First podcast

Modernism

Modernism rooted in the early 18th century in the age of Enlightenment. It can be seen as a cultural and philosophical movement that emphasises rationality,rigour and elegance. Modernism encourages re-examination of and deviance from norms, celebrating innovation and progress. It seeks to advance and relies upon scientific knowledge and practical experimentation.


A modernist ontology sees the world as ordered, with underlying systems to be discovered. In this way it is quite similar to Ancient Greeks's point of view of the world as highly mathematical. Humans are said to be rational economic,i.e. free of emotions. The second fundamental issue in the modernist ontology is that we can under- stand the natural and social worlds as systems.  The organization theorist Mary-Jo Hatch (1997) suggests that this idea of organizations as systems inspired much of the modern approach to organization theory and helps maintain continued support for modernism because it enables theorists and managers to understand organizations in all their complexity in a holistic, interconnected manner.

Modernism represents the triumph of intellect over opinion and superstition, but even though modernists express confidence in technologies that will enable progress, they might become over-concerned with building perfect systems, which will be unable to cope with rapidly changing world. This could result in "paralysis through analysis" I also think it's important to note about chaos theory: even in physics it is impossible to make 100% accurate predictions as even small changes, that are mathematically insignificant, might have tremendous consequences over a period of time(the butterfly effect). Michael Reed(1993) suggested that this ontology can no longer fit into todays world of exponential growth. 

Modernists are optimistic in their search for knowledge and have the assumption that rational principles will lead to social progress and personal growth. However many writers suggest that this ideas might be applied to top managers/professionals but not to a middle/lower class since for the latter work is essentially boring way to earn economic reward.

Modernist technologies:

Bureaucracy: the key idea behind this term is that organisations can operate efficiently and effectively if they possess clear hierarchy and authority. People are aware of their status – from the most junior through to the chief executive – so that they are aware of their responsibilities and their place in the structure of authority in the organization.
Modernist processes of management: organisations can be managed in efficient and effective way by people who possess knowledge and skills, who have clear sense of purpose of the organisation.

(But does it mean that modernist organisation, which was made by people to create order ends up by controlling us?)

Core characteristics

• That the design of organizations needs to accord with the principles of system and rational order.

• That modernist organization theory sees change as inevitable but it can be undertaken in ways that are rational and essentially ordered. This is in the context that modernism is not just about order and rationality; it is also about change and indeed excitement.

• That individuals and groups in their relationship to the organization can be conceived as components of the machine.

• That although many of the critics of modernism believe that it has passed its sell-by date, many of the technologies of management and processes of organizational development continue to be underpinned by modernism.

Talkot Parson's(1951) human systems:

What organisation needs to survive:

A set of goals.
Integration (means of communication between different groups/subsystems)
Latency(established patterns of organisation,culture)
Adaptation

Also represent the first level of Boulding's system

Boulding (1956): ‘physical and chemical and most social systems do in fact exhibit a tendency to equilibrium – otherwise the world would have exploded or imploded long ago’.  

Second level: Machine-like dynamic - smooth running organisation where everything is in its own place and external environment does not change significantly. 

Third level: System itself defines the equilibrium - members begin to communicate about the nature of their work 

Fourth level: Environment changes a lot and the organisation starts to interact both with environment and itself.

Why modernists love systems theory.

From a modernist perspective, interest in systems theory is understandable. It displays a fascination with the key concerns of modernism.

These concerns include:

• the search for order and rationality
• the establishment of control over knowledge through control of flows of information and the abil- ity to assemble data in ways that are rational and ordered
• the desire for the whole picture
• the modernist love of hierarchy
• a passion to understand what is happening in the organization
• the search for cooperation and collaboration within organizations and the avoidance of conflict.

The systems approach to organizations provides theorists and managers with an opportunity to align organization theory with the natural sciences. This means that they can legitimate the use of scientific and engineering principles as a means of establishing order and control in organizations.

Systems theory provides a rich opportunity to develop an understanding of core operating princi- ples that apply to all organizations.

It provides an intellectually rigorous structure for the exploration of organizations.

When we reach open systems theory, we can explore the relationship between the organization and its external environment. This provides a rational framework for dealing with the uncertainties that a fickle fate throws at organizations.

And why contemporary writers are sceptical of systems theory

Critics suggest that an excessive faith in the theory can lead people in organizations down some wrong paths. The organization theorists Michael Harrison and Arie Shirom (1999) suggest:

• The search for rules and regulations that would ‘cure’ situations where there are problems between subsystems can lead to major problems. Instead of searching for new rules, it is better for managers to take a pragmatic approach.
• If an organization were in perfect fit between the subsystems for more than a moment, then it would be stagnant because there is no dynamic for change.
• Even if the fit between different subsystems is not as good as it might be, limited fit may be no bad thing because a lack of fit can lead to some useful conflicts.
• Organizations are dynamic, and the shapes of the subsystems and their relationships with each other are constantly on the move.
• A well-aligned organization can become unresponsive. This issue can be significant particularly for larger, more mature organizations that become satisfied with their elegant organizational design. 

Max Weber : 

bureaucracy was revolutionary in the sense that it was responsible for the destruction of ways of organizing that were irrational such as the rule of the monarch, the feudal rights of the lord of the manor, the rule of the dictator and tyrant or the rule of the mob. The growth of bureaucracy leads, he suggests, to ‘a “rationalist” way of life’ that ‘furthers the domination of “rational matter of factness” and “the personality type of the professional expert”’ (Weber, 1922, p. 240). On the negative side, Weber was fatalistic about the development of economic materialism – the search for economic and financial reward – of which bureaucracy is a key component. He referred to the life of machine production and materialism as an imprisoning ‘iron cage’ (Weber, 1904, p. 1264). He suggests that the ‘objective indispensability’ of bureaucracy ‘means that the mechanism . . . is easily made to work for everybody who knows how to gain control over it’ (Weber, 1922, p. 229).

It is also important to note that the first argument can also be used against bureaucracy, since the means of communication have advanced a lot since 1922, making it almost impossible for the "feedback loops" to reach management. One reasonably decent solution for that, might be flatter hierarchies, but there's also a limit to the extent of how it can solve the problem, since there will still be some time between a change in the environment and the respond to it.  

There are also some moral issues about bureaucracy: since it dehumanizes workers and management, moral responsibilities are put under an anesthetic. David Cesarani argues that it is important to understand Eichmann (one of the key architects of the Holocaust) not as an evil person but as a bureaucratically ‘normal’ person who used bureaucratic means to undertake purposes that others see as evil but were not seen as such by the perpetrators - "he managed genocide in the way that any Chief Executive of any corporation would run a multinational company’.

 Of course, there are some sociologists and historians that do not agree with this view, for example Paul du Gay(2000) writes that 'objectivity’ required of the bureaucrat is not an impersonal dehumanized matter, but rather, it is the ‘trained capacity to treat people as individual cases . . . so that the partialities of patronage and the dangers of corruption might be avoided’

 

Ideas

Given the book "500 business ideas" by my friend Thomas, I have discovered several of which might actually work pretty well.

Earphones shaped like Spock's ears(or any other famous celebrity) - worth trying on kickstarter, not really hard to produce, but yet might yield a decent profit.

Not exactly ideas from the book but

Unlucky Me - website to help people who got unlucky. People publish their stories and people who visit it donate money/write comments to help them.

Iphone application "where will I be"/"note to self" : a person makes predictions about where he would be or will be doing in a month, a year or anything, which will be uploaded to the website(or kept on the phone). When the time comes a person is notified and reminded about it; If possible, an interesting feature will be to notify somebody else with this prediction (via email, text or maybe facebook)

I thought of one more but it's extremely good(if it's not made already) :)

Chapter 1

a great deal of research is simply being ‘wasted’, because academics may not be skilled at translating their theories in a language that appeals to practitioners, or indeed, because there are no institutional incentives to do so (Keleman and Bansal, 2002, p. 104)

<Pretty much sums up my attitude towards my textbook>

Important parts:

Each school of thought is underpinned by different philosophical assumptions about epistemology and ontology.

Epistemological! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8keZbZL2ero

Epistemology -  the study of the criteria we deploy and by which we know and decide what does and does not constitute a warranted claim about the world or what might constitute warranted knowledge. Useful link : (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/). Epistemological objectivists and epistemological subjectivists. The first claim that one can observe "the truth" or "knowledge" with techniques that  will not influence it and therefore obtain a proof of theory. The latter claim that any knowledge observed will be influenced by our perception, which is different for everyone(because of cultural background, etc etc). 

Ontology raises questions regarding whether or not a phenomenon we are interested in actually exists independently of our knowing and perceiving it. The realist assumptions suggest that there exist a social reality that is independent of out perceptual or cognitive structures and attempts to know, while subjectivists argue that a reality is a projection or a creation of our consciousness and cognition(or in simple words In knowing the social world, one creates it.

The relationship between organization theory and human activities: relationship between people and theories is problematic. Theories are part of human domain: they are created by it, investigated by it and they can change it. For natural scientists relationship is not problematic. People have subjective capacities and they have the ability to attempt to purposively and self-consciously change their behaviours in the light of knowledge. Double hermeneutic- the social sciences are themselves aspects of the social world and they are affected by it, but they are also causal forces that can act upon and shape that which they are trying to explain. Double hermeneutic relationship is also between the organization theory and the organizational practices

Positivist protagonist – the truth is out there and we can objectively know it.

 Type 1 positivists: explanations of behaviour according to mainstream positivism. Human behaviour is best understood as a necessary response or effect directly caused by an external stimulus

 Type 2 positivists: explanations of behaviour- human behaviour is best understood as an outcome of the culturally derived meanings, interpretations and understandings human actors attach to what is going on around them.

 Epistemological and ontological disputes, how can we ever know the truth and is there an out there? Epistemological subjectivists argue that notions of truth and objectivity are impossible. The key disagreement between critical theorists and postmodernists is centred upon the ontological implications of their shared subjectivist epistemological commitments. Where as critical theorists believe there is an out there, postmodernists do not. Critical theory adopts a phenomena list position in which, influenced by culturally derived interpretive processes, human knowing shapes our realities. We cannot reality as it is away. Critical theory is a combination of realist ontology and subjectivist epistemology. The truth about the social world may be out there but we can never know it because we lack a neutral observational language. Therefore we are always stuck in the subjective socially constructed reality for us. Postmodernism adopts subjective ontological and epistemological approach- what we take to be reality is itself created and determined by out subjective acts of perception. Both critical and postmodernism reject positivism as naïve and dangerous. Everything is relative to the eye of the beholder and the subjective means by which we organize what we perceive.  Postmodernists use the term discourse to refer to the subjective means by which people organize what they perceive. By creating a phenomenon discourses influence our behaviour. A dominant discourse (taken for granted) excludes alternative ways of knowing and behaving, alternative discourses are always possible but they are suppressed.  If we change the discourse we change the reality (hyper reality). All there is are discourses and nothing beyond them hence the truth cannot be out there because there is no out there, just different social constructions that appear to be real.  The result is that hyper realities are mistaken for an independent external reality. Postmodernism- the truth cannot be out there because there is no out there. By remembering our role we can challenge the discourses which have come to be dominant and taken for granted.  Sometimes postmodernism can be used to describe the period or epochal view.

Set goals

My goal for today read two chapters of the textbook and analyze them.

The point

I have failed one of my units in the university, so in order to prepare, I will post everything I learn/read to track my progress. I am pretty sure nobody will ever find out about this blog, so I might use it as a diary as well.

The unit I have failed - Fundamentals of Organizational Theory. I will label all post related to that with FOT label.

I have also started a book about poker, which involves a lot of maths/game theory. I will try to read and post about it in the time between FOT chapters.

I have been bored to death for about 5 years now and I hope this blog will help me to get out of this trap I've put myself in and encourage me to self-improve.

I have tried blogging in the past ( http://pureecon.blogspot.co.uk/ and http://free4a11.blogspot.co.uk/), but as one can see, it did not last for too long(not to mention was not really good).