Nelson Enrique Lozada/ José Enrique Arias Pérez

SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE

MODERNITY AND THE SPIRIT OF

ADMINISTRATION AND BUSINESS
ORGANIZATION

With the advancement of the revolutions of freedom and technology, society

consolidated a new way of life. The changes were so profound and of such magnitude
that apparently they impacted the different aspects of the individual's daily life. In this
way, it is how the administration is linked to the future of humanity, it has been in its
hands during the different stages of history to allow the human effort aimed at solving
or developing a specific company, to be carried out.
It is difficult to suppose that there has been a period in the history of humanity where
their coexistence and work did not require that both the resources and the people were
administered; from the immemorial ages of the cavemen, with their eagerness to obtain
their livelihood in an inhospitable and threatening environment, passing through the
different civilizations that bequeathed architectural and engineering wonders, as well
as cultural, agricultural, idiomatic, mercantile, thought, among others, until the
consolidation of the modern and so-called science of administration, with all its
achievements and successes in the participation of economic development as we know
it today; the administration has always accompanied human effort.
It could be wrong to think that management, according to what has been expressed in
the previous lines, traces its origins to the concepts that Smith and Babbage raised
regarding the way in which factories of the seventeenth century and, failing that, their
managers and owners, could increase the efficiency in production processes and
therefore their profits, or much more, intend to endorse Taylor and Fayol, the base on
which what we know today as administration is built. Conceptions like these show a
limited and limited thought regarding what it has meant.
Today, it implies for humanity the practice of administration, a practice that, through
the use of organization, has implications in the different facets of the individual's
existence; But at this point, it is important to remember that the rupture and radical
change that modernity produces in the way of life of the individual and his construction
of society, necessarily affects the nature of the administration and therefore of the
organization. It is also useful to remember that the two revolutions, that of freedom and
the technological, deepened the uprooting of the different facets that the individual
developed around the family nucleus, especially education and work, and transferred
Administration and organization: the socio-historical legacy of modernity and its challenge in the construction of a balanced socio-economic system
Bogotá, Pp. 158-173

them to the urban context; hence what Luhmann (2010) suggests when he argues that
“no one disputes that mo dern society depends directly or indirectly, in all its aspects,
on the organization” (p442).
In the framework that has been exposed, it is good to clarify that the consolidation of
the revolutions of technology and freedom, allowed the accelerated development of
capitalism as a socio-economic system, although this fact does not ignore that its roots,
as Mardones sets it, go back to the exchange that some Italian cities carried out with the
Orient as early as the 13th century. In what was called incipient capitalism, it is possible
to pose it as Wallerstein (2003) mentions that “the modern world system -the capitalist
world-economy- has existed since the 16th century” (p149) on the understanding that
“without a doubt we can use that designation for the system in that period, mainly
because the system already had the three defining characteristics of a capitalist world
economy ”(p131), which allows us to understand that its rise and consolidation is
linked to the emergence of modernity.
The relationship between capitalism and modernity is emphasized, due to the
symbiosis that exists between the two and, consequently, their relationship with the
administration. It can be said that modernity and capitalism are molded in a mutual
way, this arises when it is observed that the purposes and ideals of modernity become
what has been built as capitalism and that, in turn, the nature of the capitalism has
configured elements of modernity. As already mentioned, the purpose of modernity is
linked with the disenchantment of the world, with the secularization of life, with the
triumph of reason over the passivity of tradition, with the emancipation of the
individual from his master who constrains him. and dominates, in conclusion, a new
man for a new world.
In this process, reason plays an essential role, since all of the above is only achieved
thanks to the individual's ability to apply logic and calculation, with the aim of adapting
the methods to the achievement of the ends, that A process that Horkheimer (2002)
defined as the abstract functioning of the mechanism of thought or subjective reason,
which is added to objective reason that which concentrates on reflection on the ends
and seeks to establish its own general scopes applicable to humanity in its set; In
conclusion, modernity finds in the rationalization of thought, the actions of the
individual and also of society, the crystallization of its objective.
But the purpose of modernity, it seems, is truncated and is truncated, not because it
was impossible for it to extract dogmatism and arbitrariness, the life of the individual,
from tradition; Its difficulty is centered on the fact that when reaching its ideal, the
revolutions of technology and freedom do not develop in a balanced way, it is observed
that one of them, that of technology, assumes a hegemonic position in the concert of
constriction and development of modern society. This has very relevant implications in
 Nelson Enrique Lozada/ José Enrique Arias Pérez SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE

what we know today as the socioeconomic model, in the words of Touraine (2006) “the
main force of modernity, the opening force of a world that was closed and fragmented,
is exhausted as exchanges intensify and increases the density of men, capital, consumer
goods, instruments of social control and weapons ”(p93).
This depletion is directly related to the use of rationalization for
economic development that has been sustained by the deep and
frantic change in science, represented in technological developments
that increasingly allow the individual to access greater facilities for the
course of his life. Under this umbrella, the business organization, as it
is known today, has been developed; its construction has had to respond to what
Touraine (2006) refers to as the post-social situation, the result of the separation of the
instrumental and the sense where “the instrumentality is administered by companies,
economies or policies, which compete with each other in the markets "(P187).
It is becoming more and more difficult not to conceive the company as one of the main
agents, in which the rationalization materialized and of which the socioeconomic
system managed to base its rationality, which in the words of Weber (2007), seeks the
demagnification of the world, based in domination "this domination is provided by
calculation and technical means [...] which means, above all, rationalization as such"
(p64).

When talking about business, it is necessary to understand that of the social

institutions, the business organization is the one that, in a hegemonic way, seems to
have special preponderance in a socioeconomic model such as the Western one, where
the passing of the person revolves in a relevant proportion around to organizations;
The impact that the business organization and in general, that organizations have had
on the way in which the individual builds his life, although it seems very daring to
express it, seems to take on dimensions such as those that Cortina (2000) raises when
he suggests that: They go so far as to affirm that if the salvation of men can no longer be
expected solely from society, as the Rousseauian tradition wanted, nor from the State,
as the "real socialism" of the Eastern countries wanted, nor, finally, from the conversion
of the heart, a certain Kantian tradition spoke of, it is a transformation of organizations
that can save us, the company being the exemplary among them (p13).

Talking about the relevance of the business organization, necessarily refers to the role
that the administration plays, in the end who dynamizes and puts into action that
agglutinating tool of the collective human effort; Although it could be thought this way,
as Johansen (1990) maintains, which is the administration, who thanks to the
construction of social networks between individuals who, when interacting in the
context of recursion, manages to develop a synergistic pattern, which ultimately for the
author It would lead to the administration being the one that creates the organizations
Administration and organization: the socio-historical legacy of modernity and its challenge in the construction of a balanced socio-economic system
Bogotá, Pp. 158-173

and keeps them integrated. The relevant fact is that just as the organization is a tool to
materialize the rationalization of the present time, the administration also takes a
leading role in the construction of ideas that make up the nature, scope and implications
of human action around business organization. On the shoulders of the administration
and those who exercise it, the destiny of the organizations is supported, beyond the
pressures and objectives imposed on them, with regard to their financial and social
achievements and why not say it, those related with the ecosystem.
It is necessary to make it clear that it is the administration that has designed and in a
debatable way, depending on the spectrum that is looked at, the way in which the
organization plays its role in the socioeconomic model in which it lives. The
administration does not escape the influence of modernity and rationalization and
continuing the line of thought that has developed so far, it could be assumed that the
current business organization is only the reflection of what the administration has built
of it in the past. framework of the imperatives that the technological revolution posed;
Not in vain, the efforts of what became known as classical management thought were
aimed at the rationalization of business activity; His engineering perspective, motivated
to improve the company as an efficient tool for the production of things and ultimately,
of financial utility, either from the perspective of work as studied by Taylor or from the
work of the administrator and the general structure of the company. Company, as Fayol
would analyze it, is only the reflection of what reason instituted and that still seems to
remain in contemporary business and administration.

Everything converges in the construction of an

administrative discipline, based on instrumental rationality,
but the proper use of resources must be well understood,
avoiding waste that today more than ever is an imperative.
What we want to note is how the administration is constituted
in the hand that operationalizes the interest that in principle was to dominate nature
and in its contemporary version, it seems to pretend the exploitation of the resources
of the planet and man himself, with a utilitarian spirit. In the words of Mardones (2007):
Modern science […] has not realized that it is the daughter of socio-economic conditions
and that it is deeply linked to industrial development. It privileges a dimension of
reason: that which attends to the search for the means to achieve given objectives. But
those objectives or ends are not questioned, they are set thematically or
decisionistically by those who control and pay for the services of science (p39).
A socioeconomic system like the current one, supported by financial speculation and
consumption, with a level of efficiency in the generation of financial profits never seen
before, has required elaborate processes and techniques that are what sustain the
galloping pace at which every year it expands and not only increases its influence on
the size of the figures that represent the flow of international trade and finance, but also
and in a special way, of the spaces that have allowed its advance and consolidation
from the political point of view, as well as proposed Wallerstein (2005), who argues
that "the rhetoric of development - not to mention socialism - has been replaced all over
the planet by that of globalization" and goes on to say "the communist parties became
social democrats and the social democratic parties began to postulate a market
liberalism comparable to that previously proposed by conservative parties ”(p41).
It is in this context, in which the role played by the organization and therefore the
administration, are of capital relevance, ultimately these two tools are the ones that
allow us to achieve the objective of the current socioeconomic system, the one that in
the words of Weber (2010 ), is related to the "vehement longing after the achievement
of profit" (p138). It is observed in the background of modernity, in what the capitalist
socio-economic model represents, the important and fundamental influence of what the
organization and administration, be it as an institution, tool or task of humanity, has
represented for the state. current things, life, the person, as they are known today.
 Nelson Enrique Lozada/ José Enrique Arias Pérez SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE

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