1 Management’s New Paradigms
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Why Assumptions Matter ~ Management is business management~ the one right organization~ the one right way to manage people ~ technologies and end-user are fixed and given ~ management’s scope is legally defined ~ management’s scope is politically defined ~ the inside is management’s domain
Introduction
Why assumptions matter
Basic assumptions about reality are the paradigms of a social science, such as management. They are usually held subconsciously by the scholars, the writers, the teachers, and the practitioners in the field. Yet those assumptions largely determine what the discipline-scholars, writers, teachers, and practitioners- assumption to be reality.
The discipline’s basic assumptions about reality determine what it focuses on. They determine what a discipline considers “facts”, and indeed what it considers the discipline itself to be all about. The assumptions also largely determine what is being disregarded in a discipline or is being pushed aside as an “annoying exception.” They decide both what in a given discipline is being paid attention to and what is neglected or ignored.
A good example is what happened to the most insightful of the earlier management scholars: Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) Because her assumptions did not fit the realities which the budding discipline of management assumed in the 1930s and 1940s, she became a “nonperson” even before her death in 1932, with her work practically forgotten for twenty-five years or more. And yet we now know that her basic assumptions regarding society, people and management were far closer to reality than those on which the management people then based themselves-and still largely base themselves today.
Yet, despite their importance, the assumptions are rarely analyzed, rarely studied, rarely challenged-indeed rarely even made explicit.
For a social discipline such as management the assumptions are actually a good deal more important than are the paradigms for a natural science. The paradigm-that is, the prevailing general theory-has no impact on the natural universe. Whether the paradigm states that the sun rotates around the earth or that, on the contrary, the earth rotates around the sun has no effect on sun and the earth. A natural science deals with the behavior of OBIECT. But a social discipline such as management deals with the behavior of people and human institution. Practitioners will therefore rend to act and to behave as the discipline’s assumptions tell them to. Even more important, the reality of a natural science, the physical universe and its laws, do not change(or if they do only over eons rather than over centuries, let alone over decades). The social universe has no “natural laws” of this kind. It is thus subject to continuous change. And this means that assumptions that were valid yesterday can become invalid and, indeed, totally misleading in no time at all.
Everyone these days preaches team as the “right” organization for every task. (I myself began to preach teams as early as 1954 and especial in my 1973 book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.) Underlying the present orthodoxy regarding teams is a basic assumption held practically by all management theorists and by most practitioners since the earliest days of thinking about organization, that is, since Henri Fayol in France and Walter Rathenau in Germany around 1900: there is- or at least, there must be –one right organization. And what matters most is not whether the team is indeed “the answer”(so far there is not too much evidence for it), but, as will be discussed a little later, that the basic assumption of the one right organization is no longer tenable.
What matters most in a social discipline such as management are therefore the basic assumptions. And a change in the basic assumptions matters even more.
Since the study of management first begin-and truly did not emerge until the 1930s- two sets of assumption regarding the realities of management have been held by most scholar, most writer and most practitioners.
One set of assumptions underlies the discipline of management:
1. Management is business management.
2. There is – or there must be –one right organization structure.
3. There is –or there must be one right way to manage people.
Another set of assumptions underlies the practice of management:
1. Technologies, markets and end-uses are given.
2. Management’s scope is legally defined.
3. Management is internally focused.
4. The economy as defined by national boundaries is the “ecology” of enterprise and management.
For most of this period- at least until the early 1980s-all but the first of these assumptions were close enough to reality to be operational, whether for research, for writing, for teaching or for practicing management. By now all of them have outlived their usefulness. They are close to being caricatures. They are now so far removed from actual reality that they are becoming obstacles to the Theory and even more serious obstacles to the Practice of management. Indeed, reality is fast becoming the very opposite of what these assumptions and to try to formulate the New Assumptions that now have to inform both the study and the practice of management.