Week 1

What is WIS about?

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In WIS we question the traditional understanding of learning as simple transferral of notions and information and favour an approach that focuses on the experiential and situated character of learning. This means we stress the situated, historically and socially dependent character of any practice – such as `managing’ or `studying’ - and its meaning.

Social practices are something we all know about because they inform our existence. Education, for example, is reproduced through institutionalised practices on which you, as students, have much to say as practitioners. We seek to understand these practices through the insights of reading a variety of texts – novels (see below) as well as more traditional sources of understanding social practices. We are interested in exploring what it means to be situated in practices that position us as students ( but also as employees, consumers, daughters and sons etc.). Personal experience is highly valued. This is true in the course work as well as in the essays.

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WIS is designed to facilitate interactions and the exchange of ideas in lectures as well as in the seminars. Lectures and seminars are most appropriately conceived as ‘learning sets’ where involvement and commitment is encouraged and highly regarded. The learning sets are the locations in which the topics are explored, analysed and problematised. In these settings small experiential exercises or demonstrations are used to prompt reflections on the topics being explored in order to make more immediate and ‘embodied’ sense of the issues at stake.

We will be orchestrating these exercises in the first part of the course so that you can get acquainted with the process of teaching and learning pursued in this course. In the second part of the course we will move to a more participative approach to these exercises by encouraging you to take the lead and come up with exercises (dramatisation, role playing, films, games etc.). The purpose of such exercise is for you to learn through doing – it is intended that you develop an embodied understanding of the relevance of central ideas in WIS for making sense of such practices (e.g. the process of designing and orchestrating an experiential exercise).

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Another fundamental part of WIS is the use of novels. Drawing upon four novels the key elements (power, identity, inequality and insecurity) are illustrated and wider issues, such as freedom, responsibility and autonomy are explored. Novels can be very relevant to making sense of complex issues. In WIS they are (also) employed to demonstrate the connections between ‘normal life’ and academic disciplines (ie management) that are usually constructed as separated and distinct realms.

Slide 5

We have summarised how we envisage this course and the kind of work involved. However WIS is very much about you, what you want from it, and what you make of it. In a sense, ‘freezing’ WIS in a three page document is a contradiction. It is something we dislike. Why? Because it is a disciplining mechanism that situates ourselves in a power relation in which you as student are positioned on the other side….. This is an example of what we will be discussing in WIS. It is a theme within WIS to which you/we will repeatedly return as it is provoked by contradictions that lie at the heart of the `delivery’ of this kind of course in the context of a degree program. Despite the contradictions – which we view as a resource for exploring key WIS ideas and themes – we believe that much can be learned – as previous groups have testified over the past 20 years or more that this course has been taught.

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We recognise that having a clear, spoon-feedable formula for lectures and seminars is unusual and unnerving. To some extent, this is counteracted by the existence of the course text, the key concepts, themes and topics, the extensive reading list and the website. Nonetheless, we recognise that the experience of taking the course can be demanding and stretching. WIS clearly has a structure (like this document or the exams etc.) but it organised and delivered in a way that its meaning and significance is discovered through dialogical and experiential processes of interaction rather than presented through monological and purely cognitive mechanisms of teaching. While we work within a structure, we will actively encourage you to play with it and challenge it – but in a disciplined way, of course, which returns us to the contradictions that are both a constraint and a resource for your learning process.

Learning and Climbing

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Extract from R.M. Pirsig, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Corgi 1974, pp204-5; 206, emphases added

`Up ahead all of Chris’s movements seem tired and angry. He stumbles on things, lets branches tear at him, instead of pulling them to one side. I’m sorry to see this. Some blame can be put on the YMCA camp he attended for two weeks just before we started.

From what he’s told me, they made a big ego thing out of the whole outdoor experience. A proof-of-manhood thing. He began in a lowly class they were careful to point out was rather disgraceful to be in…original sin. Then he was allowed to prove himself with a long series of accomplishments—swimming, rope-tying…he mentioned a dozen of them, but I’ve forgotten them....'

 

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`...It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and co-operative when they had ego goals to fulfil, I’m sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we’re paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way’.

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Learning and Climbing (4)

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S/he’s here but s/he’s not here.

S/he rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when s/he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here."

What s/he’s looking for, what s/he wants, is all around him, but s/he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because s/he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

Management Lives - Course Textbook

Essay on text prepared by David Knights and Hugh Willmott

David Knights/Hugh Willmott

`... literature is an extension of life, not only horizontally, bringing the reader into contact with events or locations or persons or experience or problems he or she has not otherwise met, but also, so to speak, vertically, giving the reader experience that is deeper, sharper, more precise than much of what takes place in life' (Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge : Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 48)

Academic studies of management especially in the form of textbook accounts often seem dry and unexciting, and yet the lives of managers may prove to be anything but boring or uneventful.

Most established management texts treat their readers as if they - you, we - were comparatively ignorant, passive subjects. This is most apparent in the block-busting, door stopping texts, some of which come complete with an instructor's manual, overhead transparencies and even a video. Readers are presented with an endless stream of theories, typologies, bloodless descriptions and often patronizing prescriptions that they are expected to absorb in meticulous, mind-numbing detail. The producers of these texts make a Herculean effort to present a comprehensive summary of their subject. An equally Herculean effort is expected from readers in memorizing their contents. Students find this extremely difficult partly because there is so much to remember but largely due to the abstract nature of the material. They therefore are unable to feel themselves to be members of the discourse and this makes the process of memorizing hard indeed.

A parallel can be drawn here between management textbooks and manuals written to provide information and instruction for other activities - such as motorcycle maintenance. As Pirsig (1974) notes of instruction manuals, the knowledge contained within them is disembodied in the sense that it pays little or no attention to the lived experience of maintaining motorcycles:

`it occurred to me that there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted' (Pirsig: 28)

Pirsig argues that there is always more to maintaining motorcycles than knowing the contents of the manual. There is, for example, the fostering of an awareness of how a bike runs and sounds. This awareness sensitises us to potential problems that may be embryonic but could, if left unattended, become catastrophic. In manuals, the structure of the component parts and systems of bikes are described but with scant regard for how these parts and systems mesh together. Manuals are unable to provide an awareness and understanding of how any particular bike is performing.

The shortcomings of machine manuals are multiplied when it comes to the lived experience of human beings. Life at work, for example, tends to be far more complex and less predictable. Unfortunately, many textbooks present management lives at work as if they were machines. Yet even when heading up huge bureaucratic ‘machines’, organization and management is far from mechanistic. Despite this, theorists from scientific management to business reengineering, and from functionalism to systems theory, persist in treating the organization like a technical or organic machine. One way around the problems both of disembodied abstraction and machine like over-simplicity is to borrow from another medium (e.g. literature) when writing about management.

The novel provides us with a vehicle for bringing our subject matter to life in a way that can make it easier for students to explore the experience of managing and organizing. In place of the narrow, technical and disembodied representation of management found in most textbooks, we have explored the use novels to appreciate how managerial work is no less human and `troubled’ than any other aspect of life, including that of studying for a university degree or teaching students. When reading novels we imagine, for example, how a particular character may react or, more importantly, what we would do in similar circumstances.

Take, for example, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, where we observe the precarious character of status, wealth and power of a successful New York bond-trader on Wall Street. The story line charts Sherman McCoy's downfall from the pinnacle of affluence and achievement as a self-styled 'Master of the Universe'. His fall from grace follows a car accident involving Sherman where a black youth is knocked down and seriously injured. The source of Sherman's success and wealth exemplifies an arbitrary relationship between reward and effort. His fall is equally contingent and accidental. Had he not been driving his mistress – Maria - from the airport, he would have had no reason to drive close by the Bronx. Had Sherman not been scared of an attack, he would not have aggravated one. Had Sherman and his mistress been less anxious to leave the Bronx, the car would have been driven less recklessly. This and many more contingencies were the conditions that eventually condemned Sherman, to an impoverished, and incarcerated, existence. The novel illustrates the extremes of precariousness of success in business allowing parallels to be drawn from management that although perhaps less dramatic, have the same consequences for the lives of particular managers.

This concern to understand managing as a lived experience has been at the centre of our teaching activity for the past few years and forms the background agenda of Management Lives (Sage, 1999) which is a product of a jointly taught course. In this book, we use novels, like Bonfire of the Vanities, to bring management to life. But our discussion is also guided by a theoretical framework that comprises the four important social science concepts: power, inequality, identity and insecurity.

Numerous, if not most issues, including, for example, the feminization of work and the erosion of job security, lend themselves to interrogation with the use of these concepts. As job security declines, the workplace becomes increasingly feminized, office jobs attract a particular sense of gender identity. At the same time, social inequality operates to preclude women from the senior management and few of the jobs (including those of managers) are secure. These are the focus of considerable attention in the media, government and personal life. Yet, they are often neglected, or so taken for granted as to be ignored, in textbooks on management. In addition to offering a more systematic way of analysing the practicalities of managing and organizing, the concepts of power, identity, inequality and insecurity provide a bridge to more familiar ideas and theories drawn from the literature on everyday life as well as to the study of management.

For example, in the third chapter of Management Lives, two common but opposing understandings of human nature - behaviourism and symbolic interactionism – are explored. Elements from each are then drawn upon to develop an alternative understanding of individuals’ identity-securing preoccupations with self-image and social standing. In a later chapter, the operation of power and inequality in the context of the aristocratic household portrayed in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, which is contrasted with the fast-moving world of The Bonfire of the Vanities. The Remains of the Day describes how the fine distributions of hierarchical power and status reproduce themselves at both ends of the system of stratification such that the servant class replicates, within its own ranks, a parallel hierarchical ordering of status. The comparison with Wolfe's Bonfire usefully marks out the distinction between deference, in the form of devotion to the aristocratic master, and the status differentials generated by the competitive, success-seeking preoccupations of the affluent strata of New York society. Connecting issues of power and inequality with those of identity and insecurity, The Bonfire of the Vanities explores how a sense of security may also be accompanied by a (paranoid) fear of its precariousness and immanent loss. Power and inequality are conceptualized as the medium and outcome of management practice in a way that appreciates their precarious and dynamic character.

While Management Lives is informed by a range of theoretical concerns, the text is written particularly with the student in mind. Consequently, though both its subject matter and its theoretical focus are complex, there is an attempt to communicate in a simple and everyday meaningful manner. The novels act as vehicles for illustrating abstract concepts and making connections to students' everyday experiences. It is, of course, readers of Management Lives, including our students, who will be the judges of our success in conveying complex ideas in accessible, relevant and memorable ways.

References

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