o exactly this. They are
responses to a market for social constructions of reality, and ABCM is a response
to this market.In order to flesh out these ideas, and to concretize the market for managerialideas, I begin not with an analysis of ABCM, but with an account of some recent
attempts to construct the design of products (in the aesthetic sense) as a processamenable to managerial control. These cases indicate that design can only beconstructed as a process transparent to managerial control by editing out thevery characteristics which might yield competitive advantage (see Armstrong &Tomes, 1996; Armstrong, 2000). The paper then considers the image of staffactivity which underlies the project of controlling indirect costs through ABCM
(see Armstrong, forthcoming). This portrayal too is shown to involve considerabledegradation as compared with the self-images of the staff functions concerned.The likely consequences in both cases flow from management’s capacity, as
agents of capital, to concretize its own versions of reality. Both product design
and the staff functions subjected to ABCM can be forced to conform to the social
constructions demanded by management technique. These social constructions
then act as self-fulfilling prophecies in which the degraded image becomes a
degraded actuality.
Management: Generalized and Abstract
Acknowledged as the founders of management thought, both Frederick Winslow
Taylor and Henri Fayol would have been astonished at some of the inclusions
and omissions in today’s teaching and research on management. Begin with the
omissions. Importantly Taylor’s “revolution in management”, was also a “revolt of
the engineer” (Layton, 1971), a revolt against “ordinary management” which, in
Taylor’s view, had forfeited its claim to authority because it lacked expertise in
the productive process. As with the motive, so with the practice. The re-designof production processes which lay at the heart of Taylor’s Scientific Managementdepended heavily on the expertise of the mechanical engineer, a profession ofwhich Taylor was himself a distinguished member. For Taylor, then, the competentmanagement of a process was inconceivable without expertise in that process. So
it was with Fayol. Although the work translated by Lyndal Urwick as “General andIndustrial Management” (Fayol, 1949) aimed to set out the general principles ofManagement, image and management accounting 283
efficient administration, it was also an expression of Fayol’s experience as a miningengineer. And although his principles were subsequently appropriated by Urwickas the knowledge base of a decontextualized managerial knowledge, Fayol himself
took it for granted that they would be applied in the light of a thorough knowledge of
production processes.
Very early in this
history of management education, it became clear that
the pressure of educational markets would prise apart this primordial unity
of management and process knowledge. Harvard University’s first venture into
management education was a 1908 course on Railroad Management. This included
such industry-specific topics as Railroad Operation, Railroad Accounting and
Railroad Organization and Finance. The pattern of electives chosen by students,
however, quickly revealed a demand for topics of more general application, such as
Industrial Organization, and Factory Management (Copeland, 1958, 21 ff). By 1912,
the
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