Abstract
Chapter 4 will explore the concept of management. The first section contains a brief overview of the development of the management concept and of some of the current archetypes of management. Although these concepts are helpful, they do not provide a framework to explore the issues of the management concept. For this purpose the concepts of systems and cybernetics will be explored as a, hopefully, more appropriate perspective or point of reference. Firstly, classical, first-order cybernetics will be discussed. This cybernetics perspective has the advantage that the concepts of management can be explained in very general and conceptual terms in order to reveal more of the actual issues of management. This analysis will show that management faces a fundamental problem that cannot be solved within the first-order perspective. Secondly, the more recently developed second-order cybernetic and systemic concepts of autopoiesis and self-organization will be examined. These theories will lead us to the core of the issues faced by management today. In the final section, these principles of second-order cybernetics and systems will be applied to the management situation to define some general principles of self-organising management. The logical structure of this chapter is depicted in Figure 4.1.
Everything must be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
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© 1997 Lucas D. Introna
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Introna, L.D. (1997). Management: and manus. In: Management, Information and Power. Information Systems Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14549-2_4
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