Cultural underlay in management

By Ignas Kleden

JAKARTA (JP): Management has been the darling discipline at higher education institutions for the urban middle class in Indonesia for more than one decade.

One of Indonesia's top managers, Peter F. Gontha, says that people see skill organization, scientific knowledge cast for practical purposes and preparation for limited goals as being able to make a lot of things happen. People have started to view management as a miracle sent down from heaven.

Whereas mathematics is considered the peak achievement of conceptual intelligence, and technology the peak of technical intelligence, management seems to bring social intelligence to its furthest possible limit. Logic is the quintessence of the first, use and applicability are the aims of the second, and organization is the main thrust of the third.

There is a relative parallel between the three disciplines, since logic is the correlation of thoughts in their pure form, technology is the correlation of thought as applied in technical use and practice, and management is the correlation of thought as reflected in a goal-oriented attitude, efficient behavior and effective action.

Even the nature of logical correlation in connection with the three is somewhat different. Formal logic is causal in nature and technology is based on efficient logic, whereas management rests on the final logic. The emphasis in the first is the relation between cause and necessary effect, in the second it is between the cause and the result it produces, whereas in the third the correlation is between the cause, or the motive, and the goal, which is the intended result.

These three correlations between cause and effect have different characteristics. In the formal logic the correlation is purely formal and quasi-mathematical. In technology the correlation is mechanical, whereas in management it becomes psychological or sociological.

In management, the principle of causality does not work according to logical necessity owing to two basic reasons. In the first place, the role of human will and the freedom to choose, can make human beings behave not only in accord with the formal logic which is to guide them but also against it. In the second place, there is ample room for unintended results, whereby the original intention can be diverted from its course by social dynamics of human interaction.

Looking at it that way, management is a discipline of human sciences, which undertakes to put under control various human capacities in order to serve an established goal. However, this is done not by means of the submission of one's will to that of another as is the case in the military command, but rather by means of organizing the motives of the people concerned in order that they will treat the established goal as their own.

It is also geared so that they can see possible constraints as something which might disadvantage them. In other words, management aims not simply at producing physical responses, but mainly at creating mental and emotional disposition, in which the goal of an enterprise or an undertaking is treated as something which concerns everybody involved.

In that sense, the principle of operation which holds in technology applies fairly well to management. The English philosopher, Francis Bacon, once epitomized the nature of technology by saying: "In order to be commanded, nature must be obeyed". Obedience to nature is the effort to recognize its laws in order to make them serve mankind's interests.

In the same vein, the present managers would say, in order to be commanded, people must be obeyed. Obedience to people consists of the effort to recognize their interests and motives, and to use them to attain a goal.

The key word in this discussion of management is goal. Goal is a pragmatic conception of what is known in cultural studies as meaning. By definition a goal is something which one wants to achieve through his actions, whereas meaning implies that which one intends while one is doing something.

The main difference lies in the fact that a goal is a pragmatic conception of action, whereas meaning is a symbolic conception of knowledge. We can only say that one's action is goal-oriented if one means what one does. Otherwise behavior is mechanical, without any meaning underpinning one's knowledge, and without a goal which motivates one's action.

Management, to a large extent, is a cultural affair. This becomes clear if one keeps in mind that management is the organization of attitude, behavior and action; all things which usually come about through cultural formation. In that sense, the managerial subculture, which consists of correct attitude towards time, efficient thinking, effective speaking and calculated action, can only work if it is supported by the larger culture in which it is applied.

One could say that management offers an opportunity to initiate cultural change in a larger context. However, once one starts to apply management principles, one cannot help but take socio-cultural conditions into account for the simple reason that the application of management means putting it into a particular sociocultural context.

In that connection there is another similarity between management and technology. The development of technology can be assumed to be purely the concern of technologists, because it is specific. In the same vein, the development of management can be treated as purely a matter of management theorists.

However, once one starts to apply management principles, the workings of those principles depend very much on whether or not they correspond to the sociocultural conditions within which they are applied. This means that one has to reckon with the way people feel, think and behave in order to enable them to wrestle with a managerial problem, before one starts to divert all those cultural tendencies from their initial course.

In that sense management can be seen as a sort of human technology, which has first to establish "the law of motion" of a society, namely its cultural values and social norms, and then to make them into an effective instrument which serves a goal at hand.

At this juncture, we can compare management to science. Science is progress from ignorance to knowledge, whereby every new bit of knowledge tends to uncover hitherto latent ignorance. Management is the progress from nothing to something or the progress from a lot of things which have been there to a new combination which is much more than all those things put together.

The working principle of science is the hypothesis, which involves the belief that just attained knowledge may contain errors, which must be eliminated. The working principle of management is a tentative attitude, based on the belief in just achieved success, there might be still a lot of potential for failure, which must be put aside, in order for success to become sustainable.

In other words, there is a basic cultural attitude, on which to build both science and management. The basic cultural attitude of a scientist is his openness toward criticism, just as that of a manager is his openness to correction and renewal. The risk facing a scientist is that he or she might be wrong. The risk facing a manager is that he or she might fail. In both cases the general principle which underlies behavior is the tension between aspirations and the haunting possibility of error and failure.

Expecting the best, while being prepared for the worst seems to be the general cultural attitude required in both science and management. One of the main shortcomings of management as applied in Indonesia is that people are motivated to aspire after the best without being prepared for the worst. The worst is not incorporated into the managerial calculus, and if bad things happen to occur, they are treated either as accidents of circumstance, or as something originating in force majeure.

If one believes that success in life does not accrue from a sort of deus ex machina, one has to be consistent enough to consider one's failure as something not originating in diabolus ex machina.

There are many examples which illustrate the asymmetric cultural attitude described above. The clearest example is discernible in our habit of viewing unwanted results of a program as side-effects. Why on earth just side-effects?

This implies that the unwanted results are never envisaged beforehand, as if everything one has in planning must be all right. People build huge buildings without thinking of the existing drainage systems or catchments. This leads to situations in which whole towns are flooded when the rains come. To treat such things as "just side-effects" is evidence that management is oriented toward the best thing expected without any preparation for the worst possibilities.

Likewise everybody with some power at his or her disposal talks about the inevitable role of the modern press and electronic media in enhancing industrialization, but very few are aware of the possibility that the media might do something to the disadvantage of those who expect so much.

Another example is the competition to build universities all over the country. Nobody seems to realize that it does not make much sense to produce as many as possible highly educated people without creating adequate possibility of employment. Nor has anyone seemed to consider the fact that increasing the public's intelligence levels will bring about more criticism. Needless to say, criticism is not something bad in itself, but it can become a nuisance for those whose positions make them open to it.

The economists consistently remind us about cost and benefit. It is time that people involved in management apply that concept in the sense that failure or distortion should be part and parcel of complete managerial planning. Without taking this principle seriously, we get trapped in a cultural black hole by indulging in the abstract ideal of good things, without the courage to deal with a lot of bad things which, in fact, are very immediate and concrete. In a nutshell, management is a cultural attitude which comprises both enthusiasm for the best and courage to face up to the worst.

The writer is a sociologist now working at the SPES Research Foundation, Jakarta.