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JEIT
30,3
206
Received September 2005
Revised January 2006
Accepted February 2006
Journal of European Industrial
Training
Vol. 30 No. 3, 2006
pp. 206-226
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0309-0590
DOI 10.1108/03090590610662959
Frameworks of managerial
competence: limits, problems and
suggestions
Damian Ruth
Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
Abstract
Purpose – To offer a coherent critique of the concept of managerial frameworks of competence
through the exploration of the problems of generalizability and abstraction and the “scientific”
assumptions of management.
Design/methodology/approach – Employs the ecological metaphor of intellectual landscape and
extends it to examining the development of the field of management, its early contours which
traversed a diversity of conceptualisations such as management as an art, or an expression of
personality, or as a vocation, the search for coordinates and a scientific image, and finally, a
comparison of agri-business and market gardening. The argument is illustrated by reference to
particular management development programmes.
Findings – The argument is made that frameworks of competence impose conceptual limitations –
“monocultures of the mind” – that are destructive. Justifying coordinates in an activity that is always
particular, contextual and socially constructed faces the problem of finding stable evidence in a
turbulent ecology and “frameworks of competence” are beset with problems of definition. However,
with an understanding of power and discourse, and the application of the landscape metaphor such
frameworks can be productively illuminated. What seems to be required is a wholesale shift in values
and a re-evaluation of the meaning and purpose of work.
Practical implications – Useful to curriculum designers and programme developers to analyse
their work.
Originality/value – Provides a detailed coherent account of the emergence of the concept of
competency, and subjects the concept to wide-ranging critical review.
Keywords Management skills, Competences, Management development, Management effectiveness
Paper type Conceptual paper
The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or
institutions of higher education is no longer “Is it true?” but “What use is it?” This creates the
prospect for a vast market for competence in operational skills (Lyotard, 1984, pp. 48, 53).
Introduction
This paper examines the concept of frameworks of competence through the use of the
metaphor of intellectual landscape. The rationale for the metaphor is given below.
Related notions such as skill, capability, education, and training are considered, as well
as the discourses surrounding the notion of competence., and new and lost
vocabularies. It illuminates some of the contests around Foucault’s genealogies of
power, the struggles around competency in terms of “discursive engagement” and the
“politics of discourse”.
The metaphor of landscape is used to explore the problems of generalisability and
abstraction and the “scientific” assumptions of management. Management is an
activity that is always particular, contextual and socially constructed, and is practiced Frameworks of
in a turbulent ecology: science searches for stable evidence. Given how traditional managerial
understandings of management values and the social assumptions governing these
traditional understandings have been brought under critical scrutiny in recent decades, competence
the competency-based framework inevitably reflects a master discourse of
“performativity” that requires interrogation. Even if one may gain some sense of
what competency might be, however problematic, then assuming it can be developed 207
and, furthermore, that there is a link between its development and practice and
performance, the question of how to develop it remains.
Trying to draw conclusions about the usefulness and limitations of the notion of
competence is not straightforward. After all, we can distinguish a good teacher from a
bad one, or a well-designed chair from a poorly designed chair. In a rough and ready
way we make such judgement quite adequately every day. On the other hand,
analysing the notion of competence strikes at the very heart of what we mean when we
say “We know how to do this?”. What does it mean “to know”, bearing in mind
Foucault’s work in pointing out the relations between power and knowledge? The
question relates to performance/performativity, rather the epistemology of knowing.
What does “good” or “well” mean in “good teacher” or “well-designed”? Here we need
to remember Gadamer’s phronesis or practical wisdom, the common sense criteria that
we use every day in value-dependent evaluation that is nevertheless pragmatic and
task-specific. The task set out in this paper is to work between accepting
reasonable-enough evidence for the role of the concept of competence and questioning
premises on which the research producing this evidence was based, and thus
illuminate the usefulness and limits of the current understanding of competence in the
context of management development. Critical management theory drawing on
post-colonial theory has taken into account the cultural blindness often inherent in
Western efficiency models. We do not engage with these critiques, but focus on the
tension between functionalist management research and critical management research.
The aim of this paper is to assemble a coherent critique of the idea of competency
frameworks.

An intellectual landscape
It is now widely accepted that we have moved from a mechanistic to a more organic
understanding of organisations. Strategic thinking is increasingly drawing on
systemic and ecological contexts for analysis (Johnson and Macy, 2001). There is
therefore a general justification for invoking an ecological metaphor like landscape to
understand the formation and use of a concept, but there are more refined justifications
for using an ecological metaphor.
Our argument is that “a framework of competency” is a technology in the broad
Marcusian (Marcuse, 1964) and Ellulian (Ellul, 1973) sense. Marcuse (1941) describes
technology as pervasive. It includes the mind. Examples of how the mind operates
“technologically” can be understood by specific invocations of the metaphor of
intellectual landscape. Scott (1998) explains that forestry plantations developed in
Prussia and Saxony because forests were viewed through the restricting lens of fiscal
need, and seen as board feet of timber. Actual trees with a vast number of uses –
fodder, thatch, fruit for animals and people, roots for medicines and tanning, and so on
– were replaced by an abstract tree representing saleable lumber. In another approach
JEIT to landscape, Robinson (1995) explains how the act of mapping Ireland empowered
30,3 Dublin and created a double tier of geographical knowledge. The abstract
mathematical grids of Ordnance Survey drained the local significance out of local
areas. Shiva (1993, p. 7) helps us links the mental and actual landscape when she writes
of “monocultures of the mind”, demonstrating Scott’s and Robinson’s point:
. . .uniformity and diversity are not just patterns of land use, they are ways of thinking and
208 ways of living . . . Monocultures of the mind generate models of production which destroy
diversity and legitimise that destruction as progress, growth and improvement. From the
perspective of the monoculture mind, productivity and yields appear to increase when
diversity is erased and replaced by uniformity. However, from the perspective of diversity,
monoculture is based on a decline in yields and productivity. They are impoverished systems,
both qualitatively and quantitatively. They are also highly unstable and non-sustainable
systems. Monocultures spread, not because they produce more, but because they control
more.
The result is “disappeared” knowledge systems, consequent on failure to recognise the
dominant system as a globalised local (Western) tradition.
As McKenna (2004, p. 668) has pointed out and referenced, “managerial
effectiveness and competence is particularistic, situated, contextual and socially
constructed” (Chia, 1995, 1996; Clegg and Palmer, 1996; McKenna, 1994, 1999a, b, c,
2001, 2002; McKinlay and Starkey, 1998; Mulholland, 1998; Putnam and Mumby, 1993;
Watson and Harris, 1993). The “skills”, “effectiveness” and “competence” that
managers develop within a given context may also not be “positive”, “ethical” or
“generalisable”. In addition, sets of behavioural competencies established by
organisations may in practice by no more than an essentialist and
representationalist style of thinking with no consideration of the processual and
relational nature of organisational and managerial life (Watson and Harris, 1993).
We now turn back to consider the early contours of debate in the field of
management development, and develop our arguments about frameworks of
competence in terms of the metaphor of intellectual landscape.

An emerging field: the early contours of debate

Taking a longer view of management development and of required competencies, one
clearly needs to contextualise management education, associated with qualifications
and institutions, and management development, associated with companies and
training. Another important distinction is between management development as
learning and management development as performance.
In the USA, management was developed as an academic discipline, beginning with
the founding of Wharton in Pennsylvania in 1880. Vocationally oriented university
business programmes proliferated in the early twentieth century, but management per
se was initially not taught because it was considered an art dependent on personality
and on-the-job experience (Locke, 1998, p. xvii). It was when scientific management
entered universities that management began to be formalised in curricula. One of the
first criticisms of this move was that these specialised courses had no research base
(Bossard and Dewhurst, 1931). Both the recognition of management and the
development of differences emerged early in the USA. Chicago focussed on intellectual
rigour within disciplines; Harvard on the case system, which required an
interdisciplinary approach.
 The shift to a practical vocational orientation that emphasised specific trade Frameworks of
practices and business skills (Pierson, 1959; Cheit, 1985; Hugstad, 1983; Locke, 1998) managerial
was met with a rise of the idea of management as an art becoming management as a
science (Wren, 1994). Academics were taken with the idea that management could have competence
a scientific basis and be common to all business enterprises (Nelson, 1998), and the idea
of management based on generalisable principles took root. Business education was a
gateway into managerial ranks, and, at least in universities, the teaching of 209
management was descriptive of practice.
Hegemony was established gradually. Although the American Association of
Collegiate School of Business (forerunner to the AACSB) was established in 1916, its
influence was narrow until after the Second World War, and it was only in 1953 that
the US Department for Education recognised the AACSB as the accrediting agency for
business schools (Pierson, 1959). The Academy of Management was founded in 1941
and aligned itself with “a vision of management grounded in science” (Goodrick, 2002,
p. 653). Management as either an art or a science would suggest very different bases on
which to build a framework of competencies.
Further criticism of management came in the late 1950s. The Carnegie funded report
(Gordon and Howell, 1959) and the Ford Foundation funded report (Pierson, 1959)
found management education flawed: there was too much vocational orientation, it was
not general enough, there needed to be greater emphasis on quantitative and analytical
skills, and more research focus and intellectual rigour. Criticisms gave rise to a wave of
reorganisation (Ericson, 1960; Carzo, 1960; Towle, 1960), and the appearance of many
new journals. In 1957 and 1960, the Fund for Adult Education published collections of
essays by leading practitioners and educators on what a liberal education could
contribute to management development (Goldwin and Nelson, 1957/1960) illustrating
the tension between understanding, knowledge and performance.
The Foundation reports were influential and both were written by classical
economists and made similar recommendations, prescribing traditional remedies for
what they saw as deviations from academic respectability (Daniel, 1998; Silk, 1960).
They drew on the scientific paradigm dominating the broader academy, legitimating
the activities of academic-minded business deans seeking to upgrade their schools
along traditional lines (Fielden, 1959 cited in Goodrick, 2002, p. 654). To achieve
legitimacy for management as an academic study it was linked to science (Laidlaw,
1992), specifically to the behavioural sciences (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), which
emulated the natural sciences (Shils, 1966). The Ford Foundation funds were
disproportionately concentrated at high prestige schools, with the idea they would
provide the standard (Schlossman et al., 1998). In this way, “the science of economics”
was entwined with prestige and gatekeeping, and entered the debate on what
constitutes competent management.
The Porter and McKibbin (1988) report “updated” the Foundation reports. By this
time, claimed Porter and McKibbin, business schools had moved too far away from the
interests of industry, become abstract and detailed, and were dominated by fragmented
sub-disciplines. The response, through the 1990s, was attention to integration and the
softer skills. In 1992, the Harvard Business Review provoked a debate on management
education, indicating that the opinion that management’s central problem was the
control of complex organisations was no longer as hegemonic as it had been, although
it seems to have remained so in the competency literature.
JEIT Management development in Britain followed a somewhat different path to that of
30,3 the USA: management learning took place through practical work in companies. An
effort was made between the First World War and the Second World War to establish
management as a profession, but formal management education only began to develop
seriously after the Second World War (Thompson, et al., 2001). General commercial
knowledge was seen as of little value until it was contextualised by experience, and
210 there was “an introverted complacency in the university world about the nature of
disciplines and knowledge, and no sense of responsibility for the world of work”
(Thompson et al., 2001, p. 42). By the 1980s the criticism of management was severe
and the Constable and McCormick (1987) and Handy (1987) reports examining the
competitive position of UK plc were quite negative. The later Dearing (Higher
Education) and Kennedy (Further Education) reports expressed the desirability of
having both systems realigned with more explicit focus on the needs of the economy.
Most training definitions in HRM/D literature continued to emphasise a current job
focus (Garavan et al., 1995; Harrison, 1993; Reid et al., 1992/1994). By contrast, the
notion that development focuses more on the learner than on the learning per se is
common (Baum, 1995; Lauermann, 1992; McIntosh, 1994), and has a broader focus that
can include life planning (Nadler and Nadler, 1992). What constitutes education is of
course a huge debate, but in the HR context Van Wart et al. (1993) argued that
education is principle-driven and only broadly applicable to learners. In the HRD
context it teaches general skills and knowledge for the sake of a field or discipline
rather than having a specific job focus; training for workers, and education and
development for managers. The search for competencies was accompanied by a focus
on learning and the concept of the learning cycle (Revans, 1972; Kolb et al., 1974).
Rodgers (1969) also provided a person-centred view of learning. Garavan (1997) argues
that learning might be the glue that binds training, development and education.
However, because people’s understanding of learning at work is often distorted by
their understanding of learning in formal education situations the situation might be
more complex (Hager, 2004).
In 2000 The Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership (CEML) was
established in Britain “to develop a strategy to ensure that the UK has managers and
leaders of the future to match the best in the world”. The Council published a report
entitled “Managers and leaders: raising our game”. The human capital model had
emerged. The influence of the USA and a neo-liberal agenda was obvious, and this
continues (see special issue of Journal of Management Inquiry Vol. 13 No. 2, 2004). A
recent CEML report, which develops a framework for indicators of management
capability (Tamkin et al., 2002, p. 9) quotes from “a growing body of evidence” that
seeks to demonstrate the chain of impact between development, capability and
performance, but expresses substantial reservations about such a framework on the
grounds of data availability and conceptualisation.
We acknowledge that our brisk survey does not engage with European differences.
The US/UK contrast is sufficient to draw our attention to the importance of
performativity. Sambrook (2004, p. 613) has pointed out the contrast between the UK
and USA perspectives on the purposes of HRD and in so doing draws our attention to
the element of performance; whereas the former focuses on facilitating the learning of
individuals, groups and organisations (McGoldrick et al., 2002, p. 396), the latter
focuses on high performance in work-related systems (Bates et al., 2001). Even from
this brief consideration of management development and the role of science, economics, Frameworks of
and the neo-liberal agenda therein, a range of questions arise. What implications do managerial
ideas of “partnership” within and across organisations have for management practice?
What theories of society and organisation, established and emergent, have relevance competence
for the analysis of managerial work? How are boundaries and divisions of managerial
work shifting and what does it matter? What significance do issues that attract the
label “diversity” have for the theory and practice of managerial work? How does 211
“business” and “society” interface, and what role do managers play in this with respect
to “corporate citizenship”, for example?

Approaches to competency: the search for coordinates

It is in the context described above that three main approaches to competency can be
identified (Iversen, 2000): the behavioural approach; the standards approach; and the
situational approach. Triggered by McClelland (1973) “Testing for competence rather
than intelligence”, the behavioural approach is primarily based on outstanding
performers. Competence assessed actual behaviour, defined in terms of underlying
characteristics, knowledge skills and motives, and was causally related to superior
performance (Stuart and Lindsay, 1997). Different researchers measured performance
and competences differently. Boyatzis (1982) focused on supervisory nomination and
ratings and work-output measures using the “Behaviours event interview”. Schroder
(1989) used the work group performance and behavioural observation method, and
Dulewicz and Herbert (1992, 1996), used measures of career advancement and 360
ratings. Boyatizis emphasised the interdependence of effective job performance with
the individual’s competences and the demands of the job and the organisational
environment, and identified threshold and superior competencies – a notion that
echoes down the literature. The problem of different ways of identifying competences
and defining superior performance is substantial. Cockerill’s (1989) research was
developed from Schroder’s and found the need for competences increased with a faster
rate of environmental change, more complex environments and higher managerial
levels.
According to Iversen (2000, p. 12) “it is reasonable to conclude that there are some
managerial competencies that are causally related to effective and/or superior
performance in a job”, but this generic approach has been criticised as too static
(Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1997). The approach is retrospective, there is no guarantee that
what worked yesterday will still, and the models do not reflect the volatility of the
market. Other authors suggest different competencies based on different
organisational performance criteria and different business environments (Child,
1984; Morgan, 1988; Bognanno, 1990; Dale, 1990).
The standards approach defines minimum levels of accepted performance in a
specific job or positions, and focuses on actual job output (Tate, 1995; Finn, 1993). It
has dominated competency work in the UK for the last couple of decades of the last
century. Standards were developed for around 85 per cent of the workforce (Cheetham
and Chivers, 1996). The approaches have been heavily criticised (Matthewman,
1998/1999). The problems, summarised by Iversen, are that work assignments or tasks
are broken up into “fragments” that fail to reflect the actual work experience and the
interrelatedness of various tasks, (Mansfield, 1989; Aram, 1988), there is a lack of
context (Paton et al., 1992; Crawley and Reay, 1992; Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1997), it is
JEIT individual- rather than group-focused (Belbin, 1981; Kakabadse, 1991; Katzenbach and
30,3 Smith, 1992), inherently conservative (Wolf, 1994), and the role of knowledge and
personal attributes are underrated (Crawley and Reay, 1992). In sum, the approach lacks
developmental focus, output and outcome competencies ignore process competencies,
and it standardises standards by assuming each unit is equally important (Iversen, 2000,
p. 14). In sum, this approach would appear to have even graver limitations than the
212 behavioural approach. It relies primarily on a functional analysis, and as such carries the
deficits of functional analysis identified by Burrell (1996).
The situational approach explores factors that may influence the required
competencies. Approaches were more precise than the culturally contextualised
frameworks of Hofstede (1980) and Trompenaars (1993). Morgan (1988), for example,
focussed on change; Gay (1995) examined competences required by international
managers; Chong (1997a, b) compared Singaporean and British managers and
suggested it might be possible to have a relevant cross-national border set of
managerial competencies; and Thompson et al. (1996) focussed on SMEs, and claimed
both the behaviours and standards approaches were inadequate.
The terms of the debate are, broadly: “Situational factors vary so much that it is
impossible to make a generic list of managerial competencies that are relevant for most
managerial positions” (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1997) versus “Superior managers of all
types and levels share a general profile of competencies. Managers of all types are more
like each other than they are like the individual contributors they manage” (Spencer
and Spencer, 1993, p. 199). The problem is that developing a framework of
competencies involves abstraction, aggregation and standardisation. The extent to
which this takes place is precisely the extent to which its applicability and usefulness
in any particular situation is vitiated.
It is a problem that has confronted organisational studies for decades. In his review of
the field Burrell (1996, p. 642) suggests that there was a certain theoretical naivety or
oversimplification which assumed “the institutional superiority of bureaucratic
structures and the need for measurement of Weber’s ideal type construct”. The
consequence for the formation of administrative science was that it sought unity,
homogeneity and coherence at the expense of fracture, fissure and difference. It is the
ancient dilemma of science. Its tools are attempts to stabilise a world in flux. Survey
research in particular (and much competency literature relies on survey research)
inevitably tends to rely for analysis on the more stable elements of a field (Bulmer, 1984).
The problem for the stabilisers working in the field of competency is how to establish a
specifiable set of reasonably stable qualities that can indicate a manager’s effectiveness,
when the context in which such a manager operates is profoundly unstable. It is the deep
problem of post-enlightenment epistemologies deconstructed first in linguistic terms by
Wittgenstein – how to talk about what is not quantifiable, to understand how our
objectivised ways of seeing have distorted our interpretive horizon and how the
compartmentalisation of our scientific knowledge and our specialised methods for
attaining it have blinded us to the holistic consequences of our suppositions.

Competency in contemporary focus: the map is not the territory

An overview of the literature reveals that a prevalent view situates management
competence as part of management development, which is part of human resource
development (HRD) which is part of human resource management (HRM), which, in Frameworks of
good practice, is linked to overall management strategy. managerial
Problems emerge at the level of definition. “Competency” has no accepted definition
(Strebler et al., 1997; Jubb and Rowbotham, 1997) and a variety of stakeholders used the competence
term, each with their own agendas (Burgoyne, 1993). Depending on whether one was a
psychologist, management theorist, HR manager, educationalist or politician, it took on
different emphases. Hoffmann (1999, p. 277) suggests that the meaning of the term 213
“emerges from the required application of the concept as it relates to human
performance” and that it “shifts according to the context of its use and requirements of
the user” (Hoffmann, 1999, p 281). The argument is pressed further by Sandberg (2000)
whose research indicates that competence at work is constituted by the meaning work
takes on for workers in their experience of it, rather than a specific set of attributes. A
similar problem arises with the term “human resource development”.
Cheetham and Chivers (1998) with reference to Schon (1983, 1987) argue that the
primary professional competence is reflection. They discuss the issue of generic,
high-level competencies, and meta-qualities (Reynolds and Snell, 1988), meta-skills
(Hall, 1986), and meta-competencies (Hyland, 1991; Linstead, 1990, Nordhaug, 1993)
and note that relatively little attention is paid to ethics and values in most competence
models, with the exception of Eraut et al., (1994) and Ozar (1993). Trehan (2004) also
calls attention to the hidden assumptions, ideas and values within the practice of HRD
and notes the absence of attention to the issue of power.
Both Trehan (2004) and Sambrook (2004) offer substantially referenced discussions
pointing to the problem of conceptualising HRD. Sambrook refers to McLean’s, 1998
article called “HRD: a three-legged stool, an octopus, or a centipede” and to Swanson’s
(1999) article “HRD theory, real or imagined?” and she questions the extent to which
HRD should continue to draw on the theoretical assumptions of disciplines such as
economics (Sambrook, 2004, p. 622), a question we pursue below. The problem can be
better appreciated by contrasting the political perspective raised by Sambrook; “Who
influences HRD, in what ways and for what gains?” (Sambrook, 2004, p. 617), with
what Lawler (1994, p. 10) considers to be the research challenge for competency
models; “to first develop ways of evaluating skills, then to be able to measure the worth
of the skills to the organisation, and finally to take them to a market and price them
based on the market value of the individuals having a particular configuration of
skills”.
It is a short path from Lawler’s programme to the shortfalls identified by Harvey
(2004) wherein “lean management” results in a harmony of “well-drilled backing
singers, slick and together but potentially antiseptic and soulless” (Harvey, 2004,
p. 673). As Meldrum and Atkinson (1998) point out, knowing what to do is simply not
enough. As a consequence, energy is sucked into an exercise that reduces the capacity
of the organisation to critically examine what employees require, and managers are
discouraged from considering alternative perspectives of their work (Harvey, 2004,
p. 673). The competency framework becomes an industry in itself (Fletcher, 1991).
The issue of power is picked up by McKenna (2004). In his view competence was not
a set of qualities, but was determined by people’s preparedness to submit to the
disciplinary power extant in a given situation. An example of this (not from McKenna)
is the global executive competency model developed at 3M. This model illustrates how
vocabularies or discourses are deployed and construct the notion of competence.
JEIT Alldredge and Nilan (2000) led the development of an executive global competency
model at 3M. The model was developed in-house and consists of 12 competencies and
30,3 generalisable behavioural anchors for each competency. The focus was on the
placement of future leaders. In describing this, Alldredge and Nilan speak of “a
template of global leadership competencies for use in assessment, development and
succession” (Alldredge and Nilan, 2000, p. 134). A successful and complex global
214 company, 3M required a customised model of leadership. The assumption here (after
Bass, 1990) is that “leadership” is the basis of competitive advantage, and innovation is
a core competency at 3M, hence the 3M specific model. Alldredge and Nilan describe a
comprehensive long-term process. A range of elements were divided into three main
categories: fundamental; essential; and visionary. The first element from each one is
described below:
(1) Fundamental: ethics and integrity – exhibits uncompromising integrity and
commitment to 3M’s corporate values, human resource principles, and business
conduct policies. Builds trust and instils self-confidence through mutually
respectful, ongoing communication.
(2) Essential: customer orientation: – works constantly to provide superior value to
the 3M customer, making each interaction a positive one.
(3) Visionary: global perspective – operates from an awareness of 3M’s global
markets, capabilities, and resources. Exerts global leadership and works
respectfully in multi-cultural environments to 3M’s advantage.

The agenda is set by the needs of the corporate machine. It is not leadership or vision
that is being sought here; the search is for an entity to be “written into” the prescribed
recipe. The list is a power agenda for 3M.
This thinness of perspective is revealed in other work in the field. In one review of
the competencies literature and as a result of a meta-analysis of 29 validation studies
there were few conclusions more substantial than “there is a relationship between
conscientiousness and job performance” (Bartram, 2004, p. 3). We take McKenna’s
point that “managerial competence as a fact of being is illusory, managers are always
and constantly being competent or incompetent” and that “If the application and
performance of the skill is dependent on different styles and personalities, or if the
context in which the skill is applied determines the manner of its application and
performance, then the skill itself becomes at best secondary and at worst redundant in
relation to behaviour” (McKenna, 2004, p. 666). Like Lindsay and Stuart (1997, p. 326)
we believe that competency-based approaches to addressing issues of organisational
competence are “still too narrowly focussed, too static in nature and more tactical than
strategic”. Stuart and Lindsay (1997) also note the many writers who point to the need
for different lists of competencies based on different organisational performances
criteria and different business scenarios, and that fixed lists of generic competencies
may create the belief in management that at least part of the puzzle is solved, which
they suggest may be at best illusory and at worst disastrous. We wish to press this
claim further.

Market gardening and agri-business in the intellectual landscape

At the beginning of the paper we explained why we are using the ecological metaphor
of an intellectual landscape to describe/analyse processes and constructions in the field
of management development that we see as analogous to those found in eco-critiques. Frameworks of
We now continue this analogous critique extending the metaphor. Under a regime of managerial
competency frameworks, we do not have “the examined life” but performance
subjected to surveillance. At a time when it seems at least arguable that the intellectual, competence
scientifically-based, technologically-developed, rational apparatus of the western
world is failing to deliver a coherent and sustainable future for the planet[1], surely we
can conclude that notions of competence, embedded in that apparatus, are also suspect. 215
We situate the problem of generalisability and abstraction,- the aim of those whom
Burrell (1996) called the stabilisers – in the context of a world infused with technology,
a world that Postman (1992) has called a “technopoly”.
Identifying technique, or technical efficiency, as the key ideological fetish of modern
industrialised authoritarian states, Marcuse (1941, p. 138) defined technology as:
. . .a mode of production, as the totality of instruments, devices and contrivances which
characterise the machine age [which] is thus at the same time a mode of organizing and
perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and
behaviour patterns, an instrument for control and domination.
In this state:
. . . the efficient individual is the one whose performance is an action only insofar as it is the
proper reaction to the objective requirements of the apparatus, and his liberty is confined to
the selection of the most adequate means for reaching goals which he did not set (Marcuse,
1941, p. 142).
Rationality is transformed from being a critical force into one of adjustment and
compliance. This relates to what one might call the “infrastructure” of power relations
within organisations. In the discourse of current HR management, we would speak of
adaptability and transferability. Evaluations of technology cannot be confined to
machines themselves (Ellul, 1973). Ellul’s term technique grasps the fact that in a
technological society, the structure of all human life and its systems of organisation
reflect the logic of the machine. An influential form of organisation in the
contemporary world is the corporation as “an autonomous technical structure that
behaves by a system of logic uniquely well suited to its primary function: to give birth
and impetus to profitable new technological forms, and to spread techno-logic around
the globe” (Mander, 1991, p. 120). It is an economistic and quantitative logic often made
clear through ecological disasters. When the Exxon Valdez spilled oil in 1989, the
corporate apologised and promised to clean up the mess. Six months later it ceased all
such efforts, reasoning that fighting lawsuits and making settlements would be
cheaper.
The problem is that the economistic framework confuses the descriptive and the
normative (Rist, 1997). Reality is made to conform to a simple model, or the results of
possible observations are turned into the basis for general laws. In this way economics
misses a great deal. The scale of practices not dependent on the market is vast and a
diverse rationality operates. If production is to be totalled up, why not include the
destruction that is part and parcel of it? The scientific character of economics is
questionable because it omits too much from its investigation and its models have
limited validity. The core belief of the system is the universal necessity of economic
growth, which underpins the logic of corporates and increasingly pervades society at
large. This belief enters our argument about competence in several ways.
JEIT Economic assumptions are part of managerial ideology. Subscription to such
30,3 ideology is a tenet of competency frameworks. Its logic is that of increase and
accumulation, confounded with notions of development and improvement. Thus, more
credits, more competencies, or more of some competencies, are equated with “better”.
At stake here is the need to question the relationship between work and employment
(i.e. forms of social integration) and the need to conceive of social change as a social and
216 political, rather than a market process. By implication there is a need to reframe and
re-root a discussion of management competency in a social and political framework,
rather than the market/efficiency/technological paradigm.
In explaining the use of the landscape metaphor above, we mentioned Shiva’s
concept of monocultures of the mind, and disappeared knowledge systems. We ended
the previous section by referring to 3M’s leadership programme and its discourse. We
now join to our critique the idea that discourse is shaped by and shapes its contextual
topography. Here, the resonance is between disappeared knowledge systems and lost
vocabularies.
Barnett (1994) has discussed the limits of competence in the context of higher
education. He examined the situation where “understanding is replaced by competence;
insight is replaced by effectiveness; and rigour of interactive argument is replaced by
communication skills” (Barnett, 1994, p. 37). The new vocabulary of competence
(“skills”, “vocationalism”, “outcomes”, “capability”, “enterprise”) is not simply
displacing an older vocabulary of “understanding”, “critique”, “interdisciplinarity”
and “wisdom”. His point is that our intellectual landscape is being reshaped:
. . . the capacities lighted upon are those intended to improve economic competitiveness; other
kinds of capabilities and virtues that might promote a different kind of society – friendship,
altruism, ethical concern, carefulness, generosity and a myriad others – are entirely neglected
(Barnett, 1994, p. 45).
Barnett addressed the claims made by the supporters of the competency and outcomes
perspective, as enunciated by Jessup (1991, pp. 130, 134), who described them thus:
Outcome statements can be created for all learning which is considered important or that
people want. If an objective of the programme of learning was to develop creative writing or
designs, these objectives could also be formulated as outcome statements. If you cannot say
what you require, how can you develop it and how do you know when you have achieved it?.
Barnett’s response is that concerns raised by supporters of competency frameworks
are not objective but the concerns of interest groups in the world of work. We may also
ask if practising professionals are the only or best authorities on best practice, and we
should acknowledge that what counts as good practice is contested in most fields. It is
doubtful that competences or outcomes can be stated independently of the learning
process.
The crucial requirement, Barnett argued, is the ability to carry on a conversation
about competencies, to evaluate them, to embrace new ones and discard old ones.
Barnett’s reference to conversation alerts us to that substantial seam of thought in the
philosophy of education that construes “educatedness” as the capacity to conduct a
conversation or engage in dialogue (Greene, 1995, p. 20). By contrast, many
competency frameworks (see 3M) are more like pre-recorded monologues of “his
master’s voice”, a reference to an external authority.
 While acknowledging that skills are important, Barnett attacked the notion that Frameworks of
complex skills can be meaningfully considered in the abstract. All skills are a blend of managerial
action, reflection and judgement; their application is not value-neutral, but calls for
prior judgements both on the boundaries and nature of the situation and on the range competence
and character of the appropriate skills. Judgement is also consequent on action.
Furthermore, skills in use define and change a situation; they are not independent of it.
Drawing on Schon’s (1983, 1987) notion of the reflective practitioner, Barnett argued 217
that professional judgement is embedded in the skills and contained in the decision to
adopt one set of skills rather than another (Barnett, 1994, p. 64). What is at stake is not
a philosophical argument about the reality of transferability or generality but a
socio-political battle of different agencies and interest groups with disparate agendas.
Barnett claims we are ceding the notion of understanding to that of competence. The
problems with reducing understanding to observable performance are several (Barnett,
1994, pp. 75-6). We cannot know what individuals as social actors are up to by
observing them, even if they act in statistically regular ways. The actor’s
understandings are constitutive of the action. Competence offers a view of the
human being as operational in which links between thought and action, practice and
reflection are absent. It does not examine the relationship of people to their work, and
the distinction between labour and work. Labour is competency, performance to
standard whereas work is endowed with meaning, and ideas of ownership,
authenticity, care, and craft. Barnett’s lost vocabularly contains “critique”, and
“wisdom”. Shiva and Barnett offer us different but congruent justifications for
disputing the notion of the manager as technical agent, a rational actor who is in
charge and can control. This goes back to those power relations and the manipulation
of managers by the ideology that they fail to critically unmask.
When we lose a vocabulary, we lose a mentality, a way of thinking, and a view of
the world. When we adopt the vocabulary and tools of the economist/
scientist/technologist, we may gain certain perspectives; we also lose alternatives.
Paradigm, problem, theory and method exist in a state of reciprocal framing. A
framework of competencies by its nature involves abstraction, standardisation and
aggregation. It is a massive simplification and that is its very value, but it comes at a
cost of meaningful applicability.
We cannot dismiss the need to develop “competent” managers. What we need to do,
it seems, is to re-examine what we mean by “competent”, consider how appropriate or
inappropriate frameworks might be, and search for ways to express and practice what
we might, with reservation, call “the development” of managers, which in turn will
play a part in producing the kind of society we want. There are existing management
development and educational programmes that are different to the traditional
offerings. One such programme is the International Master’s Programme in Practicing
Management (IMPM), offered jointly by five business schools across five continents
and supported by several companies (www.impm.org).
This programme arose from the desire of several companies to:
. . . build the capabilities of their best managers, not just as individuals, and not just in
analytical decision making. They wanted to see them open up their perspective on business
and on life in general to become more collaborative, more worldly, and more wise (Mintzberg
and Gosling, 2002, p. 64).
JEIT Although the IMPM is a relatively young model and there is no proof of its long-term
30,3 value, it serves an illustrative purpose.
The programme acknowledges that corporate universities may bring management
closer to practice, but its designers argue that applicability comes at the price of
management education – the process of developing the depth of insight that can arise
in the academic setting. The programme attempts to gain the benefits of both – a
218 marriage of management development with management education. It recognises that
it makes little sense to select people steeped in practice and then disconnect them from
that practice to educate them. On the other hand, space is required for reflection.
Reflecting here does not mean musing; it means wondering, probing, analysing,
synthesising and confronting old beliefs with new ideas. Although there is an overall
structure, within that there are large open spaces. If we may be allowed to implant our
metaphor into a description of the IMPM, we could speak of the idea of the known and
familiar landscape becoming strange, revealed as not what we took it to be, landscape
revisited and dis-appropriated, much larger and filled with potential, at once
threatening and crowded with promise. The approach plays havoc with the schedule,
but “We are here to learn, not to ‘cover ground’”. Discussions are allowed to take
whatever direction they do. The anathema is that “if this is Tuesday, March, it must be
Strategy”. While it acknowledges that teachers have to teach, the claim is that
“education has to be less about preset design, which is a synonym for control, and more
about adapting to the learners at hand”.
The basis of the framework is that the nature of managerial work, not the functions
worked on, is the natural way to organise management education. Thus the course
(five sessions over a period of time in different countries) is organised as five mindsets
addressing self (the reflective), relationships (the collaborative), organisations (the
analytic), context (the worldly) and change (the action).
The IMPM has been described by designers and participants as not just a
programme, but a process:
We think of it as a laboratory too, and a kind of template. As a testing ground for new ideas,
the IMPM has been a lab, but as these ideas take root, the program becomes a template for the
development of other kinds of new programs as well as the redesign of existing ones
(Mintzberg and Gosling, 2002, p. 72).
The implied metaphor is biological: of biological growth and biological diversity. This
does not sit easily with the mechanistic frameworks developed to provide schemata of
competencies. It suggests a mentality resistant to high levels of abstraction,
generalisation and standardisation at the expense of the particular and the
contextualised. It resonates with a multi-cultural mentality that does not require an
interpretive grid emanating from a central point of power. It points to a balanced,
generous and inclusive notion of management. Such a concept stands in stark contrast
to the traditional Western model.

Conclusion
Our task has been to work between accepting reasonable evidence for a role for
frameworks of managerial competence in the context of management development,
and questioning the premises on which its deployment is based. On the one hand,
common sense suggests we can distinguish broadly between highly competent and
grossly incompetent managers. On the other hand, there is the claim that “The idea of a Frameworks of
competence that allows for unpredictability is ultimately incoherent” (Barnett, 1994, managerial
p. 81) and acceptance that modern management constantly confronts unpredictability
and turbulence. The eco-concept of an intellectual landscape the potential of which competence
cannot be reduced to its use-value or short-term benefits, points to the need for greater
imaginative range and cross-disciplinary conceptualising in order to restate the nature
of “knowing” and “knowing how to perform”. Pace Lyotard, there may be very little 219
future in knowing “what use is it?” if we do not know if it is “true”.
There appear to be grounds for questioning a behavioural or standards approach to
competency. Trading on generalisability and transferability at the expense of the
particular, the local and the specifically contingent carries substantial social and
human costs, and even on its own terms of efficiency may be questionable. The
problem runs deeper than developing the situational approach. What seems to be
required is a wholesale shift in values and a re-evaluation of the meaning and purpose
of work. What is called for as meta-narrative is nothing less than a questioning of the
“how” and “why” of the legitimacy of the traditional management values and social
assumptions. Competency frameworks are legitimating frameworks and
post-empiricist approaches factoring in the undecidables do not question who is
being delegitimised, nor how the tension between validity and power is scripted.
With the kind of forces at play in the turbulent environment we have, it is surely
time to question the competency approach to management development.

Note
1. We do acknowledge that this is an arguable premise. For an even-handed but ultimately
sanguine view of technology in society see Tenner (1996), and for an enthusiastic embrace of
technology see Kelly (1994).

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About the author

Damian Ruth is a Senior Lecturer in Strategic Management and Change Management at Massey
University, Wellington. He has published on institutional culture, on how research, education
and management shape each other, and on perception and affect in academic work. His
disciplinary background is broad and he is currently publishing research on management
development in New Zealand in association with a UK-based EU-funded project on international
comparisons of management development practice. Damian Ruth can be contacted at:
d.w.ruth@massey.ac.nz

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