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From Ancient Greece to the Digital Workplace: A Story of Mètis’ Usurpation

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Managing Knowledge in Organizations

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Abstract

This chapter briefly reviews why and how mètis has been repressed over the ages, starting with the writings of Plato and Aristotle to the organized labor of Scientific Management. Taylor’s ‘scientific’ quest for the ‘One Best Way’ across the replacement of mètis by techne squarely reflects Aristotelian thought (whereby, a person of experience is seen as inferior to the person who possesses techne because the former is not able to explicitly explain what he knows across universal rules and tenets). Today’s digital technologies appears to have either brought back Taylorism or simply made it more evident in many contemporary management practices within the workplace. This includes many instances of knowledge work involving highly qualified professionals in which creative and intellectual tasks are now being subjected to similar chainwork. Finally, examples of organizational policies thwarting mètis within the workplace are examined within both the healthcare and airline industries in which algorithmic approaches are being used to capture and reduce all manners of human knowledge and meaning across efficient explications and formalizations. Such ‘efficient’ and analytical approaches often fail to recognize the unique and inimitable characteristics of human creativity and its associated tacit knowledge imbricated within mètis.

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  1. University of Quebec at Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada

    W. David Holford

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Holford, W.D. (2020). From Ancient Greece to the Digital Workplace: A Story of Mètis’ Usurpation. In: Managing Knowledge in Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41156-5_2

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