Intro Items  How to Read Stories   Deconstruction  Harley Example 

Road Map: Bob: In the last chapter we gave a broad-brush stroke of information of pre-mod, mod, and postmod. We take the hybrid view that all three discourses are simultaneously co-present. Now from that overview, we now want to develop one management function in more detail. We begin with planning and indicate how planning exists in organizations in pre-mod, mod, and postmod configurations. We will provide stories from a variety of time frames: early printing, Harley-Davidson, Taylor and his pig iron, Deming and his work with Japanese planning.
 
 

What is Planning?

Boj: Some reviewer-critics have asked why you and I did not break out of the functionalist paradigm of plan, organize, influence, lead, and control? Our approach is to crack the foundations of functionalism from within. We do this by juxtaposing pre, mod and post perspectives to show their co-presence. As the foundation of functionalism cracks we seek to show how for example, planning is contested ideological terrain. First, we begin by comparing pre-modernist, modernist and postmodernist definitions of planning. To make your studies easier, we follow a suggestion of one of my management students and use mnemonic acronym terms, CRAFT, PYRAMID, and NETWORK. These have contradictory roots that are intermingled in contemporary times.

Note: pre, mod and post are not eras but are simultaneously co-present and inter-penetrating in our postmodern world.

You find all three forms in contemporary organizations. The three forms have their historical roots, but it would be a mistake to assume that any have vanished.

How to Read Stories. When you read stories, look for the pre-, mod, and postmodern roots of concepts that are interwoven in the story. Stories convey not just experience, but whole ways of thinking about management relationships, quality, pride, and planning. People at work tell each other stories all the time, and as you make them your own, you internalize the voice of the storyteller. Voice is a point of view, a narrator's or storyteller's perspective on reality. The more voices in a story, the more points of view and perspectives are brought into the discourse. Each character in the story can represent alternative voices. Refer back to our Tamara model of many storytellers with many voices telling stories in the storytelling organization. In each story you read and hear, ask yourself whose voices and which characters get privileged, and which voices and characters get marginalized (do not get a voice of their own). [Note: Each new term is defined in the glossary at the front of the book.]
 
 
 
 

Defining deconstruction is contrary to the spirit of Derrida’s idea. Yet, this is education and deconstruction often does involve ways of reading to decenter or otherwise unmask narratives that posit authoritative centers. "According to Derrida, all Western thought is based on the idea of a center – an origin, a Truth, and Ideal Form, a fixed Point, an Immovable Mover, an Essence, a God, a Presence, which is usually capitalized, and guarantees all meaning" (Powell, 1997: 21). We offer some humble guidelines for story deconstruction knowing deconstruction is not a method. We do this in the hopes that some of the oppressive stories we live can be restoried or what Derrida calls "resituated" to remove some of the center, hierarchy and marginalization. In the end we think the purpose of what we call "Story Deconstruction" is to be able to write and live a better story. We offer these guidelines as our own readings of what constitutes "Story Deconstruction." As you practice, keep in mind, since no story is an island, but in a dynamic context of a plurality of other stories, the centered-position self-deconstructs naturally without any pushing, shoving, or editing on our part. Stories are in a context of other stories and are self-deconstructing without our help. Stories are pyramids.  

(press here for Deconstruction Tutorial).
 
 

Table 2.2 presents eight guidelines for doing story deconstruction. These are exercises, like the ones you play to learn to play the piano. If you practice you can learn the art of deconstruction. Learning to play deconstruction takes practice, practice, and more practice.

Table 2-2: Story Deconstruction Guidelines  http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/deconstruct.html

Table 1: Story Deconstruction Guidelines (Adapted from Boje & Dennehy, 1993) #1
 

Here is a brief example.
 

The following Story ties Craft, Pyramid, and Network together. We will then offer a brief story deconstruction. We give you a pre, mod, and postmodern rendition of a few Harley-Davidson stories strung together as a saga.
 

The Craftsmen: Pre-modern Roots

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, William G. Harley, a 21-year-old draftsman/toolmaker lived next door to Arthur Davidson, a 20-year-old pattern maker. These two neighbors used their mechanical skills to cast an engine, build a carburetor out of a tomato can and complete their first bike in 1902.

Production

By 1906 their yield of 50 motorcycles necessitated a second building measuring 20 by 80 feet. A beekeeping uncle financed this edifice. In 1907 Bill and Arthur not only produced 150 machines but also incorporated with all the shares purchased by the 17 employees. 1910 they built 3200 cycles. Harley-Davidson had arrived.
 
 

Quality

From the beginning, Bill and Arthur did not ask: How cheap can we make our motorcycles. Rather they asked, "How good can we make them?" The price was $200. Skilled motorcycle craftsmen built the bikes - one at a time.

Whatever had to be done was handled by whoever was available with the know-how and time. As Walter Davidson, Bill's brother said, "We worked every day, Sunday included, until at least 10 O'clock at night. I remember it was an event when we quit work on Christmas at 8 o'clock to attend a family reunion."
 
 

People

A deep feeling of camaraderie existed among the employees. The family-like atmosphere prompted a group of employees to help out a fellow employee who lived in a tarpaper shanty with his wife and two children. Bill Davidson well known for his kindness and generosity supplied the materials and the employees built their fellow worker's family a fine two-story house.

The commitment to its employees was also shown in 1933 when sales took a tremendous dip. H-D kept as many employees working as possible, even if they only could work two days a week.
 
 

Service

Reduced cycle time is a term that we hear today. Harley-Davidson epitomized this concept in 1916. In March of that year, the War Department requested immediate shipment of a dozen of motorcycles. They arrived in two days ready for use. Later that month a second order was delivered in 33 hours. The motor cycles were equipped with a sidecar gun carriage to serve as a platform for mounting a Colt machine gun. Bill Harley had developed this unique feature.

In 1917, H-D started a service school to teach repair procedures. By the end of the war, H-D was training 1000 riders and mechanics per month.

By the end of the decade, H-D inhabited 400,000 square foot plant with 1,800 employees producing 22,685 motorcycles and 16,095 sidecars.
 
 

Dealers

Dealers were received as partners. This relationship was strengthened in 1933 when sales slumped steeply. Industry-wide sales fell to 6,000 units and H-D captured 3,700 of them. Walter Davidson worked closely with dealers to organize rallies, tours, polo tournaments, races, field meets, rodeos, picnics, jamborees, and to start clubs. New riders were attracted and existing enthusiasts remained active and interested. Other services to dealers included:

- Increased advertising- especially economy of operation, longevity, and ease of maintenance.

- Promoted accessory sales- rider jackets, lubricants, parts, luggage racks.

- Public relations campaign to address negative image of cyclists. H-D also promoted the use of mufflers.

- "The Enthusiast" magazine was distributed to 500,000 people a month.
 
 

By 1934 sales moved up to 10,000 units a year and this pace continued into 1940's. During World War II, thousands of military riders were introduced to Harleys. In fact, H-D produced 90,000 military models in various configurations. The production of military cycles also allowed spare parts to be made available to keep the civilian worker alive.
 
 
 
 

THE CORPORATE BUREAUCRACY and Modern Roots

Harley-Davidson came home from World War II. In 1947, H-D resumed full civilian production of motorcycles, parts and accessories. The bikes were updated 1941 models but with hydraulic shocks and added chrome. Accessories included-batteries, leather saddlebags, chrome dress-up, ladies wear, and leather helmet and goggles. But the most noteworthy introduction was the first black leather jacket with chrome zippers and snaps, belted waist and zippered sleeves. Cycles continued to be improved. For example, the 1958 Duo-Glide was unquestionably the most comfortable and beautiful motorcycle on the road.
 
 

Pressures

In 1969 the Japanese entered the big bike market. H-D faced a hostile take-over and opted to merge with AMF (American Machine and Foundry). H-D now had to answer to a higher corporate authority.

The fact that Harley-Davidson was no longer worker of its destiny became evident soon after the addition of the AMF corporate logo to all 1971 motorcycle gas tanks. As AMF Harley-Davidson, the loyal enthusiasts were rankled. That summer, AMF flexed its corporate muscle even more by naming a new president. For the first time in 68 years, someone other than Davidson sat in the president's chair.

AMF provided H-D with the necessary funds to modernize new tanks, frames, and fenders. AMF also built a new facility in York, PA. To focus on the production of the V-twin heavyweight models. But despite all of AMF efforts at making the company a more powerful and efficient manufacturing force, many riders and enthusiasts blamed AMF for a number of H-D shortcomings. Relationships between managers and workers were adversarial. Management was at odds with suppliers and dealers were muffled.

Problems surfaced where bikes had either missing parts (one-half the bikes) or in some cases even excess parts. AMF paid $1000 per bike for inspection to check for complete parts. When the bikes produced vibrations or oil leaks, many loyalist would repair the problem. Others, however, bought Japanese bikes. The outcome of the customer dissatisfaction was reflected in the drop in market share of big bikes from 75% in 1973 to 25% in 1983.
 
 
 
 

THE EMERGING POSTMODERN DISCOURSE

To mark the 75^th anniversary of Harley-Davidson in 1977, a group of the executives toured the United States following seven different routes and they traveled 37000 miles to visit 160 H-D dealers. The fact that the people who ran the company were all riders-and that they would take two weeks out of their busy schedule to get on the road and meet their customers-impressed everyone who came in contact with them.

This anniversary ride for customer input was instrumental in stimulating a group of H-D executives to purchase the company from the AMF. In June 1981, H-D returned to private ownership. The euphoria, however, was short-lived as demand fell by 33,000 units while at the same time Japanese exports soared.

Thus, in September 1982, H-D petitioned the International Trade Commission (ITC) for tariff relief from Japanese manufacturers who were building up inventories of unsold motorcycles. President Reagan put added tariffs on all imported Japanese cycles 700 c.c. or larger for a five year period ending in April 1988. The tariffs began at 45% in 1983 and were scheduled to decline to 10% in 1987, before being phased out.

One of the major factors in the ITC in decision to recommend tariffs was the fact that Harley-Davidson had started a major revitalization campaign in the late 1970's. The campaign was aimed at improving efficiency and product quality through programs of just-in-time manufacturing, employee involvement and statistical process control. Dealers were also included in the just-in-time inventory management so they could cut their own costs. H-D was particularly concerned about its 120 suppliers since the roster had just been pruned from 320. "We buy 50% of the dollar value of our motorcycles from the suppliers, says G. E. Kirkham, Harley's manufacturing manager. "So improvements we made (internally) only got us half way".#2

Under this umbrella of protection its market share soared to 63% in large motorcycles, up from 23% in 1983. The plunge of the dollar after 1985 also helped.

Sales results were reflected in the award of a contract from the California Highway Patrol in 1984, after 10 years of buying from competitors. H-D continued to win contracts in 1985, 1987, 1988 and 1989.

In 1983 H-D not only gained import protection but also formed The Harley Owners Group (HOG) to refocus attention to customer satisfaction after the sale. HOG membership swelled to 90,000 in six years.

The tariffs gave H-D time to complete revitalization which began in late 1970s. The fact that the tariffs were declining acted as a motivator to accelerate the transformation.

Harley-Davidson regained its health so quickly that it asked Washington to eliminate tariffs a year early. The move was unprecedented. No other American company had asked for removal of import protection. The press hailed the request as one of the best public relations moves in history.
 
 

In 1991 H-D had 62.3% market share in the big bike category (850 c.c. and larger). It had 31% of the street bike market; second-seller Honda had 26%. By way of contrast, in 1985 Honda had nearly 47% of the street-bike market, with Harley a paltry 9.4%.

In 1992 Harley's sales have been constrained by capacity. The company has a new paint facility and two new assembly lines about to open, but for now it cannot make more than 70,000 bikes a year. And it exports about 40% of them. Many of the exports are to Japan. Other exports are to Korea where the Korean National Police proudly display their spit-polished Harleys.

Harley-Davidson is America's only surviving motorcycle manufacturer. It pictures itself as soaring like an eagle in touch with customers, workers skilled in process control, and an organization on the path of self-control.

"If you can persuade your customers to tattoo your name on their chests they probably will not shift brands". Robert W. Hall said at the Indiana University School of Business, referring to buyers of Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
 
 

Harley Story Deconstructions

1. Duality Search. Harleys-Hondas; Riders-Non-riders; Craftspeople-Management; Family-Corporate
 


2. Reinterpret. In the AMF Harley-Davidson presumed that expert planners could build better Harleys than before. Much of the Harley Triad seems to have been in place before the Modern (AMF) phase. Seems like H-D had to go back to the past to get to the future.
 
 

3. Rebel Voices. In this story, the people on the work line were the last to be asked. Yet it was their rebel voices that got into this story to turn around a bad situation. The customers also had a voice that was not really heard until it was all but too late.
 
 

4. Other side of the story. Without the AMF infusion of cash and technology, Harley could not have expanded to keep pace with the Japanese manufacturers.
 
 

5. Deny the Plot. There is a romantic plot as William Harley and Arthur Davidson get together to make those first Harley's. There is tragedy in the way Harley did not notice either the small or large bike invasion. You could turn around the plot and say that without the bike invasions Harley would not have changed its ways. There is also irony, in that Harley discovers in the Honda plant visits that Harley had tossed out Kanban and other work methods the Japanese were using to their advantage.
 
 

6. Find the Exception One rule early on was build the Bikes to last, which was broken in the AMF phase.
 
 

7. Trace what is between the lines. Between the lines there seems to be a need to evolve a new bike design and new motor, but no one is talking of this.
 
 

8. Resituate. When Harley moved from Craft to Pyramid planning, it lost its know-how. When Harley moved from Pyramid to Network planning, it seemed to get things right again. I would resituate to look at the complimentarities of the three approaches. Rather than all or nothing thinking, can one benefit the other or be used more selectively.
 
 NOTE: HD has all 3 discourses (pre, mod, and post). 

Planning is a Craft.
C Craftspeople combined planning, doing, and checking (inspection) into each individual's job.

R Rituals of work and rites of passage in the planning of quality work performance.

A Apprenticeship was a planned progression from "greenie" to apprentice to journeyman artisan in each profession.

F Fraternal organization of professions dedicated to a steady and gradual improvement of their work quality.

retold by storytellers.
 
 

In pre-mod discourse, people plan and inspect their own work. This is a idea that pre-dates modernity, and is now once again quite fashionable. Work is a dignified craft practiced by artisans in fraternal guilds. Artisan Guilds are on the rise in Italy. In the case of Harley-Davidson, tinkering and inventing in the family garage brought about some bike that put on 100,000 miles. In feudal times, youth entered work as apprentices and conformed to very strict norms and disciplines of behavior for seven to fourteen years before becoming journeymen. There are places in Europe, such as Switzerland, where you go to college or you get a vocation that allows you to earn a living.

Being a craftsperson takes work, thrift, and independent-self-reliance. Journeymen, more then than now, could practice thrift and self-reliance to become masters of their own shops and proud members of their fraternity. Now, people buy a franchise and open a business they may not understand. In the case of the ancient printing industry, apprentices and journey-people were expected to respect the secrets of their brethren and pass down the secrets of their craft to their devil's apprentices. Here are a few examples:
 
 

Pre-Modern Printing. There is a difference between craft planning and modern and postmodern business planning. A craftsperson, after a decade of apprenticeship became a journeyman. They learned to take the raw materials and plan fine printing. They could plan a job and carry it out from start to finish. Planning was part of his or her craftsperson-ship. His or her own artistic style went into the choice of type faces, the design of each character, their fitting into a line, their layout on a page, the mixtures of inks, and the binding. The stories of the craft era supported a worship of high quality work[person]ship, an ancient economy of artistic performance, and a noble heritage. Stories gave work practices meaning. Today people still apprentice to run the Heidelberg press, but the smaller quick copy presses take far less time to learn.
 
 

Printing was a Noble Profession. For four centuries, printing was a noble occupation. In a time when none but the clergy and the nobility were taught to read and write, you could learn these skills in a print shop as a Devil's apprentice. Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed as a printer and went on to franchise ink and printing companies.
 
 

Use of Physical Torture to Discipline Printers. Printing was not all so noble. The infamous "Star Chamber" in England was a punishment court to control who did printing and what was printed. More than one printer was tortured and executed for printing anti-government or blasphemous material.
 
 
 
 

The Gutenberg Bible Story

Gutenberg looked in the mirror one morning and saw a reflection of a hand-scribed bible and said: "Oh that I could but express upon vellum, that which I see in this glass!" He decided then and there to make the best quality bible ever; one so fine it could be passed off as a hand-scribed bible.

"I will work in secret and cast metal type, mix special inks, and hand-peg the type into these chases. Then, I will press the type onto paper using a converted winepress. I could be burned at the stake." He worked secretly for ten years. His production practices were of such high quality that his Mazarine Bible would stand as best and most perfect quality workmanship that could not be improved for the next four hundred years.

Gutenberg was no businessman. "I have a plan. Since the church has a monopoly on Bible scribing, I think they will not take kindly to my inventing a way to do in a few weeks, but takes them many months to do. I will keep the news of this invention secret and get a partner to sell my bibles." Jean Fust and Johanne Gutenberg decided together to pass their printed bibles off on an unsuspecting clergy as original hand-scribed copies. "We will not put a date on them either." Fust and Gutenberg's one apprentice, Peter Schoeffer had all workmen from then on swear an oath of secrecy to never divulge the practices of their Black Art.

Between 1455 and 1457, Fust sold bibles to the clergy for 60 crowns. Scribes charged as much as 500 crowns for their products. The invention of the Black Art soon was suspected. It was not a threat because it could conceivably put clandestine scribes in monastic orders out of work, rather it was thought to be the contraptions and the work of the Devil himself. As the bibles were sold, clergy asked: "How could Fust supply so many bibles so quickly, each copy looking so much like the others, selling for such a low price, and how did he get his ink so brilliantly red? Surely, he has sold his soul to the devil!" They had never seen such a hue of red and never seen scribes produce Bibles that were alike in every minute detail. Surely Satan's blood has been used. The story went that Fust had sold his soul to the devil. This story is one source of the legend of "The Devil and Doctor Faustus."

Jean Fust feared the bible would not sell well and wanting to keep any profit to himself formed an unholy alliance with Gutenberg's apprentice, Peter Schoeffer. Jean Fust's brother, Nicholas was the judge and gave his brother possession of all the printing inventions, including the racks of set type to produce more bibles. The apprentices of Fust and Schoeffer were from the city of Mentz. They kept their oath of secrecy until Archbishop Adolphuse of Nassau sacked their city in 1462. Fust's printing office was destroyed and during the commotion, apprentices went to Rome, Cologne, Basle, and Strasburg to start their own businesses. They carried the secrets of the Black Art with them and formed a fraternal order of secret apprenticeship practices and a reverence for quality that would last four centuries.

Unfortunately, and as the story goes, like most printers Gutenberg was more of a craftsman than a businessman was. He had let Fust take everything and he died poor trying to do some odd printing jobs.#3
 
 

The story can be read for its Affirmative and its Skeptical points (see last chapter).
 
 
 
 

1. Find the Dualities. Take Gender Roles - by mid 1950's, computerized typesetting was introduced and a predominately male occupation becomes gender-balanced. Women were bindery-girls. With the computer age, women who had worked as secretaries took over the computer keyboards. Modernization had done its thing: de-skilled a profession so it could lower wage rates to the bare minimum. Women were paid less than half what the men had been paid.
 
 

2. Reinterpret. Gutenberg initiated the quality revolution into printing. Each printer was a skillful artisan who practiced his craft with a sense of aesthetics: an appreciation for taste and beauty in their choice of type faces, margins, inks, paper, and binding. Setting type and printing pages and doing bindery were fine arts more than they were technical productions.
 
 

3. Deny the Plot - Business and Craft do not mix any better than water and ink. The story gives credence to the craftsman's attitude that business people will take their skills, tools, and craft away from them. In the modern age, they did use the linotype machine and the computerized typesetter and laser scanned press to do just that. But, Gutenberg had used his machine: reusable type and the printing press to put the Scriptoriums out of business.
 
 

4. Other Side of the Story - Do not trust your Devil's Apprentice. The story demonstrates that an apprentice can swear an oath of secrecy, but take your training and use it to put you out of business. In all trades there are strict periods of highly disciplined and ritualized apprenticeship before a person is admitted as a journeyman into a trade. Drinking, gambling, and hazing were not invented by fraternities, they were sacred practices of the printer's rites of passage.
 
 

4. Find the Exception Not all hierarchy is bad. This story conveys the aesthetic practices, the hierarchy of apprentice, journeyman, and master printer. A hierarchy that was based on the perfecting of one's own skill; doing quality workmanship.
 
 

5. Between The Lines. What happened to Scriptoriums? Scriptoriums flourished from 1100 AD until Gutenberg's invention. Monks collected tithes and offerings to finance their work (Timperley, 1977)#4 In 1457, Gutenberg brought automation to scribes working in scriptoriums. In the mid-1800's, the hand set type production process would be supplanted by the hot type process of the Linotype machine. Linotype picks up brass slugs and casts lines of lead type for composition. Wooden presses with their loose joints and hand operation were replaced in the industrial revolution by metal presses with motorized parts. The machine was faster, more efficient, less expensive, but it separated man from the aesthetics of his work.
 
 

6. Between the Lines - Sovereign Control of Printing. Sovereign monarchies had no burning desire to educate the masses. Scriptural critique was heresy and classical works were profane until the Enlightenment. You could be burned at the stake for merely possessing a Wyclif Bible. The masses were more governable when they were illiterate. When William Caxton set up the first press in England in the autumn of 1476, he cautiously and wisely selected a Chapel attached to Westminster Abbey. He located his shop where his customers would be and where he could get symbolic ecclesiastical protection from accusations that he was using a contraption of the devil.#5

Pre-Mod Roots of Quality, Individualism, and Pride

Quality did not begin with the Excellence movement of the 1980's. Quality was a very pre-mod outlook. Individualism and pride in one's craftsmanship also has pre-mod roots. And pre-mod Craft ability is still the hallmark of quality in many fine woodworking, glassmaking, and tin shops. Many small businesses are quilt upon painstaking craft abilities.
 
 

Aesthetic Harmony and Mechanics: First of all you look at the mechanics. The mechanics have to be excellent. Type composition correct, the spacing and that sort of thing exact - no glaring errors and that sort of thing. The presswork was to be workman-like and inking even and uniform. After the mechanics are satisfied then you look for the aesthetic detail, the suiting of the typography to the subject, choice of type and size of type, the amount of space between lines. The use of initial letters, display lines and that sort of thing has to harmonize with the subject matter and with the typeface being employed. [Boje, 1983, DH-5].
 
 

Pride in My Craft: With a craft you take pride in creating something... like an artist in effect making something... somebody will give you some garbage copy like this. It's just a bunch of hand scratches. Some napkin they blew their nose on and when you're through you'll have a nice looking printed piece. It could be a menu, a broadside- it could be a flyer, or a business form or whatever. Look what I've created! I have a printer's eye. I can look at something and tell things, although I'm not a pressman... Some of the printers, just love the work I do because I can take this garbage copy and make it look nice because of the typographic skill I've developed over the years. [Boje, 1983, ER-11, 12].
 
 

Main Point Premod Crafts are very much alive today. The modern planning machine put a dent in them, but Craft, ritual apprenticeship, fraternal bonds and the tales of pride and quality are still in effect.
 
 
 

MODERNIST PLANNING

Part I - the Mother of Management, Mary Parker Follett, and Parts II and III the Three Fathers of Management Henri Fayol, Frederick Taylor and Max Weber.
 
 

Planning is a Pyramid:
P Police lower level people's time and motions.

Y Yoke people to their pyramid plan and position.

R Reports on everyone in the hierarchy so management can gaze their plans and actions.

A Atomize the pyramid to isolate people into the smallest and most fragmented planning cells.

M Monitor money, materials, and manpower budgeted for month-end results.

I Inspect people's MBO's [Management By Objectives] and time schedules for signs of waste and inefficiency.

D Distribute people, money, material, services, and production into specialized cells to minimize their interaction.

Modernist planning is the pyramid atop a factory: layers of management levels, in functional boxes, with workers distributed in cells in the production function doing ever more specialized and mindless tasks, while their heritage of craft and quality atrophied. In the end, the brains plan, and the workers do the handwork.
 
 

Modernist planning is blueprinting all the work tasks and administrative procedures to combine workers, machines, and capital to deliver goods and services. Modernist planning combines bureaucratic administration and the mass production factory assembly line into one formula for business success. The industrial revolution model of this combination was Henry Ford's Model T assembly line.
 
 

At the Turn of the century premod and mod planning began an struggle that continues to this day. The following section presents the Mother of Management and three Fathers of Management. Each had differing storied perspectives on how much of a Pyramid there would be and how much division of labor between management and workers there would be.
 
 

Father Weber's theory of bureaucracy was an early observation of the birth of capitalism. When an entrepreneur began an enterprise, he or she would fall into one of three patterns. Either the entrepreneur-capitalist follows the church model of charisma, the feudal model of noble estate, or the bureaucratic model.
 
 

Father Taylor's famous "Scientific Management" approach came from his engineer's experience in mechanistic production. Taylor's mechanistic approach to planning was to take all planning away from craft workers and hand that job over to a planning department. Taylor made planning part of the managerialist system. He reasoned that the system had to be more important than the individual and that central planning based upon scientific observation of time and motions of workers' bodies was the most efficient way to go.
 
 

Mother Follett sought modifications and reforms to Father Taylor's Scientific Management. Follett wanted to balance managerial control and planning with worker democracy. She saw situation science as a way to get management and labor to jointly investigate and decide their disputes. She also advocated Workers' Councils and instead of putting science into the hands of managers and expert planners, Follett wanted to use the science of "situation analysis" to do joint planning. She wanted workers to be educated in the sciences.
 
 

Father Fayol, on the other hand, favored a division of labor based on his organic model of the firm. He preferred to let workers plan their work, while managers focused upon the financial and commercial plans for the firm. He objected to having so many managers and departments micro-manage the workers. Fayol was also concerned that as many engineers became managers, they were being overly trained in mechanistic reasoning without an appreciation for the humanities. Fayol looked at the firm as a whole and thought Taylor was much too narrow too focused on the shop floor.
 
 

Edward Deming, while not having the status of a Father of Management, seems to have rediscovered Mother Follett's concern, though he never mentions her. Deming came along in the 1970s and 1980s to argue that Taylor's separation of workers' doing from planning (done in departments of planning) was a bad for the Total Quality Management and Continuous Improvement of the Firm. Deming like Taylor favored Statistical Process Control, but wanted the workers to measure their own time and motions. While Taylorism hired others to gaze and measure time and motion, Deming and the TQM movement encouraged workers just to measure themselves. Workers in Japan and then most everywhere else began in the 1980s and till now to just measure everything about their job and how to do it better.
 
 

Boj- I re-read several histories of management thought and compared these to the original works and what came after. What I hypothesize is that a number of management historians, did not have a rhetoric background. They read the original works, then summarized them without including the basic architectural metaphor of the original author (e.g. Wren, 1976/1979; Georges, 1968; Pollard, 1974). For example many writers just lump Taylor and Fayol together without looking at differences in mechanistic and organic rhetoric of the two consultant-writers.#7 Then, I believe subsequent writers, especially writers of the more popular management and OT textbooks, relied upon the management historian’s reading (particularly Wren, 1976/1979) rather than doing their own reading of the original. Or, perhaps read the original, but tuned out all the rhetorical devices that the management historians tuned out. Most recently Steve Robbins has written the best-selling management textbook and marginalized history altogether to a brief appendix, and then argues that history is unimportant and unnecessary to the management student. To me, ignoring history seems quite silly. Let's talk about the Mother of Management, the one who gets only a paragraph or a note in the appendix of most management texts.
 
 

Mary Parker Follett where her Father of Management-contemporaries (Frederick Taylor and Henri Fayol) set out dualities (management-labor; centralize-decentralize) and functionalism (the five functions of management of Fayol), Follett, again and again, refuses to be trapped.

We think she did a form of deconstruction before Derrida invented the word. She would identify dualities, reinterpret them, and oftentimes resituate the duality into theory of cooperative power or co-power.

Follett deconstructed many dualities that still proliferate not only in management and organization scholarship, but also in the popular management and OT texts of today. As for planning, this is the duality we mean:
 

Beyond the Planning/Doing Duality - Speaking directly to the duality of management/labor and Taylor’s separation of planning/executing Follett notes the artificiality of the rhetorical distinctions:
 

… No sharp line can be drawn between planning and executing … the line between those who manage and those who are managed has been in part artificial (1940/1925: 88).
 
 

The joint responsibility of management and labor is an interpenetrating responsibility, and is utterly different from responsibility divided off into sections, management having some and labor some (1940/1925: 78)
 
 

… Managing itself is an interpenetrating matter, that the distinction between those who manage and those who are managed is somewhat fading (1940/1925: 84).
 
 

Knowledge Worker is Old News - Follett anticipated the knowledge work revolution of the 1990s. She argued that workers, in order to participate more fully in co-operative and democratic governance, needed to acquire education and knowledge about general business and trade practices including "sales" and marketing, "supply and demand, prospective contracts, even the opening of new market – would make the opinion of the worker … more valuable" (p. 90).
 
 

Empowerment is Old News Empowerment is just another reinvented debate about delegation and Follett wrote about long ago. As Follett put it:
 
 

I do not think that power can be delegated because I believe that genuine power is capacity… Where the managers come in is that they should give workers a chance to grow capacity or power for themselves (p. 109)
 
 

Empowerment implies that you have been disempowered. To be disempowered is to be on the margins, to be peripheral to power, and even to have access to power denied. We think much of what is called empowerment is very token. Co-ownership, co-determination, and cooperative workplaces have been posed since the mid-1800s as alternative forms of corporate governance. Yet, in the contemporary Business College these alternatives are not courses or even chapters in textbooks. How much control should managers and owners have in a democratic society?

We can trace between the lines of the empowerment work of today by putting popular Guru empowerment writing in its historical context. The trade union movement in the early 1900s settled for participation in wages, hours, safety, and other comfort conditions (Gompers, 1920: 286; Gold, 1986: 19). Marxist workers’ councils, Robert Owen’s cooperatives, and the resurgence of the socialist guild movements in the early 1900s pushed trade unions and corporations to provide direct worker governance of the total business enterprise including areas of finance, strategy, and policy. Employers formed their own movements to oppose and tame the various industrial democracy movements. Who is empowered to plan? HR empowerment proponents counter that the hierarchy of management control in running the finances, policy, and strategy of business is inviolable and that participation should therefore be restricted to task areas. For Follett co-power ruled and both managers and workers could learn to plan in cooperation.
 

OD must move beyond (but certainly not leave) the single organization as its primary focus of attention. We call this shift in focus from intra-organizational change to interorganizational change and social change the emergence of a transorganizational perspective … In this broader, less structured context, central issues like policy making, directionality, power relations and conflict management become important and we intend to explore them in practice. Hens our label, transorganizational practice" (Culbert et. al, 1972: 2).
 
 

In a separate effort, Thayer (1973: 12) defined transorganizational as:
 
 

… The innumerable occasions when individuals from different organizations and suborganizations work together to solve an existing problem … The effective functions are performed partly inside each separate organization and partly outside, for the cooperative venture is itself a new organization. The emphasis on the "trans" helps us see that things occur both through and beyond individual permanent organizations, and that we can no longer visualize each such organization as a closed system.
 
 
 
 

In sum, where most management text writers theorize power as power-over, and dualizes capital/worker, manager/worker, centralization/decentralization, competition/cooperation, win/lose, etc. -- Follett not only reverses these dualities but also resituates them in a co-operative interpenetrate model of transorganizational behavior and co-active co-ordination of the urge to power. Instead of dualizing she interpenetrates the opposed terms. Instead of building division, segmentation, and opposition, she attempts to build an understanding of how the whole can be resituated. In doing so we believe she did deconstruction before the term was coined.
 

II a. Henri Fayol Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management Fayol (1949/1916) launched a management knowledge revolution, Fayolism rivaled Taylorism in popularity. Fayol’s functions and principles is the organizing frame for all popular and most other management texts. Management texts too easily combine Taylorism and Fayolism, as two halves of the whole, one for shop management, and the other for the strategic administration of the whole enterprise, one specialist, the other generalist in principles and functions.

Fayol’s five functions (he mostly called them elements) are planning, organizing, command, co-ordination, and control. Many writers assume that these are part of a mechanistic model of the firm, which can be easily fitted to Taylor’s mechanistic model of the firm. The mutilation of both authors’ work misses other more basic rhetorical architecture in the process of translation, summarization, and copying from those who read originals, the historians, to those who read each other, the textbook authors (even me). Robbins (1998) can thereby move history to the appendix, all of Fayol, Taylor, Weber, and Follett and then proceed to substitute a new version of history based upon the knowledge worker management system (KWMS), an abridgement of Toffler’s first, second, and third waves of history theory, culminating in the KW adhocracy, and the virtual organization. KW is now the substitute history. Fayol (1916) was doing knowledge work (KW) at the turn of the century. He wrote about management and worker knowledge and how to acquire them both. He argued against an over-preparation in engineering models, in mechanistics, and in mathematics. These knowledges were important, but needed knowledge of accounting, finance, and the experience of work (itself important knowledge). Addressing, college engineers:
 
 

No industrial leader would be rash enough to entrust you immediately with the sinking of a mine-shaft or the running of a blast furnace or rolling mill. First you must learn the trade which you do not know ((1949/1916: 90).
 
 

He asked these graduates to pledge themselves to industry.
 
 

Your duty is not merely to yourself, but also to your colleagues, superiors and the firm which you serve; your bearing, attitude, remarks and conduct should show that you are precisely aware of your responsibility (p. 93).
 
 

Energy, firmness, willingness to accept responsibility, initiative, loyalty, tact, dignity (p. 7).
 
 

As society grows, so new organs develop destined to replace the single one performing all functions in the primitive state (p. 20)
 
 

A body with two heads is in the social as in the animal sphere a monster, and has difficulty in surviving (p. 25).
 
 

Both are designing theory of the firm as a whole and organic enterprise. Both are focused on harmony and co-ordination. Both seek to overcome the duality of management and capital and capital and labor. But Fayol does end up with many dualisms when the work is done, and these continue into current times. Here is an example of harmony of capital and labor, even an acknowledgement of Follett’s co-operative model of the firm.
 
 

Profit sharing … the idea of making workers share in profits is a very attractive one and it would seem that it is from there [their] harmony between capital and labor should come (p. 29).
 
 

Table 2.3:
 

Body Corporate, Organic Metaphor Fayol writes the organic architecture as a way to discover his fourteen commandments. The eighth commandment is centralization (something that Follett saw as a false duality with decentralization). "Like division of work, centralization belongs to the natural order" (p. 33). Fayol builds up a theory of the corporate body by looking at both animal and plant biology.
 
 

Plant life too has served for numerous comparisons with social units. In the realm of [tree] growth there spring from the single trunk branches which spread out and grow leaves, and the sap brings life to all branches, even the slenderest twigs, just as higher authority transmits activity right down to the lowest and farthest extremes of the body corporate (p. 58).
 
 

Man in the body corporate plays a role like that of the cell in the animal, single cell in the case of the one-man business, thousandth or millionth part of the body corporation in the large-scale enterprise (p. 158).
 
 

In the social organism, as in the animal, a small number of essential functional elements account for an infinite variety of activities… The nervous system in particular bears close comparison with the managerial function. Being present and active in every organ, it normally has no specialized member and is not apparent to the superficial observer, but everywhere it receives impressions which it transmits first to the lower centers (reflexes) and thence, if need be, to the brain or organ of direction. From these centers or from the brain the order then goes out in inverse direction to the member or section concerned with carrying out the movement. The body corporate, like an animal, has its reflex responses or ganglia which take place without immediate intervention on the part of the higher authority and without nervous or managerial activity the organism becomes an inert mass and quickly decays (p. 59-60).
 
 

1. Shareholders
2. Board of Directors
3. General management and its staff
4. Regional and local management
5. Chief engineers
6. Technical (departmental) managers
7. Superintendents
8. Foremen
9. Operatives

Fayol’s Reading of Taylor. There are important parallels and differences in Taylor and Fayol. Both are industrial engineers. Fayol managed mines and Taylor steel production. Both have functional theories of the form. Both seek to anchor management knowledge in scientific study. Deeply aware of his own organic model, Fayol pauses in his text, to construct a reading of Taylor rhetorical model. He reads in Taylor a military metaphor. Fayol thought Taylor negated the principle of unity of command and called Taylor the "tireless propagandist" (p. 70). In five pages (66-70) Fayol glimpses Taylor’s militaristic model of the firm, and then blinkers and goes back to constructing his organic corporate body image.
 
 

I have tried to formulate for myself a fairly precise conception of the system of organization known as the Taylor system, so much discussed or recent years … Practically all the shops are organized upon what may be called the military plan. The orders from the general are transmitted through the colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants and non-commissioned officers to the men. …
 
 

First: As far as possible the workmen, as well as the gang-bosses and foremen, should be entirely relieved of the work of planning, and of all work which is more or less clerical in its nature.
 
 

Second: Throughout the whole field of management the military type of organization should be abandoned and what may be called the ‘functional type’ substituted in its place
 
 

‘Functional management’ consists in so directing the work of management that each man from the assistant superintendent down shall have as few functions as possible to perform (p. 66).
 
 

"Functional Management’ lies in the fact that each workman instead of coming in direct contact with the management at one point only, namely through his gang-boss, receives his daily orders and help directly from eight different bosses, each of whom performs his own particular function … [what] was done by the single ‘gang-boss’ subdivided among eight men - route clerks, instruction card men, cost and time clerks, who plan and give directions from the planning room; gang-bosses, speed bosses, inspectors, repair bosses, who show the men how to carry out their instructions and see that the work is done at the proper speed; and the ‘shop disciplinarian’ who performs this function for the entire establishment … Such is the system of organization as conceived by Taylor … It turns on the two following ideas –

(a) Need for a staff to help out shop foremen…

(b) Negation of the principle of unity of command.

Just as the first seems to me to be good; so the second seems unsound and dangerous (p. 68).
 
 

"So deep-rooted, however, is the conviction that the very foundation of management rests in the military type as represented by the principle that no workman can work under two bosses at the same time that … For myself I do not think that a shop can be well run in flagrant violation of this" (p. 69).
 
 

In Fayol’s knowledge organization, no man alive possess all the knowledge to embrace "every question thrown up in the running of a large concern, and certainly none possessed of the strength and disposing of the time required by the manifold obligations of large-scale management" (p. 71). The solution was for management develop staff work for knowledge assistance, liaison, draw up future projects and development study. "… The staff as an organ of thinking, studying and observation, whose chief function consists, under managerial impetus, in preparing for the future and seeking out all possible improvements" (p. 72).
 
 

We should not forget that Fayol was to write two more parts to his work, but never did, Part III. Personal observations and experience -- Part IV Lessons of the war (p. xxi). But in finished parts, we do get a glimpse of the military model under-girding this organic Leviathan. He refers to the rule of three, as an argument against an exclusive education in technical knowledge, when more managerial knowledge is need:
 
 

If we turn back to the studies which Napoleon was able to make fifteen years before the beginning of last century there is every reason to believe that "the God of War" never used any more complicated formulae (p. 87).
 
 

It then becomes easy, I think, to transmute organism into the mechanical monster, Leviathan.
 
 

Hobbes (1588-1679) 17^th century root-metaphor of a Leviathan argued that people are artificial animals, machine-beasts and savages with Natural lusts and evil instincts, sensations set in motion until they encounter resistance and counter-force. Hobbes said "the life of man, [would be] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (In Bronowski & Mazlish, 1960: 204).#9 This is why wars break out all over the planet. The purpose of Leviathan was imprisoning human dynamics in the machine. Hobbes, like Fayol wanted to reengineer the artificial-machine of Nature to make it subject to scientific laws. But, instead of live nerves, as in Fayol, the nerves were dead:
 
 

For seeing life is but a motion of limbs … why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body" (As cited in Bronowski & Mazlish, 1960: 197).
 
 

Over-Generalized Organic Metaphor. Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer (1910) was critical of applying biological analogy to the social:
 
 

…Cells of an organism correspond to individuals in a society, tissues to simpler voluntary groups, organs to the more complex organizations. Economic, juridical, and political activities parallel the physiological, morphological, and unitary aspects of an organism. Merchandise in transition is tantamount to unassimilated food. Conquering races are male, the conquered female; the struggle matches the struggle of spermatozoa around the ovum (Spencer, as cited in Hodgkinson, 1996: 41).
 
 

Schumacher (1984/1986) did read Fayol’s architecture as organic, not mechanistic. But, without paying attention to Spencer’s warning of misplaced concreteness, proceeds to develop even more biological analogy.#10 Schumacher (1986) includes as an Appendix Mr. Desaubliaux (1919) biological translation of Fayol’s biological architecture, with illustrations of the structures of plant and animal cell life. "I would simply like to set forth some biological parallels which Mr. Fayol’s observations on the administrative functions have suggested to me" (Desaubliaux, as cited in Schumacher, 1984/1986: 200).
 
 

This is the exception. As most management historians summarized Fayol and Taylor, most excluded the metaphoric. Pollard (1974: 87-99) summarized Fayol without organic reference and Taylor (3-16) without military metaphor.#11 Both are just pure scientific management. Wren (1976/1979) summarizes Fayol (226-248), pointing to differences in translations of Fayol, but also marginalized, no excludes the metaphoric architecture.#12 Taylor is summarized (Wren, 1979: 119-157) without metaphoric analysis. But Wren (1979: 260) does point your that his reading is "Taylor maintained that scientific management was the essence of industrial democracy." I would assign such a reading to Follett, but not to Taylor. Georges (1968) in a History of Management Thought has the same treatment of Fayol (105-111) and Taylor (82-99).
 
 

Summary

What can we say about this short history of management thought? Subsequent management historians wrote mechanistic narratives, devoid of organic, military and systemic referent. They rewrite many father management figures, from Fayol and Taylor to Weber into just the one Father of Management. Then, the popular management text writers imitate this collage, so all three can become a mechanistic morph, and a reincarnation of Hobbes’ Leviathan, a mechanical monster that feeds on the planet earth. And, if this monster is slain, then we have the Chinese boxes, each embedded in the next, a decidedly dead systems theory.

Mother God is Mary Parker Follett, but her teachings have been easy to ignore. She is reborn in the contemporary writings about teams, cross-functional relations, collaboration, learning organization, open systems theory, co-operatives, transorganizational theory – but males have taken over her ideas. Her interpenetration is an act of Derridian deconstruction, a turning of the dualities of the Fathers, but also Marx and Braverman, into resituations. The dualities of management/worker, capital/labor, whole/part, organization/environment and so many more are shown to be an artificial rhetoric. Her critique of LPT is that management and work, capital and worker, consumer and investor, supplier and distributor are engaging not just in competition but also in acts of collaboration, collective learning, not just negotiation, but integration, not a false consensus, but a co-creation of power, a collective fulfillment of desire, and a collective urge to power.

In the rewriting process, the historians and imitators of management thought and philosophy have killed the Father and Mother gods. The KWMS is invented as if it had not already been thought through at the turn of the century. It is the postmodern death of the author. Any reading will do, no re-appropriation is beyond belief, and all mis-reading becomes scholarship. Still I think there is something organic in Fayol, maybe some secret democracy in Taylor, and certainly Follett has a radical reading of the dualities. Weber did have a systems theory of bureaucratic, charismatic, and feudal forms of authority.
 
 

What are the implications? I think that a democratic, even ecological mode of organizing can be found in the ancient writings. I think that there is hegemonic blinkering, to keep from seeing ways to diminish hierarchy, a power-over and look at power-with, to cease the proliferation of survival of the fittest, replete with competitive expansion, and look at co-operatives among all types of stakeholders. It may be time to privilege Mary Parker Follett over the male godheads. Perhaps even looking at the role of male hierarchical philosophy in Carolyn Merchant’s death of nature, the five centuries struggle between organic and mechanistic forms.
 
 

It may be possible to move to an ecological and organic understanding that is not one more Leviathan, masquerading as a mechanistic in biological rhetoric. To deconstruct mechanistic/organic dualisms is our goal here.
 
 

Summary - With, the industrial revolution came modernization of the planning function. Frederick Winslow Taylor stepped forward with a plan to get the job done. People other than the work crew and a supervisor planned the work. Taylor's management scientists trained clerks to plan the time and the movements of the gangs of workers. Human Relation, social scientists planned the social and group dynamics of the corporation to keep the worker-cogs happy. These two movements: scientific management and human relations marked an end to the Craft ethic and the dawn of modernist planning. Crafts people were no longer expected to plan their own work. This thinking dominated management until the rise of Deming and TQM in the 1980s.
 
 

Taylorism and Modernist Machine Planning. In the early 1900's, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was the hero of the modernist planning movement. He was the radical revolutionary of his time. Taylor objected strongly and passionately to the impediments to excellence being caused by the "pre-modernist" era. In the pre-modernist phase of industrial history, the trade unions, craft apprenticeship systems, and a managerial class antagonistic to workers and unions dominated capitalist societies. Taylor pointed out the extensive goldbricking or what he termed "soldiering" going on in the pre-modern firms. His plan was to pay workers more in order to motivate them to increase production. He planned time and motion of each specific work task according to scientific principles. He also wanted leaders to be scientific, rather than individualistic. In 1873, Taylor worked as a supervisor for Midvale Steel Company. His story reveals his theory. We want to analyze the stories told by Frederick Taylor as he set out to evangelize his scientific method of work planning to a country that was already well along the path toward modernization. Taylor is one hero of the Modernist movement.
 
 

Please read the following play out loud. Have someone play Taylor and Schmidt. It all sounds different when you enact the play as a bit of modernist theater.
 
 

The Schmidt Pig Iron Story
 
 

[Scientific planning increases Bethlehem Steel

"Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?"

"Vell, I don't know vat you mean."

"Oh yes, you do. What I want to know is whether you are a high-priced man or not."

"Vell, I don't know vat you mean."

"Oh, come now, you answer my questions. What I want to find out is whether you are a high-priced man or one of these cheap fellows here. What I want to find out is whether you want to earn $1.85 a day or whether you are satisfied with $1.15, just the same as all those cheap fellows are getting."

"Did I want $1.85 a day? Vas dot a high-priced man? Vell yes, I vas a high-priced man."

"Oh, you're aggravating me. Of course you want $1.85 a day - every one wants it!. You know perfectly well that has very little to do with your being a high-priced man. For goodness' sake answer my questions, and don't waste any more of my time. Now come over here. You see that pile of pig iron?"

"Yes."

"You see that car?"
 
 

"Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will load that pig iron on that car to-morrow for $1.85. Now do wake up and answer my question. Tell me whether you are a high-priced man or not."

"Vell - did I got $1.85 for loading dot pig iron on dot car to-morrow?"

"Yes, or course you do, and you get $1.85 for loading a pile like that every day right through the year. That is what a high-priced man does, and you know it just as well as I do."

"Vell, dot's all right. I could load dot pig iron on the car to-morrow for $1.85, and I get if every day, don't I."

"Certainly you do - certainly you do."

"Vell, den, I vas a high-priced man."

"Now, hold on, hold on. You know just as well as I do that a high-priced man has to do exactly as he's told from morning till night. You have seen this man here before, haven't you?"

"No, I never saw him."
 
 

"Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will do exactly as this man tells you tomorrow, from morning till night. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk, you pick it up an you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that right straight through the day. And what's more, no back talk. Now a high-priced man does just what he's told to do, and no back talk. Do you understand that? When this man tells you to walk, you walk; when he tells you to sit down, you sit down, and you don't talk back at him. Now you come on to work here tomorrow morning and I'll know before night whether you are really a high-priced man or not."

... Schmidt started to work, and all day long, and at regular intervals, was told by the man who stood over him with a watch, "Now pick up a pig and walk. Now sit down and rest. Now walk - now rest, etc. He worked when he was told to work, and rested when he was told to rest, and at half-past five in the afternoon had his 47 1/2 tons loaded on the car. And he practically never failed to work at this pace and do the task that was set him during the three days that the writer was at Bethlehem. ... he received 60 percent higher wages than were paid to other men who were not working on task work. One man after another was picked out and trained to handle pig iron at the rate of 47 1/2 tons per day until all of the pig iron was handled at this rate, and the men were receiving 60 percent more wages than other workmen around them (Taylor, 1911).#14