Abstract
If you have read this far and aren’t sneaking a peak at the end to find out whether I have anything interesting to say, I won’t have to remind you that I have been poking around inside knowledge-work and the mindset we call management in order to understand work practices. Whatever they do, you can assume people want to do a decent job and, whether it is cleaning out the garage or preparing a report, they need to be properly organized. So, one-on-one, or in groups, knowledge workers spend much of their time talking—planning, negotiating, and arranging; preparing to do something.
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Notes
I’m identifying humanness and the humanness of work with one’s sense of being in it, being constituted by the situation and the doing—Martin Heidegger’s Dasein, which Herbert Dreyfus calls “being-in-the-world.” See Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being- in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
It appears Taylor’s views sparked the attitude that, as John P. Hoerr notes, “wage workers and their representatives lacked the competence to handle complex issues that required abstract knowledge and analytical ability.” Quoted in Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (New York: Viking, 2004): xxi.
Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009): 28.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Language and Perception in a More-Than- Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997): 50 (my emphasis).
Henri-Louis Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (New York: Dover, 2001).
Hedge-fund managers who bet on the housing bubble bursting earned “more money than god,” as Sebastian Mallaby puts it. See Sebastian Mallaby, More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).
Two recent books, with some similar themes, trawl history, ancient and more recent, for evidence of humans‘ failure to see the impacts of actions (and, possibly, to listen to their inner voices) which devastated their environments, resulting in environmental collapses and the destruction of whole societies. You have to conclude that humans often aren’t at all reason-able (i.e. able to reason intelligently) and “progress” is by no means either linear or assured. See Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005); Ronald Wright, A Short History ofProgress (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004). Ian McCallum explores the idea of “ecological intelligence,” the “act of weaving and unweaving our reflections of ourselves on Earth.” The issues I’ve raised echo themes in this marvelous book. See Ian McCallum, Ecological Intelligence: Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature (Cape Town: Africa Geographic, 2005).
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© 2011 Mark Addleson
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Addleson, M. (2011). Good work wanted. In: Beyond Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230343412_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230343412_15
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