Taking on the work of organizing

Abstract

The industrial-age management practice that casts the longest shadow over knowledge-work is the division of responsibilities between managers or administrators—authorized to organize work and responsible for setting goals, making plans, drawing up schedules, creating rules, and so on—and workers, who are not. Fredrick Taylor, who portrayed workers as dull-witted and competent only to take and follow the most basic instructions, had a hand in shaping the division.¹ Yet it is difficult to imagine that his particular brand of misanthropy would have amounted to much were it not for circumstances (factory systems designed to make humans function like robots) and the fact that his prejudices tapped currents of intellectual life, meshing with attitudes (like patriarchy, hierarchy, bureaucracy) and ideologies (individualism, colonialism, and scientism) in favor at the time. Other factors contributed to the division too. An us- versus-them mentality had support from economists, who still claim that competition promotes efficiency, but are silent about the importance of cooperation.² Then there were the armories managed by graduates of the West Point Military Academy using military-command-like structures. These were among the first mass production operations in the USA and, as the management practices spread to other kinds of factories, every org chart replicated their basic “chain-of-command” structure and the implicit division between officers and enlisted men.³