ABSTRACT
In previous chapters, I have argued that the problem of ‘knowledgeable organization’ was historically posed and elaborated within the limiting conditions of a tenacious rivalry, conducted between two traditions issuing from Aristotelian political theory and Smithian political economy. In the theoretical systems deriving from the latter, the problem could only be introduced in ambiguous fashion, because the productive status of mental or immaterial labour vis-à-vis material labour was never adequately clarified. It was apparent from the works of Smith through those of the Ricardian socialists up to Marx that, in so far as mental labour was studied at all, emphasis was normally laid upon the organizational or managerial element (the so-called ‘labour of inspection and direction’); only with Gramsci did the generic term ‘intellectual labour’ begin to be used-and sparingly at that-in order to circumscribe the broader category of managers, bureaucrats, professionals, and intellectuals.1 In the Aristotelian tradition of political theory, which was never constrained by the materialist prejudices of its rival, the problem of knowledgeable organization could be more squarely faced, but here as well there was a tendency to conflate it with the problem of management in the broad connotation of Aristotelian ‘politics’. Sociology, which inherited the intellectual perspective of this latter tradition, began its career as a new science of politics or of the orderly, science-based reorganization of society, which was routinely taken to imply that henceforth the problem of power took precedence over that of property. In whichever
way it was handled-residually and ambiguously in an economic framework, or principally and focally in a political one-the analysis of knowledgeable organization was poised towards the organizational dimension, and was to a lesser extent occupied with an independent appreciation of knowledge or skill as forces of production or species of capital in their own right. This remains true despite the fact that most writers followed Saint-Simon in presuming a close linkage between symbolic proficiency and the expert handling of people.
