This issue of Army Logistician marks the debut of Spectrum
a new department devoted to carefully researched and referenced
articles that are intended to be thought provoking and intellectually
|A Values-Based Critique
of Lean and Six Sigma as a Management Ideology
|by Dr. Christopher R. Paparone
These observations are drawn from articles that
appeared in the November-December 2006 issue of Army Logistician.
That issue focused on the success stories of Lean and Six
Sigma (LSS) methods employed by managers at Army Materiel
Command (AMC) depots. (LSS is a combination of “Lean” and “Six
Sigma” methodologies, which are explained separately
in Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your
by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, and Six Sigma:
The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World's
Top Corporations, by Mikel Harry and Richard Schroeder.) Today,
the Army logistics community and other public organizations
are taking cues from businesses that have incorporated
performance-based methods with reported success (such as those
recounted in Army Logistician). In the spirit of professional
inquiry, these efforts should be subjected to critical examination
to illustrate the potential dangers of overvaluing the LSS-style
It is vital to the profession of military logistics that we
maintain the ideal of unobstructed freedom to dialog. We must
be able to provide important support or counterpoints to articles
and commentary published in Army Logistician or similar venues
both inside and outside the Department of Defense. Enlightened
members and stewards of the profession of military logistics
should appreciate the need for a vigorous exchange of ideas.
Although criticisms may or may not be well received by senior
leaders who have committed
significant resources to implement certain techniques (such
as LSS), the criticisms should at least be accepted as fundamental
to the viability of the profession.
The purpose of this essay is to open a critical discussion
about the nature of popular performance-based management initiatives—particularly
LSS—and those oriented on the “reinventing government” movement
for more than a decade (GPRA, 1993; Gore, 1993). I offer a
values-based critique of LSS, supported with published research
available in organizational and management studies (OMS) from
a respectable body of literature. (A version of this article with complete bibliography and
citations is available as an HTML document on the Army
LSS: Blending Internal Process
and Rational Goal Values
My fundamental argument in this essay is that those organizations
that adopt an LSS-style management philosophy tend to demonstrate
a dominant cultural “ideology” that is based on
the command and control values of the internal process and
rational goal models of management (Cameron and Quinn, 1999).1 (See
the chart below.)
and professional journals that seem to favor LSS and similar
performance-based management practices. Do these publications
reflect a management ideology and perhaps a community-wide
The focus of the internal process model
of management is on organizational values that emphasize the
of the organization. The thrust of the model is to identify
and eliminate process instability and wasteful practices through
control measures. One of the early pioneers of the internal
process model was Frederick Taylor, hence this model
has often been linked to the ideology of “Taylorism”(e.g.,
Perrow, 1986; discussed in Mintzberg, 1989b; Quinn, Faerman,
Thompson, and McGrath, 1996; Hatch, 1997; and epically told
by Merkle, 1980) and
associated with the machine metaphor of organization (Mintzberg,
1989a; Morgan, 1997). The basic assumption is that quality
can be defined and technically
engineered into processes and procedures to the point that
human and machine error can be minimized and production accuracy
and speed can be maximized.2
The rational goal model of management
stresses organizational values associated with reading the
understanding the desires of key stakeholders outside the
formal boundaries of the organization, integrating goals,
acknowledging interdependencies, and then planning well-controlled
ways to achieve the goals. The prevailing metaphor of organization
under this model, on which “agency theory” is
based, is that of “organization as domination” (Morgan,
underlying transactional assumption of this model is that
machines and people (“agents”) can be systematically
sanctioned to achieve top-down objectives that top management
(“principals”) believes will satisfy the “market,” clients,
or other external constituencies (Perrow, 1986).3
LSS-style management reflects these two models
that together closely align with the fields of operations
research and systems analysis (ORSA) and strategic management
(Paparone and Crupi, 2006). Both work hand in hand in organizations
that have top management that, above all, values control and
stability. In these models,
processes are directed by upper management and then implemented
and controlled through hierarchical authority, sanctions,
rules, policies, and similar accountability structures (Quinn
and Rohrbaugh, 1981). Popular past examples of similar performance-based
that also fall between these models are Just-in-Time Inventory
(Ford, 1922; Shingo, 1989/1981), Management by Objectives
(Drucker, 1954; Odiorne, 1965), Statistical Control/Total
Quality Management (Deming, 1950, 1982), Business Process
Reengineering (Hammer and Champy, 1993), and Balanced Scorecard
(Kaplan and Norton, 1996).
Like its predecessors, LSS aims to identify and remove inefficient
or nonproductive steps in order to increase speed (hence the
metaphor “lean”) and to control process variation
by capturing measurements and analyzing them based on plus
or minus three standard deviations in the normal curve (hence
the statistical term, “six sigma”). LSS implementation
calls for developing a hierarchy of skilled personnel (from
the lowest “member” category to the highest “champions” category)
that more or less mimics the traditional organizational power
structure (Ho and Chuang, 2006). The belief is that continuous
feedback of internally and externally oriented performance
metrics will identify
when improvements or wholesale process changes are working
well and when they are not. The primary motivators behind
the LSS mode of management are economical ones: cost savings
and the approval of those who “buy” the methods
and results (Spector, 2006).4
Dominant Psychological and Cultural Value
Preferences of the U.S. Army
Organizational cultures that are attracted to the Tayloristic (scientific
management) qualities of LSS-type systems may be blinded to other important
interpretations of effectiveness and criteria for decisionmaking (Quinn
and Rohrbaugh, 1981; Mitroff and Mason, 1982; Burrell and Morgan, 1989;
Paparone and Crupi, 2006). An abundance of literature warns those who
have psychological and cultural
penchants for the arguably false sense of certainty and machine-like
perfection that LSS and other internal process- and rational
goal-based methods advertise (e.g., Marion, 1999; Wheatley, 1999;
Clampitt and DeKoch, 2001).
Before summarizing the main findings of that body of literature, I want
to discuss the underlying, and perhaps hidden, values that may make
LSS a seductive management practice for senior Army leaders, both psychologically
and culturally. While I will report some selective data, I make no claim
that interpretation of the data can be applied to the Army as a whole.
However, the implications of the data do suggest that more study may
be fruitful, and it is worth speculating here on the importance of the
data if they are indeed reflective of the larger body of Army managers.
David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, in Please Understand Me: Character
and Temperament Types, describe four temperaments associated with Jungian
psychological archetypes and how management style
preferences are linked to them. I distilled short descriptions of temperaments
from their lengthy discussion (the short names are Greek gods who epitomized
Apollonian/NF (intuitive-feeling). Emphasizes self-actualization; life
is a search for deeper meaning and a higher sense of mission; values
religiosity and becoming the person to the maximum potential to become;
there should be no pretenses—the true self should be revealed;
values ethical reasoning.
Dionysian/SP (sensing-perceiving). Quests for artistic freedom; values
by impulsiveness and tentativeness; hungers for action as its own end
without the necessity of rules.
Promethean/NT (intuitive-thinking). Focuses on competence and acquisition
of intelligence; values skill and ingenuity, logic, and by-the-book
operations; searches for prediction.
Epimethean/SJ (sensing-judging). Yearns to
belong; values economical reasoning, preparation, strong sense of duty
and tradition, stability,
seriousness; desires clear hierarchy and formal structure. (pp. 27-66)
Based on several years of aggregated results of hundreds of Army War
College students who took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) instrument,
approximately 86 percent are consistently (year after year) characterized
as having the SJ (55 percent) or NT (31 percent) temperaments. These
findings are similar to percentages found in 1987 to 1989 and in 1993
Army pre-command courses for 755 and 380 lieutenant colonels (88 and
86 percent SJ or NT, respectively). These data suggest a dominant psychological
temperament (SJ-NT) among Army personnel biased toward prediction and
the very structured approaches to management that characterize LSS-type
Some group data also are available that indicate a cultural propensity
for the values associated with both the internal process and rational
goal models. In a recent culture study conducted at the Army War
College, 533 Army students (mostly lieutenant colonels) were asked to
if they considered Army organizational values to fall more along the
internal process and rational goal models or toward
alternative values associated with the human relations and open
systems models. (The latter models are more oriented on
flexibility and acceptance of conflict and variability. See the chart
below for definitions of
these models.) The students were given 100 points to allocate among
the four value groupings in the 24-item, valid and reliable Organization
Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) (Cameron and Quinn, 1999). The
average response indicated approximately 65 of a possible 100 points
were allocated to the internal
process (27 percent) and rational goal (38 percent) models.
The results for weighting human relations and open systems values
were 21 percent and 12 percent, respectively (Pierce, 2004). These data
indicate that the respondents
perceived the Army’s dominant values as being associated with
those of the LSS or similar performance-based management techniques.
Considering these MBTI and OCAI data together, I postulate that there
could be at least moderate psychological and organizational biases in
the Army’s senior leaders and a bent toward management values
and practices epitomized by LSS and the like. More study is required
to determine if this proposition can be supported more objectively.
organizational values associated with four
distinct managerial models. (Adapted by the
author from “A Competing
Values Approach to Organizational Effectiveness,” in
Public Productivity Review, by Robert E. Quinn
and John Rohrbaugh, and Paradox
and Transformation: Toward a Theory of Change
in Organization and
Management, by Robert E. Quinn and Kim S. Cameron.
List of prominent figures by the author.)
Literature Review of LSS-Style
Performance-Based Management Techniques
A host of publications favor the implementation of LSS, including many
trade magazines and professional journals associated with management
by statistical controls. (See the chart at the top of the page.)
Although some articles in these publications do critique LSS and similar management-detailed
practices, the focus of the criticisms tends to be on implementation
issues and on choosing the right factors and metrics to integrate
perfect the manager’s surveillance of effectiveness (e.g.,
Anderson and McAdam, 2004; Mariotti, 2005; Huntington and Trusko,
2005; Cheng and Shiu, 2006; Spector and West, 2006; Sutton, 2006).
For example, Robert Spector and Mary West, in their 2006 survey of
revealed studies that reported that 43 percent of the companies who
adopted performance-based techniques failed to achieve the objectives
from 2002 to 2005 and that, even if successful, took too long to
implement those techniques. As with the Spector and West study, I
found no calls
in these sources for a rejection or wholesale criticism of the practice
of performance-based management. One explanation for the lack of
any critical examination of the assumptions and underlying values
management techniques in the publications listed in the chart may
be that the many authors were commenting as members within a single
In the following paragraphs, I examine LSS-like
techniques through alternative epistemological and ontological
perspectives (Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1981; Mitroff and Mason,
1982; Schön, 1983; Burrell and Morgan, 1989; Lewis and
Grimes, 1999). In other words, to counter the “discursive
formation” contained in these publications, I pose reflective
questions at the beginning of each paragraph that imply alternative
philosophies that are available by employing OMS publications
that have different perspectives (Sewell and Barker, 2006).6
LSS: A competency trap? Excessive
controls on the use of known “technology”7 can
stifle experimentation and innovation and inhibit learning
essential in the production
of diverging or exploratory ideas (Argyris and Schön,
1978; Senge, 1990). When you are evaluating
practices from within the confines of a single paradigm (in
this case, the paradigm of “technical rationality”8 I
associate with the values of the internal process and rational
goal models), the danger is to be caught unknowingly in a “competency
trap.” Such a mental trap “reflects the ways in
which improving capabilities with one rule, technology, strategy,
or practice interferes with changing that rule, technology,
strategy or practice to another that is potentially superior,” according
to James G. March in A Primer on Decision Making: How
Decisions Happen (March, 1997, pp. 96-97). The concept
of competency traps is conceptually related to the idea of “groupthink.” As
defined by Chamu Sundaramurthy and Marianne Lewis in their
and Collaboration: Paradoxes of Governance,” in the
Academy of Management Review, groupthink is “a
pattern of collective defenses aimed at denying or suppressing
is associated with a shared comfortable feeling about known
technology (Sundaramurthy and Lewis, 2003, p. 400).
LSS: Antithetical to the learning
organization? In other
words, the perception of ongoing success interferes
with what scholars of organizational learning have termed “double-loop
learning” (the ability to suspend deeply held values,
no matter how successfully they have appeared to have guided
effectiveness, in order to consider alternative values) (Argyris,
1985). If managers are blinded by infatuation with the seemingly
nature of LSS (the explanatory power of factor analysis and
the proposition that we can isolate and manipulate independent
variables) and related statistical control measures, organizational
learning may be disabled. Whereas the learning organization
employs metaphors associated with moral reasoning, exploration,
question, and adaptation, LSS employs machine-like, amoral
metaphors such as levers, controls, and engineering. Gareth
Morgan, in Images of Organization, insists that “.
. . mechanistic approaches to organization work well only
conditions where machines work well . . .” (1997, p.
27) In contrast, the open systems model of management
espouses values that include the uniqueness of each situation.
their environments are too complex for prescriptive approaches
(such as LSS) to be effective across all structures and missions
(Thompson, 1967; Perrow, 1986).9
LSS: A maladaptive tool for impression
management? In his article, “Goal-Based
Learning and the Future of Performance Management,” in Public
Administration Review, Donald P. Moynihan found that
Government agencies tended to use “managing for results” as
to argue for increased resources, not as a tool to change
management practices” (Moynihan, 2005, p. 213). His
study concluded that some organizations and managers
tended to complete their reporting requirements and then not
be bothered by them until the next reporting cycle. The performance-measuring
process became more of a “rationalizing myth” for
impression management, with a purpose of arguing for resources
rather than a cause-and-effect tool for increasing efficiency
and effectiveness (Perrow, 1986, p. 266). The process of setting
reporting requirements also can interfere with organizational
learning (a key value
associated with the open systems model) when the control structure
is emphasized over flexibility to adapt and learn in ever-changing
contexts (Mintzberg, 1989a, 1989b).
LSS: A “psychic prison” for innovation? P.W.
Ingraham, in his article “Performance: Promises to Keep
and Miles to Go,” in Public Administration Review,
commented that the idea of becoming lean in terms of efficient
can interfere with the ability to adapt later. In the face
of uncertainty and environmental complexity, Ingraham endorses
the idea that capacity may have to be valued more by management
as a predecessor to performance. Management emphases on workforce
recruitment and development, oriented on creativity, commitment,
and talent (which are human relations model values),
performance metrics appear at best as mediocre practice. On
the other hand, investing in the workforce could develop the
capacity to be breathtakingly outstanding and lead to performance
well beyond management expectations. Managers can set conditions
for performance by concentrating more on the quality of the
workforce than on the quantity of the metrics. In contrast,
a longitudinal study conducted by Mary Benner and Michael
Tushman over a 20-year period “indicates that increasing
the use of process management activities tips the innovation
balance toward exploitation at the expense of exploration
. . . [and] contribute[s] to inertia and, in turn, dampen[s]
environmental responsiveness” (2002, p. 702). Too much
management surveillance can serve as a kind of psychic prison
(Morgan, 1997; Sewell and Barker, 2006).
LSS: Dehumanizer of the workplace? In
a similar light, the paradigmatic assumption of LSS (and like
methods) is that
the whole process seems invitingly rational because substantive
outcomes (such as control of otherwise shirking workers, goals
achievement, mission performance measures, and allocations
of resources) are the preeminent focus for achieving organizational
effectiveness. On the other hand, such performance-based management
tends to ignore organizational effectiveness expressed in
terms of symbolic outcomes (such as sentiments, beliefs, attitudes,
satisfaction, values, and commitment) (Pfeffer, 1981, p. 8).
Emotional, moral, or informal social issues do not account
for much under the
of technical rationality. The paradox is that LSS-style management
may inspire, as Henry Mintzberg notes in The Rise and
Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving Roles for Planning,
and Planners, “. . . routinization [that] may discourage
the very creative and judgmental orientation that it so evidently
requires” (Mintzberg, 1989b). Arguably, LSS oligarchic-style
techniques violate principles of over 50 years of human relations
open systems theories research.
LSS: Instigator of subcultural conflict? Organizational
cultures that give at least equal weight to the values of
the human relations and open systems models
can serve to transcend ephemeral goals because the goals by
themselves are not necessarily
internalized as the taken-for-granted, technically correct,
or moral ones. The values of goals and performance-oriented
leaders (as represented by LSS) may not be compatible with
the deeply rooted values of some organizational subcultures.
For example, in the team-based, highly adaptive, morally astute,
trustworthy, and improvisational subculture of Soldiers and
units engaged in ongoing operations, any managerial attempts
to communicate hierarchical goals and efficiency indicators
may be interpreted as overly coercive, bureaucratic, and ineffective
to the members of that subculture. These attempts can be met
by passive or active resistance, to the eventual detriment
of the overall organization (Paparone, 2003).
LSS: A nom de plume for strategy? Mintzberg
(1989b) makes a strong case that technical rationality may
inhibit strategy making.
LSS and the like represent the idea that what “[Frederick]
Taylor accomplished in the factory, planning systems could
now accomplish by extrapolation in the executive suite” (p.
23). In other words, LSS-like management programs become the
strategy by default. The seductive certainty and precision
of programmatic implementation becomes more valued than the
uncertainty and complexity involved in having strategic mindfulness
(Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001). Achieving strategic adaptability
with command and control systems like LSS, Mintzberg says,
is analogous to a pregnant
virgin (Mintzberg, 1989b, p. 25). Process mapping and watching
the dashboard metrics of LSS-style statistical methods is
like deciding on a sequence
of football plays before the game begins and then coaching
the game by watching only the scoreboard and not what is happening
on the field.
A mindless fixation on measures of performance and detailed
objectives serves to detach managers from a deeper understanding
of the complexities of organizations and those they serve.10 The
holistic picture is subjugated to the details and some short-term
gains, and any aspect of detecting possible synergistic
forces at work is removed (Argyris and Schön, 1978; Senge,
1990; Anderson and McAdam, 2006). Mintzberg argues (with a
book full of supporting evidence) that remaining open to learning
important in uncertain environments because “strategies
may fail, not only by being unsuccessfully implemented, but
also by being successfully implemented and then proving inadequate.
Likewise, strategies can succeed even though they were not
initially intended” (1989b, p. 360). LSS-type management
techniques assume that such techniques are adequate to the
of the organization.11
The claims of Lean and “Six Sigma revolution” (Cheng
and Shiu, 2006, p. 22) and implausible expectations evoked
from “the machine that
changed the world” (Raulerson and Sparks, 2006, p. 6)
reflect at best an evolution of techniques under the auspices
of Taylor’s scientific management (later recast as performance-based
management). LSS and the like tend to reflect the Tayloristic
dogma (people as machines) at a higher level of analysis,
thereby feeding the dominant image of the organization as
a machine (Mintzberg 1989b; Morgan, 1997).
I have attempted in this essay to provide a values-based critique
of LSS and other performance-based techniques by demonstrating
the apparent psychological and cultural preferences for control
and stability that may dominate the Army’s managerial
structures. I suspect this ideology extends to AMC and its
authors in the November-December 2006 issue of Army Logistician.
The dangers of a single paradigmatic orientation (in this
case, that of technical rationality) can blind us to values
associated with double-loop learning and the learning organization,
organization adaptability, workforce creativity and development,
humanizing the workplace, cultural awareness, and strategy
I’ll See It When I believe It.” As
the character Dr. Eleanor Arroway, played by Jodie Foster,
observed in the
1997 movie, Contact, “Ironically, the thing people are
most looking for—meaning—is what science has been
unable to give them.” Army training and education programs
should stress the importance of individual self-awareness
and the value of organizational reflexivity.12 The
contemporary OMS literature gives a tremendous amount of support
proposition (e.g., Gardner and Stough, 2002; Argyris, 1991;
Argyris and Schön, 1978; Senge, 1990; Hardy, Phillips,
and Clegg, 2001; Mintzberg, 2004). Use of multiple paradigmatic
approaches to training and education will help the processes
of self-awareness and
group reflexivity and increase the propensity toward transformational
sensemaking (Quinn and Cameron, 1988; Weick, 1995; Hatch,
1997; Lewis and Grimes, 1999; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001).
A philosophy of logistics and management. A
philosophy can be defined as one’s own to the extent
that the individual rids himself of the effects of clichés
and catchwords, placards, parades, slogans, and watchwords
from the social counterpressures of ideological clubs,
circles, peer and populist groups, and professional orthodoxies
associations. (See note 1.) By thus surmounting the laws
of fashion, the individual can define his individual standpoint
(Feuer, 1975, p. 187). AMC should lead the field and expand
its espoused management philosophy to incorporate a more
balanced and open approach
to institutional management values, to include examining
potential moral sterility of Taylorism. A comprehensive
assessment of its organizational culture and subcultures
and those of
its clientele may produce significant opportunities for
values-based reflexivity and more opportunity to consider human
relations and open
systems approaches to strategy making and management
in general (Quinn, Faerman, Thompson, and McGrath, 1996).
A professional academe. The Army needs a venue to question
the efficacy of assertions made and to reveal potential fallacies
and otherwise unexamined assumptions contained in them. AMC
and other Army logistics activities should publicly lead and
recognize the importance of scholarship and professional inquiry
designed to openly question underlying assumptions and the
efficacy of espoused practices and theories of effectiveness
in the professional field of military logistics. The Army
should develop a professional journal, requiring blind, peer-reviewed
acceptance of manuscripts (and applying the acceptance process
to ones written and submitted by those of high rank and organizational
position). The intellectual creation and sustainment of the
professional body of military logistics knowledge must include
a level playing field based on scholarly merit, substance
of argument, allowance for multiple perspectives, and the
opportunity for bold conjecture controlled by intellectual
With the opportunity presented by the Army Logistics
University to be established at Fort Lee, Virginia,
Army logistics leaders should endorse the creation of
an institute dedicated to the field of military logistics.
This academe, constituted initially with a journal and
an institute, should not be considered a “taskable” agency
for senior logistics commanders or staff officers but
rather as a network for theorists and practitioners
The academe should serve as a professional hub for military
logisticians and should be guarded against subjugation
by hierarchical influences and perceived immediate needs
for studies or projects. Those in authority should serve
as stewards of the professional ideals that the academe
is based on and must themselves compete on the intellectual
grounds of all members in the tradition of primus
inter pares (“first among equals”).
The academe must remain focused on academic freedom,
which is the
only insurance for positive and continuous moral, individual,
organizational, and cultural transformation. In that
regard, “speaking truth to power” (Wildavsky,
1979) is perhaps the value above all others for this
academe of military logistics. In this way, popular
management literature (such as that reported on LSS)
can be criticized in an open, professional manner.
Dr. Christopher R. Paparone is an associate professor
in the Army Command and General Staff College’s
Department of Logistics and Resource Operations at Fort
Lee, Virginia. A retired Army colonel, he has a Ph.D.
from Pennsylvania State University.
in an organization context means the tendency “to
provide justification for the organization’s existence
and functions” (Daniel Katz and Robert L. Kahn, The
Social Psychology of Organizations). For example,
this statement by Hart in the November-December 2006
issue of Army Logistician may indicate an
ideological bent: “Lean is a philosophy that, when appropriately
applied to a production process, reduces or eliminates
the expenditure of unnecessary time, materials, and
effort. Now coupled with a concept called Six Sigma,
Lean has evolved into a successful program instead of
slipping into history like so many management fads.” Another
example includes this proposition by Hart that survival
of the depots is at stake: “Innovation and
the desire to be competitive in the looming 2005
led Red River to explore Lean and to discover a book
called Lean Thinking, by James P. Womack
and Daniel T. Jones.” (Hart, 2006, p. 4)
I also think Lewis S. Feuer’s description of
ideology in Ideology
and the Ideologists seems to apply here: “[Ideology] is the
outcome of social circumpressures; it takes philosophy, and reduces
it to the lowest common social denominator . . . the emphasis is on
the being ‘one of us,’ and the free, uncontrolled, venturing
idea is suspect. An ideology is an ‘ism,’ that
is, a philosophical tenet which has been affirmed as the axiom for a
political group . . . But above all, the ideology closes the door to
search and doubt . . .; the ideology claims answers that are certainties
. . .; it closes questions; it records terminal collective decisions;
it is not a franchise for the individual questioner” (1975,
2 Judith A. Merkle traces the
Tayloristic roots of military logistics to the Prussian
Army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and to the
U.S. Army logistics system in World War I (1980,
p. 71 and pp, 172-175).
Moe (1984) published an economic theory of hierarchy
based in “agent theory.” The “principal” (the
manager) interacts with the “agent” (his
subordinate) by contractual arrangement, with the underlying
assumption that both want to maximize the value of the
outcome of their relationship. The principal wants something
done (he has a goal) and employs positional power advantages
over the agent (particularly to offset the agent’s
advantage of “asymmetry” of information—the
agent may know things the principal does not) to get
the agent to work toward that goal. The principal and
the agent struggle to settle conflicts of interest between
them and are driven toward contractual settlement (like
officer efficiency report support forms) because both
are risk-aversive. The principal wants to ensure that
the agent is not shirking, so the game of how to go
about ensuring that (such as goal setting, reporting,
and monitoring or through attempts to align value systems)
is what organization is all about. See Complex
Organizations: A Critical Essay, by Charles Perrow,
for a scathing critique and an explanation of the moral
example of a transactional (agent theory-based) and “organization
as domination” ideology can be discerned from
this statement by Raulerson and Sparks in the November-December
2006 Army Logistician: “Too many times, proposed
improvements in an organization fail because individuals
resist or do not buy into the need for change.” (Raulerson
and Sparks, 2006, p. 7). And later in the same article: “But
users of Lean Six Sigma should be warned: At times,
the multifaceted Lean Six Sigma processes can be very
frustrating. This is particularly true in the beginning,
when employees often are very reluctant to actually
buy into the processes” (p. 9). These statements
indicate that this ideology dominates the thinking of
Kuhn suggests that a paradigm “stands for the
entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques,
and so on, shared by members of a given community” (1996,
6 A “discursive
formation” is “what is important for a particular
community of researchers [or practitioners] to study
and how it ought to be studied,” according to
Graham Sewell and James R. Barker in “Coercion
Versus Care: Using Irony to Make Sense of Organizational
Surveillance,” in the Academy of Management
Review (p. 936).
It is similar in concept to what Thomas Kuhn (1996)
called a “paradigm.”
characterize LSS (and similar popular management
remedies) as a technology, defined by Rupert F. Chisholm
Advanced Information Technology Into Public Organizations” in Public
Productivity Review as “. . . all the
knowledge, information, material resources, techniques,
that a work unit uses to convert system inputs into
outputs—that is to conduct work.” (Chisholm,
definition implies that technology is a pre-existing
solution to a given problem and that technical rationality
is the reasoned application of it (hence, technology
consists of solutions that continuously look for
problems in a seemingly random way) (Cohen, March,
and Olson, 1972).
8 The paradigm of “technical rationality” is
described by Donald Schön, in The Reflective
Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action,
as “the view of professional knowledge which
has most powerfully shaped both our thinking about
professions and the institutional relations of research,
education, and practice—professional activity
consist in instrumental problem solving made rigorous
by the application of scientific theory and technique” (1983,
p. 21). Schön
cautions that a cultural fixation on technical rationality
can blind professionals to the limits of this paradigm:
It assumes away “complexity, uncertainty, instability,
uniqueness and value-conflict” (p. 39). Technical
rationality assumes that there are such things as “ends” (in
the military vernacular, “end states”).
But, in the face of complex situations, ends tend
to be “confused and conflicting.” Hence,
we tend to fall back on known technologies to make
the complex unknowns into something “rationally” understandable
(p. 41). Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan
in “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” in
Administrative Science Quarterly (1972),
describe this phenomenon as “solutions looking
for problems” rather
than vice versa (the sequence assumed by technical
rationality). It then follows that, when those in
authority are inculcated in the technical rationality
paradigm and they perceive the criteria for organizational
decisionmaking are dissonant, they will seek reduction
of dissonance over time using the façade of
technical rationality in political ways (Bacharach,
Bamberger, and Sonnenstuhl, 1996). They will negotiate
collectively toward dissonance reduction
with external stakeholders (for example, by engaging
in macropolitics) and individually and in coalitions
among executives, managers, and workers internal
to the organization by engaging in micropolitics.
In this process, hidden organizational power politics
(behind the façade of a professed “science”)
can serve to stifle professional inquiry and truth-seeking.
I observed this phenomenon when working on joint
logistics lessons learned, as the commander and staff
of the U.S. Transportation Command seemed to present
the “deployment and distribution operations
center” (DDOC—a brainchild of TRANSCOM
during the later stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom
1) as a technical solution for all problems identified.
I felt frustrated at every meeting to voice a contrary
opinion, and eventually I succumbed to overwhelming
use of the tactic of what Marcia Wilkoff calls “consensus
through exhaustion” (Wilkof, 1982).
old adage, “one size fits all,” is implied
with LSS-like prescriptions. I recently heard that
there is a move afoot to take LSS to the Army’s
schools and attempt to apply statistical control
techniques to academic organizations and missions.
This illustrates the ideological nature of technically
rational, performance-based management techniques—the
belief that one can apply Tayloristic style statistical
controls to manage any situation. I invite readers
to investigate Charles Perrow’s typology based
on the continua of organization complexity and degree
of coupling that make the homogenous application
seem absurd (1986, pp. 148-150). I also invite readers
to study the history of Taylorism and its undesirable
education in Management and Ideology: The Legacy
of the International Scientific Management Movement,
by Judith A. Merkle (1980).
think back on my Army career and the annual ritual
of filling out my officer efficiency report support
forms (a management-by-objectives management scheme)
(Drucker, 1954; Odiorne, 1965). I cannot think
of a single instance where my objectives, formulated
at the beginning of my rating period,
remotely matched my accomplishments a year later.
This is because conditions and missions changed so
often as to make the initial objectives and my plans
to get there obsolete. Yet, because the departmental
culture has apparently preferred performance-based
management (the paradigm of “technical rationality” fueled
by agency theory), the ritual persists. The Department
of Defense seems to do the same on an even grander
scale with the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and
Execution process (Paparone, 2007).
11 The articles in the November-December
2006 issue of Army Logistician (Hart,
2006; Raulerson and Sparks, 2006; Russell, 2006)
spoke neither to an overall Army Materiel Command
to other management beliefs that might present
a more balanced management philosophy that would
include evidence of human relations model
open systems model values.
is “. . . an awareness of the situatedness
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Nelson Phillips, and Stewart R. Clegg in “Reflexivity
in Organization and Management Theory: A Study of
the Production of the Research ‘Subject,’ ” in
Human Relations (Hardy, Phillips & Clegg,
2001, p. 554). Reflexivity is related
to skepticism. It requires not only suspending belief
having dogmatic assertions) but also asserting that
we do not know how to obtain ultimate knowledge at
this time. This does not mean abdicating intellectual
integrity or rigor when theorizing. A professional
organization or academe continuously examines its
own roots of argument and considers other assumptions,
purposefully creating dissonance that, in turn, creates
opportunities for transcendence or transformation.
Ray Holland, in “Reflexivity” in Human
Relations, defines “transdisciplinary
going beyond the traditional view of “unidisciplinary” reflexivity
and into four levels of reflexive analysis (1999,
p. 474). To find meaning, the organization must be
willing to look
outside itself “transorganizationally” to
question itself and its organization-centric paradigms
or realize the confines of its own discursive formation.
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