Monika Kostera

We live in a world of change. The last decades have brought us some indisputable social progress and a growing awareness that we indeed share life with a planet that we are responsible for. But ours is also a difficult time, one demanading a re-thinking and a fast adoption of new constructive approaches to mounting social, economic and natural problems which can no longer be kept at bay or remedied with the old means which bring social consequences such as: privatization of problems and alienation, the increasing lack of solidarity with and indeed growing contempt for the poorer classes by the middle class, including even media and many intellectuals, a fragmentation of life, a time that Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid modernity, increasingly devoid of any stable points, lasting relationships and acceptance of obligations towards the Other. Education is becoming increasingly available for many social groups and individuals that up till now have been barred from entering a university. On the other hand, the knowledge created and passed on at the contemporary universities is more and more dispossessed and the whole higher education process is being ferociously macdonaldized as George Ritzer observed some time ago. Our organizations are becoming open to diversity and less fixated upon the idea of a fordist linear order. But at the same time, they grow liquid and fragmented, no longer able nor willing to offer security of employment or indeed any sensible participation to its ”human resources”. Even the term itself speaks loudly enough of what we humans have become in the face of our organizations. Organizations and education considered vital for the managing of them and generally dealing with them, have become like huge fast food outlets where everything is supposed to happen in a given order and way, but nobody is foolish enough to trust that the smile offered by the employee is an expression of sympathy, joy, recognition of the Other or indeed even the pleasure of work of the smiler. No attempts are made to link the parts into a meaningful whole and only that what is “adds value” is considered worth pursuing. But what value and to what? And, indeed, what for?

The 20th century has been called the century of managers who have been taking over control, bit by bit, over private and public sector organizations, NGOs, education, entertainment and all spheres traditionally belonging to independent professions, academia being perhaps the most recent to fall under its spell (it is falling still with some bastions not taken yet, notably, for example, in Eastern Europe). The managerial culture penetrates other disciplines and milieus, including schools, theatres and art galleries. Management is studied by managers and ordinary employees, entrepreneurs, farm owners, members of the clergy and artists. This is, of course, not a unidirectional process. Somewhere by the end of the last century it has become increasingly clear that there is a strong influence in the other direction as well: management has become infused with other ideas and cultures, deriving from all the milieus which it has infiltrated. What we call management and management science today is different from the technocratic discipline of the 60s and 70s, which was strongly inclined towards economics and bookkeeping. Nowadays it encompasses sociological, philosophical, anthropological, philological, pedagogical, psychological, artistic, theological and indeed many many other ideas that are increasingly invading the mainstream. At the same time, managerial culture has ceased to be a culture of the ruling elite of technocrats and turned into a vibrant popular culture, diverse, full of redundancies and inconsistencies. The biggest challenge, as well of blessing that this situation creates is a culture of diversity. What we desperately need in our times is an idea of management that is capable of holistically sustaining this development, in human as well as in ecosystemic terms. This kind of management is, indeed, demanding a novel approach towards organizations, people, nature, needs, consumers, beauty, experience and life. It is, perhaps, a question of a new paradigm. However, fortunately, we already have what we need to have in order to embark on this way.

This foundation for the way ahead, towards a holistically sustainable management, is located within the humanities. With its help we can start addressing several pivotal questions, of which I shall now present five exemplary ones, to show what we are dealing with and where we need to go.

Firstly, there is a need to find meaning in organizations and organizing - one of the most pervasive phenomenon of contemporary society. Organizations have always been multi-faceted and complex and people have been spending an increasing part of their lives dealing with them. Today practitioners as well as theoreticians call for an open concern with the meaning of organizations in our lives and within the ecosystem of the planet. Human experiences have more sense than it seems when we look at them from a single, simple perspective. There is still hope for humanity thanks to the connections: being human does not only mean being greedy, egoistic and aggressive, but also - empathic, understanding and compassionate. This is a time which calls for taking a stand against greed, shortsightedness, striving only for what can be measured with no consideration for the consequences and for a compassionate management. Humanities can teach us where and how to look for these qualities and how those who walked the Earth before us have gone wrong and right in this regard; what they have left for us to learn, left there as a free resource for all to share.

Secondly, resources are one of the most vital problems of our times. People representing states and organizations are increasingly concerned about where and how to acquire them, how to manage them, avoid wastage and show responsibility towards the environment and others. Organizations react to the need for responsible management of resources quite often not so much by a more green and ethical approach but by a radical “cost-cutting” tactic, getting rid of everything that does not immediately generate profit, outsourcing corporate functions, limiting the number of employees and letting many contributors work as outside contractors etc. These corporations have grown ferociously fixated upon one dimension of their life only, cutting down not only on functions generating cost but also those aspects that do not generate income such as on ethical values, human happiness, sense of belonging, responsibility, care and inspiration. Yet this is not the only way. James March’s classical idea of organizational slack as a strategy of redundancy intended to creatively adapt to changes in the environment may serve as a guideline an inspiration for the new holistically sustainable strategies. Now is the time to work against lean and mean organizations, devoid of all human sense, anorectic machines for goal achievement, and for ebullient, baroque organizations, which thrive on redundancy, recycling and re-usage. Humanities can give us an ethics and aesthetics for this agenda and offer a language to talk about things that cannot sensibly be calculated and maximized or minimized.

Thirdly, there is the issue of how our organizations approach change. Authentic and profound change needs to be rooted in the needs of the participants and the environment. Quick fixes and linear turnarounds, based on one or a few factors only, have a tendency to make our collective problems as inhabitants of the planet Earth, more, rather than less, profound and urgent. We need to take into consideration aspects that are dark, hidden, shared, non-linear and seemingly irrelevant. Instead of linear planning, we need to develop a sensitivity towards synchronicity and serendipity. It is time to speak out against manipulated, planned change, driven forcefully through without consideration for the environment, and for transformation, a change that is affirmative of the cycles of life, death and rebirth. Humanities can help us to find the way through darkness and obscurity and learn the lessons we so much need to learn for our collective and organizational futures.

Fourthly, there is a growing concern about the importance of learning. More and more, organizations and managers appreciate learning beyond superficial accumulation of information and data. Human life consists of constant education and many have started viewing organizations in much the same way, as learning organizations, as, for example, in the writing of Peter Senge. Learning in order to be deep and creative, as Chris Argyris and Donald Schon have pointed out some time ago, has to be concerned with understanding rather than memorizing, with problematizing rather than receiving models and ideas, with contextualization rather than fragmentation and only definition of separate parts. The whole area of learning is too complex to be left to technocrats. What is needed is an interdisciplinary and holistic approach and that is exactly what the humanities can offer us. It is time to act against a new Taylorism called knowledge management which serves to subdue the knowledgeable to managerialist systems, and for the development of wisdom in organizations. Humanities have much to bring in this sphere: a broad, redundant, inspiring education, where history, art, ethics, philosophy play a vital role, and which actually helps students to look for their own answers, use their imagination and sensitivity, which inspires them to reach out of the shells of their egos and of what is known toward new horizons and senses of community.

Fifthly, intuition has been something of a strict taboo in the last century, not least among management professionals and theorists, even though old masters such as Chester Barnard recognized the importance of intuition for the good manager. Now voices are being raised for the necessity and indeed, inevitability, of the re-inclusion of intuition to organizations and ways of thinking of and practicing management. If we are to solve the contemporary problems of an ailing ecosystem, a growing spiritual and existential imbalance in common everyday life, and deal with mounting problems of economies running amok and communities dissipating, we need to welcome intuition into the decision processes. Pure logic will only tell us that a solution is impossible and it is not good enough to leave it at that. We need humanities in our curricula, especially in the curricula of managers, to develop sensitivity and get in touch with their compassionate nature. We need to take a stand against just in time management and for synchronicity in management. Humanities can offer a way of discerning signals that show that the time is right for certain actions and ideas, when such signs cannot reasonably be forecasted by means of statistics and mathematics.

To fulfill these ends we need to take inspiration for the humanities. They are capable of leading us towards the holistically sustainable management that is so desperately needed in our times. This kind of management incorporates a broad ecological awareness that Gregory Bateson had in mind when speaking of an ecology of the mind: according to him ecosystems consist of both natural and human spheres and it is only by understanding the complete informational patterns and thus grasping the ecosystemic unity that we can avoid eco-crisis.

Holistically sustainable management is about such a Batesonian ecological awareness, and it incorporates what is often regarded as dichotomies: the human and the natural, the spiritual and the material. Instead of forcing human activity and talent into predetermined forms - an activity seen as “management” by the mainstream theories and practices of the previous century, holistically sustainable management use natural flows of the inexhaustible human activity and imagination. It is not the same as leaving people and organizations to their own devices. Laisser faire all too often results in chaos and further impoverishment of the poor. What instead is needed is a conscious, thought-through and carefully balanced approach to management that is based on following the natural needs and activities and drawing energy from renewable sources, in terms of fuels and energy as well as labour and creativity.

Such a manager can no longer get away with being a short-sighted technocrat - rather, he or she is a new renaissance person. Many years ago, Abraham Maslow encouraged such an approach to management which he expressed in his idea of the eupsychic manager, and today his thought returns as a very relevant idea and starting point for the development of compassionate, sensitive, long-term oriented approaches. This is a time for holistically sustainable management. Such management needs humanists, and humanists need such management.

OCCUPY MANAGEMENT!

My lectures about Organizations and archetypes:

Jagiellonian University, 8/12/2010, 12:00  

University of Szczecin, 21/10/2011, 10:00

Gdansk University of Technology , 29/03/2012, 12:00

To book a lecture please email me

Some of the areas sketched in this Manifesto are addressed more in depth in my book, Organizacje i archetypy to be published in English as Organizations and Archetypes by Edward Elgar in October 2012