Instead of Managerialism: From What Goes on Inside Our Heads to What Our Heads (and Bodies) Go on Inside of – the World between Us (Review Essay: Theodore Taptiklis: Unmanaging: Opening up the Organization to its own Unspoken Knowledge)

John Shotter

International Journal of Action Research, 2009, vol. 5, issue 3, 322-341

Abstract: Theodore Taptiklis is a former McKinsey & Company consultant who, over the course of a 40 year career in business and organizations, undertook a wide variety of roles, including board member, senior executive, strategist and change manager, business development manager, and worked also in a variety of line-management positions as both an employee and as a professional advisor. He characterizes his professional life during that time as a progression from, not only a position of arrogant certainty to one of increasing ignorance, but also as one from realizing the all-consuming pervasiveness and insidiousness of traditional management doctrine (managerialism) to the possibility of more authentic and liberating ways of experiencing organizational life. The starting point for this process of ‘unmanaging’ ourselves, he suggests, is what we can notice each moment in our experience of the activities occurring between us in our everyday lives – a move from understanding our own practices as outside observers of them to engaged participants within them.

Keywords: managerialism; utterances; responsiveness; systems thinking; life events (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 J10 J17 J20 J23 P12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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