Archive for 1 May 2008
Is Management a General Skill?
| Peter Klein |
First Matthew Stewart, now Simon Blackburn — philosophers writing about management without actually knowing anything about management. Muses Blackburn:
People can be persuaded, and ordered, given incentives and penalties, suppressed and killed, but not managed. Human affairs can be administered, but administration is not management. One administers to people and their needs. One tries to manage them by ignoring whichever of their needs is inconvenient and by treating them as a mere means to your own ends. But, mirabile dictu, people treated like that become irritable and subversive and quite quickly unmanageable.
Daniel Davies tries valiantly to deconstruct this passage and concludes, rightly I think, that Blackburn hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s talking about. I find Davies’s own definition of “management” too narrow, focusing on routine administration and small-group leadership but excluding the activities of the general manager, but I think he gets Blackburn right. Philosophers, please stick to examining thyselves!
Organizations and Markets 
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