Interpersonal Communication: management theory

Management Theory

Management consultancy has been a major growth area since Thatcher and Reagan set capitalism free in the 1980s. The process of deregulation and globalization coincided with the rapid implementation of information technology, whose existence may indeed have been a prerequisite for that deregulation (see the article on 'Information Society' for further details), which shattered the post-war social consensus. The unleashing of the creatively destructive forces of the free market has been one of the major factors contributing to the sense of uncertainty amid rapid change, the instability and fragmentation which are repeatedly referred to by social commentators, especially those of a 'postmodern' bent. 

What is [....] new about the postmodern rendition of uncertainty [...] is that it is no longer seen as a temporary nuisance, which with due effort may be either mollified or altogether overcome. The postmodern world is bracing itself for life under a condition of uncertainty which is permanent and irreducible.

Baumann (1997 : 21)

Amidst this uncertainty companies have had to cope with managing rapid change, trying to find strategies which afford them a commercial advantage, or at least, in a world where 'strategies' are perhaps impossibly long-term, 'tactics' which will enable them to survive until next year. Companies have had to learn from the warning examples of IBM, which almost disappeared entirely, and the giants of the American automobile industry, which saw their markets being stolen from under their noses by the Japanese, even from Microsoft, which came perilously close to being wrong-footed by the Internet. And so the management consultancies, the business schools, the management 'gurus' have grown in importance, since they may hold the secret to success.

It would seem obvious at first sight that management theory must have a contribution to make to the general theoretical basis of communication studies, since it deals with such matters as group interaction, leadership, influence and persuasion, generally accepted as part of the core of communication studies. My impression, though, is that it hasn't had a great impact. I think the articles I have here on groups and on leadership pretty much summarize what seems to be included in most communication textbooks, at least at pre-university level. This is an odd state of affairs, possibly due to the fact that management theory tends to be viewed with some suspicion by many academics, especially because the theoretical basis for it is often obscure, in some cases perhaps quite non-existent; perhaps also due to the fact that management consultants can earn several times what the average academic earns. Whatever the reason, I intend here to give only a brief overview of some of those aspects of management theory which appear to coincide with the conventional subject matter of communication theory.

I should declare an interest here. My own problem with much of management theory is my personal experience of managers who announce their commitment to such fashionable notions as worker 'empowerment' and then proceed to manage in a dictatorial top-down manner and ruthlessly pursue those who dare to disagree with them, eradicating autonomous and creative thinking wherever it may present a challenge to their power; managers who trumpet the value of increased communication and then shut themselves in their offices; managers who profess themselves to be committed to 'management by walking about', and who then practise 'management by walking away'; managers who claim that there should be no finger-pointing if someone fouls up, since mistakes are valuable to the organization, but who then threaten disciplinary action against anyone they deem to have fouled up; managers who proclaim their commitment to quality, but whose only measure of quality is the extent to which the employee fills in pointless forms; managers who insist on the completion of all the appropriate paperwork for the organization's appraisals procedure, not because it is likely to contribute to anyone's professional development, but because it will increase their chances of gaining an 'Investors in People' award; managers who tell me I am part of the organization's most valuable resource, so valuable that they now pay me exactly what they paid me over seven years ago; managers who employ a long-serving and respected member of staff on a 'zero-hours' contract so as to avoid paying her redundancy pay; managers of whom the standard joke runs 'How do you know when managers are lying? Answer: their lips move.' For that matter, that the body handing out  'Investors in People' awards cannot provide me with access to the documentation on which the award was based simply demonstrates what an empty exercise the process is, and that the person who presents the award should approvingly quote Henry Ford at the awards ceremony.... no, this is not a joke.  

No doubt, in fairness, none of that is the fault of the management gurus. Tom Peters, for example, makes it quite clear that the USA's competitors have not achieved the productivity they have by increasing earning differentials, the West Germans having 36% less inequality than the US and the Japanese 50%. What we have seen throughout the eighties and nineties, however, in the most deregulated first-world economies of the USA and the UK is a massive increase in the earnings of the top managers, while those at the bottom have seen a real-term decrease in their income. 

I suppose it just confirms the old adage that the higher a monkey climbs up a tree, the more clearly you see its arse.

Re-engineering

During the 1990s one of the principal buzzwords was 're-engineering derived from Hammer and Champy's book Re-engineering the Corporation. Its most noticeable affect was 'downsizing', an extraordinary period of bloodletting, where no one's job was safe. the average shop-floor worker had seen his or her job endangered during the eighties, but re-engineering set a bout a process of delayering, the stripping away of layers of management, producing a flatter structure than the traditional multi-layer hierarchy of a conventional company,  removing middle management. Management consultants saw middle managers as barriers to creating a flatter, more streamlined structure. The theory held that the leaner the company, the more flexible and responsive it would be. Hammer and Champy insist that where it has been applied according to their prescription, it has normally worked and that, where it has failed, it has failed because managers have done little more than pay lip service to the notion. There may be some truth in that claim, since where I am employed, a management circular proposed a restructuring which was said to be introducing a 'flatter' structure, whilst the accompanying graphic clearly showed an additional level in the hierarchy. The re-engineering concept has had something of the feel of scientific management to it, tending as it has to neglect the effect which it might have on employee morale. In Britain, British Telecom shed 84,000 of its workforce over a period of five years. Since this would not have been possible without a concerted attack by the British government on trade union power, typically leading to the introduction of management-employee relations where negotiation is impossible, replaced by mere 'consultation' (which often seems to consist of telling the employees what you're going to do, listening carefully to their objections and concerns and then doing it anyway), the effect on morale has often been devastating. For example an internal survey at BT in 1995 revealed that only 20% of employees felt managers could be trusted. (Micklethwaite and Wooldridge (1996 : 42)) (See the brief comments on industrial studies of leadership for further details of this.) In the meantime, some have become to question the wisdom of re-engineering, which has led in many cases to the 'anorexic corporation' - Railtrack which has insufficient maintenance workers to maintain its track and rail companies with too few drivers to drive their trains.

Sorry ... more to come at some point (maybe)