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 THE CRITIQUE OF
MANAGEMENT
TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY AND
ETHICS OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

Vincent Blok
“Finally, a book in Management Philosophy providing clear and concise
definitions gluing the fields together, making us understand the possi-
bilities and impossibilities of management better”.
Anders Bordum, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

“At last, a philosopher looks critically at the idea of management, and

some of its associated literature in business ethics. Vincent Blok has done
management theory a favor in showing how philosophy can be useful in
understanding the basic ideas of management in a sophisticated way”.
– R. Edward Freeman, Professor of Business Ethics,
Professor Business Administration at the Darden
School of the University of Virginia

“Vincent Blok is one of the most important contemporary philosophers of

innovation, technology and management. He engages deeply with various
expert literatures to tackle important questions in an accessible way. What
is management? What is the best it could be? What sort of knowledge can
managers use to make decisions? I expect that anyone reading this book,
as expert as they might be, will come away with a new insight and a new
learning”.
– Wim Vandekerckhove, Professor of Business Ethics, University of
Greenwich and Editor-in-Chief Philosophy of Management

“This book is one of the most important contributions to the developing

field of the philosophy of management in this century. A simple but
fundamental question is raised, which many have pondered over - what is
management? - and is pursued with a thoroughness that enables the reader
to follow the many different facets of the argument, through ancient Greek
philosophy to modern critical theory, across political, social and ethical
disciplines,, and covering management in the widest range of different
contexts. The author builds his position carefully and iteratively over
succeeding chapters, to arrive at a broad and comprehensive perspective on
the field. This is a book which speaks simultaneously to several audiences:
managers in general wishing to understand more deeply the issues involved
in their day-to-day decisions, philosophers formulating ways to apply their
frameworks to business issues, business ethicists looking for a groundwork
for their investigations, management scholars seeking a sound foundation
for their ideas, as well as students on MBA and related programmes as they
develop their understanding of management. A valuable addition to the
literature”.
– Paul Griseri, author of An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Management
The Critique of Management

This book reflects on the nature of business management to contribute to

the development of a philosophy and ethics of management. It engages in
conceptual engineering of management to delineate the phenomenon of
management and, as a result, to open a new perspective on management
beyond its self-evident conceptualization.
After questioning the self-evident concept of management, the author
develops a philosophy of management with six dimensions of the nature of
management: management as participation; management as resistance and
responsive action; management as constitution of meaning; management as
politico-economic governance; management as non-reductive stakeholder
engagement; and management as epistemic insufficient entrepreneurship.
These six dimensions of management are taken as points of departure to
develop an integrated concept of business ethics, an individual competence
for ethical business management, and a concept of ethical codes for
corporate social-responsible behavior. This new conception of philosophy
of management and business ethics can guide future philosophical and
empirical work on the nature of management.
The Critique of Management is an excellent resource for researchers,
students, and professionals interested in philosophy of management,
business ethics, and corporate social responsibility.

Vincent Blok is associate professor in Philosophy of Technology,

Business Ethics, and Responsible Innovation, Wageningen University,
The Netherlands. He holds a PhD in Philosophy of Technology from
Leiden University. His books include Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of
Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene (Routledge,
2017) and Heidegger’s Concept of Philosophical Method: Innovating
Philosophy in the Age of Global Warming (Routledge, 2019).
The Critique of
Management
Towards a Philosophy and Ethics
of Business Management

Vincent Blok
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2022 Vincent Blok
The right of Vincent Blok to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Blok, Vincent, 1970- author.
Title: The critique of management : toward a philosophy and
ethics of business management / Vincent Blok.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, [2022] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021032609 (print) | LCCN 2021032610
(ebook) | ISBN 9781032137940 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032140001
(pbk) | ISBN 9781003231875 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Industrial management–Philosophy. |
Management–Philosophy. | Business ethics. | Social responsibility
of business.
Classification: LCC HD30.19 .B58 2022 (print) |
LCC HD30.19 (ebook) | DDC 658–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032609
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032610

ISBN: 978-1-032-13794-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-14000-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-23187-5 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231875

Typeset in Sabon
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
Dedicated to my students (Teunis Brand, Eghe Osagie,
Lisa Ploum, Tjidde Tempels)

Voorburg, The Netherlands January 15 2021

Contents

Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1
1 What Is Management? 1
2 Research Questions, Task, and Main Contributions
of This Study 3
3 Design of the Study 6

1 Setting the Scene: Opening Up the Self-evident Concept

of Management 11
4 Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management 12
5 Key Requirements of Business Managers According
to Xenophon 20
6 Questioning the Self-evident Conceptualization of
Management from the Perspective of Xenophon’s
Philosophy of Management 25
7 Questioning the Self-evident Conceptualization of
Management from the Perspective of the Grand
Challenges of Our Time 30
Conclusion 38

2 Management as Participation, Responsive Action, and

Constitution of Meaning 42
8 Management as Participation 43
9 Management as Resistance and Responsive
Action 45
x Contents
10 Management as Constitution of Meaning 48
Conclusion 51

3 Management as Politico-economic Governance 54

11 Management as Corporate Governance and the
Perspectives of Economics and Politics 55
12 Agamben’s Genealogy of Governance and its
Application in Governance Practices 58
13 Philosophical Reflections on Management as
Politico-economic Governance of the Business
Operations 66
Conclusion 70

4 Management as Non-reductive Stakeholder Engagement 73

14 Identify, Unity, and Difference in CSPs and
Collaborations 75
15 Identity, Unity, and Difference in the Philosophical
Tradition 82
16 The Metaphysics of Collaboration: Identity, Unity,
and Difference in CSPs and Collaboration 85
17 Towards and Ethics of Non-reductive Stakeholder
Engagement, Collaboration, and Partnership in
Management Practices 96
Conclusion 102

5 Management as Epistemic Insufficient Entrepreneurship 108

18 The Paradox of Sustainable Entrepreneurship 109
19 Towards an Integrated Theory of Management as
Epistemic Insufficient Entrepreneurship 115
Conclusion 122

6 Managing for the Common Good: Towards an

Integrated Principle of Business Ethics 127
20 Towards an Integrated Principle of Business
Ethics 130
21 Key Requirements of Business Managers:
Individual Virtuous Competence 144
 Contents xi
22 Institutionalizing Business Ethics: Performative
Corporate Codes 162
Conclusion 183

7 Conclusion 185

References 189
Index 208
Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of portions of Sections 4–6 appeared as Blok, V. (2019)

“Xenophon’s philosophy of management”. In: Neesham, C., Segal, S. (Eds.),
Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Springer: Dordrecht (10.1007/
978-3-319-48352-8_27-1); Blok, V. (2020) “What is (business) manage-
ment? Laying the ground for a philosophy of management”, Philosophy of
Management 19: 173–189 (DOI: 10.1007/s40926-019-00126-9). Earlier
versions of portions of Section 7 appeared as Blok, V. (2014) “The
metaphysics of collaboration: identity, unity and difference in cross-sector
partnerships for sustainable development”, Philosophy of Management 13
(2): 53–74 (DOI: 10.5840/pom201413211); Blok, V., Gremmen, B.,
Wesselink, R. (2016) “Dealing with the wicked problem of sustainable
development. The role of individual virtuous competence”. Business &
Professional Ethics Journal 34(3): 297–327 (DOI: 10.5840/bpej20162173
7); Blok, V. (2018) “Information asymmetries and the para-
dox of sustainable business models: toward an integrated theory of
sustainable entrepreneurship”. In: Idowu, S.O. et al., Sustainable Business
Models: Principles, Promise, and Practice. Dordrecht: Springer, 203–225.
Earlier versions of portions of Sections 11–13 appeared as Blok, V. (2020)
“Politics versus economics: philosophical reflections on the nature of
corporate governance”. Philosophy of Management, 19(1): 69–87. Earlier
versions of portions of Sections 14 and 15 appeared as Blok, V. (2014) “The
metaphysics of collaboration: identity, unity and difference in cross-sector
partnerships for sustainable development”, Philosophy of Management
13 (2): 53–74 (DOI: 10.5840/pom201413211). Earlier versions of
portions of Sections 14–17 appeared as Blok, V. (2019) “From partici-
pation to interruption: toward an ethics of stakeholder engagement,
participation and partnership in CSR and responsible innovation”. In:
Von Schomberg, R. (Ed) Handbook Responsible Innovation: A Global
Resource. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 243–257. Earlier
versions of portions of Sections 18 and 19 appeared as Blok, V. (2018)
“Information asymmetries and the paradox of sustainable business models:
toward an integrated theory of sustainable entrepreneurship”. In: Idowu,
S.O. et al., Sustainable Business Models: Principles, Promise, and Practice.
 Acknowledgements xiii
Dordrecht: Springer, 203–225. Earlier versions of portions of Section 21
appeared as Blok, V., Gremmen, B., Wesselink, R. (2016) “Dealing with the
wicked problem of sustainable development. the role of individual virtuous
competence”. Business & Professional Ethics Journal 34(3): 297–327 (DOI:
10.5840/bpej201621737). Although I have shifted the focus from compe-
tencies for sustainable professionals to competencies for managers in order
to fit the material for this book, Section 21 can be seen as co-authored by
Bart Gremmen and Renate Wesselink. I am very grateful for their work and
inspiration. Earlier versions of portions of Section 22 appeared as Blok, V.
(2017) “Bridging the gap between ethical principles and actual responsible
behavior: toward a performative concept of corporate codes”. Philosophy of
Management 16(2): 117–136; Blok, V. (2013) “The power of speech acts:
reflections on a performative concept of ethical oaths in economics and
business”. Review of Social Economy, 71 (2): 187–208.
After my graduation in philosophy of technology at Leiden University,
I worked for several years as team manager at a health-care institution
(Centrum Autisme, Leiden) and as CEO of a private research institute in the
area of organic and sustainable agriculture (Louis Bolk Institute, Driebergen).
It is first of all this type of first-person experience with management practice
that helped me to articulate my intuitions in this book. In 2010, I returned to
the university and started to work at the management studies group of
Wageningen University. In this position, I started to think about management
from a scientific perspective. I have learned a lot from colleagues like Onno
Omta, Stefano Pascucci, and Domenico Dentoni, who were open enough to
collaborate with a philosopher in the area of management science. I am also
grateful for the openness and collaborative efforts of other colleagues at
Wageningen University, like Bart Gremmen, Renate Wesselink, and Thomas
Lans. The collaboration with these eminent colleagues enabled me to
contribute to empirical research in sustainable entrepreneurship and
business ethics.
At the same time, as a philosopher working in the phenomenological
tradition, I was interested to develop philosophical work on management
science, next to my empirical work with colleagues in Wageningen. As
philosophy of management is a relatively small subdomain, I am very
grateful for the openness of this community to support my work. I have
such good memories of the various philosophy of management conferences
I attended in Oxford, Chicago, and Greenwich over the years, where most
of the material presented in this book is also discussed. I would like to
thank Nigel Laurie for his dedication and effort to make this conference
such a success year after year. I would like to thank Paul Griseri and Wim
Vandekerckhove for their work as editors in chief of the philosophy of
management journal that published my first article in this field. Later,
I joined the community myself and worked as executive editor of the
journal. Without this community of great scholars and friends – Cristina
Neesham, Frits Schippers, David Carl Wilson, and Marian Eabrasu – much
xiv Acknowledgements
of the ideas developed in this study would not have matured. Another
source of inspiration was the working group on business ethics of the
Dutch Research School of Philosophy. Guided by eminent scholars like
Wim Dubbink, Johan Graafland, Ronald Jeurissen, and Luc Vande-
liederkerke, I learned a lot of the great discussions we had over the years.
Finally, I am very grateful for the great discussions with my team of
PhD students and post-doc researchers during the years I was working on
this book: Daniel Agbeko, Teunis Brand, Jilde Garst, Edurne Inigo,
Thomas B. Long, Rob Lubberink, Peter Novitzky, Eghe Osagie, Lisa
Ploum, Eugen Popa, Mmapatla Senyolo, August Sjauw-Koen-Fa, Tjidde
Tempels, Job Timmermans, Mira Vegter, and Waliou Yessoufou. I am
also very grateful that Bart Gremmen, Paulan Korenhof, Thom Long, Julia
Rijssenbeek, and Job Timmermans were willing to proofread this book.
Introduction

1 What Is Management?
Today, business management seems to be only a special case of manage-
ment as a more general human condition. Management is everywhere,
ranging from people’s self-management to social network management,
and from household management to planetary management in the context
of global warming. This raises the question what is meant by the concept
of business management.
In management theory, the concept has a long tradition. It is normally
understood as managerial power and mechanism to control, inspired by the
scientific management theory that is still taught in business schools today.
Henry Fayol and Frederick Taylor can be seen as the founders of manage-
ment theory. They introduced scientific management (Taylor, 1911) in
general and five functions of management in particular: planning, orga-
nizing, instruction, coordination, and control (Fayol, 1949). Further insights
in the nature of management were provided by Luther Gulick and Lyndall
Urwick; for instance, they extended Fayol’s work and coined the POSDC-
ORB acronym to indicate the nature of management: planning, organizing,
staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting (Urwick, 1952;
Gulick and Urwick, 2012). Koontz and O’Donnell developed principles of
management as well, such as principles of planning, organizing, staffing, etc.
(Koontz and O’Donnell, 1972). These later developments in management
theory are also influenced by scholars who indicated the importance of soft
skills in management (Mintzberg, 2005), social and informal processes in
management (Follett, 1940), or studied management from the perspective of
organizational behaviour (Miner, 2002).
In academic philosophy, however, the question what is management
received less attention. It is striking that the sub-discipline of philosophy
of management never raised the question what management is. Paul
Griseri is, for instance, one of the leading experts in the field. In his
Introduction to the Philosophy of Management, he introduces in section
one “the ‘what’ of management”, but he in fact only answers the
question about the “what” of organizations, work, and leadership in this

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231875-101
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