The role of humanities in the formation of new European elites

Organization Studies, Jan, 2003

Conference promoted by Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice in cooperation with

Istud-Istituto Studi Direzionali, Milan and Said Business School, University of Oxford

Venice, September 10-11-12, 2003

In the vein of an old tradition (which historically emerged as a product of the Enlightenment), the academic study of organizations and management has been for years in Europe in great ferment, gradually acquiring a set of distinctive features. The three most striking are:

1 A tendency to contextualize the phenomena studied: attention has shifted from the organization as a circumscribed phenomenon analyzed mainly in terms of its internal dynamics to the relations between organizational forms (or management models) and the socio-institutional context, with its diverse political, cultural, economic, and technological aspects.

2 Organizational analysis has grown more 'cultured', eclectically open to the most diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, interested (in the best Weberian tradition) as much in the 'understanding' of the local as in the 'explanation' of the translocal. It has become attuned to general trends in contemporary thought, and attentive to ongoing debate on the crisis of science and the nature of knowledge.

3 Above all, analysis of organizations and management has fruitfully sought inspiration in disciplines other than those from which it has traditionally drawn its analytical categories, namely, economics and sociology. The most promising new insights seem to derive not from other social sciences like anthropology or political science, but rather from disciplines to which the division of intellectual labor has assigned the great heritage of European humanistic culture: philosophy, history, literary criticism, linguistics, the study of art and of aesthetic experience.

Only very little of this richness and vitality has been transferred to management education, to management consulting and, as a consequence, to everyday management practice. In the sphere of practice, besides the hasty and often uncritical embracing of managerial 'fads' which the management services market ceaselessly produces and consumes, the basic conception of the manager's role and of how it is learnt continues to be (in substance and in almost all cases) the conception adopted and disseminated fifty years ago by the first European business schools and consultancy companies that imported it from North America.

This conception essentially views managerial competence as the possession of a self-referential set of methods which enable managers to cope rationally with problems that--even if strategic and far-reaching--are and remain practical problems. These problems have to do with resources and goals, means and ends, and are therefore to a large extent 'technically' governable. This conception - which distinguishes the sphere of politics (in the non-pejorative sense), of values and emotions, from the sphere of administration, facts, efficiency--has probably come to predominate because it serves to qualify management as a scientific phenomenon. What is most surprising is that this conception is increasingly proposed as a model for non-profit organizations, whether public or private, where it is evidently more difficult to artificially separate the sphere of ideals, values, and collective interests from the technical-administrative sphere of operations.

Those who share a concern for the construction of the European identity, and the conviction that professional elites can play a significant role in the construction of collective identities, will agree on the importance of a collective effort to redefine the role, the skills and training programs for a European administrative class, superseding the pragmatic and efficientist model that has to date largely inspired management education and management practice.

The Conference

A limited number of scholars and qualified interested practitioners will gather next September (10/11/12) in Venice--on the Island of San Giorgio, where the Cini Foundation is based--for a three-day conference aimed at debating the role of humanities in the formation of new European elites. Papers are invited that explore the following main themes, and the relations between them:

1 the construction and quiddity of European identity,

2 the role of professional elites in the construction of collective identities,

3 the processes through which knowledge is translated into action, and the role of humanities in management education.

Keynote speeches will be given, among others, by Pierre Guillet de Montoux, Marcel Henaff, Karin Knorr Cetina, Lorenzo Ornaghi, Michel Serres, Lars Vissing. A restricted range of top managers, opinion leaders and journalists will be invited to attend and to contribute as discussants. The best papers presented will be published in an edited book.

Deadline

Abstracts of about 800 words should be sent by 17 February 2003, preferably via e-mail, to the Secretariat:

Anna Lombardi, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, 30124 Venezia, Italia