I was struck by your comments on the lack of any real fundamental theory
for what management is:
"The upshot of all this, Johnson claims, is that business administration
academics never developed a native theory of how managed organizations
operate, but rather tried to force inapplicable paradigms onto the field."
Fernando Flores attempts to define an ontology of management in his work.
Most of his work is very hard to come by (Computers and Cognition, which
he wrote with Terry Winograd is probably the easiest to find). Flores
defines organizations as networks of committment and looks at management
in terms of speech acts or language/action. The practical outcome of this
is the ActionWorkflow methodology for mapping processes (and the
associated software for implementing workflow systems). I think of the
ActionWorkflow methodology as a mental which allows you to rigourously
view processes in terms of accountability and committments, rather than in
terms of tasks, inputs, and outputs. It is a very powerful tool for
identifying and analyzing breakdowns in the process.
- Steve Taylor
SST @ Workframe.com