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Keywords Managers, Responsibilities, Management attitudes
Abstract This paper explores the discipline, study and practice of management through the "current voice of management" and through four different voices. The four different voices are those of: a one-person business, a PhD researcher in a school of management, a co-ordinator of an articulated inter-disciplinary Masters program in the Leadership and Management of Change, and a management consultant. The paper first introduces some implications of our current management voices and then explores aspects of each voice, concluding with a short reflection on the message drawn from them.
Introduction
Many of us, in our "business", have become mentally lazy. Our own experience remains silent, presupposed, un-thematized, and unexplored. It contains within itself the un-interrogated, overlooked beliefs and actions that we daily live through, but do not critically examine.
We are often only ready to acknowledge some individual or other as a great soul merely on authority Steiner (1993) cited in Bayes (1994, p. 118). Living in the language and dogma of others can be reassuring, providing the impression of security, safety, alleviation of the fear of the unknown - a dulling of the senses. This fosters complacency and short circuits thought.
"Received wisdom" is omnipresent, mostly outside our "focal attention", most often outside our "field attention" and "unless carefully, mindfully attended to, definitely outside our 'horizonal awareness'" (Ihde, 1976, pp. 45, 108). Armstrong (1997, p. 49) generously suggests that those who have so debilitated thousands, millions of people over the years in education, workplaces, politics and other spheres of our world are "not to be blamed". They were "simply passing on received wisdom and did not have the sense to question it." I myself have been complicit in this though I am not sure I am quite as generous to the purveyors of such "wisdom" - even myself!
The discipline, study and practice of management are also implicated. In the language of "management" no voice emerges. If there is voice, it is person-less, the "everyman"[l]. In academic and business management writing there is no presumption of personal accountability. The third person, passive voice is the standard. More weight is given to abstract and categorical knowledge (a "hardening of the categories") (Owen, 1994) than to direct testimony of personal narrative...