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Manufacturing Uncertainty and Uncertainty in Manufacturing: Managerial Discourse and the Rhetoric of Organizational Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Yehouda Shenhav
Yehouda Shenhav
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and AnthropologyTel Aviv University
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Abstract

In this paper I challenge the “uncertainty reduction” argument — the dominant explanation (and justification) for the rise of bureaucratic firms in the late nineteenth century. In contradiction to the agrument that “uncertainty” was a barrier to rational economic order and therefore needed to be reduced, I argue that “uncertainty” was manufactured, objectified, and reified in the course of developing industrial bureacracies. Using an alternative historical narrative I demonstrate that “uncertainty” was used to increase the “rationality” — i.e., control — of hierarchies and to enhance the legitimacy of “rational planning.” In other words, strategies to “reduce uncertainty” increased the “certainty” — i.e., control and centrality — of rational planners but increased the “uncertainty” of their subordinates. I point to the fact that the “uncertainty reduction” argument became a central element in the professional idelogy of management and a focal point in management education programs. Furthermore, the canonical organization theory in the social sciences adopted the rhetoric, logic, and epistemlogy produced by the agents under its study and disseminated their ideology. Through their interrelationship in organization theory, “uncertainty” and “rationality” were enacted as two binary opposites that reproduce each other and construct one “coherent” scheme.

Type
Modern Societies and Their Environments
Information
Science in Context , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Summer 1994 , pp. 275 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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