Managerial ecology
Managerial Ecology
Management is a tertiary skill—a method, not a value. And yet we apply it to every domain as if it were the ideal of our civilization (Saul 1995:200).
Carolyn Merchant (1980) describes managerial ecology as a modern utilitarian approach to nature with philosophical roots in the Enlightenment and the revolutionary economic, political and scientific order that began to emerge in 16th and 17th century Europe. As society became increasingly organized around the dictates of the market, and a scientific view of nature gradually replaced organicism, “a value system oriented to nature as a teacher whose ways must be followed and respected” gave way to a system of human values focused on “efficiency and production in the sustained use of nature for human benefit” (Merchant 1980:238). “Managerial ecology,” Merchant explains, emerged out of the scientific and industrial revolutions to become the dominant way of framing society-nature interactions as modern people sought to “maximize energy production, economic yields and environmental quality through ecosystem modeling, manipulation, and prediction of outcomes” (1980:238).
By assuming that solutions ultimately lie within the hands of managers, that better organization is the key to improvement, and that problems can be solved merely by increasing effort or efficiency, managerial ecology has come to significantly constrain human relations with the natural world, obscuring alternative ways of framing and responding to environmental issues (Luke 1999a, Pollitt 1990, Sachs 1993, Torgerson 1999). While theories, practices, philosophies, and meanings of management have changed significantly over time, faith in management’s applicability has only strengthened (Parker 2002). Indeed, management of all kinds has expanded rapidly in the 20th century to become ubiquitous, dominating the way social, economic, political and environmental issues are framed and addressed (Grey 1999, Torgerson 1999, Bavington 2002, Parker 2002).
As Paehlke and Torgerson (1990:5) observe:
If there is a problem, better management is often assumed to be the solution. This assumption has deeply influenced the rise of advanced industrial societies and now guides much of the response to environmental problems.
Max Oelschlaeger (1994) supports the observations of Paehlke and Torgerson (1990) tracing managerial responses to the global ecological crisis back to the Enlightenment period. It is not surprising that the Western “intelligencia would want to manage their way out of ecocrisis” Oelschlaeger (1994:47) explains, “because that is the Western paradigm. We have been trying to manage the planet for at least three hundred years.”
Management thinking now defines much environmental scholarship and practice. Despite proclamations by environmental scholars of worldwide crises (Holling et al. 2000), pathologies (Holling and Meffe 1996) and even the end of management itself (Ludwig 2001), managerial interventions remain firmly mapped across the earth’s face and stand unchallenged as the dominant legitimized response to a host of social, political, economic and ecological problems (Parker 2002).
What Does Management Mean?
Despite the grip that management holds over the contemporary imagination, clear definitions of the term and its implications remain largely unexplored. At first blush, management appears to be a word without history or geography, a received tool, a ubiquitous technical necessity, a rational given. Management has been described as a “plastic” archetypically pliable term, because its use conjures up numerous connotations without a specific denotation (Poerksen 1995). However, the etymology of management foils this interpretation. The term, in fact, encompasses three principal meanings: management-as-control, management-as-caretaking, and management-as-coping (Bavington 2002).
Management-as-control originates in Italy during the 16th century. Descending from the Latin root word for hand, manus, the Italian maneggiare suggests the exertion of dominion over nature through the breaking and training of horses (Williams 1980). Extended through to the present, the essence of management-as-control can be found in the faith that management can successfully manipulate nature, human beings and, increasingly the enterprise of management itself (Parker 2002:3). Management-as- control implies steering and directing along a charted course. Managers handle people, objects and processes indirectly through representations that enable executive action. As Petter Holm (1996:179) observes “management is a control strategy by which processes or people are handled indirectly through a system of representation.” These representations simplify the world, turning it into a malleable space. Through a wide variety of scientific and technical methods, people and other living species are rendered legible as resources, subject to the handling of managers. Once objectified and quantified, the world becomes an actionable space open to rational control and instrumentalized action from a distance (Holm 1996, Law 2001).
During the early part of the 17th century, the meaning of management was influenced and confused by the entrance into the English language of the French word ménager, meaning to use carefully (OED 1989). With its Latin root mansionem, meaning a dwelling or household, the introduction of ménager shifted the meaning of management to a different location (the household in place of the horse corral), a different set of activities (housekeeping as opposed to horse training), and a different set of attitudes (caretaking and wise stewardship instead of command and control) (Bavington 2002). The caretaking sense of management introduced a domestic and morally positive association of management with housekeeping, stewardship and husbandry. This warm, paternal meaning of management, conjuring illusions of happy households, well tended gardens, and wise pastoral custodians, introduced misunderstanding with its application throughout the 17th and 18th centuries (Williams 1980). The term “manager” thus came to encompass both the identity of trainer and director as well that of a careful housekeeper, husband, leader, custodian, and steward (OED 1989). While management-as-control referred to a hierarchical two-way relationship between the manager and the managed, management-as-caretaking placed the manager into the role of custodial middle man, entrusted to use objects previously mapped and staked by an owner or master creator in the heavens (Palmer 1992).
Management-as-caretaking involves a hierarchical three-way relationship between owners, stewards and wards (Roach 2000). Stewards look after and carefully use private property ultimately owned and thereby presumably controlled by someone else who is positioned above the steward. Management-as-caretaking does not indicate a relationship of altruistic care for another person or an autonomous subject that is accorded intrinsic value, rather it implies looking after and tending to objects and possessions—forms of property with instrumental value. Management-as-caretaking, therefore, points not only up to control but down to a third meaning of management, one epitomized by the position of the ward or the managed (Bavington 2002).
The plight of wards or the managed is to cope with being controlled and carefully used. The third meaning of management (management-as-coping), therefore, implies the opposite of management-as-control and caretaking. Coping as a management strategy is a response to being controlled or carefully used. It refers to situations of unequal power where the one coping functions like “a subsystem, a creature that functions within an oppressive system” (Esteva et al. 2005:23). Management-as-coping implies that one is “just getting by”, barely “managing” in a system or environment over which one has little say, ownership or control.
When control or caretaking breaks down, the position of the manager suddenly becomes that of the ward. In the context of managerial failures, managers can merely cope with disorder, uncertainty and conflict while trying to restore an order that allows them to regain control and caretaking ability. When this type of managerial coping appears in natural resource management the control and caretaking functions of management often do not cease to exist but rather shift their targets—from the unmanageable to something perceived as more manageable. In this instance, management-as-coping becomes an instrumental, institutionalized response to a crisis brought on by a temporary loss of control or caretaking ability. As inequality and perceptions of interconnected, heterogenous, global systems, failure, risk, uncertainty, ignorance, conflict and complexity have increased management-as-control and caretaking have declined in significance leading to the expanded use of management-as-coping (Thompson and Trisoglio 1997).
From humble beginnings in horse handling and housekeeping, managerial thinking has expanded in scope to include economies, ecosystems, resources, environments, industries, trans-national corporations and human labour. Even emotions, values, beliefs, motivations and life in general are now viewed as being in need of, and amenable to, managerial interventions. In any or all of its three guises, management has been used to describe most every aspect of daily life, and in so doing it has entrenched the notion that everyone everywhere is a manager—and always has been (Grey 1999).
It is important to remember that in practice, management remains rhetorically pliable. It can simultaneously mean all of control and coping with the lack of control; careful use and coping with misuse; controlling private access while promoting participatory stewardship; not to mention coping when all the assumptions permitting a belief in control and caretaking have broken down. In this context, battles are waged over types of management as opposed to drawing attention to the effects of pervasive managerialism. As Parker (2002:11) observes, managerialism, of which managerial ecology is but one example, focuses on a narrow conceptualization of management as a generalized technology of control and caretaking applied “to everything—horses, humans and hospitals. This is management as the universal solution, not a personal assessment of a local problem.”
In the context of widespread managerialism it is important to ask how management has mobilized natural resource managers and other environmental practitioners especially how management has been deployed to address ecological issues at particular times and in specific places. Only when a clear description of the multiple meanings of management, their interconnections, and how they have been expressed in particular practices over time is achieved can a space be provided to begin to understand the significance of managerial ecology and what alternatives may be available.
ADAPTED FROM: Bavington, D. 2005. Of Fish and People: Managerial Ecology in Newfoundland and Labrador Cod Fisheries. Wilfrid Laurier University. Waterloo, Ontario. Unpublished Dissertation. Ch.1. pp.4-11