Tag Archives: reductionism

Organizational Frames: Casual Reductionism Plus Taken-for-granted Egocentrism

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[This isn’t going to make much sense to folks who haven’t done an MBA or studied organizational behavior/organizational theory in, say, a sociology PhD, but here goes.]

Background: I’m visiting Bainbridge Graduate Institute, the Original American Sustainability-oriented MBA Program, and observed a class today in “Organizational Systems.”  Then it hit me:  conventional organizational analysis has a deep flaw and it has to do with a concealed individualistic assumption in the “new thinking” that is supposedly radical, yet presents an obstacle to more enlightened, sustainable modes of management.

This flaw was introduced in the late 1970s and early 1980s when critical thinkers and post-modernists started to make their liberating methods known in management circles.  Their central point was that organizations are not fully knowable physical objects you can tamper with and manipulate, but intangible complexities that can be looked at from many equally valid standpoints.  Out of this came Gareth Morgan’s eight metaphors (Images of Organization) and, later, Lee Bolman’s and Terrence Deal’s four organizational frames.  The latter’s work, Reframing the Organization, is probably the world’s most commonly used textbook for organizational behavior courses in undergrad and MBA programs, and has been ascendant for at least a decade.

To be sure, the approach these books introduced was a big improvement over what came before:  brutally boring, mechanistic neo-Taylorism that trudged through organizational management looking for the “right answer” to help “fix things” as if every organization were nothing more than a box-filled diagram with order-following people in “functions”.

So now we were enlightened!  Of course, it has taken a long time for even this insight to percolate through the flaccid axons of conventional thinkers – many businesspersons would still consider this old stuff “revolutionary” and “far out leftist woo woo” – but it’s the norm now.  Get used to it.

Wait!  DON’T get used to it!  It is flawed!  It’s transitional thinking from the last century – a positive step, but very much NOT where we want to relax and stop our forward march toward Understanding.

Think about it.

Each frame is a perspective that we construct, and then we forget we constructed it.  If we don’t watch it, the frame becomes the reality.  “The culture is re-asserting itself!”  “Oh, you know, office politics…”  “I can’t get anything done in this oppressive structure!”

The map starts looking like the territory.

But that’s not the worst of it.

The worst is that each of Bolman’s & Deal’s frames is based in an individualistic, ego-centric apprehension of reality.  This is the curse of reductionism compounded by the curse of ego-centrism.

Consider: We REIFY (construct into false concreteness) one of a number of perspectives, FORGET that we have, and are then limited (rationally and emotionally) by the fact that each of these perspectives is deeply planted in concepts that relate to our own personal, individual context: my needs, my interests, my power, the rules I follow, my values and beliefs, the stories I tell, the meaning I assign, my victories, my defeats…

Look in Bolman & Deal: where is the sustainability piece?  There isn’t one.  They were too early.  Their logic admits no entry for sustainability.

I assert that sustainable organizational leadership by definition transcends the individual, and anchors reality in the “we,” the collective, the community.  You won’t find an easily navigated road from B&D’s frames to the modes where truly sustainable organizations appear to operate – the servant leaders, authentic community, the gift economy, employee ownership and workplace democracy, coops, and traditional tribal organizations.  Practitioners of these have leapt beyond the ego-centric frames, into a wholly different radical place of analysis and action.

The book has not yet been written that brings sustainability into organizational analysis in a fashion that’s as powerful and complete as B&D’s approach.  Theirs is a book for LAST century.   There’s no sustainability in it.  It’s a transitional form.  How do we keep what’s valuable about framing without remaining trapped in its forgetful reductionism and heedless egocentrism?

“Occupy the Business Schools?”

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Occupy the business schools?  Really?  Because this is what David Ikenberry and Donna Socknell declared last week in Bloomberg/Business Week.  Does this mean doing away with the hierarchies – the academic ranks, the departments, tenure – and replacing them with the horizontal organization of Occupy?  Does this mean opening up decisions to all stakeholders’ voices, with transparency, joy, and love?  Occupy is a militant protest movement to its most ardent participants, not a marketing slogan, corporate change program, or lifestyle brand.  Occupy means radical reexamination of every institution with a hand in the overconcentration of wealth and power, the plutocratization of politics, the marginalization of communities and cultures, and the plunder of the Earth.

Invoking “Occupy” is a radical step for any B-school dean.  What further steps await the intrepid dean-gone-occupier?  Slashing tuition from above $60,000 to more reasonable levels?  Forswearing the facilitation of private student loans?  Surely, including ethics lessons in every course – as if every moment weren’t teachable – falls far short of a moral education.  Who cares about deontological this and consequentialist that and how-would-you-resolve-this-dilemma if the MBA students are not surrounded by a caring, collaborative, supportive and authentic community throughout their studies, where ethical leadership is modeled continually, and where domination and hypocrisy are leavened and reversed?  It takes a deeply moral community to build a courageously ethical leader.

What about the numbing reductionism of the modern MBA paradigm?  Occupy seeks to make whole a broken society and political economy.  In conventional MBA programs, the departments are proudly disparate siloes, decoupling academics from one another’s worlds.   They read different journals, go to different conferences, write mutually unintelligible (yet similarly irrelevant) papers, and teach different theories and world-views.  What good is an overlay of ethics modules if the “functional” disciplines are deeply fractured and reductionism rules?

In 1960, about 5,000 new MBA students enrolled in American business schools.  In 2009 – the all-time peak – this number reached around 125,000.  The half-century spanned by these two years saw our middle class decline, our manufacturing flee, our family farms decimated, our small towns gutted, our people ravaged by excess and pointlessness, and the financial sector swell into a dominant component of our economy.  It also saw the explosive spread of a global capitalism that grows more extractive and heedless by the day, particularly in places where environmental protection and human rights are weak.  Is there any connection between the mindset of the modern MBA grad and these destructive decades?  One has to wonder, because they were running the organizations that made all this happen.  Ikenberry and Socknell call them “good people doing terrible things.”  How were they good?  Good is what good does [that’s what business ethics profs call “consequentialism,” by the way].  Society lets the likes of Enron, Bernie Madoff, Jack Abramoff, and MF Global do what they do because of a corrupted, hard-hearted, individualistic culture of economic power cutting across business, government, education, and other major institutions.  Yeah, maybe occupying the B-schools would help.

Finally, are cross-curricular CSR modules even remotely adequate?  Modern management has taught us to think of people as consumers, to ignore communities, to buy off “stakeholders,” to abandon economic losers, to discount the future, to place exaggerated value on personal wealth, and to treat much of what makes our planet and our humanity wonderful as disposable commodities.  CSR doesn’t really challenge these.  CSR is often about band-aids and public communication that, at best, mean a little less unsustainability.  This is the most that even the “good” companies usually want in their new hires – not real occupiers!

John Ehrenfeld sees sustainability as “the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on Earth forever.”  Can business schools steeped in the converse be trusted to truly “occupy” themselves in this spirit?