This article is a synthesis of the two dichotomies of positive and normative administration. The main objective of the writing is to focus on the broad inventory of the philosophy of science in administration. The philosophical orientation of the essay can be described as modern pragmatism and falsificationism by Popper and Lakatos. The approaches of management gurus, widely criticized, are neither sophisticated nor remarkable. The article is critical of new topics, administrative fads, such as learning organizations, total quality management, reengineering, and empowerment.
Introduction
This essay is part of a documentary investigation, an approach to the state of the art of organization administration, in order to project trends in the profession of business administrator; The above is necessary input in the formulation of the referential framework to apply for the accreditation of the Business Administration program of the University of Antioquia. When we talk about essay we say that it is a theory suggesting urgency because in it we find the author's position in front of a research problem that needs quick explanation; it is a hybrid between art and science.
Now, what is meant by state of the art? It contains: A current state of knowledge or diagnosis that inquires about what has been said? And how has it been said? Questions are raised about reality, a topic or a given situation. Also, it includes a pretended state of knowledge or prognosis that is achieved through questioning, critical awareness, argumentation, hypothesis formulation and theories; Finally, the state of the art leads to where can we go? The state of the art can be condensed into three stages: first, a descriptive phase that contains the design, explorations, and traces; an interpretive phase, where common language and jargon are homologated and critical positions are stated; third, a deepening stage, where the state of the art is truly built.
Galeano and Vélez (1999) summarize: “the state of the art is a documentary investigation from which the accumulated knowledge on a certain object of study is reflexively recovered in order to transcend it”. At the same time, what is meant by documentary research ?, Vargas (1991) defines it: “it is a process of decanting the origin of different ways of understanding a phenomenon, what theories have tried to propose themselves as tentative explanations relating to a sphere of objects and How has a scientific finding been inserted into a social practice? "
In a state of the art of the administration of organizations, the study of certain passing approaches, known, prosaically, as administrative fashions, cannot be aborted.
The purpose of the writing is to review the main opinions, theoretical arguments and criticisms of notable authors on the sometimes misnamed administrative fads: the approaches of Jackson, Simon, Mintzberg, Koontz, Robbins, Johansen and Drucker are addressed; the fashions analyzed, at work, are: learning organizations, total quality control, reengineering and “empowerment”.
Another derived objective is to demonstrate the interdependence between administrative and organizational theory and their epistemological status; likewise, emphasis will be placed on the different philosophical views that support administrative theory, such as the positive, normative, pragmatic and falsificationist approach; In addition, to understand the development of the philosophy of science of the discipline, called administration, Popper's and Lakatos' speculations will be taken into account.
This monograph does not highlight nuances or subtle differences between terms such as management, administration, management or manage, administer and manage. Given the great closeness between the previous words and the definitions on administration provided by dictionaries and manuals, we can consider them as synonyms: therefore, interchangeable and indiscriminately usable.
Administrative fashions
Now, let's address the central theme of the essay, Jackson (1994) proposes these administrative fashions: 1. The theme related to the Learning Organizations, 2. Total Quality Control (CTC) and 3. The Reengineering of processes.
But what is an administrative fad? It can be understood as an interest or administrative practice followed over a period of time with exaggerated zeal or fury, fads go and go, some slowly, others quickly, some survive and others stay on the road; obviously, immutable there is no fashion. Fashions can be found in all areas of the administrative process Koontz and Weihrich (2003) state how fashions can become techniques and contribute to the development of the organization. However, if they are considered to solve crucial short-term problems, then their true value can be questioned. Koontz and Weihrich (2003: 15) consider, in administrative functions, the following trends: in planning are strategic alliances; in the organization, the corporate culture;in staff integration, stress management, pay-for-performance, and degassing “downsizing,” a euphemism for firing employees; in management, the internal entrepreneur, understood as that person who focuses his attention on innovation and creativity to transform a dream or an idea into a profitable business within the organizational environment. Becoming an entrepreneur and internal consultant has been in fashion since the 1980s; in control, fashion is quality circles ”.understood as that person who focuses their attention on innovation and creativity to transform a dream or an idea into a profitable business within the organizational environment. Becoming an entrepreneur and internal consultant has been in fashion since the 1980s; in control, fashion is quality circles ”.understood as that person who focuses their attention on innovation and creativity to transform a dream or an idea into a profitable business within the organizational environment. Becoming an entrepreneur and internal consultant has been in fashion since the 1980s; in control, fashion is quality circles ”.
Abravanel et al (1992) state: “When an idea becomes fashionable, two problems arise. In the first place, under the effect of enthusiasm, there is a danger of forgetting the historical and scientific roots that in this case go back not only to the scientific works already mentioned, but more to those decades of research and publications in the domain of sociology, anthropology and ethnography. Secondly, and even under the effect of enthusiasm, there is also the danger of forgetting that fashions pass quickly. In both cases, the danger is the same: not seeing the full richness of an idea and thus depriving yourself of all the complexity and diversity of what it could have taught us. ”
On the epistemological status of administration, Mintzberg (1975), with his approach to administrative roles or roles, criticizes the administrative profession and launches the following statement: “… a brief observation about some administrator will immediately invalidate the notion that administrators practice a science. A science involves structuring procedures and programs in a systematic, analytical and rigorous way. If we do not yet know what procedures administrators use, how can we prescribe them through scientific analysis? And how can we attribute to the Administration the fact that it is a profession if we cannot specify what administrators have to learn to carry out their tasks?… ”. Not only do we not have a science of administration, but what it purports to be,the administrative process, among other things, does not correspond to reality. Despite the above. Managing is not a profession, nor is it a science; It is a practice that depends above all on skill and, significantly, on art. Skill is obtained through experience. Art can logically be observed in class, but truth be told, no one can become an administrator from a classroom. Fayol in chapter three of the first part of his fundamental work "Industrial and General Administration", expressly wants to establish the need and the possibility of a teaching of the Vélez administration (2000).It is a practice that depends above all on skill and, significantly, on art. Skill is obtained through experience. Art can logically be observed in class, but truth be told, no one can become an administrator from a classroom. Fayol in chapter three of the first part of his fundamental work "Industrial and General Administration", expressly wants to establish the need and the possibility of a teaching of the Vélez administration (2000).It is a practice that depends above all on skill and, significantly, on art. Skill is obtained through experience. Art can logically be observed in class, but truth be told, no one can become an administrator from a classroom. Fayol in chapter three of the first part of his fundamental work "Industrial and General Administration", expressly wants to establish the need and the possibility of a teaching of the Vélez administration (2000).expressly wants to establish the need and the possibility of teaching the Vélez administration (2000).expressly wants to establish the need and the possibility of teaching the Vélez administration (2000).
If the science approach were accepted in the Administration, it would be multiparadigmatic. This means that there are multiple global ways of contemplating, conceptualizing and accessing administrative reality, a multiplicity that affects not only ontological, meta-theoretical and epistemological positions (what is it, how can it be understood, under what conditions can we know the organizational reality), or to scientific statements, whether theoretical or applied (how it works; how we can modify organizational reality), but also to empirical techniques (how we extract; and how we analyze information from administrative reality).
Regarding the texts of fashion in administration, Johansen (1987) presents the following categories:
- Authors who relate their personal experiences, in them it is a question of proving personal success and the method of administration also successful, here you can include all "best seller" publications of the managers of most multinational companies; This is corroborated by works such as "Who has stolen my cheese" and "If it is not broken, break it" or better "if it is not broken, do not fix it", Bristow (2003) writes "I have taken your cheese" and the editor states: “this is a self-help manual for those who do not want to help themselves. What's more, for those who don't even want to get up from the sofa. The bad thing about the self-help manuals that invade our bookstores and bedside tables (apart from how badly written they are and how ugly their authors are) is that they force you to do everything by yourself. You have to read it, remember each step and even put them into practice ”.The issues related to the setting within a particular culture and idiosyncrasy of administrative behavior that proved to be successful in another context, for example, in the country the techniques of Theory Z and the Quality Circles have been directly adopted, it would seem that Everything pertaining to Japanese culture is profitable for Colombia.Johansen, in the third category, includes diverse topics and texts such as those related to the pursuit of excellence up to recipes: Administration on one page, Strategic planning for couples and The effective executive (1967).
On the other hand, Johansen (1996), polemicizes: «… discussing administration and social organization, I point out that three relatively obvious consequences could be distinguished in this relationship:
- Administration and social organization are two different things, that both are interrelated, that for administration to exist, organization must be necessary.
“… But today, the previous conclusions do not seem as obvious to me as then I supposed, in other words, social organizations are synergistic patterns or recursive models of interrelation between subsystems that respond to general designs developed by the administration. She is the true author of the organization, she is its creator. Individuals are related to each other by the phenomenon of administration. It is the action of the phenomenon of administration that ultimately manages to build the networks that make these individuals integrate, constituting a social organization. All this within the space that those same networks limit, since they are the ones that constitute their borders. In other words, what keeps it united to the social organization is its administration… ”
Consequently, the thesis worth defending is the phenomenon of administration, which creates social organization, and therefore, without administration, organization does not exist. Separating the two phenomena is a theoretical elaboration that on certain occasions may be relevant, but it is not a "reality", but a fallacy to entertain certain students of the social sciences.
Johansen (1996) perceives the administration in this way: “… A definition of administration is to point out that the administrator's task lies in maximizing the objectives of the entire organization (for which he is responsible) and that this could only be achieved through the demaximization of the parties' objectives or, putting it from another perspective, the administration must resolve the conflicts of objectives between the parties, and it does so through the demaximization of them… ».
Thanks to the above, the administrator seeks the integration of parts that seek to disintegrate. That makes them unequal, because their goals are different and somewhat opposite. It can be inferred that the hierarchy of authority is not an organizational characteristic, but an instrument created by the system to allow efficient administration. Social organization exists, it is a visible phenomenon, although immaterial, it is the result of the interactions carried out by its participants, interactions more or less defined according to a synergistic pattern and limited by the administration, it has real characteristics but passes to be the consequence of the administrator to administer. An attempt has been made to demonstrate that division of labor and hierarchy are not properties of social organization,rather, they are instruments designed by a particular management strategy, that is, species of adequate tools to achieve the best objective of an organization subject to the demaximization of its component parts, therefore they are characteristics of management and not of the organization. The dilemma presented by Johansen points out that it is the phenomenon of administration that structures social organization, that the division of labor and the hierarchy of authority are not characteristics of the organization, in other words, the independent variable is administration and the dependent variable is the organization.species of adequate tools to achieve the best objective of an organization subject to the demaximization of its component parts, therefore they are characteristic of the administration and not of the organization. The dilemma presented by Johansen points out that it is the phenomenon of administration that structures social organization, that the division of labor and the hierarchy of authority are not characteristics of the organization, in other words, the independent variable is administration and the dependent variable is the organization.species of adequate tools to achieve the best objective of an organization subject to the demaximization of its component parts, therefore they are characteristic of the administration and not of the organization. The dilemma presented by Johansen points out that it is the phenomenon of administration that structures social organization, that the division of labor and the hierarchy of authority are not characteristics of the organization, in other words, the independent variable is administration and the dependent variable is the organization.that the division of labor and the hierarchy of authority are not characteristics of the organization, in other words, the independent variable is administration and the dependent variable is organization.that the division of labor and the hierarchy of authority are not characteristics of the organization, in other words, the independent variable is administration and the dependent variable is organization.
Organization management has redefined its scope, moving from operational management of Taylorist organizations to systemic comprehensive management.
On streams of administrative thought, Johansen (1992: 13) makes the following judgment: “… there are only two streams of administrative thought (not schools); Furthermore, both positions are not contradictory. We would say that there are only differences in the level of abstraction with which they are presented. And these two currents, taking into account the names given to the schools are: traditional thought and the decisional school. It could be argued that the other currents (human relations, scientific administration) are mechanisms that help the administrator in the development of his functions or elements belonging to the theory of organization or organization. The term organization has two specific meanings within the administrative vocabulary, one as a noun and the other as a verb. As a verb,organizing is part of the administrative process, therefore it is perfectly valid to speak of "organizing the organization". As a noun, there is the theory of organization (organizational) or organizations that tries to explain the phenomenon of social structure and tries to describe and predict the behavior of that social organism… ». Organizations are rarely established as an end in themselves, they are instruments created to achieve ends. This is reflected in the origins of the word organization that is derived from the Greek "organon", that is, instrument.there is the theory of organization (organizational) or organizations that tries to explain the phenomenon of social structure and tries to describe and predict the behavior of that social organism… ». Organizations are rarely established as an end in themselves, they are instruments created to achieve ends. This is reflected in the origins of the word organization that is derived from the Greek "organon", that is, instrument.there is the theory of organization (organizational) or organizations that tries to explain the phenomenon of social structure and tries to describe and predict the behavior of that social organism… ». Organizations are rarely established as an end in themselves, they are instruments created to achieve ends. This is reflected in the origins of the word organization that is derived from the Greek "organon", that is, instrument.
Hodge et al (2000) define organization and organization theory as follows: an organization can be defined as two or more people who collaborate within defined limits to achieve a common goal. Several ideas are implicit in this definition: organizations are made up of people; organizations subdivide the work between their individuals and organizations pursue shared goals, then, the theory of the organization is a set of concepts, principles and hypotheses that tries to explain the existing interaction between the different organizational components.
Abravanel et al (1992) argue: “The reasoning about organizations is particularly rich in analogies and metaphors. According to a biomorphic analogy, organizations become entities whose main concern is survival; they have health problems and are subject to the selection processes. The anthropomorphic metaphor gives the organization its own personality, needs and character, or even attributes typically human cognitive functions. More recently, the prevailing analogy is to compare organizations with miniature societies. The metaphor that organizations are small societies, social systems endowed with socialization processes as well as social norms and structures, has been useful to a good number of authors ”.
Drucker (1994) states: "society, community and family are, organizations do"
In the past, on Administration, organizations and fashions, (Simon "behavioral approach", 1972: 21) stated: "The organization is a complex design of communications and relationships within a group of human beings. The social sciences suffer from acute schizophrenia, in the treatment of rationality, you have, to one extreme, economists who attribute to the economic man an absurdly omniscient rationality, to the other side you have the tendencies of social psychology that follow in the footsteps of Freud and they try to reduce all knowledge to the affections of the individual ”.
On the other hand, regarding Administration or management, Simon (1972: 3) argued: “Administration is the ordinary art of getting things accomplished, Administration is spoken of in terms similar to those used by a witch doctor, when he diagnoses a disease, or at best, lives on household proverbs and applies to the Administration. The principles of Administration, currently accepted, are, little or more, ambiguous and contradictory propositions, therefore the Administration suffers from superficiality, over-simplification, lack of realism and rigor in the study of decision-making ”.
For some years, in relation to the object of study of the discipline formed by administrative knowledge or in practical terms, the administration, Chiavenato (2000) opined: the object of study of the administration was always the organization, initially understood as a set of positions and tasks, and later as a set of organs and functions, later divided into a complex range of variables that reaches the conception of processes and systems.
Many years later, administrative theories aim to study the organization as a system composed of subsystems that interact with each other, and with the external environment. Obviously, the object of study of the administration, has undergone a considerable expansion while it has appropriated a large number of important variables for its understanding; analogously, it could be inferred that sociology deals with the study of social institutions, this means the interaction of individuals and groups with organizational entities in a spontaneous order.
In the Colombian environment and on the management of mass consumption, Durango (2000) suggests specifying the term of theory of organization (or organizations) and makes the following basic propositions:
- The theory of the organization maintains only an indirect correspondence with some fields of vocational training, its essential task has been, until now, in research. Her strongest initial bond, maintained over time, she established with the administration, a discipline from which she obtained her primary objective (organizations), and to which she provided the necessary theoretical support to move her away from the excessive pragmatism that saw her born. The organization theory is not one theory but many. Organization theory can be characterized to this day as a diverse and fragmented multidisciplinary space. The diversity and fragmentation of organization theory denote the complexity of its object of study.The theory of the organization is a space of knowledge dominated by the proposals generated in the Anglo-Saxon world, but in an accelerated process of internationalization. Concern for the study of organizations arose and developed in the United States and, shortly afterwards in Great Britain, maintaining until now a clear hegemony. There is a general tendency of behavioral disciplines to study the organizational phenomenon. This trend partly explains why most theorists of Organizational Theory have tried to describe their object of study from an individual or micro analysis, that is, considering individuals and subgroups as main actors within the organization, ignoring the organization as a whole or the macro level of analysis.There is no epistemological or methodological consensus in organizational theory, perhaps, this occurs due to the interdisciplinary influence of the field, from which it obtains the multiplicity of perspectives regarding its object of study, and therefore, its research methods. consequence of the interdisciplinary nature of the field has been the different levels of analysis. Most sociologists have been interested in the study of organizations as units, while psychologists have taken an individual approach as the unit of analysis. Economists, political scientists, and anthropologists also often focus their attention on the macrostructural aspects of organizations.There is a gap in the foundation of organizational theory, which is generated by the epistemological and ontological variety,through metaphors and paradigms of each discipline, replicating this variety in the methodological and ignoring the context, especially the historical one, in which the organizational action takes place.
Hall (1996: 34) questions: Are organizations real? Or it is actually a social construction in the minds of organizational actors. (Hall, 1996: 298) presents the schools of thought, these can be labeled as theories, models or perspectives: 1. the population-ecology model, 2. the resource-independence model, 3. the contingency-rational model, 4 the transaction-cost model and 5. the institutional model
Vélez (2000) specifies: "Organizational theory must answer a simple theoretical question: What is an organization ?; In addition, administrative theory faces a practical question: How is it administered? Administrative theory does not even have a century of experience, which in science is just the beginning; Administrative theory includes: 1. The administrative principles or axioms proposed by Taylor and Fayol and 2. The administrative functions, suggested by Fayol, which includes managerial work, defined as a process of planning, organizing, directing and controlling. The administration, in the university environment, is the primipara of the great disciplines. Incipient, hesitant, stammering discipline, which aims to rub shoulders with the sciences established in the university since its inception, some 700 years ago.
Regarding the youth of organizational theory, Pfeffer (1992) argues: there is little doubt that the study of organizations as a different, though interdisciplinary, object of study is relatively recent, the issue of organizations did not emerge as a category different, in the discipline of sociology, but until 1965.
Organizational theory hardly fits three decades. Thinking about it, all that has been done so far seems amazing. A path is being traveled that leads to understand organizations not as a set of people and other elements, but as phenomena of relationships, as relational events, since we define them not in terms of nouns, but in terms of verbs. Specifically, an organization is to produce, import elements, process information, define products, investigate, train, and more verbs, depending on the organization in question. "
Continuing with fashions, at the local level, (Acevedo and López, 2000: 44-45) emphasize: “Administrative fashions are a type of proposal that offer themselves as the great solution to the problems of the administration. The contents of these proposals are based on: personal experiences of success, without there being a conceptualization of them; successful experiences in certain contexts and situations without warning about the appropriate precautions of adaptability and adaptation to other contexts; the criteria of novelty, thereby incurring the double fallacy of believing, on the one hand, that all new knowledge is true and, on the other, that because a theory contains important truth, all prior theory is false; and finally,trade-imposed fads are not supported by previous research and for this reason it is often not possible to determine why they are sometimes successful and sometimes not. ”
Continuing with Jackson (1994), he approaches learning organizations as the first fad. The "Learning Organization" has as maximum representative Peter Senge, author of "The Fifth Discipline", the work is based on systemic thinking. So what is a learning organization? It can be understood as that organization capable of creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge and modifying its behavior in response to new knowledge and perceptions. The book presents a series of ideas disconnected from each other, about change, learning and communication, drawn from dissimilar sources such as: systems dynamics (Jay Forrester), quantum physics (David Bohm), organizational behavior (Critopher Argyris) and music (Robert Fritz).A practical limitation of learning organizations has been describing them as a great, all-purpose concept whose tentacles reach for everything from customer service, strategy execution, and change management. (Senge, 1994: 21) summarizes: “it is vital that the five disciplines develop as a whole. This represents a challenge because it is much more difficult to integrate new tools than to apply them separately. But the benefits are immense. That is why systemic thinking is the fifth discipline, merging them into a coherent body of theory and practice, which prevents being separate resources or a latest trend. " The selection of the term discipline, reflected in the title, was essentially a rhetorical tool that served, as a structure, to refine the author's work.Senge later acknowledged that he did not fully understand the basic premise of the book.
Senge in his work agrees with the strategic phrase: "the ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage." The primary hypothesis of the systemic or “Fifth Discipline” approach is the recovery of simplicity. The five disciplines can be grouped as follows: "personal domain" and "mental models" refer to individual attitudes that collaterally have a great influence on the organization. The "personal domain" means self-knowledge, maturity, balance and development of the human being. The "mental models" refer to traditional values, resistance to change and paradigmatic paralysis. Another group, not individual, but collective is the one formed by the "construction of a shared vision" and "team learning",The four previous disciplines place man in society and as an individual; the Fifth discipline, "systemic thinking" helps dynamic interaction as subsystems and addresses the whole as a synergistic system and not as the simple aggregation of the parts.
On administrative and organizational theory, Senge (1994: 20) states: “it is not true that organizations can benefit from disciplines. Ultimately, management disciplines, such as accounting, have been around for a long time. But the five disciplines of learning differ from the more traditional disciplines of administration in being "personal". The five disciplines are more like art than traditional administrative disciplines. Practicing a discipline is different from emulating a model. Management innovations are often described with reference to best practices from so-called leading companies. While these descriptions are interesting, they do more harm than good and generate a piecemeal copy and the urge to reach others.I don't think great organizations are built by trying to emulate others (benchmarking), just as individual greatness is not achieved by trying to copy another great person. ”
If one compares the metaphor of the machine with Senge's Fifth Discipline, it could be inferred: if Taylor's main concern was inefficiency and waste, Senge's is chaos and complexity. Senge argues that most people feel lost within the organization to which they belong. According to him, this systematic inability to deal with complexity is the direct result of traditional scientific approaches to management. In a sense, managers find themselves in a similar position to the natural scientists of the Precaos. They believe they understand the relationships between cause and effect within their organizations. As a result, managers are prisoners of the many systems they manage. Friedman (1993).
To emphasize poor adaptation to mounting threats to organizational survival, Senge (1994: 34) proposes the parable of the boiled frog: if we put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it immediately tries to get out. But if we put the frog in water at room temperature, and we don't scare it, it stays calm. When the temperature rises from 21 to 26 degrees Celsius, the frog does nothing, and even seems to be having a good time. As the temperature rises, the frog becomes increasingly stunned, and is finally unable to get out of the pot. Although nothing prevents it, the frog stays there and boils. Why? Because your internal apparatus for detecting threats to survival is prepared for sudden changes in the environment, not for slow and gradual changes.
Organizing continuous learning is a perfect subject for gurus; Certainly, the book is ambiguous, puzzling, and filled with sophisticated jargon: inference scales, causality circles, left columns, balanced spirals, archetypes, and microworlds.
The top researchers in learning organizations try to demonstrate:
- The most important learning occurs in the workplace and not in the classroom. The most effective learning is social and active, not individual and passive. The most important elements that people must learn are not the explicit rules, the procedures, but the unspoken stuff found in the rich and nutritious soup of intuition, judgment, experience, and common sense found in the seeming chaos of daily activity. Most organizations today have a culture that inhibits learning.
In very broad terms, Senge's argument sounds good, however it is in danger of contradicting itself, in general it is not possible to act against systems whose behavior we can predict using a few archetypes. Another drawback of Senge's work seems to be, apart from the dynamics of systems, the little attention paid to the other branches of systemic thought. »Systems» is “The Fifth Discipline” to which the title of the book refers and seems to be the most important. In fact, it is in dispute whether the other four, (personal mastery, mental models, the construction of a shared vision and team learning) are disciplines or not.
More modernly, Taichi Sakaiya (1995) coined the term "knowledge society" or third wave economy to describe his vision of the coming society, it refers to the value of knowledge, originated in the price of knowledge as in the value created for him.
It is important to differentiate the following concepts: data, information, knowledge and intellectual capital.
Data is a set of numbers or figures. They are the basic blocks that sustain an economy based on information and knowledge. When the data is ordered they become basic information. The interpretation of information is done through the intelligence of the people and becomes knowledge.
Intellectual capital is the sum of the knowledge and intelligence of all the actors in the company. However, its development is individual and personal. The basis of intellectual capital is to make the learning rhythm of the collaborators intensify, by developing an environment where the development of intelligence is stimulated and knowledge is shared.
Intellectual capital is the entire inventory of knowledge generated by the organization and expressed as:
- Technology: patents, improvement of processes, products and services. Information: knowledge of customers, suppliers and the competition. Skills developed in the staff: team problem solving, communication techniques, conflict resolution and intelligence development.
Now, what is knowledge management or management? It is the process of continuously managing knowledge of all kinds to satisfy present and future needs in the organization, to identify and exploit existing and acquired knowledge resources and to develop new opportunities. The knowledge management process includes:
- Knowledge generation, Capture and acquisition, Organization, Search and use, Publication, Distribution.
The importance of the knowledge society has shifted from the functional micro-economic field of the company and of the production systems to the territorial, geographical field, so the term of “learning region” appears (region that learns, scholarly region, region informed).
The idea of the “learning region” comes from the notion that innovation is not just a one-off event centered around cognitive breakthrogh events, but more as a process based on gradual and cumulative aspects of trajectories. development passes.
The notion of intelligent region is not very different from what is understood by intelligence in people: the ability to learn from their own interaction with the environment, that is, the ability to change patterns of behavior (paradigms) since in an environment Turbulent repetition of past practices, routine, can only guarantee failure.
Knowledge or cognitive capital, and its rate of increase, are the keys to this century, not only for economic growth but also for countries, regions and cities.
The so-called knowledge or information society is based on the developments in information and communication technologies (cyber and telematics).
It should be understood that the traditional factors of production (land, capital and labor) present decreasing returns while the new factor, knowledge, presents increasing returns. In prosaic words, if individuals are considered as objects of a production function, simply as labor, they enter the world of diminishing returns, instead if they are considered as subjects, as human persons capable of learning, unlearning and knowing, the door of increasing returns is overcome.
The second trend argued by Jackson (1994) is regarding the customer-based CTC (Total Quality Control) approachAt the expense of other actors, the above is the starting point of criticism; Secondly, the CTC's emphasis on continuous improvement, seen as "Get out of everything you don't want," seems to be wrong. Continual improvement is not enough to dominate the market. The gap between the organization and the market leader will increase, unless the organization creates innovative "leaps" that lead to major qualitative changes, or in other words, a "discontinuous" improvement process occurs. (Lambin, 2002) refers to breakthrough innovation as follows: It is risky for the company to depend on the products demanded by the market (the voice of the consumer) to the detriment of products unknown to it, but driven by technology. It can be seen that the majority of breakthrough innovations, not minor,they come from the laboratory and not from the market. The CTC philosophy pays little attention to the organizational design that has to be carried out for quality to thrive within the organization. Another weakness of the CTC is related to the difficulty of developing a culture of quality and the negligence of managers due to the political dimension of quality.
Currently, Colombia absorbs the texts and programs on Total Quality, highly promoted, in a messianic tone, in addition, these are implemented through functional organizational structures (they should be matrix or network), quarreling with the fourteen postulates for the Quality improvement of Edwards Deming, these are: 1. Create a constancy of purpose, 2. Adopt the new philosophy, 3. Stop relying on inspection to improve quality, 4. End the practice of doing business on price basis only, 5. Constantly improve processes, 6. Implement on-the-job training, 7. Adopt and implement leadership, 8. Drop fear, 9. Break down barriers between support areas, 10, Eliminate Slogans and exhortations, 11. Eliminate numerical quotas and numerical objectives, 12.Remove barriers and annual grading or merit system, 13. Implement a vigorous organization-wide education and self-improvement program, 14. Team up across the organization to achieve transformation. Contrary to the above, there are the seven deadly diseases of Total Quality: 1.The emphasis on short-term profits, 2.The evaluation of performance, 3.The lack of constancy of purpose, 4. The mobility of management, 5.Operating the organization, based solely on visible figures, 6.Excessive medical costs in many organizations, and 7. Excessive costs of guarantees promoted by attorneys who work, in the event of unforeseen circumstances, on a fee basis.Implement a vigorous education and self-improvement program for the entire organization, 14. Work as a team throughout the organization to achieve transformation. Contrary to the above, there are the seven deadly diseases of Total Quality: 1.The emphasis on short-term profits, 2.The evaluation of performance, 3.The lack of constancy of purpose, 4. The mobility of management, 5.Operating the organization, based solely on visible figures, 6.Excessive medical costs in many organizations, and 7. Excessive costs of guarantees promoted by attorneys who work, in the event of unforeseen circumstances, on a fee basis.Implement a vigorous education and self-improvement program for the entire organization, 14. Work as a team throughout the organization to achieve transformation. Contrary to the above, there are the seven deadly diseases of Total Quality: 1.The emphasis on short-term profits, 2.The evaluation of performance, 3.The lack of constancy of purpose, 4. The mobility of management, 5.Operating the organization, based solely on visible figures, 6.Excessive medical costs in many organizations, and 7. Excessive costs of guarantees promoted by attorneys who work, in the event of unforeseen circumstances, on a fee basis.The emphasis on short-term profits, 2. Performance evaluation, 3. Lack of consistency in purpose, 4. Management mobility, 5. Managing the organization, based solely on visible figures, 6. The Excessive medical costs in many organizations and 7. Excessive costs of guarantees promoted by attorneys who work, in the event of unforeseen circumstances, on a fee basis.The emphasis on short-term profits, 2. Performance evaluation, 3. Lack of consistency in purpose, 4. Management mobility, 5. Managing the organization, based solely on visible figures, 6. The Excessive medical costs in many organizations and 7. Excessive costs of guarantees promoted by attorneys who work, in the event of unforeseen circumstances, on a fee basis.
On the other hand, Mariño (1993) suggests: “… firstly, it is necessary to clarify that Total Quality is not synonymous with Continuous Improvement. I think that the authors of the Reengineering book and its promoters are wrong in this regard. Continuous Improvement is just one of the disciplines on which Total Quality is based. I am not among those who think that there is nothing new in Process Reengineering. However, Total Quality as theory and administrative practice has included most of the elements promulgated by the Reengineering approach… ”
There are authors who present five generations in the evolution of the concept of quality, these are: 1. Quality by inspection, quality is understood as an instrument; 2. Quality assurance, quality is understood as a tool; 3. The total quality process, here, quality is the organization's strategy; 4. The process of continuous quality improvement, quality is also the strategy of the company and 5. Reengineering and total quality, in it, quality redesigns the organization.
Total quality processes are based on the following values:
- Customer orientation Quality Continuous improvement and Commitment of staff and empowerment.
The excellent representatives of total quality control, with their contributions, are: Shewart with his statistical process control and his "PHVA" (plan, do, verify and act); Juran brings the trilogy of planning, control and improvement; Deming owns a management model; Crosby emphasizes "zero defects" and costs; Ishikawa patents quality circles, later expanded as participation circles.
González (1995: 77-78) argues: “There is nothing new under the sun, my initial concern is to try to show how the premises that define sustainable management, as a management philosophy, are embedded in the fundamental pillars of La Total quality". In addition, Gonzálezb (1995: 37) references the following data, facing the question: how well do businessmen in Medellín know about administrative approaches ?: Sustainable Management knows it well, 90%; The Service Management, 40%; The Systems Approach, 70%; Administration By Objectives (APO), 75%; The Administration by Policies (APP), 30%; Reengineering, 60%; The Administration for Total Quality, "total quality management" (TQM), 60%; Organizational Culture, 60%; The prospective, 85%; Knowledge Management, 65%.
The third fashion according to Jackson (1994) is Reengineering. She was a failure, according to Hammer himself, as much emphasis was placed on radical redesign of processes, on systems, and human talent was forgotten. The reengineering thesis lies: today's corporations need nothing less than to re-invent the way of doing things, reengineering means »starting again», the cornerstone of Reengineering is discontinuous thinking Hammer and Champy (1994: 33).
The Reengineering process changes the questions, how, when, where and who? And it puts the question before: why?
Hammer and Champy (1994: 27) reason: “Some people, even many managers, attribute corporate problems to deficiencies in management. They think that if companies were managed in a better way, they would prosper. But none of the administrative fads (some are management instruments) of recent years: management by objectives, value chain analysis, diversification, Theory Z, Zero Base budgets, Quality Circles, In search of excellence, the Method of Managing by Walking (Peripatetic Administration), the Internal Business and the Minute Administration, have stopped the deterioration of the competitive performance of the corporation. They have only served to distract administrators from the really necessary task. ”
Ultimately, Hammer (1994) recognizes: “the really important thing is to have increasing incomes in the long term. It is not about getting rid of people. It's about getting more out of them. ” Champy says: “I was not smart enough with Reengineering, it reflected my engineering background and did not pay enough attention to the human dimension. I have learned that it is a vital factor ”. (Champy, 1994) presents his new formula, different from Reengineering: "… I want to call it Business Transformation, it combines the triangle of restructuring, strategy and change in business culture…". Many managers have recognized that simple downsizing (thinning the structure),instead of reorganizing working methods, it did not generate the great increases in productivity that Hammer and Champy proclaimed in their book. Therefore it would be better to radically abandon Process Reengineering. The process is understood as a series of interrelated activities that convert inputs into products. The processes are made up of three main types of activities:
Those that add value (important activities for customers); handover activities (those that move the workflow across borders that are primarily functional, departmental, or organizational); and control activities (serve to control transfers across the aforementioned borders).
On the contrary, Micklethwait and Wooldridge (1997) affirm, despite everything, Reengineering should not be totally abandoned, rather, it is suggested to refine it. They say: Reengineering and Downsizing are a better action than letting an organization die of obesity, especially those companies that look like corporate dinosaurs.
For Acevedo and López (2000), Reengineering has been associated with “Downsizing”. So what does “Downsizing” or organizational thinning mean? Let's see, it is understood as the contraction of the organizational structure or the reduction of the size of the staff by applying different administrative techniques, fundamentally implying the reduction of the size of the workforce, with the aim of improving efficiency, productivity and competitiveness of an organization.
Lambert (2001: 15) states: "The most recent research indicates that Downsizing, through the loss of managers and experienced workers, leads to a" corporate amnesia "or, what is worse, a" corporate Alzheimer's ". The opposite of Downsizing is known as rightsizing.
A last trend could be the "Empowerment" or empowerment, understood as empowering or recognizing the power that people have from birth and not taking it away. This has always existed in administration since the days of theorists of human behavior in organization such as Maslow and Herzberg. The “empowerment” has as a paradigm the promotion of self-control, which was first mentioned by Mc Gregor in his Theory “Y”. The “empowerment” takes up Fayol concepts such as delegation and authority, it is often said that in the companies of the past, employees worked to satisfy the needs of superiors, to whom all authority fell. In today's company, on the other hand, the imperative is the delegation of functions that allows responsible decisions to be made without consulting the highest levels of the organization.
Matamala (1996: 20) makes the following analysis: “the“ empowerment ”has been translated, into Spanish, as empowerment or empowerment. I do not share either of the two translations and I will rather use the English term. "Empowerment" is recognizing that power is in "being" instead of "having" or "doing"; starting with ourselves, it's not really anything new. It is to rediscover something that is as old as the history of humanity. The "Empowerment" is not to talk about it, it is to live it. He runs a high risk of becoming one more fad, in the livelihood of some business consultants and in the intellectual training of certain managers. ”
Robbins and Coulter (2002: 63) associate “Empowerment” with Total Quality Management, when they state: “… the fifth characteristic of Total Quality Management (TQM) is empowering or involving line employees in the improvement process. Equipment such as powered vehicles is widely used in TQM programs to locate and solve problems; domestically, empowering can be understood as granting greater discretion to workers to make decisions… ”.
The term empowerment has different meanings depending on the sociocultural and political contexts. An exploration of translations of the term empowerment always leads to lively discussion. The terms related to empowerment are: personal strength, control, personal power, own choice, dignified life in accordance with the person's own values, ability to fight for one's rights, independence, own decision-making and being free. Empowerment is embedded in local value systems and beliefs. It is of intrinsic value. It also has instrumental value. It is relevant both individually and collectively.
In the Antioqueño case, López and Acevedo (1999) present the following research findings: Reengineering as Total Quality, Strategic Planning, Management by Objectives and other administrative fashions have been used by the large Antioquia company to solve its lack of competitiveness in the global sphere, in the face of the change from a protectionist model to a model of openness to other markets. Reengineering was adopted in our environment without making a well-founded analysis of the idiosyncrasy of the Antioquia worker and without realizing that administrative fads transplanted without any cultural adaptation tend to fail. Previous researchers conclude that Reengineering as defined in the management literature,it was not applied in all its dimensions in the companies explored in the department of Antioquia. “… I think that the Administration is almost a kind of fashion launch; administrators are like dressmakers who have to invent a new fashion from time to time because they don't sell collections… ”, the former are the words of Nicanor Restrepo Santamaría, collected in the research by (López, 1999). Many administrators use administrative zapping, this means changing the management tool every six months to better disguise the difference between discourse and reality.the above are the words of Nicanor Restrepo Santamaría, collected in the research by (López, 1999). Many administrators use administrative zapping, this means changing the management tool every six months to better disguise the difference between discourse and reality.the above are the words of Nicanor Restrepo Santamaría, collected in the research by (López, 1999). Many administrators use administrative zapping, this means changing the management tool every six months to better disguise the difference between discourse and reality.
Regarding gurus, there are three classes: academic gurus, there are gurus-consultants and administrators-heroes, and administrative fashions, (Dávila, 2000: 11) comments: “on a par with renowned academics, for the hotels and convention centers of Latin America has also been visited by missionaries, alchemists and diligent sellers, bearers of a new faith: simplistic managerial preaching. The same can be said of books, quickly translated, where the criterion of becoming "best sellers", products of skillful commercialization, is not necessarily in accordance with their quality. Although the rhetoric of the end of the 20th century has turned the client into a supposed king, the reality is that the world of knowledge is governed by different standards than the habits and preferences of clients. ”
We could admit that society is fed up with enlightened preachers in Administration. (Dávila, 1994: 27) concludes in relation to fashions: "… of the new approaches it can be pointed out that most of them have some common characteristics (ahistoricism, reductionism, problems of objectivity and ethnocentrism), care must be taken when we think about whether it has applicability, since the administration in Latin America and Colombia occurs in different historical circumstances, in a different cultural environment from which certain administrative currents come. This does not mean that these management approaches should be rejected or dismissed, but rather be clear about their successes and limitations… ”.
In sum, while Reengineering, Empowerment, Total Quality, Learning Organization and Downsizing do not seem to constitute new organizational theories, it is undeniable that if there are new economic theories of the organization, they start from the idea to stop seeing the company as a black box; ends up affirming (Dávila, 1994). This can be reaffirmed with the recognition as a science, in Germany, of the economy of the company, based on productivity.
Conclusions
Administrative fads (others have called them managerial technologies), per se, are not good or bad, many of them cease to be temporary, they come to stay, and they become instruments or profitable techniques for solving problems in the organization, obviously, after adapting it to the vernacular culture. Consequently, fashions should not be stigmatized or mythologized; Perhaps we are all, on the artistic side of the Administration, apprentices and dressmakers. Remember that without perception and sensitivity, knowledge turns out to be an impossible undertaking.
As a colophon one could extrapolate:
1. Koontz and Weihrich, Neoclassical School (2003) conclude: fashions and metaphors have always existed, from the earliest times, throughout the administrative process. But there is more, in the sixties, Koontz used the term "administrative jungle", understood as a large set of administrative theories that were not capable of solving the prevailing productivity problems of the time.
Incidentally, koontz and Weihrich (2003: 44) argue: “from a remote time, the vegetation in this jungle has changed a bit: new approaches have been developed and some older ones have adopted new meanings by some neologisms added to them, but the evolutions of science and administration theory still have the characteristics of a semantic jungle ”.
As a concept of pan-administration, Fayol (1986) said: “everyone has a need, to a greater or lesser degree, for administrative notions; the teaching of the administration must, therefore, be general: rudimentary in primary school, a little more extensive in secondary school and highly developed in university ”.
On fashions, (Fayol "anatomical approach", 1986: 21) stated: "the administration has no doctrine and without it there is no teaching possible. Therefore there is no established administrative doctrine, out of public discussion. Personal doctrines are not lacking. In the absence of consecrated doctrine, everyone can believe that they have the best methods, so they can be seen everywhere: in industry, in the army, in the university and in the state, the most contradictory practices placed under the aegis of the same principle "
In the European context, Lambert (2001) says: Management fads have come and gone, and some, despite their poor performance in the real world of work, have come and stayed. Companies continue to accept process reengineering and the like, despite an estimated failure rate of 80 percent. The queue syndrome of the bus “let this new idea pass, another one will arrive in a minute” is part, increasingly, of the increasing fatigue generated by the attempt to do more with less resources and in less time, and often with a lower salary. There is more talk of globalization, empowerment and creation of the future than is actually understood.
2. It could be agreed that the study of the Administration of organizations seems marinated by metaphors, for example, is the case of Morgan (1997), for him, images and metaphors are systems of interpretation that serve as a method for understand organizations through social mediation and the acquisition of new forms of administrative thought. For Morgan (1997: 2), the use of metaphor implies a "way of thinking" and a "way of seeing" that goes beyond how we understand our world. The proliferation of theories and approaches dedicated to the study of Administration, in general, has been defined, first as Jungle or jungle of administrative theory Koontz (1961); second, row of trees Simon (1972); third, Pfeffer scrub (1993) and as a garden to be fertilized by Fernández (1999). Pfeffer (1999), proposes:“The field of organization management theory is becoming more like weedy ground than a well-kept garden. Mid-range theories proliferate. It is often difficult to discern in which direction Management's knowledge moves, if indeed it does. Continuing with the garden metaphor, it is clear that there is a lot to prune and weed ». The Administration study remains a garden where trails diverge, rather than converge. Forty years ago, the field of organizational leadership was characterized as a theoretical jungle, a conceptually fragmented terrain, and a highly divided profession. Jungle, tree line, thicket, or garden; the variety has not decreased over the years, but on the contrary, it has grown exponentially,the theoretical acquis on the administration of organizations. As workers make their way through the jungle and managers sharpen the machetes they use, they set up training programs for those who use and wield the machete; it can happen that an intelligent administrator shouts at them sometimes: they go through the wrong jungle !; although it is also likely that they will then reply: “silence. We're moving forward".We're moving forward".We're moving forward".
According to García and Munilla (1998), the administration's history resembles a disordered galaxy with many stars and planets poorly organized around a single, unifying theoretical framework. Another simile to consider, the administration resembles a jungle of recipes with an eclectic flourishing of semantic mutations.
In reality, administrative issues are prone to similes and rediscoveries, for example: If the Management by Objectives-APO- (Drucker, neoclassical school, 1953) could be contextualized, successfully, in a current organization, it would be welcome. Empowerment, Total Quality and Learning Organizations are rediscoveries with archetypes and new meanings, the totally innovative is scarce. It could also be said, in administrative discipline, on some occasions, inclusions abound; cases will be cited: Robbins and coulter (2002) take “Empowerment” as the subject of Total Quality Control. Additionally, empowerment encloses the paradox of empowerment, while taking control; if the following elements of “empowerment” were accepted: support for organizational transformation,a change in leadership, teamwork, strategic thinking, and process redesign; then it would be concluded that it contains part of the reengineering. Mariño (2000) tries to demonstrate, as Reengineering is an element belonging to the same Total Quality Control, similarly González (1995) assures, Sustainable Management is immersed in the context of Total Quality. Continuing with the metaphors, the administrator is a kind of Alice in Wonderland chasing the white rabbit and this, according to neoclassicals, represents efficiency, effectiveness and effectiveness. Let's see the importance of the technical principle of planning in the dialogue, Carroll (1994: 51), between Alice and the cat:then it would be concluded that it contains part of the reengineering. Mariño (2000) tries to demonstrate, as Reengineering is an element belonging to the same Total Quality Control, similarly González (1995) assures, Sustainable Management is immersed in the context of Total Quality. Continuing with the metaphors, the administrator is a kind of Alice in Wonderland chasing the white rabbit and this, according to neoclassicals, represents efficiency, effectiveness and effectiveness. Let's see the importance of the technical principle of planning in the dialogue, Carroll (1994: 51), between Alice and the cat:then it would be concluded that it contains part of the reengineering. Mariño (2000) tries to demonstrate, as Reengineering is an element belonging to the same Total Quality Control, similarly González (1995) assures, Sustainable Management is immersed in the context of Total Quality. Continuing with the metaphors, the administrator is a kind of Alice in Wonderland chasing the white rabbit and this, according to neoclassicals, represents efficiency, effectiveness and effectiveness. Let's see the importance of the technical principle of planning in the dialogue, Carroll (1994: 51), between Alice and the cat:Sustainable Management is immersed in the context of Total Quality. Continuing with the metaphors, the administrator is a kind of Alice in Wonderland chasing the white rabbit and this, according to neoclassicals, represents efficiency, effectiveness and effectiveness. Let's see the importance of the technical principle of planning in the dialogue, Carroll (1994: 51), between Alice and the cat:Sustainable Management is immersed in the context of Total Quality. Continuing with the metaphors, the administrator is a kind of Alice in Wonderland chasing the white rabbit and this, according to neoclassicals, represents efficiency, effectiveness and effectiveness. Let's see the importance of the technical principle of planning in the dialogue, Carroll (1994: 51), between Alice and the cat:
Alice: Will you tell me, please, what path should I take to get out of here?
The cat: that depends a lot on where you want to go.
Alice: I don't care where to go.
The cat: then, the path you take matters little.
Alice: As long as it leads somewhere.
The cat: oh! You can be sure that you will get somewhere if you walk long enough.
Alice: what kind of people live here?
The cat: here we are all crazy. I'm crazy. You're crazy. Each time you have to pedal faster to stay in the same place.
Alicia: how do you know I'm crazy?
The cat: you must be; otherwise you wouldn't be here.
Alicia: and how do you know that you are crazy?
The cat: First of all, a dog is not crazy, do we agree?
Alice: I think so.
The cat: well, well; a dog growls when angry and wags its tail is happy. Now, I growl when I'm happy and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore, I am crazy.
Regarding fashions, Popper (1994) argued: “in addition to intolerance, there is another folly that we should not tolerate; above all the folly that leads the intellectual to follow the latest fashion; a folly that has led many to adopt a gray style. Intellectuals should stop admiring and tolerating that style, the style of big, bombastic words. It is an intellectual irresponsibility that undermines common sense and destroys reason. " Karl R Popper argued that any definition of a discipline was highly arbitrary in content. This is to generate initial definitions that represent an agreement to focus attention on some problems, issues and phenomena, with the exclusion of others; Popper believed that defining the philosophy of science in this way would almost by definition avoidthat philosophy make substantive contributions to the entire body of scientific knowledge.
4. Despite the fact that Mintzberg's hypothesis and criticism (1975), about the profession and administrative science, are passionate and exaggerated; The following thesis could be better elaborated: accepting administrative praxis as an art; and organized administrative knowledge, inherited from microeconomics, social psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, and political science, as a social science - empirical in nature - under construction. Mintzberg introduces himself and is often presented as a revolutionary of administrative thought, but he merely replaces one myth with another.
In short, it could be said that Mintzberg came at one point to fill a doctrinal gap in an administration that was trying to de-grammatize.
The administration has been saturated with technical-organizational principles and has lacked theoretical-general principles. There is a real reason why organization management has been slow to develop a single theory, the reason is simply one: management is not a science, rather it is an art or a practice, but as such it is much closer to engineering, medicine or architecture than physics, chemistry or biology. The medical profession offers us an excellent example, if we understand it well, its members are called doctors and not scientists. It is the job of physicists, doctors, and administrators to apply the findings of the various sciences to problem solving.
Drucker (1997) states: “I have argued from the start that management has to be a discipline, an organized body of knowledge that can be acquired and perhaps taught. Administration is not and will never be a science, as this word is understood today. Administration is as scientific as medicine: both are practical. A practice is fed by a large body of true science. Just as medicine feeds on biology, chemistry, physics, and others, so administration feeds on economics, psychology, mathematics, political theory, history, and philosophy. And like medicine, management is a discipline in itself, with its own premises, its own purposes, its own tools, and its own performance goals and assessments.We could affirm that the administration is one of the liberal arts ”.
To paraphrase Morgan, the non-exclusion of the concepts of art and science in the Administration can be intuited in the following parable of oriental wisdom: a frog (art) and a scorpion (science) are found trying to cross a lake, Let's look at the dialogue:
The frog: we both need to cross the lake, it's true!
The scorpion: but I can't swim, how do we do?
The frog: it is simple and vulgar. I swim and you climb on my back. Be careful not to prod me.
The scorpion: obvious, I won't prick you.
The frog: I do not know, but I am a little suspicious, I felt that you have pricked me. We are going into the abyss; why did you do it?
The scorpion: I could not control myself, I am so by nature.
Arguably the most important thing is to overcome the Byzantine dichotomy between science and art in administrative discipline. The legitimacy of administrative knowledge and its theoretical training is not antinomic. Another shortcoming of the mentioned discipline is the terminological vagueness that negatively influences the operation of the concepts. In the community the terms of management, management, administration, leader-administrator, "management", company and organization are confused.
But, (Popper, 1994) states: “… Do not allow the inclination to take seriously the problems about words and their meanings. What should be taken seriously are questions of fact and assertions of fact: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they pose… ”
4. It is essential that the University and the schools of Administration rescue the critical spirit and recognize the different philosophical approaches that support The Administrative Theory, this would allow evaluating the epistemological status of the discipline; Such approaches could be: the positive of the Administration that adopts the perspective of trying to describe, explain, predict and understand the existing administrative activities and phenomena, this perspective examines "what is". Positive propositions are intended to account for a reality in terms of categorizing or affirming what is that reality like? In terms of (Johansen, 1992: 13), administrative theory has to describe and explain the administrator's behavior, her particular behavior that makes her different from that of others.
The positive approach will account: if the individual is a rational decision maker? In addition, you must answer what managers really do. What is the philosophy of science of the discipline, called administration? Finally, if decision-making essentially characterizes the administrator's practice?
The normative approach to Administration, full of value judgments and of an inductive nature, takes the perspective of prescribing what organizations and individuals should do or what types of Administration systems should be desirable for a society? This perspective examines what should be and what organizations and individuals should do. This prescriptive approach suggests what managers can do. It is possible to think that the traditional school or the Administrative Process was classified as normative, both in the approach of said process, and in the promulgation of administrative principles.
The normative approach should answer if the objective of the organization, to maximize profit, is desirable for society? What type of legal regulation, from the Administration, is desirable for society? If the administration should have responsibilities special social ?, If there should be a hybrid management model that takes into account efficiency, time and movement studies (Taylor) and an organizational climate based on cooperation (Quality and empowerment circles); (Chiavenato, 2000: 39) reference, the main objective of the administration should be, according to Taylor: to ensure maximum prosperity for the employer and, at the same time,the maximum prosperity for the employee, if the codes of ethics and good government help the administrator or also serve other professionals who carry out administrative tasks ?, and lastly, if the non-profit organizations should interest the administration's scholars?
Some thinkers have suggested that the positive / normative dichotomy (approach) in administration is false because we cannot escape our value system. This premise is probably true: you cannot escape our value system. However, the premise does not imply that the positive / normative dichotomy is false. Accepting it would mean falling into the fallacy of certain modern philosophers.
Another approach can be considered, the pragmatic one, Henry Fayol himself was a practical man who had a broad analytical sense, this allowed him to conceptualize a large number of particular cases that he had lived or known as administrator, which produced, in the end, a administrative theory, capable of explaining managerial behavior and laying the foundations for the development of formal management education. Pragmatism recognizes truth as an instrument (instrumentalism) for solving problems, not as something that corresponds to an immutable realm of facts. There is no eternal truth, but there are truths in constantly changing situations. The Instrumentalism of (Dewey, J, 1960) places as an element to highlight, the experience, it must continue living in subsequent experiences;just as there are beneficial experiences, anti-educational ones are presented if, instead of favoring, hindering or disturbing the subsequent experience, and if they are meaningless in the vital, intellectual and work perspective. The previous philosophical approach is summarized in "learning by doing". Pragmatism proposes to administrative theory that the only valid criterion for judging the truth of all doctrine must be based on its practical effects. Pragmatism emphasizes action, is based on reality, replaces the criterion of truth with that of verification.Pragmatism proposes to administrative theory that the only valid criterion for judging the truth of all doctrine must be based on its practical effects. Pragmatism emphasizes action, is based on reality, replaces the criterion of truth with that of verification.Pragmatism proposes to administrative theory that the only valid criterion for judging the truth of all doctrine must be based on its practical effects. Pragmatism emphasizes action, is based on reality, replaces the criterion of truth with that of verification.
In closing, the Administration's falsificationist approach criticizes inductivism and proposes a relationship between theory and experience. Theory guides observation and therefore presupposes it, science is considered a set of hypotheses that must be tested. All hypotheses must be falsifiable, that is, susceptible to being falsified. A falsifiable hypothesis should not be confused with a false hypothesis. For example, "The Administration has never been renewed" is falsifiable. Let's see more, "If the characteristic of a profession is its transferability, then, the manager will be easily transferable", is another falsifiable hypothesis. For falsificationism, the falsity but not the truth of the theory can be established from the numerous observations available.Falsability is understood as the search for empirical statements that reject a theory.
Falsificationism serves to demarcate, in The Administration, its characteristic of science and non-science (the epistemological status). In addition, it should answer ¿If the administration, like other scientific disciplines, shares the trait of refutability, criterion to establish the scientific status of a discipline, according to Popper (1994).
A theory is potentially scientific if and only if, there are possible observations that can falsify (refute) it. Forgery can be understood as an alternative method of theoretical justification aimed at overcoming various difficulties associated with logical empiricism. Falasacionists argue that scientific practice cannot be rationally defined if it proceeds inductively, and that all scientific theories are therefore equally improbable and unprovable.
All theories are equally conjectural, science therefore cannot demonstrate any theory but if it can demonstrate its falsity with certain logic, the above means that there must be an empirical factual base that can be used to demonstrate the falsity of a theory. The more falsifiable a theory is, the better it is. There are non-falsifiable theories that are taken as scientific, such is the case of some interpretations of Freud's psychoanalysis.
According to (Popper, 1970), science is presented not simply as an accumulation of demonstrated truths but rather as a correction through bold and objective criticism. He maintains that the scientific paradigm can be seen as the proliferation of rival theories, it is not the case of administrative theory and organization theory, that is, to live a constant scientific revolution.
(Albach, 1993) emphasizes the difficulty of establishing an academic community in the administrative discipline and states: “one of the differences between the natural sciences and the social sciences is that, in the natural sciences, a generation of researchers relies on the investigations developed by the previous investigation, whereas in the social sciences, a generation slaps the previous one ”. Let's see an illustration: (Aktouf, 1996) questions his predecessor, Koontz: »… although the traditional administration tries to identify the correct path of efficiency and good behavior of men, it is necessary to exclude from it everything that is not native of the United States, especially when we see the administration's "bibles" (such as Koontz's book, eleven times republished since 1955) which, practically,it decrees a human nature traced over the mold of the lifestyle of the United States employee… ».
Likewise, (Lakatos, 1978) drives the existence and desire of multiple theoretical positions in a discipline. The Lakatosian perspective defends the Kuhnian notion of solving specific problems with medium-range theories. Lakatos tends for methodological pluralism: it includes quantitative and qualitative methods that help the discovery of new findings in the discipline, this would seem favorable for the theory of the Administration of Organizations. In the Kuhnian context, administrative discipline is in a prepadigmatic state. A paradigm is renewed when the conception that served as its basis changes,when it enters into verification contradictions (Thomas Kun and Karl Popper) or when gaps or shortcomings are recognized in the training for the good performance of the professional in a complex world and with increasing demands. In Lakatosian terms it is better to introduce, in the administration, the notion of research paradigms.
The falsificationist methodology, in simple terms, can be summarized:
- The direction of science is mainly influenced by the creative and human imagination and not by the universe of facts. In this way, the rational reconstruction of scientific progress occurs in the world of ideas. The demarcation between science and pseudoscience is objective in the world of ideas. Theoretical effort is a matter, only in the world of mental states and thoughts. Scientific knowledge is never absolute. Whether a proposition is a fact or a probable situation, will depend, within the context of a research program, on the methodological decision of the scientist. Absolute truth cannot be achieved by science, but research programs tend, in the long run, always to add more truth and reduce falsehood and thus increase plausibility.There are some rules for making good science. A theory is scientific, only if, by corroborating it, it contains a greater amount of explanation of reality than its rival theory.
A modified Lakatosian reconstruction of The Organizations Administration could be:
According to Lakatos (1998), the merit of a PIC (scientific research program) is assessed if, in the first place, it has a degree of coherence that implies the elaboration of a defined program for future research. Secondly, a PIC must lead to the discovery of new phenomena. Furthermore, he claims that science progresses when some ingenious modification of a theory's protective belt leads to some spectacular discovery that will revive the program and enter a progressive phase.
A = fundamental nucleus, includes the investigative guide, the general assumptions of the administration and the organization, the models (some fashions), the integrated approaches, the currents of thought and the classification schemes. The theory of the company (its general theoretical hypotheses) is accepted as the central or fundamental nucleus.
B = protective environment, are those elements embedded in the behavior of the individual and the organization (developed in research programs, auxiliary hypotheses, underlying assumptions and observational statements). The contributions of the auxiliary sciences - propaedeutic - (microeconomics, sociology, psychology and others) can be accepted as part of the protective belt or environment.
C = medium grade theories (they are those that mediate the hypotheses of less validity, highly developed during the daily routine of the investigation, in addition, it includes speculations and the conceptual framework). The theoretical, qualitative and quantitative support provided by research in organizational studies to the administrative discipline must be recognized as medium grade theories.
Also, there are valid hypotheses that are the lowest level within the proposed scheme, these, generally, are poorly articulated to generate a single medium-grade theory.
D = Feasible (working) hypotheses are guides or assertions to accept or reject, very common in empirical research.
It can be seen, in The Administration, that many of the medium and auxiliary theories have been provided, this generates an epistemological and ontological variety that materialize in metaphors, parables and paradigms typical of each discipline, for example: of social psychology, industrial sociology and microeconomics. All of the above points to the need to build more endogenous theory, guided by the positive and negative heuristics of the discipline; In addition, theories that explain the central ring must be expanded and related and, in addition, it would be necessary to generate progressive research projects in administration of an empirical, theoretical, pure and applied nature, the latter is imperative, if the discipline wishes to leave the jungle and become in a second generation science. Without the investigation,The new techniques do not enrich administrative discipline, they would be superfluous, like throwing a life preserver at a castaway who is already on the shore.
One last conclusion, in Colombia, in administrative matters, we are a dogmatic and uncritical country, therefore very permeable to fashions and lovers of metaphors, with excessive pragmatism, anecdotal recipes are accepted, without any setting: “management ”Of mass consumption and foreign and successful business stories. Administration education and administrative practice in the country have been influenced by the postulates of North American theorists. Except for the current of Industrial Improvement - normative managerial ideological waves proposed by (Barley and Kunda, 1995) - the theoretical proposals of the Northern country have been accepted and implemented, without taking into account idiosyncrasy, almost simultaneously in both countries. Most management schools have been influenced,Ideologically, by the strategic management approach, understood as a reflection on corporate senior management, "CEOS" (Chief Executive officer), this approach is based on the technique of visionary leadership to achieve competitiveness. The dominant paradigm of strategic "management" rests on the foundations of modern microeconomics and does not take into account the contributions of the basic social sciences, such as: group sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology and political science.The dominant paradigm of strategic "management" rests on the foundations of modern microeconomics and does not take into account the contributions of the basic social sciences, such as: group sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology and political science.The dominant paradigm of strategic "management" rests on the foundations of modern microeconomics and does not take into account the contributions of the basic social sciences, such as: group sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology and political science.
Bibliographic references
- Abravanel, Harry et al. 1992. Organizational culture, theoretical, practical and methodological aspects. Legis. Bogotá.Dewey, John, 1960, experience and education, Buenos Aires, Losada.Lakatos, I, 1978, “falsification and methodology of scientific research programs” in the methodology of scientific research, cited by, Meng Leon Siew, “metatheory and metamethodology in Marketing: a lakatosian reconstruction ”in Journal of Marketing, Vo. 49 (fall 1985), 23-40. Lakatos, Imre (1998). THE METHODOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH PROGRAMS. University Alliance. Madrid.Aktouf, Omar.1996 THE ADMINISTRATION BETWEEN TRADITION AND RENEWAL. Cali: Universidad del Valle.Popper, R: K, 1994, "in search of a better world". Barcelona, Piados.Popper, karl, 1978, “normal science and its dangers”, in criticism and the growth of knowledge, Cambridge University press,quoted by Meng Leon Siew, "metatheoyr and metamethodology in Marketing: a lakatosian reconstruction" in Journal of Marketing. Vol.49 (fall 1985), 23-40. Morgan, Gareth, 1997, images of the organization, Mexico, Alfaomega.Johansen, Oscar, 1996, “Administration as a builder of organizations, Santiago de Chile, Universidad de Chile.Johansen, Oscar, 1992. Anatomy of the company. México, Limusa SAJohansen, Oscar, 1987, “research in administration”, Guatemala, Rev. Academia.Jackson, Mike, 1994, “Beyond administrative fads: systemic thinking for administrators”. Innovate, Bogotá, (4), July-December 1194, pp. 6-21.Hammer Michael and James Champy, 1994, Reengineering, Bogotá, Norma.Senge, Peter, 1994, The Fifth Discipline. Madrid, Granica.Mariño, Hernando, 1993, Total Quality Management, Bogotá.Tercer mundo editores.Fayol, Henry, 1986, Industrial and General Administration, Madrid, Orbis.González, Omar, 1995, Sustainable management in the context of total quality ”, Tecnología administrativa, Medellín, (27), May-August, 1995, pp. Gonzálezb, Omar, 1995, The impact of Total Quality on the Valle de Aburrá corporation, Medellín, UdeA.Micklethwait, John and Adrian Wooldridge, 1997, The witch doctors, New York, times books, Random House.García Gelmar and Fermín Munilla, 1998. "A proposal of theoretical principles of administration: a light within the" administrative jungle ". At www.managementweb.com.ar/Management1.htm. López, Francisco, 1999, “Administrative prescriptions in vogue. ¿Siren song ?, EAFIT University, (115), July-August-September. López, Francisco and José Acevedo 1999,"Reengineering as a competitive option, Administration, Medellín, (11), Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana.Acevedo, José and Francisco López, 2000, Organizational thinning, Medellín, UPB.Dávila, Carlos, 1994, Organizational theories and administration, a critical approach, Bogotá, McGraw Hill.Dávila, Carlos et al., 2000, “Organizational culture: an instrument of management? Some considerations for your study? In Innovation and culture of organizations in three regions of Colombia, Bogotá, Colciencias- Corporación Calidad.Matamala Señor, Ricardo, 1997, “The Empowerment: a comprehensive approach” Poyección, Bogotá, Uconal.Drucker, Peter F. Post-society capitalist. Bogotá: Norma, 1994. Mintzberg, Henry, 1975, “The work of the administration: fantasies and realities”. Harvard Business Review, Koontz Harold and Heins Weihrich, 2003.Administration, a global perspective. México, McGraw-Hill.Robbins, Stephen and Mary Coulter, 2002, Administración, Mexico, Prentice-Hall.Sakaiya, Taichi, 1995, history of the future, the knowledge society, Santiago de Chile, Andrés Bello.Lambin, Jean, 2002, Strategic Marketing, Madrid, McGraw-Hill.Simon, Herbert, 1972, Administrative Behavior, Madrid, Aguilar.Fernández, Zulima, 1999, "The Study of Organizations", Spanish Economy Papers, Madrid.Pfeffer, Jeffrey, 1993, organizations and theory of organizations, Mexico, fund of economic culture.Galeano, Eumelia, Velez Olga. 1999, “the state of the art of documentary sources”, qualitative research, UdeA.Vargas Guillén, Germán, 1991, “Documentary research”. Ascolbi, Vol.4, No.3-4 (July December), P23-30.Durango, Carlos Mario, 2000, “editorial,the epistemology of the administration ”, Medellín, UPB. No. 12, year 12.Albach, H, 1993, the economy of business as science, Madrid, Alcalá de Henares University.Carroll Lewis, 1994. Alice in Wonderland. Medellín, Bedout. Lambert, Tom. 2001. Consulting manual. Madrid: Gestión 2000.Bristow-Bovery, Darle (2003). I have taken your cheese. Barcelona: vergara editores, Velez Maya, Tulio (2000). "About the organization as a system." Rev. Business Administration No. 17. UPB. Medellín.Drucker, Peter F. 1997. A new dimension of administration. Bogotá: Norma.Drucker, Peter F. 1994. Post-capitalist society. Bogotá: Norma.Hall, Richard. 1996. Organizations, structures, processes and results. Mexico: Prentice Hall, Friedman, David. 1993. "Is management still a science?" Rev. Efficient Office, No. 55.September October.
Bibliography
- López, Francisco. "The Administration as an epistemological system. In search of an object of study ”. In Eafit University magazine. January-February-March 1999.Blanchard, Kent, 1996, Empowerment: three keys to make the process of empowering employees work in your company, Bogotá, Norma.Bericat, Eduardo. THE INTEGRATION OF QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE METHODS IN SOCIAL RESEARCH. Barcelona: Ariel, 1998. Hanna, David P. DESIGN OF ORGANIZATIONS FOR EXCELLENCE IN PERFORMANCE. Mexico: Adissson Wesley, 1995. Etzioni, Amitai. MODERN ORGANIZATIONS. Mexico: Limusa, 1994. Deming W., Edwards. QUALITY, PRODUCTIVITY AND COMPETITIVENESS. Barcelona: Dasantos, 1997.Ishikawa, Karou.WHAT IS TOTAL QUALITY CONTROL? Bogotá: Norma, 1992.Ouchi, William. THEORY Z. Bogotá: Norma. 1992.Walton, Mary. HOW TO ADMINISTER WITH THE DEMING METHOD.Bogotá: Norma. 1997. Gitlow, Howard S. and Shelley, J. Gitlow. HOW TO IMPROVE QUALITY AND PRODUCTIVITY WITH THE DEMING METHOD. Bogotá: Norma, 1992.Crosby, Philip. LET'S TALK ABOUT QUALITY. Mexico: Mc Graw - Hill. 1990.Berry, Thomas H. HOW TO MANAGE THE TRANSFORMATION TOWARD TOTAL QUALITY. Bogotá: Mc Graw-Hill. 1992.Barley, R and Kunda, G. "Desing and devotion: Surges of rational and normative ideologies of control in managerial discourse". Rev. Administrative Science Quarterly, ASQ 37, pp. 363-399. 1995.Fantova Azcoaga.Fernando. THE MANAGEMENT OF NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS. Madrid: CCS Editorial. 2001.Guiot Jean M. and Alain Beaufils. Organization design. Bogotá: Legis, 1992. Hodge B. Et al. ORGANIZATION THEORY, A STRATEGIC APPROACH. Madrid: Prentice Hall, 2000. Gibson, James L. And others. THE ORGANIZATIONS, behavior, structure,processes. Wilmington, USA: Addison Wesley, 1994.Kast, Fremont, and Rosenzweing, James. ADMINISTRATION IN ORGANIZATIONS. Mexico: Mc Graw Hill, 1998. DuBrin, Andrew J. ADMINISTRACIÓN. Mexico: International Thomson. 2000.Van Der Erve, Marc. THE FUTURE OF MANAGEMENT. Bogotá: Legis, 1990.Stoner James and Edward Freeman. ADMINISTRATION. Mexico: Prentice Hall, 1998.Kuhn, Thomas. THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS. Brief economic culture fund. 1998.Lakatos, T. THE METHODOLOGY OF RESEARCH PROGRAMS: Madrid: Alianza, 1993.Chiavenato, Idalberto. INTRODUCTION TO THE GENERAL THEORY OF ADMINISTRATION. Bogotá: Mc-Graw-Hill, 2000.Minztberg, Henry. THE NATURE OF MANAGERIAL WORK. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980.Minztberg, Henry. THE RISE AND FALL OF STRATEGIC PLANNING. Harvard business review (Enuary-February, 1994).Minztberg, Henry. THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZATIONS. Barcelona: Ariel, 1994.Minztberg, Henry. And Branquin, James. THE STRATEGIC PROCESS. Mexico: Prentice Hall, 1993, Mintzberg, Henry, 1973, the nature of managerial work, Barcelona, Ariel, Lakatos, T. 1983, the methodology of research programs, Madrid, Alianza, Narayan, Deepa. EMPOWERMENT AND REDUCTION OF POVERTY. Alfaomega reference book. World Bank. Colombia. 2002.Valdes, Luigi. THE BUSINESS RE-EVOLUTION OF THE 21ST CENTURY. Bogotá: Norma, 2002.Daft, Richard L. THEORY AND ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN. Mexico: International Thompson, 2000. Hall, Richard. ORGANIZATIONS, STRUCTURES, PROCESSES AND RESULTS, Mexico: Prentice Hall, 1996. Boyett, Joseph and Jimmie Boyett. The gurus speak. Bogotá: Norma, 1999.Senge, Peter. "Through the eye of the needle" in Rethinking the future. Bogotá: Norma, 1997.Senge, Peter and others. The fifth discipline in practice. Madrid: Granica, 1995.Senge P. (1990: 7-23), “The leader's new Work: building learning organizations, Sloan Management Review, No. 32.Sáenz Rouner, Eduardo. "The faculties of administration in Colobia". Administrative and social science magazine. National University. Bogotá, January-July 1995. Hunt, SD (1991). Modern Marketing theory ”. South Western publication. Chapter one.pp. 1-17.Durango, Carlos Mario et al., 1999, "progress report", organization science research group, UPB. Colciencias. Salinas, Orlando. "Object and method in the science of the company". ASCOLFA memoirs. No. 1. Medellín.2001.Jaimes, Fabio and others. "Elements for an epistemological reflection on administration". Memories of ASCOLFA No. 1. Medellín, 2001. Varela, Edgar."Strategies to configure an academic and scientific community in business schools". Memoirs of ASCOLFA No. 2. Medellín, 2001.Bennet, Roger and Robert G. Cooper. ” Beyond the Marketing Concept ”in Business Horizons, June 1979. pp. 76-83.Zapata, Alvaro. ” Administrative knowledge and its study method ”. Medellín: memories of ASCOLFA. 2001. “The new Management and the application of general theories” at www.apoyo.com./infor/articuloshtml/25education in Administration and administrative notes ”at www.eafit.edu.co/revista/109/.presprescriptions administrative in vogue, siren song? At www.eafit.edu.com/revista/115/lopez.pdf. “administrative modes” at www.gestiopolis.com/recursos/experto. “questions about organization and business administration” at www.monographies.com/work11. shtml. "quality management" at www.prism.com / notes / category = 101.www.knowledge-nurture.comwww.gestiopolis.comwww.liderazgoymercadeo.comwww.gerenciait.comwww.danielcestauliz.com / manag_introduccion.htm.
Fashion management: Semantic changes or necessary techniques
Abstract
This article is a synthesis of a research about two categorical dichotomies: positive management, normative management. The major purpose of this monograph will be to drawn upon the vast storehouse of the philosophy of science in management. The philosophical orientation of this article can be described as modern pragmatism and critical rationalism (falsificationism, Popper and Lakatos).
The management gurus can not be sophisticated and conspicuous. This article is a critical tool kit of new materials as the learning organization, total quality management, reengineering the corporation and empowerment.
Download the original file
