Re: Images of Taylor

["John K. Balor" <balor1999@yahoo.com>]

I agree with John Majerus that Gareth Morgan's 'Image of Organization' is a wonderful book that is both enjoyable to read and produces lots of thoughts and ideas.  While it is a good idea to talk of the importance of metaphors, I think it works perhaps best when Morgan talks about when the machine metaphor is good, when it's useful to think of the organization as a biological shape, as flux, a politics, and so on.   
  His critisism of Taylor when he talks of the organization as a machine makes as little sense as when he is critisising Deming when talking about the organization as a brain.
   
  To my knowledge, Taylor never spoke of the organization as a machine, and Deming never talked about the organization as a brain.
   
  What these two geniuses of management talked about, however, was the organization as a system and how we should use the method of science ("scientific management") for systematical analsys and improvement.
   
  These are timeless ideas that have nothing to do with metaphors.  I don't understand why some people on this forum seem to have a problem with science.  I was expecting most of the DEN to have a similar background as that of Taylor and Deming, namely engineers and scientists.  Some of the things beeing said on this forum would have made Deming turn in his grave, I think.
   
  John Balor