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Roundtable On Management Theory After Organization Man: Creativity, Burnout, Intuition, Heterarchy
Special Section on Management Consulting
In 1989 at a gathering of executives and intellectuals from the influential California-based management consulting firm Global Business Network (GBN), poststructural philosophy professor turned management consultant Jay Ogilvy presented the idea that an obscure model from midcentury cognitive science called heterarchy was an ideal way to conceive of organizational management for the information economy.111In his talk "People in the Nineties," Ogilvy emphasized that future corporations and employees would better cope with uncertainty through flexible, distributed authority and shared responsibility.
Heterarchy is best described in juxtaposition to hierarchy. In a hierarchy, one assumes that if A is over B, and B is over C, then A must be over C. In heterarchy, however, C may be over A even if A is over B. Importantly, heterarchy does not denote the absence of hierarchy; heterarchies are instead made up of circular loops of overlapping, and ever-changing, hierarchies. In a heterarchically organized structure there are no ultimate tops or bottoms even though superiority and inferiority exist.112
In the midcentury corporation, hierarchy, the assumed natural order for pyramidal organizational charts, came into question. Passed down from medieval theologians, hierarchy ruled corporations through rigid levels of authority. This inflexible management strategy directed by a single leader, once a bastion of midcentury corporate success, began to symbolize deterministic worldviews, the bane of innovation. The problem, as articulated by Ogilvy, was not "that there are no hierarchies, no preferences, no valuations of one thing over another; the problem is that there are too many."113Ogilvy positioned the corporation against master narratives based on universal preferences or solutions. It was not only the poststructuralists and feminists who read Jean-François Lyotard's The Condition of Postmodernity (1979); thwarting metanarratives also animated consulting strategies concerning how one could run a corporation in order to maximize conflicting values and contradictory preferences as potential sources of innovation and avoid destruction.
In cognitive scientist Warren McCulloch's 1945 experimental biological model for decentralized neural net communication--what he called "heterarchy"--Ogilvy saw a nondeterministic logic of relations that could serve as a model for complex organization not only in the mind, but also in the self and in the corporation....