An Introduction to the Philosophy of Management

Paul Griseri

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446291795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

What and who is business for? What exactly is work and how can we distinguish it from other activity? Do businesses operate along different ethical lines from individuals?

This clear and accessible text introduces key philosophical concepts and ideas and applies them to fundamental issues in management and organizations. Written for business and management students with no previous knowledge of philosophy, this text will lead readers to question the basic assumptions widely made about business and management.

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Management is packed with case studies and examples which provoke thought and discussion. Coverage includes crucial topics such as business ethics, culture and leadership.

Key features:

- Boxed definitions of key concepts

- Real life case studies and examples

- Questions for Reflection

- Further reading

This text is essential reading for any business and management student wanting to think creatively.

THE ‘WHAT’ OF MANAGEMENT

1

The first section of this book looks at three key elements of management in organisations:

• the idea of an organisation;
• the idea of work and workers;
• the idea of a leader.

The discussion will start with two distinct aims. The first is the search for clear and accurate definitions of key terms. And the second, to identify in what sense these phenomena are identified, how they come into being and how they cease – in short how they exist. However, we shall see that fulfilling these two aims depends on other issues which will only be addressed in later chapters.

A great deal of philosophical thinking is generated by defining terms and by drawing distinctions between similar ideas that are often equated. The natural source of definitions is a dictionary, however this is not necessarily watertight – dictionaries tend to tell you how words are commonly used, but not always what the word means precisely.

A definition should enable us to use a word correctly in all appropriate situations. In most cases this comes down to stating those features (the connotation) that capture what things are covered by the term in question (the denotation). If you are looking at a definition to help you understand something more fully, then it needs to tell you exactly what would be an example of the term used, and make clear how it differs from other, possibly similar terms. For example, a definition of ‘profit’ should cover all the different kinds of cases where a profit has been made, and only those cases – so in this case it would help you distinguish profit from a related idea such as sales revenue. In many cases the meaning of a term can be defined in terms of a combination of other, more basic terms: so for example a definition of ‘airplane’ might be ‘a human-made structure with a long central section, two large wings and a tail, powered by engines and intended to fly’. This definition is thus composed of several constituent concepts – machine, structure, wings, flying etc.

Some concepts, however, are basic, so that it is difficult to find more fundamental ideas, in terms of which the definition may be stated. You might define a word like ‘cold’ as ‘of low temperature’ but then the definition of ‘temperature’ would be something like ‘the degree of heat or cold’ which makes the definition circular – someone who did not know what temperature was would therefore not learn what cold is.

Some very basic ideas are therefore less easily explained by other words than by showing examples – what is called ostensive definition. I can show people examples of cold, and if I do this enough then they will get the idea. Of course this is not a guaranteed situation. A lot of assumptions have to be made when one person decides that another person has ‘got the idea’, as the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued: he compared learning language ostensively to following a rule – but he also indicated how a rule may be difficult to pin down, even when one is provided with a good range of examples.¹

But as well as the definition of very basic terms, there are many terms that have a degree of ambiguity or vagueness built into them. How do we define ‘a Swedish company’? HQ in Sweden? But some companies might relocate their HQ to an offshore tax haven. Having a Swedish founder? But a company might be set up by a Swedish person in the USA. Having its main factories in Sweden? But in the present day many European companies locate their main operations in third world countries with lower labour costs. So the concept is ambiguous. We have a sense of what we want to cover but there are difficult peripheral cases that resist a watertight set of criteria that will capture all and only those cases where we would unambiguously want to say that a company is Swedish.

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A definition states what is necessary as well as what is sufficient for something to come under a certain concept. It should cover all and only those things covered by that concept.

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We see in the previous paragraph an important part of the process of testing out a definition: a definition covers all cases of an idea (its denotation), so given a set of terms that is supposed to define something (the purported connotation of the idea), we need to see whether it covers not just the obvious, well-known examples, but also the more unusual ones.

Sometimes we have to accept that the concept is a bit fuzzy round the edges, so to speak, and make a definition that deliberately draws a line round the most characteristic examples. This is a stipulative definition. So we might stipulate that being a Swedish company just does mean that it has its HQ in Sweden, and if there are companies excluded by this then we say that although they possess some characteristics of Swedish companies, they are not actually Swedish.

Stipulative definitions are useful where one absolutely must have a definition – say when conducting a research study. But they are less an explanation of a concept than an attempt to change the concept to something more practicable.

Another aspect of definitions is what they actually show us. A long standing philosophical question concerns the difference between real and nominal definitions. A nominal definition indicates the meaning of an idea as constructed from other ideas. So one can have a definition of, say, what makes something a soft drinks manufacturer, for example,² but one can also have nominal definitions of non-existent things, ideas simply dreamt up by someone: you could easily define what a frozen air manufacturer is, but there is no such thing (at the time of writing this).

In contrast, adherents of the idea that definition can be real have held that such a definition somehow captures the essence of something – to define ‘company’ is to show what companies actually are, even though these definitions may be expressed in words. To define ‘soft drinks manufacturer’ one needs to somehow show the underlying essence of this concept. A nonexistent concept would not have a real definition, on this view.

One way to distinguish these two ideas is that a real definition would be tested out by going and looking at examples in the real world, whilst a nominal definition would be tested out by considering how people used the term in question when talking about it. In general, the majority philosophical opinion in the last century has tended towards the idea that definition is primarily nominal in nature.

One area of dispute concerning real and nominal definition has been the treatment of proper names (i.e. names that are supposed to refer specifically to one individual thing, such as ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘Paris’ or ‘UNESCO’). Some would say that a proper name is really only explained by direct reference to the thing that it names – in effect a realist definition, where the meaning of ‘Shakespeare’ is the actual person who bore that name. Many recent philosophers, construing all definition as nominal, have instead claimed that a proper name is really an abbreviation of a complex collection of descriptive terms: so the meaning of ‘Shakespeare’ is a set of ideas that collectively happen to pick out just that one person (rather than the meaning being the individual person with that name). One conclusion of this is that in different circumstances a different individual (or even more than one individual) might possess that collection of descriptions – Shakespeare could have been a different person, in effect. However, this has not closed the debate; one very influential contemporary philosopher, Saul Kripke, has argued that some definitions of proper names are ‘real’ in that they connect directly with the thing so named – he calls these names rigid designators (so ‘Shakespeare’ would, in any conceivable situation, refer to that specific person). This argument is relevant in this section of the book when we consider definitions of ‘organisation’ and what these and related terms really tell us.

We see here that even a simple matter such as defining a term can conceal significant and substantial issues. And yet we need decent definitions of ideas in order to discover more about what organisations are, what are the consequences of calling something an organisation as opposed to saying it is not one, and so on. Throughout not just this first section, but also right across the book, we will find that key arguments turn on questions of just what we mean by a certain term, so definitions matter.

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¹ L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 1953). One example of the difficulties with following a rule he used was the sequence of numbers 2,4,6,8: this might naturally lead someone to suppose that the rule was to list even numbers – but actually this sequence would look just the same, in those first cases, as a rule where once you got to 1000 you went 1004, 1008, 1012... And what would happen at 10,000? At 100,000? The point being that rules may look clear but there are often opportunities for creatively distinct ways in which they may be applied, so that one can rarely capture all those creative differences at the outset.

² Which presumably could be defined in terms of two more basic concepts – what makes something a soft drink, and what makes something a manufacturing company. This would then help distinguish soft drinks companies from other drinks manufacturers, say.

WHAT ARE ORGANISATIONS?

1

When you have read this chapter, you will be able to:

• analyse and critique definitions of organisation
• evaluate potential conditions for an organisation to be said to exist.

DEFINING ‘ORGANISATION’ IN TERMS OF MEMBERSHIP

1.1 The most fundamental question in any philosophical enquiry into organisations and management is: what exactly is an organisation? We can distinguish the two following senses of this question:

What is it for something in general to be an organisation?
How can we decide whether a specific ‘thing’ is an organisation or not?

Although the two questions are clearly related, it may be possible to answer the first and not be able to answer the second. I may accept that an organisation possesses features a, b, c, d, but not be able to find out whether some particular collection of people has all of these features. Or I may see features a, b, c and d all present, but not be sure that they all attach to the same identified entity.

When we talk about an organisation, it goes beyond the physical manifestations – we do not mean just the buildings, or the people. Take away the buildings and you have an operational problem – but the organisation has not ceased to exist. Take away the people, leaving the rest, and you have a bigger problem, but arguably there is still an organisation there, something waiting to be re-populated. The ‘organisation’ is somehow abstracted from its people and its buildings – just as it would be from the machinery, the legal documents, the goods and services it produces and delivers. It ‘exists’ – but we do not seem to be able to explain how in terms of its components. Each of the things mentioned above are part of something being an organisation, but no specific cluster of them represents ‘the’ organisation. None is necessary, and none on its own is sufficient – even a set of legal documents defining a company is not enough for us to say that an organisation exists. Some cluster of these elements must be sufficient for us to say that an organisation exists, but it is difficult to pin down exactly which.

Let us start by looking at a couple of ‘standard’ definitions of an organisation, as given in Box 1.1.

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BOX 1.1

DEFINITIONS OF ‘ORGANISATION’

Business Dictionary (online)

A social unit of people, systematically structured and managed to meet a need or to pursue collective goals on a continuing basis.

Oxford English Dictionary

An organized group of people with a particular purpose, such as a business or government department

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As this indicates, one well known attempt at a definition of an organisation is that it is a collection of individuals somehow associated with the achievement of certain goals. The first example of this kind of definition makes clear that these are somehow ‘collective’. One would presume that this indicates that they are commonly agreed amongst that group of people. But this on its own is not enough – a group of protesters demonstrating in the street will often have a set of commonly agreed goals, but they will not comprise an organisation.

Both of the definitions given above also include some aspect of control – in one the idea of the group being ‘systematically structured’ and in the other of being ‘organised’. But again our protesters might be systematically structured – one group is set up to go to the palace, and another to the government buildings – without that making them an organisation. Some definitions of ‘organisation’ include the idea of being self-consciously structured and purposive, but again a group of protesters might be fully aware of what they are doing, how and why, without this making them an organisation.

We might turn this around and ask what are the differences between a collection of people such as a group of protesters, and an organisation? One presumably is that there is a formal process of including someone in an organisation – it possesses recognised members, which the protesters would generally not have. Another might be that it is has a degree of longevity that a group of protesters would not have, these having come together often almost spontaneously for a specific and defined event.

So perhaps our definition could become:

An ongoing group of individuals who are formally recognised as associated with the group, and with a common set of goals which they are systematically structured to accomplish

Is this enough? Well, the standard turn in philosophical discussion is to see if we can construct a counter-example – here this would be either a case that we would all agree is an organisation but lacks some aspect of this definition, or one that we would all agree is not an organisation but has all of these features (in fact we already did the latter...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the author
• Introduction
• Section 1 The ‘what’ of management
• Section 2 Thinking and knowing about management
• Section 3 What to do? Making decisions and acting ethically in management
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• General further reading
• Names index
• Subject index