the verbal and the articulated. By contrast, the immediate context

of written words are simply other words. Fifthly, writing enforces a certain degree of

verbal precision and apartness which is not generally experienced in oral cultures. In

some homogeneous oral cultures for instance sentences are hardly ever completed

because it is assumed that the listener, being part of an established community, is able

to comprehend what is implied and unspoken. In literate cultures, however, written

words are made to bear the burden of meaning within themselves. Hence they develop

more defined or bounded meanings than in speech. Sixthly, writing linearizes thought.

It separates the past, the present and the future. By freezing verbalizations, writing can

refer either to states of affairs no longer effectively imaginable or alternatively to

states of affairs not yet imaginable. Seventhly, and of key importance to our study

here, writing separates 'administration' from other social activities. Administration

refers to the overseeing, organizing and managing of a social collectivity in a more or

less abstractly structured fashion. It comes into being with the development of written

accounts, documents and records. As Goody (1986) points out, ‘the desk and the

bureau’ (p. 90) are critical to Weber’s concept of bureaucracy. Likewise Green (1981)

argues that the emergence of large-scaled, centralized bureaucratic institutions is a

consequence of the rise of writing which 'enabled the administration to grow and,

through written liability, to maintain direct authority over even the lowest levels of

personnel and clientele' (Green, 1981: 367). Eightly, writing facilitated the separation

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of logic from rhetoric. For Ong (1986), the invention of logic is inextricably tied 'to

the completely vocalic phonetic alphabet and the intensive analytic activity which

such an alphabet demands of its inventors' (p. 41). The Aristotelian logic which

dominates contemporary thought is very much a product of the mental discipline

associated with the use of the alphabetic system. Ninethly, writing separates academic

learning from wisdom. Although writing makes possible the conveyance of highly

abstract thought structures, by committing wise sayings to textual forms they

'denature' wisdom and render them emptied of their insights. It is this 'dumbing down'

process created by writing which led T.S.Elliot to lament in The Rock:

' Where is the Life we have lost in living

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot The Rock (1934)

Modern knowledge, including especially what passes for management knowledge is

best exemplified by the frequently held criticism of the Accountant who 'knows the

price of everything and the value of nothing'.

But the most crucial of all the separations effect by the invention of writing is the

separation of being from time. By this is meant that the most crucial and momentous

effect of writing is the spatial and temporal fixing of being, identity and presence

from their temporal emergence. Time is, henceforth not incorporated into the

formation of identities and attributes but regarded as an independent variable along

which beings move. Becoming is thus regarded merely as the passage of being and

not the ontological basis from which being arises. This dividing and separating

tendency of writing, and especially alphabetic writing, elevated a logic of identity and

presence. It also precipitated a visually-based form of knowledge alien to pre-literate

cultures.

Alphabetization and Typography: The Rise of Visual Knowledge

Any understanding of Western cultural evolution and change is impossible without a

prior appreciation of the fundamental changes in sense-ratios, and hence attitudes of

observational discrimination, brought about by the invention of the alphabet and the

rapid spread of the printed word. Together, they constitute the defining moments

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shaping the very ground of possibility for the rise of the Cartesian/Newtonian world-

view which has lasted till the early half of the last century. Alphabets transformed

acoustic sound into visual terms and by so doing gave ‘the barbarian or tribal man an

eye for an ear’ (McLuhan, 1967: 26). The interiorization of the technology of

phonetic alphabet ‘delivered’ man (sic) from the magical acoustic world to a world

dominated by vision and abstract visual space. As Carothers (1959) points out:

'When words are written, they become, of course, a part of the visual world. Like most of the elements of the visual world, they become static things and lose, as such, the dynamism which is so characteristic of the auditory world' (Carothers, 1959: 311).

The tonal inflections and emotional emphases accompanying the spoken word are

inevitably lost in the translation into written form4. The sound heard and the word

seen are distinctly different experiences. In the former, like listening to a continuous

melody, the individual sounds melt into one another and there are no clear distinctions

separating each note of the music. On the other hand, the phonetically-based alphabet

clearly delineates one syllable from another, one word from another, and one sentence

from another, and each are treated as distinct entities to be manipulated and dealt with

in isolation.

In The Presence of the Word, Walter Ong analyses the shift from aural to

visual knowing and shows how it is inextricably tied to educational procedures and to

the transfer of verbalization from its initial oral-aural economy of sound 'to a more

and more silent and spatialized economy of alphabetic writing'. Moreover, the

introduction of printing and the idea of the moveable alphabetic type seemed to

suggest that words could be assembled out of pre-existent parts 'like houses out of

bricks' (Ong, 1977: 126). The way visualism as the basis for knowledge developed

proceeded by a series of 'nonce inventions'. Thus, the invention of the alphabet, the

development of printing from the idea of a moveable alphabetic type, and a

mathematically implemented science were 'all major steps on the road to modern

visualism' (Ong, 1977: 128). What is distinctive about this shift in sense-ratios from

the aural to the visual is that it led to the vocalization of visual discrimination at a

level far more precise and elaborate than primitive man ever achieved. It is true that

4 This is much less the case in the Chinese language which is ideographic in character and which allows for tonal inflections in its written form.

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primitive man had keen eyes and in many ways observed more acutely and accurately

than does modern man, but:

'he cannot expatiate on them or describe or analyse accurately to any appreciable extent. He may have a hundred different words for different kinds of snow or camel and no generic word - a quite ordinary lexical situation…But, however specific his visual and other perceptions and however rich his nomenclature, early man has no science of elk or salmon or camels or snow….despite his acute powers of observation, many specific things a scientist needs to observe he has not observed' (Ong, 1977: 129).

This shift to vocalising visual observation dramatically affected the secondary use of

the senses. McLuhan (1967: 8) suggests that it is this shift in sense-ratios from an

overwhelming reliance on mouth and ear to hand and eye that has generated the

abstractive and detached attitude necessary for precipitating the opening up of

otherwise closed pre-literate societies.

Invented some three thousand years ago by the Phoenicians and appropriated

and modified by the Greeks some three centuries later, alphabetic writing paved the

way for the de-tribalizing of ancient Greece and its subsequent rise into prominence in

the first millennium BC. Through the newly-systematized alphabetic script, the

Greeks created, from the fifth and fourth century BC, one of the richest literature of

all times, including poetry, drama, epics, history and philosophy. So much so that we

have today inherited much of this literature and wisdom, just as we have inherited the

writing system in which it was recorded. The advantage of the alphabetic system over

previous forms of scribal writing lay in its startling economy and flexibility of use in

communication: as an achievement it has often been compared to the invention of the

wheel and the domestication of the horse. Henceforth, instead of having to deal with

hundreds of distinct pictograms (picture signs), ideograms (idea signs) and logograms

(word signs), between twenty and thirty quasi-phonetic symbols could now be used to

portray an infinity of words and hence afford a much wider variety of expressions.

This breakthrough in streamlining an otherwise unwieldy mess of previously

disorderly signs gave language an overall orderly shape and made it much more

manageable than before. It eventually led to the almost obsessive labelling,

classification and thematization of material and social phenomena so as to create

order and predictability in an otherwise amorphous and fluxing lifeworld. The

alphabet is, as McLuhan (1967) puts it, ‘an aggressive and militant absorber and

transformer of cultures’ (p. 48). It inspired the abstraction, isolation, objectification

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and linearizing of phenomena for the purpose of analysis, and by reducing all our

senses into visual and pictorial or enclosed space, precipitated the rise of the

Euclidean sensibility which has dominated our thought processes for over two

thousand years.

In around the year 1447, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz became the first in the West to

mechanize printing. Initially, printing appeared to complement the manuscript writing

which was increasingly in demand by the upper and middle classes and which the

monastic scribes became increasingly unable to cope with. Soon, however, like the

cottage industries of more recent times, the slow and laborious process of producing

the written word gave way to printing. This marked a significant moment in the

modification of the visual/tactile/audible sense-ratios that had first been rendered

apart by the introduction of the alphabet. For whilst manuscript culture remains

effectively conversational in that ‘the writer and his audience are physically related by

the form of publication as performance’ (McLuhan, 1967: 84), the print culture

created the distinction between authors and the consuming public. The invention of

typography exponentially ‘extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge,

providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the

first mass-production’ (McLuhan, 1967: 124). Typography as the first mechanized

handicraft altered the use of language and utterance as a means of tactile exploration

and perceptual shaping (i.e., uttering as ‘outering’) to a portable commodity distinct

from the producer. Whilst scribal culture remained essentially tied to a vocal culture

that was intent on throwing light on the world through the manuscript form,

typography threw light on the surface print itself. This subtle shift in focus from

'interiority' to 'surface' observations has been critically illuminated by Ong's (1967,

1977) excellent analyses of the emergence of visualism as the basis for modern

knowledge.

According to Ong, it is possible to draw a continuum of senses from 'touch' at one end

to sight' at the other, with 'taste', 'smell', and 'hearing' reflecting increasing degrees of

distancing. Thus, touch emphasises a propinquity of the sense organ to the source of

stimulus as does taste. Both touch and taste are intimate but lack clear definition.

Smell, on the other hand, can only be experienced in terms of limited localised

experience. It suggests 'presences or absences…and is connected with the

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attractiveness or repulsiveness of bodies…smell is a come-or-go signal. Hence "It

Stinks" expresses maximum rejection or repulsion' (Ong, 1967: 117). Sight, however,

is possible over large distances hence it invites greater abstraction. But sight unlike

hearing, for instance, deals only with surfaces and exteriorities. Sight gives precision

but lacks intimacy. It is effective only at a distance. As Ong writes:

'Sight presents surfaces (it is keyed to reflected light; light coming directly from its source, such as fire, an electric lamp, the sun, rather dazzles and blinds us)….To discover…things by sight we should have to open what we examine, making the inside outside, destroying its interiority as such' (Ong, 1967: 118)

However, a drift towards visual explanation is inseparable from any economy of

explanation since to explain is effectively to 'lay out flat on a surface'; to 'open up' and

make evident what is obscured or hidden. Explanation entails forcible externalising of

an otherwise hidden interior. Explanation, however, is the quintessential modus

operandi of modern science. For this reason, we witness more and more today the

attempt to reduce everything supplied by the other senses - touch, taste, smell and

sound - to charts and tables or other measurement that can be laid out and visually

assimilated. Even our everyday language is infused by visual metaphors. Thus, 'I see

what you mean'; 'give a focus to'; 'obtain an insight'; 'throw light on'; illuminate;

'speculate'; 'vision'; 'elucidate' etc., are all examples of the extent with which the

language of vision has become so much infused into our everyday language. The

visual is, thus, the area most exploited by science. Reduction to spatial form fixes

everything including sound. Interestingly, reduction of sensory data on the opposite

direction (i.e., from visual to touch or sound say) is virtually non-existent. This is an

indication of the extent of the domination of visually-based knowledge in

contemporary thought. Such a visually-dominated mode of comprehension, however,

gives rise to a problem that plagues us because we intuitively realise that sight or

vision is a limited analogue for intelligence since sight is keyed primarily to surfaces.

We are able to vaguely recognise the existence of more subtle forms of knowing

which are not visually accessible. Thus:

'To say that knowing means being able to explain impoverishes knowing. Explanation is invaluable, but any mere explanation or explication is pretty thin stuff compared either with actuality or with understanding' (Ong, 1977: 123)

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Moreover, intellectual knowledge derived from vision is fragmenting. Apartness is a

central feature of this form of knowing. We are able to identify what a thing is by

cutting it off from other things. Definition, distinctness, clarity and precision are key

properties of visual knowledge. Whatness is its essence. More importantly, however,

vision freezes and kills. For some knowledge, however, precision, distinctness and

clarity is irrelevant or even devastating. When understanding more than explanation

is sought the surface-bound knowledge generated by sight and vision is grossly

inadequate. Visual knowledge, as Ong (1977) maintains:

'is at best only an adjunct of, never a basis for, interpersonal knowledge and understanding. When a married couple or even a group of friends try to base their understanding of one another on explanation, on a knowledge which has definition, distinctness, precision, the bond is headed for disaster. The drive to symbolize intellection and understanding by vision…corresponds to the drive to objectify knowledge, to make it into something which is clearly thing-like, nonsubjective, yielding meaning not in depth but off of surface, meaning which can be spread out, ex-plained' (Ong, 1977: 140)

Visual knowledge generates 'thing-like' thinking. In other words it promotes a

tendency to reify experience and to treat personal encounters as inert and object-like.

Sound, on the other hand better represents a 'world of dynamism, action and being-in-

time….it complements both vision and touch more complexly and richly than either'

(Ong, 1977: 136). Unlike sight, sound reveals interiors without the necessity of

physical invasion. Thus, we may tap a wall to find out if it is hollow or solid or ring a

silver-coloured coin to discover whether it is perhaps lead inside. Sound reveals

interiors because 'its nature is determined by interior relationships. The sound of a

violin is determined by the interior structure of its strings, of its bridge, and of the

wood in its sound-board, by the shape of its interior cavity in the body of the violin,

and other interior conditions. Filled with concrete or water, the violin would sound

different' (Ong, 1967: 117-118). Because of this distinction between sight and sound,

knowledge of things (what Martin Buber calls the world of "it") is more easily

assimilable to knowledge by sight whilst knowledge of persons (what Buber calls the

world of "I-Thou") is more easily assimilable to knowledge by hearing. Yet our

dominant forms of knowledge remain overwhelmingly visually-inspired. This has

been a clear (another visual metaphor!) consequence of the alphabetization of the

world and its refinement through a culture of print. Despite these setbacks, however, it

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is clear that the astonishing progress achieved by the West over the last three thousand

years owes much to the developments that have taken place in human communication.

Without the written word, communication would have had to be passed on ‘by

word of mouth’ thereby incurring inevitable distortions. Intimacy is maintained but

clarity is sacrificed. Without the alphabetic system the range of abstract meanings,

perspectives, concepts and ideas would have remained very limited. Without the

printed word, communication would have been restricted only to the privileged few

and not to the critical masses required to produce revolutionary changes in the

priorities and mindsets that paved the way for the Enlightenment to take place. The

dramatic transformations and breakthroughs achieved in the West over the last five

hundred years especially would not have been possible.

The Modern Mindset

The period of the Enlightenment was a historical watershed because of the emphasis it

gave to a number of key ontological assumptions and epistemological imperatives

which continues to underpin much of contemporary management knowledge. Firstly,

there is the unquestioned commitment to an atomistic/entitative view of reality.

According to this view, ultimate reality is made up of discrete and individual particles

that engage in processes of combination and recombination to produce the varied life-

sized phenomena of our experiences. These atomistic entities are deemed to exist

externally and objectively to an observing consciousness and can therefore be isolated

and simply located in space and time for the purposes of identification and causal

analysis. A logic of self-identity and presence thus ensures whereby the visible and

the present are accentuated as the legitimate bases for knowledge-creation. It is this

atomistic notion of reality and its implications that has dominated modern Western

thought and consequently the visually-based mode of inquiry underpinning

management knowledge.

Correspondingly, within the realms of social analysis, the idea of discrete

individuals agents existing as ultimate units of social reality that act and interact with

each other to create macro-social phenomena such as organizations, institutions,

cultures and societies is one which therefore remains deeply entrenched in the

collective pysche of the Western academic world. Organizations and institutions are

generally held to be aggregate (and very often unintended) outcomes of social

exchange and interactions between otherwise self-interested individuals. Such

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individual agents are deemed to exercise rational choice in their desire to maximise

their interests and to achieve predefined outcomes. The result is that individual

identity, action, and intentions provide the foundational basis for causal explanation

and conceptual generalisation. Moreover, experienced macro-social units such as

'organizations' are themselves considered to be aggregate objective and independent

socially-constructed entities ‘simply locatable’ (Whitehead, 1926/85: 61) and hence

susceptible to systematic analysis.

This breaking up of experienced social phenomena into discrete manageable

pieces and their conceptual 'reassemblage' into macro-social units rendered them more

amenable to cognitive manipulation and causal investigation. Such a strategy of

analysis replicates the typographic mindset that was accentuated by the invention of

printing. This method for dealing with macro-social phenomena has been called

methodological individualism and can be understood as the result of a convenient

habit of analysis inspired by the same principles underlying the breaking up of vocal

sound into alphabetic form and their reconstitution into words, sentences, paragraphs

and complete texts. As we have tried to show previously, the printing press and the

typography associated with it also helped to perpetuate this mode of analysis through

its method of mass production. Just like the print type-setters dextrously shuffled

individual alphabetic letters around to produce the desired combinations, the breaking

up and simple-locating of human experiences to create clear-cut, definite objects

occupying clear-cut, definite places in space and time, reinforced the underlying

principle of methodological individualism.

Secondly, with the Enlightenment came the increasing emphasis on a modern

epistemology based upon the principle of systematic empiricism. Systematic

empiricism is typified by the obsession with the visual observation, collection,

categorisation and classification of both natural and social phenomena and their

conceptual location in overarching typological schemas. This emphasis on

observation and classification is very much inspired by the rise of visualism as a

principle method of knowledge-creation. However, as Ong (1977) has argued this

new-found form of visualism is unlike the untainted vision of primitive man because

it entailed the explicit need to vocalising visual observations according to the method

of assemblage previously discussed. Such a practice requires the mastery of a

detached perspective; a dispassionate 'eye', that is able to survey the phenomena

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apprehended through an established and objectifying set of conceptual lenses. John

Berger (1972) for example, shows convincingly how the Enlightenment

systematically transformed our ways of seeing from one of involved engagement to

that of passive objectification. The 'light' of the Enlightenment inspired what Bryson

(1982) calls a 'logic of the Gaze'; a fixing, prolonged and contemplative look that

instantaneously freezes its object of analysis. The Gaze, attempts to arrest and extract

form from fleeting process. It is penetrating, piercing, fixing, objectifying. A violent

act of forcibly and permanently ‘present-ing’ that which otherwise would be a

fluxing, moving and amorphous reality. In this focal act, the looker ‘arrests the flux

of the phenomena, (and) contemplates the visual field from a vantage-point outside

the mobility of duration, in an eternal moment of disclosed presence’ (Bryson: 94). It

is a vision disembodied, a vision decarnalised. But it is also underpins the

epistemology of contemporary management knowledge.

With the Enlightenment came the overpowering desire to scan, document, classify

and sort out objects of interest, and to attribute causal powers to these artificially-

isolated objects of analysis. Through such careful observation and painstaking

differentiation and classification of phenomena, it was believed that our knowledge of

the universe could be systematically documented and the underlying natural order

revealed. Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, written in the early eighteenth century

provides one of the clearest examples of this obsession with fixing, observing,

collecting and classification. Initiated by Aristotle’s call for grounding our knowledge

in observations and inspired by Descartes’ rigorously logical method of doubting,

systematic empiricism surfaced most prominently in the kind of logical positivism

which held sway in intellectual circles for the best part of the earlier half of the

twentieth century. It is within this theoretical soil, that contemporary management and

organization theory took root. Such a systematic and typological approach remains

dominant in management theorising. Witness the numerous 2 x 2 typologies and other

tabular schemas that abound in the management literature.

Thirdly, the triumph of Enlightenment knowledge brought with it the idea that

language is primarily a medium designed to enable us to accurately represent

linguistically our visually perceived reality. This representationalist view of language

derives from the Cartesian split between mind and matter. The purpose of the

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Cartesian mind is to mirror accurately the nature of matter existing external to itself.

Thus, to claim to possess knowledge, in the Cartesian sense, is to be able to accurately

describe and explain things and events occurring outside the mind. Knowledge is only

deemed true and acceptable if it is able to accurately represent external reality as it is

in itself. Such a view implies that language is seen as merely the medium of

communication and that it does not play an active and constitutive role in the

production of social reality. This belief about language has led to the commonplace

insistence on literal precision and parsimony in the theory-building process in general

and organizational theorizing in particular (Pfeffer, 1993). For, if reason and

observation are to work in harmony and language gives us an unmediated access to an

objective reality, it would be possible to objectively validate and assess the status of

any truth claims. This would, in turn, mean that an inexorable march towards a

complete and ultimate truth was possible. The result would be the systematic

application of this established knowledge to produce absolute predictability and the

total elimination of any surprises in all facets of our lives. Our world would then be

increasingly subjected to our absolute control and this, in turn, would be a desirable

outcome for mankind. It is the inherent attractions of the narrative of absolute control

that drives the still-unabated search for complete knowledge in all major fields of

inquiry.

Finally, and relatedly, a key imperative in Enlightenment knowledge is the emphasis

on causal explanation. Such an emphasis is a natural outcome of the atomistic view of

reality. For if ultimate reality is deemed to comprise discrete and isolatable entities the

question arises as to how each of these entities are able to interact and influence each

other to create the changes around us and other life-sized effects. Clearly, despite the

insistence upon the fundamentally individual and atomistic nature of reality a

conceptual bridge needs to be made to explain how it can then be possible for

observable patterns of regularities to emerge. Causal explanations are thus a

convenient mechanism for relinking these initially-assumed independent entities so

that a coherent system of explanation on the nature and causes of change is possible.

Aristotle was, perhaps, one of the first to attempt to formulate the notion of

causality as the basis for change. For him there are four aspects of causality. Firstly,

the form received by a thing gives it its formal cause. Secondly, the matter underlying

that form which provides for the continuity in any change is called the material cause.

22

Thirdly, the active agent that brings about the change in form is called the efficient

cause. Finally, the ultimate purpose served by that change Aristotle called the final

cause. Thus to take a simple illustration - the production of a marble statue - the

formal cause is the shape given by the raw marble, the material cause is the marble

itself, the efficient cause is the sculptor and the final cause is perhaps the

beautification of a palace or church. In modern analysis, however, following on from

Hume's (1740/1992) Treatise of Human Nature, where he reformulated the notion of

causality by focussing primarily on what Aristotle termed the 'efficient' cause and

basically ignored or underplayed the other aspects proposed by the latter, cause is now

defined as 'an event precedent and contiguous to another and so united with it in the

imagination, that the idea of one determines the mind to form the idea of the other,

and the impression of one to form a more lively idea of the other' (Hume, 1740/1992:

172). To say that an object or event is the cause of an effect is to maintain; a) that the

cause and effect are contiguous in space and time; b) that the cause is prior to the

effect; and c) that there must be a constant and predictable relationship between cause

and effect. Thus, observed 'contiguity', 'priority' and 'constancy of relations' constitute

the founding basis for the attribution of causality in the modern positivistic sense.

These four epistemological axioms; methodological individualism, systematic

empiricism, representationalism and causal determinism constitute the founding basis

for modern knowledge. They provide the intellectual cornerstones for modern

management thought and the knowledge associated with it. Yet such forms of

knowledge are increasingly proving to be inadequate in our comprehension of global

capitalism and the phenomenon of management as we enter the 21st century. They fail

to account for the unabated fluidity of enterprise, inventiveness and imagination as

well as tacit understandings that oil the wheels of day-to-day business and managerial

functioning. For example, as George Gilder (1993) has so convincingly shown in

Wealth and Poverty, contrary to Adam Smith's insistence that it is individual 'self-

love' that gives rise to exchange and the division of labour necessary for the

capitalistic enterprise, it is in fact the more ancient art of 'giving' and hence self-denial

that inspires the enterprise and creativity necessary for capitalism to thrive and

prosper. As Gilder writes:

'Capitalism begins with giving. Not from greed, avarice, or even self-love can one expect the rewards of commerce, but from a spirit akin to altruism. A

23

regard for the needs of others…..Not taking and consuming, but giving, risking, and creating are the characteristic roles of the capitalist….The unending offerings of entrepreneurs, investing capital, creating products, building businesses, inventing jobs….all long before any return is received….constitute a pattern of giving that dwarfs in extent and in essential generosity any primitive rite of exchange. Giving is the vital impulse and moral centre of capitalism….Economies run not only on light but also on heat and energy, not merely on information but also on courage and skill. Entrepreneurial learning is of a deeper kind than is taught in schools….Capitalism is based on the idea that we live in a world of unfathomable complexity, ignorance, and peril; and that we cannot possibly prevail over our difficulties without constant efforts of initiative, sympathy, discovery and love' (Gilder, 1993: 21-37)

Such a definition of capitalism precipitates a radically alternative conception of the

function of management. Instead of the obsessive preoccupation with the distribution

of limited resources, a concern with what might be called 'allocational efficiency' and

the calculative mentality associated with it, management in this revised post-modern

understanding becomes one concerned with productive inventiveness, risky offerings,

uncertain futures and ambiguous returns. This is the real world of precarious

managerial experiences which is hardly ever reflected in the management literature.

Understood thus, a post-modern critique of management knowledge seeks to show

that what underpins modern rationality is a reductionistic 'logic of representation'

whereby the phenomenal flux of lived experience are systematically subjected to

division, representation and classification in order to render the latter more amenable

to instrumental manipulation and control. Modern rationality, and hence

representation, is thus a method of organization which creates legitimate objects of

knowledge for a knowing subject. Through this almost unconscious method of

organization, subjective experiences are imbued with objective representations

thereby rendering the former more amenable to analysis, judgement and action. In this

process of representation, the subjective and ephemeral aspect of human experiences

are inadvertently marginalised and overlooked. It is this rejection of the concrete but

'subjective and ephemeral' aspect of human experience which circumscribes the

epistemological limits of modern management knowledge. Such an arbitrary

privileging of the explicit and the measurable over the tacit and qualitative aspects of

human experience is what post-modern analyses seek to overturn. The postmodern

then is centrally concerned with giving voice and legitimacy to those tacit and

oftentimes unpresentable forms of knowledge that modern epistemology inevitably

24

depends upon yet conveniently overlooks or glosses over. This is the real purpose for

analysing the foundations of management knowledge.

Conclusion

Modern management knowledge relies overwhelmingly on the written word and it’s

disseminated through print. Writing in general and alphabetic writing in particular

facilitated the development of abstract thinking and the capacity for purposeful

framing of individual activities: all crucial elements of modern management. In so

doing it precipitated the necessary future goal-orientation required for a rudimentary

form of organization and management to emerge. However, these organizational

forms were confined to local orderings and this state of affairs did not substantially

alter until the invention of the printing press enabled the printed word to reach far

beyond the spatial confines of a particular established social order. Through the

printed word, the aspirations, cultural attitudes and lifestyles of those both far and

near, and across time, could be influenced and shaped. Printing thus freed thought and

aspirations from the shackles of local knowledge. Moreover, it inspired a visual

emphasis that led to the advent of the Enlightenment with its obsession with rational

analysis, systematic empiricism, representationalism and causal determinism.

Contemporary management knowledge has, thus, only become possible for a

number of interconnected reasons. Firstly, the practice of management as a technique

for constituting, ordering and control of ‘resources’ is only possible because of the

development of an analytical attitude based upon the alphabetization of the world and

the advent of typography. Secondly, the systematic accumulation of knowledge about

management (i.e., management knowledge) as a reality of World 3 is only possible

because such knowledge relies upon the stockpiling of the written word. In this sense,

as we have attempted to argue throughout this chapter, modern management

knowledge would not have been possible without the alphabetization of the world and

its systematic dissemination through the printed word. However, it is clear that we are

now entering a realm of reality in which wisdom, knowledge and information can no

longer be simply understood in commodified and identitarian terms. Instead,

instability and ‘noise’, informational fluxes, dispersions and transient configurations

of relations are what characterise the phantom-like qualities of our post-modern

world. From this perspective an elliptical and allusive form of knowledge is now

required in which the 'unspoken', the ‘in-betweens’, the opportunistic ‘conquests’, the

25

restless expansions and sudden offshootings are accentuated and celebrated. Such

knowledge-formation is often subtle, agglomerative, subterreanean and heterogeneous

in nature spreading like oil patches rather than following any particular pre-

established order. They insinuate themselves into our consciousness rather than

confront us directly through a logic of the Gaze. From this understanding, modern

management knowledge can no longer confine itself to the articulate, the explicit, the

well-defined and the unambiguous. Instead, it is the tacit, the inarticulate, the

unconscious forms of scanning and the ellipitical modes of understanding which now

needs to be forgrounded in our search for a more complete understanding of the

management phenomenon. This is the new mode of thought to cultivate as we enter

into the new millennium.

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