ABSTRACT
Recent economic events of credit crunch and recession must surely be making it very diffi cult for all but the most willfully blind to avoid questioning whether senior executives in organizations really can do what the dominant management prescriptions call for. The vast majority of textbooks, business school programs and research projects around the world, most professional management and leadership development programs in organizations, management consultancies and people in organizations, including executives, all talk about how organizations should be governed, all making the same takenfor-granted assumptions. There is a dominant discourse in which it is assumed, without much questioning, that small groups of powerful executives are able to choose the ‘direction’ their organization will move in, realize a ‘vision’ for it, create the conditions in which its members will be innovative and entrepreneurial, and select the ‘structures’ and ‘conditions’ which will enable them to be in control and so ensure success. The problem is that to be at all effective, these activities rely to a signifi cant extent upon the ability of powerful executives to know enough about what has been, is now and will be happening around them. Executives are supposed to know what is going on, because they are supposed to be avoiding emotion and personal politicking so that they can make roughly rational decisions on the basis of the ‘facts’. If they cannot do this, then, on the basis of dominant thinking, they must simply be pursuing only their own interests and gambling with society’s resources. However, recent and current economic developments are making it more than usually clear that executives of large corporations and their management consultants, as well as politicians and their advisors, are far from sure of what has been happening and they simply do not know what is now happening, let alone what will happen in the future as a consequence of the actions they are taking. However, surely there has to be more to what they are all doing than gambling. Despite not being able to know what the outcomes of actions will be as required by the prescriptions of the dominant discourse for choosing the ‘big picture’ over ‘the long term’, executives and others doing their jobs in organizations are, nevertheless, sustaining some kind of stability and change, producing growth and decline while generating all manner of technological innovations. If none of them knows enough to choose outcomes as prescribed, then how are they doing all this? It becomes a question of importance to ask what it is that they, and the rest of us, are all actually doing which the dominant discourse is making us rationally blind to.
