Understanding the future by looking at the past: Search of management wisdom as therapeutic autocommunication
Ari Ahonen, Pori University Consortium
Tomi J. Kallio, Pori University Consortium
It may well be argued that the 1900s was, both socially and theoretically, the ‘century of business management’. Socially in the sense that, historically, business management becoming a separate, divergent and leading function has been an exceptionally fast and revolutionary (Chandler, 1977). Theoretically in the sense that the scale of the literature describing the activities of this new group, i.e. both the academic management and organisation study, and the wider cultural management and organisation discourse attached to it, has been massive (Koontz, 1961). Consequently, during the past century, there has been a huge amount of literature produced on the efficient management of organisations that it is possible to talk about special ‘management theory industry’ (Micklethwait & Woolridge, 1997).
After the Second World War, in particular, the public communication atmosphere has, due to the dedicated participants, once and again been filled with constantly renewing speeches, demands, predictions and promises about radical upheavals testing the structure of working life and its organisations. In reality, the promised or demanded changes have often remained modest compared to the volume of discussion (Eccles & Nohria, 1992). Given that the promised changes and reforms of working life have remained rather modest, it is only fair to ask how the management theory industry achieves its social legitimation. Accordingly, in the paper the authors try to critically explore the very essence and social function of this discourse: to search the cultural locus of the search for wisdom on the management and efficient running of organisations.
In the paper it is argued that in management and organisation literature, to compensate for the inhuman logic of business, it is necessary to have the Grail, constantly renewing descriptions of an ideal community in the discourses of progress, where all values, ideals and hopes could be simultaneously fulfilled, for everybody. The authors thus suggest that the management theory industry serves a wider social call, and that the cultural locus of the discoursive search for management wisdom seems be to function as a gigantic therapeutic autocommunication on an institutional level. It seems that the discoursive search for wisdom on the efficient running of organisations is part of the social mechanism, whereby the core cultural values are taught to the young and reaffirmed to the old. In this sense, the discourse on the efficient running of organisations is a ritual, more or less a religious ritual, gigantic cultural self-reflection, whose fundamental goal is above all to decrease existential anxiety by projecting the value conflicts and other problems related to all communal life from an intrapsychic to an institutional level.
At the cultural level, the theory industry feeding the management wisdom of the efficient running of organisations is serving internal, therapeutic mission, the Grail, and thus becomes legitimised even though the promised changes and reforms of actual working life have remained modest. Therefore it is likely that the discourse will maintain its social legitimation, and it seems only logical to say that the discoursive search for wisdom on the management and efficient running of organisations has just begun. Thus, the authors feel that it is likely that we shall witness another century of business management triumph.