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Notes 218 people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.” He also said: “in this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.” Topping the original quote, Oskar Kennedy says, “there are three types of people. Those who can count and those who can’t” (http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/ are-there-only-two-types-of-people-in-the-world/). 11. The American Heritage Dictionary (4th edn, 2000) defines management as: “1. The act, manner, or practice of managing; handling, supervision, or control. . . . 2. The person or persons who control or direct a business or other enterprise.” 12. The “view from the top” is a metaphor which refers to what people know or “see.” It is not a literal description of where they stand or sit. The Coen brothers’ film The Hudsucker Proxy has an engaging visual portrayal of the view from the top, which is important in the film both for the plot and in creating the visual impact of particular scenes. Various sequences either depict “the top” as it might appear to others, particularly to people at “the bottom,” or show aspects of organizational life from the perspective of the top. I’ve used the expression for quite a while, contrasting it with the “view from practice.” Recently, I discovered that at least one other person uses it, though somewhat differently. Theodore Taptiklis has a chapter called “The View from the Top” in Unmanaging. Chapter 2 1. The official Dilbert website is www.dilbert.com. The Office began as a BBC comedy written by Ricky Gervais who also played the lead. It was later Americanized with Steve Carell in the lead. The official NBC website for the U.S. version is www.nbc. com/The_Office. 2. For one view of the social nature of work life see Dennis Sandow and Ann Murray Allen, “The Nature of Social Collaboration: How Work Really Gets Done,” Reflections:The SoL Journal 6, nos 4–5 (2005): 1–14. 3. An especially egregious case, outlined by Thomas Homer-Dixon, involves IBM and the Federal Aviation Administration’s proposed Advanced Automation System for air traffic control. This software development and equipment design project was shut down after more than 10 years of work, when 2 billion dollars had already been spent. See Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable World (New York: Vintage Books, 2002): 183–4. Another example, outlined in a story in the Washington Post, involves the Commonwealth of Virginia’s decision to consolidate its computer operations into one agency and contract out the running of its computer system. See Anita Kumar and Rosalind S. Helderman, “Va. Pays Dearly for Computer Troubles: Northrop Grumman $2 Billion Upgrade Disrupted Services,” October 14, 2009: B01 (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/ 13/AR2009101303044.html). 4. Edsel wasn’t just a brand name or model, but, briefly, was a division of Ford. See the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Edsel. 5. Military hardware programs that result in technologies that are dysfunctional or anachronistic belong in the same category. For example, programs which produce cold-war-era weapons systems when the military’s target is terrorism. The Strategic Defense Initiative, or “star wars program,” a still-fanciful missile defense shield, which Notes 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. was initiated when Ronald Reagan was president, is one example. In one form or another it is still rolling on and might end up costing billions of dollars, although, as I write, judging by what many experts say, it can’t and won’t provide protection and is certainly not a shield against incoming missiles. Arguments along these lines are exceptionally well articulated by Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan author and scholar, in his interview with Krista Tippett, the host of the National Public Radio Program, Talking of Faith, titled “The Ethics of Aid: One Kenyan’s Perspective” (http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/ 2009/ethicsofaid-kenya/). The fact that teams exist in name only explains the title of Michael Schrage’s book, No More Teams!, where he takes a close look at collaboration and how to foster it. See Michael Schrage, No More Teams: Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1995). Zachery A. Goldfarb has a fine example of this type of breakdown in “SEC’s Regional Offices Present Managerial Problems, Become an Obstacle to Reform,” Washington Post, June 10, 2010: A13. He writes that “for nearly a decade, Julie Preuitt told her colleagues at the Securities and Exchange Commission . . . that she had found problems at a fabulously successful investment firm . . . But officials in the agency’s enforcement division weren’t interested in complex cases, just quick-hit lawsuits that would make the regional office look active, according to a review by the SEC inspector general.” According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2010 the United States total military spending of US $698 billion accounted for about 43 percent of the world’s total military spending of US$1630 billion. See the Institute’s “Background paper on SIPRI military expenditure data, 2010,” at www.sipri.org/research/ armaments/milex/factsheet2010. The Government Accountability Office that oversees United States government departments. April Witt, “Fatal Inaction,” Washington Post Magazine, June 18, 2006: 22. Another widely reported set of breakdowns had to do with the shockingly poor way in which soldiers who needed treatment for physical injuries and traumatic stress syndrome were actually treated (i.e. “handled”) by various agencies and departments like the Veterans Administration and military hospitals. Two books, by ex-management consultants writing with views from practice, provide good insights into the work of consultants: not least the heavy-handed and self-serving way they wield the “tools” of their profession. See Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); and Theodore Taptiklis, Unmanaging: Opening up the Organization to Its Own Unspoken Knowledge (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Many books and articles define “management” and examine the paradigm. One is Stephen Linstead, Robert Grafton Small, and Paul Jeffcutt, eds., Understanding Management (London: SAGE Publications,1996), an edited volume, with a postmodern orientation, in which contributors highlight the complex, social nature of management and managing. See also Dan Growler and Karen Legge, “The Meaning of Management and Management of Meaning,” in Understanding Management, ed. S Linstead, R.G. Small, and P Jeffcutt (London: SAGE Publications, 1996). Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: W.W. Norton, 1911; reprint, 1967); Frederick Winslow Taylor, “The Principles of Scientific Management,” Bulletin of the Taylor Society, December (1916). Henri Fayol, 219 Notes 220 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. General and Industrial Management, trans. C. Storrs (London: Pitman, 1949). The huge literature on Taylor’s work includes these contributions: Gail Cooper, “Frederick Winslow Taylor and Scientific Management,” in Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas, ed. C.W. Pursell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free Association Books, 1988); Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Fredrick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997). Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth, has a unique perspective on Taylor, arguing, ironically, that it was his ability to tell a good story that brought him both fame and fortune, not “the numbers” he professed were so important and, evidently, was so passionate about. On the evolution of science and the ideas that contributed to the Enlightenment, see Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Hugh Willmott refers to Heidegger’s description of the “period we call modern [as] . . . defined by the fact that man becomes the centre and measure of all things.” Hugh Willmot, “Bringing Agency (Back) into Organizational Analysis: Responding to the Crisis of (Post)Modernity,” in Towards a New Theory of Organizations, eds. John Hassard and Martin Parker (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). On modernism in organization and management studies see the following which, as they deal with worldviews and the contrast between modernism and postmodernism, are all philosophically oriented: Robert Chia, “From Modern to Postmodern Organizational Analysis,” Organization Studies 16, no. 4 (1995); Robert Cooper and Gibson Burrell, “Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction,” Organizational Studies 9, no. 1 (1988); Susan Stanford Freidman, “Definitional Excursions:The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001). Tim Hindle, “The New Organization,” The Economist, January 21, 2006. The injunction to “be objective” seems far less onerous, technically and perhaps morally, for astronomers, physicists, and the like, who deal with inanimate objects, than for anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and even economists, who study people with attitudes, values, and beliefs, who live relationship-filled lives. What’s more, if their relationships, attitudes, feelings, and values are what make people tick and make them interesting, wouldn’t their efforts to put their feelings and relationships aside make experts less than human? Why would we want less-than-human experts explaining human behavior or human societies? On the whole question of objectivity and subjectivity in science see R.J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). Fantastic Voyage is not a particularly memorable film. Although it won some awards for special effects, to at least one reviewer it was a vehicle for squeezing Raquel Welch, a leading 1960s sex symbol, into a white neoprene wetsuit. Another difference between knowledge-work and industrial-work is that, in factories, the distinction between “inside” and “outside” doesn’t matter as much. If you are watching people on a production line filling boxes of corn flakes or, in rows, at benches, assembling electronic components, you have a good idea of what they are doing just by observing them, no matter that you’re not actually doing the same work. Julian Orr highlights the importance of stories at work, in conversations that may not specifically be about work. Julian E. Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Notes 21. It is not uncommon, these days, to hear people talking about “knowing” rather than “knowledge.” See Frank Blackler, “Knowledge, Knowledge Work and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation,” Organization Studies 16, no. 6 (1995). Scott Cook and John Seely Brown make the distinction a theme in explaining the synergy between the knowledge and knowing. See Scott D.N. Cook and John Seely Brown, “Bridging Epistemologies: The Generative Dance between Organizational Knowledge and Organizational Knowing,” Organization Science 10, no. 4 (1999). 22. The “view from the top” makes the connection with top-down management easy. Remember that the view from the top is a metaphor. In every organization lots of people work from this view and, because it can be very useful, at times it is desirable, even necessary, that they deliberately adopt a view from the top by “stepping back” from their work and looking at it from the outside as it were. The problem is that a management lens only permits the view from the top, which is wrongly presumed to be the view you must have to organize work. 23. The fad for “reengineering” work processes, to make organizations more efficient, is directly attributable to this view. I discuss reengineering more fully in Chapter 8. 24. As you’ll see, a good deal of knowledge-work consists of organizing, and much of the work of organizing involves making sense of what happened, such as what people said or did, and then deciding what to do. I’m going to call this “meaning making.” Karl Weick calls it “sensemaking” and has written a book explaining that this is mostly what people do in organizations. Work is nothing more, or less, than sensemaking. Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1995); and Making Sense of the Organization (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001). Chapter 3 1. Stephen Fineman, Daniel Sims, and Yannis Gabriel, Organizing and Organizations, 2nd edn (San Francisco: SAGE Publications, 2000): 6–7. 2. There is no direct English equivalent for the German word Verstehen. Scholars translate Verstehen as “interpretive understanding” or “subjective understanding” or (more recently) “meaning-making.” See Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, ed. Talcott Parsons, trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: The Free Press, 1964); Max Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,” in Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. F.R. Dallmayr and T.A. McCarthy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977); Mario Truzzi, ed. Verstehen: Subjective Understanding in the Social Sciences (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1974). The tradition of interpretive understanding (or meaningmaking) actually began before Weber with the first generation of scholars who coined the term “hermeneutics.” They were interested in biblical exegesis—how to interpret the Bible. After the Reformation (which coincided with the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism and science), people came to accept that you didn’t have to rely on the church hierarchy to interpret the word of God for you; you could do it for yourself. It was not only church teachings but also hierarchy that was being challenged. In the absence of an expert or single authority who told you what to believe, the question was how to draw out the (real) meaning of the Bible. The challenge was the “hermeneutic circle” or the relationship between whole and part. You can’t make meaning of 221 Notes 222 3. 4. 5. 6. the whole until you understand the individual parts and you can only interpret the parts when you understand the message of the whole. This provided a context for appreciating the subjective and intersubjective character of meaning-making. On the question of how we construct meaning of the social world, see Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. F. Walsh and G. Lehnert (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972). The original German title of this book translates as The Meaning Construction of the Social World. See also Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1967). Renate Mayntz describes a network, succinctly, as a form of governance, “characterized by negotiation and collaboration—purposeful co-operation over time.” Renate Mayntz, “Modernization and the Logic of Interorganizational Networks,” in Societal Change between Market and Organization, eds. John Child, Michael Crozier, Renate Mayntz et al. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1993): 11. On the shifts in thinking at this time, see Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Charlene Spretnak argues, convincingly, that it is precisely the kinds of knowing that began to be rejected at this time—bodily (feelings, emotions) and spiritual (beliefs) knowing, as opposed to mental knowing (reason)—which are, for humans, what “real” knowledge is. From her perspective, postmodernism, which relates knowing to the construction of meaning, represents a “resurgence of the real.” Charlene Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997). “Get the beat” is the first step in what Donella Meadows calls “dancing with systems.” This is what she says: “Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened.” Donella H. Meadows, “Dancing with Systems,” Sustainability Institute (www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/pubs/Dancing.html). Chapter 4 1. For another example of how these types of projects can go wrong see Dan Eggen and Griff Witte, “The FBI’s Upgrade That Wasn’t,” Washington Post, August 18, 2006, p. A01 (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/ 17/AR2006081701485.html). 2. If you have ever tried to demonstrate computer technology to a group of people you have almost certainly experienced Murphy’s law first hand. No matter how many times you test your setup and no matter how many times you check it to see that everything is working as it should, when you get to the actual demonstration you will find that anything that can go wrong has gone wrong. See www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/ murphy-true.html. 3. This passage and others remind me of why software developers adopt the agile programming methods which I’ve written about in Chapter 9. 4. With all the interest in knowledge management, lots of people now know and use the term “tacit knowledge,” which is usually contrasted with “explicit knowledge.” I believe Michael Polanyi was the first to write about tacit knowledge in his Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). See also Kazuo Ichijo and Florian Kohlbache, “Tapping Tacit Notes 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Local Knowledge in Emerging Markets—the Toyota Way,” Knowledge Management Research & Practice 6 (2008). Jeff’s distinction, between a “contract-is-all approach” and a “people-and-clientcentered” one, is analogous to the difference between the “view from the top” and the “view from practice.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_coupling. This article, cites as the originator of the idea, Karl E. Weick, “Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems,” Administrative Science Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1976); Karl E. Weick, “Management of Organizational Change Among Loosely Coupled Elements,” reprinted in Karl E. Weick, Making Sense of the Organization (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001); James Douglas Orton and Karl E. Weick, “Loosely Coupled Systems: A Reconceptualization,” Academy of Management Review 15, no. 2 (1990). Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky also use the metaphor of a play-book. See their Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2002). Why do people in IT and marketing departments, for example, need a shared vision or mission? Surely, you’ve noticed that vision and mission statements are interchangeable among organizations. They need to be vague and bland, rather than specific and descriptive, to accommodate the enormous diversity of work as well as interests and outlooks in any organization. It is a good thing employees don’t have to chant their mission statements when they come to work, or else we’d hear echoes of the worst excesses of authoritarianism. When I thought about this—the reason for the magic—it isn’t just that people’s knowledge is tacit, not explicit. As important is the fact that they don’t know what they’re doing until they actually do it. Their knowledge emerges in the work, through the work, and as a result of the work. The work “calls forth” the knowledge. The story is a folk-tale about three blind men who feel an elephant. One feels the tail, the second its front legs, top to bottom, and the third, the trunk. When, later, they compare their experiences, each claiming to know what an elephant is, they describe different objects: a straw fan, two big trees without branches, and a snake (http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant). Blindness is a metaphor for being absorbed by one’s own work—whatever it happens to be—and not being able to see things from the point of view of others doing different kinds of work According to Jeffery Goldstein, emergence happens in complex systems when “novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties [arise] during the process of selforganization.” Jeffrey Goldstein, “Emergence as a Construct: History and Issues,” Emergence: Complexity and Organization 1 (1999): 49–72. Quite a few authors have written about the improvisational nature of work and compared it to jazz improvisation. See Frank J. Barrett, “Living in Organizations: Lessons from Jazz Improvisation” and Lois Holzman, “Lev Vygotsky and the New Performative Psychology: Implications for Business and Organizations,” in The Social Construction of Organization, eds. D.M. Hosking and Sheila McNamee, Advances in Organization Studies (Malmö, Sweden: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, 2006). Arguing that there are many forms of improvisation, Ken Kamoche and his co-authors explore some that go beyond the often highly structured and competitive improvisation associated with jazz. See Ken Kamoche, Miguel Pina e Cunha, and João Vieira da Cunha, “Towards a Theory of Organizational Improvisation: Looking Beyond the Jazz Metaphor,” Journal of Management Studies 40, no. 8 (2003). 223 Notes 224 13. “Dance,” too, is now quite a popular metaphor in contemporary descriptions of management and managing. See for example, P. Senge, A. Kleiner, C. Roberts, R. Ross, G. Roth, and B. Smith, The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1999). 14. Jeff’s distinction between plans and planning (i.e. organizing conversations) mirrors the distinction between “tools” (plans) and “talk” (planning) that I introduce in Chapter 8. It is important for understanding organizing practices and the difference between management (which focuses on tools) and organizing (which begins with talk). 15. A lot has been written about social networks and network mapping. I’ll discuss this later in the book. See, for example, Robert Cross and Andrew Parker, The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004). 16. Adam Kahane makes a similar point about dealing with tough problems in his Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004): 104. 17. Jeff’s “social space” sounds to me like the Japanese concept Ba. The Japanese philosopher K. Nishida is credited with introducing the concept in a book published in 1970 (www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/thonglipfei/ba_concept.html). Working in the area of knowledge management, Ikujiro Nonaka and N. Konno use ba in a similar way to Jeff. See Ikujiro Nonaka and N. Konno, “The Concept Of ‘Ba’: Building a Foundation for Knowledge Creation,” California Management Review 40, no. 1, Special Issue on “Knowledge and the Firm” (1998). Scott D.N. Cook and John Seely Brown introduce the idea of “affordance.” This ties in with social spaces, which allow or afford varying possibilities for action. Scott D.N. Cook and John Seely Brown, “Bridging Epistemologies: The Generative Dance between Organizational Knowledge and Organizational Knowing,” Organization Science 10, no. 4 (1999). Chapter 5 1. See the growing literature on brain functioning including Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005). 2. Figure 5.1 can be viewed as a Western perspective on knowledge from about the time of René Descartes onwards. Descartes, a French philosopher of the Enlightenment, was a prime influencer of the view that science and religion are separate, because they are different types of knowledge or different ways of knowing. Science, represented by the left-hand side of the picture, is associated with the mind. It is rational, analytical, empirical, objective, certain, and so on. Religion, on the right, is associated with the body (or spirit). It has to do with beliefs, values, and other non-observable, unquantifiable, hence “subjective” phenomena. When this “Cartesian dualism” took root about 400 years ago, the West began to turn its back on the phenomena of the right-hand side in the course of embracing empirical science. That process continued into the 20th century, with scientific knowledge gaining in stature at the expense of emotions, beliefs, feelings, intuition and other human ways of knowing, which were downplayed and even rejected as being subjective, hence anti-scientific, and not real knowledge. The Cartesian divide explains why we are deeply attached to management and ignore organizing and why students are taught to think about management as a science. Management doesn’t and won’t have Notes 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. anything to do with what’s on the right-hand side of the diagram. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. J Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 197. Words like “spirit” and “creativity” have crept into management-speak, but they don’t belong there and are used mainly for show. They are useful to have when you’re trying to motivate people, but they don’t mean much and people know this and aren’t fooled by this rhetoric. As far as management practices are concerned—and they dominate the way we work—it is the meaning of those words on the left-hand side that matters. This view from the top of a network of conversations is the source of “knowledge networks,” a construct quite widely used in the field of knowledge management. See Verna Allee, “Knowledge Networks and Communities of Practice,” OD Practitioner 32, no. 4 (2000). Don Lavoie was a colleague. As far as I know he never put the concept in print, but taught students about “returnability” in the context of how online collaborative tools like SharePoint or Lotus Notes change the nature of interactions and conversations. When you have an online conversation, mediated by these kinds of technologies, you can usually come back to the content, as office workers may find to their dismay when they discover that their employer has archived copies of all their emails. The problem, however, is we never know what another group, or the same people at a different time or in another place—i.e. in a different context—will make of the tools. Although you can return to them, these artifacts don’t have meaning on their own: people have to make meaning of them and, as Brown and Duguid explain so well, meaning depends on context. See John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000): ch. 7. I want to acknowledge here that the distinction I’m drawing between management and organizing was foreshadowed by Douglas McGregor’s “Theory X” and “Theory Y” organizations and by Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker’s “mechanistic” and “organic” systems, as well as other writers, none of whom had the benefit of philosophical discussions about paradigms or worldviews, which came later. Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960); Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker, The Management of Innovation, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961; reprint, 1994). This doesn’t mean there is no room for some of the practices associated with management. It does mean that the main way of getting work done is by people organizing themselves, treating one another as peers and being accountable to each other. Chapter 6 1. In his highly praised and well-received book on the value of craftwork, Matthew Crawford has a bit to say about knowledge-work, which he contrasts with craftwork. See his Shop Class as Soulcraft (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 2. Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda note that, from Fredrick Taylor onwards, earlier writers kept a close eye on work, but, in organization studies during the 1960s and 1970s, attention shifted away from the work place. Among their list of contributions that were work-oriented, it is relevant that most were based on the observation of factory-work. See Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda, “Bringing Work Back In,” 225 Notes 226 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Organization Science 12, no. 1 (2001): 80. As ethnographic research, based on interviews and participant observation, become more acceptable (compared to quantitative research which always was), we are seeing a renewed interest in work, such as Julian Orr’s close look at the work of people who repair photocopiers: Julian E. Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Some of the most interesting studies in recent years that provide a deeper understanding of work practices, have come from writers who, like Orr, were linked to Xerox PARC and the Institute for Research on Learning. Jared Sandberg, “Modern Conundrum: When Work’s Invisible, So Are Its Satisfactions,” The Wall Street Journal, Asia, February 19, 2008 (my emphasis). See also, Robbie Kunreuther, “Goals, Objectives, and the Everyday Employee,” Fedsmith.com, March 11, 2008 (www.fedsmith.com/article/1540/). Peter Eisner, “How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War,” Washington Post, April 3, 2007. Charles Chaplin, Modern Times (United States of America: United Artists, 1936) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)). Fritz Lang, Metropolis (Germany: UFA, 1927) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)). Historically important images of factory-work, from the same era, taken in the Western Electric Company’s Cicero, Illinois, plant can be viewed, online, at Harvard University Business School’s Baker Library Historical Collections website ‘The Human Relations Movement: Harvard Business School and the Hawthorne Experiments 1924–33,’ ‘Western Electric Company Photograph Album’ (www.library.hbs. edu/hc/hawthorne/). The famous Hawthorne experiments, conducted in the 1920s and 1930s, which sparked the human relations movement in management, were undertaken at this plant. Researchers, led by Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger, explaining the outcome of conventional experiments with lighting levels in the plant, which appeared to have failed, argued that what seemed to be perverse results were a consequence of industrial workers wanting and getting approval and appreciation; or, more generally, being treated like human beings not machines. Their published findings contributed to the emergence of organization development, which continues to challenge the fundamentals of management that are still in place a hundred years after they were first articulated. On the Hawthorne Plant experiments and the human relations movement see Fritz. J. Roethlisberger, William J. Dickson, and Harold A. Wright, Management and the Worker: An Account of a Research Program Conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939). On the history of organization development as a heretical movement, see Art Kleiner, The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1996). For a short but quite comprehensive overview, including a history of the concept, see the Wikipedia entry on “Social Network” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ network. The last 10 years or so have seen a proliferation of material on social networks and mapping social and organizational networks, accompanied and encouraged by the more recent explosion of Internet-based social networks. For a sample of work on networks and organizations see Verna Allee, “Knowledge Networks and Communities of Practice,” OD Practitioner 32, no. 4 (2000); Robert Cross and Andrew Parker, The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done Notes in Organizations (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004); Art Kleiner, “Karen Stevenson’s Quantum Theory of Trust,” Strategy+Business 29 (2002); Valdis Krebs, “Introduction to Social Network Analysis” (www.leader-values.com/Content/ detail.asp?ContentDetailID=912) and “Knowledge Networks: Mapping and Measuring Knowledge Creation, Re-use and Flow” (www.leader-values.com/Content/detail. asp?ContentDetailID=914); Duncan J. Watts, “Relationship Space: Meet Your Network Neighbors,” Wired 11.06 (2003). See also Ronald Breiger, “The Analysis of Social Networks,” in Handbook of Data Analysis, eds. Melissa Hardy and Alan Bryman (London: SAGE Publications, 2004) and Union of International Associations, “Network Visualizations Online” (www.uia.be/sites/uia.be/db/db/x.php?dbcode=vi& year=2006). 9. My arguments owe a lot to Etienne Wenger, particularly to his concept of “identity.” Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Explaining the work of insurance claims clerks, he says they don’t switch off their work and work identities when they leave work and, similarly, they bring who they are at home to work. You don’t slip your identity on and off like a coat. It is integral to who you are—your “being-in-the world,” which is why everything that happens between people at work is their work. Anything may, and probably does, influence their attitudes in some way, hence what they do or don’t do. Just as relevant here is Richard McDermott’s powerful and subversive comment that “knowledge belongs to communities.” His position, that people acquire knowledge by making or creating it together, when they interact, is a radical departure from the standard Western idea that knowledge is stuff that people have in their heads, “between their ears.” See Richard McDermott, “Knowing Is a Human Act,” Upgrade 3, no. 1 (2002): especially p. 9. On “being-in-the-world” see Hubert L. Dreyfus, Beingin-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 10. This is probably the right place to identify the interpretative tradition in social theory that has shaped my thinking about the work of organizing. Here it is hermeneutics and particularly the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. G. Barden and J. Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), especially his argument that meaning is constructed between people or between a person and an object—that meaning resides in the space between them. See Georgina Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). Besides Max Weber and Alfred Schutz, whose contributions I’ve already referred to, this line of thinking includes phenomenology (for example: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis in European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962)); contemporary hermeneutics (for example: Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971)); and postmodern thought (for example: Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1972); David L. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1989); D.M. Boje, R.P. Gephardt, and T.J. Thatchenkery, eds., Postmodern Management and Organization Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1996); William Bergquist, The Postmodern Organization: 227