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Yiannis Gabriel
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Since its earliest beginning, management theory has been preoccupied with control, a concept lying at the core of managerial discourses of organizations. It has featured prominently in managerial literature since Taylor and Fayol and has been a central pillar of organizational theory since Max Weber's work on bureaucracy. Standing as the guarantor for order, predictability and reliability, control has become virtually co-extensive with what most managers understand by 'organization'. Control has also been the core concept for much critical thinking about management, notably that emanating from the labour process tradition and from the critique of the corporate culture literature (See, for example, Knights and Willmott, 1990, Jermier, Knights and Nord, 1994, Turner, 1986, Rosen and Astley, 1986, Sievers, 1986, Smircich, 1983, Willmott, 1993). These traditions have approached control not as an organizational desideratum but rather as the cause of oppression and alienation or as the occasion for subterfuge and deception. Yet, like managerial discourses they place control at the core of management. The word 'management' with its connotations of
control is no longer restricted to a technical or indeed political function
within organizations. It is currently used to encompass areas as diverse
and grandiose as the management of the environment, the management of
the economy,the management of the African elephant, the management of
emotion, or still more ambitiously the management of the planet. It
seems that nothing lies beyond the embrace of management -- "Managing
x" is the title of countless books, where x is virtually anything.
For practicing managers, the issue has become one of technique and search
for efficiency -- how best to control people, information and other
resources in the light of continuous change and uncertainty. To this
end virtually any concept or technique may be marshalled, including
concepts such as autonomy and empowerment, which are often assimilated
into a rhetoric in which self-policing seeks to camouflage management
control. Lately, managerial discourses of control have been joined by followers of Michel Foucault, who have built on his insights on the clinic, the asylum and the prison. (Foucault, 1965, 1971, 1977) The emphasis here shifts from the agents and techniques of control to the deeper mechanisms and modalities of control, at once more subtle and more pervasive than the ones we encounter in orthodox management literature (Burrell, 1988, Linstead and Grafton-Small, 1988, Knights, 1990, 1992, Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994, Townley, 1993). Panoptic techniques, ranging from spatial design and electronic surveillance to employee appraisal, ensure minuscule control of individual behaviour, creating subjects, disciplined and self-disciplined in body and soul. The idea of the subject itself, as a sovereign or independent agency, is critically dissolved by this discourse, ending up as the effect of discursive and non-discursive practices, ranging from psychotherapy (Rose, 1989) to career planning, the writing of CVs or submission to staff appraisal (Grey, 1994, Miller and Morgan, 1993, Austrin 1994). Organizational practices, like observing, classifying, labelling, assessing, promoting and dismissing do not merely control 'pre-given' subjects but actually define them; this is how contemporary subjects, whether as managers or as managed are constituted, their cognitive and emotional states controlled every bit as closely as their physical movements. None of these arguments deny that individual men and women energetically pursue their individual projects of self or identity at work, at home, in shops or in streets. But individual men and women delude themselves, or more precisely they police and manage themselves through this delusion of being sovereign subjects. Even when they believe that they are free to realize or discover themselves, to experiment with different identities or to relax and enjoy themselves as they please, they in fact are being managed and policed. The docile queues in Disneyland are being managed and policed every bit as intensely as the new accounting trainees competing for the favours of their seniors. More often than not, management and policing becomes self-management and self-policing. "The project of self-management links home and work, leisure, dreams and day-dreams. Perhaps most significantly, it links past, present and future through the vector of the self" argues an eloquent exponent of this view. (Grey 1994:481) Indeed consumption is a range of practices, managed and controlled as closely as work practices. In spite of ritual affirmations of the consumer's sovereignty, vast amounts of resources are expended on monitoring, analysing, observing and influencing consumers, seeking to anticipate every market fluctuation. Colossal surveys currently claim to have drawn street by street purchasing profiles for the entire population of the United Kingdom. (Gabriel and Lang 1995, Lansley, 1994) Every credit card transaction is closely scrutinized, every movement in a shopping mall monitored by electronic cameras. Even bigger resources are devoted to advertising which saturates the world of information and the media and exercises asphyxiating control over meanings. Baudrillard, in his early writings, argued that the meanings of objects are fixed by an omnipotent code, which ultimately controls and defines individuals:
In this paper, I wish to challenge the over-managed and over-controlled images of individuals, organizations and societies generated by such discourses. I wish to argue that social reality entails a vital unpredictability which seriously undermines the possibility of planning and control. In particular, I wish to challenge the hubris of management, the presumptuous belief that everything is, can be and must be predicted, planned for and controlled. Instead, I wish to emphasize that managers are not masters of their own fate, let alone of their organizations or their customers to anything like the extent commonly imagined. Control has become an item of faith. Chaotic times It is remarkable, though not accidental, that faith
in control rises with feelings of insecurity, uncertainty and impending
chaos. These are turbulent times, according to the ultimate cliché,
or even crazy times calling for crazy organizations (Drucker 1980, 1995,
Peters, 1994). The word chaos has now started to appear in management
literature (Peters, 1987, Watson, 1994). Economic climate, markets,
technologies, information systems, government policies to say nothing
of the predicaments of companies themselves, mergers, acquisitions,
precipitous bankruptcies, massive redundancies and re-structurings,
create feelings of unpredictability, uncertainty and even chaos. Yet,
control remains firmly at the heart of the management agenda, with authorities
like Peters advising managers not merely how to manage chaos, but how
to thrive on it. There is an oxymoron here. Reading current management
texts one has the impression of manuals advising drivers to grip ever
more tightly their steering wheels, as their vehicles run out of control.
2. Peters' Thriving on Chaos amounts to 565 pages of prescriptions to
managers, one of which is the need for brevity including the reduction
of business reports to 2 pages maximum and the ritual burning of unread
paperwork. In this paper, I wish to explore an alternative line of argument. Chaos cannot be managed or controlled, certainly not through reliance on algorithms, prescriptions and formulas. Chaos and turbulence are not higher orders of order, orders whose rules we have not (yet) grasped. They are situations where there is vital randomness and unpredictability; they are situations which defy domestication within mathematical equations. Even if equations existed, there would be more variables than equations. In fact, looking for sufficient equations to enable one to 'manage' such chaos is part of the futile and wish-fulfilling quest, the hubris of management. Instead of seeking to contain and control chaos, an alternative strategy may be to try an understand it, and then learn how to live with it. It is fortunate that chaos has become an area of considerable interest and progress in the natural sciences and it is beginning to make an impact on the social sciences. I shall therefore explore some of the insights of chaos theory and then study its implications for understanding the nature of management work in general, and the limits to management control more particularly. Chaos theory Chaos theory emerged in the natural sciences in the 1960s, drawing on the study of non-linear dynamic systems, such as the weather system or turbulent flow of fluids. Since then it has found applications in natural and biological sciences ranging from the study of volcanoes and earthquakes to the study of the heart and the brain. More recently, chaos theory has found some applications in human sciences, in demography, geography and economics. (For an overview, see Gleick 1987) In the last ten years, chaos theory has started to penetrate organizational and management studies beyond the level of the fashionable cliché, generating some highly original contributions. Non-linear dynamic systems can operate under three types of equilibrium, stable, explosive and complex. In the first case, negative feedback operates as a mechanism of control ensuring the stability of the system through damping, which cancels out externally or internally caused fluctuations. The thermo-stat of a domestic heating system functions in this manner, as does the governor on a steam engine. In explosive equilibrium, positive or reinforcing feedback accelerates the impact of changes exponentially, leading to sudden collapse of the system. Non-linearity implies that a small disturbance may quickly escalate to 'run-away' or 'explosive' situations, in the manner of a vicious circle. Examples of such feedback can be observed in the collapse of bridges and other structures under the impact of forces that they were designed to withstand under normal conditions. The extinction or proliferation of species resulting from relatively small changes in their natural environment are other examples of explosive equilibrium. One major innovation of chaos theory has been the identification of a third type of equilibrium, one which operates between the other two, combining positive and negative feedback, stability and instability (Gleick 1987, Ruelle, 1988, 1991, Thietart and Forgues 1995, 1996, Stacey 1992, 1996, Gregersen and Sailer 1993). Under this equilibrium, the system may reach stability, being drawn to what is referred to as a point attractor. Alternatively, the system may display a regular, repetitive behaviour, drawn to a periodic attractor. Finally, it may display a highly irregular behaviour contained within a strange surface, referred to as a strange attractor; the system will never move outside this surface, though within it its behaviour is described as chaotic. Several properties of chaotic systems have been identified and studied. One major property of chaotic systems is self-similarity across scales, illustrated by Mandelbrot's (1982) work on fractals. Self-similarity implies that as one 'zooms' in or out of a system, one encounters similar patters. For example, vortices may be encountered at different levels in the weather system, just as promontories, gulfs and peninsulas recur at different scales on a map, irrespective of the map's scale. A second property of chaotic systems is the unexpected
consequences of small changes -- in Lorenz's famous 'Butterfly effect',
a butterfly flapping its wings in Peking today may cause a storm in
New York in the future. (Gleick 1987) Tiny differences in initial conditions
lead to radically different outcomes for chaotic system, just as two
leaves blown by an autumn breeze may start from virtually the same position
and end up miles apart. This accords chaotic systems two important characteristics;
such systems are not time reversible, i.e. they do not return periodically
to their original state, and, within them, the same cause results in
different effects, i.e. a cause-effect link observed once cannot be
repeated (Thietart and Forgues 1995, 1996). Chaotic systems are characterized
by a vital unpredictability, making long-term prediction impossible,
both in theory and in practice. This is one point to which chaos theory
invariably returns -- the total impossibility of long-term forecasting
in spite of the possibility of modest short-term predictions. 3. In
the case of the weather system the theoretical maximum for accurate
forecasts is two weeks, one that yet far from being reached. See Stacey
1996: 319. A third property of chaotic systems is self-organization (Gleick 1987, Kauffman, 1991, 1992, Stacey 1992, 1995, 1996), a chance but not uncommon ability of chaotic systems to break out of a disorderly pattern into a spontaneous and unexpected order. This is a phenomenon observed in the behaviour of gas molecules as they are exposed to changing energy sources or in certain types of turbulent flow. Self-organization does not mean that the system has lapsed from chaotic to stable equilibrium, since it is not achieved with the help of damping feedback; instead, it generates what have been described as 'islands of order from the sea of chaos' (Gleick 1987, Von Krogh and Roos 1995). These islands are subject to the earlier two properties of chaotic systems; neither their scale, nor their duration may be predicted, a butterfly flapping its wings may lead to their disappearance or re-appearance. To conclude then, as Stacey has argued
In conditions of chaos, science loses its predictive prowess. It cannot anticipate the precise condition of the system at some future time nor can it anticipate the effect of specific disturbances or interventions. Control of the system from inside becomes impossible, since the same interventions may lead to diametrically opposite consequences. Yet, chaos theory does not leave us in a position of powerlessness and confusion: it enables us to observe and analyse such systems, unravel patterns, establish boundaries (e.g. no snowstorms in the Sahara), note similarities, identify areas of tranquillity and make short-term forecasts. The chaotic qualities of organizations How useful is chaos theory for the study of organizations? Contrary to a binary opposition of organization with chaos, a number of organizational theorists have long viewed a measure of chaos as constitutive of ordinary organizations and some have even seen it as beneficial to them. Based on a study of managers in an electrical company in the UK, Watson (1994) argues that we live in a world in which only partial control is ever possible:
At the cost of some simplification, it could be said that organizational theorists have taken note of chaotic features in organizations in three inter-related ways. First, human cognitive capabilities, the unpredictable nature of organizations and the complex link between learning and action preclude full understanding, and therefore, control of organizations. Second, non-rational features of organizations, such as emotions, humour or fantasies can never be fully controlled through managerial processes, and will therefore always introduce chaotic features in organizations. Thirdly, organizations entail a bewildering variety of processes of resistance to management controls; these may at times be silenced but can never be overcome, nor can their manifestations be anticipated. Conflict at times escalates in a precipitous way or it exhausts itself equally precipitously. Its unfolding cannot be conclusively controlled. One major challenge to the mechanistic/rational view of organizations has come from Weick's (1977, 1979) long-standing appreciation of complex feedback; his description of organizations as self-designing systems prefigures the chaos theory of self-organization. The non-linear quality of managerial interventions is graphically captured by Pettigrew, who argues that "changes have multiple causes and are to be observed by loops rather than by lines". (1990: 10), while the significance of vicious and virtuous circles has been a crucial feature organizational learning theory (Argyris 1993, Argyris and Schön 1978, Senge 1990). Yet, no single theory of organizations captures their chaotic qualities quite as graphically as Cohen, March and Olsen's garbage can theory of decision-making (1972). According to this theory, no-one in an organization is in overall control or knows clearly what is going on. Problems and solutions emerge and collide with each other in almost accidental manner, producing unintentional or unpredictable effects. In a subsequent book, March and Olsen (1976) highlighted randomness as a key quality of organizational decision-making, describing it as 'organizational anarchy', multiple garbage cans in which problems and solutions are found in an ad hoc, opportunistic manner. Without making use of chaos theory, MacIntyre (1981/1985) argued that predictability is impossible in human affairs, in general, and organizations in particular. He identified four reasons which preclude predictability, even in periods of relative calm. These include the Popperian observation of the impossibility of anticipating future inventions without actually accomplishing them, the reflexivity of game-like situations (including politics), the catalytic consequences of accidental effects (the Cleopatra nose argument) and, more generally, the unanticipated consequences of human action. But the impossibility of accurate prediction undermines claims by managers to be able to control future states of their organization by applying law-like generalizations, like those of natural laws. Drawing on MacIntyre's work, Mangham questions the possibility of any control whatsoever and asks rhetorically:
The view that organizations are to a degree unmanageable finds further support in the work of writers who have highlighted the emotional dimension of organizational life. While the employees' emotions have been the object of concerted attempts to control and subordinate them to rational organizational expediences (Hochschild, 1983, Jermier, 1985, Rosen and Astley 1988, Flam, 1990a, 1990b, Albrow, 1992, Fineman, 1993), much of the emotional life of organizations unfolds outside the mechanisms of rationality and control. Gabriel (1995a), for example, has argued that within every organization, there is an uncolonized terrain, a terrain which is not and cannot be controlled, in which people, both individually and in groups, can engage in all kinds of unsupervised, spontaneous activity. These activities occasionally engage with the practices of organization, principally through the medium of fantasy. In this organizational dreamworld, desires, anxieties and emotions find expressions in highly irrational and unpredictable constructions which have been overshadowed by the discourses of the managed and, controlling organization. Jokes, described by Mary Douglas as "a victorious tilting of uncontrol against control" (1975:98), are an archetypical feature of the unmanaged organization. Jokes, of course, may stretch beyond evasion of organizational controls into a deliberate strategy of resistance and opposition, offering a partial immunity from organizational censors. (Benton, 1988, Davies, 1988, Gabriel, 1991) They are one of a formidable array of mechanisms of resistance to organizational control, which have been explored by the tradition known as labour process theory, and include sabotage, whistle-blowing, ritualism, bloody-mindedness, legal recourse, counter-ideologies and refusal of discretion, as well as strikes and other forms of militancy. (See, for example, the contributions in Knights and Willmott, 1990, Jermier, Knights and Nord, 1994) The subjective experience of chaos It may be argued that, in contrast to chaos theorists who envisage islands of tranquillity in seas of chaos, the majority of organizational theorists (including some labour process theorists) have viewed organizations as areas of tranquillity with pockets of chaos. Even when discontinuity, crisis and conflict are brought center-stage, they are commonly regarded as 'exceptional' or 'abnormal' phenomena. The long social science tradition of presuming stability to be normal and instability abnormal is still potent. But, there are signs of change, especially in current ethnographic, case studies and studies based on depth interviews. (See, for example, Van Maanen, 1988, Mangham 1986, Mangham and Pye 1991, Kunda 1992, Hirschhorn and Gilmore 1989, Hirschhorn, 1993, Hirschhorn and Young, 1993, Watson 1994) For many organizational participants, confusion, uncertainty and even chaos are not marginal phenomena or exceptions to the rule of order, but are endemic to their organizations. Many managers are especially sensitive to unpredictable and even chaotic features in their organizations. When they pull a lever, push a button or issue an order, they know that several different things may happen. To the extent that they are in control, their control is a precarious, nervous one, threatened by numerous forces. Even if some organizational participants idealize a golden age of stability and order (Gabriel 1993), such images simply do not accord with the experiences of many organizational participants today. Control is experienced as increasingly difficult, both at the personal and at the organizational level. As Gould has argued succinctly: Organizations were, to be sure, never closed systems, but in more stable times with much slower rates of change, they were experienced as self-contained and self-perpetuating. By contrast, contemporary post-industrial organizations often have quite the opposite character. They are experienced as unstable, chaotic, turbulent, and often unmanageable. (Gould 1993: 50) Unmanageable consumers Unmanageability arises not only from within an organization but, equally and possibly to an even more alarming extent, from outside. Sociologists since Simmel and Veblen have long appreciated the whimsical, transient qualities of fashion and the difficulties of anticipating consumer preferences. Few managers would tempt fate, in the manner of Mr Gerald Ratner, by taking for granted their hold over their organization's customers. Ratner in a widely publicized remark claimed that his chain of jewellers supplied its customers with low-price, low-taste, inferior quality goods, which is what they were after. His remarks, a classic example of hubris, brought about the demise of his company, showing that consumers cannot be taken for granted any more than employees. What is especially interesting is that Mr Ratner had made similar remarks on at least one previous occasion without any appreciable effect. The incident illustrates two inter-related qualities of chaotic systems -- the different outcomes which may arise from the same action and the explosive conclusion brought about by run-away positive feedback. The more people took notice of Mr Ratner's remarks, the more objectionable they found them, the greater the negative publicity they generated -- a truly vicious circle leading to the demise of the company. Gabriel and Lang have argued that consumers are becoming more defensive, more unpredictable, more insecure, in short unmanageable. (Gabriel and Lang, 1995) Casualization of work and career reinforces casualization of consumption. Consumers increasingly lead precarious and uneven existences, one day enjoying unexpected boons and the next sinking to bare subsistence. Marginality paradoxically becomes central, consumption clutches the wheel of fortune and proceeds in an unpredictable, chaotic manner. Fads, fashions and tastes become ever arbitrary, the connections between signs and signifiers fleeting Baudrillard, 1970/1988, Firat, 1992); one moment consumers are seduced by the latest advertising cliche, the next they rebel against it or subvert it. To portray consumers as unmanageable does not seek to overlook the difficulties many have in making ends meet or the lack of choice they experience due to the oppressive burden of social expectations. Nor does it skim over the immense resources and effort deployed to observe, monitor, survey, forecast and control their behaviour, i.e. to manage them. Like today's worker, today's consumer is over-managed, prodded, seduced, controlled. Yet, like the worker's, the consumer's compliance cannot be taken for granted. Writers like de Certeau (1984), Fiske (1989) and Willis (1990) have highlighted the consumers' ability, in their every day practices, to dodge, subvert or evade the controlling strategies of manufacturers, planners and advertisers. De Certeau has likened the behaviour of consumers to the responses of native Americans to Spanish colonization; while appearing to capitulate to the colonizers' rule and acquiesce to their religious and political practices, indigenous peoples "subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept." (1984:xiii) In a similar way, consumers are often seen using products and places in unorthodox ways, replacing the stories of script-writers and advertisers with their own stories, re-asserting that even in the area of consumption, management and control are problematic. Chaos Theory in organizational studies Unpredictability, uncertainty and elements of chaos which inhibit control have been appreciated by organizational theorists and form part of the daily experience of many organizational participants. Yet, the application of chaos theory in organizational studies is at its infancy. In recent years, a number of theorists have started to explore the implications of chaos theory for marketing (Windsor 1995), product innovation (Perry, 1995), information systems (Hoplin, 1994, Baskerville and Smithson, 1995), management accounting (Tse and Robb, 1994), decision theory (Chia, 1994) or more generally, for organizational strategy (Thietart and Forgues 1995, 1996, Perry 1995, Levy, 1994, Gordon and Greenspan, 1994, O'Connor, 1994, Stacey, 1992, 1995, 1996). Although it would be premature to see a new discipline of organizational chaotics emerging, there are several arguments which run through these works. These may be summarized as follows:
The application of chaos theory to organizations has been criticized (see, e.g., Churchman, 1994, Stewart and Cohen, 1994) and faces a number of crucial challenges. Chief among them appears to be the lack of a precise diagnostic technique for identifying when organizations enter a chaotic domain. The qualitative trichotomy between stable, unstable and chaotic equilibrium, beautifully demonstrated in fractal geography where the three areas are distinctly identifiable, finds ingenious applications in map construction. But can it be said to hold with organizations or social systems in general? Some theorists (e.g. Stacey, 1992) view the limits of bounded instability as precisely definable; yet, one searches in vain for clues as to how such limits are defined in social systems. In spite of such reservations, the promise of chaos theory is quite considerable. It proposes a way of incorporating randomness and arbitrariness into the study of social systems. It offers a possibility of making progress in a number of stalemated debates in organizational and social theories, like free will vs. determinism, action vs. structure, order vs. disorder (See Thietart and Forgues, 1996). Finally, it offers a way of redefining the concept of management, liberating it from its historical binds with control and aligning it with the requirements of 'turbulent', 'chaotic' and complex times. The costs of chaos theory, however, to theorists and practitioners are daunting. Chaos theory punctures several core beliefs about the nature and scope of managerial work and organizational interventions. Sensitive dependence to small changes makes chaotic systems entirely unpredictable in the long term. Strategic plans, mission statements, leadership visions are a total waste of time as instruments of change (though not, as we shall see presently, for overcoming anxiety) (Thietart and Forgues 1995, 1996, Stacey, 1992, 1996). Successful businesses operating in the chaos border
area must be prepared to be wasteful, destructive and conflict-ridden
in order to be creative and innovative. (Stacey, 1992: 83) Looking for
targets to apportion blame or give credit for successes may appear to
be organizationally expedient, but has little justification -- single
individuals are not responsible either for success or for failure, these
phenomena being the products of a multiplicity of chance and systemic
factors. Seeking to repeat success by applying a 'winning formula' is
futile; organizational learning has nothing to do with learning formulas
and much to do with experimentation, reasoning by analogy and an ability
to question underlying assumptions and existing patterns.4. In this
sense, unlearning is as important as learning. See Nystrom and Starbuck,
1984. The main demand then of chaos theory is that we acknowledge unmanageability as a fact of life and accept that control is a myth, a fantasy and a delusion. This is the point on which most chaos theorists agree:
Forces of order and stability are used to close a system which is too complex to be mastered by cognitively limited organizational actors. Search for order is an attempt to build islands of certainty and rationality where purposeful action can be undertaken. Furthermore, order is a means to create the illusion of management. This illusion is forged by organizational actors who are confronted with the impossible challenge of achieving a mission without having the capacity to succeed. (Thietart and Forgues, 1995: 28) The Myth of Control Is it possible to think of control as a myth, when it appears to lie at the very essence of what it means to be a manager. A manager cited by Watson describes it aptly: What I like, ... is the feeling that you are controlling something -- it is in your destiny, if you like, whether you make a go of it or you fail. The only problem we have is you may fail for something out of your control -- where you have something like a shortage of materials. But if you have done everything you can get that job out and at the end of the day you say you have done everything you can; then that is the satisfaction. (1994: 69) Being in charge is a core belief which the majority of managers espouse, no matter how much unpredictable reality frustrates them. They hold each other technically and morally responsible for the successes and failures of their divisions, departments and organizations. They plan, they articulate visions and they use analytical techniques based on 'if-then' chains of thought in order to control resources, people and information. Criticizing these techniques, Thomas argues that they are best seen, not as rational means of controlling employees' behaviour but as magical rites which take a rational form. Furthermore, managerial faith in the possibility of the control of uncertainty presented by human involvement in organizations reflects reverence for the sacred symbols of rationality and professionalism. (Thomas, 1993: 79) Like Thomas, MacIntyre (1981/1985) viewed management control as a myth and the analytical techniques meant to bring it about as quasi-magical rites.
Yet, MacIntyre argued that both the myth of management control and the accompanying techniques are crucial for sustaining the legitimacy of managerial authority. This is why managers demand obedience, this is why they are handsomely paid. Their technical competence is meant to enable them to steer their departments or their companies through harsh and unpredictable waters. If it were an easy task, neither their claim to be obeyed nor their rewards would be justified. Politically, therefore, it is vital for managers to claim the credit for organizational success; equally, it is vital to be able to pin the blame for organizational failure on a specific number of people (those meant to be in charge). Besides its political function, in recent decades, the myth of management control has contributed to a broader cultural trend. The 1980s saw the lionization of the manager as a cultural archetype (MacIntyre 1981/1985), capable of heroic deeds like turning around moribund companies, rescuing failing ones, launching apocalyptic campaigns and reaching vertiginous success. During this decade, business and management were not merely rehabilitated from the radical critique of the 60s and 70s, but also redefined as a terrain for brave exploits and glorious careers. (Grey and Mitev, 1995). The wider discourse of organizations as arenas for dull bureaucrats and tame 'organization men' was swept aside by a quasi-religious rhetoric of missions, visions and 'management of the planet'-style grandiosity. None of this would have been possible, if management was seen as employing arcane procedures on a hit-and-miss basis with little direct influence on outcomes. (Thomas, 1993) Control as psychological defense While politically and culturally expedient, the illusion of management control, like all illusions, also fulfils important psychological needs -- fulfilling in fantasy wishes that cannot be fulfilled in actuality and reducing anxiety. For some, management control represents a grandiose dream in which individuals, groups and organizations may be commanded with no fear of recalcitrance, like machines, or symbols on a computer screen. For others, it meets a dependency need, a re-assurance that someone is in charge, even if he or she is not liked. (See Gabriel, 1995b) For yet others, it fulfils a need for victimization and scapegoating -- someone may be blamed, so long as someone claims to be in charge. (Hirschhorn, 1988) Subordinates collude in the hubris of management, endowing leaders with truly super-human qualities, such as omnipotence, omniscience and total composure. If they were seen as confused, erratic, ordinary people, their ability to stay in charge, to control things would be called into question. (Lapierre, 1989, 1990, Krantz, 1989) Pretending that the world (including the economy and the African elephant) can be controlled and managed helps us cope with the anxiety caused by the chaos that is threatening our lives. Building on the work of Bion, Jaques and Menzies, Stacey (1992: 117ff, 1996: 398ff) has argued that long term plans, mission statements and corporate visions are defensive techniques aimed at exorcising the fear of losing control. They are techniques which preserve the illusion of control when faced with a chaotic environment. But the fear of outer chaos and the threats issuing from it are themselves a result of the anxiety over inner chaos, chaos which arises from our own disorderly desires, impulses and inhibitions. Here chaos theory joins an important point of psychoanalytic discourse. In a paper called 'A difficulty in the path of psychoanalysis' (1917), Freud argued that psychoanalysis had inflicted a blow on human narcissism, by showing that our ego is not master in its own house. If Copernicus heliocentric theory shattered the view that the earth is the centre of the universe and Darwin's evolution destroyed the myth of man's uniqueness among animals, psychoanalysis adds a third blow; our own soul is not a simple thing; on the contrary, it is a hierarchy of superordinated and subordinated agents, a labyrinth of impulses striving independently of one another towards action, corresponding with the multiplicity of instincts and of relations with the outer world, many of which are antagonistic to one another and incompatible. (1917:187) Faced with such a situation, the ego becomes, in another Freudian metaphor, like the rider who seeks to control a wild horse; the rider may stay in control, but may equally be overwhelmed. While safely in control, he would be wrong to dilute his vigilance. It is telling that the word 'to manage' originates in the French word 'manege' and the Italian 'maneggiare', the training of a horse in its paces. The Freudian ego is truly a managerial ego as Philip Rieff (1959) has argued, constantly facing forces which it may temporarily keep in check or even exploit to its advantage but can never overcome. What are these forces? In addition to natural catastrophes, floods, earthquakes, crop failures, and so on, people are threatened by slings and arrows of everyday life, by illness, accident, death, loss of loved ones, loss of jobs, discrimination, warfare, poverty, hatred and much else besides. They are also threatened by inner disorder, overwhelming cravings, irrational fears and anxieties, loss of self-esteem, fear of aging and dying, rejection, guilt and so on. These uncontrollable chaotic forces in human life are frequently referred to by Freud (1927, 1930) through the unscientific term 'Fate'. There are elements, which seem to mock all human control: the earth, which quakes and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in a turmoil; storms, which blow everything before them; there are diseases, which we have only recently recognized as attacks by other organisms and finally there is the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found, nor probably will be. With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization. ... For the individual, too, life is hard to bear, just as it is for mankind in general. The civilization in which he participates imposes some amount of privation on him, and other men bring him a measure of suffering, either in spite of the precepts of civilization or because of its imperfections. To this are added the injuries which untamed nature -- he calls it Fate -- inflicts on him. (1927c:195) In Freudian discourse the image of the ego confronting fate is ever-present. In this confrontation, the ego may seek solace in illusions which promise to make it independent of fate, including religious beliefs or erotic infatuation. It may become superstitious, seeking to placate fate through private, arcane rituals. Or, it may deny fate, pretending that reality is controllable, civilized, orderly and predictable. More pragmatically, the ego may seek to establish a measure of order, employing the resources of civilization to keep chaos at bay. Man's observation of the great astronomical regularities not only furnished him with a model for introducing order into his life, but gave him the first points of departure for doing so. Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision. ( 1930a: 282) But, in its confrontation with fate, the ego may
only create islands of order, which are forever subject to disorder.
The Freudian ego is usually troubled; whether seen as a city under siege
or as the servant of three harsh masters, the ego's need to be in control
is every bit as powerful as the forces of disorder, inner and outer,
which threaten to overwhelm it. Reading managers' accounts of their
work experiences one is struck by the aptness of those Freudian metaphors.
Rather than 'running business', 'making decisions', 'solving problems'
etc., managers manage more in the sense of seeking to keep chaos at
bay. (See, for example, Watson, 1994) They worry a lot. They do a lot
of fire-fighting. Crisis management becomes chronic. 5. Watson operates
within the same frame as Freud: "Culture can be understood as a
human creation which helps human beings avoid the dark abyss of disorder
and chaos into which they might otherwise fall." 1994:20 Chaos and Order This argument should not create the impression that all is chaos or that all control is illusory. Far from it. Both chaos and psychoanalytic theories recognize the existence of areas of tranquillity, predictability and order in personal and organizational lives. There are periods in the life of an organization or an individual when everything appears to be going according to a plan, so much so that the future may appear as nothing more than a continuation of the present. The argument developed in this paper, however, would suggest that such a course would be tempting fate. When everything appears to be under control, a small discontinuity may result in a collapse of what previously seemed unassailable. Nor does the argument in this paper deny that the lives of individuals in and out of organizations are daily and continuously controlled by forces ranging from traffic signals and appraisal procedures to seductive images and career opportunities, as Foucault and his admirers have demonstrated. In fact, we accept that we are simultaneously over-controlled and inadequately controlled, since we may never be totally controlled. What this argument emphasizes is, first, that many of the controlling practices are resisted, subverted or simply dodged by those who are meant to be subjected to them and that their outcomes cannot be taken for granted. And second, that even when these practices are not tested by those subjected to them, they are tested by a clamorous, capricious entity, akin to Freud's fate, an entity which the Romans envisaged as Fortuna, the bitch-goddess of unpredictability, to whom they dedicated more temples than to any other. Fortuna, dispensing malice and favours in equal and equally unexpected measures, is a goddess not unknown to us, whether as the mast-head of a chief business publication in the USA or as the divinity of those hoping for a win in lotteries. The hubris of management is to pretend that Fortuna does not exist or that she may be permanently coaxed or placated into servility. Disregarding the chaotic qualities of life or seeking to control them, tame them or 'disqualify' them through forecasting, planning and other law-like techniques amounts to a set of wish-fulfilling illusions, which may in the short run relieve feelings of anxiety and powerlessness, but, if anything, accentuates our long-run vulnerability to it. In the face of defeat and failure, leaders may react by suddenly blaming the unpredictable and arbitrary qualities of fate and adopting a fatalistic position. They may then act, as Lapierre has argued, "as if they have no freedom, no liberty to choose and shape their environment, and so avoid responsibility for their failure to act, to take risks. 'Fate' precludes success." (1989: 187) Between the hubris of omnipotence and the fatalism of impotence, Lapierre rightly argues that leaders must find a course, combining self-questioning with a healthy pragmatism, which recognizes the complexities of their task, yet seeks to capitalize on opportunities and minimise the reverses. This is almost exactly the project Machiavelli set for himself, in his major political writings, The Prince, and The Discourses. Conclusion In the early 16th century, a period of considerable political turmoil as well as artistic glory, Machiavelli drew a sophisticated picture of governance, sometimes obscured by facile equations of his philosophy with immorality and deceit. Machiavelli tried to show how rulers or managers may rule in an environment which alternates between disorder and order, not by pretending that everything can be controlled but by accepting randomness and arbitrariness. At the broad level, Machiavelli, like Freud, was operating within an implicit and occasionally explicit paradigm that life is at times chaotic, that sufferings and blessing are meted out arbitrarily and that it is futile to seek to find meaning in the capriciousness of Fortuna. This churns up a turbulent, random, clamorous and senseless sequences of happenings, which we may try to handle (maneggiare) but can hardly ever hope to control. What Machiavelli, along with some of his contemporaries counter-posed to Fortuna is neither wisdom nor knowledge, neither management nor control, but Virtu. Virtu does not mean 'virtue' in the Christian or Greek traditions, but a personal and collective virtuosity in political, military and psychological terms. Virtu is not a methodical, scientific or technical force -- no such force would stand a chance against the caprices of Fortuna. Instead, it is a force which combines vitality, opportunism, eclat, wit, alertness and ruthlessness with prudence, knowledge and wisdom. While Virtu finds institutional expressions in systems of governance and decision-making, (Discourses, ii.1) it is also a quality of leadership. The first qualities of Virtu is the ability to read the times (Machiavelli's "i tempi") and then, "to adapt oneself to the times if one wants to enjoy continued good fortune". (Discourses iii.9) "I believe that it is probably true", argues Machiavelli "that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves." (The Prince, xxv) It is precisely because fortune is implacable that the task of the leader is complex, his or her success uncertain, and skills non-reducible to simple laws, generalizations and formulas. Machiavelli goes on to use a metaphor which would not surprise many of today's managers -- the metaphor of the river which may seem peaceable and predictable one moment, violent and unmanageable the next. Virtu means prudence and prescience at times of calm, decisiveness and impetuosity at times of storm. By such means can fortune be handled, its boons maximized and its adversities lessened. Nevertheless, Machiavelli is under no illusion that two people may succeed by using different methods or that two people may enjoy widely differing fortunes even as they employ the same methods. The goddess may be placated but her capricious nature can never be tamed. Napoleon was truly Machiavellian when he reputedly claimed that the virtue he most valued in a general was luck. In concluding this paper, I would like to note some implications of these arguments. First, if we accept that managers, just like the rest of the people, must contend with unpredictability and chaos, we may be wise to recognize the ambiguity in the word 'to manage', which means equally to treat with respect and consideration, to cope in adversity, to handle as well as to control. Second, we must re-assess the nature of the skills and knowledge which make an effective manager. These skills and knowledge are, as Machiavelli reminds us, highly contingent on the times and the circumstances in which a manager operates. They are not likely to be generalizeable propositions, after the paradigm of natural sciences; rather they are more likely to be practical rules of thumb which 'sometimes work'. This is what Carlo Ginzburg describes as 'common knowledge' or lore, as opposed to scientific knowledge. (1980) Third, we should recognize that, like the rest of us, managers are most of the time confused, erratic and irrational; they deserve neither exorbitant praise for success nor total vilification for failure. Finally, drawing our inspiration from current development in chaos theory, we should recognize that chaos, in spite of the fear which it inspires, need not always be our enemy but there are many instances in which it is our friend.
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