Bill Cooke

The Managing of the (Third) World

This paper is about the relationship between management, a First World discipline, and the Third World. Management is widely assumed to apply in organizations in modern, or postmodern, societies. However, a distinctive form of management, Development Administration and Management (DAM), exists and is applied to Third World nation-states, which are deemed in the First World to require modernization. This article sets out the institutional and conceptual separation and crossover between management and DAM. It then goes on to consider DAM in practice, demonstrating how it, and through it management, are complicit in neo-liberal World Bank interventions in the Third World. It concludes by reviewing the implications of the status of DAM, and management, as direct instruments of national-level neo-liberal change.

Writing the Left out of Management Theory: The Historiography of the Management of Change

The change management discourse has appropriated central ideas of action research, group dynamics, and the management of attitude change from the political left. This has been concealed by the way that that discourse has written its own history, that is, its historiography. Managerialist accounts of the lives of Kurt Lewin and John Collier (in relation to group dynamics and action research), and of the work of Edgar Schein (in relation to the management of attitude change), are compared with those found in non-managerialist sources. The latter alone reveal Lewins left activism, his working relationship with the radical John Collier, and the likelihood that Collier invented action research before Lewin. They also show how Scheins theory of attitude change was derived from the Chinese Communist Party. Change managements very construction has been a political process which has written the left out, and shaped an understanding of the field as technocratic and ideologically neutral. However, it is not only managerialist historiographies, but also supposedly more critical approaches to organizational theory which have a historiographical shaping effect.

Review Article: The past, present and future of organization development: Taking the long view

Organization development has been, and arguably still is, the major approach to organizational change across the Western world, and increasingly globally. Despite this, there appears to be a great deal of confusion as to its origins, nature, purpose and durability. This article reviews the ‘long’ history of organization development from its origins in the work of Kurt Lewin in the late 1930s to its current state and future prospects. It chronicles and analyses the major stages, disjunctures and controversies in its history and allows these to be seen in a wider context. The article closes by arguing that, although organization development remains the dominant approach to organizational change, there are significant issues that it must address if it is to achieve the ambitious and progressive social and organizational aims of its founders.

Situating Maslow in Cold War America A Recontextualization of Management Theory

This article makes the case for situating understandings of Abraham Maslow and his ideas within Cold War America. After discussing the general significance of Maslow, we set out the historical conditions of Cold War culture and social institutions in the United States. We then make links between these conditions and Maslow’s life, his work, and his reflexive awareness of them. This analysis maps, inter alia, Maslow’s place and agency in the Cold War academy and his positions on (un)Americanism, liberalism, religion and secularism, and modernization and Marx. The links identified reveal new explanations of Maslow’s life, work, and significance in the management canon and indicate that the Cold War should be considered as a hitherto missing grand narrative, within which the history of management ideas more generally should be situated.

Management as a Cold War phenomenon

Those who foster the Cold War are ‘leading the world toward a massacre because they are abstract. They have cut the world in two and each half is afraid of the other . . . Within this perspective, even men [sic] become abstract. Everybody is the Other, the possible enemy, not to be trusted.’ (Jean-Paul Sartre, speech to the Vienna Congres des Peuples pour la paix, December 1952, quoted in Cohen-Solal, 2005: 338)

The Cold War origin of action research as managerialist cooptation

Managerial applications of action research (AR) (e.g. in Organization Development) have been critiqued as cooptational. Their participatory focus on means over ends of change, on micro-, intra-organizational issues, and the tacit but questionable claim to rigour, are said to conceal and reinforce existing power relationships, rather than deliver the meaningful empowerment promised. This article shows an empirical connection between the Cold War US and these problematic features of today’s managerialist AR. Drawing on a correspondence between Ronald Lippitt and John Collier, two AR founders, it shows a more profoundly socially engaged version of AR was proposed, but shut down by US Cold War inquisition. It was in response to this alternative version of action research that the problematic, now managerialist, version of AR was first consciously and deliberately articulated. This shows that managerialist AR’s self-detachment from social circumstances is evident not just in its application, but its historiography

Participation, ‘process’ and management: lessons for development in the history of organization development

Participatory and process-driven social interventions have a history that dates back to before 1945. Hitherto this history has been presented within management theory as that of Organization Development (OD). An alternative history of OD is presented in this paper, focusing on the contributions of John Collier, Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt and colleagues, and Edgar Schein. This reveals how OD has been constructed from methodologies invented for economic and social development, and summarizes the extensive and critical knowledge of intervention practice that OD provides. This history, and the exclusion of development from orthodox histories of OD is seen to have lessons for the contemporary uses of OD and of participatory interventions in development, and for the creation of a new model of development management.

Business history and the historiographical operation

Abstract In this article we explore the implications of the epistemological position taken by writers of business history through a critical hermeneutic reading of recent key statements within this field. Using the theoretical lens provided by Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting, we concentrate on the potentially reflexive nature of the historiographical operation that is involved in transforming memory into history.We argue that there is little sign of reflexive historiography within business history and suggest that this reluctance goes some way towards explaining the sub-discipline’s relative isolation from the rest of organization and management studies.

Impact and Management Research: Exploring Relationships between Temporality, Dialogue, Reflexivity and Praxis

This paper introduces the special issue focusing on impact. We present the four papers in the special issue and synthesize their key themes, including dialogue, reflexivity and praxis. In addition, we expand on understandings of impact by exploring how, when and for whom management research creates impact and we elaborate four ideal types of impact by articulating both the constituencies for whom impact occurs and the forms it might take. We identify temporality as critical to a more nuanced conceptualization of impact and suggest that some forms of impact are performative in nature. We conclude by suggesting that management as a discipline would benefit from widening the range of comparator disciplines to include disciplines such as art, education and nursing where practice, research and scholarship are more overtly interwoven.

Managing Organizational Culture and Imperialism

In Culture and Imperialism (1994), Edward Said sets out to reconnect cultural forms, notably the novel, “with the imperial processes of which they were manifestly and unconcealedly a part” (1994: xv). Thus he famously identifies allusions to the slave-based Caribbean sugar industry in Jane Austen’s 1814 Mansfield Park, resituating our understanding of Austen’s narrative within British imperialism of the time. Culture in Said’s sense includes not just art forms like the novel and opera, but “the specialized forms of knowledge in such learned disciplines as ethnography, historiography, philology and literary history” (1994: xii). In this vein, Bishop (1990) has, for example, explored Western mathematics as a secret weapon of cultural imperialism, and Rabasa (1993) re-presented Mercator’s Atlas as a Eurocentric imposition of meaning upon the World. This chapter, titled in homage to Said,1 presents the management of organizational culture (MOC) as another such cultural form. This form is perhaps more mundane than the novel, opera, Western mathematics, or Mercator’s atlas. As the basis for interventions in the working lives of employees in the United States and the United Kingdom, particularly from the 1980s onwards (Burnes, 1996; French & Bell, 1998) MOC is however particularly pernicious.