Looking Up and Looking Around’
Hey there, here is an essay I wrote for one of my business subjects. Seeing as I do not actually work in the field it will be interesting to see how true or false some of the points I make are. NOTE: The second half of the essay is on another one of my threads. Thanks
Management is typically thought to be the place where calm, considered and well thought through decisions are taken. Drawing upon writings about the realities of managerial work and the nature of the management advice industry, why might we question this conventional view?
Jackall’s (1988) text ‘Looking up and looking around’ looks beyond the façade and exposes the realities that make up the inner-workings of the managerial position. The notion of ‘looking up and looking around’, as explained by Jackall (1988) to be a manager’s inability to make “gut decisions” and the need to add people to his/her problem to pass blame is far removed from the widely held belief in the ‘consensus manager’; “[a manager] who brings his team together through adroit persuasion to achieve a communally defined goal…” (Jackall 1988, p. 75). This conventional view on managerial work is challenged by Huczynski (1993) in ‘Explaining the succession of management fads’ who furthers Jackall’s (1988) points by highlighting and then exploring the various ideological fads management seek as quick fix solutions to managerial issues. The adoption of such fads can understandably be seen as a solution that offers most sense of security to a manager because it removes the need for the managers themselves to find a resolution as the fad itself scaffolds the solution for them. The definition of ‘management idea’ provided by Kramer on page 444 of ‘Explaining the succession of management fads’; “organised knowledge applicable to a relatively wide area of circumstances… [that] assists managers to analyse and explain the underlying causes of a given business situation” (Huczynski 1993, p. 444), reiterates this underlying need in managers to
Management is typically thought to be the place where calm, considered and well thought through decisions are taken. Drawing upon writings about the realities of managerial work and the nature of the management advice industry, why might we question this conventional view?
Jackall’s (1988) text ‘Looking up and looking around’ looks beyond the façade and exposes the realities that make up the inner-workings of the managerial position. The notion of ‘looking up and looking around’, as explained by Jackall (1988) to be a manager’s inability to make “gut decisions” and the need to add people to his/her problem to pass blame is far removed from the widely held belief in the ‘consensus manager’; “[a manager] who brings his team together through adroit persuasion to achieve a communally defined goal…” (Jackall 1988, p. 75). This conventional view on managerial work is challenged by Huczynski (1993) in ‘Explaining the succession of management fads’ who furthers Jackall’s (1988) points by highlighting and then exploring the various ideological fads management seek as quick fix solutions to managerial issues. The adoption of such fads can understandably be seen as a solution that offers most sense of security to a manager because it removes the need for the managers themselves to find a resolution as the fad itself scaffolds the solution for them. The definition of ‘management idea’ provided by Kramer on page 444 of ‘Explaining the succession of management fads’; “organised knowledge applicable to a relatively wide area of circumstances… [that] assists managers to analyse and explain the underlying causes of a given business situation” (Huczynski 1993, p. 444), reiterates this underlying need in managers to