Desde la socioterritorialidad de comunidad de vecindad

In a recent survey of the literature on gurus, Wilson & Mishra (1999) suggest a number of dimensions of the work of gurus. Citing principally Huczynski (1993), Clark & Salaman (1998), Crainer (1996) and Jackson (1996), they identify the following characteristics:

• Primacy of verbal transmission • Premium on physical presence

• Authority • Charisma

• Management o f meaning • Commercial relationship • An all-encompassing answer • Authoritative and dogmatic

• Short term manipulation of emotions • Material focus

• Narcissistic concern with self-aggrandisement • Discontinuity to meet the demands of novelty

Wilson & Mishra also make an examination of both the differences and similarities between gurus in the yoga traditions and management gurus. Their preference for yoga gurus is plain, but their perspective is partial, and neglects the insights of Storr (1996) into the paranoia that can afflict spiritual leaders as well as management gurus.

Shapiro (1997), in a review article, suggests a distinction between researcher (which she conflates with ‘academic’), intellectual property developer and guru somewhat different from mine. She suggests:

Would-be management gurus will keep promulgating what some consultants call “new intellectual properties” even when they conflict with the theories that the academics adhere to. (p. 143)

Her sights are focused upon the guru, and she is part of the rich strand o f critical literature about these unfortunate beings. The guru literature surveyed is characterised by being critical of the moral stance of the management gurus and negative about their modus operandi. In developing this thesis, I came to recognise that I wanted to examine contributors to the field of management development who operated in a different way from gurus as conventionally described and who did not necessarily possess all the moral defects ascribed to the gurus. It is worth also pausing to consider whether the gurus deserve all the opprobrium heaped upon them. In Britain, the middle classes’ Saint - Charles Handy - not only dispenses sage advice and connects people to changes in society and invites them to think about them (his ‘Thoughts for the day’ on BBC Radio 4, offer more in the way of questions than answers). Peter Drucker in the USA is similarly provocative. Many managers in big bureaucracies have Tom Peters to thank for opening their eyes to (or at least giving them a language to deal with - which may amount to the same thing) the stultifying nature of their organisations. So, I would not want to join in with the blanket criticisms of gurus. A lot of this seems to me to be a literature o f envy

(why can’t I write as well as Charles Handy, have the staying power o f Peter Drucker, or the sales of Tom Peters?). Nonetheless, guru processes have within them the seeds of their own downfall, and the telling analysis of Storr (1996) shows how this paranoid cast o f mind can develop destructively. What I notice is that some gurus (as Storr, 1996, demonstrates) succumb comprehensively to these pressures and others (such as Handy and Drucker) hold them in check.

Returning to Wilson & Mishra’s (1999) analysis o f gurus, it focused on people with different characteristics from those I wished to study. In particular the people I was interested in studying were not involved with:

• Physical presence • Authority

• Charisma

• An all-embracing answer

• Being authoritative and dogmatic • Short-term manipulation o f emotions.

However, the intended objects of my study, like the gurus analysed by Wilson and Mishra, had authority, managed meaning, had a commercial relationship with their clients and a material focus, and used discontinuity to meet the demands of novelty. They were producers of intellectual properties, like the gurus, but it seemed to me did not rely on their own presence or even their own writing to give life to their IPs.

There did not seem to be a literature describing the people I have come to call IPDs, so I determined to make them the focus of my research. I decided to identify them by asking practitioners in the field what were the models that they used and valued and who produced them. This, then, is my criterion for separating what I came to call Intellectual Property Developers (IPDs) from gurus. They rely for their influence primarily upon their intellectual outputs, which may be more or less thoroughly researched, but are valued by

users for their utility in explaining or organising the understanding o f phenomena in the field o f practice.

The literature on fads

There is a related literature of fads (Battram, 1998; Gill & Whittle, 1992; Huczynski, 1996; Keisler, 1997; Pascale, 1991; Price, 1995), which seeks to examine and explain the cyclical way in which ideas are produced and then superseded by other ideas. Like the guru literature it is predominantly hostile. In the case o f the fads literature the hostility is directed towards the perpetrators of the fads - the researchers, consultants and teachers who adopt and then discard them. However the opprobrium is also attached to the

consumers - the managers in organisations - who adopt them. Huczynski (1996) provides an overview o f the arguments for the existence and ephemerality o f fads. The situation, however, is even more complicated than he makes out (eight explanations for the co­ existence o f fads, five reasons why managers buy them, half a dozen for why consultants supply them). The complication lies in the observation that there is not one phenomenon that has to be accounted for but two. On the one hand, many fads appear transitory, as is suggested by the common usage of the term (Huczynski 1996; Pascale, 1991), but on the other, many authorities have pointed out the extraordinary longevity of the ideas in circulation in management practice and theory (Jacques, 1996; Watson, 1996). Additionally, if what is extraordinary about fads is their brevity, then what is

extraordinary about gurus is their longevity in the public eye. Covey, Drucker and Handy have all been eminent in their various ways for several decades, and even his death did

not stop the inexorable rise of the reputation of W Edwards Deming. Some of these gurus seem to achieve this longevity by finding something clear to say and then saying it over and over - like John Adair, Stephen Covey and Anthony Robbins. Others - notably Peter Drucker and Charles Handy - maintain themselves in the public eye by having a

perceptive hold on the constantly shifting issues in management thought.

Carson, et a l(1999) offer a framework that seeks to integrate this troubling

concatenation of phenomena. Using a historical perspective, they differentiate fads from trends and collective wisdom. They use evidence of numbers of publications on the issue to trace the patterns o f fads, which they see as being increasingly rapidly abandoned; trends, which they see as adaptations o f earlier ideas, as does Jacques; and collective wisdom, which persists over many decades. Payne (1976) has a splendid analysis of collective wisdom in an article entitled ‘Truisms in organizational research’, where he argues that the findings of all the organisational behaviour research that had been conducted to date, could be compressed into four truisms - participation, feedback, systems and the unconscious.

The emergence of fads is explored using a complexity theory perspective by Price (1995), with his notion of organisational memetics, and Battram (1998), with his list of what he calls selfish memes including - quality, value for money, partnership, learning

organisation, standards of competence, business process re-engineering (BPR). To illustrate why Battram calls them selfish, he takes the example of BPR. In the early 90s BPR was only one of many versions - BP Review, BP Control, BP Transformation, BP

Management, BP Innovation, BP Improvement, BP Engineering. BPR triumphed. ‘It locked its adherents via positive feedback in a classic QWERTY dynamic. That dynamic - widespread proliferation and experimentation followed by stabilisation around one, or a few, designs - is common if not universal in the introduction of new technologies. ’ (p. 65-74).

This literature, like the overlapping set of writing about gurus, is carping in tone. It identifies reasons for creative authors to generate new sets of ideas, which might be described as fads. It also offers reasons why managers might welcome and adopt the new ideas. What this literature gives scant attention to (although Huczynski (1996) touches upon it and Watson (1996), addresses it thoughtfully) is the deep-seated nature of the dilemmas that managers face and the need that they therefore have for stories and ways of encouraging themselves to take action. Weick’s (1995, p. 54) wonderful story (of the map that energised the storm-bound soldiers in the Alps to redouble their efforts and get back to safety, but which turned out to be a map of the Pyrenees) is a deep reminder of the organising power, rather than the truthfulness, of stories. What the fad literature also lacks is an understanding of a social constructionist perspective on truth, as its criticisms o f the quality of the managerial discourse are couched in what I have described in Chapter 2 as a ‘positist’ tradition.

Reflection

The guru literature is useful in describing what IPDs are not and in contrasting with the range of qualities that I developed during my fieldwork in separating researchers, IPDs and gurus. The literature on fads offers a framework for thinking about the place of new ideas in the practice of management. It comes to uncomfortable conclusions about the legitimacy and efficacy o f these efforts, but in its critique it fails to pay attention to the depth o f the dilemmas faced by managers, their need for stories and the socially constructed nature o f ‘truth5.