Management theory isn’t just time and motion studies anymore. We’ve got a bit more sophisticated than that.
O.M.’s about human relations. It’s all about practices, routines, behaviours, norms, rules, regulations, emotions, affects.
Look, management is about economics, sociology, psychology, accountancy … it was a science. That was the way management started claiming it as a science in the late nineteenth century. Well, it’s an art now. We need the humanities to help.
Philosophy’s part of the creative sector, really. All the humanities are. Which is why Organisational Management is turning its attention to the arts.
O.M.’s curious about the humanities. O.M. wants to find out more about the humanities. O.M.’s interested.
We need to be able to draw on the general intellect – language, affect, cognition, creativity, emotion. Even your despair will be useful – do you see?
O.M. can play with whatever it likes. It can have its fun now that it’s taken over the entire world.
It’s all idling. Entertaining itself. Fooling around with the humanities.
They want our freedom. They want our free time. They want our idle talk. They want our stupidity, our most precious resource. They want our capacity to bullshit. To talk rubbish.
They want to work out the secret of the humanities postgraduate. If they crack you, then they’ll understand philosophy. And if they understand philosophy …
The philosophico-literary: they want that, too. Nothing is incidental to them. They want to know all. To study all.
Philosophy is the final frontier for O.M. The humanities are. It’s the last thing to be conquered. It’s like we’re the end level Boss. Except we’re the anti Boss. We’re so weak. We’re so fucked. We shrinking, worldwide.
So you’ve chosen to break the wild horse of philosophy. Break us, and you can break anyone. Break our despair.
Open innovation – that’s what it’s all about. Organisational Management isn’t about R&D. We leave that to the people we bring on board. You guys are the R&Ders. You’re doing the real innovation – you guys in Philosophy. We’re drawing on your brilliance. On the ideas we harvest from you. It’s built on the model of open source software.
Open-source parasitism, more like.
Work in Progress 