...channel outlet. meter wheel was invented in Victoria by John Stewart Dethridge in 1910. Dethridge was an engineer who, in 1911, was appointed Commissioner of the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission in Victoria. For the next fifteen years he ably carried out his role, as both administrator and "hands on" engineer. He was, for instance, involved in the design and construction of the original Eildon Reservoir on the Goulbum River.

I have drawn attention to Dethridge because I take him to be typical of what one might term "old-fashioned" managers. These were the people who occupied senior administrative positions, both government and non-government, in an earlier Australia. For the most part, they all shared one thing in common--a good working knowledge of that which they were appointed to manage. Often they had worked their way up the promotional ladder in the department or industry to which they belonged. And the word belonged is important, for these people really did have some sense of vocation, in the truest sense--a lifetime's calling to a particular trade or occupation.

We might contrast this type of manager with the modern species of manager--the subject of this essay. Such individuals rarely have any long-term association with the particular activity being managed. Indeed, they will often have no specific training in that area at all What they have instead is something called "managerial skill" and such skill operates quite independent of the actual processes of output. In short, the typical modern manager can manage anything because the process of management is seen as being a wholly over arching skill which bears no relationship to the technical knowledge of production.

Managers, then, function in much the same way as do catalysts in a chemical reaction. That is to say, they facilitate certain events without themselves being involved in any intimate way. Catalysts, though, have a degree of specificity, whereas managers do not. We may rather liken these modern managers to "plasticine people"--they can be moulded to fit any shape or size. In Aristotelian terms they are pure potentiality.

Recent issues of Quadrant have carried articles dealing either wholly or in part with the problems and shortcomings of modern management, especially as it applies to the professions. Malcolm Saunders' account of managerialism in the modern universities (March 2006) stands as a notable example. While these articles have been useful in highlighting the problems, few accounts go to the heart of the matter--the whole basis upon which modern management theory is based.

One commentator whose account of the modern manager does provide just such a detailed analysis of the whole phenomenon of managerialism is the Scottish-born moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who now teaches at Notre Dame University in Indiana. His book After Virtue, published in 1981, has become something of a classic in modern moral philosophy. MacIntyre, along with Elizabeth Anscombe and Bernard Williams, can rightly claim to have significantly altered the course of moral philosophy in recent decades. He has done this primarily by re-introducing the Aristotelian notion of virtue as an alternative to rival consequentialist or deontological approaches to ethics. That is to say that virtues, or moral character, are emphasised, not the idea of duty or the idea of judging moral actions on the basis of their likely consequences.

For me at any rate, MacIntyre is not easy to read, and his brilliant ideas...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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