Editorial: Knowing How to Manage

Over a decade ago Peter Drucker was arguing that for managers in the developed world ‘the single
greatest challenge…is to raise the productivity of knowledge and service workers’.1 He had in mind
the likes of lawyers, teachers, salespeople, research scientists, strategic planners, nurses, cardiac
surgeons - and, of course, managers themselves. But knowing how to manage managers requires a
grasp of what and how they know so that the direction and control they receive allows them to put
their expertise to work. As Michael Luntley notes in Knowing How to Manage: Expertise and
Embedded Knowledge, their expert knowledge is embedded in interactions with the environment
and cannot be fully specified in or by procedures, and this has clear implications for practice. He
offers a philosophical model of what it means to say that knowledge is embedded in practice and
concludes that trying to manage managers by imposing detailed targets ignores both the dynamic
and contextual nature of their expertise and the level at which it functions. As he puts it, ‘managers
need goals, they do not need targets, for they need the flexibility to adjust targets in order to stay on
goal and there is no recipe of targets that defines goals cross-contextually’. We know from practice
in the UK - and perhaps elsewhere - just how counterproductive control through targets can be.
Those who grasp this surely have a better chance of raising the productivity of the managers they
direct. For managers too, as Drucker put it, ‘the workers’ knowledge is the starting point for
improving productivity and performance’.2

In Doing Justice to Solidarity: How NGOs Should Communicate, Juan Luis Martinez urges NGOs to
understand and stay true to their unique status and align their marketing with their mission. Using
negative images of recurrent disasters amounts to ‘demagogic sentimentalism’ which produces ‘a
superficially informed compassion or guilt’ leading to ‘compassion fatigue’. NGOs, he maintains,
should make clear their mission to carry out development in the name of human solidarity, spell out
what they achieve and build an informed and committed body of supporters. Pursuing ‘the logic of
relational marketing’ they can look forward to lasting support. With a communication strategy that
respects the rationality of its audience, NGO managers can hope to make their marketing more
productive and their income stream more stable.

The claim - in neo-classical economics - that decision-makers can make purely rational decisions
has long been challenged. Decisions, it is said, are always made in historical settings and are
therefore ‘path dependent’, leading a market to settle on an inefficient equilibrium even over the
longer term. Duncan Pritchard’s Are Economic Decisions Rational? Path Dependence, Lock-In and
‘Hinge’ Propositions offers a new account of path dependence in terms of Wittgenstein’s notion of the
‘hinge’ proposition. Because it is clearer about the kind of empirical data needed to settle the
debate, his new account holds out the hope of progress in settling whether path dependence is
genuine and economically significant.

Sheelagh O’Reilly reflects in her continuing Manager’s Philosophical Diary on how technology is
introduced and applied in development contexts. She urges greater self-knowledge and respect for
local knowledge, needs and diversity in those pressing for its use.

Understanding and dealing with failure in management is the concern of John Dixon and Rhys
Dogan. In Towards Constructive Corporate Governance: From ‘Certainties’ to a Plurality Principle they
present four contending accounts of corporate governance, each fundamentally flawed in its
underlying premises. Each posits a set of corporate governance ‘certainties’ incompatible with the
others and when a failure of governance occurs, trench warfare between governors and governed
follows unless the competing interests and desires are confronted and integrated.

1
Peter F Drucker ‘The New Productivity Challenge’ Harvard Business Review Vol 69 No 6 November-December
1991 pp 69-79
2
op cit p 77

Reason in Practice Volume 2 Number 3 2002 © Copyright Reason in Practice Ltd 2002 1
Finally, Paul Dearey presents an overview of systems thinking as an interdisciplinary approach to
managing complexity in organisations. Questions remain, as he points out in Systems Thinking: A
Philosophy of Management, but the philosophical interpretation of the practice of systemic
intervention holds out the promise that those managing such interventions in organisations will
better understand the nature and potential of what they do.

Referees

Besides the Editorial Board, the following have kindly acted as referees in our first two years of
publication. Our grateful thanks go to all on the Board and to:

Michael Bokeno
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Organizational Communication
College of Business and Public Affairs, Murray State University, Kentucky

Mike Hall
Principal Lecturer
School of Applied Social Science
University of Brighton

Norma Romm
Senior Researcher
Centre for Systems Studies
Hull University Business School

Doris Schroeder
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
Centre for Professional Ethics
University of Central Lancashire

Michael Yaziji
Doctoral Candidate
Strategy Department
INSEAD

2 © Copyright Reason in Practice Ltd 2002 Reason in Practice Volume 2 Number 3 2002