Collaborating over Meanings in Management: Drucker Looks at Effectiveness
| Published date | 01 May 1987 |
| Date | 01 May 1987 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055578 |
| Pages | 34-39 |
| Author | Stuart Hannabuss |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Collaborating over Meanings
in Management: Drucker Looks
at Effectiveness
by Stuart Hannabuss, School of Librarianship and Information Studies, Robert Gordon's
Institute of Technology, Aberdeen
Introduction
In personal relationships, the clarification and negotiation
of meanings is central. We live within a web of language and,
by giving things names and through sharing and restructuring
knowledge, we communicate with each other. In personnel
management in organisations, therefore, the management of
meaning lies at the heart of
things.
Such management entails
the ordering and co-ordinating of work done by ourselves
and other people, as well as the mastery of complex social
and technical patterns of thought and behaviour.
Meaning is embedded in every strategy and statement
within the organisation, in the job description which reifies
the managerial conception and perception of a work role,
in a policy which operationalises key objectives and priorities
selected from a context of the perceived reality, and in
performance appraisal where, within authority structures and
dyadic relationships, roles and intentionalities are negotiated.
Effective personnel management exemplifies successful
communication, a process made up not just of explicit and
objective "public domain" facts and information but also
overt and latent value and belief systems, attitudes and
prejudices. At the same time, people in organisations use
meanings for explanation and command as well as to suggest
and explore hidden or half-realised symbolisms and myths.
Meaning, then, as revealed in action and interaction, is a
crucial interpretative dimension of the personnel manager's
role.
Knowledge Paradigms
The work of
Kuhn[1],
Mannheim[2], Ziman[3] and Gurvitch[4]
shows how pervasive are the knowledge paradigms within
which particular groups of people work and think. Such
paradigms, of course, are made up of informational or
cognitive elements (such as what we know, what we know
we know, what experts are considered to know, what novices
are expected to know) as well as value and belief-laden
knowledge. Into this second category come what educational
psychologists call affective knowledge (i.e. dealing with the
feelings); but research has broadened our conception of this
axiological area into a fuller view taking in ideology and
symbolism, the pragmatics of discourse, semiotics and non-
verbal communication. Ultimately, it is impossible to divide
paradigms up like cakes, for the various components inter-
penetrate.
In personnel management, there is a natural interest in the
operation and scope of such paradigms within the
organisation (or, at least, interpersonally in group structures).
Sociologists and social anthropologists like Burrell and
Morgan[5],
Harris[6], Willmott[7] and Astley[8] have
illuminated the behaviour of people in such groups through
looking at connections between explicit actions and perceived
realities, and often there are important outcomes to this, such
as a mismatch between the perceived priorities of top
management and personnel. Greatest problems lie over
central issues like power and roles, tasks and people.
It is difficult to conceptualise problems such as these in
terms of hegemonistic meanings, that is, authoritative
attributions of meaning to key concepts within the subject
domain or activity. Unlike, say, botany or zoology, or even
in a thesaural structure of a knowledge database, where the
syntactical and semantic relationships between concepts is
often highly ordered (e.g. hierarchically, cohyponymically),
the central concepts and meanings in the field of
management are more consensually negotiated. This is, in
part, due to the plain linguistic fact that sociological concepts
are eligible to a plurality of hermeneutic approaches (e.g.
concepts like "performance", "socialisation", "justice"), and,
in part, to the origins of most common and useful meanings
within an oral and practitioner-orientated tradition.
This is why Astley[8] correctly speaks of the management
"discipline" as "an arena for the interchange of theoretical
ideas uncoupled from their base in managerial practice",
emphasising the way in which, as if in an arena, meanings
get shaped and reformulated through use, rarely stay fixed,
and change over time as new combinations of skills and
perceptions arise. An example of this, with reference to the
concept of "performance", is discussed by Hannabuss[9]. The
pragmatic incrementalism of meaning in management, what
Knorr-Cetina[10] terms "constructivistic", characterises any
area of professional activity where knowledge exchanges
incorporate negotiated meanings of this type. At work,
simultaneously, are facts and beliefs, knowledge and
metaknowledge, factors deriving from the organisational
culture.
Organisational Cultures
The researcher is encouraged to see this process holistically,
partly because managers themselves have beliefs about the
task and business of managing, i.e. they are vigorously
metacognitive and self-critical. The beliefs they have about
what effective management
is[11,
12, 13] and the extent to
which their own practice and attitudes conforms to, or
diverges from this consensual paradigm (e.g. it might be a
predominantly entrepreneurial paradigm), as well as how they
themselves think about their own thinking[14], profoundly
influence decision making in the office and on the shop floor.
Moreover, they live within an organisational culture to which
they themselves contribute in no small way. This culture is
34 • PR 16,5 1987
To continue reading
Request your trial