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Foreword by Peter Checkland
Sir Geoffrey Vickers once said to me, and he was in his mid-eighties at the time,that he no longer had time to carry on reading any book with which he foundhimself in agreement! Only if the book did some rearranging of his mentalfurniture did he continue to read it. I think that Sir Geoffrey would have stayed with Luc Hoebeke's book through to the end, because though it is informed byVickers' notion of 'appreciative systems' (as well as by the work of Beer,Checkland and Jaques) it offers a unique view of the process of management which will help to rearrange some mental furniture for most of its readers. WhenI read the early manuscript it was like coming across a copse of green trees inthe otherwise rather arid landscape of organisation and management theory, notleast because it was not simply a theoretical work; it was the result of deepreflection on the relation between our experience of managing and the mentalconstructions we develop to make sense of that experience. Luc Hoebeke is theepitome of Donald Schon's 'reflective practitioner'. That I am personally sympathetic to the process view of management expressedhere is no doubt due to my own experience in the field. I was at first a physicalchemist, taking part in the game to define Nature's regularities which naturalscientists play. Then I became a technologist in science-based industry andquickly learnt that although the science remains unaltered, the value system which lies behind the activity of an industrial scientist is very different. What Ihad been doing previously in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory at Oxford madesense only in terms of a value system which assumed that new knowledge is anultimate good, taken as given, valued for its own sake. What I was doing inindustry made sense only in terms of a different assumption, namely that thegeneration of wealth is an ultimate good, the value of which is taken as given. This I could understand. But when I became a manager I found my situationmuch more problematical. What was the nature of this strange and difficultactivity of 'managing'? What were its values?At that point I discovered the existence of a literature calling itself 'ManagementScience', and imagined that it would tell me, an ex-scientist, now a manager, just what I needed to know. Imagine my surprise when I found that thetextbooks (and I now know that the student texts, in particular, reflect onlydimly what the best practitioners do) were simply irrelevant to everything I wasdoing, day by day, as a manager.Later on, as I began to read the organisational management literature, I foundthat it too failed to reflect much of the lived texture of organisational life asmembers of organisations experience it. The lists of academic publishers wereheavy with 700-page tomes on management which simply took as given theconventional wisdom that organisations were goal-seeking entities functionallystructured to achieve their succession of goals.By then my colleagues and I were deep into a programme of action research inorganisations in which we tried to use systems thinking to help tackle the kind of ill-structured problematical situations with which managers have somehow tocope. From these experiences we were led to a process view of management, tothe view that the answer to the old question: does form follow function orfunction follow form? was, at least for managers, that structure ought not to beprime, but ought to follow from decisions on what processes were crucial andhow they should be organised.
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