Implications: so what and what now?

Abstract

In the preceding chapters I have made an effort to recast the discussion of management, the manager and information into a non-functional, non-representational paradigm: as Heidegger suggested, to return to the things themselves. This was not an easy task. The whole management language-game, management-speak, is pervaded with the ghosts of Descartes and Taylor. We have deeply rooted beliefs in words such as manage, think, understand, know, decide, information, and so forth. It is ever so easy to fall back into the old, now so seemingly obvious, terminology and notions; an orthodoxy for management thinking that was mostly articulated in the age of the Enlightenment. The effort to avoid drawing on this obvious and widely understood lexicon may have made this book rather obscure at points. Also there might still be a lot of Descartes’ and Taylor’s ghosts hiding in the very attempts to critique them, since our own assumptions only become manifest in our doing and in our speaking or writing and thus we do not have direct access to them. Re-engineering assumptions is not a matter of merely ‘rewiring’ through a set of eloquent arguments. Assumptions are rooted in our being, part of our body (Polanyi, 1973). To change them may even require something akin to a religious conversion as Burrell and Morgan (1979) have argued.

Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than — learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by “learning” we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

Martin Heidegger