Ooh, baby, do you know what that's worth? Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth Permission to Dance Lauren Dixon has written Trending toward a jobless economy. It’s a good enough post to demand a response but first I need to talk about a recent article that Lauren links to.
The problems in the practice and theory of management lie MUCH DEEPER than McGrath et al can conceive. They are rooted in how we make sense of the world and ourselves and the role that language plays in the process. Mainstream Anglo-American management still clings to a modernist interpretation of the world ('solid modernity' as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called it). 'Reality' (like data!) is given. We can see it as it is as detached objective observers. Language can achieve a one-to-one denotative relationship between symbols and that reality.
Management experience suggests that this modernist view of us and the world is totally inadequate for making sense of ourselves and the world we live in. What is needed is a view that matches what Bauman called ‘liquid modernity’ (he didn’t like the baggage that the term ‘post-modern’ came with). I think it takes an ecological perspective on how we and organizations function as complex adaptive systems.
We are a biological species. We don’t see reality ‘as it is’, rather we see our surroundings as a landscape of continually changing action possibilities (‘affordances’), based on whatever it is that we are trying to do. Management is a practice. In real time managers are immersed in a stream of events, doing their best to cope, acting forwards into a continuously emerging, unknowable future. Our sensemaking minds (together with our languages) are basically analogical, not analytical.
McGrath et al need to get on the warehouse floor. It's back to the 'rough ground' of practice where we can get some traction and lessons from the far side of experience.
Thanks for this thorough response and the mention, Matt. You've far more clearly outlined the reasons I touched on when discussing whether I thought the jobless economy would actually eventuate. I am fascinated (and not surprised) to learn the concept of a full gig workforce is not slightly new.
I am glad, I think, that the jobless economy is unlikely. I don't think the social cost is worth the potential economic gains (and even then those gains are unlikely to be fairly distributed).
The problems in the practice and theory of management lie MUCH DEEPER than McGrath et al can conceive. They are rooted in how we make sense of the world and ourselves and the role that language plays in the process. Mainstream Anglo-American management still clings to a modernist interpretation of the world ('solid modernity' as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called it). 'Reality' (like data!) is given. We can see it as it is as detached objective observers. Language can achieve a one-to-one denotative relationship between symbols and that reality.
Management experience suggests that this modernist view of us and the world is totally inadequate for making sense of ourselves and the world we live in. What is needed is a view that matches what Bauman called ‘liquid modernity’ (he didn’t like the baggage that the term ‘post-modern’ came with). I think it takes an ecological perspective on how we and organizations function as complex adaptive systems.
We are a biological species. We don’t see reality ‘as it is’, rather we see our surroundings as a landscape of continually changing action possibilities (‘affordances’), based on whatever it is that we are trying to do. Management is a practice. In real time managers are immersed in a stream of events, doing their best to cope, acting forwards into a continuously emerging, unknowable future. Our sensemaking minds (together with our languages) are basically analogical, not analytical.
McGrath et al need to get on the warehouse floor. It's back to the 'rough ground' of practice where we can get some traction and lessons from the far side of experience.
Thanks for this thorough response and the mention, Matt. You've far more clearly outlined the reasons I touched on when discussing whether I thought the jobless economy would actually eventuate. I am fascinated (and not surprised) to learn the concept of a full gig workforce is not slightly new.
I am glad, I think, that the jobless economy is unlikely. I don't think the social cost is worth the potential economic gains (and even then those gains are unlikely to be fairly distributed).