Mgt Educatiors:
Thanks for your many replies. I am resending this, I think the listserve
kicked it back. It if it redundant, I apologize in advance.
I am sharing my reply with ROT-L and Mgt-Ed since I
am having to respond to similar issues that you raise. I agree that more an
more techno is being pumped into the mgt ed. delivery system, and that the
administrators have already subverted our role in Academic Freedom, but
there are some points I want to respond to.
1. The New techn changes to Cybertech and Biotech are being implemented en
mass without much dialogue about Bioethics or Cyber-ethics. We do not see
the kinds o Biotech Century discussion of Rifkin (1998) or think ind of
Darwin Among the Machines wokrk by (Dyson, 1997) or by Best and Kellner in
papers they are about to publish in several places.
2. It is not some idealic image of learning that I lament, it is the new
exercise in social control that happens as most new technologies get adopted
in business. While we are made to get use to it, we business faculty
participate in the seamless socialization of the population so they do not
resist the new technology or the Duponts and Monsantos that are unleashing
the new species human into the ecology.
3. I think we are sold a bill of good about linking up folks who can not get
education because they are too remote. There are a few remote folks who do
not want to commute. But look at the case of New Mexico, a diffuse
population with lots of rural foks in small towns. Six to ten distance ed.
provideres including New Mexico State compete in out-lying communities to
provide distance ed. What you see is each attracting very few students from
the rural areas and having to pay for the technology by enticing on-campus
students to fill out the empty seats. The competition is cutthroat to reach
the rural few. Students on campus do not seem to like the distance ed. "Why
come to campus if I am doing cyber-class work?"
4. Weber always applies, but the fire wall between business and the
"creative side of the university" is also the administrations gamit to turn
the university into a profit-seeking business, to make its innovative
entrepreneurial adventure appropriators of our intellectual property. And
this is where Braverman and the labor process theory applies in ways that
Weber did not foresee.
5. I disagree about universities not being a special target. There is
special attention on universities as the AACSB and the Regional Reaccredit
the University associations attempts to implement the kinds of Outcome
Assessmment Strategies they have used to make high school a joke. Measuring
outcomes is a ruse since everyone knows you substutite what you can measure
for what you can not. What you can measure is the implementation of the
neauvoux techo. And as you say the college and hish school is part of how
the population gets socialized.
6. I did wake up. But it is not the innovation that freightens me. It is the
lake of critical appraisal of the changes and the uses they are being put
to. And as you say we are telling ourselves a new story about the Biotech
and cybertech Century, but to me it is a One-Dimensional Man story (i.e.
Marcuse), one that celebrates without asking the ethical questions.
7. I think we have to look carefully at evolutin theory and its uses in
busess. We do mimic the evolution models in mgt/ot, just as Spencer mimicked
Darwin to give us survival of the richest business legitimation, and we now
adapt the chaos/complexity/self-organizing theories. But we also need to
look at what is this phenomenon of co-evolution? That is how is it that the
cyber/machine system is co-evolving with the human, and these co-evolving
with the Biotech species changes we are genetically reengineering and
unleashing into the planet, how is the cyberspace coevolving with cyborg
(human/machine). Mimicry may be a well known effective evolutionary
strategy, but it is one we need to look at carefully. I recommend Dyson's
(1997) book, Darwin among the Machines and Mitchell's (1997) The Last
Diinosaur Book. this is critical scholarship, but what I seen being
presented as magagement thought is more like Leonard's book "BOT" (1997).
8. HMO's have a downside. What is wildly out-of-control is the dependency
on drugs medical care and the even more access of the privileged vs. the
masses caught in HMO care. Making doctors into MBAs is a scary thought. We
becoming EMO's is the way of it. To me it is time to remember Ivan Illich
and Deschool the University, get back to the university life of the 12th
century. The rise of corporate universities is another new form that AACSB
(I went to their convention a year ago) is imitating and partnering with.
The control of knowledge is the new mission statement of AACSB. Control by
whom? Control for whom? These are challenging questions. The buzz is for
efficiency, cost control and profit, but more is going on in this co-evolution.
9. I do think that Business professors are a conservate interest group. We
never taught the reality of business life, not the way that Ptton Sinclair
(1905) studied it in the Jungle. We present a glorified and heroic image of
management history, one so standard, that Seteve Robbins reduced it to a
dozen pages and stuck it in the appendix in his new Management book edition.
We present highly conservative histories, not daring at all to drag out a
history of the Peasantariat, as does Burrell (1996) in Pandemonium.
10. A real issue of concern lies in the creation of knowledge. I agree. And
society is adjusting itself to the new coevoltuion. And as Rifkin in biotech
Century argues, with new technology there must be the invention of a new
theory of nature, a new cosmology, that legitimates it all as "common sense"
and "natural evolution." What we are seeing is the cosmology that overcomes
resistance. We critical/postmodernists will be labeled Luddite, and we will
be dismissed, there will be no revolution, the masses will sign up for
chat-room Univiersity and they will be socialized into accepting higher
increments of violence in the bloody Nintendo games. And all in the name of
the Second and Third Genesis, the evolving "Good Society."
11 I agree - Witness high school and community college cultures dominated by
administrators. We are also witness of the Outcomes Assessment movement
migrating to the University to centralize control over delivery and
knowledge produciton.
In sum, we are witness to the spectacle of evolution as Guy Debord spoke of
in the Situationat International movement (see Best and Kellner chapter in
Postmodern Turn).
Thanks Rob to giving serious thought and response to my Luddite ideas.