ABSTRACT
The American business management community is in crisis and with it, all ancillary functions such as public relations and issue management, that have become strategic to the organization. The root of the crisis is a failure of the traditional rationalist and number-oriented management approach which has dominated American business for decades (Wilson, 1994a, 1994b). Business management consultants Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman (1984) commented on the prevailing model:
Professionalism in management is regularly equated with hard-headed rationality. . . . The numerative, rationalist approach to management dominates the business schools. It teaches us that well-trained professional managers can manage anything. It seeks detached, analytical justification for all decisions. It is right enough to be dangerously wrong, and it has arguably led us seriously astray.
It doesn’t tell us what the excellent companies have apparently learned. . . . It doesn’t show . . . that “good managers make meanings for people, as well as money.” (p. 29)
