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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Management has been one of the driving forces of the last century, indeed an idea and a language that colonized most other institutions, areas of human activity and walks of life, even those that had until recently been regarded as completely unmanageable, such as art, academia and creativity. Some it supported and others it destroyed, but there are few areas in modern societies that have been untouched by it. What is the meaning of management now almost omnipresent and all-powerful in our current bleak times, in our current state of 'interregnum' that is characterized by an increasing sense of insecurity and hopelessness, a time when, paradoxically, the seemingly omnipotent force of management does not seem to work? Does it have a role to play today and in the future? What can it become and whom should it serve when the interregnum is over and a new, hopefully more humane, system begins to dawn? These are some of the questions explored in this timely new book by Zygmunt Bauman, one of the greatest thinkers of our times, architect and Urban Studies professor Irena Bauman, and two organization and management scholars, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Monika Kostera.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 On interregnum, meso-level organizing and the city
Notes
2 Management without managers?
Notes
3 The organization of the global and the local
Notes
4 Utopian hopes
Notes
5 Craftsmanship
Notes
6 Crises and consequences
Notes
Coda
Notes
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Management in a Liquid Modern World
Zygmunt Bauman Irena Bauman Jerzy Kociatkiewicz Monika Kostera
polity
Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman, Irena Bauman, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, and Monika Kostera 2015
The right of Zygmunt Bauman, Irena Bauman, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, and Monika Kostera to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0225-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bauman, Zygmunt, 1925-
Management in a liquid modern world / Zygmunt Bauman, Irena Bauman, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, Monika Kostera.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-5095-0221-9 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-5095-0222-6 (pbk.)
1. Postmodernism--Social aspects. 2. Organizational sociology. 3. Social history--21st century. I. Title.
HM449.B394 2015
302.3’5--dc23
2015005697
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
Management has been most often applied to formal organizations such as businesses, governments, hospitals and so on. In these settings, management unsurprisingly carries connotations of control and organization (‘Anna is responsible for managing 10,000 employees’). But management can also refer to coping or muddling through (‘Carl managed to provide for his family in spite of losing his job’). Sometimes we manage others, sometimes ourselves; sometimes we manage to change things, sometimes to adjust to what we cannot change. Since most of life involves influence and adjustment, controlling and coping, changing and accepting what does not change, organization theory and management practice may be more broadly applicable than is generally recognized. The authors of Management in a Liquid Modern World will focus your attention on problems that characterize the biggest challenges we face in the world today – climate change, unsustainable levels of resource depletion, poverty, joblessness, and the natural, economic, political and social disasters to which these conditions contribute – and they will ask you to join them in imagining what sort of management will help us to address and resolve these problems.
You will find many interesting ideas discussed here, not least of which comes from structuring the book as a series of conversations. The points of agreement and disagreement that appear as Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, Zygmunt Bauman, Irena Bauman and Monika Kostera converse are both instructive and demonstrative. That is, at the same time participants present their varied views about the world’s problems and options for solving them, they enact many of the ideas and suggestions presented. Consider heterotopia as one example. The participants discuss this idea as an alternative to both utopia and dystopia, which have both been used to seduce or shock people into changing how they live to conform to an ethic that is represented in either positive (utopian) or negative (dystopian) terms. Unlike both utopia and dystopia, a heterotopia embraces not one but many moralities and visions for the future and thereby encourages acceptance of paradox, irony and contradiction, making them into common ground on which to rebuild society in a pluralistic world. Intriguingly the wide-ranging conversations this book presents offer an example of heterotopia in action, showing how, when effectively managed, different visions for the world and the ethical and aesthetic values they imply can lead to solidarity (i.e., a form of cooperation based on accepting equality among humans rather than attempting to normalize their behaviour, which suppresses or denies the differences by which they make their unique valuable contributions to the whole).
The conversations begin with Zygmunt framing his approach to the world’s problems with the idea of interregnum, ‘a time-span of yet unknown length, stretching between a social setting which has run its course and another, as yet under-defined and most certainly under-determined, which we expect or suspect will replace it.’ Interregnum offers a chance to stop and consider possible futures, which might be the most desirable, and how to realize them. It also suggests one way of reading this book, that is as a momentary stopping point that will give you the opportunity to listen in on a conversation that can deepen your understanding of the world’s problems and give you a change to act according to the ethics this book will also encourage you to craft out of concern for yourself and others.
Another powerful idea you will meet in this book is the growing need worldwide to trust the level of social organization that lies between constructing a massive global authority to control everything and everyone (often operating under the rubric of systems theory, which assumes that some small group is either smart enough or powerful enough to maintain this authority) and a conflict-generating individuality formed from self-serving choice. This in-between level is arising, our authors suggest, in organizations like cities – though cities, Zygmunt notes, are not ‘conflict-trouble-and-worry-free zones … only … they are the sites providing relatively better – more realistic and promising – chances of confronting and tackling conflicts, troubles and worries pestering the present-day human condition at all levels of social integration’. Cities may not be the ‘solutions’, he argues, ‘but [they offer] the best toolboxes available to produce them … they are means, not goals – not the prospective destinations of the voyage, but the agencies capable of servicing the travellers’. Each participant in the conversation, in his or her own terms, pins hopes on this meso level, where management knowledge is most readily applicable, though managing management knowledge itself requires management. Lying between global institutions and self-serving individuals, in cities and small to medium-sized organizations, humans are better able to care for one another and thereby discover ways to cooperate to mutual advantage.
Pragmatism is discussed as one explanation for why cooperation at the meso level of the city can work where international-level efforts often fail. At the city level, one can experiment to discover what works and then adopt that solution because it works. By contrast, at the national or international level such pragmatic action is often frustrated by the inability to act and then learn from the outcomes of taking action. On such a large scale, mistakes are too costly, so learning based on experimentation is avoided, whereas cities and other meso-level organizations could be used as laboratories for experimentation. What this sensible position leaves out, however, is a view of how to manage the competitiveness that arises between meso-level assemblages of humanity. Returning us to the contradiction heterotopia embraces, Irena points out: ‘It is likely that, as we discover the benefits of the city state, we will also come to remember why these did not survive as distinct units of management.’
I personally found it thought-provoking that three of the authors have resided for portions of their lives in Poland, a place where, having lived under the rule of Russian communism until 1989, many people are still relatively new to the effects of capitalist competition. This geographical and historical positioning allows Zygmunt, Jerzy and Monika to speak about revolution and solidarity as solutions to the problems of the world that might in Western contexts evoke suspicion, if not outright disbelief. Thus, when they decry and propose overthrowing the underlying assumptions of modern management, including competiveness as well as hierarchical structure and the ethos perpetuated by top-down control, I can almost see them reaching for what might be characterized in the West as an overly romanticized past. Yes, there certainly are things about cooperation, about self-management, about solidarity, about the crafted life that, as the authors maintain, are worth reintegrating into the driven lives we lead today – that is, if we are lucky enough to have a job, or motivated enough to work hard to make our living without the benefit of paid employment. And yes, some of the problems and possible solutions presented here can be usefully framed as having a moral imperative. I have few doubts that more cooperation and community, more caring for others as much as we care for ourselves, could help us produce better responses to the crises we face no matter which way we turn. But I also feel compelled to ask: isn’t a search for solutions pointless in a world where, as the authors readily admit, no agreement on problem definition is likely (i.e., in the heterotopia)? Why not ask instead: what happens if we stop thinking in terms of problems and solutions? Problem/solution thinking is itself deeply embedded in the mainstream management consciousness they criticize as one of the many problems we face. As Einstein pointed out some time ago, we cannot solve our problems with the same kinds of thinking we used to create them. Analysing problems and mentally rehearsing alternative solutions, while an interesting occupation (that of the academic as much as the mainstream manager), continues the sort of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.
So where do we go from here? The authors – somewhat ironically, given the downbeat character of their conversation at many points – offer hope as a good place from which to face the future as we emerge from the current interregnum. In the midst of clarifying and analysing problems of such enormity as those addressed here, hope might seem a bit too optimistic. Yet hope threads its way through the conversations in this book. Though clearly not a rational option, and possibly not sustainable, on a moment-by-moment basis hope renews us, raises our spirits, keeps us going in the face of what can seem insurmountable odds. What might we do if hope were sustained for however long we can manage it? Note that here I use the word ‘manage’ deliberately in the light of the book’s major premise that management, at least in the ways it is newly defined by these conversations, offers us a reason to hope.
One pressing question remains: what should we hope for? The participants in these conversations offer several answers:
Management without managers
Cities as proving grounds in the search for
pragmatic
solutions to the world’s ills
A
new
socialist revolution based in the collective commons, heterotopia, sharing and collaboration
Craftsmanship or making supported by Toffler’s ‘prosumers’ who buy and sell on the Internet of Things
Moving from sociality to cooperation and ultimately to solidarity.
While none of the items on the list is an altogether new idea, together they begin to suggest a vision of the world that breaks with what the authors decry as outmoded solutions. What else belongs on the list? As you read, I hope you will formulate your own contributions to these conversations and begin to take actions to realize them.
Mary Jo Hatch Visiting Professor, IEDC Bled School of Management(Slovenia) and Singapore Management University(Singapore)
1On interregnum, meso-level organizing and the city
Jerzy Kociatkiewicz I am really grateful to all three of you for agreeing to partake in this conversation-to-be, while at the same time giddy about the range of topics open for us to cover, as the task we are setting ourselves is by no means small, and we are unlikely to arrive at any definite answers in the course of this exchange. For while you, Zygmunt, have explored the consequences of your diagnosis of the current situation as liquid modernity for various and divergent aspects of our lives, the topic of management and organization in liquid modern times has remained relatively unexplored.
At the same time, your writings and ideas have served as an inspiration for, by now, generations of management scholars,1 and you yourself have repeatedly touched upon issues of managing and organizing in your writings (perhaps most notably in Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor2); you have also lectured extensively in management and business schools. As yet, though, you have not collated these insights in a dedicated publication. This, then, is the task before us: to examine the need for and the possibility of managing in a liquid modern society, to investigate the continued viability of management ideas, and to explore the alternative viewpoints and seeds of change already around us.
You have written of the managerial revolution Mark II,3 the process in which the managers are increasingly freed from the burdens of (but not the remuneration for) performing managerial duties, shifting the responsibility for the workers’ performance onto the shoulders of the workers themselves. Self-assessment, peer-reviews and the general need to demonstrate one’s own usefulness to one’s superiors greatly streamline the processes of control.
In our own world of academia, researchers are now expected not only to be able to demonstrate the quality and the worth of their work (according to everchanging but increasingly quantitative criteria – after all, comparison of quantitative data is much easier and less burdensome than the comparison of qualities irreducible to numbers) and to show the economic (again, hopefully quantitative) impact of their activities, but also to acquire the funds to pay for their research themselves without burdening their university with the unnecessary cost of their employment. And employment becomes an ever more elusive and temporary state. Universities – particularly, but by no means exclusively, American ones – are relying more and more on low-paid temporary staff who need continually to provide fresh rationale for their own employment.
Of course, universities serve here just as a convenient example, particularly striking because of the high educational requirements demanded of academic staff. The same processes can be seen in practically all other walks of life, where job security becomes an ever-more-distant, though still strongly coveted, prospect. The term ‘precariat’, popularized by Guy Standing4 to describe the social class primarily defined by the precariousness of its work arrangements and social position, has gained widespread acceptance to the point of being included in a BBC-led survey study of the social classes of contemporary Britain (where it was claimed to comprise 15 per cent of the population).5 All this seems like a bitter afterimage of the celebrated management scholar Charles Handy’s6 vision of the portfolio worker, unfettered by traditional organizational structures, accumulating experiences and knowledge, and working only on projects that seem particularly interesting or stimulating.
You have also argued that this arrangement is not a sustainable one and, indeed, calling on Antonio Gramsci’s notion of interregnum,7 you have described the current organizational and management regime as undergoing a profound crisis – if not an outright failure – of legitimization. There are indeed widespread signs of its continuing failure. The worldwide recession which is still very much with us was largely brought about by the banks’ institutionalized irresponsibility8 all over the globe. There are continuing (and ever more frequently publicized) cases of neglect and outright exploitation (which should be called criminal if not for the fact that perpetrators are still very rarely brought to account) of workers by Western companies’ subcontractors, not just in the increasingly ironically sounding developing countries, but also in the more affluent areas including the European Union.9 Last year, various beef and pork products sold in UK supermarkets were found to contain horsemeat. The subsequent investigation was remarkable not because of uncovered dishonesty and profiteering (we have come to expect these in any story of corporate misconduct), but because it laid bare just how little managerial oversight there is in the global economy of subcontractors.10 It was not only the government investigators who were baffled and surprised by each new piece of evidence; the companies themselves (including both the supermarkets selling products and the so-called ‘producers’ whose logos appeared prominently on the packaging) turned out to be equally ignorant about the origin of their wares. In the much more tragic case of the collapse of Rana Plaza in Savar, Bangladesh, a building housing numerous textile factories, we could see the same patterns: companies fronting large, well-known Western clothing brands issued halfhearted denials of any involvement while scrambling for information about where in Bangladesh their recent batches of products had been manufactured. For all the 21st-century information technology at our disposal, clothing labels found in disaster sites turned out to be the most reliable signs of involvement.11
Interregnum, as its name suggests, is not just a time of collapse of the old order, but also the moment of possibility: new ideas deemed absurd within the old system can now be seriously considered, and new discourses can appear to try to make sense of what is happening around us. You, Monika, have devoted most of your research to finding new ways of understanding and managing organizations, and provide an essentially upbeat look at the world of possibilities before us in your latest book, Occupy Management!12 You treat management scholarship and management education (in the UK alone, there were over 260,000 full-time students in management and administration programmes in 2011/2012, far more than in any other subject area13) as a crucial resource to be used for what might be termed the managerial revolution Mark III: the elimination of corporate structures of management and the actual empowerment of workers.
Yet the issue is not just one of the (re)distribution of power or agency: it is the much more important matter of the possibility of reconnecting work and morality. For Adam Smith, the great precursor of both economics and management studies, the two topics were inextricably bound and it seemed absurd to discuss one without reference to the other (as immoral or amoral models of economic development seemed to hold little interest or value). Yet, over the next two centuries, the two notions radically diverged to the point where business ethics exists as a separate topic and discipline with only limited crossover to other business and management subjects, and where a top-rated business ethics journal publishes articles defending sweatshop labour and violations of local labour laws by multinational corporations on ethical grounds of preserving (the easily dismissed) employees’ free-market agency, and because the impossibility of devising uncontentious standards of fairness precludes discussion of exploitation in the division of profits between workers and multinationals.14
Thus, to buck the popular management textbook (and management course) tradition of including an ethics section somewhere at the very end of the book (or the lecture series), I propose that we start our discussion of organizations with the moral impulse (which, as Lévinas15 forcefully reiterates, precedes all other relations or actions): where can we find it in the life of liquid modern organizations and their participants, what structures lead to its all-too-common suppression, and what chances are there for its acknowledgement and meaningful influence over the sphere of work?
Monika Kostera Let me just briefly interject a few words on the topic of the role of management in the time of interregnum – as you so accurately have depicted it, Jerzy, it is a phase lying between systems, in between working organizational and institutional orders, able to offer political, economic and cultural frames for human culture to function and develop in, and also to cultivate a sustainable relationship with the broader ecosystem. It is a liminal period, of unknown durability, characterized by fundamental uncertainty and many compelling questions, in place of what up till now has been regarded as the axiomatic truth, ceteris paribus, of modern economic faith. New working ideas of power and political settings, of markets – financial and human – and of the planetary consequences of ecological and social mismanagement are being urgently called for and the areas of problems caused by the lack of viable solutions are growing to ever more alarming proportions.16
The current system is perfectly unable, if perhaps not completely unwilling, to solve them; however, the only solutions proposed seem to be offered within the logic of a failing system – as Krzysztof Obłój so persuasively described it in mid-1980s Poland, more of the same!17 Unable to offer new solutions, because that would demand a transcending of its limits, of its fundamental frames, it responds to all ills with well-trained yet completely unhelpful reactions: by invoking its axiomatic foundations and proposing solutions that ‘should work’ or ‘are believed to have worked once’. If detailed planning is the problem, introduce more detail in the planning process! If centralization is the problem, more centralization! More formalization, more control, more limitations on trade, and so on.
Whereas the image intended by Obłój depicted another system, that of the centrally planned economy of what used to be called the Eastern Bloc, the mechanism of failing seems to be pretty much the same. More austerity, more tax privileges to the richest, fewer regulations on labour in the poorest countries, more outsourcing, etc. As in Krzysztof Obłój’s brilliant analysis, then, the big picture seems to be just the same today: a system that has lost its ability to renew itself, to solve at least the problems it is itself causing, is bound to fall – is fallen already. However, if in the mid-1980s we, East Europeans, believed in the existence of a working alternative, another general way of doing things, a frame that would work for us as well as it seemed to be doing for the Others, the Western world – nowadays, there is no such easy and predictable template for change. What will come after the interregnum? We see no working example of something instead of what we, even in its failed current form, have today. I have no faith in science being able to predict the future – see what happened to futurology and sovietology – but I have propositions, suggestions concerning what can be done on a level of organizational practice – the meso level, in-between the broad, societal context and the micro-world of individuals and relationships.
This is what my book, Occupy Management!,18 is about – how we can make a difference on the meso level by practices of self-management and self-organization, not waiting for the politicians or corporations to take initiative but by taking the initiative into our own hands. In the world of complete colonization of almost all human domains by management, in a world where virtually everyone has been educated in management in some form, at some point in their lives, we have all learned the basics of how to manage. I propose that it is time to use that knowledge to create meso structures – organizations – able to support themselves economically, which have different overarching aims from the current mainstream corporations and political institutions. The great Polish social activist and dissident, Jacek Kuroń, famously called out to the Polish society, then limited in its freedom of organizing by a dictatorship calling itself ‘real socialism’, not to burn (party) committees but to create ones of its own.
Interregnum, being a liminal phase, or a state betwixt and between more stable states and realities, was described by Victor Turner as a transitory stage, a state of blurred boundaries, where the usual constraints of normality and cultural definitions do not apply, where norms are relaxed and there is a special openness to experimentation and the creation of a sense of community.19 During the liminal phase, strong and highly empowering bonds are created between people who go through it together, labelled ‘communitas’ by Turner. These bonds are based on humanity and much less defined by structures than are regular social and economic organizations. That is why I believe that the era of interregnum, which you, Jerzy, have described above – as bleak and unpromising as it may look – also has a strongly constructive potential. This is a time when we, the 99 per cent, by taking the initiative, self-organizing, can seek to make a real and lasting difference and work for a change on a much more global and systemic scale. By creating ‘our own committees’, we may, I believe, be building the premises of a new world, even if I am not sure what its more general rules, institutions and structures may be – not just waiting passively for the ‘central committee’ to fall. Passive waiting always frees space for other, more powerful forces to operate, rooted in the big nest of interests. What I propose in the book is, then, to start making a difference even before we know what the end result may become, or what the cause will ultimately be called: a form of self-management without a cause. What do you think of its prospects for accruing real critical mass, Zygmunt and Jerzy – in other words, do you think we can manage ourselves out of the crisis? Which brings us back to Jerzy’s question about the moral impulse. Can the managerial revolution Mark III be based on the Lévinasian moral impulse on a meso level, where organizational relationships take place? What do you think, Zygmunt and Jerzy?
Zygmunt Bauman
