2024-03-19 23:03:45
According to Lichtenberg, “One of the strangest applications that man has made of his reason is undoubtedly that of considering as a masterpiece the fact of not using it, and, born thus with wings, of cut them off and let yourself fall like that from the first bell tower that comes along.” If there is one area in which this maxim makes perfect sense, it is management!
Management, although it has become fundamental in our lives as workers but also as citizens, for good or bad reasons, suffers from what I call the paradox of double ignorance, that is to say the propensity that has more in addition to people for whom management represents a certain interest, not to distinguish between their opinions on the subject and the “truth”, going so far as to erect “laws” and recommendations based on these opinions, as a driver who would give driving lessons because he is not “aware” of being one. Besides, the driver is always the other person.
We thus find in the field of management the general observation made by Jacques Bouveresse on the decline of truth in favor of sincerity: “we have arrived today at a worrying situation, in which the sincerity of belief seems authorized to replace its truth and to dispense with any obligation to give reasons.
Management today is corrupted by abstraction and formalism, this “logical delirium”, “blind to concreteness and to existence” in the words of Edgard Morin, many things have also been written on the subject. However, these are only consequences because even the attributes of rigorous thought are now ignored, notably the impossibility, as Pascal said, “of knowing the parts without knowing the whole, any more than of knowing the whole without particularly knowing the parts”. One of the primary causes of this rationalist and obscurantist drift is a sick management of opinions established as doctrines without any authority emerging to help see things clearly and correctly.
Indeed, while an art like medicine mobilizing a multiplicity of scientific and technical knowledge has regulatory authorities, management as a practice, although having to take care of Man, is one of ´provided then that the latter should also normally mobilize several knowledge and techniques because it impacts, through another prism, our lives and therefore our health.
If everyone is authoritative, no one is authoritative. So why such a vacuum of authority in management?
If we want to be rigorous, we should not speak of “management”, in the singular but of “managements”, each company having its operational purposes and therefore its “own” management, the only invariant between the “managements” being more or less the degree of verbal humanism and the degree of obstinacy of “managers” to satisfy the objectives assigned to them whatever the price to pay. As for management research, when it does not plunge into the extrapolation of concepts and theories borrowed from other sciences to get closer and closer to the essay and thus move away from science, it often struggles to penetrate the practice with a system of “publish or perish” which has given rise to above-ground research whose purpose is only the volume of publications and the number of citations per publication.
There is therefore an urgent need to give substance to management by clearly positioning it in the human and social sciences in order to delimit its contours and thus give meaning to the discourses and tools: there is no limitless meaning.
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