Archives
Book Review
Management Theory. A Critical and Reflexive Reading
Nanette Monin, Edited by Barbara Czarniawska & Martha Feldman,
ISBN: 978-0-415439-88-6 2004 248 pages Routledge, London & New York
Viviane Morrigan
School of Management and Marketing, University of Wollongong, NSW
One way to read Monin's text is as a 'methods' book, but one that is refreshingly out of the ordinary for the management discipline. In it the author describes the eclectic 'scriptive' method of text analysis that she developed for her PhD research project and is able to use in her current work in the Department of Management and Business at Massey University in New Zealand. Based on literary criticism, deconstruction, reader-response and rhetoric theories, the scriptive method involves a tripartite process of reading a text. Firstly, a 'dominant' reading focuses on the author, to provide a summary of (what the reader understands is) their argument(s). Monin chose this Derridean label in an effort to escape a realist mode of analysis - also calling it 'paraphrasis', defined as 'a rewording of the original text' (p.77). Secondly, an in-depth 'critical' reading focuses on the text. The backbone of her method, this phase examines three more 'P's that are borrowed from rhetoric theory and practice 'performance', 'perspective' and 'persuasion'. Thirdly, a 'reflexive' reading focuses on the reader, exploring how they have constructed their individual interpretation. This final phase Monin calls 'perpension' - the fifth 'P' - which she defines as 'a process of apprehending, considering and evaluating and "weighing up" the outcomes of my reading to this point' (p.80).
Monin then applies her scriptive method to analyse selected parts of five classic management texts: Frederick Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management, Mary Follett's Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, Peter Drucker's The Practice of Management, Henry Mintzberg's The Nature of Managerial Work, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter's The Change Masters: Corporate Entrepreneurs at Work. Monin concludes that four of the texts contain a long-held and institutionalized utopian metanarrative and root metaphor that provides ten 'precepts', or rules of moral conduct for guiding the practice of management and its theories over much of the 20th century. This is a heroic story of progress in the form of a journey that instructs managers to discard old incorrect theories and practices in favour of the map that is offered, which will ensure that the hero discovers the right question and its answer. When he (the hero is strongly gendered as male) reaches this utopian future place, the manager will enjoy many powerful roles that will enable him to control his employees, with whom to fight others different from them, but who are, nevertheless, resources for meeting the primary financial needs of both himself and his organisation (pp.189-191). Follett's is the exception - and noticeably so, as her text contradicts nine of the ten precepts (her only similarity is in her criticisms of the past and suggestions for management in the future) (p.193). Monin proposes that her evidence of Follett's different perspective can explain the discipline's long neglect of her ideas, and that a recent disciplinary interest in Follett's texts promises new narratives and worldviews to guide future theory and practice of management (pp. 196-197).
Taking up Monin's invitation to use her scriptive method, I follow up my 'dominant' reading outlined above with a 'critical' reading of her text that identifies a number of ways the author performs her text. Firstly Monin adopts a role of poet and literary scholar, which she signals from the beginning, when she introduces a poem by Robert Graves and a Shakespearian quotation in blank verse before even exercising her own voice. In her arresting opening paragraph she then constructs herself as a hybrid poet/management theorist:
I read poetry and I read management theory. Sometimes I read poetry in search of a good theory and sometimes I read management theory as if it were a poem (p.l).
Soon after, Monin reformats a quote from a rhetoric text into poetic form, in order to accentuate the authors' representation of constructivist views of reality as textual communications about human experience (p.3). Every succeeding chapter opens with a quote from a poem or Shakespearean text, and this overall literary performance on a management disciplinary stage is consistent with Monin's cross-disciplinary education in English Literature, Business Studies and Management.
Monin also gives voice to a pragmatist role in management theory and its practice. Her in-depth narrative of how she developed her scriptive method is a succinct summary of many theories - some popular and others rarely found in management texts. She describes her understanding of their many tensions, and how she resolves them in terms of an active process of making 'choices' - 'from an infinite array of reading strategies' (p.91) - in favour of: a commonsense method of expressive realism that provides standard interpretations of the author's meaning - necessary to engage readers who ascribe to this dominant way of reading a text, and as a foil for a deconstructive reading of a text; the focus of a structuralist semiotics and New Critics' literary analysis of the text as a 'network of symbolic associations' - but not using a realist focus on the text that denies the autonomy of the reader or excludes them from a role at all; deconstructivist understandings of the complexities of meaning making - but not 'nihilist' interpretations of truth: very close reader-response readings of texts that focus on readers and their interpretations - but not to the exclusion of more traditional views that focus on the relationship between the author and reader mediated by the text; and, finally, rhetoric and reflexivity (which she accepts less critically) for understandings of text in terms of strategies for gaining reader-writer identification through the text and its perspective, and of understanding the role(s?) of the self (selves?) in a critically interpretive process (pp. 45-80).
Metaphors are abundant throughout the text, both as objects of analysis and as rhetorical tools for providing the author's particular perspectives (the latter sometimes become rather tortured, heavily layered and so mixed that they lose their rhetorical effectiveness). Monin identifies a range of metaphors that are used by many authors - of other as well as management texts, such as the ones she examines. However, using metaphor herself, she extends her readings to a deeper level of 'root' metaphors so that, for example, she describes how Taylor's rather obvious and well-known use of warfare, sports and machine metaphors enhances root metaphors of 'an ideal moral order' and 'money as a God substitute'. She concludes by admitting to a 'distaste' for parts of Taylor's text and reflects on how they contradict her competing perspective, expressed in her own metaphors that use words such as 'dance', 'sing', and 'decorate' (p.94-103 ). Drucker uses metaphors similar to Taylor, but they are sometimes contradictory and, in combination with rhetorical techniques, they construct a dichotomy that indirectly assigns managers and the United States as the rightful possessors of power to lead others into a utopian society (pp. 121-130). Mintzberg provides contradictory constructions of the manager as 'folk hero' and as victim of their own work practices and of management science. Interestingly, Monin offers this as evidence to explain the enthusiastic acceptance of his text by both managers and critics of managers. In her reflection, Monin appears to be struggling with feelings of guilt, as she admits to wanting to provide a favourable interpretation of Mintzberg's text because of a 'respect' for his ideas and his 'generosity' in reading her somewhat 'mocking and destructive' criticism of another of his texts (pp. 133-146).
Kanter uses oppositional rhetorical strategies and metaphors of geography, 'sustenance and health', and the organisation as mechanical vs. organic entity to mobilize American nationalism as a continuous strand throughout (pp. 148-157). In what I feel is a naive feminist position that denies the many differences between women, Monin is disappointed and angry with Kanter because she does not strike out on a journey that is different from the three men with whom Monin makes a comparison (pp. 157-158). Follett's text is a remarkable exception in that, although she also mobilises core metaphors of warfare and games as well as legal judgement, she uses these with rhetorical strategies, such as understatement, anecdote, and inclusive references to the less powerful, to subtly yet strongly construct a different story of management in terms of conflict and power (pp. 107-116). Follett differs from the others in her view of management as non-hierarchical, in her respect for the past, for alternative theories, and for the 'other' in people and organisations, and in her non-utopian hope for the future that includes acceptance of life's complexities and some of its errors. Follett's view is one of individual progress towards personal responsibility in managing conflict (pp. 193-194). Monin admires Follett's text, expressing only one negative reflection that derives from her close agreement with it in that she experienced 'many frustrations' with its depth of meanings that could not be adequately described within the structure of her argument (p.117 ).
Monin herself gives free rein to the journey metaphor in developing her own story (this metaphor is strategically useful for creating a sense of progress through change, as I have found in my current research where it was strongly mobilised by participants within organisational change programs). In her first and last chapter Monin describes how she developed and applied a method for finding her own identity and reading management texts by using a root metaphor of a 'journey' in the land of management thought. She does this from the vantage point of the vehicles of reading and writing which she harnesses in a tourist's journey of 'exploration' and 'discovery' in a largely 'unmapped' place of 'danger' and 'wonder'. She positions the 'reader' on a 'route' where she wants to 'construct' 'signposts' pointing the way(s) towards 'meaning' that she wants to 'share' with us in order to transform us into active 'reader-writers' like herself. Rather than taking a role as the heroic leader, Monin is more of a tour guide, teaching others to participate in new experiences.
To persuade the reader to discover what she has to offer, Monin offers maps for the new terrain in the form of illustrations that succinctly summarise her suggested method for reading (pp.76, 78) and her analysis of the five texts in the form of tables ('matrices') (pp.163, 171, 181). She finally summarises her critique in a beautifully concise half-page 10-point summary ('the ten precepts of management theory') (p.191). Buried in the chapter describing her scriptive method Monin warns the reader not to take her illustrations literally, as 'all these elemental textual considerations cannot actually be separated out in, what appears to be, diagrammatically illustrated a controlled fashion' (p.80), and this warning is repeated elsewhere (eg, p.188). Using language that seems to appeal to some sort of authority over Truth, she places a 'caveat' over her method:
Scriptive reading is boundaryless: in so far as I have described it as a method. I intend it to portray just what is discernibly happening in the reading process at certain given points along the way. Always there is hovering, somewhere within and just beyond the process I have described, and the visible text itself, an imminent aporia, an entanglement of potential meaning that leads the scriptive reader, teasing out its knotty strands, further and further away from, and deeper an deeper into, the multilayered, multifaceted and plurivocal text, to a point where reading could both permeate and sop up like a soft blotter, the hypnotic pull of infinite possibility - to meaning-making that could become endlessly elusive (p.81).
Monin's warning exemplifies her struggles to deal with the relativism of constructivisms such as hers. She resolves this by taking a pragmatic position. She acknowledges the contradictions of her own methods story by offering it (as shown above) as not finitely knowable, just as for any text. Her critical reading aims to 'look 'through' the text to images of the 'Eternal Truth' that may, or may not exist' (p.79-italics added). Nevertheless, she makes claims about what her method 'is', and - with language from the Enlightenment - describes how it can 'shed light on the critical reading' (p.160), as well as stating she wants to 'ensure a transparent context for the critical readings' (p.160) - as though Eternal Truth can be found behind the images, and to 'maintain' a 'balance of justice, perception and honesty' - as though these are incontrovertible Eternal Truths (p.159). As a result, she worries that her reading of Drucker was 'not as controlled, as objective, as perhaps were my critical readings of the other selected texts' (p.131). Thus, despite her rejection of positivist traditions, she expresses unacknowledged performances of that perspective.
Overall, I am very sympathetic to Monin's project of using literary perspectives to enrich management theory and practice. This is partly because I feel like a disciplinary boundary rider myself, drawing on multiple perspectives I have fashioned from working as a woman in manufacturing and professional businesses, the medical bureaucracy, science and the arts. However, I do not agree with her claim that the literary theory she uses 'lies outside' 'political stances' such as those found in feminist methodology texts. My identification with her as a feminist is ruptured by her 'forgetting' in some of the positivist ways that I have commonly found within critical theory, and by her unwillingness to engage with the politics of individual choice (which she does not acknowledge at all) and of 'gender issues' (which she 'chose not to become involved with') (p.102). Gender is too important a strand weaving through her text to be ignored like this, and I was left wanting her to bring gender to the foreground of her perspective.
For example, she does not reflect on the politics of gender that could explain the radically different perspectives of Follett and Kanter, nor on how the content of Follett's text, which consciously examines power relations ('conflict') in management and an alternative vision, shares many similarities with feminist visions such as those of Monin. I am left hoping that Monin will engage with feminist critiques of methods discourses in the future, as she has so much to offer - not by claiming her own 'feminist' method, but by making a significant contribution to the rich understandings of power and knowledge already being developed by other feminists.
Finally, but regrettably, too many, but minor, editing errors did not do justice to this innovative and remarkable text.
eContent Home
