Planning Lecture Notes Boje (updated September 8, 2001)

Joke: Management Joke;  Bill Gates At McDonalds; If Gates owned McD;  How McDonalds gets food?; How to order McNuggets?;

Intro: This week you were asked to craft and compare modern and postmodern planning stories, and then deconstruct them.  Below I give an example of two stories I wrote for you, one on of NMSU (Pistol Pete shoots vegetarians), and the other of Dave becoming David (See Sartre Page for expanded version).

Stories: Trowbridge Conveyor Plan (The planning separated from doing check and act - why would Taylor think it would work?).

Lecture Goals

1. Boje, David M & Robert D. Winsor (1993). The resurrection of Taylorism: Total quality management's hidden agenda. Journal of Organizational Change Management. Vol. 6 (4): 57-70.

2. Boje, David M., Grace Ann Rosile, Robert Dennehy & Debra J. Summers. Restorying reengineering (1997). Communication Research. Vol. 24 (6): 631-668. 

3. Women's stories of the planned factory life and the spectacle cover story.

4. What is difference between Era and Epistemological Postmodern?

5. New Vocabulary?  Boje's Top 10 List of words Consultants Need to Know & ahimsa

   • Ekstatic Dimensions

   • For-Itself

   • In-Itself

   • Nothingness

   • P-SEAM

   • Interpenetration

6. What are 2 current forms of Taylorism?

7. In what ways is Follett postmodern?

8. Is Fayol Organic or Mechanistic theory?

9. What is McDonaldization? (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

10. What is McDonaldization in the move through Disneyfication and Las Vegatization in this Society of the Spectacle?

Planning - is setting goals of what to do in the future and specifying the means (strategy and programs) to achieve those goals. Planning is a reflective intention, a reflection that is somewhat unreflexive. So what's the problem? Epoch approach...

Premod - Once upon a time... Plan Do, Check and Act  were part of craftsmen's job.

Mod - Plan Do, Check, and Act -- got split up and the manager became the Brain and the work just a Hand. Planning became "stakeholders of the mind."

Post - Plan, Do, Check, and Act got recombined as planning decentralized (de-centered_ to include stakeholders (managers, workers, suppliers, community interests, investors...). Planning shifted from "stakeholders of the mind" to democratic participation in the planning process.

 

SAM's TAYLORISM and PLANNING

What are SAM's?  Standard Allotted Minutes. 

If you sow a sweatshirt in a Nike factory in Mexico, China, or the Dominican Republic, you have 30.35 seconds.  Nike SAM are tied to every time and motion step of every item that a worker touches in some 740 factories around the globe.  "Nike has calculated how much time (and motion) it will allow, to the 1,000th of a second" (4/18/2001 New York Daily News editorial by Lenore Skenazy). If you buy a Nike sweatshirt for $22.99, at a 70 cent an hour labor cost, the worker is paid 11 cents for their labor. What if Nike paid 22 cents to the worker instead of 11 cents; would that put a dent in Tiger Wood's 100 million a year Nike salary, or the 750 million a year Nike advertising budget? Would it change Phil Knights net worth, now over $4 billion. 

About 85% of all Nike factory labor are women (some 700,000 workingwomen) between the ages of 16 and 23. After 23 they are fired. 

Main Points

1. There is enough money in the Nike budget to pay a living wage instead of a starvation wage.
2. These are not Tayloristic factories. They use SAMs like Taylor did, but Taylor also wanted to pay workers a lving wage, a wage that would incentives their performance and reward better workers.  When a Nike worker does more, their daily quota is bumped up, say form 2000 pieces a day to 2100, for the same pay.  This is NOT Taylorism, it is Pre-Taylorism.
3. Nike subcontractors combine modern machinery, SAMs, and a style of management that goes back to 1850s predatory capitalism practices (See Marx Chapter 10, The Working Day).  The game of monitoring, denial, and lack of enforcement of labor standards has changed little. 

INTRO to WORKING WOMEN'S STORIES click for expanded version

Who is this? CLICK for QuickTime on line video feature

How do the stories of Lap and Lek relate to Planning? ANSWER - Transnational corporations put contracts out for bid to factories, that plan every body motion of a work down to the hundredth of a second.  Time and Motion studies are done before a contract is let, to determine a work quota of so many seconds allowed for each operation by each type of work on each type of product.  This is a port of Taylorism (not the full implementation, See difference of this to Taylor who wanted living wages for workers, breaks, differential pay for performance, etc. This is just sweat work. ).

THE POINT - Sweatshops are not even Tayloristic. By setting excessively high production quotas (e.g. women must attach 2000 sleeves to Nike T- each shift, sewing one sleeve every 15.3 seconds nonstop for 8.5 hours – paid two-tenths of a cent for every sleeve they sew.). As Nike sets the plan of seconds per motion of each worker, the subcontract must agree to the plan or not get the contract,  Nike measures its production time and motion, as carefully at Frederick Taylor, but this is not Taylorism.  Taylor planned work, to be DIFFERENT than a SWEATSHOP. Taylor, saw his scientific management, as going beyond the sweatshops of the early 1900s. This is NOT TAYLORISM!.  This is plain and simple SWEATING, working a person to the point of physical exhaustion.  We postmodernists call it PERFORMATIVITY (See Marx, Working Day: Work until you drop dead). 

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him (Marx Chapter 10 of Das Kapital).

Why would Marx make such a statement? Because he studied the case of women, like: Mary Anne Walkley who "died from long hours of work in an over-crowded work-room, and a too small and badly ventilated bedroom."

Now think this through. If, a corporation plans every second of the work day for the subcontract factory work, then do they also plan the ways in which people are treated (humanely or not) in those same factories? In other words, are sweatshops an accident, exception, oversight, or are they planned to be exactly that way?

USAS project NMSU

PART I: POSTMOD PLANNING - The Five Hybrids of Interpenetration and Planning

Figure One: Five Hybridities of Interpenetration

 

As you watch Figure One (above), you will see the five hybridities, plus Dave's Hawg in a succession of images.  This are images of hybrids, elements that exist in multiplicity, but do not merge into some kind of uniform synthesis of being.  As the images scroll by, not the flow, that each is somehow in relation to the other, and that all five constitute an interpenetrated system. This is David's psychic temporality, a successions of now images that constructs my relationship to Dave (my first marriage) and David (my now marriage), an to SEAM, to the work on spectacles (carnival and festival), the hybrid narrative frames of organization, and the ekstatic dimensions of Sartre, and of course the Being and Nothingness of NMSU. The five slides and the Hawg are explained below. Before we go further we need to bit of vocabulary and some talk of planning

Interpenetration - Mary Parker Follett and Jean-Paul Sartre, and recent work on complexity theory in organizations, all talk about interpenetration. 

What is the meaning of Interpenetration? "If there is interpenetration" writes Sartre, "it is necessary there be parts that interpenetrate each other" Being & Nothingness, 1956: 166). For example, at NMSU, we all know its one huge bureaucracy, but did you stop and think that here and there, are gaps, voids, and shadows where parts, I call narrative frames (postmodern, quest, chaos/ complexity, and ante) are also existent.  Here is a list of bureaucratic parts of NMSU, and some parts that are not:

1. Ever notice you can register the bureaucratic way with all the paperwork and signatures, or just go on the web and register for courses with no signatures from professors or department heads?

2. The College of Business Administration and Economics (CBAE) is a bureaucratic planning monster with committees for committees, yet I am here, a critical postmodernists, who manages to persist despite the plans, the evaluation reports, and the surveillance of many gazing eyes.

3. I am allowed one web server, but managed to use two others at NMSU to story pages, and when the bureaucracy chases a page off campus, I have the Zianet server off campus, yet I can link to the exiled server, and escape the rule (till another rule says I can not).

4. I founded a veggie club (with Professors Gray and Rosile, and lots of students), and overcome a death threat, and managed to forgive Pistol Pete.  The rules of NMSU said we could not hand out tofu, but we did, and by the rules.

5. I am starting the United Students Against Sweatshops, in acts of carnivalesque resistance (See Naked Feet [full of postmodern irony] and Tiger Woods [full of satire]), that will soon take on the NMSU administration, and demand that Fair Labor Association's contract be voided, and a new one started with Workers Rights Consortium. How is it possible for both bureaucracy (as spectacle) and USAS (as carnival) to exist in the same space? Is this university big enough for both?

6. Did I mention that I as a department head, a postmodernist in the belly of the bureaucratic NMSU beast. I did resist the strategic plan of NMSU, that would have shut down the management Ph.D. program, merged us with the Marketing Department, then exiled us to the Agriculture College, where we would have been absorbed into Hotel and Tourism. The NMSU president got fired (Guess password and you can read the story a hint--- let's see Boje is to Nike, as ekin is to _ _ _ _).

7. 503 is a course inside an MBA program in a conservative university in a conservative part of the country, where the word "vegetarian" can get you killed. So between the cracks, outside the lines, and in the shadows are readings you just would find in Europe, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, but rarely in the U.S. business college.

8. What about starting a journal called TAMARA, complete with manifesto? (What is Tamara?). Starting an interdisciplinary journal in a field of quite conservative ones, devoted to critical postmodern organization science is interesting. Did you know that members of my department have taken out subscriptions; how ironic is that?

9. Final Example: You have a university newspaper called the Roundup , and a second one, a lot more radical, that is devoted to Free Speech issues. We only just got free speech rights at NMSU in the past year. You all know this story.

If you deconstruct each story, you see there are a series of dualities, and each poses a power and resistance relationship, with one power considerably more formidable than another. If we resituate the dualities, and move away form and either/or logic, we see that there is interpenetration going on in each storyline.  The Bureaucratic and the Postmodern are interpenetrating at NMSU.  Each interpenetration (of presumed opposites) shows us what Follett and Sartre (and Bergson) also saw. 

"Interpenetration hides multiplicity of already formed 'nows'" (Sartre, Being & Nothingness, 1956: 167).

If time is a succession of nows, not arrayed in linearity (except in someone's story of time), then NMSU has a psycho (analytic) temporality, where there is multiplicity, within some kind of systemic unity.  NMSU is "an infinity of 'nows'" that are just being what they are (In-Itself), and also trying to be what they are not yet being (For-Itself), and in between there is just Nothingness.  It is precisely for this reason (the three #5 below) tend to isolate themselves in their own quest for self-identity.  As I just do my thing (In-Itself) and as NMSU just does its thing (In-Itself), we also confront us trying to be more than we are (For-Itself) and we also show some reflective awareness on Nothingness. You must admit there is always a lot of Nothingness in Bureaucracy!

NMSU, as my nine stories suggest is rich with contradictions, and can not be rightfully said to be only or just completely and totally bureaucratic (though I often say they are). Rather, NMSU is a hybrid, perhaps mostly nothingness pretending to be bureaucratic, questing after complexity and postmodern networking. I should know, I have worked the past six years with department, college, classes, and even PSL to invite the quest from just bureaucratic to the hybridity of five narrative (organizing and planning) frames. NMSU is a contradiction, a multiplicity of forms, that are never overcome, to become just one.  The struggle continues...

NMSU is managed and organized to be both a bureaucracy and in yet another "now" to be made-to-be what it is mostly not, post-bureaucratic.

But, my focus here is on interpenetration.  NMSU managing and organizing its multiple selves, plans to be efficiently bureaucratic, and effectively post-bureaucratic.  Yet, the two interpenetrate one another.   The metaphor Sartre uses is the copy of coffee clouded with cream; the coffee and the cream are autonomous elements, they have some cohesion, but it is hardly a synthesis, and there is some interpenetration (one tastes of the other).  At NMSU, this comes down to psycho (analytic) parts:

1. There are feelings of friendship, mixed with envy

2. Will to power (Nietzsche) is mixed with will to serve (See Three Dimensional Leadership Model).

3. Our feelings of working with people in our relationships are tinted with friendship and instrumentality, but without the autonomy of either one.

4. NMSU had two mascots before Pistol Pete, and there is a Post-Pete form yet to be unveiled.

5. Marriott runs food services and the recycling center (last I heard), and there is some strange relations and interpenetrations with Physical Plant, and student (and faculty) body. Some call it the corporatization of the university.

Look back at Figure One. Do you see those five hybrid images (plus the Hawg) scrolling by you? These do not operate with classical mechanistic planning causality assumptions.  Post is not yet, but exists in the gap already there in bureaucratic governance structures, giving meaning to itself and to its other, as if it already has been in the future of NMSU.

Therefore, a post-bureaucratic-NMSU interpenetrates with the nows of bureaucratic, quest, chaos & complexity, and postmodern (network).  This is being planned for, and it is being planned against (See story # 6 above). Post-something is becoming NMSU In-Itself, as For-Itself plans what it thinks will be, despite both In-Itself and For-Itself, and let us not forget all that Nothingness.  There are many voids, shadows, gaps, in-betweens, and one huge abyss in any bureaucracy.  A bureaucracy is a consciousness, and it is part of a multiplicity.

Planning can be said to have three ekstatic dimensions (#4 below). NMSU tries hard to not be the bureaucracy it just is being all the time.  And NMSU tries to be what it is not (it is not very post-anything). And the hybrid of NMSU is both "to not be what is" and "to be what it is not."  

To understand this, think about the relationship between spontaneity and planning. Every element of NMSU (from professor to department to College, to Physical Plant) seeks to be spontaneous and autonomous. At the same time a burgeoning (by most accounts) administrative planning apparatus of committees, policies, reviews, and evaluations tries to have everything be planned down to the dot on every i. Yet, NMSU is also planning to be spontaneous (which never works). NMSU is just planning to be "made-to-be" planned and to be spontaneous.  This means by itself, a bureaucratic-NMSU is incapable of determining itself into some post-something existence. It has inertia when it comes to reflecting upon the situation (see Follett and Taylor). 

We can only apprehend a post-something (plan it and such) in relation to its most bureaucratic processes. Sartre says that being is always accompanied by nothingness, and we can therefore say planning is always accompanied by nothingness.  Planning tries to nihilate nothingness, but can not, and vice versa.  You see the cohesion and interpenetration (of the five hybrids in Figure One, which is still sequencing), is quite unintelligible to (most) administrators (I have met exceptions). 

Interpenetration is not a dialectic of thesis, anti-thesis, followed by synthesis. Way to linear a process.  And, who says synthesis always happens?  Rather, in interpenetration, there is just multiplicity (relation of nows in hybridity).

Do not get me wrong. There is ample pomophobia at NMSU. You sense a level of resistance (even with out the phone messages of Pistol Pete). In the succession of "nows" some nows have more power and influence than others.  The cohesion an divisibilities and multiplicity of the five hybrids remains disguised.  Still as I operate in the gaps of NMSU and play outside its walls, my exteriority to NMSU is denied me: I do work for NMSU; I am NMSU. You work (and study) here to.

In sum, NMSU is a multiplicity of forms, all being planned and unplanned, that can be seen at CBAE, at PSL, in critical pedagogy (Education), in the critical discourse studies (Communication & English), and in the critical Castilian-Spanish of Linguistics.  Bureaucratic and post ought to fall back into respective isolation, but instead there is a flow, a mix of coffee and cream, as the become more cohesive. I would not say there is fusion at NMSU, in terms of planning or narrative frames, but there is a logic of NMSU being what it is not and not being what it is, and there is all this nothingness around us.

THE FIVE HYBRIDS, ONE BY ONE:

1. Psycho-SEAM

• SEAM main site (click on STRUCTURE for P-SEAM); Center for TD study guide on SEAM

In P-SEAM, there is an interpenetration of the social performance areas (working conditions, work organization frames, communication [and coordination and cooperation], time use, training, and strategic initiatives [such as planning]). In the Structure aspect (left leaf of 4-leaf clover model) of SEAM, we move from the psychoanalytic structure of mind, to the psycho-group, onto the psychic prison of organization, and the psycho-transorganizational global consciousness.  P-SEAM is what you will be using in your team project analysis. At a psychoanalytic level, NMSU is a psychic prison with jealousy, envy, hate, intrigue, and politics you would not believe. At the same time there is love, tenderness, and friendship here. 

 

2. 3 Theatrics of Spectacle, Festival & Carnival

• Boje, D. M. (2001e). Carnivalesque Resistance to Global Spectacle: A critical postmodern theory of public administration (accepted for publication for November issue).

• Boje, D. M. (2001l) "Global Theatrics of Capitalism." Presentation to Academy of Management August meetings in Washington D.C.  Contains examples of culture jamming art, missing absent referent photos, and analysis of relation between Athletic Apparel Industry spectacle of disinformation, and carnivalesque acts of street theater resistance. Appendix of 10 College of Business theatrics training experiential exercises.

• Spectacle book in WEB CT site  (use aggie359 and Pass=adventure if you forgot your ID and pass).

• Festivalism web site has study guides for spectacle, carnival, and festival

You have got to admire the spectacle of a graduation ceremony, the President's state of NMSU message each term, and our Dean when he takes the stage. We in the faculty design the spectacle that is this classroom, that is all the classrooms on campus, and you perform in our theater. Fortunately we also resist spectacle with a bit of more carnivalesque theater. And here and there, is some genuine festivalism, a few moments of life just being-in-itself.

3. Five narrative Frames

	Bureaucratic Narrative	Chaos Narrative
	Quest Narrative	Postmod Narrative
	What is Antenarrative?

READ and Note Each of 5 Frames:

• 1. What is Bureaucratic Frame?

• 2. What is Quest Frame?

• 3. What is Chaos Frame?

• 4. What is Postmodern Frame? 

• 5. What is Antenarrative?

• Background paper on Narrative Frames

•  Narrative Frames Survey (on line)

• See Three Dimensional Leadership Model related to 4 of the Frames

In planning language, we can scarcely plan anything without trying to bureaucratize or de-bureaucratize. There is a posterior and an ANTE, planning happening at NMSU. An ante, because what is planning if not a bet and a pre-story, that some story can be told which will capture our imagination, and transform us into what we are not being?  Narrative frame oppose and struggle with one another in an the infinite nows. Each is a shadow world a phantasm that is NMSU of virtual unities and indifferences and as I see it hybridities.  Planning tries to bring the hybrid into some new alignment or balance; this is what quest is about. And watching the balance turn to chaos is what complexity theory is about. And locking it all into hierarchical order (at least making a good try) is bureaucracy. And in the postmodern, there is an emphasis on planning that is inclusive, participative, and it is feared by the autocrats everywhere.  The ANTE, again is a bet that your plan will work.

4. Three Ekstatic Dimensions

• See 3 Ekstatic Dimensions Figure

• The Jean-Paul Sartre Page

• Complexity and Chaos Papers (Boje):

  • Disney Example

  • Nike Example

NMSU, like any formal organization is planning all the time, and failing to plan when planning is most necessary.  What is planning? Trying to not be the organization that is; trying to be what the organization is just not: and doing both at the same time.

5. The Trilogy of Being-For-Itself, Being-In-Itself, and Nothingness

• The Jean-Paul Sartre Page

• Dave's Harley photo

For-Itself is perpetually designing (and planning) itself not to be the In-Itself. In-Itself is not thinking about planning or much else, it is too busy doing the processes of work, and being what it is.  Being (either one) can not escape Nothingness.  "Nothingness is the putting into question of being by being--that is, precisely consciousness or for-self" (Sartre, 1956: 79).  I call it self-reflection. What is planning if not a self-reflective gaze on what the organization is not being?

WRAP - What is the interpenetration of these five hybrids?  NMSU is tinted with all five, and there is a romantic courtship between them.  Interpenetration has occurred, and it is before any marriage. NMSU has an "amorous friendship" with post-something. At PSL it is a planned and arranged courtship. I know, I was the facilitator and the matchmaker. In friendship, both parties seek their autonomy (in marriage too). 

NMSU has a degraded spontaneity, and autonomy here and there, that is inseparable from its cohesion to the whole of NMSU (which is partly just nothingness). It can not all be planned.  More and more is falling into the nothingness. NMSU is a flow, a dynamic transformation (a quite slow one it seems), what appears as unity is quite fragmented and hybrid.  

Will the result of all this dynamic planning and surging energy be some synthesis of the prior forms? I do not think so.  NMSU is a highly planned, yet spontaneous and under-organized (while over-organized) entity, with a multiplicity of interpenetrating elements. NMSU can act spontaneously only as one whole on some other whole object. It is not too adept at being spontaneous with itself. 

In sum, planning is a reflective intention, an attempt to reflect on the ekstatic dimensions of being and nothingness.  Planning tries to make things linear, but we all see the futility in applying linear plans to a dynamic, mostly non-linear world.  Lots of nows in juxtaposition, is something that takes a good deal of planning skill and I think a measure of participation to sort out.