Intro Items  How to Read Stories   Deconstruction  Harley Example 

Road Map: Bob: In the last chapter we gave a broad-brush stroke of information of pre-mod, mod, and postmod. We take the hybrid view that all three discourses are simultaneously co-present. Now from that overview, we now want to develop one management function in more detail. We begin with planning and indicate how planning exists in organizations in pre-mod, mod, and postmod configurations. We will provide stories from a variety of time frames: early printing, Harley-Davidson, Taylor and his pig iron, Deming and his work with Japanese planning.
 
 

What is Planning?

Boj: Some reviewer-critics have asked why you and I did not break out of the functionalist paradigm of plan, organize, influence, lead, and control? Our approach is to crack the foundations of functionalism from within. We do this by juxtaposing pre, mod and post perspectives to show their co-presence. As the foundation of functionalism cracks we seek to show how for example, planning is contested ideological terrain. First, we begin by comparing pre-modernist, modernist and postmodernist definitions of planning. To make your studies easier, we follow a suggestion of one of my management students and use mnemonic acronym terms, CRAFT, PYRAMID, and NETWORK. These have contradictory roots that are intermingled in contemporary times.

Note: pre, mod and post are not eras but are simultaneously co-present and inter-penetrating in our postmodern world.

You find all three forms in contemporary organizations. The three forms have their historical roots, but it would be a mistake to assume that any have vanished.

How to Read Stories. When you read stories, look for the pre-, mod, and postmodern roots of concepts that are interwoven in the story. Stories convey not just experience, but whole ways of thinking about management relationships, quality, pride, and planning. People at work tell each other stories all the time, and as you make them your own, you internalize the voice of the storyteller. Voice is a point of view, a narrator's or storyteller's perspective on reality. The more voices in a story, the more points of view and perspectives are brought into the discourse. Each character in the story can represent alternative voices. Refer back to our Tamara model of many storytellers with many voices telling stories in the storytelling organization. In each story you read and hear, ask yourself whose voices and which characters get privileged, and which voices and characters get marginalized (do not get a voice of their own). [Note: Each new term is defined in the glossary at the front of the book.]
 
 
 
 

Defining deconstruction is contrary to the spirit of Derrida’s idea. Yet, this is education and deconstruction often does involve ways of reading to decenter or otherwise unmask narratives that posit authoritative centers. "According to Derrida, all Western thought is based on the idea of a center – an origin, a Truth, and Ideal Form, a fixed Point, an Immovable Mover, an Essence, a God, a Presence, which is usually capitalized, and guarantees all meaning" (Powell, 1997: 21). We offer some humble guidelines for story deconstruction knowing deconstruction is not a method. We do this in the hopes that some of the oppressive stories we live can be restoried or what Derrida calls "resituated" to remove some of the center, hierarchy and marginalization. In the end we think the purpose of what we call "Story Deconstruction" is to be able to write and live a better story. We offer these guidelines as our own readings of what constitutes "Story Deconstruction." As you practice, keep in mind, since no story is an island, but in a dynamic context of a plurality of other stories, the centered-position self-deconstructs naturally without any pushing, shoving, or editing on our part. Stories are in a context of other stories and are self-deconstructing without our help. Stories are pyramids.  

(press here for Deconstruction Tutorial).
 
 

Table 2.2 presents eight guidelines for doing story deconstruction. These are exercises, like the ones you play to learn to play the piano. If you practice you can learn the art of deconstruction. Learning to play deconstruction takes practice, practice, and more practice.

Table 2-2: Story Deconstruction Guidelines  http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/deconstruct.html

Table 1: Story Deconstruction Guidelines (Adapted from Boje & Dennehy, 1993) #1
 

Here is a brief example.
 

The following Story ties Craft, Pyramid, and Network together. We will then offer a brief story deconstruction. We give you a pre, mod, and postmodern rendition of a few Harley-Davidson stories strung together as a saga.
 

The Craftsmen: Pre-modern Roots

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, William G. Harley, a 21-year-old draftsman/toolmaker lived next door to Arthur Davidson, a 20-year-old pattern maker. These two neighbors used their mechanical skills to cast an engine, build a carburetor out of a tomato can and complete their first bike in 1902.

Production

By 1906 their yield of 50 motorcycles necessitated a second building measuring 20 by 80 feet. A beekeeping uncle financed this edifice. In 1907 Bill and Arthur not only produced 150 machines but also incorporated with all the shares purchased by the 17 employees. 1910 they built 3200 cycles. Harley-Davidson had arrived.
 
 

Quality

From the beginning, Bill and Arthur did not ask: How cheap can we make our motorcycles. Rather they asked, "How good can we make them?" The price was $200. Skilled motorcycle craftsmen built the bikes - one at a time.

Whatever had to be done was handled by whoever was available with the know-how and time. As Walter Davidson, Bill's brother said, "We worked every day, Sunday included, until at least 10 O'clock at night. I remember it was an event when we quit work on Christmas at 8 o'clock to attend a family reunion."
 
 

People

A deep feeling of camaraderie existed among the employees. The family-like atmosphere prompted a group of employees to help out a fellow employee who lived in a tarpaper shanty with his wife and two children. Bill Davidson well known for his kindness and generosity supplied the materials and the employees built their fellow worker's family a fine two-story house.

The commitment to its employees was also shown in 1933 when sales took a tremendous dip. H-D kept as many employees working as possible, even if they only could work two days a week.
 
 

Service

Reduced cycle time is a term that we hear today. Harley-Davidson epitomized this concept in 1916. In March of that year, the War Department requested immediate shipment of a dozen of motorcycles. They arrived in two days ready for use. Later that month a second order was delivered in 33 hours. The motor cycles were equipped with a sidecar gun carriage to serve as a platform for mounting a Colt machine gun. Bill Harley had developed this unique feature.

In 1917, H-D started a service school to teach repair procedures. By the end of the war, H-D was training 1000 riders and mechanics per month.

By the end of the decade, H-D inhabited 400,000 square foot plant with 1,800 employees producing 22,685 motorcycles and 16,095 sidecars.
 
 

Dealers

Dealers were received as partners. This relationship was strengthened in 1933 when sales slumped steeply. Industry-wide sales fell to 6,000 units and H-D captured 3,700 of them. Walter Davidson worked closely with dealers to organize rallies, tours, polo tournaments, races, field meets, rodeos, picnics, jamborees, and to start clubs. New riders were attracted and existing enthusiasts remained active and interested. Other services to dealers included:

- Increased advertising- especially economy of operation, longevity, and ease of maintenance.

- Promoted accessory sales- rider jackets, lubricants, parts, luggage racks.

- Public relations campaign to address negative image of cyclists. H-D also promoted the use of mufflers.

- "The Enthusiast" magazine was distributed to 500,000 people a month.
 
 

By 1934 sales moved up to 10,000 units a year and this pace continued into 1940's. During World War II, thousands of military riders were introduced to Harleys. In fact, H-D produced 90,000 military models in various configurations. The production of military cycles also allowed spare parts to be made available to keep the civilian worker alive.
 
 
 
 

THE CORPORATE BUREAUCRACY and Modern Roots

Harley-Davidson came home from World War II. In 1947, H-D resumed full civilian production of motorcycles, parts and accessories. The bikes were updated 1941 models but with hydraulic shocks and added chrome. Accessories included-batteries, leather saddlebags, chrome dress-up, ladies wear, and leather helmet and goggles. But the most noteworthy introduction was the first black leather jacket with chrome zippers and snaps, belted waist and zippered sleeves. Cycles continued to be improved. For example, the 1958 Duo-Glide was unquestionably the most comfortable and beautiful motorcycle on the road.
 
 

Pressures

In 1969 the Japanese entered the big bike market. H-D faced a hostile take-over and opted to merge with AMF (American Machine and Foundry). H-D now had to answer to a higher corporate authority.

The fact that Harley-Davidson was no longer worker of its destiny became evident soon after the addition of the AMF corporate logo to all 1971 motorcycle gas tanks. As AMF Harley-Davidson, the loyal enthusiasts were rankled. That summer, AMF flexed its corporate muscle even more by naming a new president. For the first time in 68 years, someone other than Davidson sat in the president's chair.

AMF provided H-D with the necessary funds to modernize new tanks, frames, and fenders. AMF also built a new facility in York, PA. To focus on the production of the V-twin heavyweight models. But despite all of AMF efforts at making the company a more powerful and efficient manufacturing force, many riders and enthusiasts blamed AMF for a number of H-D shortcomings. Relationships between managers and workers were adversarial. Management was at odds with suppliers and dealers were muffled.

Problems surfaced where bikes had either missing parts (one-half the bikes) or in some cases even excess parts. AMF paid $1000 per bike for inspection to check for complete parts. When the bikes produced vibrations or oil leaks, many loyalist would repair the problem. Others, however, bought Japanese bikes. The outcome of the customer dissatisfaction was reflected in the drop in market share of big bikes from 75% in 1973 to 25% in 1983.
 
 
 
 

THE EMERGING POSTMODERN DISCOURSE

To mark the 75^th anniversary of Harley-Davidson in 1977, a group of the executives toured the United States following seven different routes and they traveled 37000 miles to visit 160 H-D dealers. The fact that the people who ran the company were all riders-and that they would take two weeks out of their busy schedule to get on the road and meet their customers-impressed everyone who came in contact with them.

This anniversary ride for customer input was instrumental in stimulating a group of H-D executives to purchase the company from the AMF. In June 1981, H-D returned to private ownership. The euphoria, however, was short-lived as demand fell by 33,000 units while at the same time Japanese exports soared.

Thus, in September 1982, H-D petitioned the International Trade Commission (ITC) for tariff relief from Japanese manufacturers who were building up inventories of unsold motorcycles. President Reagan put added tariffs on all imported Japanese cycles 700 c.c. or larger for a five year period ending in April 1988. The tariffs began at 45% in 1983 and were scheduled to decline to 10% in 1987, before being phased out.

One of the major factors in the ITC in decision to recommend tariffs was the fact that Harley-Davidson had started a major revitalization campaign in the late 1970's. The campaign was aimed at improving efficiency and product quality through programs of just-in-time manufacturing, employee involvement and statistical process control. Dealers were also included in the just-in-time inventory management so they could cut their own costs. H-D was particularly concerned about its 120 suppliers since the roster had just been pruned from 320. "We buy 50% of the dollar value of our motorcycles from the suppliers, says G. E. Kirkham, Harley's manufacturing manager. "So improvements we made (internally) only got us half way".#2

Under this umbrella of protection its market share soared to 63% in large motorcycles, up from 23% in 1983. The plunge of the dollar after 1985 also helped.

Sales results were reflected in the award of a contract from the California Highway Patrol in 1984, after 10 years of buying from competitors. H-D continued to win contracts in 1985, 1987, 1988 and 1989.

In 1983 H-D not only gained import protection but also formed The Harley Owners Group (HOG) to refocus attention to customer satisfaction after the sale. HOG membership swelled to 90,000 in six years.

The tariffs gave H-D time to complete revitalization which began in late 1970s. The fact that the tariffs were declining acted as a motivator to accelerate the transformation.

Harley-Davidson regained its health so quickly that it asked Washington to eliminate tariffs a year early. The move was unprecedented. No other American company had asked for removal of import protection. The press hailed the request as one of the best public relations moves in history.
 
 

In 1991 H-D had 62.3% market share in the big bike category (850 c.c. and larger). It had 31% of the street bike market; second-seller Honda had 26%. By way of contrast, in 1985 Honda had nearly 47% of the street-bike market, with Harley a paltry 9.4%.

In 1992 Harley's sales have been constrained by capacity. The company has a new paint facility and two new assembly lines about to open, but for now it cannot make more than 70,000 bikes a year. And it exports about 40% of them. Many of the exports are to Japan. Other exports are to Korea where the Korean National Police proudly display their spit-polished Harleys.

Harley-Davidson is America's only surviving motorcycle manufacturer. It pictures itself as soaring like an eagle in touch with customers, workers skilled in process control, and an organization on the path of self-control.

"If you can persuade your customers to tattoo your name on their chests they probably will not shift brands". Robert W. Hall said at the Indiana University School of Business, referring to buyers of Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
 
 

Harley Story Deconstructions

1. Duality Search. Harleys-Hondas; Riders-Non-riders; Craftspeople-Management; Family-Corporate
 


2. Reinterpret. In the AMF Harley-Davidson presumed that expert planners could build better Harleys than before. Much of the Harley Triad seems to have been in place before the Modern (AMF) phase. Seems like H-D had to go back to the past to get to the future.
 
 

3. Rebel Voices. In this story, the people on the work line were the last to be asked. Yet it was their rebel voices that got into this story to turn around a bad situation. The customers also had a voice that was not really heard until it was all but too late.
 
 

4. Other side of the story. Without the AMF infusion of cash and technology, Harley could not have expanded to keep pace with the Japanese manufacturers.
 
 

5. Deny the Plot. There is a romantic plot as William Harley and Arthur Davidson get together to make those first Harley's. There is tragedy in the way Harley did not notice either the small or large bike invasion. You could turn around the plot and say that without the bike invasions Harley would not have changed its ways. There is also irony, in that Harley discovers in the Honda plant visits that Harley had tossed out Kanban and other work methods the Japanese were using to their advantage.
 
 

6. Find the Exception One rule early on was build the Bikes to last, which was broken in the AMF phase.
 
 

7. Trace what is between the lines. Between the lines there seems to be a need to evolve a new bike design and new motor, but no one is talking of this.
 
 

8. Resituate. When Harley moved from Craft to Pyramid planning, it lost its know-how. When Harley moved from Pyramid to Network planning, it seemed to get things right again. I would resituate to look at the complimentarities of the three approaches. Rather than all or nothing thinking, can one benefit the other or be used more selectively.
 
 NOTE: HD has all 3 discourses (pre, mod, and post). 

Planning is a Craft.
C Craftspeople combined planning, doing, and checking (inspection) into each individual's job.

R Rituals of work and rites of passage in the planning of quality work performance.

A Apprenticeship was a planned progression from "greenie" to apprentice to journeyman artisan in each profession.

F Fraternal organization of professions dedicated to a steady and gradual improvement of their work quality.

retold by storytellers.
 
 

In pre-mod discourse, people plan and inspect their own work. This is a idea that pre-dates modernity, and is now once again quite fashionable. Work is a dignified craft practiced by artisans in fraternal guilds. Artisan Guilds are on the rise in Italy. In the case of Harley-Davidson, tinkering and inventing in the family garage brought about some bike that put on 100,000 miles. In feudal times, youth entered work as apprentices and conformed to very strict norms and disciplines of behavior for seven to fourteen years before becoming journeymen. There are places in Europe, such as Switzerland, where you go to college or you get a vocation that allows you to earn a living.

Being a craftsperson takes work, thrift, and independent-self-reliance. Journeymen, more then than now, could practice thrift and self-reliance to become masters of their own shops and proud members of their fraternity. Now, people buy a franchise and open a business they may not understand. In the case of the ancient printing industry, apprentices and journey-people were expected to respect the secrets of their brethren and pass down the secrets of their craft to their devil's apprentices. Here are a few examples:
 
 

Pre-Modern Printing. There is a difference between craft planning and modern and postmodern business planning. A craftsperson, after a decade of apprenticeship became a journeyman. They learned to take the raw materials and plan fine printing. They could plan a job and carry it out from start to finish. Planning was part of his or her craftsperson-ship. His or her own artistic style went into the choice of type faces, the design of each character, their fitting into a line, their layout on a page, the mixtures of inks, and the binding. The stories of the craft era supported a worship of high quality work[person]ship, an ancient economy of artistic performance, and a noble heritage. Stories gave work practices meaning. Today people still apprentice to run the Heidelberg press, but the smaller quick copy presses take far less time to learn.
 
 

Printing was a Noble Profession. For four centuries, printing was a noble occupation. In a time when none but the clergy and the nobility were taught to read and write, you could learn these skills in a print shop as a Devil's apprentice. Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed as a printer and went on to franchise ink and printing companies.
 
 

Use of Physical Torture to Discipline Printers. Printing was not all so noble. The infamous "Star Chamber" in England was a punishment court to control who did printing and what was printed. More than one printer was tortured and executed for printing anti-government or blasphemous material.
 
 
 
 

The Gutenberg Bible Story

Gutenberg looked in the mirror one morning and saw a reflection of a hand-scribed bible and said: "Oh that I could but express upon vellum, that which I see in this glass!" He decided then and there to make the best quality bible ever; one so fine it could be passed off as a hand-scribed bible.

"I will work in secret and cast metal type, mix special inks, and hand-peg the type into these chases. Then, I will press the type onto paper using a converted winepress. I could be burned at the stake." He worked secretly for ten years. His production practices were of such high quality that his Mazarine Bible would stand as best and most perfect quality workmanship that could not be improved for the next four hundred years.

Gutenberg was no businessman. "I have a plan. Since the church has a monopoly on Bible scribing, I think they will not take kindly to my inventing a way to do in a few weeks, but takes them many months to do. I will keep the news of this invention secret and get a partner to sell my bibles." Jean Fust and Johanne Gutenberg decided together to pass their printed bibles off on an unsuspecting clergy as original hand-scribed copies. "We will not put a date on them either." Fust and Gutenberg's one apprentice, Peter Schoeffer had all workmen from then on swear an oath of secrecy to never divulge the practices of their Black Art.

Between 1455 and 1457, Fust sold bibles to the clergy for 60 crowns. Scribes charged as much as 500 crowns for their products. The invention of the Black Art soon was suspected. It was not a threat because it could conceivably put clandestine scribes in monastic orders out of work, rather it was thought to be the contraptions and the work of the Devil himself. As the bibles were sold, clergy asked: "How could Fust supply so many bibles so quickly, each copy looking so much like the others, selling for such a low price, and how did he get his ink so brilliantly red? Surely, he has sold his soul to the devil!" They had never seen such a hue of red and never seen scribes produce Bibles that were alike in every minute detail. Surely Satan's blood has been used. The story went that Fust had sold his soul to the devil. This story is one source of the legend of "The Devil and Doctor Faustus."

Jean Fust feared the bible would not sell well and wanting to keep any profit to himself formed an unholy alliance with Gutenberg's apprentice, Peter Schoeffer. Jean Fust's brother, Nicholas was the judge and gave his brother possession of all the printing inventions, including the racks of set type to produce more bibles. The apprentices of Fust and Schoeffer were from the city of Mentz. They kept their oath of secrecy until Archbishop Adolphuse of Nassau sacked their city in 1462. Fust's printing office was destroyed and during the commotion, apprentices went to Rome, Cologne, Basle, and Strasburg to start their own businesses. They carried the secrets of the Black Art with them and formed a fraternal order of secret apprenticeship practices and a reverence for quality that would last four centuries.

Unfortunately, and as the story goes, like most printers Gutenberg was more of a craftsman than a businessman was. He had let Fust take everything and he died poor trying to do some odd printing jobs.#3
 
 

The story can be read for its Affirmative and its Skeptical points (see last chapter).
 
 
 
 

1. Find the Dualities. Take Gender Roles - by mid 1950's, computerized typesetting was introduced and a predominately male occupation becomes gender-balanced. Women were bindery-girls. With the computer age, women who had worked as secretaries took over the computer keyboards. Modernization had done its thing: de-skilled a profession so it could lower wage rates to the bare minimum. Women were paid less than half what the men had been paid.
 
 

2. Reinterpret. Gutenberg initiated the quality revolution into printing. Each printer was a skillful artisan who practiced his craft with a sense of aesthetics: an appreciation for taste and beauty in their choice of type faces, margins, inks, paper, and binding. Setting type and printing pages and doing bindery were fine arts more than they were technical productions.
 
 

3. Deny the Plot - Business and Craft do not mix any better than water and ink. The story gives credence to the craftsman's attitude that business people will take their skills, tools, and craft away from them. In the modern age, they did use the linotype machine and the computerized typesetter and laser scanned press to do just that. But, Gutenberg had used his machine: reusable type and the printing press to put the Scriptoriums out of business.
 
 

4. Other Side of the Story - Do not trust your Devil's Apprentice. The story demonstrates that an apprentice can swear an oath of secrecy, but take your training and use it to put you out of business. In all trades there are strict periods of highly disciplined and ritualized apprenticeship before a person is admitted as a journeyman into a trade. Drinking, gambling, and hazing were not invented by fraternities, they were sacred practices of the printer's rites of passage.
 
 

4. Find the Exception Not all hierarchy is bad. This story conveys the aesthetic practices, the hierarchy of apprentice, journeyman, and master printer. A hierarchy that was based on the perfecting of one's own skill; doing quality workmanship.
 
 

5. Between The Lines. What happened to Scriptoriums? Scriptoriums flourished from 1100 AD until Gutenberg's invention. Monks collected tithes and offerings to finance their work (Timperley, 1977)#4 In 1457, Gutenberg brought automation to scribes working in scriptoriums. In the mid-1800's, the hand set type production process would be supplanted by the hot type process of the Linotype machine. Linotype picks up brass slugs and casts lines of lead type for composition. Wooden presses with their loose joints and hand operation were replaced in the industrial revolution by metal presses with motorized parts. The machine was faster, more efficient, less expensive, but it separated man from the aesthetics of his work.
 
 

6. Between the Lines - Sovereign Control of Printing. Sovereign monarchies had no burning desire to educate the masses. Scriptural critique was heresy and classical works were profane until the Enlightenment. You could be burned at the stake for merely possessing a Wyclif Bible. The masses were more governable when they were illiterate. When William Caxton set up the first press in England in the autumn of 1476, he cautiously and wisely selected a Chapel attached to Westminster Abbey. He located his shop where his customers would be and where he could get symbolic ecclesiastical protection from accusations that he was using a contraption of the devil.#5

Pre-Mod Roots of Quality, Individualism, and Pride

Quality did not begin with the Excellence movement of the 1980's. Quality was a very pre-mod outlook. Individualism and pride in one's craftsmanship also has pre-mod roots. And pre-mod Craft ability is still the hallmark of quality in many fine woodworking, glassmaking, and tin shops. Many small businesses are quilt upon painstaking craft abilities.
 
 

Aesthetic Harmony and Mechanics: First of all you look at the mechanics. The mechanics have to be excellent. Type composition correct, the spacing and that sort of thing exact - no glaring errors and that sort of thing. The presswork was to be workman-like and inking even and uniform. After the mechanics are satisfied then you look for the aesthetic detail, the suiting of the typography to the subject, choice of type and size of type, the amount of space between lines. The use of initial letters, display lines and that sort of thing has to harmonize with the subject matter and with the typeface being employed. [Boje, 1983, DH-5].
 
 

Pride in My Craft: With a craft you take pride in creating something... like an artist in effect making something... somebody will give you some garbage copy like this. It's just a bunch of hand scratches. Some napkin they blew their nose on and when you're through you'll have a nice looking printed piece. It could be a menu, a broadside- it could be a flyer, or a business form or whatever. Look what I've created! I have a printer's eye. I can look at something and tell things, although I'm not a pressman... Some of the printers, just love the work I do because I can take this garbage copy and make it look nice because of the typographic skill I've developed over the years. [Boje, 1983, ER-11, 12].
 
 

Main Point Premod Crafts are very much alive today. The modern planning machine put a dent in them, but Craft, ritual apprenticeship, fraternal bonds and the tales of pride and quality are still in effect.
 
 
 

MODERNIST PLANNING

Part I - the Mother of Management, Mary Parker Follett, and Parts II and III the Three Fathers of Management Henri Fayol, Frederick Taylor and Max Weber.
 
 

Planning is a Pyramid:
P Police lower level people's time and motions.

Y Yoke people to their pyramid plan and position.

R Reports on everyone in the hierarchy so management can gaze their plans and actions.

A Atomize the pyramid to isolate people into the smallest and most fragmented planning cells.

M Monitor money, materials, and manpower budgeted for month-end results.

I Inspect people's MBO's [Management By Objectives] and time schedules for signs of waste and inefficiency.

D Distribute people, money, material, services, and production into specialized cells to minimize their interaction.

Modernist planning is the pyramid atop a factory: layers of management levels, in functional boxes, with workers distributed in cells in the production function doing ever more specialized and mindless tasks, while their heritage of craft and quality atrophied. In the end, the brains plan, and the workers do the handwork.
 
 

Modernist planning is blueprinting all the work tasks and administrative procedures to combine workers, machines, and capital to deliver goods and services. Modernist planning combines bureaucratic administration and the mass production factory assembly line into one formula for business success. The industrial revolution model of this combination was Henry Ford's Model T assembly line.
 
 

At the Turn of the century premod and mod planning began an struggle that continues to this day. The following section presents the Mother of Management and three Fathers of Management. Each had differing storied perspectives on how much of a Pyramid there would be and how much division of labor between management and workers there would be.
 
 

Father Weber's theory of bureaucracy was an early observation of the birth of capitalism. When an entrepreneur began an enterprise, he or she would fall into one of three patterns. Either the entrepreneur-capitalist follows the church model of charisma, the feudal model of noble estate, or the bureaucratic model.
 
 

Father Taylor's famous "Scientific Management" approach came from his engineer's experience in mechanistic production. Taylor's mechanistic approach to planning was to take all planning away from craft workers and hand that job over to a planning department. Taylor made planning part of the managerialist system. He reasoned that the system had to be more important than the individual and that central planning based upon scientific observation of time and motions of workers' bodies was the most efficient way to go.
 
 

Mother Follett sought modifications and reforms to Father Taylor's Scientific Management. Follett wanted to balance managerial control and planning with worker democracy. She saw situation science as a way to get management and labor to jointly investigate and decide their disputes. She also advocated Workers' Councils and instead of putting science into the hands of managers and expert planners, Follett wanted to use the science of "situation analysis" to do joint planning. She wanted workers to be educated in the sciences.
 
 

Father Fayol, on the other hand, favored a division of labor based on his organic model of the firm. He preferred to let workers plan their work, while managers focused upon the financial and commercial plans for the firm. He objected to having so many managers and departments micro-manage the workers. Fayol was also concerned that as many engineers became managers, they were being overly trained in mechanistic reasoning without an appreciation for the humanities. Fayol looked at the firm as a whole and thought Taylor was much too narrow too focused on the shop floor.
 
 

Edward Deming, while not having the status of a Father of Management, seems to have rediscovered Mother Follett's concern, though he never mentions her. Deming came along in the 1970s and 1980s to argue that Taylor's separation of workers' doing from planning (done in departments of planning) was a bad for the Total Quality Management and Continuous Improvement of the Firm. Deming like Taylor favored Statistical Process Control, but wanted the workers to measure their own time and motions. While Taylorism hired others to gaze and measure time and motion, Deming and the TQM movement encouraged workers just to measure themselves. Workers in Japan and then most everywhere else began in the 1980s and till now to just measure everything about their job and how to do it better.
 
 

Boj- I re-read several histories of management thought and compared these to the original works and what came after. What I hypothesize is that a number of management historians, did not have a rhetoric background. They read the original works, then summarized them without including the basic architectural metaphor of the original author (e.g. Wren, 1976/1979; Georges, 1968; Pollard, 1974). For example many writers just lump Taylor and Fayol together without looking at differences in mechanistic and organic rhetoric of the two consultant-writers.#7 Then, I believe subsequent writers, especially writers of the more popular management and OT textbooks, relied upon the management historian’s reading (particularly Wren, 1976/1979) rather than doing their own reading of the original. Or, perhaps read the original, but tuned out all the rhetorical devices that the management historians tuned out. Most recently Steve Robbins has written the best-selling management textbook and marginalized history altogether to a brief appendix, and then argues that history is unimportant and unnecessary to the management student. To me, ignoring history seems quite silly. Let's talk about the Mother of Management, the one who gets only a paragraph or a note in the appendix of most management texts.
 
 

Mary Parker Follett where her Father of Management-contemporaries (Frederick Taylor and Henri Fayol) set out dualities (management-labor; centralize-decentralize) and functionalism (the five functions of management of Fayol), Follett, again and again, refuses to be trapped.

We think she did a form of deconstruction before Derrida invented the word. She would identify dualities, reinterpret them, and oftentimes resituate the duality into theory of cooperative power or co-power.

Follett deconstructed many dualities that still proliferate not only in management and organization scholarship, but also in the popular management and OT texts of today. As for planning, this is the duality we mean:
 

Beyond the Planning/Doing Duality - Speaking directly to the duality of management/labor and Taylor’s separation of planning/executing Follett notes the artificiality of the rhetorical distinctions:
 

… No sharp line can be drawn between planning and executing … the line between those who manage and those who are managed has been in part artificial (1940/1925: 88).
 
 

The joint responsibility of management and labor is an interpenetrating responsibility, and is utterly different from responsibility divided off into sections, management having some and labor some (1940/1925: 78)
 
 

… Managing itself is an interpenetrating matter, that the distinction between those who manage and those who are managed is somewhat fading (1940/1925: 84).
 
 

Knowledge Worker is Old News - Follett anticipated the knowledge work revolution of the 1990s. She argued that workers, in order to participate more fully in co-operative and democratic governance, needed to acquire education and knowledge about general business and trade practices including "sales" and marketing, "supply and demand, prospective contracts, even the opening of new market – would make the opinion of the worker … more valuable" (p. 90).
 
 

Empowerment is Old News Empowerment is just another reinvented debate about delegation and Follett wrote about long ago. As Follett put it:
 
 

I do not think that power can be delegated because I believe that genuine power is capacity… Where the managers come in is that they should give workers a chance to grow capacity or power for themselves (p. 109)
 
 

Empowerment implies that you have been disempowered. To be disempowered is to be on the margins, to be peripheral to power, and even to have access to power denied. We think much of what is called empowerment is very token. Co-ownership, co-determination, and cooperative workplaces have been posed since the mid-1800s as alternative forms of corporate governance. Yet, in the contemporary Business College these alternatives are not courses or even chapters in textbooks. How much control should managers and owners have in a democratic society?

We can trace between the lines of the empowerment work of today by putting popular Guru empowerment writing in its historical context. The trade union movement in the early 1900s settled for participation in wages, hours, safety, and other comfort conditions (Gompers, 1920: 286; Gold, 1986: 19). Marxist workers’ councils, Robert Owen’s cooperatives, and the resurgence of the socialist guild movements in the early 1900s pushed trade unions and corporations to provide direct worker governance of the total business enterprise including areas of finance, strategy, and policy. Employers formed their own movements to oppose and tame the various industrial democracy movements. Who is empowered to plan? HR empowerment proponents counter that the hierarchy of management control in running the finances, policy, and strategy of business is inviolable and that participation should therefore be restricted to task areas. For Follett co-power ruled and both managers and workers could learn to plan in cooperation.
 

OD must move beyond (but certainly not leave) the single organization as its primary focus of attention. We call this shift in focus from intra-organizational change to interorganizational change and social change the emergence of a transorganizational perspective … In this broader, less structured context, central issues like policy making, directionality, power relations and conflict management become important and we intend to explore them in practice. Hens our label, transorganizational practice" (Culbert et. al, 1972: 2).
 
 

In a separate effort, Thayer (1973: 12) defined transorganizational as:
 
 

… The innumerable occasions when individuals from different organizations and suborganizations work together to solve an existing problem … The effective functions are performed partly inside each separate organization and partly outside, for the cooperative venture is itself a new organization. The emphasis on the "trans" helps us see that things occur both through and beyond individual permanent organizations, and that we can no longer visualize each such organization as a closed system.
 
 
 
 

In sum, where most management text writers theorize power as power-over, and dualizes capital/worker, manager/worker, centralization/decentralization, competition/cooperation, win/lose, etc. -- Follett not only reverses these dualities but also resituates them in a co-operative interpenetrate model of transorganizational behavior and co-active co-ordination of the urge to power. Instead of dualizing she interpenetrates the opposed terms. Instead of building division, segmentation, and opposition, she attempts to build an understanding of how the whole can be resituated. In doing so we believe she did deconstruction before the term was coined.
 

II a. Henri Fayol Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management Fayol (1949/1916) launched a management knowledge revolution, Fayolism rivaled Taylorism in popularity. Fayol’s functions and principles is the organizing frame for all popular and most other management texts. Management texts too easily combine Taylorism and Fayolism, as two halves of the whole, one for shop management, and the other for the strategic administration of the whole enterprise, one specialist, the other generalist in principles and functions.

Fayol’s five functions (he mostly called them elements) are planning, organizing, command, co-ordination, and control. Many writers assume that these are part of a mechanistic model of the firm, which can be easily fitted to Taylor’s mechanistic model of the firm. The mutilation of both authors’ work misses other more basic rhetorical architecture in the process of translation, summarization, and copying from those who read originals, the historians, to those who read each other, the textbook authors (even me). Robbins (1998) can thereby move history to the appendix, all of Fayol, Taylor, Weber, and Follett and then proceed to substitute a new version of history based upon the knowledge worker management system (KWMS), an abridgement of Toffler’s first, second, and third waves of history theory, culminating in the KW adhocracy, and the virtual organization. KW is now the substitute history. Fayol (1916) was doing knowledge work (KW) at the turn of the century. He wrote about management and worker knowledge and how to acquire them both. He argued against an over-preparation in engineering models, in mechanistics, and in mathematics. These knowledges were important, but needed knowledge of accounting, finance, and the experience of work (itself important knowledge). Addressing, college engineers:
 
 

No industrial leader would be rash enough to entrust you immediately with the sinking of a mine-shaft or the running of a blast furnace or rolling mill. First you must learn the trade which you do not know ((1949/1916: 90).
 
 

He asked these graduates to pledge themselves to industry.
 
 

Your duty is not merely to yourself, but also to your colleagues, superiors and the firm which you serve; your bearing, attitude, remarks and conduct should show that you are precisely aware of your responsibility (p. 93).
 
 

Energy, firmness, willingness to accept responsibility, initiative, loyalty, tact, dignity (p. 7).
 
 

As society grows, so new organs develop destined to replace the single one performing all functions in the primitive state (p. 20)
 
 

A body with two heads is in the social as in the animal sphere a monster, and has difficulty in surviving (p. 25).
 
 

Both are designing theory of the firm as a whole and organic enterprise. Both are focused on harmony and co-ordination. Both seek to overcome the duality of management and capital and capital and labor. But Fayol does end up with many dualisms when the work is done, and these continue into current times. Here is an example of harmony of capital and labor, even an acknowledgement of Follett’s co-operative model of the firm.
 
 

Profit sharing … the idea of making workers share in profits is a very attractive one and it would seem that it is from there [their] harmony between capital and labor should come (p. 29).
 
 

Table 2.3:
 

Body Corporate, Organic Metaphor Fayol writes the organic architecture as a way to discover his fourteen commandments. The eighth commandment is centralization (something that Follett saw as a false duality with decentralization). "Like division of work, centralization belongs to the natural order" (p. 33). Fayol builds up a theory of the corporate body by looking at both animal and plant biology.
 
 

Plant life too has served for numerous comparisons with social units. In the realm of [tree] growth there spring from the single trunk branches which spread out and grow leaves, and the sap brings life to all branches, even the slenderest twigs, just as higher authority transmits activity right down to the lowest and farthest extremes of the body corporate (p. 58).
 
 

Man in the body corporate plays a role like that of the cell in the animal, single cell in the case of the one-man business, thousandth or millionth part of the body corporation in the large-scale enterprise (p. 158).
 
 

In the social organism, as in the animal, a small number of essential functional elements account for an infinite variety of activities… The nervous system in particular bears close comparison with the managerial function. Being present and active in every organ, it normally has no specialized member and is not apparent to the superficial observer, but everywhere it receives impressions which it transmits first to the lower centers (reflexes) and thence, if need be, to the brain or organ of direction. From these centers or from the brain the order then goes out in inverse direction to the member or section concerned with carrying out the movement. The body corporate, like an animal, has its reflex responses or ganglia which take place without immediate intervention on the part of the higher authority and without nervous or managerial activity the organism becomes an inert mass and quickly decays (p. 59-60).
 
 

1. Shareholders
2. Board of Directors
3. General management and its staff
4. Regional and local management
5. Chief engineers
6. Technical (departmental) managers
7. Superintendents
8. Foremen
9. Operatives

Fayol’s Reading of Taylor. There are important parallels and differences in Taylor and Fayol. Both are industrial engineers. Fayol managed mines and Taylor steel production. Both have functional theories of the form. Both seek to anchor management knowledge in scientific study. Deeply aware of his own organic model, Fayol pauses in his text, to construct a reading of Taylor rhetorical model. He reads in Taylor a military metaphor. Fayol thought Taylor negated the principle of unity of command and called Taylor the "tireless propagandist" (p. 70). In five pages (66-70) Fayol glimpses Taylor’s militaristic model of the firm, and then blinkers and goes back to constructing his organic corporate body image.
 
 

I have tried to formulate for myself a fairly precise conception of the system of organization known as the Taylor system, so much discussed or recent years … Practically all the shops are organized upon what may be called the military plan. The orders from the general are transmitted through the colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants and non-commissioned officers to the men. …
 
 

First: As far as possible the workmen, as well as the gang-bosses and foremen, should be entirely relieved of the work of planning, and of all work which is more or less clerical in its nature.
 
 

Second: Throughout the whole field of management the military type of organization should be abandoned and what may be called the ‘functional type’ substituted in its place
 
 

‘Functional management’ consists in so directing the work of management that each man from the assistant superintendent down shall have as few functions as possible to perform (p. 66).
 
 

"Functional Management’ lies in the fact that each workman instead of coming in direct contact with the management at one point only, namely through his gang-boss, receives his daily orders and help directly from eight different bosses, each of whom performs his own particular function … [what] was done by the single ‘gang-boss’ subdivided among eight men - route clerks, instruction card men, cost and time clerks, who plan and give directions from the planning room; gang-bosses, speed bosses, inspectors, repair bosses, who show the men how to carry out their instructions and see that the work is done at the proper speed; and the ‘shop disciplinarian’ who performs this function for the entire establishment … Such is the system of organization as conceived by Taylor … It turns on the two following ideas –

(a) Need for a staff to help out shop foremen…

(b) Negation of the principle of unity of command.

Just as the first seems to me to be good; so the second seems unsound and dangerous (p. 68).
 
 

"So deep-rooted, however, is the conviction that the very foundation of management rests in the military type as represented by the principle that no workman can work under two bosses at the same time that … For myself I do not think that a shop can be well run in flagrant violation of this" (p. 69).
 
 

In Fayol’s knowledge organization, no man alive possess all the knowledge to embrace "every question thrown up in the running of a large concern, and certainly none possessed of the strength and disposing of the time required by the manifold obligations of large-scale management" (p. 71). The solution was for management develop staff work for knowledge assistance, liaison, draw up future projects and development study. "… The staff as an organ of thinking, studying and observation, whose chief function consists, under managerial impetus, in preparing for the future and seeking out all possible improvements" (p. 72).
 
 

We should not forget that Fayol was to write two more parts to his work, but never did, Part III. Personal observations and experience -- Part IV Lessons of the war (p. xxi). But in finished parts, we do get a glimpse of the military model under-girding this organic Leviathan. He refers to the rule of three, as an argument against an exclusive education in technical knowledge, when more managerial knowledge is need:
 
 

If we turn back to the studies which Napoleon was able to make fifteen years before the beginning of last century there is every reason to believe that "the God of War" never used any more complicated formulae (p. 87).
 
 

It then becomes easy, I think, to transmute organism into the mechanical monster, Leviathan.
 
 

Hobbes (1588-1679) 17^th century root-metaphor of a Leviathan argued that people are artificial animals, machine-beasts and savages with Natural lusts and evil instincts, sensations set in motion until they encounter resistance and counter-force. Hobbes said "the life of man, [would be] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (In Bronowski & Mazlish, 1960: 204).#9 This is why wars break out all over the planet. The purpose of Leviathan was imprisoning human dynamics in the machine. Hobbes, like Fayol wanted to reengineer the artificial-machine of Nature to make it subject to scientific laws. But, instead of live nerves, as in Fayol, the nerves were dead:
 
 

For seeing life is but a motion of limbs … why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body" (As cited in Bronowski & Mazlish, 1960: 197).
 
 

Over-Generalized Organic Metaphor. Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer (1910) was critical of applying biological analogy to the social:
 
 

…Cells of an organism correspond to individuals in a society, tissues to simpler voluntary groups, organs to the more complex organizations. Economic, juridical, and political activities parallel the physiological, morphological, and unitary aspects of an organism. Merchandise in transition is tantamount to unassimilated food. Conquering races are male, the conquered female; the struggle matches the struggle of spermatozoa around the ovum (Spencer, as cited in Hodgkinson, 1996: 41).
 
 

Schumacher (1984/1986) did read Fayol’s architecture as organic, not mechanistic. But, without paying attention to Spencer’s warning of misplaced concreteness, proceeds to develop even more biological analogy.#10 Schumacher (1986) includes as an Appendix Mr. Desaubliaux (1919) biological translation of Fayol’s biological architecture, with illustrations of the structures of plant and animal cell life. "I would simply like to set forth some biological parallels which Mr. Fayol’s observations on the administrative functions have suggested to me" (Desaubliaux, as cited in Schumacher, 1984/1986: 200).
 
 

This is the exception. As most management historians summarized Fayol and Taylor, most excluded the metaphoric. Pollard (1974: 87-99) summarized Fayol without organic reference and Taylor (3-16) without military metaphor.#11 Both are just pure scientific management. Wren (1976/1979) summarizes Fayol (226-248), pointing to differences in translations of Fayol, but also marginalized, no excludes the metaphoric architecture.#12 Taylor is summarized (Wren, 1979: 119-157) without metaphoric analysis. But Wren (1979: 260) does point your that his reading is "Taylor maintained that scientific management was the essence of industrial democracy." I would assign such a reading to Follett, but not to Taylor. Georges (1968) in a History of Management Thought has the same treatment of Fayol (105-111) and Taylor (82-99).
 
 

Summary

What can we say about this short history of management thought? Subsequent management historians wrote mechanistic narratives, devoid of organic, military and systemic referent. They rewrite many father management figures, from Fayol and Taylor to Weber into just the one Father of Management. Then, the popular management text writers imitate this collage, so all three can become a mechanistic morph, and a reincarnation of Hobbes’ Leviathan, a mechanical monster that feeds on the planet earth. And, if this monster is slain, then we have the Chinese boxes, each embedded in the next, a decidedly dead systems theory.

Mother God is Mary Parker Follett, but her teachings have been easy to ignore. She is reborn in the contemporary writings about teams, cross-functional relations, collaboration, learning organization, open systems theory, co-operatives, transorganizational theory – but males have taken over her ideas. Her interpenetration is an act of Derridian deconstruction, a turning of the dualities of the Fathers, but also Marx and Braverman, into resituations. The dualities of management/worker, capital/labor, whole/part, organization/environment and so many more are shown to be an artificial rhetoric. Her critique of LPT is that management and work, capital and worker, consumer and investor, supplier and distributor are engaging not just in competition but also in acts of collaboration, collective learning, not just negotiation, but integration, not a false consensus, but a co-creation of power, a collective fulfillment of desire, and a collective urge to power.

In the rewriting process, the historians and imitators of management thought and philosophy have killed the Father and Mother gods. The KWMS is invented as if it had not already been thought through at the turn of the century. It is the postmodern death of the author. Any reading will do, no re-appropriation is beyond belief, and all mis-reading becomes scholarship. Still I think there is something organic in Fayol, maybe some secret democracy in Taylor, and certainly Follett has a radical reading of the dualities. Weber did have a systems theory of bureaucratic, charismatic, and feudal forms of authority.
 
 

What are the implications? I think that a democratic, even ecological mode of organizing can be found in the ancient writings. I think that there is hegemonic blinkering, to keep from seeing ways to diminish hierarchy, a power-over and look at power-with, to cease the proliferation of survival of the fittest, replete with competitive expansion, and look at co-operatives among all types of stakeholders. It may be time to privilege Mary Parker Follett over the male godheads. Perhaps even looking at the role of male hierarchical philosophy in Carolyn Merchant’s death of nature, the five centuries struggle between organic and mechanistic forms.
 
 

It may be possible to move to an ecological and organic understanding that is not one more Leviathan, masquerading as a mechanistic in biological rhetoric. To deconstruct mechanistic/organic dualisms is our goal here.
 
 

Summary - With, the industrial revolution came modernization of the planning function. Frederick Winslow Taylor stepped forward with a plan to get the job done. People other than the work crew and a supervisor planned the work. Taylor's management scientists trained clerks to plan the time and the movements of the gangs of workers. Human Relation, social scientists planned the social and group dynamics of the corporation to keep the worker-cogs happy. These two movements: scientific management and human relations marked an end to the Craft ethic and the dawn of modernist planning. Crafts people were no longer expected to plan their own work. This thinking dominated management until the rise of Deming and TQM in the 1980s.
 
 

Taylorism and Modernist Machine Planning. In the early 1900's, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was the hero of the modernist planning movement. He was the radical revolutionary of his time. Taylor objected strongly and passionately to the impediments to excellence being caused by the "pre-modernist" era. In the pre-modernist phase of industrial history, the trade unions, craft apprenticeship systems, and a managerial class antagonistic to workers and unions dominated capitalist societies. Taylor pointed out the extensive goldbricking or what he termed "soldiering" going on in the pre-modern firms. His plan was to pay workers more in order to motivate them to increase production. He planned time and motion of each specific work task according to scientific principles. He also wanted leaders to be scientific, rather than individualistic. In 1873, Taylor worked as a supervisor for Midvale Steel Company. His story reveals his theory. We want to analyze the stories told by Frederick Taylor as he set out to evangelize his scientific method of work planning to a country that was already well along the path toward modernization. Taylor is one hero of the Modernist movement.
 
 

Please read the following play out loud. Have someone play Taylor and Schmidt. It all sounds different when you enact the play as a bit of modernist theater.
 
 

The Schmidt Pig Iron Story
 
 

[Scientific planning increases Bethlehem Steel

"Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?"

"Vell, I don't know vat you mean."

"Oh yes, you do. What I want to know is whether you are a high-priced man or not."

"Vell, I don't know vat you mean."

"Oh, come now, you answer my questions. What I want to find out is whether you are a high-priced man or one of these cheap fellows here. What I want to find out is whether you want to earn $1.85 a day or whether you are satisfied with $1.15, just the same as all those cheap fellows are getting."

"Did I want $1.85 a day? Vas dot a high-priced man? Vell yes, I vas a high-priced man."

"Oh, you're aggravating me. Of course you want $1.85 a day - every one wants it!. You know perfectly well that has very little to do with your being a high-priced man. For goodness' sake answer my questions, and don't waste any more of my time. Now come over here. You see that pile of pig iron?"

"Yes."

"You see that car?"
 
 

"Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will load that pig iron on that car to-morrow for $1.85. Now do wake up and answer my question. Tell me whether you are a high-priced man or not."

"Vell - did I got $1.85 for loading dot pig iron on dot car to-morrow?"

"Yes, or course you do, and you get $1.85 for loading a pile like that every day right through the year. That is what a high-priced man does, and you know it just as well as I do."

"Vell, dot's all right. I could load dot pig iron on the car to-morrow for $1.85, and I get if every day, don't I."

"Certainly you do - certainly you do."

"Vell, den, I vas a high-priced man."

"Now, hold on, hold on. You know just as well as I do that a high-priced man has to do exactly as he's told from morning till night. You have seen this man here before, haven't you?"

"No, I never saw him."
 
 

"Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will do exactly as this man tells you tomorrow, from morning till night. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk, you pick it up an you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that right straight through the day. And what's more, no back talk. Now a high-priced man does just what he's told to do, and no back talk. Do you understand that? When this man tells you to walk, you walk; when he tells you to sit down, you sit down, and you don't talk back at him. Now you come on to work here tomorrow morning and I'll know before night whether you are really a high-priced man or not."

... Schmidt started to work, and all day long, and at regular intervals, was told by the man who stood over him with a watch, "Now pick up a pig and walk. Now sit down and rest. Now walk - now rest, etc. He worked when he was told to work, and rested when he was told to rest, and at half-past five in the afternoon had his 47 1/2 tons loaded on the car. And he practically never failed to work at this pace and do the task that was set him during the three days that the writer was at Bethlehem. ... he received 60 percent higher wages than were paid to other men who were not working on task work. One man after another was picked out and trained to handle pig iron at the rate of 47 1/2 tons per day until all of the pig iron was handled at this rate, and the men were receiving 60 percent more wages than other workmen around them (Taylor, 1911).#14
 
 

According to Taylor, Schmidt is like an uneducated gorilla who is incapable of understanding the scientific arts of the mechanical sciences underlying each work task Schmidt performs. Therefore, separate out all planning tasks and locate them in the hands of another, more educated college man. The duality here is Schmidt is dumb, scientists are smart. Taylor's characterization of Schmidt as a gorilla is similar to the way defense attorneys portrayed Rodney King.
 
 

Table 2.3:
 

Taylor's Planning Principles     1. Replace rules of thumb with scientific work planning using time and motion studies, PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) and Gantt charts and time tables.     2. Plan harmony in group actions, rather than discord by keeping workers in very small crews and having managers and clerks plan all work in advance, letting owners profit by savings of scientific work planning.     3. Plan cooperation of human action, rather than chaotic individualism by putting the planning job in the hands of clerks.     4. Plan maximum worker output, rather than peer-restricted output by setting worker quotas by the "best men" standards.     5. Develop all workers to the fullest extent possible for their own and their company's highest prosperity by paying people by their productivity.#15

 
 
 

Midvale Steel Story

"Now, Fred, we're very glad to see that you've been made gang-boss [said one of the workers]. You know the game all right, and we're sure that you're not likely to be a piece work hog. You come along with us, and everything will be all right, but if you try breaking any of these rates you can be mighty sure that we'll throw you over the fence."
 
 

The writer told them plainly that he was now working on the side of the management, and that he proposed to do whatever he could to get a fair day's work out of the lathes. This immediately started a war; in most cases a friendly war, because the men who were under him were his personal friends, but none the less a war, which as time went on grew more and more bitter. The writer used every expedient to make them do a fair day's work, such as discharging or lowering the wages of the more stubborn men who refused to make any improvement, and such as lowering the piece-work price, hiring green men, and personally teaching them how to do the work, with the promise from them that when they had learned how, they would then do a fair day's work. While the men constantly brought such pressure to bear (both inside and outside the works) upon all those who started to increase their output that they were finally compelled to do about as the rest did, or else quit. No one who has not had this experience can have an idea of the bitterness which is gradually developed in such a struggle. In a war of this kind the workmen have one expedient which is usually effective. They use their ingenuity to contrive various ways in which the machines which they are running are broken or damaged - apparently by accident, or in the regular course of work - and this they always lay at the door of the foreman, who has forced them to drive the machine so hard that it is overstrained and is being ruined. And there are few foremen indeed who are able to stand up against the combined pressure of all of the men in the shop. ... the Superintendent accepted the word of the writer when he said that these men were deliberately breaking their machines as part of the piece-work war which was going on, and he also allowed the writer to make the only effective answer to this Vandalism on the part of the men, namely: "There will be no more accidents to the machines in this shop. If any part of a machine is broken the man in charge of it must pay at least a part of the cost of its repair, and the fines collected in this way will all be handed over to the mutual beneficial association to help care for sick workmen." This soon stopped the willful breaking of machines.

...Once or twice he was begged by some of his friends among the workmen not to walk home, about two and a half miles along the lonely path by the side of the railway. He was told that if he continued to do this it would be at the risk of his life. In all such cases, however, a display of timidity is apt to increase rather than diminish the risk, so the writer told these men to say to the other men in the shop that he proposed to walk home every night right up that railway track; that he never carried and never would carry any weapon of any kind, and that they shoot and be d------.
 
 

After about three years of this kind of struggling, the output of the machines had been materially increased, in many cases doubled, and as a result the writer had been promoted from one gang-boss-ship to another until he became foreman of the shop. For any right-minded man, however, this success is in no sense a recompense for the bitter relations which he is forced to maintain with all of those around him. Life which is one continuous struggle with other men is hardly worth living. His workman friends came to him continually and asked him, in a personal, friendly way, whether he would advise them, for their own best interest, to turn out more work. And, as a truthful man, he had to tell them that if he were in their place he would fight against turning out any more work, just as they were doing, because under the piece-work system they would be allowed to earn no more wages than they had been earning, and yet they would be made to work harder (Taylor, p. 50-2).
 
 
 
 

1. In the pre-modernist system of trade unions, there was no differential pay for performance. Taylor's modern revolution was to pay people according to their work output, not by their trade.

2. In the pre-modernist period, 20 to 30 trades subdivided labor into distinct specialties. Men were more committed to their craft brothers than to demands for management to work faster. Taylor wanted to modernize the work place by giving management more control over the work tasks, the scheduling of tasks, and the scheduling of workers to a given task.

3. In the pre-modernist system, workers retained control over the knowledge of their craft, the timing of their work, the motions of their body, and the tools of their trade. They were craftsmen. The modernization of the work place resulted in the deskilling of the worker to a few tasks on the assembly line.

4. In the pre-modern work systems, the workmen got together to plan just how fast each job should be done and how much production was allotted to each machine throughout the shop. In this way they opposed the efforts of any manager to speed up production because increases in production did not mean increases in wages and their experience was that when output increased, members of their brotherhood got fired. Workers who rate-busted were penalized by other workers. The modernization of the workplace labeled this goldbricking or what Taylor called "soldiering" (putting the needs of the brotherhood ahead of economic output).
 
 

How was Schmidt's Work Planned? For example, Schmidt, the Bethlehem Steel pig iron worker, was studied at length, along with the other pig iron laborers.
 
 

If Schmidt had been allowed to attack the pile of 47 tons of pig iron without the guidance or direction of a man who understood the art, or science, of handling pig iron, in his desire to earn his high wages he would probably have tired himself out by 11 or 12 o'clock in the day. He would have kept so steadily at work that his muscles would not have had the proper periods of rest absolutely needed for recuperation, and he would have been completely exhausted early in the day. By having a man, however, who understood this law, stand over him and direct his work, day after day, until he acquired the habit of resting at proper intervals, he was able to work at an even gait all day long without unduly tiring himself.

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word "percentage" has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful. (Taylor, p. 59).
 
 

Why was Taylor Controversial? Frederick Winslow Taylor advocated the maximization of time and motion productivity through the application of scientific principles. Taylor believed management and worker interests were in harmony because "the principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee" (p. 9). Taylor wanted to pay men better than they were getting in exchange for increasing the productive efficiency of each worker. The planner did the thinking and the worker did the labor.
 
 

Was Taylor a Revolutionary? Taylor, the revolutionary, appeared before congressional hearings to explain why his methods would not rob employers of their judgment and discretion; why unions would not be toppled; why workers would not be laid off in mass when productivity doubled. Taylor is the hero of modern scientific management: what we are calling the "modernist" movement.
 
 

Three major challenges to planned work principles were presented to Taylor when he appeared in front of Congressional hearings or did public presentations:
 
 

1. Increasing output per worker would put people out of work. Working at full pace would harm the brotherhood of workers by throwing brothers out of work. It is better to curtail output.
 
 

Taylor's response: Increasing output, reduces cost, which in turn increases consumption. Increases in mechanization have put more and more people to work.
 
 

Taylor's story: "It evidently becomes for each man's interest, then, to see that no job is done faster than it has been in the past. The younger and less experienced men are taught this by their elders, and all possible persuasion and social pressure is brought to bear upon the greedy and selfish men to keep them from making new records which result in temporarily increasing their wages, while all those who come after them are made to work harder for the same old pay" (p. 22).
 
 
 
 

2. It is in the interests of managers for workers to need close supervision in order to protect manager's jobs.
 
 

Taylor's response: Workers work at a slow, easy gait, even though it is against their own best interests because management pays the energetic and the lazy man the same wage. They will restrict machine output to keep the production targets from increasing.
 
 

Taylor's story summarized: Managers are ignorant of science and have surrendered the workplace to the workers. They let workers decide the best way to do a given job. The worker has the final responsibility to do each job as he sees fit. Managers could, in fact, train workers in the sciences of how to do their jobs better and workers are indeed not capable of understanding those sciences. Managers were letting workers select people for their own crews. The job of the manager is to develop the science of how to do work and help the worker assume responsibility for work results. Now, management tries to get workers to produce, but does not train them in the sciences and does not pay them any more for their increased output. This is why pre-scientific management is characterized by warfare between workers and management.
 
 

3. Rule-of-thumb methods practiced by workers are protected by trade unions to insure union survival even though they are inefficient.
 
 

Taylor's response. Educated men of science are better able than ignorant workers to set up the procedures, movements, and schedule for a job. The rule of thumb procedures are controlled by work crews that value the brotherhood of workers over increased productivity.
 
 

At Bethlehem Steel there were about 600 shovelers. A scientific study was conducted to design shovels for different types of materials and tasks.

In order that each workman should be given his proper implement and his proper instructions for doing each new job, it was necessary to establish a detailed system for directing men in their work, in place of the old plan of handling them in large groups, or gangs, under a few yard foremen. As each workman came into the works in the morning, he took out of his own special pigeonhole, with his number on the outside, two pieces of paper, one of which stated just what implements he was to get from the tool room and where he was to start to work, and the second which gave the history of his previous day's work; that is, a statement of the work which he had done, how much he had earned the day before, etc. ... yellow paper showed the man that he had failed to do his full task the day before, and informed him that he had not earned as much as $1.85 a day, and that none but high-priced men would be allowed to stay permanently with this gang. ... So that whenever the men received white slips they knew that everything was all right, and whenever they received yellow slips they realized that they must do better or they would be shifted to some other class of work.

Bob: I recall a shoveling experience where the straw boss said, "Fill your shovel or fill your jacket." Partial load means you file out the door.
 
 
The Modernist Planning Unit. Dealing with every workman as a separate individual in this way involved the building of a labor office for the superintendent and clerks who were in charge of this section of the work. In this office every laborer's work was planned out well in advance, and the workmen were all moved from place to place by the clerks with elaborate diagrams or maps of the yard before them, very much as chessmen are moved on a chess-board, a telephone and messenger system having been installed for this purpose. In this way a large amount of the time lost through having too many men in one place and too few in another, and through waiting between jobs, was entirely eliminated. Under the old [pre-modern] system the workmen were kept day after day in comparatively large gangs, each under a single foreman, and the gang was apt to remain of pretty nearly the same size whether there was much or little for the particular kind of work on hand which this foreman had under his charge, since each gang had to be kept large enough to handle whatever work in its special line was likely to come along. (Taylor, p. 68-9)
 
 

What the Japanese flexible production system is teaching us is that the worker who participates in the planning, organizing, influencing, leading, and controlling produces more with higher quality and lower costs (less waste). The work is not planned for uneducated Schmidt's, it is planned for intelligent workers.
 
 

Taylor saw that in the craft age of pre-modernist, the man was first and the system was second. In the scientific modernization of corporate life, the system became more important than both craftsman and leader. In the postmodern movement, the system is returned to its subordinate place with respect to man.
 
 

"The best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation" (p. 7).
 
 

Summary. What are the two elements of Modernist Planning? Answer: Time and Space. By planning, we allocate resources: people, money, services, production, and social auditing in time and space.
 
 

Time. After Taylor initiated modernism, planners continued to pre-plan tasks into parallel time intervals, evenly spacing workers, supervised in smaller groups, and all controlled by time-tables. At the end of each time interval clerks inspected the results and workers who were slower were paid less and sent back to slower work gangs, services that were botched got paid less, and so it went. The time table was inflexible, like the machines and shovels that were more important than the humans that were governed by their rhythmic movements.
 
 

Space. Planners move the shovelers about like men on a chess-board, using elaborate diagrams or maps of the yard space. Planners put people into their spaces at precisely the right times. We are standing in the space of a modernist enterprise. Space is also divided between shovelers and superintendents. High spaces go to bigger supervisors. Parking spaces are reserved for high status executives. Employees who serve customers walk farther from their parking spaces, eat in distant cafeterias, work in windowless office cubicles, and stand in line to receive their shovels.
 
 

Taylorism, is but one side of the mechanization of man. Taylor is the father of machine bureaucracy. There is a second, more ubiquitous form: service bureaucracy which we will examine in the chapter on influence.

Modernist planning is rooted, not only in the factory model, but in the service bureaucracy (usually government) as well. Bureaucracy is part of both service and product organizations. Bureaucracy and scientific management were compatible allies in the de-skilling of pre-modern men and women. Every organization has some bureaucratic discourse.
 
 
 
 

Figure 2.1:
 
 

Gantt Chart for a Course Project
 
 

TASKS WEEKS

PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique. PERT was developed by the Special Projects Office of the US NAVY, with help from Lockheed and the Booz, Allen & Hamilton consultants for work done in 1958 on the Polaris Weapon System. The tool has been computerized and is used to this day throughout the Aerospace industry. PERT is a network tool for flow charting the production process to display what people, materials, and tasks will be networked and how long each task will take to complete. Notice the similarity to the Gantt chart.
 
 
 
 

1. Brainstorm a list of all tasks to be completed.

2. Determine how long (time elapsed) each task will take to complete.

3. Identify who will complete each task.

4. Specify which tasks must logically be done before a subsequent task can be started and which tasks can be done simultaneous with other tasks.

5. Draw a flowchart with circles and arrows between circles with time estimates written on each arrow.

6. Critical Paths are the longest time-to-complete paths in the time-event network.

7. Estimate the "optimistic" and "pessimistic" time to complete the total project.
 
 

A computerized PERT chart can tabulate thousands of events and pathways. PERT force management to plan how all the pieces of a task will fit together. Each person can see what he or she is doing in the total plan. As a network, people who screw up will create downstream problems for other people's tasks. Managers work to keep the total network on schedule.
 
 

PERT Critique. The problem with PERT works when you can foresee all the contingencies and relationships in advance. Schedules are guesses. In repetitive events, such as in mass production, PERT is not necessary because the sequence of events and time management issues are worked out once and there is no need to keep working them out again and again. PERT puts planning into the hands of the engineers and programmers who work out all the guesses and time-event inter-relationships. In complex projects, without computerization it is difficult to keep re-modifying a PERT chart in order to keep pace with the delays and false starts in thousands of event arrows.
 
 

Summary

The pyramid is a combination of Taylor's scientific management, Weber's bureaucracy, and Fayol's administrative bureaucracy. Despite the adaptations Elton Mayo and hundreds of other human relations advocates, the modernist form of organization is the dominant American form of organization in the private and public sector, in both product and service organizations. Each of the classical pioneers were revolutionaries in their zeal to displace pre-modern organization with modern organization. As we transition to postmodern planning, keep in mind that most large organizations contain strands of pre-modern craft-based planning, modernist brains and hands planning, and postmodern planning. Just because America USSR centralized bureaucratic planning models collapsed --- do not for a moment think that modernist organization has lost its steel grip on the capitalist economies of the world.

Max Weber (1864-1920) Weber saw bureaucracy as a way to get beyond the shortcomings of pre-modern feudal and charismatic forms. His conclusions were based on studies of long-term organizations like the Catholic Church, the Egyptian Empire, and the Prussian army. These shortcomings of feudalism and charismatic included nepotism, inequity in how people were selected and managed, and inefficiency. While today we do not think of bureaucracy as efficient, to Weber they were much more so than feudal and charismatic. Charismatic and Feudal leaders and managers, in his view, were less reliable in these areas than more rational, legal leaders guided by rules, laws, and policies. He vested control of the bureaucratic machine in the particular offices.
 
 

Table 2.4:
 
 
 

Principles of Weber's Bureaucracy

1. Division of Labor. Divide labor into specialized expertise areas throughout the organization. 2. Chain of Command. Pyramid position defined by a hierarchy of authority and an explicit chain of command.  3. Rules and Regulations. Formal rules governing decisions and actions of everyone. Allows continuity in event of personnel changes. 4. Impersonality. Be detached with employees so that sentiments do not distort objective judgment. 5. Selection. Select workers by their technical utility. Friendship or fraternal favoritism is ruled out. Advancement is by seniority and achievement. Pay them with salaries.  6. Documentation. Keep records to document, monitor, and evaluate. 7. Centralization. Centralize all decisions at the top.#17

 
 
 

Charisma Weber wanted to put limits on leader discretion. He constructs his ideal type of the Charisma system, as a system that will eventually become either a traditional or a bureaucratic system. Note that in charisma, there is an emotional form of communal relationship to which Weber objects (p. 360). The pure ideal type charismatic system has all those postbureaucratic qualities we adore in OT: no career, no spheres of competence, no zones of authority, no system of formal rules, no promotion, no appointments, no functions, and no hierarchy. The leader inspires, sets out visions, engages in revolution, and appeals to sings and magic. Charisma is anti-bureaucratic and anti-traditional, but in the end must become one or the other. Charismatic leaders repudiate the past and announce the revolution (p. 362). But, soon the rational economic forces and the division of the duties along the material interest of followers take hold. "It cannot remain stable, but becomes either traditionalized or rationalized [code for bureaucracy], or a combination of both" (p. 364).
 
 

Weber saw charismatic and traditional as unstable systems, evolving toward his ideal type-bureaucratic system. If organizations are conceived as a single system, be it bureaucratic, organic, charismatic, or traditional, this is because society is seen as a unique whole to which everything including organizations and environment are related (Lukes, p. 441).
 
 

Martin and Knopf deconstruct Weber's story of bureaucracy and pose a "resituated" model. They do this by proposing a story of bureaucracy that is not more male rhetoric. They also do more than just reverse the roles to make it a female-organization. Instead they work up a story to make both genders co-partners in the way that organizing gets done. We will leave you to draft your own resituated story of bureaucratic organization. We turn now to planning in the postmodern world.

Getting Started There are three questions in the minds of people who become interested in postmodern management.
 
What is postmodern? (press here for tutorial).  

First, how does postmodern management differ essentially from those of ordinary modern management?
 
 

Before Schmidt and before Human Relations, the worker planned his own time, and retained control over the knowledge of his own work. Schmidt grew up in the pre-modern age of union crafts and had worked as an apprentice pig iron worker. With the application of engineering and social science, the modern age began. Management planners observed workers to extract detailed knowledge of the worker's crafts. These scientific observations were converted to time and motion rules, laws and time-tables, norms of group functioning. Managers became systematic recorders, indexers, and scientific data gathers.
 
 

After the 1970s (jump in trade deficit, gas wars, rise in Japanese flexible production), the planning function began to be re-integrated with the worker's job. Workers are now trained to plan more of their own work and to participate more fully in the planning of the enterprise. The over-specialization of work tasks under modernism is being re-integrated under postmodernism. The results are better, because the new methods of work planning allow more decentralized and flexible production systems to adapt more quickly to customer needs and to attain higher levels of quality when people are skilled enough to inspect their own work.
 
 

No. The postmodern approach looks at the historical interface of management style and industrialization from one generation to the next. Contingency theory, on the other hand, is an a-historical stop gap theory. Contingency theory was one more attempt to make management into an a-historical science of terms, concepts, and measurements: a list of terms, conditions, and variables without stories and without history. It seeks to explain anomalies in the transition from the modernist to postmodernist period of production. It falls short.
 
 

Are Postmodern Organizations Good or Bad? We think there is both an emancipating and a dark side to postmodern management and organization. While we would like to tell you a story to lead you to believe that its all the fault of the mods, in deed there is a need to deconstruct postmodern discourse. And much that is masquerading as postmodern management, is just late modern in disguise.
 
 

The Dark Side of Postmodern Management - postmodern managing is enveloping us in ways that mediate our ability to find critical distance and resistance. Jameson (1984a) writes of these things: a context that takes on depthlessness, a weakening of historicity, intensities of the sublime and deep constitutive relationships and our world is decontextualized.
 
 
 
 

1. Depthlessness. Simulacrum comes from the work of Baudrillard and refers to a copy for which no original ever existed. Organizations are not part of a natural environment, as much as they are responsive to simulated environments. Organizations are responding to other organizations.
 
 
A new depthlessness which finds its prolongation both in contemporary "theory" and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose "schizophrenic" structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new emotional ground tone - what I will call "intensities: - which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; [and] the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system (Jameson, 1984a: 58).
 
 
Nature has been paved-over with simulated images and hyper-realities where Disney is more real than the images it simulates. Jameson compares Van Gogh’s painting, "Peasant Shoes," which gives us a strand link to the context of a class society, with Andy Warhol’s "Diamond Dust Shoes," which is more a random collection of images without apparent signifiers to a life world narrative. Rather than contextualism, in the postmodern, there is "no way to situate its features into a larger life-context, making it impossible to interpret" (Dickens, 1994: 89). I would like to call this postmodern world hypothesis: decontextualism.
 
 

2. Weakening of Historicity. We have become schizophrenic, in that we are displaced from an unfolding historical narrative and replaced by many diffuse and local narratives. Such universal, historical narratives as Columbus discovering America are being rejected as ideological and a transparent hegemonic revision of Columbus exploitation and brutality into a hero-narrative rationalizing colonization. Narrative histories of General Motors, Sears, Coca Cola, Ford, Nike, and Disney are also being viewed as ideological and hegemonic revisions to make exploitation into a tale that glorifies CEOs as capitalist adventurers on some grand entrepreneurial and global journey. Postmodernism is an "evident existential fact of life that there no longer seems to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from the schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and our own daily life" (Jameson, 1984a: 69). I can no longer believe the universalizing history of corporations and their heroic CEOs we read in management and organization theory textbooks. Lyotard (1984) has also described the postmodern fragmentation of the universal narrative into diverse and local narratives of particular races, genders, communities, and occupational groups. There is no organic relationship between the context of my local experience and the context presented in the universal narrative as the constant improvement and synthesis of the corporate system, as told in organization theory textbooks. The writings of Weber, Durkheim, and Marx are cannibalized and randomly recombined in the contemporary theories of Aldrich, Mintzberg, and Pfeffer with the stories of Michael Eisner, Alfred Sloan, and J.C. Penny. The textbook histories are simulacra where it is no longer clear how the classic work is being copied into the contemporary work, so that the original is no longer apparent (Gephart, Boje, & Rosile, 1996). Postmodernists seek to write the histories of the local narratives that highlight the weakening of modernist historicity. Jameson’s film examples include American Graffiti, The Shining, and Chinatown which nostalgically represent a time when the USA was stable, prosperous, and world dominant (Jameson, 1984a; Dickens, 1994: 91). These films are ideological in that they represent a nostalgic longing for a past that was simpler, with black-and-white categories and clear class distinctions. This weakening of history is also decontextualizing the contextualism presented in the modernist narrative, while nostalgically searching for an aesthetic to explain our current time and history.
 
 

For Jameson (1984a: 63): "concepts such as anxiety and alienation are no longer appropriate in the world of the postmodern." The alienation of the subject which we could experience in Munch’s modernist paining, "The Scream" has been replaced by Andy Warhol’s works on "Marilyn Monroe." Munch’s painting had signifiers that derived meaning in an historic context, but Warhol’s work is disconnected from a context of temporal continuity. Reality is a series of disconnected presents. Universal narratives, such as globalization, colonization, and the domino theory of the Vietnam War -- united past and future into a relationship with the present. This temporal unifying process of a story of the past and future into the present is how human identity has been achieved. Pepper (1942), coming from pragmatic, semiotic philosophy, uses the example of the temporal unfolding sentence to illustrate contextualism. Jameson (1984a: 72) also looks at the sentence, but sees it as an example of temporal disunity: "if we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life." This is because objects in our postmodern intertextual context is composed of simulacrum relationships and no longer situated in a real world context.
 
 

3. Intensities of the Sublime. This is an outcome of the fragmentation of our subjectivity in a system of multinational capitalism. Instead of alienation or Durkheim’s (1939) anomie (can not integrate the strands of the division of labor together) we have a new problem: the death of the self as a unified subject to experience any feelings at all. Jameson does not mean we do not have feelings, only that our feelings are "free floating" and not linked to a real world context of temporal continuity. Since the human organism no longer has "nature" as the other, feelings lack a referent. The intensities of the sublime feelings have been decontextualized from nature and put into a postmodern context. For Jameson, the other of contemporary society is no longer nature, it is technology, his fourth dimension.
 
 

4. Deep Constitutive Relationships. It is not religion or education, but technology and global consumption that constitute our collective consciousness. Jameson is not referring to the industrial technology of modernism, which focused on the machine as the defining metaphor of modernism. This is also Pepper’s (1942) mechanistic world hypothesis. Machines in the modern and postmodern industrial era have distinctly different capacities for representation (Dickens, 1994: 93). The electric motor, railroad locomotive, automobile factory, and the grain elevator are objects whose mimetic metaphors are all about "speed concentrated at rest." The postmodern machines are the computer, Nintendo game, fax, and the television --- does not connote speed but implodes space itself, carrying its flat surface image within itself. These are machines of reproduction, not production. Our new identity becomes channel surfer and web space navigator. Our perceptual habits are suited for modern mechanistic time and space, but we now find ourselves living in hyperspace (Jameson, 1984a: 80). Postmodern hyperspace has:
 
 

finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surrounding perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a map-able external world (Jameson, 1984a: 83).
 
 

This is the grid we used in the 1993 book to explain Network.
 

N-E-T-W-O-R-K
 
 

NETWORK PLANNING: Postmodern planning is network because many voices: suppliers, customers, workers, communities, etc. get heard and networked into the planning process.
 
 
 
 
N Needs of customers get discovered.
 
 

The purpose of business according to Peter Drucker is to "create and maintain a customer."
 
 

Plan around customer needs. There are two types of customers: the external one that buys the goods and services, and the internal customer that receives the results of the work you do. Postmodern planning is network planning. In a network of small and large producers, suppliers, movers and shakers, there are a lot of internal customers. Talk to the internal and external customers to find out their needs.
 
 

Plan for the niche needs. Service, quality, and uniqueness define the customer niche of any organization. Once upon a time Henry Ford could make any car as long as the Model was a T and the color was black. Now the preferences of each customer are communicated through dealerships to the choices of models and colors planned to come off the assembly line in the Toyota flexible production system. The planners make more short runs. A black car followed by a red sedan, and three blue convertibles. The worker has to think about which interior, which steering wheel, which doors, and a hundred other elements. Instead of massive inventories between each process, suppliers are told through computer terminals, triggered by assembly counts, when to bring the "Just In Time" inventory to the factory, to be fork lifted to the necessary location "Just In Time." [Refer back to the Harley-Davidson section for more JIT].
 
 

Space is allocated to customer need fulfillment in the postmodern concern. If we define the environment and mother earth as a customer, then plan some space to give to social and environmental causes, like food and education for the homeless.
 
 

E Expectations of network stakeholders.
 
 

What is a stakeholder? Anyone (individual, group, business, community organization, agency) who has a stake (expectation) in the product/service network.#18
 
 

What is network planning? Network planning is taking into account all the various stakeholders that constitute the delivery network for products and services, the community has a stake in the activities of that network as does the environment and even good old mother earth. Rather than a planned network, the network adapts and flexes and contracts and reconfigures to develop and deliver quality goods and services. Planning in a postmodern network is planning how to bring the ad hoc stakeholders together to shape, bend, and untwist the network relationships. The postmodern networks are not only cross-organizational, they are global. Products are composed of parts and services from several nations, composed in yet another nation, and sold in another.
 
 

How can you plan your time schedule and your movements so that you create and maintain internal and external network customers? First, get up and go visit internal and external customers. Plan to move where they move, and spend time where they spend time. Plan to tune into their reality. Ask the value-added question: How does what I do add value to the person or persons who receives the results of my work? Spending quality time with customers is the first priority of value-added planning.
 
 

Internal and External Customers Expect Quality. Plan for quality. Customers define what is and is not quality products and services. Do not lie to the customer and promise quality that is not there. The American automobile companies did this in the 1970s and customers left in the millions. Do not expand on the truth or stretch the truth. When the CEO's of Hewlett Packard address their employees at their annual meetings they are beginning to tell the truth about quality. Xerox corporation distributes customer dissatisfaction letters and posts summaries and excerpts of customer complaints on their corporate walls.
 
 

The Community is a stakeholder with Expectations. Companies like Control Data Corporation plan to give to their community, even when their community investments are not as profitable as alternative investments. CDC conducts high tech training aimed at unemployed and under-employed minorities. They recruit drop outs and gang members and fabric good citizens.
 
 

Mother Earth is a Stakeholder with Expectations. If we do not change the patterns of consumption and production in American and in particular, in third world countries, our planet is going to die. Our planning parameters are avoidance-oriented. We avoid pollution laws by building plants in countries with weaker laws. While we do negative-earth planning, global warming increases, the Amazon Rain Forests are cut down, and toxic waste levels build up in our oceans, streams, and underground water sources. There are a few organizations, like Ben and Jerry's ice creams that have environmental and social consequence auditing built into their plans and disclosed in their annual reports.
 
 

T Team planning among network players.
 
 

How do you plan the creation, modification, or reformation of networks? Bring together teams of people throughout the network that do not normally get to interact on a face to face basis. Let the customer for calculators meet the person who works on the circuit boards. Teams can meet to define the needs of the network. Networking depends on the continual negotiation of collective needs and expectations as participants try to discover and negotiate common issues. To create a network, you have to bring the potential participants together to talk out their issues. To modify a network you bring people to the table who have not met before so they can form new pathways in the network. To reform a network, you break network boundaries and broaden the participation.
 
 

Ram Charan vividly demonstrates the effectiveness of networks at Conrail, Royal Bank of Canada, Dun and Bradstreet Europe. He concludes that by forging a strong set of relationships and values, networks reinforce managers' best instincts - and unleash emotional energy and joy of work.#19
 
 

Postmodern Storytelling Teams. In the postmodern era, planning teams are comprised of social auditors, employees, managers, customers, vendors, and stockholders. Each has a stake in the planning process. The stories of each are told and retold, until the teams emerge with a story of a plan that will guide the firm into the 21st century. As the organization plans to make customers and mother earth happy, it is rewarded with long term survival.
 
 

W 6 W's. (Who, where, what, wants, when, and wow).
 
 

Who is in the network? A network is a pattern of information and resource exchanges recurring and enduring over time. The exchanges occur all the way from resource supplier, to producers, service providers, and all the way to end users.
 
 

Where are the resources? Information, people, money, and materials (even borrowed ones) are resources.
 
 

What are the goals? The goal is to survive as a network by keeping customers happy with their services and products.
 
 

Wants of each customer? Customers are internal and external. Anyone with a stake in the network. The wants of customers vary and need to be identified and responded to.
 
 

When do customers need their stuff? Customers want their goods and services now. Networks that provide quick response time, short cycle times, are going to be more competitive.
 
 

Wow (is this exciting to customers?)? Anything worth doing, is worth doing with a sense of enthusiasm and excitement.
 
 

O Organize your network plans.
 
 

Planning the organization of a network. Networks have a core of participants who are more dominant than more peripheral actors in a given network. They are more central to the information, decision, and resource pathways of the network. Do you organize to give that core greater control over the peripheral stakeholders? Do you mobilize stakeholders that can oppose the grip of the core? Do you break up a hierarchy of prestige and privilege to form a new pattern of resource allocations? Pecking orders in networks are just as entrenched as Weber's bureaucracy. The postmodern project is to give more marginal and peripheral stakeholders more voice in the organizing of the network.
 
 

In Ram Charan's network study, membership criteria are simple but subtle: What select group of managers, by virtue of their business skills and judgements, personal motivations and drive, control of resources, and positions at the juncture of critical information flows are uniquely qualified to shape and deliver on the corporate strategy.#20
 
 

How to induce networking? People network out of self-interest and out of an understanding of shared fate. Shared fate means what I do affects your outcomes and what you do affects my outcomes, even though we do not directly interact. For example, homelessness lowers everyone's standards of living, even though you may never meet a homeless person. To induce networking, get people to define common needs, common outcomes, common enemies, and shared fate. What are the inducements to participation and what are the contributions you can expect from each participant? Get people to share their stories about the past.#21 Get them to share their stories about future scenarios. Exchanging stories is a primary basis for network formation and reformation.
 
 

R Responsiveness of the network to customers.
 
 

How do you deconstruct and then reconstruct networks to be responsive to customers? Define the needs and expectations of customers. Organize story exchanges between customers (both internal and external) and different groups of network players. The customer's story has to be championed and broadcast to all network participants. What is the customer's story? What are the stories of how different players in the network have or have not been responsive to customers? Storytelling is political. Stories bring new definitions of customers, new customer needs, new customer expectations, and new customer solutions to the table. The stories are scenarios of how to behave in ways that do or do not promote customer responsiveness. To deconstruct a network, buy off its resources. Dumping more money into public bureaucracies, for example, did not make them any more responsive to customers. Most of the money that is taxed on the middle class to be redistributed to the poor reaches the pockets of professional bureaucrats in entrenched bureaucratic networks that resist any and all attempts to make the bureaucracy accountable to the customer (defined as tax payers and recipients of aid). Grass roots lobbying, demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, and other rebellions (from vantage point of the elite center) is necessary to reshape bureaucratic networks. Jack Kemp, for example, at HUD, is setting up oppositional networks called "Economic Empowerment": where the customers of the housing projects, the tenants, run the housing, the way that free citizens run the services of a private condominium. Kemp wants to see people get financing to buy their own units, contract their own services, manage their own affairs.
 
 

Loosen or tighten the network. Loosely coupled networks are adaptive. Tightly coupled networks, with empires and central dominance, are typically rigid and unresponsive to customers. To make a network more responsive, the network has to be loosened up so that new patterns of relationship can form with the customer as the center of attention and responsiveness. This can be done by cutting off resources, inviting new players to the network, getting peripheral members to coalesce in order to take power away from the core, setting up a competing network to serve customers, and non-violent protest.#22
 
 

Stories. Stores can be told that highlight victories over enemies, identify customer needs, promote positive network actions, and shape network futures. There is a history to how the network got started, a scenario of dramas about how it evolved, stories of its important leaders, dramas about the pathways it has incorporated and deconstructed from the network. Networks can be transformed by stories of network possibilities for being customer-responsive. Stories can motivate stakeholder participation. Stories convey the language metaphors that define customers: serfs and slaves versus customers as kings and rulers. To reshape a network, reshape the language, the common stories, their sense of common history, and their common vision of the future.
 
 

Ram Charan confirms the story message when he points out that the network must share openly and simultaneously each member's experiences, successes, and problems, soft information that cannot be captured in databases and spreadsheets and that remain hidden for as long as possible in most traditional organizations.#23
 
 

K KISS. Keep It Sweet and Simple: Plan to make customers happy!
 
 

KISS is Happy Customer Planning. Making and keeping customers happy is the purpose of business. All planning must start from this premise. The network must service the needs, expectations, wants, quality definitions, and responsiveness dictates of customers.
 
 

What is ROT? Boj - I am a member of ROT-L, a listserve and electronic journal (EJ-ROT). ROT-L stands for Radical Organization Theory. This is a group of about forty scholars around the world who seek to discuss and debate the potential contribution of radical organizational theory. ROT looks at issues such as democratizing the workplace, environmentalism, feminism, critical theory, and my favorite: postmodernism. ROT is a shift in management, ownership, and control of organizations from a power elite to democratic governance that is environmentally sustainable and non-violent. Note this definition would not include re-engineering, which does just the opposite: placing more control in the hands of an elite group of managers, owners, and their expert consultants. ROT brings the marginalized and dominated into democratic and meaningful control of the organization and its sustainable-ecological context. Institutions are set up to keep people apart so they do not interfere with the simple few who run things. But, they run things by setting up smoke screens. I would like to get a different way of seeing the world than the one I am fed by the system I work in. I seek a different understanding social ecology than what I am exposed to at work. I want to work in an organization that reflects the concerns, interests, and needs of the people, not some self-serving, propagandist, leader-elite. I have spent my life, thus far, working in organizations where decisions go while a charade of participation is staged by leadership. The leader propagates a system of convenient myths that sustains elite power and control. Leadership in organization theory is a specialized class of folks that see to their own interests, while removing the majority from meaningful participation.
 
 
 
 

What is the role of storytelling in postmodern planning?
 
 

Collect planning stories to show parallels and differences with the stories of Frederick Taylor. Gather stories from unhappy and happy customers. Keep modifying plans until customer stories report higher levels of satisfaction with service, quality and uniqueness.

What is the story line of your time and motions? Are you an individual or are your time and motions carefully programmed for you.
 
 

The American emphasis is on controls, performance, results (usually financial), or the denial of rewards and even penalties. R-Criteria, or P-Criteria, are easily quantifiable and short term. American management emphasizes R Criteria almost exclusively.
 
 

Process-Oriented Management.

The Japanese emphasis is on KAIZEN. P-Oriented managers support and stimulate efforts to improve the way employees do their jobs. It is a long-term outlook. Attitude factors are rewarded including: discipline, time management, skill development, participation and involvement, morale, and communication.#30
 
 

Table 2.7:
 

R-Criteria	P-Criteria
* Number of successful sales calls. * Amount of money saved.     * Increments to this quarter's profits.  * Discipline. Getting fired for talking back. * Got customers to increase orders by 10%. * Met quarterly profit goals.	* Amount of time spent calling on new customers. * Time spent generating solutions to problems. * Time spent improving the work process. * Discipline. Coming to work on time each day. * Improved customer order handling by 10%. * Improved the quality of the work environment.

 

Table 2.8:
 
 
 

Modernist Wisdom The American Way	Postmodern Wisdom The Japanese Way
Higher quality leads to higher costs.     Larger inventory lots lead to lower costs.     Workers do not need to be taken into account.     Experts, not workers generate new ideas.         The manager is the judge of quality.	Higher quality leads to lower costs.     Smaller inventory lots lead to lower costs.     A thinking worker is a productive worker.     Workers ideas improve work process, increase quality, and build customer satisfaction.     The customer is the judge of quality.#31

 

Table 2.9:
 

Japan's Application of the Deming PDCA Wheel

P Plan. Everyone plans improvements in present practices using statistical measurement tools, such as Pareto diagrams, cause-and-effect diagrams, histograms, control charts, scatter diagrams, graphs, and checksheets.     D Do. Doing the plan---making, or working on---the product or service that was planned.     C Check. People doing the work Check to insure that the plan satisfies customer needs and expectations.     A Action. In case a complaint is filed, or a mistake is made, or a better way is discovered --- it has to be incorporated into the planning phase, and positive steps (action) taken for the next round of efforts. Action here refers to action for implementing continuous quality improvement.

 

1. Pareto diagrams. A diagram that classifies problems according to reasons why something is not high quality. Qualtiy and service snags are diagrammed by priority using a bar-graph format. For example if a customer has to wait, what are all the reasons?
 
 
* Not enough help.

* Staff is at lunch.

* Staff does not know answers to questions.

* Staff does not know location of merchandise.

* Staff has to wait for manager's signature.

* Customer is asking for wrong item.

* Staff engaged in lengthy conversation.

* Staff does not understand customer request.
 
 

To do a Pareto diagram, someone must systematically record how often a given glitch is observed to occur. Then the chart is made up, analyzed, and problem solved. The PDCA is set in motion.
 
 

2. Cause-and-effect diagrams. Use to analyze a process according to factors such as men, materials, methods, machines as branches on a tree or bones in a fishbone or "Godzilla-bone graphs." The problems within each element are listed as sub-branches or connecting bones on each main branch.
 
 

1. Japanese Management is not the same thing as Postmodern Management? Japanese production systems began with the biggest wholesale adoption of Taylor's scientific management in combination with Japanese human relations consensus engineering that the world had ever fabricated. Thousands of workers began to apply Taylor-principles as part of a collective machine. However, Japan began to bend and improve and adapt the Taylor machine methods to their own culture. Instead of strict division of labor and the separation of planning and doing, the Japanese did not strictly divide labor or separate planning and doing, brains and hands. Each worker became an entrepreneur producing quality and dedicated to customer satisfaction.
 
 

Since the Japanese system is the most well known and researched role model, we can make observations about postmodernism using the Japanese system as a case study. In addition, Japan marginalizes women. Many of the Japanese life time employment benefits go to men, not to women. Women are on the periphery doing more of the temporary work.
 
 

The Japanese have a saying deru kugi wa utareru "the nail that sticks up, gets pounded down." It is no less true in America. There is often no place in the corporation for individuals. People who plan their time and motion around doing something unique, something high quality, something innovative and sticking with it until it takes hold in their corporation.
 
 

2. Cycle Time. With cycle time the definition of every step of every work process and every individual's job is more and more specified and increasingly the worker is controlled by the process. The postmodern rhetoric says that the worker is getting increased control over the line and can even shut down the line to make sure that quality levels are achieved. However, the skeptical counter is that as cycle time is implemented, individual discretion and pace decreases. Loyotard (1984) brings up the concept of "performativity." Rosenau (1992) defines performativity as "modern criteria by which judgment is made on the basis of pragmatic performance or outcome ("capacity, efficiency, control,") ... Postmodernists argue that performativity discourages diversity and autonomy, flexibility and openness. Performativity through cycle time removes discretion and control over the pace of work from the worker. Workers can not schedule breaks, speed up or slow down their pace in response to fatigue cycles, and as a result become more and more an extension of their machines.
 
 

Bob: I saw an ad that said robots do not need breaks, do not go to the bathroom, do not eat lunch, or come to work late.

Statistical Operator Control (SOC)
 
 

3. The Productivity Triad. Planning is all about improving productivity. At Harley-Davidson, for example, their productivity triad consists of employee involvement (EI), statistical operator control (SOC), and just in time (JIT) (see Reid, 1990).#32 There is EI in the planning process, which from a postmod perspective gives the worker increased control over their own work. However, a skeptical analysis would point out that with EI there is less need for supervisors and staff positions, which in the modernist firm, did all the planning work for the workers. The workers were the hands and the staff was the brains. People are now expected to think on the job and the thinking and actions they now take on, allows management to save money by reducing its overall staff investment. One of the grand revelations, as management of Harley-Davidson executives visited the Marysville, Ohio Honda plant, was that there were no computers and no legions of staff planners running around. Productivity was higher with fewer people. How is it that fewer people do more productive work than many more people? The usual story is that when workers think for themselves, are trained in planning their own work, and as systems are streamlined by, for example, getting rid of overly complex computer scheduling of the line as well as giving the worker local discretion over planning their work --- then these facets lead to improved productivity with fewer people. Nevertheless, the skeptic must ask if these workers, working faster cycle times, and thinking as they work, and working at much more rapid assembly line speeds are over-worked. Are they in fact getting more discretion or are they more tightly coupled, than even Frederic Taylor and Henry Ford imagined, to their production function?
 
 

Statistical Operator Control (SOC). In the 70s and 80s the U.S. experimented with quality circles. Workers were trained in brainstorming and problem solving techniques by legions of consultants. They made tons of suggestions, which management labeled griping and complaining. Management just was not prepared to implement quality circle productivity and planning suggestions. This is the usual story for quality circle failures. However, there is a more fundamental reason for the failure of quality circles. W. Edward Deming and Joseph Juran, when they were brought to post-World War II Japan by General Douglas MacArthur, taught the Japanese workers and managers the arts of SOC. The workers now had the means to chart their own productivity variances and show management bar charts and histograms of the impact of weakly designed parts from suppliers, inconsistent machine settings, etc. The charts showed clear paths to increasing productivity and management was quick to implement the results. With more SOC training and more SOC implementation, continuous improvement (KAIZEN) became reality. Now what is the skeptical analysis here? For one thing, isn't SOC just time and motion study done with stop watches and gauges the way Frederic Taylor did it? The crucial difference is instead of a staff of people going around inspecting the worker's routines, the workers now do time and motion studies on their own work process. Foucault would term this internalizing the gaze. As surveillance tasks are taken on by the worker, then you no longer need staffers to do the gaze. Therefore foremen can be released, time and motion people can be released, preventative maintenance people can be released. The worker self-supervises, does the work and the maintenance, and does her own time and motion studies. The worker is every bit as controlled in this postmodern dimension as she was in the modernist period of Taylorism.
 
 

Just In Time JIT. With JIT, management can plan to lower its inventory levels. It is a pull system instead of a push system. Pull means that computer algorithms track the parts, predict how many parts are needed when, and transmit orders and reorders to suppliers. In JIT, it is a pull system of planning. As workers on the line need more parts, their bins get empty. This is obvious to people who keep the bins full and the supplier is informed more parts are needed on the line. At Harley-Davidson the results were quite dramatic. In the 70s and early 80s, massive rube-goldberg overhead conveyors carried parts all around the plant. And there were massive levels of available inventories spun about on these conveyors. The problem is that the parts did not fit, were rusted, or could not be found. As JIT was implemented, first in a few sectors of the plant, then spreading throughout the manufacturing centers, a marvelous result occurred. If a part did not fit, the worker now armed with SOC and EI notified the supplier to fix it immediately. This lowered the waste, improved the quality, and brought up the productivity. Instead of huge hospital bays with hundreds of new Harleys needing to be repaired, be fitted with parts that could not be found, or shipped to dealers with a bag of parts yet to be installed, the Harley's were coming off the line with high quality. Costs were lowered, the rumbling, noisy, cumbersome overhead parts conveyor was dismantled.
 
 

What is the skeptical analysis of JIT? How about the fact that lowering the assembly plants inventories, raises inventories at the supplier's plants. The cost of inventory can be shifted from manufacturer to supplier. In an ideal world, the supplier would also use JIT, produce smaller lot sizes while getting up-to-date feedback from assemblers that parts fit. JIT, like cycle time, takes more slack out of the work process and thereby adds more stress to the worker. According to Parker and Slaughter (1988) at the NUMMI (New United Motors Manufacturing Incorporated) plant in Fremont, California, the supposedly postmodern system of flexible manufacturing (cycle time, continuous improvement, JIT, etc.) has led to increased worker stress, increased health problems, etc.
 
 

4. Greed and Letting Investment Bankers do Planning. One primary cause for the ruination of the US economy is greed. Greed is the penchant and obsession with quarterly returns. Make a quick score, get promoted, make another quick score, and move on before the roof caves in. Many finance MBA's do precisely this. And it is not the MBA who is to blame. The blame must lie with the MBA degree factories, those bastions of wisdom, populated by people who, for the most part, never worked as an executive or a manager, or a shop keeper. The so-called "professional" educator who never worked. Their advice was short term profit, with the share holders as the only relevant customers. Well guess what happened? A whole lot of foreign customers, in cooperation with their governments, began to engage in long term investments in people training, better work processes, more flexible production systems, and innovative research. These new "postmodern" producers are teaching the U.S. a lesson we shall never forget. The problem is the MBA mills are still turning out financial geniuses who are obsessed with short term gains, short term financial markets, and to hell with long term customers, long term employees, and long term growth. Dismantle, sell off, acquire, merge, and absorb. Collect businesses in unrelated industries to hedge your bet that any one will fail. Planning has become a kin to gambling. And the loan sharks are winning.
 
 

America is a bunch of burger flippers, insurance salesmen, and importers. We are working in companies owned by off shore interests, managed by long distance, and employing millions of temporary workers, who do not receive medical benefits, and can be laid off without notice.
 
 

Here is the best case scenario story.

America begins to invest in long term growth planning, customer listening takes precedence over stock speculating, and our government begins to facilitate competition that meets the challenge of the world economy. We are working in companies that invest in long term training, provide excellent benefits, and if someone must be laid off they spend their off time in training.
 
 
 
 

5. Planning for Social Audits. What if profit is not the only thing important to organizational success. In the postmodern organization, success is also defined by meeting customer needs, meeting societal needs, and by meeting the needs of mother earth. What good is a company whose profits suck the marrow from mother earth; rape her environment, and leave her discarded as a pile of deserted waste. Plans that focus on short term gain at the expense of a long term balance of mother earth interests are short sighted. Ben and Jerry's is an ice cream company. It is also a company that invests 5% of its earnings into the environment. At the end of each year, an external firm audits their environmental performance. They look at pollutants, packaging and other factors that waste mother earth's resources? Maybe if we care more about mother earth resources we will care too about human resources. It is colonization at its worst to build factories in Mexico and in third world countries so we can avoid pollution standards, employ child labor, and pay them poverty wages. This demeans us all.
 
 

Perrow's sentiments are echoed by Ben Hamper in his book Rivethead.#34 A fourth generation auto worker, Hamper spent 11 years as a riveter at General Motors Corp.'s Truck and Bus Div. plant in Flint, Michigan. A nervous breakdown in 1988 compelled him to give up his cherished nightmare of someday winning a 30-year pin at GM. Angry yet comical, Rivethead is about people who sweat for their pay. These folks, Hamper says, still toil in unsafe factories for companies that often treat them like children.
 
 

What are Radical Postmodern Planning Prescriptions.
 
 

Second. People need to be more career centered than organization centered. This prescription flies in the face of the Japanese system, which is more organization-centered than career-centered. Face it, America is a mobile society with very temporary attachments, even to family groups. The thing that will stimulate individualism is educating the individual to be well rounded. Now, we train people to fit into the organization, not to bring education to the corporation that bends the corporation. And, this is more likely liberal arts and fine arts education more than science, engineering, law, and management education. The educated generalist is more curious than the specialized company man. Education needs to stimulate individualism and stop making people take standardized tests, and move through a standardized time table of classes, sitting in egg carton classrooms, learning to imitate an instructor. Students need to be taught to follow their bliss, not fit into the corporate staff, and rise rung by rung up the corporate ladder.
 
 

Third. Topple the corporate ladder. The postmodern form of organization is more a flat network of relationships (many of them temporary) than a tall hierarchical system of supervision. People climb a ladder of supervision rather than perfect themselves as individuals to build better products, services, and life styles.
 
 

Fourth. Fight the organization planners. In particular, fight bureaucratic planning systems like management by objectives and bottom up planning, and corporate vision retreats. They do feel good, you do get exhausted, you do produce a whole lot of paper, but no one reads the paper, and the plans never get implemented.
 
 

Fifth. Capitalize on diversity. If there is one American virtue it is diversity. By the year 2001, the white male dominated corporation will cease to be viable. In its place, we will see a work place with 50 percent women, over 70% minorities, and a wider range of ages and disabilities. Unfortunately, the middle class will have trouble coping.
 
 

The modern organization plays checkers with man using Taylor's principles of scientific management and human relations social science principles of group harmony. In the process, the entrepreneurial spirit of the Americans has been tamed and confined to work in a bureaucratic corporate machine that values conformity and docility above all else. It is man's destiny to be controlled by the modern organization and he is a willing collaborator in his own mechanization. In the authoritarian system of scientific management it was easier for man to see his own imprisonment. In the human relations movement, the plans to control man in the group machine are often too subtle to be noticed. It is like the story of frog in the pot of water. The frog does not notice that the water is gradually heated to a boil until it is far too late for the frog to jump out of the pan. In the authoritarian system, man had a clear target; in the human relations system, there is only a steamy fog to resist. In both modern systems, man is a planned and captured being, without independence, and without an innovative spirit.
 
 

The hero's journey. For Taylorism, the hero is the engineer who plans the time and motions of everyone in the firm. For Mayo and the human relationalists, the hero is the group facilitator who establishes harmony among the workers and bureaucratic administrators. For the Postmodernist, the hero is the individual who resists the modern organization and does the work of the entrepreneur. He makes the organization secondary to individual performance. He does not surrender to benevolence. He steps off the bureaucratic treadmill and spends time with customers. He knows there can never be harmony between his entrepreneurial spirit and the administrator. The hero of postmodernism is the rebel with a cause. Through the struggle with organization, he rekindles the American innovative spirit of capitalism.
 
 

So What Happened? Management researchers in the 1950s and 60s began to notice a decline in entrepreneurship, creativity, and individualism in the bog of corporate systems. By the 1970s there were severe drops in product and service quality. The rhetoric of the time was "oh well, forget these hard industries, we will become an information society of softer technologies and service industries." Through the 1980s American has gotten out of the manufacturing business. In the 1990s management has the challenge of teaching people to be creative entrepreneurs inside of big corporations.
 
 

With books like In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman, although the social science research was marginal and many of the firms they studied did in fact fade out of existence, it was clear that a new movement was happening. The management science and human relations movements were being pushed aside by the excellence and total quality management movements. Toyota of Japan was the exemplar of flexible production, high innovation, high quality, and high customer service. Leaders were supposed to topple bureaucratic corporate industrial administrators and do things like "create a vision" and "make everyone in the company an individual entrepreneur" who "added value to customers." But, by this time the scientifically-based modern organization was the very fabric of the American capitalist economy. The inertia of the status quo is deeply entrenched not only in industry, but especially in business education. We will look at the pioneering work of William Whyte, Jr. who in the 1950s was among the first to spot the modernist organization man.
 
 

In the postmodern era, people are more important than time. The earth resources are more important than the time table of any plan. The needs of customers are more important than the time intervals.
 
 
 
 

Exercises.

1. Find a mentor, listen to planning stories. Ask for success and failure stories. Pick the best yarn, and recreate the dialogue that you imagine the original players spoke at the time of the episodes in the mentor's story. Write it up and ask the mentor to check your story for authenticity. Did you capture the essence of the characters, get the plot right, and use their language instead of your own? Finalize your story and be ready to perform it in class without notes.
 
 

2. Conduct a time and motion study of someone's repetitive tasks. How much of this task is planned by the person doing the work? How much is planned by the system they work in? Where are the planners located? How many different types of planners control this person's work life?
 
 

3. Analyze a service delivery system by looking at the postmodern N-E-T-W-O-R-K.
 
 

4. The Planning Story Improvisation. As an activity, design a story about time and motion planning. Improvise some possibilities until you find something creative to express. Take these improvisations and put them into a series of scenes. You will act out a sequence of scenes with several others in the class depicting an individual and then a company-dominated individual.
 
 

1. Story Sequencing. Lay out the sequence of each scene in your group discussions. Choose the characters to be in each scene and talk about the motivation of each character. How will each scene set a particular planning mood? How will the planning moods vary from one scene to the next?
 
 

2. Character Scripting. Script the dialogue you will use for each character in each scene. If you want to add some flair to the story characters, let some be male and female, and different races. Practice several dialogue exchanges before you put the story on before the class as a whole.
 
 

3. Gestures and Movements. Discuss the voice, movements, gestures, and expressions of each characters. If needed, add some props such as calendars, signs, bells, watches, alarms, etc. Develop the particulars of each scene so the audience will be drawn into the planning world your story recreates.

1. How are pre-mod, mod, and postmod discourses combined?
 
 
 
 

2. What is niche?
 
 
 
 

3. What is pre-modern, modern, and postmodern planning? How are they different?
 
 
 
 

4. What is the purpose of business?
 
 
 
 
 
 

5. What are the ways to make networks more responsive to customers?
 
 

6. How do Fayol's principles differ from postmodern network prescriptions?
 
 
 
 

7. What is the story of printing as it went from scriptoriums to hand set to hot metal to cold type?
 
 
 
 
 
 

8. Who is the hero of the postmodern network?
 
 
 
 

9. What are the 6 W's?
 
 
 
 

10. What is the role of storytelling in networking?
 
 
 
 

11. What is similar about pre-modern planning and postmodern planning?
 
 
 
 

12. What is MBO and how is it used as surveillance?
 
 
 
 
 
 

13. What is a stakeholder? Why is mother earth a stakeholder?
 
 
 
 

14. What are the characteristics of Weber's bureaucracy?
 
 
 
 

15. How do you plan for happy customers?
 
 
 
 

16. What is PERT and Gantt?
 
 
 
 

17. What is a postmodern critique of Fayol's principles?
 
 
 
 

18. Who is Schmidt and so what?
 
 

19. What is Taylor's 5 planning principles?
 
 

20. What in Taylor's stories suggest he hates pre-modern planning?
 
 
 
 

21. What is the Shoveler's planning department and how does it work?
 
 
 
 
 
 

22. Define N-E-T-W-O-R-K and C-R-A-F-T?
 
 
 
 
 
 

23. What is the Gutenberg bible story and why is it pre-modernist?
 
 
 
 
 
 

24. What is a Devil's Apprentice?
 
 
 
 

25. What is the gender deconstruction of the Tail board Planning Story?
 
 
 
 

26. How is modernism an implementation of the machine metaphor?
 
 
 
 

27. What is cold and hot type? What did the transition do to worker culture?
 
 

28. What are William Deming's 7 deadly sins?
 
 

29. What are Deming's 14 points and how does (or does not) each point relate to postmodern control?
 
 

30. Deconstruct postmodern planning. What are the most relevant critiques?
 
 

31. Do you think we are progressing from pre- to mod to post? Is this progress?
 
 

32. What is Kaizen?
 
 

33. What is plan-do-check-act?
 
 

34. What is the Harley-Davidson Triad?
 
 

35. Take Harley through the pre-, mod-, and post eras?
 
 
 
 

1 Deconstructing student’s field interviews with managers. An example from Boje, D. M. & Dennehy, R. F. 1993 Managing in the postmodern world: America’s revolution against exploitation (2nd ed.). Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. Appendix A contains a 7 part story deconstruction method. I have extended "Deny the Plot" by posing an eighth move. And I have redefined terms.

^. 2 Business Week 1/27/92 p.59. See also 27

^.3 Adapted from Notes and Queries issues: Vol II, 1868: 386-7; Vol XI, 1861: 23. See Boje, David. "The passing of the ancient printer and his folklore." (December) 1983. UCLA working paper 83-27.

^.4 1977 Encyclopedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote, Volume One, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. (Original Printing, 1839).

^.5 Deacon, Richard 1976. A Biography of William Caxton: The first English editor, merchant and translator. Chatham: W. and J. Mackay Limited. p. 110.

^.6 English translation. General and Industrial Administration. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd, 1949.

7 Hodgkinson (1996:34) observes "both Taylor and Fayol shared a rationalist logic and mechanistic view of organizations. It is as if for Hodgkinson and so many contemporaries, the organic view of Fayol and the military roots of both Fayol and Taylor are totally ignored. I thnk this occurs, when the organic metaphor gets stripped out in the summarization and translation work, the very revision of Fayol by the management historians. There are lists of principles and the five elements, but missing is all reference to organic architecture that keep these organs from spilling out.
 
 

^. 8 Adapted from Daniel A. Wren, The Evolution of Management Thought (New York: Wiley, 1979): 218-221; Koontz, Harold, Cyril O'Donnell, and Heinz Weihrich. Management. 7th Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980: 45-47; Taylor's writings, Ibid.

9 Browowski, J. & Bruce Mazlish

1960 The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel. NY: Barnes & Noble Books.

10 Schumacher, B.G.

1984/1986 On the Origin and Nature of Management. Norman, Oklahoma: Eugnosis (dates are first and second editions).

11 Pollard, Harold R.

1974 Developments of Management Thought. NY: Crane, Russak, and Co., Inc.

12 Wren, Daniel

1976/1979 The Evolution of Mangement Thought. NY: John Wiley & Sons (dates are first and second editions).

13 Georges, Claude

1968 Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

^.14 Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. The material was copyrighted in 1911 and first published by Norton in 1967 after being published in many other places. pp. 44-7.

^.15 Based on Taylor's works: Shop Management (originally published in 1903); Principles of Scientific Management (originally published in 1911), and Testimony before the Special House Committed (1912) reported in Scientific Management (New York : Harper and Row, 1947).

^.16 Gantt, Henry L. "A bonus system of rewarding labor," ASME Transactions 23 (1901), 342-72; Work, Wages, and Profits (New York: Engineering Magazine Company, 1910.; Organizing for Work. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1919.

^.17 Durkheim, Emile De la Division du travial social. Paris: F. Alcan, 1893; Gerth, H.H. and C. Wright Mills, (trans.) Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.; Parsons, Talcott (trans.) Max Weber: The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press, 1947.; For critique see: Selznick, Philip, "Foundations of the Theory of Organization," American Sociological Review Vo. 13 1948: 25-35; Gouldner, Alvin W. Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1954; Merton, Robert K. Social Theory and Social Structure Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957, 2nd Ed.; Simon, Herbert Administrative Behavior New York: The Macmillan Company, 1945; Wren, Daniel A. The Evolution of Management Thought New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2nd Ed., 1979.

^.18 Mason, Richard O. "A Dialectical Approach to Strategic Planning." Management Science 15 (1969), B403-B414.; Mason, Richard O. "Management by Multiple Advocacy." Unpublished working paper, UCLA, 1978.; Mason, Richard O., Ian Mitroff, and James Emshoff "Strategic Assumption Making: Arriving at Policy through Dialectics.: Unpublished paper, UCLA, 1978.; Boje, David and Terance J. Wolfe "Transorganizational Development: Contributions to Theory and Practice" In Leavitt, Pondy, and Boje (Eds). Readings in Managerial Psychology, 4th Ed, 1989: 733-754.

^. 19 Charan, Ram. 1991 . "How Networks Reshape Organizations - For Results.". Harvard Business Review. Sept-Oct, pp 104-115.

^.20 ibid Charan, Ram. 1991.

^.21 Boje, David M., Don Fedor, and Kendrith Rowland. "Myth-making: A qualitative step in OD interventions." Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 18 (1982): 17-28. Boje and Wolfe, 1989, Ibid. p. 747.

^.22 Simon, Herbert "The architecture of complexity." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106 (December, 1962): 467-82.; Weick, Karl E. "Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems." Administrative Science Quarterly, 21 no. 1 (1976) 1-18.; Pfeffer, Jeffrey and Gerald R. Salancik. The External Control of Organization: A resource dependence perspective. New York: Harper and Row, 1978; Aldrich, Howard Organizations and Environments. Englewood Cliffs: NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979; Boje, David and David A. Whetten. "Effects of organizational strategies and contextual constraints on centrality and attributions of influence in interorganizational networks." Administrative Science Quarterly, 26 (1981): 378-95.; Boje and Wolfe, 1989, Ibid.

^. 23 ibid Charan, Ram. 1991.

^.24 Deming, W. Edward Statistical Adjustment of Data New York: Dover Publications. 1964; Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position Boston: MIT Press. 1982; Walton, Mary. The Deming Management Method New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. 1986; Gitlow, Howard S. the Deming Guide to Quality and Competitive Position. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. 1987.

^.25 We would like to thank LMU MBA student and now graduate John Bennett for his research assistance in reviewing the W. Edward Deming philosophy.

^.26 Imai, Masaaki Kaizen: The key to Japan's Competitive Success. 1986 New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 60-65.

^. 27 Ibid. Imai p. xx.

^.28 Ibid Imai, p. 61-2.

^.29 Ibid Imai p. 64.

^.30 Ibid. Imai based on p. xxii, xxiv, 16-21.

^.31 Ibid. Adapted from Imai p. 205-9.

^.32 Reid, Peter C. 1990. Well made in America: Lessons from Harley-Davidson on being the best. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.

^.33 Perrow, Charles. 1991. "A Society of Organizations". Theory and Society 20: pp 763-794.

^.34 Hamper, Ben. 1992. Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line. N.Y.: Warner.