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Spacing, Timing and the Invention of ManagementWarwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK, keith.hoskin{at}wbs.ac.uk This piece reflects on what we might mean by spacing and timing in a number of ways. It considers first how we might see the Palermo conference that launched this journal issue as a kairos, a temporal moment of crystallization that worked through the coming together of its participants to signal that a new intellectual path was already being and continues to be cleared. It then reflects on how these terms work, for the author, to make a new sense of his long-term attempt with Richard Macve to understand where management comes from and what management is. It suggests that management emerges when humans succeed in engineering the spacing and timing of activity into a new kind of centripetal amalgam. At the structuring level this entails the design of a centripetal kind of structure, where vertical and horizontal nodal connections are engineered to cohere rather than collapse—something that is arguably first achieved with the articulation of the line-and-staff structure. But such a structuring is nothing without a set of processes ensuring and enacting the continuity of spacing-timing coherence within and between nodes, all day every day, and here and every relevant where. Such processing, it is suggested, takes place once writing and examining practices get combined with putting numbers on people. Finally the paper asks whether spacing and timing may not have a conceptual or theoretical status analogous to that of Heidegger’s ‘lighting of the world’, as horizonal constructs marking out the ground and limit of our acting and making sense in the world at all.
Key Words: engineering history • Heidegger • kairotic events • lighting of the world • line-and-staff structuring • management as invention • time-and-motion processes • United States Military Academy at West Point
Organization, Vol. 11, No. 6,
743-757 (2004) This article has been cited by other articles:
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