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Human, all too human: Difference between revisions
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{{ | {{a|mgmt|}}A view infects modern [[management consultant|management consultancy]] that a business enterprise can be — ''should'' be — reduced to its data points: broadly, inputs and outputs; a balance sheet of assets and liabilities. On this view any activity the firm undertakes, and any plant, chattel or servant with which or through whose agency it undertakes it — should be quantified and then articulated on one side of the ledger or the other. | ||
Legend has it the specifications given to farmers who grow the potatoes McDonald’s turns into French fries run to 30 pages. With that level of control you can unitise your inputs. One potato meeting criteria as tightly drawn as those is entirely substitutable for another even though, if you look at them closely, each is subtly different. | Legend has it the specifications given to farmers who grow the potatoes McDonald’s turns into French fries run to 30 pages. With that level of control you can unitise your inputs. One potato meeting criteria as tightly drawn as those is entirely substitutable for another even though, if you look at them closely, each is subtly different. | ||
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The higher you fly, the easier it is to see your organisation this way. The [[CEO|chief executive officer]] has little choice - but even {{sex|he}} will find that dystopian analysis breaks down when his gaze falls upon his own executive suite. Well; it must do. For he is a genius! No-one else could lead the enterprise with such clear-eyed vision! | The higher you fly, the easier it is to see your organisation this way. The [[CEO|chief executive officer]] has little choice - but even {{sex|he}} will find that dystopian analysis breaks down when his gaze falls upon his own executive suite. Well; it must do. For he is a genius! No-one else could lead the enterprise with such clear-eyed vision! | ||
===Seeing like a state=== | |||
There is a contrarian view, articulated by {{author|James C. Scott}}<ref>{{author|James C. Scott}} — {{br|Seeing Like a State}} (1998).</ref> that this kind of [[reductionism]] is not so much wilful as ''inevitable''; without some kind of prism for “[[legibility]]” the comintern cannot otherwise understand their organisations at all. But in any system stocks, flows and feedback loops are interconnected; if you change one the others will adapt to cope with it. So restricting your view of the organisation to a homogenous set of data-points incentivises its personnel to respond only to those data points, and neglect the other, potentially vital, interconnections that in subtle ways make the organisation tick. | |||
{{Sa}} | |||
*[[Legibility]] | |||
*[[High modernism]] | |||
{{ref}} | |||