Philosophy of Management Between Scientism and Technology

Philosophy of Management Between Scientism and Technology Enrico Beltramini Philosophy & Technology ISSN 2210-5433 Philos. Technol. DOI 10.1007/s13347-018-0314-6 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Philos. Technol. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0314-6 R E S E A R C H A RT I C L E Philosophy of Management Between Scientism and Technology Enrico Beltramini 1 Received: 21 December 2017 / Accepted: 9 April 2018 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract This article addresses the difficulty in pursuing a philosophical engagement with management without falling into the trap of scientism. It also explores the option to turn management theorists away from science to seek insights from technology. The article is organized in four parts: a preliminary discussion on management from a philosophical viewpoint, a crucial distinction between philosophy of management as a mode of inquiry and a field of study, an analysis of the risk of scientism in the current philosophical work on management, and an initial inspection across the waters separating management and philosophy of technology. Keywords Philosophy . Management . Scientism . Technology 1 Introduction While there is increasing consent on a clearly identifiable philosophy of management, questions emerge in this article about the nature of such philosophical work. Although most scholars agree that a philosophy of management marks the transition from a theoretical conception to a philosophical foundation of management, the extent of this transition is under scrutiny (i.e., Fontrodona and Mele 2002; Griseri 2011). Philosophy of management sounds sober and respectable and creates the horizon of reception from a variety of different schools and traditions of philosophy. Today, philosophy of management is mostly seen as the philosophical counterpart of management science (i.e., Thomas 2010; Darwin 2010). At the same time, the relationship between management science and technology turns on its head, moving from an instrumental understanding of technology to an unstoppable technological advancement fueled by scientific research. * Enrico Beltramini [email protected] 1 Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, CA, USA Author's personal copy E. Beltramini The problem this paper addresses centers on the identification of the proper approach and home of philosophy of management. To put differently, this paper addresses the Bmeta-theoretical question,^ namely the topic of the disciplinary nature and status of philosophy of management. As an academic field, philosophy of management is part of an internal history of the intellectual orientations within the discipline of management. Accordingly, this article focuses on the philosophical scholarship within the recent intellectual history of management discourse. The intellectual history of management is a decidedly minority discourse. The ideas are central to the intellectual history of management, but the discourses in which they are examined are marginal to the central disciplinary orientation of the field of management itself. When mainstream management scholars discuss their discipline, they do so in terms that might be regarded as much more Bnuts and bolts^ than those theoretical, philosophical, and conceptual ones considered here. With this limitation in mind, this study advances three claims. First, philosophy of management is an approach, a mode of inquiry, not a subfield. Second, most of the philosophical work on management is at risk of scientism. Third, philosophy of management should be considered a subfield of philosophy of technology. This is a four-part paper. I show the relevance of a proper philosophical work on management, I trace the three main trajectories of philosophy of management, I discuss the risk of scientism, and I propose a locus philosophicus for management in philosophy of technology. Methodologically, this paper is an internalist history of the idea of a philosophically informed management. A brief note on the terms used in this article: Bmanagerial reasoning^ stands for the entire self-reflective management enterprise, including critical thought, paradigms, theories, and philosophy; Bintellectual history^ is the historical articulation of Bmanagerial reasoning;^ Bcritical thought^ is continental and critical theory; Bmanagement paradigms^ are the managerial schools of thoughts; Bmanagement theories^ are frameworks; Bphilosophy of management^ is the work of philosophically oriented intellectual management scholars. 2 Management In the course of the twentieth century, many illustrious political philosophers have addressed the notion of administration, or management. Among the most notable are Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Erich Peterson, Ernst Kantorowicz, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben. Most have connected the notion of administration to that of government. Working mostly from the classic philosophy of Greek politics and the medieval treatises of Scholasticism, these célèbre thinkers have articulated a story that can be summarized as follows: political theology, which founds the transcendence of sovereign power on the single God, inspires political philosophy and the modern theory of sovereignty and government. Schmitt summarizes the process of assimilation of the theological-political paradigm into a philosophical-political paradigm with this: BAll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts^ (Schmitt 2005, p. 36). The notion of modern biopolitics (Foucault 2003: pp. 243–245) and the current triumph of economy and government over every other aspect of the political order is also part of this philosophical-political paradigm. To put it differently, administration, or management, is another word for government, and as Author's personal copy Philosophy of Management Between Scientism and Technology such, it belongs to the political paradigm. Of course, Bphilosophical-political paradigm^ stands for a paradigm that finds its roots in a certain branch of philosophy, i.e., political philosophy. Only recently, political philosophers such as Agamben (2011) have investigated another option, which connects the notion not only of administration but also of government (usually a term related to politics) to economy. Their story works as follows: a distinction should be made between the city and the house, the polis and the oikia. In the Aristotelian treatise on Politics, the author states that the politics differs from the administration just as the city differs from the house (Aristotle 1945). The politics is for the politician and the king and refers to the sphere of the city; the administration is for the oikonomos and the despotes and refers to the sphere of the house and the family. Thus, oikonomia means Badministration of the house;^ oikonomos stands for Badministrator of the house^ and despotes for Bhead of the family.^ The head of the family is also the administrator of the house, which may include the administration of slaves and the management of a small- or medium-sized farming business. One individual, named the oikonomos—or the oeconomus, or œconomus—of the oikos, functions from time to time as the manager, the housekeeper, the administrator, or the head of the family. In the ancient Greek world, this individual operated as slave owner, parent, and husband, and was at the center of a complex, entangled, and heterogeneous net of relations. Aristotle labels these domestic relations Beconomic^ to distinguish them from the political relations of the politician and the king. Aristotle also notes that this array of economic relations managed by the head of the family Bdoes not refer to a science (epistemen) but to a certain way of being^ (Politics, p. 125 5b). In other words, administration is a matter of an activity that is not bound to a system of rules and does not constitute a science in the proper sense of the word. Rather, this activity implies decisions and orders that cope with problems that are specific each time a problem arises, and that concern the functional order (taxis) of the different components of the oikos. In other words, administration is not a science, but a praxis. While Aristotle linked management with the idea of an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent, domestic, and therefore apolitical order, our managerial era has understood management as epistemic, as a science. The difference between the two interpretations of management could not be more strident: a praxis is a process, not a subject; it finds its ultimate expressions through verbs, not nouns. It is not a method, or an approach, or a technique, but a way of governing the course of things, adapting at each turn to the nature of the circumstance against which it must measure itself. The confront between the original notion of management as oikonomia and the scientific character of modern management is outside the scope of this article. However, a degeneration of this epistemic tendency, a degeneration eventually called scientism, is definitely relevant, particularly in terms of its effect on philosophy of management. Scientism is a term that was originally intended to be pejorative; in this article, it stands for a scientificization of nearly the entire territory of management studies (the discipline of management). While the science of management is supposed to be a mode of inquiring scientifically into management, scientism is the colonization of management by a scientific form of epistemic means. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this situation is unacknowledged. For clarity, a brief story of the philosophical engagement with management is crucial. Author's personal copy E. Beltramini 3 Philosophy After almost a century of scientific inquiry in the dominion of management (Whitley, 1984b), recently, management scholars have begun to look at disciplines such as literary criticism, anthropology, and even philosophy, for inspiration. As a result, management scholars have initiated to think philosophically about what managerial reasoning means. But managerial reasoning has its own story, a story with a trajectory. To put it differently, the intellectual history of management in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s remains important to understanding the emergence of philosophy of management in the 2000s. A monographic, definitive account of managerial self-reflection in the twentieth century is still missing, but something like a standard story can be probably summarized this way: the rise of scientific management in the North American academy, the emergence of anti-scientific alternatives, and the creation of a middle space covering these two forces in the late twentieth century. The standard story stresses management as a science and management theory as a matter of theoretical frameworks (i.e., Wren 2004; Wren and Badeian 2008; Witzel 2012). This option resonates for management scholars and initially aligns their discipline with logical positivism. In this perspective, management as a discipline possesses its own scientific methods and standards of intellectual inquiry. These management scholars have expanded their work to create a theory of management that adopts internal methods and standards for the managerial profession as a means of expressing facts, as complementary to the verification epistemology of modern rational objectivism. These intellectuals defend classical methods for proving the validity of facts, upholding the notion that a chain of facts can be reasonably deduced from the proper logical arrangement of events. These management scholars’ basic assumption is that despite the impression of fragmentation recently created by postmodernism, management is a coherent discipline which still bears the imprint of its early twentieth-century scientific origins (for the fragmented state of the discipline, see Whitley (1984a) and Zald (1996); for the situation of the discipline, see Hatch (2006), Hillman (2011), and George (2014)). In summary, despite of the frequent insistence by scientists that management is not a science in natural science terms, management scholars themselves have committed to strengthening the concept of management as a scientific discipline. An alternative account, however, maintains that management is a humanistic, rather than a scientific, discipline (i.e., Vissing 2004; Alvesson, Bridgman, and Willmott 2009). This account concentrates on aestheticism—literary criticism, history, cultural studies—as the major player in management. This different account acknowledges the progressive generation of changes of focus in the discipline: the Bcultural turn^ was followed by the Bliterary turn^ and then the Bhistorical turn^ and finally the Baesthetical turn^ (i.e., Barley (1983), Schein (1985), and Swidler (1986) (cultural turn); Phillips (1995); (literary turn); Zald (1993) and (1996), Kieser (1994), Ferguson (1997), Üsdiken and Kieser (2004), and Bucheli and Wadhwani (2014) (historical turn); and Minahan and Cox (2007) (aesthetical turn)). This account is also responsible for the shift in management scholarship’s concern from forms of knowledge to kinds of writing (i.e., Czarniawska 1999; Grey and Sinclair 2006). Not all scholars are at ease with a more or less aggressive use of the scientific premise, as some seem to have lost confidence in the notion that knowledge is founded upon universal principles and empirical fact. Management scholarship’s claims to objective knowledge are critiqued Author's personal copy Philosophy of Management Between Scientism and Technology by post-foundationalists who argue that facts cannot exist outside of language, while management as much as literature is saturated with fictional characters. Moving beyond the traditional focus of management science, scholars who embrace a more humanistic approach ultimately claim the identity of management as aesthetics. In that view, the Baesthetic turn^ in management can help to relieve scholars and practitioners of the narrowness of scientific orthodoxy. As a result of these diverse forces, science and aesthetics, at work in the discipline, management scholars have created the distinction from the classical notion of science, as well as aesthetics, avoiding traditional patterns of writing and adopting quantitative methods and concepts from the systematic social sciences. More importantly, scholars have created a middle ground between science and art that management has enjoyed since the late twentieth century. In this perspective, scholars claim occupancy of an epistemologically neutral middle ground that supposedly exists between science and art (i.e., Shenhav 2003; Czarniawska 2007). Thus, scholars sometimes argue that management contains both science and art in harmonious compatibility. According to this view, the management scholars have the special task of tolerating together two modes of comprehending the world that would normally be unalterably separated. In summary, the discipline has settled on three options, according to different levels of intellectual inclination and sensibility: (1) remaining firm in the belief that the management scholar is committed in a scientific enterprise, (2) embarking on an attempt to maintain a privileged middle ground between science and art, and (3) demonstrating that management is a form of art. A brief history of the twentieth-century managerial rationale is essential in order to identify the different philosophical schools in action. In fact, philosophy of management assumes a more positivistic, analytical, or critical form according to its distance from natural science. Logical positivism has made it easier for management scholars to avoid theoricizing their own preferred practice and to learn management methodology through practice rather than speculative training. It is well known that logical positivistic scholars learn research methods as if they were the result of timeless revelation. Management scholars and practitioners practice management with no need of more than a rudimental understanding of theory because logical positivism freed both of them from the inconvenience of theoricizing their work. Epistemology focuses the attention of theorists on managerial knowledge, according to the principles suggested by logical empiricists such as Carl Hampel, assuming that management scholars should meet the same logical criteria as scientists, that is, subsuming specific events under general laws. The dominance of logical positivism within management works in this way: on one side, there is metaphysics as an example of muddy thinking; on the other, critical thought and the string of cultural-literary-historical-aesthetical turns. Logical positivism thus can represent itself as a bastion of methodological rigor between the determinism of metaphysics and the contingency of anti-scientific forces. Leaving logical positivism apart, two types of philosophizing can be distinguished with regard to management. Just as the word management has two common meanings, one referring to the totality of human managerial actions and the other to the narrative account of those actions, so too philosophy of management divides into Banalytical^ and Bcritical^ halves. The first addresses management as a mode of discourse, as a kind of language which needs clarification; the second, which chronologically precedes the first, deals with a critical and at times challenging engagement with mainstream theory Author's personal copy E. Beltramini (Eden 2003). In retrospect, the emergence of philosophy of management—largely an early twenty-first-century phenomenon—occurred after the assimilation within intellectual management scholarship of French and German critical theory. To put it differently, prior to the philosophical turn taken by the management scholarship in the 2000s, critical thought was the term in vogue to describe management scholarship’s engagement with continental philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s (i.e., Burrell 1988; Cooper 1989). Critical forms of philosophy of management share with structuralism and postmodernism the hostility toward universal narratives, metanarratives, and metaphysics, and, in addition, acquire a whole catalog of associations such as language, narrative, and culture. Structuralism and postmodernism offered at least three new modes of managerial discourse and related vocabulary: differently managerial (local, postcolonial, anthropological, etc.), non-managerial (deconstructionism), and anti-managerial (history as literature and art). Narrative-linguistic approaches share with critical forms of management an increasing dissatisfaction with the notion of coherent scientific explanation of events, and the highly scientific modes of managerial discourse. In this perspective, the twentieth-century attempt to build a profession on either scientific methods or universal social theory failed, leaving management scholars no choice but to recognize the literary character of the managerial enterprise. The description of the various components of the linguistic and cultural turns is not complete without mentioning the lack of impact that these so-called revolutionary developments have had on the management scholarship (i.e., Fournier and Grey 2000). The same marginal impact of mainstream scholarship can be said of postmodernism. Of course, the accepted narrative is that the linguistic and cultural and postmodernist turns have revolutionized management thinking, but actual management practice remains the same, anchored in the scientism of logical positivism and rationalistic forms of science. In the 2000s, pundits announced that, after decades spent wandering in the scientific wilderness, management as a discipline had taken a philosophical turn. After nearly a century of expeditions in search of scientific theories and timeless laws, management scholars had finally come to their philosophical sense. Two important books in philosophy or management (or management philosophy)—Ole Fogh Kirkeby’s monograph Management philosophy: a radical-normative perspective (2000), and Paul Griseri’s monograph An introduction to the philosophy of management (2013)—and the launch (and re-launch) of a dedicated academic journal, Philosophy of Management, promise a prominent future to philosophical consciousness in management scholarship. The efforts to create a new field seem effective: philosophy of management has become a recognized specialty with its own practitioners, problems, and a realistic hope of reaching a much larger audience. In this context, philosophy of management is a philosophical margin of management, in which management is understood as a privileged third ground between science and art. In fact, it is worth clarifying that this clear preference for a middle ground between the extremes of science and art creates the space for a philosophy of management currently understood. It is this middle space in which intellectual scholars locate themselves that demands a philosophical foundation of a discipline of management beyond any talk of theories. With the discipline firmly situated in the middle ground between science and art, management is a field of its own, and philosophy of management is articulated as a natural counterpart to science and aesthetics. Author's personal copy Philosophy of Management Between Scientism and Technology With that said, only few management scholars have much contact with modern philosophy and have the technical competence to seriously engage much of the last century’s worth of continental and analytical philosophy. Only a handful of management and business departments list a philosophy of management course in their 2017 catalog. Today, it remains unusual to hear a management scholar use philosophy of management in a sentence; instead, management theory is a terminology in use. Thus, how shall management scholars go from management theory to philosophy of management? While the phrase Bphilosophy of management^ still struggles to find its place in the conversations within management scholarship, this disinterest is matched by professional philosophers. A brief survey of the top ten ranked departments of philosophy in the USA in the spring of 2017 confirms that no permanent faculty listing philosophy of management as a research interest. In other words, no professional philosopher in these departments has engaged management as a field. Not a single important title in philosophy of management has been published in the flagship Journal of Philosophy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it appears that American philosophers rarely think about philosophy of management. Instead of asking themselves to reflect philosophically on management, professional philosophers seem more interested in reflecting on the idea of a philosophically informed notion of human nature and society in a technological era. The problem is that philosophy of management, if it exists, should stand as a mode of inquiry, not a field of management studies. 4 Scientism Today, philosophy of management is understood as a field of management studies. In the effort to create a philosophical foundation to management science, philosophers of management re-engage the philosophical past with regard to management. They devote space to a respectable recovery of Aristotelian physics or ancient wisdom (i.e., Fontrodona and Mele 2002; Kessels 2001; Rooney and McKenna 2007; Arjoon 2010; Rooney, McKenna, and Liesch 2010; Bhattacharjee, 2017). Philosophers of management offer foundations to the discipline and propose epistemologies of organizing to meanings of work and principles of collective action, using the work of classical and modern thinkers—such as Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein (i.e., Krentz and Malloy 2005; Bathurst 2009; Rehn and Taalas 2009; Sheard 2009). While analytical and critical forms of philosophy of management are broadly based on the major Western philosophical traditions, wider sources such as the work of East Asian and South Asian thinkers, can also be included (i.e., Barnett and Cahill 2007; Bhattacharjee, McKenna, and Ray 2016). The vagueness in the expression Bphilosophy of management^ encourages notions ranging from theology to epistemology. However, the wider the intellectual ambition, the higher the risk of philosophy of management’s temptation to constitute itself as a field of study and make itself an obvious target for critics. In that case, the risk is that philosophy of management remains subject to a tendency to scientism. A science of management properly defined would assume philosophy as an activity distinct from but integral to science, with each addressing separate but complementary questions—supporting, correcting, and supplying knowledge to one another. Scientism, Author's personal copy E. Beltramini instead, replaces philosophical inquiry with a scientific one, including in areas of management that were once considered open to questions that originally belonged to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at dealing with such questions, but the one offering the best means of answering them. In other words, scientism is not simply, and embarrassingly simplistically, the replacement of philosophy with science, but, more nuancely, the application of a Bpeculiar epistemic reliability^ (Ross, Ladyman, and Spurrett 2007: p. 37) to philosophy, so that the philosophical activity survives but ceases to operate in philosophical terms. Scientism in management is indeed more—to borrow a term from the vocabulary of theology—a form of economic supersessionism, in which the function of the philosophical enquiry is replaced by scientific method, rather than of structural supersessionism, in which science de facto replaces philosophy. Seen as a field of study, philosophy of management is not philosophy, rather a configuration of scientism engaged in theorizing borrowing philosophical ideas. The problem is that just as the science of management has been twisted to be the scientism of management, so too have the philosophy of management (as an area of study) and critical management studies become vulnerable to the same risk. Thus, it is clear that at least two meanings—which seem to have no necessary connection to each other—of Bphilosophy of management,^ are at work within scholarship: philosophy of management as a mode of inquiry (BPhilosophy of Management^) and as a field of study. Seen as a mode of inquiry, Philosophy of Management purposefully speaks to a philosophical axiology, rather than to a scientist one, that still underpins nearly the entire discipline, critical theory and philosophy of management streams included. The problem with some critical theory and philosophy of management scholars is that they eventually engage in specific bits of philosophy and philosophers to sustain their arguments. They produce, to borrow a line from Alfred North Whitehead, a quasi-philosophical narrative that is Bdelightful to read, easy to comprehend and largely fallacious.^ They produce, in other words, an intellectual hopscotch that is far from a philosophical axiology, far from a genuinely philosophical mode of inquiry (Dibben 2009; Dibben and Sheard 2013). Thus, the crucial distinction is between professional philosophers with a genuine interest in management and organizations, on one hand, and philosophically disposed management scholars on the other. The distinction comes from the fact that instead of overlapping significantly with dominant problems of philosophy of science at large, philosophers of management simply cover the much narrower problems of management (i.e., Macaulay and Lawton 2003; Styhre 2004). From a meta-theoretical viewpoint, the above can be summarized as a project of scientific assimilation, the philosophizing of management as a discipline through assimilation of philosophy on science’s own terms. Philosophy of Management as an alternative mode of inquiry encourages a philosophical axiology. Just as the science of management is a mode of inquiring into management scientifically, so the Philosophy of Management is a mode of inquiring into management philosophically. In other words, at its best, it engages in thoroughgoing, serious-minded, hard-core common-sense application of philosophy and philosophers to the topics of management, to derive otherwise unavailable insight. Author's personal copy Philosophy of Management Between Scientism and Technology 5 Philosophy of Technology The rise of technology signals the shift from truth based on knowledge to truth based on power. Truth today means power and technology is the supreme power, and the question is asked, what kind of inquiry is relevant to Philosophy of Management, precisely because technology is the negation of any definitive truth based on knowledge. Today, technology rules the economic world unchallenged and has the potential to displace science as the preferred form of theorizing managerial discourse. It becomes increasingly clear that management is impossible today outside of a technological elaboration of existence. As a mode of inquiry, it is legitimate to suggest that Philosophy of Management can fall within the field of study that is philosophy of technology. Philosophy of technology as a discipline emerged in the late nineteenth century, when technology manifested itself as a phenomenon distinct from science. In the twentieth century, the phenomenon of technology took the modern Bhigh-tech^ meaning of emerging technologies (such as genetics and artificial intelligence). The term Bemerging technologies^ stands for reliable, persistent, and revolutionary drivers of change. Philosophy of technology is concerned with the systematic clarification of the nature of technology, operates as a systematic reflection on the consequences of technology for human life, and investigates the practices of engineering, invention, designing, and making of things. While there are parallels between the philosophies of technology and science, the former is an independent field of philosophy. Central in philosophy of technology are epistemological and methodological questions about technology, the conceptual analysis, and issues related to technology and society. Another parallel between the philosophies of technology and science lies in the existence of continental and analytic approaches. The inclination of our time is marked by a double, concomitant movement: the futile attempt of economic organizations to transform technology into episteme, and the triumphant attempt of technocratic/technologist machineries to transform episteme into technology. Technology no longer is an instrument for economic growth, but rather an end on its own; economy is asked to serve the ideology of technological advancement. According to this view, technology is not handmaid of the scientific forces that govern the managerial world, but is itself what governs the destinies of these scientific forces. Modern science, or at least that part that interacts with management, tends to sink into technological knowledge. Management science has to strengthen the technological means of which it makes use, but in doing so, management science empowers technology and transforms it in a goal. To put it differently, technology is a mean that becomes necessary for increasing the power of management science. Because it is necessary for increasing the power of management science, it is no longer a mean; rather, it is a goal in itself. The economic world is approaching a historical situation in which the managerial character of the organization of technology will be replaced by the purely technological character of the economic organization. This is a situation whose authentic meaning escapes contemporary culture’s grasp, be it humanistic or scientific. But it does not escape philosophy. To examine the whole subject of the relationship between technology and management wearing philosophical glasses, not simply narrowly epistemological lenses, technology is far more than a support system; technology is an entire cultural package with a complex array of philosophical foundations affecting every aspect of work, Author's personal copy E. Beltramini including management and organization. Since Neil Postman published Technopoly in 1993, the notion that technology is an apparatus destined to become stronger than the scientific managerial systems that makes use of it has materialized (Postman 1993). The managerial world thinks that it is directing technology, but in reality, it has already been outmaneuvered. Driven by their inclination to reach rising efficiency standards, managers have gradually technologized their organizations. They believed they were dominating the process but instead they were dominated. In current management scholarship, no ambivalence seems to exist toward the omnipotence of logic and formalisms in the traditional scientific approach to the study of management. The mass market organization is gone, so what is the point in having people to manage organizations as bureaucratic-administrative machine? Some of the most important scientific contributions from authors like Hamel and Mintzberg show a deeper appreciation of the power and pervasiveness of management while focusing on the limits of formalisms (Mintzberg 2009; Hamel 2011). Most scholars echo Antony Jay’s concern, back in the 1970s, that human beings were not designed to work in big groups and advocate drastic changes to the current concept of management (Jay 1971). This literature of a sort of humanist revolution in management is massive: its main point is that the Bindustrial age paradigm,^ that is, the bureaucratic-administrative complex, will be replaced by the creative class, the knowledge society, the information economy—that is, the human being. This article, however, frames the bureaucratic-administrative complex as a pit stop in the continuing story of moving organizations from scientific management to mechanism. In a nutshell, organizations are not moving from modernity to postmodernity, but from modernity to absolute modernity: the absolutization of the rationalist and instrumentalist tendencies of modernity. With the adoption of intelligent machines, contact with the reality Bout there^ is filtered through the electronic interface. A network of tools such as computer programs, screens, robots, and cable connections stands behind algorithmic trade. Transactions are numbers on a screen; reality has disappeared from view. People no longer manage the materiality of organizations; in fact, intelligent machines take over the management of dematerialized economic organizations. At this point, machines are far more efficient than managers; the notion of managing as a human action at the very core of organizations’ governance is outdated. Human-crafted management is replaced by automated management. In this context, management is the intelligence of the machine’s action of managing. Here, Bintelligence^ is understood as machine’s intelligence, a distinct way of reasoning, a form of calculative thinking. The transformation of economic organizations into techno-scientific organizations is driven by a consolidation of the entire management thought into computational reasoning, or intelligence. To put it differently, the entire deposit of concepts, practices, techniques, and knowhow that is related to the human action of managing, that is, management, is compressed and reduced into the form of intelligence. The argument is not that machines needs to develop an entire range of human abilities in order for them to threaten managers’ usefulness; the argument is that the economic system is reorganizing appropriately to operate through calculative thinking. The way in which many things previously done by humans disappeared brings to mind Joseph Haydn’s Farewell Symphony where, during the last movement, one musician after the other takes his instrument and leaves the stage until, at the end, none is left. In the current world of business, everything is reframed technology-like. Human beings are already conceived in terms of machines and algorithms: human nature is an information-processing mechanism, the body as an operating Author's personal copy Philosophy of Management Between Scientism and Technology system or platform in need of an updating. Like all other organisms, humans are essentially biological algorithms. The dominance of artificial algorithms over biological algorithms explains why economic system will not really need managers: because the human mind will not be as valuable as the algorithm-run, artificially intelligent machine. As this trend accelerates across all industries, gradually, the human mind loses its economic significance. Among the ramifications of this assumption is the power shifting from management as human practices and theories to elaborated software, on one hand and on the other, the transformation of management in an area of application of technology. Management is framed on technology’s own terms and managing is an act ultimately performed by technology. Neither the future of managing nor the future of managers is within the perimeters of this article. However, the future of management cannot be framed without some references to the overall context of managing and managers. What is management if a software has more impact on the success or failure of a modern business than any expertise displayed by managers? What is management if a software minimizes the amount of human intervention and makes human value irrelevant? Investing is a technological problem, no longer an economic problem; finance is a technological problem; banking is a technological problem (i.e., Coeckelbergh 2015; Viana 2016; Ossewaarde 2017). These are all technological problems, and in essence, they should have some technological solution. When one solves a technological problem and he reinvents the economic world, which is a completely different project than economic growth. Reinventing the economic world through technological solutions is a fundamentally different project in economic and social terms than economic growth, because economy enlarges what humans can do, while technology rather reboots it. For the sake of this article, however, the most relevant fact is not that economic problems are reframed in terms of technological problems, rather that the economic organizations are turning into technological apparatuses. As the economic organization gives way to the techno-scientific organization, managers are replaced by scientists and technologists. Here, the idea is that technologies have concreteness and people still manage technologies in their concreteness. Economic and financial technologies are not autonomous or out-of-control; they still strongly depend on material, spatial things: trading hubs, server clusters, and transcontinental glass fiber cables. While the progressive dematerialization of economic organizations transfers the burden of their management to intelligent machines, humanoids learn to manage the emerging materialities of machines. These technologically mediated developments do not render organization merely Bvirtual,^ for its technological practices remain material and place-bound. A solid option for the future of management designed by humans is to deal with the effects of machines’ actions on humanity. Instead of knowing how machines can better deal with the economic systems that humans create, knowing how the action of these machines can conversely influence human lives. Financial and economic markets can function as a kind of ghost in the machine, distant from the concrete, earthly human world. In the global world of technofinance, electronic technologies take the place of the humans behind the markets as they abstract from concrete humans and social relations. The world of finance may seem distant, but the consequences are material and vividly concrete. Technologies maintain a material margin not simply because their practices remain material and place-bound, but also because the economic and social Author's personal copy E. Beltramini consequences these technological practices create are no less real. Exploring these economic and social consequences is the other side of the process: humans give machines their power on economy; machines use their power to determine what will happen to humans. Managing these consequences is precisely what makes technological progress a progress, that is, a strong, rigorous social safety net. To put it differently, part of what reinvention of human management is supposed to do is revealing technologies in human lives and society and accepting the hidden ways they shape economy and finance. Humanity can manage the ways in which contemporary technoeconomic developments can be resisted or re-oriented in a morally and socially responsible direction—not without, but with technology. The predicament of living in the times of machines requires humans to think beyond their traditional humanist limitations and embrace the risks that dialoguing-other-than-human bring. In order to repair this blank spot, management scholarship needs to thinking about economic and financial technology and their material and social consequences. In the end, an economic organization of just people would not work, but an organization of just computers could certainly be improved. 6 Conclusion If management needs philosophy, which philosophical approach does it need? One does not need to be a professional philosopher to know that management as a subject has so far been only superficially treated in philosophy. Academic journals of philosophy only rarely receive contributions on any aspect of the philosophy of management. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, it appears that professional philosophers seldom think about philosophy of management, and management scholars more than match that disinterest. How do management scholars get a Bnew^ philosophy of management in which philosophers participate? It is very possible that, by the end of the 2010s, several departments of management in the USA will expect graduates and sometimes undergraduates to take at least one course in philosophy of management. However, scholars may be aware that a course in philosophy of management cannot be understood as a field, rather as a mode of inquiry. One of the ways that a specialty defines itself, in fact, is through the creation of a canon for teaching as well as research, and here, the philosophical training evinces a remarkable attracting power. If considered a mode of inquiry, in which field of study philosophy of management can fall? Technology has shown the limits of human knowledge, including managerial knowledge. While the progressive dematerialization of economic organizations transfers the burden of their management to intelligent machines, humanoids learn to manage the emerging materialities of machines, as well as the material-social effect of machine’s actions on humanity. By operating in a subfield of philosophy of technology, philosophers of management can act as cartographers, providing a clean and clear map; they play the role of philosophical radar station, a bunker screening the sky and distinguishing the friendly pulses from the evil ones. Philosophy of management can achieve a position within philosophy of technology by bringing order to ideas that emerge inside the accelerating advances in technology, on one side, and converge at this moment of epochal transformation of work and organizations, on another. Author's personal copy Philosophy of Management Between Scientism and Technology Acknowledgements A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 12th Annual Conference of Philosophy of Management, St. Louis, Missouri, July 13–16, 2017. I thank John Orr, Paulina Segarra, Ajnesh Prasad, and Steven Segal for their valuable comments. 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