Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland
A rumination on
managerial judgment
M
y opening assumption is that managing is not usefully defi- ned as an abstraction, a com- puter-like decision-making activity; rather it should be defined by the nature of the managerial task – being shaped by the nature of the thing being managed (the firm) with needs only its managers can address.But what is “the firm” that thereby defines
“managing”? Management and organiza- tion theorists take “the firm” pretty much for granted – IBM exists, just as Facebook and Alitalia, exist for the moment. We have ample evidence that firms exist – just ask people which they work for. Likewise the basic nature of “business management” is generally assumed – firm-related decision- making, idealized as “rational” but cer- tainly presumed key to the firm’s practices.
Assuming firms exist, we organization theorists discuss making rational decisions about their structure, process improve- ment, hiring, payment systems, marketing, alliances, product mix, IT needs, culture, relative performance, and so on. The firm’s existence seems as obvious as the goods
and services it produces – only the selection and direction of the firm’s various invest- ments and activities seems problematic, non-rational to the extent managers fail to see the firm’s truly rational nature.
This is actually very curious. First, Coase’s famous 1937 paper on The Nature of the Firm asked four “killer questions” that have yet to be answered: 1) Why do firms exist?
2) Why are their boundaries where they are? 3) Why are their internal arrangements as they are? and 4) Why is their perfor- mance so varied? (Coase, 1937). As we now realize, Coase was questioning “rationality”
as the core of any answers to these ques- tions; he told us we cannot understand the profit-making firm as a rationally designed apparatus. So he left us a puzzle – if not
“rationality”, what else? In other words, in spite of several centuries of theorizing we are still not sure about the firm’s nature against which management’s work might be measured (Williamson and Winter, 1991).
We are part of a conspiracy of silence, ignoring Coase’s questions as we take firms’
existence for granted.
Second, even when we have relatively secure definitions of the firm – from lawyers and accountants – the practical implications for managers are unclear. For lawyers the firm is an “unnatural person” with a citizen- like presence before the law, able to own property, undertake obligations, be sued, and so on. US firms can almost vote! The nature of this “legal person” is changeable and underspecified; so corporate law is the dynamic outcome of a history-contingent contest of interests rather than a corpus of static rules drawn up and left in place.
For accountants the firm is represented by the firm’s balance sheet, whatever the legal entity owns and owes. But the puzzles around valuing the firm’s assets and liabi- lities are legion – cost or market-priced, past or anticipated? Otherwise FASB and IFRS9 would not be necessary. Indeed if these matters were not puzzling there would be little need for accountants. We know – from Tobin’s q and otherwise – that the accountants’ representations of the firm are increasingly problematic not less so; hence “creative accounting”. Likewise, the combination of corporate law and the firm’s charter does not really tell the firm’s managers what choices to make. While the firm’s accountants and lawyers know some of the legal and regulatory limits to the managers’ choices, the managers still act as if they have considerable latitude. Is this no more than a misunderstanding showing their ignorance of the basically rational and fully determined nature of their firm?
Looking at the research published in our journals it seems that most organization theorists are searching for the fully determi- ned (causal) nature of a rationally designed entity we have simply assumed exists – yet a century of this research has produced little
that has impacted managerial practice. Is our
“strategic plan” to pursue another decade of this academic activity – ever more rigo- rous – in the hope that it will finally answer Coase’s questions? Some define stupidity as doing the same thing over and over again when it does not work. Perhaps in some distant future the rigor and relevance debate will have been resolved – but an alternative interpretation is that we are doing the wrong things. Instead of searching for the funda- mental characteristics of an entity we have simply presumed into existence, it might be useful to turn the analysis around and think about management as the creation of the firm as a context of organized individual activity. At first sight this sounds like “go ahead and build your firm using the designs org theorists have provided”; a bit like building an automobile. The classic design is four wheels, front engine, front-wheel steering, real-wheel drive, etc. Once built, managing means driving (and maintaining) the entity. The classic design is bureau- cratic, applying Weber’s ideas and those of the Scientific Management movement around the turn of the 20th Century and, maybe, the reinforcing work of Hammer &
Champy et al. A great deal of organization and management theorizing is about how to modify rational bureaucratic ideas in the pursuit of better performance or competitive advantage – flat, open-sourced, boundary- less, networked, and so on – whatever is the latest “hot thing”. I am not sure such modi- fications bring answers to Coase’s questions any closer.
One of our discipline’s many weaknesses is that we pay insufficient attention to history.
Firms existed long before Weber. Indeed Weber’s PhD showed he also assumed firms existed; his problematic was the incursion
of “rationality” into existing firms, how pre- rationalist “design rules” became increa- singly “rationalized” and “disenchanted”
(Weber, 2003). From this point of view the process Weber pointed towards is far from complete; indeed there are proliferating questions about whether “the firm” can ever be fully rationalized. Not all toilers in our academic groves appreciate this issue splits our research programs into two very different categories. On the one hand are those who presume that, in principle, firms can be fully rationalized, or more speci- fically, that a fully rationalized approach to the design and management of firms is methodologically appropriate and poten- tially useful to real world managers. On the other is a loose community of writers who look to something other than “rationality”
as the core of the firm’s nature or the central principle of the managerial practices of its creation. The second community embraces many of those interested in culture-mana- gement, trust-management, learning-mana- gement, service-management, etc. Note the strength of the first community derives from more than their sheer numbers and their dominance of our journals and the business school curriculum. It also derives from its coherence, methodological and conceptual. Its research methods are abs- tract mathematical tools applicable to every situation; statistics for everyone, neoclassi- cal economics for most.
In contrast the second community is metho- dologically diverse. Cultural anthropolo- gists’ methods differ from political and institutional theorists’, and from historians’
or psychologists’. Many in the first commu- nity think such undisciplined drawing from the natural sciences and the full panoply of social sciences has fragmented our field;
that this “progress” has been counter-pro- ductive, that the “theory police” should be called in, that rigorous modeling is the only true path to organizational understanding.
Note the first community has not yet answe- red Coase’s questions. At the same time it is not clear the second community’s impact on managerial practice has been any greater.
In contrast, management consultants have served managers better; and tools like the Balanced Scorecard (BS) are widely used – maybe by over 50% of all large firms.
The academics’ reaction to this managerial enthusiasm is revealing. They sneer at the Balanced Scorecard because its metrics are wobbly and not validated empirically. Plus there seem to be few theoretical concepts to support the BS itself and no evident calculable objective function. Yet managers find something useful in it despite of these
“weaknesses” – and researchers have yet to identify this usefulness. Interesting also are “event studies” into the relationship between a firm’s adoption of the BS and the resulting performance uptick. The findings are not compelling and suggest managers adopt the BS largely because doing so is
“faddish” – further suggesting managers do not really know what they are doing, one of our discipline’s central conceits and our main reason for researching their doings, claiming our research is “serving the business community”. Against this, we have a huge volume of empirical evidence that, were we to examine it using our own
“scientific methods”, would surely show our claim about our findings’ practical value is poorly supported.
Perhaps we should back away from Coase’s questions and think more about what mana- gers find useful about the Balanced Score- card – and the other popular consulting tools
such as the BCG matrix, scenario analysis, triple bottom line, or Goldratt’s theory of constraints (Goldratt, 1990). Management and organizational theorists seldom men- tion the last though it is widely applauded by managers. The enquiry presents serious methodological challenges for we have to have some kind of answer in mind before we can get the research going – we need a research hypothesis. As noted, hypothe- sizing a relationship between the adoption of one of these tools and performance has been examined and found wanting – which may undercut the value using the normal
“firm performance” metrics as if they were the dependent variables uppermost in mana- gers’ minds. But if measured performance (e.g. declared profit) is not what managers are driving towards, where are they going?
Indeed, indeed. Various possibilities have been proposed – such as maximizing salary or the number of people reporting to them (highly correlated). Paradoxical here is the obviousness of the relationship between the two entities we assume exist – manager and firm – contrasted with our not understanding either enough to “measure” them. Again, our journals show how we conspire to assume all such uncertainties away in the pursuit of our own objective function – publication.
Sarcasm gets us nowhere, of course; we need to step into the situation and take a stand on our role as researchers. Should we be exploring ways in which managers fail to live up to the expectations we have of them, that they will dutifully and rationally analyze what is best for the firm and make decisions accordingly? Or should we move in some different direction – carrying consi- derable professional risks – publication, research grants, colleagues’ opinions, MBA acceptance, etc? Our discipline is highly
institutionalized and professionalized, sur- prisingly more so than the “profession of managing” itself – assuming there is such a profession. But if we are seriously interested in helping managers rather than ourselves, are there any signposts to follow?
Puzzling out the BS’s appeal is one way to go, though I would not want to make too much of it. There are older and more established indications already in our lite- rature. The BS has much in common with the methods being taught MBAs at the Harvard Business School (HBS) in the 1960s. Note my intention is not to “sell”
HBS’s approach, especially given what is being taught there nowadays. Rather I want to call on our discipline’s history to leverage away from our current rationalist discourse. Social, economic and business history is important and is often useful when rationalist scientific methods are not working well. When 1960s students got into HBS’s case rooms they were presented with problem situations that “had no right answers” (Learned et al.,1965). Rather than being challenged to analyze data and arrive at rational solutions, they were presented with data that was under-determining – and challenged to construct their own scenarios and make a compelling case for their views – to the instructor and to the section. The instructor may well have had a solution in mind but if s/he closed off the possibility that an exceptional student might make a convincing case for a novel solution s/he was going to fail as a case teacher – axio- matically, by rejecting the “no right answer”
presumption (Christensen, 1987).
The HBS teachers of the day did not pres- ume managers should be dealing rationally with determinable situations, but rather that managing meant contending with under-
determined situations – and they were edu- cating their students accordingly. Today’s
“big data” and IT-intensive practice only negates this approach if we think that what was under-determined in the 1960s has now become determined, calculable, and fully forecast-able. This is another way of characterizing our discipline’s divide – one the one hand those that hold to rationalism as the managerial ideal, to be delivered by
“big data”, on the other those presuming managers deal with under-determination.
These contrasting views of the human situa- tion go back millennia, of course; indeed we might argue that there would be no phi- losophical problems if we found our world fully determinable.
What is going on here? Our discipline is presently dominated by positivistic methods and principles we call “scientific” – wit- hout looking at the large literature on how natural science actually proceeds. Be that as it may, the positivist approach makes a fundamental and substantial assumption – that the situation is determinable, that we seek the rules (causes) that determine the firm’s nature and behavior. In contrast the crucial characteristic of our discipline’s second community is that they do not make this assumption, or at least in only very limited ways. The problems raised are good reasons to pay close attention to Simon’s notion of “bounded rationality” for he was probably the second community’s most pro- found thinker (Spender, 2013). Two other major authors are highly relevant, and can help the second community say something other than the trivial – “We know human beings are not rational” – trivial in the sense the claim is without content until we posit something positive, a claim about what human beings are. Saying we (and
managers) are “emotional” or “social” or
“believers” or “driven by psychoses” and so on simply puts the question about what these terms mean to the firm, and whether can we develop a sound analysis thereby.
The two authors I have in mind are Carl von Clausewitz and Frank Hyneman Knight.
Their epistemologies and methods have much in common although, as far as I know, Knight never mentioned von Clausewitz in his writings. Knight’s 1921 PhD (Knight, 1965) distinguished risk from “Knightian uncertainty”, the first pointing to situations for which population data existed – such as life expectancy – versus situations in which such statistics were not available – those Rumsfeld labeled the “unk-unks”. Knight argued engagement with uncertainty was the only source of profit and in such situa- tions choice demanded more than rational analysis. Both von Clausewitz and Knight noted a second human capacity – yes, we are rational and can calculate when there are data to be calculated – but we can also deal with situations in which calculation is impossible by exercising our native capacity for judgment. Judgment is an epistemologi- cally complex notion, not at all comfortable for those trained into positivist ways of loo- king at the world. This is ironic, of course, because we exercise judgment constantly as we maneuver through our lives. Our real world choices are constantly exposing us to surprise at their results, sometimes good, often bad, and by definition, no-one’s judg- ment is “perfect”. In the English language tradition the distinction between our capa- cities for judgment and reason goes back at least to John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).
Provided we draw fully on von Clausewitz, Knight, and Simon, our discipline’s non-
positivistic community has all the concepts necessary to proceed on the basis that managers exercise Lockean judgment as well as Cartesian rationality. The HBS case situation challenges the student to project her or his own judgment into what is known of an incompletely known situa- tion, uncertain in that it hides no optimal answer that rational analysis can reveal.
The implication is that the firm is less a rationally designed apparatus to achieve known goals – the bureaucratic presump- tion – than a social and economic context in which people apply their judgment and choose actions that strike them as “appro- priate” rather than validated or proven.
This judging process can be illuminated – though not defined – by looking at the Balanced Scorecard as a description of the firm as a particular context, a framing of the historically contingent space into which the managers’ judgment must be “thrown”
for considered action to result. There is an allusion to Heidegger and his notion of Dasein here, the active construction of self as we “inhabit” a real world context.
The Balanced Scorecard’s four dimensions suggest some subjective level of satisfac- tion or dissatisfaction with this inhabiting.
Instead of contrasting a “score” against some ideal, the BS’s metrics are inherently subjective – for those inhabiting this parti- cular firm, does this or that dimension indi- cate a problem that demands action? The
“balanced” bit being that if some action is implied then the resulting interactions and consequences must be evaluated, for while the BS’s dimensions are each very dif- ferent we know that “the firm” means there are powerful interconnections. Spending money on “learning and development” pro- bably impacts the firm’s “processes” – but
the managers will not know this precisely because what they know of the firm cannot be laid out as a rigorous “business model”.
Here the Balanced Scorecard helps mana- gers explicate their business model.
As we look at the other consulting tools developed since WW2 – SWOT, BCG matrix, scenario planning, and so on – we see each offers a framework or “language”
managers can use to sketch their firm as a
“business model” (BM) (Spender, 2014a).
Unfortunately the current BM literature got off on the wrong foot by presuming the firm was a bureaucracy, grounding the ana- lysis into our first community’s methods.
Writers then tried to leverage away from simple rationality without collapsing the analysis into circular wordplay. For the most part the BM literature is mix of tau- tology and our discipline’s claims to know the firm’s characteristics better than the firm’s own managers – in spite of Coase’s questions being unanswered. The metho- dological shift above – into the language of our second community – foregrounds what neither academic theorists nor the firm’s managers know. This a rhetorical device to prioritize the judgment managers “throw”
into the firm as they bring it into being, over the judgments of academics theorizing the firm as already existing. These managers’
actions define the nature of executive res- ponsibility – judgments and actions well articulated in Barnard’s work (Barnard, 1938). Academics have no such responsibi- lity, nor are they held accountable. Consul- tants occupy a middle ground, having the power to shape managers’ choices without being held accountable for their outcomes – beyond risking their repeat contracts.
Overall the point of this rumination is to sketch the territory I address in my seminar
on “Managerial judgment” and how one might try to think about it in a relatively structured way, given that our positivist background and inclinations do not help at all, indeed often blind us. The arc of the story is pretty straightforward. The Balanced Scorecard and similar can be seen as tools for framing the contexts or
“opportunity spaces” into which manage- rial judgment must be thrown if the firm is to come into existence – it sketches the entrepreneur’s vision or what Normann cal- led “the business idea” (Normann, 1977).
The entrepreneur has to craft a space in the boundless uncertainty in which we are immersed. But this alone cannot lead to a workable analysis. We do no more than imply we answer each of Coase’s questions with “the business idea” – and since we cannot “explain” how this is generated we are no further ahead. To the contrary, the business idea can only be explained in a non-positivistic way, inferred from a des- cription of the opportunity space into which human judgment is projected to produce it.
My approach is less weird than it might seem for it is what historians do all the time – such and such a situation arose and so and so did X, thereby revealing who they really were – the historian’s target. It is rela- tively easy to see how a situation of supply, demand, and profit possibility might occur and that a firm might arise as a result of an entrepreneurial idea about to engage the situation. But a firm is always much more than its foundational “idea”, it is a concept or idea articulated into a relatively coherent pattern of practices. Firms only exist as managed practices. Some of these can be understood as “mechanical” or bureaucra- tic designed; but even they are ultimately determined by and subordinated to judg-
ment rather than analysis. The story of an entrepreneur’s idea opens into a richer and more complicated story about how it was transformed into an enterprise by drawing in the judgments of others – employees, investors, and customers. While the solitary entrepreneur might be able to achieve goals and profit without help from others this description allows no space for the concept of managing. More interesting is when the entrepreneur, being of bounded judgment, is obliged to engage imaginative others to bring the firm into existence. Together they generate the practices that actualize the business idea – so a firm differs from a solitary entrepreneur.
Today’s entrepreneurship literature contrasts the tradition of Richard Cantillon against that of Jean-Baptiste Say, the former focused on an arbitrage opportunity – spot- ting a promising deal, as any individual might – the latter on building a firm to arti- culate a business idea into a business model and thence into a going concern. The Say- ian entrepreneur works through people, not economic resources, and constructs a firm by communicating her/his “vision” in ways that then shape their behavior – “leader- ship” as Barnard understood it. But given Knightian uncertainty this process must go beyond the communications considered by our first community; instruction, accounta- bility, signaling, incentives, modeling, and so on. This is adequate when the leader is managing others’ rationality, presuming their self-interest. But under Knightian uncertainty the managed firm arises as an apparatus for engaging uncertainty by harnessing others’ judgment to the business idea in the pursuit of profit; nothing at all like a bureaucratic apparatus for rationally achieving known goals. Managing imagi-
native collaboration under uncertainty is tricky because another’s” judgment cannot be instructed – the topic of principal-agent theory (often mis-labeled “agency theory”
though quite different (Foss and Stea, 2014;
Spender, 2011)). Fortunately we have mil- lennia of academic work on this particular human situation – the use of language and the art of persuasion, which is rhetoric (Conley, 1990).
To conclude, if we step beyond the first community’s presumptions about firms as objects existing we see them as constructed and managed social contexts in which judg- ment is applied collaboratively in situations of Knightian uncertainty; the result being profit far great than the sole entrepreneur can garner. Uncertainty lets entrepreneurs identify and engage the opportunity spaces into which their judgment is thrown. The result is the business idea. Firms arise as entrepreneurs reach out to others for sup- porting judgments because, as with “boun- ded rationality”, real entrepreneurs have
“bounded judgment”. The firm indicates a
context of coordinated practice wherein a
“division of judgment” complements the
“division of labor”. Managers coordinate others’ judgments using well-understood rhetorical methods that lead to what some label “alignment”. The firm is “managed”
into existence, so this is a “theory of the managed firm” (TMF) (Spender, 2014b).
Coase’s intuitions about his own answers to his “killer questions” suggest he saw the firm’s nature as tied up with its mode of subordinating its employees to its managers’
intentions. The firm, he suggested, is not a rational mechanism, rather it is a socio- economic context of subordination marked by the supersession of the price mechanism – which implies, of course, abandoning any analysis based on a rationalist theory of incentives, such as Jensen and Meckling suggested. Thereby Coase intuited an extre- mely sensitive fifth question we must also address – Why would enfranchised citizens allow themselves to be subjugated into firms? – the very question posed in Whyte’s Organization Man (Whyte, 1956).
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Barnard C.I. (1938). The Functions of the Executive, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.
Christensen C.R. (1987). “Teaching with Cases at the Harvard Business School”, Teaching and the Case Method, C.R. Christensen (Ed.), Boston MA, Harvard Business School Press, p. 16-49.
Coase R.H. (1937). “The Nature of the Firm”, Economica N.S., vol. 4, n° 16, p. 386-405.
Conley T.M. (1990). Rhetoric in the European Tradition, Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press.
Foss, N.J., Stea D. (2014). “Putting a Realistic Theory of Mind into Agency theory:
Implications for Reward Design and Management in Principal-Agent Relations”, European Management Review, early view, p. 1-16.
Goldratt E.M. (1990). What is this thing called Theory of Constraints and how should it be implemented?, Great Barrington MA, North River Press.
Knight F.H. (1965). Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, New York, Harper & Row.
Learned E.P., Christensen R., Andrews K., Guth W. (1965). Business Policy: Text and Cases, Homewood IL, Richard D. Irwin.
Normann R. (1977). Management for Growth, New York, John Wiley & Sons.
Spender J.-C. (2014a). Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Spender J.-C. (2014b). “Management’s Role in the Theory of the Managed Firm (TMF)”, Kindai Management Review, 2, p. 28-45.
Spender J.-C. (2013). “Herbert Alexander Simon: Philosopher of the Organizational Life- World”, Oxford Handbook of Management Thinkers, M. Witzel and M. Warner (Eds.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 297-357.
Spender J.-C. (2011). “Human Capital and Agency Theory”, The Oxford Handbook of Human Capital, A. Burton-Jones and J.-C. Spender (Eds.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 186-217.
Weber M. (2003). The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages (Lutz Kaelber, Trans.), Lanham MD, Rowan & Littlefield.
Whyte W.H. (1956). The Organization Man, New York, Doubleday & Co.
Williamson O.E., Winter S.G. (Eds.) (1991). The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development, New York, Oxford University Press.
C’est une bouffée d’air frais que nous propose JC Spender. Après une carrière académique intense, il se consacre à un exercice salutaire et bienvenu, celui de revisiter des questions fondamentales du management des entreprises. Et, ce faisant, il nous rappelle certaines voies sans issues, des pistes prometteuses mais inabouties, des contributions qui peuvent apporter un éclairage utile. Et surtout, il nous propose sa vision, en construisant un raisonnement argumenté.
Bien sûr, ce faisant, il prend parti. Il convoque la littérature pour écarter ce qui lui paraît de peu d’intérêt. Il affiche ses convictions, ses préférences, ses intuitions et ses doutes. En ce sens, cet écrit est tout à fait à part. JC Spender rumine et revisite.
Il le fait librement, en y mettant beaucoup de lui-même et en mobilisant le meilleur de ce qu’il a digéré de décennies de lecture assidue de la littérature.
L’auteur nous propose un texte court, dense et riche, et je salue l’initiative du nouvel éditeur de RFG, Jean-Philippe Denis, de le publier en anglais car le traduire en français
lui aurait fait perdre beaucoup de sa saveur.
Nous revendiquons tous d’écrire les plus ambitieux de nos textes dans notre propre langue. Les subtilités que JC Spender aborde ici méritent d’être proposées dans sa langue maternelle – qu’il écrit remar- quablement1. Mes commentaires seront en français pour les mêmes raisons. Et c’est très bien ainsi car ce septuagénaire sportif, britannique vivant à New York et en même temps résolument européen, lit et comprend le français.
Suivons-le dans son exercice et décryptons le cheminement de sa pensée.
Fondamentalement, JC Spender pose la question de ce que signifie entreprendre, gérer ou manager, ce qui l’amène à s’inter- roger sur ce qu’est l’entreprise2. Dans un premier temps, il s’efforce de déconstruire la vision purement rationnelle de l’organi- sation, dénonçant l’image très imparfaite de la bureaucratie organisationnelle proposée par les Weber et consorts. Les efforts ulté- rieurs d’aménagement de cette vision ne sont, pour lui, rien d’autre que des patchs infructueux. En d’autres termes il n’accepte
1. Le lecteur francophone, habitué aux propositions subordonnées introduites par des « que » ou « qui » ou encore des virgules, pourra souhaiter insérer mentalement ici ou là un « that » ou une virgule au sein de certaines des phrases de J.C. Spender pour s’en clarifier le sens. C’est que la langue anglaise manie cette « signalétique » grammaticale avec plus de parcimonie que le français, au risque de perdre certains lecteurs.
2. Notons que son texte est centré sur l’entreprise en quête de profit. Toutefois mon sentiment est qu’il serait poten- tiellement tout autant intéressé par d’autres formes d’organisations mais qu’il cherche ici à simplifier son objet en le délimitant fortement pour faciliter son propos.
COMMENTAIRES DU POINT DE VUE
PAR
THOMAS DURAND
pas l’idée du manager analytique prenant des décisions rationnelles fondées sur une représentation modélisée de l’entreprise et de son environnement. Par ailleurs, il écarte rapidement la vision du comptable comme celle du juriste, en soulignant que les appa- reils comptables et légaux cadrent le mana- gement, l’assistent et le contraignent, mais ne disent rien sur l’exercice consistant à manager.
JC Spender mobilise Ronald Coase pour rappeler les interrogations fondamentales posées dès les années 1930 autour du pour- quoi l’existence de la firme dans des éco- nomies de marché, pourquoi ses frontières, pourquoi ses arrangements organisationnels internes ; et pourquoi de tels écarts de per- formance entre firmes. En ne retenant que les questions de Coase et en passant sous silence la théorie des coûts de transaction à la Williamson, il rejette implicitement cette théorie, mais sans s’en expliquer vraiment.
Une fois écarté le primat de la rationalité sur le tryptique initial « management-entre- prise-décision », il pose légitimement la question d’une alternative. Il campe alors un décor binaire, un peu dichotomique mais très pédagogique, avec deux communau- tés. La première, dominante, assez soudée et raisonnablement homogène car centrée sur des modèles et méthodes partagés, correspond aux penseurs positivistes, qui, à l’image des sciences dures, aspirent à découvrir l’équivalent de lois fondamen- tales régissant le monde des entreprises.
La seconde est une communauté plus hété- roclite mobilisant des concepts plus mous, moins aisément mobilisables dans des
modèles quantifiables, comme la culture, la confiance, l’apprentissage organisationnel, etc. Cette seconde communauté n’hésite pas à questionner l’idéal type d’une fonc- tion-objectif unique et claire pour le mana- gement (le profit) pour aller voir ailleurs (sa propre rémunération, son pouvoir, etc.).
On sent immédiatement que c’est vers cette seconde communauté que pencherait le cœur de l’auteur. Pourtant, s’il dénonce la rigueur méthodologique de la première communauté, à ses yeux stérilisante car ina- daptée, c’est pour reconnaître aussitôt que les travaux produits par la seconde com- munauté n’ont pas non plus été d’un grand secours pour les managers praticiens3. Et il rend alors un hommage implicite aux consultants qui, eux, parviennent, selon lui, à mobiliser des outils et des recettes dans lesquels les managers se retrouvent – ce qui n’est pas rien. S’il n’utilise pas le mot
« heuristiques », on voit bien que c’est de cela qu’il s’agit. JC Spender en profite pour égratigner au passage le monde de la recherche en management, auquel il appar- tient évidemment, lui reprochant d’avoir été très efficace à se doter d’une fonction- objectif pourtant discutable, en l’espèce, la publication, alors même que ces mêmes chercheurs peinent à comprendre les fonc- tions-objectifs des managers.
Mais ce n’est pas des consultants que vient l’ouverture que nous propose JC Spender.
Il va chercher à une autre source, celle de la business school de Harvard des années 1960, quand les cas étaient destinés à mettre les étudiants face à des situations sous-déterminées, donc irréductibles à des
3. Notons qu’en cela, JC Spender considère que le champ du management vise à éclairer l’action des managers.
On pourrait utilement élargir cette ambition à toutes les parties prenantes (salariés, actionnaires, syndicats, élus, citoyens, etc.).
approches calculatoires. C’est là un thème cher à JC Spender : pour lui, seule l’incer- titude knightienne peut laisser espérer des sources de profit car l’incertitude probabi- lisable amènera inévitablement les acteurs aux mêmes calculs et aux mêmes conclu- sions, détruisant ipso facto les possibilités d’avantage concurrentiel et donc de rente.
Pour faire face à ces situations de sous- détermination, ne reste plus alors que la capacité de jugement. Il y a dans cette capacité de jugement un cocktail étrange fait pour partie d’analyse documen- tée, pour partie d’expérience, pour partie d’empirisme, pour partie d’intuition dont l’origine reste énigmatique4. JC Spender convoque non seulement Knight, mais aussi Clausewitz et Locke pour le jugement face à l’incertitude et évoque le « Dasein » de Heidegger pour l’inscription du soi dans un contexte. Par analogie, il suggère qu’une idée de business qui émerge dans la tête d’un entrepreneur sera portée par sa capa- cité de jugement autour de l’inscription de l’idée dans un contexte d’affaires. Mais, et ce point est clé, il souligne que l’entre- preneur, s’il reste seul, n’est pas manager d’entreprise. Il lui faut mobiliser des colla- borateurs pour passer de l’idée de business à l’entreprise. C’est dans cette capacité à embarquer des tiers que s’affirme le mana- ger qui entreprend.
Je définis pour ma part le management comme le pilotage de l’action collective organisée. JC Spender est sur la même lon- gueur d’onde lorsqu’il conçoit l’entreprise comme « un contexte organisé pour les activités d’individus ». Il lui arrive d’ailleurs de définir le management comme « harnes-
sing collaborators’ agency », ce que Jean- Marie Barbier, mon collègue du Cnam, décrit comme « engager l’activité d’autrui dans un cadre », ce que je reformule par
« mobiliser la pro-activité de collaborateurs au service d’un projet ». JC Spender nous dit explicitement que l’entrepreneur-manager va non seulement répartir les tâches entre les collaborateurs mais va aussi mobiliser leur capacité de jugement car sa propre capacité de jugement est inévitablement limitée.
Mais pour embarquer des collaborateurs dans l’aventure, il faut parvenir à les attirer.
JC Spender aborde alors un autre thème qui lui est cher, celui des capacités rhéto- riques du manager-leader. Autant Barnard a bien décrit les tâches du leader, autant JC Spender regrette de constater que les cursus universitaires ont progressivement abandonné la formation à la rhétorique.
Implicitement JC Spender suggère que miser sur la seule logique de l’intérêt des collaborateurs (par exemple par l’incita- tion financière) n’est bon que pour la pre- mière communauté. Il termine d’ailleurs son texte par une cinquième question à ajouter aux quatre interrogations de Coase : comment se fait-il que des personnes libres en droit dans nos sociétés démocratiques choisissent délibérément d’entrer dans un lien de subordination au sein d’entreprises- hiérarchies, sous des managers. Il y a là pour lui une énigme. Peut-être est-ce que :
« il n’y aurait pas de leaders, s’il n’y avait des suiveurs ». En tout cas, il en appelle à une réhabilitation de la rhétorique comme moyen d’embarquer les acteurs et donc comme exigence pour l’entrepreneur-mana- ger qui a besoin d’être leader.
4. Une contribution que je recommande sur ce sujet est celle de Duggan (2007).
Au total, la construction argumentaire est lumineuse. (Elle est représentée schémati- quement figure 1 pour visualiser le chemi- nement) :
Rejetant la seule logique rationnelle du trytique « management-entreprise-déci- sion », JC Spender regrette de ne pas trou- ver de point d’appui satisfaisant dans la seconde communauté de chercheurs qui tentent de penser l’entreprise et le mana- gement hors du positivisme et de la rigueur imposée par l’hypothético-déductif et les méthodologies statistiques. Il mobilise alors trois ingrédients :
1) l’entreprise comme un contexte organisé pour l’activité de personnes ;
2) le caractère irréductiblement sous-déter- miné des situations d’entrepreneuriat et de management ;
3) la vision du fait d’entreprendre comme une idée de business mise en contexte et
évaluée par la capacité de jugement de l’entrepreneur.
Ainsi, l’entreprise émerge de l’idée de busi- ness de l’entrepreneur et de sa capacité à embarquer des collaborateurs, avec leur force de travail, leur talent et donc leur propre capacité de jugement. Ceci fait appel à des capacités de leadership, dont des capa- cités rhétoriques qui permettent d’attirer, de mobiliser, de donner envie. Puis il lui faut développer et gérer, en un mot, manager.
D’où l’entreprise ; d’où le management.
Quelques commentaires pour conclure : – Le texte publié ici est en fait une sorte de synthèse d’un ouvrage que JC Spender vient de publier et qui pourra combler ceux que cette version ultra-courte aura intéres- sés (Spender, 2014).
– Ce propos de JC Spender alimente et vient étayer une partie des réflexions que nous conduisons avec Stéphanie Dameron
Figure 1 – Représentation de la construction argumentaire
sur l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche en management et donc sur les business schools (Dameron et Durand, 2011 ; Durand et Dameron, 2008). Car c’est toute la question de l’enseignement du manage- ment qui est fondamentalement reposée ici.
D’ailleurs, la question de la rhétorique est un thème souvent abordé au sein de la SFM (Société française de management).
– La conceptualisation du management que nous propose ainsi JC Spender mobilise une vision simplifiée de l’entreprise, réduite à un entrepreneur suffisamment leader pour avoir embarqué des collaborateurs à bord avec lui, puis suffisamment manager pour les animer. Or la grande entreprise est constituée de sous-parties conduites par des managers qui doivent eux aussi adopter une posture d’entrepreneurs internes (ou d’in- trapreneurs) pour renouveler les activités qui leur sont confiées. À ce titre, la concep- tualisation proposée par JC Spender méri- terait d’être complétée pour traiter des inte- ractions entre managers, entendus comme des pairs, car les conversations stratégiques, les capacités rhétoriques, les capacités de leadership s’expriment aussi transversa-
lement aux unités d’affaires (BU) et aux divisions des grands groupes, mais aussi dans le dialogue avec les grandes fonctions centrales. En cela, le construit que nous propose JC Spender peut être considéré comme une brique élémentaire qui traite de l’unité d’affaire mais qui appellera d’autres briques pour traiter des autres formes de management dans la grande organisation multidivisionnelle.
– JC Spender est ingénieur de formation et souligne combien notre éducation nous a pétri de réflexes positivistes : la rationalité et l’analyse ne me semblent pas exclues de la vision développée ici mais ne sont plus qu’une dimension explicative parmi d’autres de la complexité de l’objet que constituent l’entreprise, l’entreprendre et le management.
– J’aime les questions fondamentales qu’aborde JC Spender, celles qui motivent une vie de chercheur. Au fond, la recherche peut être vécue comme une sorte de hobby… professionnel. C’est un peu mon cas. Et JC Spender, qui poursuit son che- min intellectuel sans vraiment prendre de retraite, me semble être sur cette posture.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Dameron S. et Durand Th. (2011). Redesigning Management Education and Research – Challenging Proposals from European Scholars, (Eds), Edward Elgar publishers.
Duggan W. (2007). Strategic Intuition – The creative spark in human achievement, Columbia Business School Publishing.
Durand Th. et Dameron S. (2011). “Where have all the Business Schools gone?”, British Journal of Management, September.
Durand Th. et Dameron S. (2008). The future of Business Schools: Scenarios and strategies for 2020, (Eds.) Palgrave Macmillan.
Spender JC (2014). Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, & Enterprises, Oxford Universiy Press.
