Time in industrial world

The post-modern managerial reasoning brought the idea of multi-dimensional perception of time, including the timing in industry. The speed of making decision process is different from sector to sector, so is the horizon for planning. The time always was a rare resource, but in the innovative economy the timing became crucial factor for competitiveness.

Globalisation, especially, the financial world market, imposed the strict and narrow “using” of time as one of the lines in the grid of reference for calculating profit. With the informational technological revolution, the time became divided to the shortest parts – seconds, even milliseconds for the computer’s automotive models for exchange trade. So, the modern time was compressed.

First of all, the horizon of planning in real sector is much larger, than milliseconds, it is stretched out to years, decades, even to a half-century: e.g., investment in a pipe-line project is calculated on the prospective 20-30 years of estimated yield.

In the high-tech sectors, where new products and new technologies appear each 6 months, the companies should organise the fundamental R&D works with advancing 10-15 years ahead.

The long-term vision became necessary not only due to the ecological damage, obvious at the last quarter of XX century, but due to the logic of swift change in demand, fast evolution of technologies and aggressive competition.

Secondly, the real industrial life is cyclic, and not linear, as it was considered in the modernist approach.

Cycle as a dimension for management

Post-modernist reply is concentrated on the long-term idea of development, with the core concept of plurality, including the differentiation of goals, which implies, inter alia, the re-orienting managerial activity to the necessity to meet different requirements. The “sustainable” responsible manager must have in his/her mind the idea of the future generations – human beings, nature, technologies or products.

The life and the creative process are organised in round logic from birth to death through growth, crisis and recovering (or restructuring, in the case of organisations). The spiral development at individual level concerns the professional rise, the assimilation of new experience and skills, the enrichment with new competences, acquirement of new knowledge, the hierarchical promotion and getting new social status, advancement in social, economical or political position. It is also the interest of individual to improve the position for himself and to assure the future opportunities for his or her children, or spouse, or relatives, who will in their turn support the individual one day.

The spiral growth at macro-level means the creative update of technologies or products, the evolution of managerial models, of organisational forms. To change the corporative structure or core value chain, the manager should reject the old mechanisms and prior personalities, and start ab initio.

Myth

At the start, the manager has the idea, the picture of the potential future and combines the mythological conscience of desired thing or state with the rational thought of the tools to achieve them. The myth in this case includes two dimensions:

· values as the scale of priorities, the direction to move, and these values are more of less traditional and distinct;

· idea, more or less clear picture, representation of the planned future and environment.

The vision of the potential future world is mythological, due to the fact, that this vision reflects the will and the wish of the acting person, and is based on the value system, which is given to people (including managers) with education and culture.

Context

Textual prescriptions took their predominant place in the regulating working process after the Weberian formalisation. The legal legitimating and the written transfer of instructions date about a century: on the largest territory of Western Europe until the XIX century the decisions were made by sovereign, and the literate workers and masters were too rare. But the modernist change imposed the legal ideal-type of authority and the rational bureaucracy.

How the industries were functioning before? The processes were built on the basis of the background knowledge and of the acquired personal behavioural experience.

The context permitted to avoid instructions on dozens of pages, for example, to explain, what does it mean “quality”. Now, enterprises create their policies of “philosophy of quality”, implement the TQM concept, but time to time the necessity to assure the dividends for shareholders forces to decrease costs to the detriment of the quality. The textual regulation is based on complex mechanisms of sanctioning, which are also expensive. So we find the melamine in the milk, we see the BP oil leak in Mecsico Gulf, etc.

Furthermore, the background makes not written things more important, then the legal prescriptions, e.g., the volunteers at the nuclear station in Fukushima were taking fatal and heroic risk due to the culture assimilated with education from the earliest childhood. Another example concerns one of the administrative tool, the dismissal (or threat of it). The dismissing for an employee has not only the direct consequence of loosing wage, it includes the loss of social position, the deprivation of pride to be a part of a company with its reputation, of identifying with this company or this place, this office, this job. It includes the new problem, what to do with a huge volume of free time. It means the rupture of friendship with colleagues. That is why in collective national cultures, incl. Russia, the strikes and protest actions of employees are not as widespread as in Western European or Northern American countries.

The behavioural economics shows many non-economical and even irrational arguments, which determine our real behaviour in economic situations. Usually, these arguments are connected to the background, the habits, the usage – all that is called “culture”.

Culture

The cultural background’s influence is not limited by the role of contextual grid of reference. Culture’s impact can be discovered in all the facets of management: definition of objectives, choice of means, involvement of resources, etc.

Culture includes the model of education as acquiring and applying knowledge and competences, including the competence of innovative behaviour, that is why we can say, that a stable culture may produce constant innovation.

Culture forms the identifying system (e.g., national or religious belonging). The cross-cultural management, comparative researches and multi-cultural approaches were quite popular in science and even more in minds of managers in the last third of XX century. Since the speech of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, on 2010 oct 17, the Western political world in United Kingdom and France recognised the failure of multiculturalism as a simple way of managing culture. The strong nationalist movements in Western Europe, even in Scandinavian countries, demonstrate the deepest roots and the powerful impact of this factor on the real regulation in political or industrial worlds.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 760