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管理学大师德鲁克怀疑资本主义

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管理学大师德鲁克怀疑资本主义

武夷山

英国Strathclyde大学的市场学系教授Michael Thomas（1933－2010）在“Management: a profession in theory（管理：一门理论上的职业）”一文（发表于Management Decision， 2006，44卷3期：309－315）中说：

德鲁克晚年对资本主义不满，不满其犒赏贪婪而不是犒赏绩效，不满经理层与工人之间的差距不断增大，高管猛赚，工人猛被解聘。他说，“这在道德上和社会上都是不可原谅的……虽然我笃信自由市场，但是我对资本主义严重怀疑”。

博主：德鲁克没有在自由市场和资本主义之间划等号。而在我们这里，将二者划等号的人可不少。

该文全文如下（http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=0025-1747&volume=44&issue=3&articleid=1550187&show=html&PHPSESSID=ftk3mirs2i6mec4j1eckansks0）：

Management: a profession in theory

The Authors

Michael Thomas, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK

Acknowledgements

Note from the publisher: In November 2005, the world lost one of its greatest management thinkers when Peter Drucker sadly passed away. In this invited article, Professor Michael Thomas pays tribute to the father of modern management, He reflects on Drucker's feelings of disenchantment with late twentieth century capitalism and draws radical conclusions about the role of “management” in society.

Abstract

Purpose – Seeks to explore the responsibilities of the major players in the market-driven, globally orientated, capitalist system. Should managers and management educators be concerned with the way the system works? If the great guru of management thinking, Peter Drucker, raised fundamental questions about equity and management responsibility, then surely they must. This viewpoint challenges managers to think about their role as social trustees for a just society.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper explores the author's thinking about the problem

Findings – Concludes that managers and management educators should consider their social and cultural role as “citizen professionals”, and the responsibilities that that term implies. Instead of talking vaguely about paradigm shifts, they should rethink the future in the context of the all too evident “discontinuity” (Drucker) and “disruption” (Fukuyama) that characterise capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and beware of “epistemopathology” (Thomas) of those times.

Practical implications – The paper provides insights into a new conceptual framework for management in these times.

Originality/value – Draws radical conclusions about the role of “management” in society.

Article Type:

Viewpoint

Keyword(s):

Managers; Society; Culture (sociology); Change management.

Journal:

Management Decision

Volume:

Number:

Year:

2006

pp:

309-315

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

ISSN:

0025-1747

Peter Drucker, born in Vienna in 1909, died in California on 11 November 2005, aged 95 years. Jack Welch, former Chairman of General Electric Corporation, said “The world knows he was the greatest management thinker of the last century”. Tom Peters said, “He was the creator and inventor of modern management”. In his 1954 book The Practice of Management (Drucker, 1954), he put marketers in the driving seat by telling business to focus on the customer, on satisfying customer needs, and understanding the nature of competitive advantage. “There is no business without a customer”. Management was a profession, serving its client groups as doctors serve their patients. He wrote 38 books over his long and productive life, and most certainly influenced my generation of management educators.

Less well known is his criticism of the very system that he had analysed and promoted. Drucker became disenchanted with late twentieth century capitalism (Drucker, 1999, 2002), with its willingness to reward greed rather than performance, with the growing gap between management and workers, senior managers reaping fortunes as they fired thousands of workers. “This is morally and socially unforgivable […] Although I believe in free markets, I have serious doubts about capitalism” (Business Week, p. 102).

In this paper I have exercised my mind in respect of matters that must exercise the minds of all management professionals, and especially management educators. Educators must speculate continuously about how management can be made to function more effectively and more efficiently. That requires us to think about the system in which management functions, namely market-driven capitalism.

I have been thinking a lot about the world after 9/11. I have been thinking about Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and how we might be shafted. I have been embracing eschatology, and thinking about paradise, being scatological and observing paradox. In other words, I worry a lot about what comes next. We are in the midst of what Francis Fukuyama has called the Great Disruption (Fukuyama, 2000). Globalisation made possible by technology, worldwide systems of monetary exchange, trade and marketing. Information technology places space-time-place relations in great flux – we have yet to grasp the scope of this disruption. The Marxist view of paradise is totally discredited, we observe a world in thrall to market capitalism, but my fear is that we are all the sightless psychopaths of market forces (Ascherson, 1999). People, places, states and phenomena are all potentially interrelated and interdependent. We know that consumer choice is influenced by cultural values and lifestyles, and that in the current dialogue, consumer choice is equated with human freedom. But, especially since 9/11 and 7/7 (the terrorist attacks on London), a dark cloud hangs over the world. It is the fundamentalist, radical challenge to the system dominated by market-driven capitalism. It represents a challenge to progress, to the very values upon which our economic world is built. This suggests to me at least three questions that need to be explored:

1. Consumer freedom of choice is a cornerstone of the marketing philosophy upon which our empires are built. Is this concept a dishonest invention of marketers, a device merely for justifying our manipulations?

2. Is freedom compatible with wellbeing?

3. Who has choice?

Consumer freedom. Probably less than one-fifth of the world's population has real discretionary income. The Pareto principle rules – 20 per cent of the world's population controls 80 per cent of the world's wealth. How can the notions of consumer choice be compatible with human well-being, environmental sustainability, indeed with survival itself?

If we are to navigate the future, we need to understand the development and effects of globalisation. The agenda is a long one:

1. Economies and economic:

industrialisation, de-industrialisation, post-industrialisation;
the role of international institutions (WTO, World Bank); and
scale and its effects.

1. Politics and political economy:

tyranny, despotism, enlightenment; and
the establishment, support and nurturing of democratic structures.

1. Culture:

the viability of local culture, and ethnic/religious tradition; and
globalisation portends the homogenisation of systems of meaning, of life styles.

1. Social institutions:

from the village to the global village;
from the manor born to the global city; and
from central government paternalism to rampant individualism.

The push towards globalisation and the accompanying decline of the nation state leads to fundamental questions about the future of citizenship, and of relations between:

citizens;
consumers;
customers and their suppliers;
clients; and
citizen professionals.

We will argue that the management profession, most particularly in its academic guise, suffers from “epistemopathology”.

Epistemopathology is diseased, sick, and bad knowledge that is mechanically applied to contemporary (global) market systems, in self-serving ways, to identify and solve immediate problems, problems which are not well understood and without any consideration of ripple effects on society as a whole. Lindbloom (1990) calls this tendency “impairment”; Senge (1994) calls it “organisational learning disability”.

We live in a global world, a world fashioned by the machine, the factory, the assembly line, and in increasingly sophisticated information systems operating in and networking large-scale bureaucratic organisations. We have been trained and educated in industrialised, bureaucratised schools, colleges and universities. Our profession is an instrument of market-driven, industrialised, bureaucratic society. We are steeped, indeed brainwashed, in mechanical, market-driven professionalism. Our watchwords are planning, organising, motivating, controlling, stability, conformity, predictability, regulation.

The post-modernists are threatening that world. Ambiguity, complexity, and chaos threaten our cosy self-defined world. Future shock and paradigm shifts are in post-reality, the world we now inhabit.

In this paper I am going to concentrate on citizen professionals, partly because I am a fully paid-up member of the class (a Chartered Marketer, and past President of the Market Research Society), partly because I am interested in the role of the professions in our society. Another set of questions:

Do citizen-professionals really demonstrate social responsibility?
If consumer freedom of choice epitomises the dichotomy between the citizen professional and the private citizen, can interdependency be re-established?
Can democracy, citizenship and socially responsible professionalism be made the hallmarks of the twenty-first century?
Today, mechanical, market driven professionalism prevails – social trusteeship has been compromised. Epistemopathology or organisational learning disability?
Can we invent social trusteeship in our profession? Can mutual empowerment and constituent practice theory help?
How do you educate citizen professionals? Can they contribute to the transformation of the sightless psychopath?

Implicit in the questions is a contrast between what I will call mechanical, market-driven professionalism, and social trustee, civic professionalism. The remainder of this paper will dwell on these two definitions, since the author's contention is that the management profession must redefine itself in its social trustee role if it is to survive.

We want to propose that in the era of globalisation, social trustee civic professionalism must rule. Narrow self-interest must no longer characterise our professionalism. Citizen professionals must minister to the needs and wants of other citizens. We must not pretend, as we have, that we regard the needs and wants of consumers as the grist for our mill, for the needs and wants of some customers cannot be equated with the needs and wants of our citizens.

We envision paradise as a globally networked society, dedicated to promoting social welfare, with citizen professionals dedicated to sustainable, integrated, equitable, social and economic development. Citizen professionals will promote democracy and insure social responsibility. In other words, instead of being self-serving, method-bound, narrowly focused profession members, we will become social trustees of the common good. We will have a clear, comprehensive vision of the good and just society and its place in the world order. We will abandon our pretences about value-neutrality and objectivity (our inheritance from the philosophy of science) and focus on ethical-moral, social responsibility as it confronts the citizens of global, cosmopolitan democracies.

The most powerful criticism is directed at the changed role of global corporations. “Corporations are much more than the purveyors of the products we all want; they are also the most powerful political forces of our time, the driving forces behind bodies such as the World Trade Organisation” (Klein, 2000).

Figure 1 provides a model for understanding civic professionalism in its social trustee dimension. This model may help us to explore a new approach to the role of marketing in civil society.

What is it that we need to do to become more professional? As a profession we have an unparalleled opportunity. We must demonstrate by our professionalism that we are crucial to the survival both of the organisations we claim to serve, and to society in general.

Let me highlight the differences between mechanical, market-driven professionalism and social-trustee, civic professionalism. I will endeavour to do this with a set of pair-wise comparisons, shown in Table I.

Management as a culture means that management professionals have a critical role to play as advocates for customers and for the value system that puts the customer first. The customer is not defined as only the ultimate purchaser – the concept of internal and external marketing defines the customer as any downstream contact. Marketing relationships are becoming much more complex, and mutual dependency relationships, strategic alliances and network organisations require insights well beyond those traditionally associated with the marketing function, namely the management of promotion and distribution, the management of the sales force, and some opportunities to influence pricing and product policy. The new insights will derive from such diverse disciplines as political economy, organisation psychology and cultural anthropology to name but three.

The most important asset a business has is its ongoing relationships with its global customers. Management professionals have a legitimate claim to a profound understanding of the development and nurturing of those relationships. Though increasingly it is claimed that everyone in the corporation must be charged with this responsibility, understanding it and interpreting it should be the domain of the management professional.

The management profession has a powerful rhetoric. We do not lack ideological materials. It is more than a set of techniques for the management of external markets. Our flexible ideology, our disposition to accept change as the inevitable consequence of the interplay of market forces would, however, be hijacked by others, for quite different purposes.

We must improve our reputation as knowledge generators, through strategic linkages and alliances with leading-edge knowledge generators. We must demonstrate, perhaps by benchmarking, that the most successful companies are those that are truly market driven and responsible global citizens.

More urgently perhaps, we must recognise that in addition to high standards of objectivity, integrity and technical competence, we must, in responding to the changing environment, demonstrate that we can and will serve society in general. This requires clear and articulate demonstration of our ability to be relevant in the political sense. Accountants have been successful in part because they have been so obviously servants of Anglo-American capitalism, with its historical focus on finance. Though this is not the correct forum to discuss this, we could develop an argument that this historic focus has served us poorly in competition with the Japanese. In the global economy, and in the face of the competitive forces within it, it is the company and the country that delivers value to the market place that will survive. If we remain tied to the forces of manipulation and hype, if we are seen merely to be the servants of our capitalist masters, we will remain marginal and untrustworthy. If we can demonstrate that we have the keys to the knowledge base that will benefit society as a whole then we may prosper.

Figure 1Mutual determination with social trustee, civic professionalism

Table I

References

Ascherson, N. (1999), "The indispensable Englishman", New Statesman, Vol. 29 pp.26.

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Drucker, P. (1954), The Practice of Management, HarperCollins, New York, NY, .

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Drucker, P. (1999), Management Challenges in the 21st Century, HarperCollins, New York, NY, .

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Drucker, P. (2002), Managing in the Next Century, St Martin's Press, New York, NY, .

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Fukuyama, F. (2000), The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, Profile Books, London, .