Managing Knowledge-Intensive and Creative Industries Master’s course (GS Management) Fall 2010 Alexander Styhre Dept of Business Administration School of Business, Economics, and Law University of Gothenburg Course introduction and outline • The purpose of the course is to train the students to get an understanding of the managerial demands in organizations based on intellectual capital and creativity. • The course consists of a series of lectures, guest lectures, a literature seminar, and the presentation of the final exam paper. • The lectures are theoretical (by AS) or aimed at introducing various managerial practices in different industries and sectors (guest lectures). • Course literature: journal papers addressing a variety of aspects covered in the course. Course papers downloaded from GU library. • Advanced level Master’s course structured as a Ph.D. courses • All slides will be posted on the course homepage. Schedule Lecture Lecturer Reading Knowledge society, knowledge capitalism, Friday, Sept 2 etc: Setting the scene 10.00-12.00 Professions, professionalism, and the creative class Tuesday, Sept. 7 10.00-12.00 Papers examination assignment: Introduction Managing science-based work Tuesday, Sept 7 13.00-14.00 Alexander Styhre, Dept. of Business Administration Nordenflycht (2010), Townley, Beech & McKinlay (2009) Alexander Styhre, Dept. of Business Administration Kärreman, Dan & Alvesson, Mats, (2004), Leicht & Fennel (1997) Alexander Styhre, Dept. of Business Administration Paper template Tuesday, Sept. 14 13.00-15.00 Mats Sundgren, AstraZeneca Project Management in the Event Industry: collective top-down, planned ad-hoc and other challenges Managing architect work Tuesday, Sept. 21 13.00-15.00 Göran Lindahl. Chalmers University of Technology Tuesday, Sept. 28 13.00-15.00 Cohen et al., (2005); The videogame development community Thursday Oct. 7. 10.00-12.00. Fredrik Nilsson, White Architects & Chalmers University of Technology Peter Zachariasson, GRI Literature seminar Tuesday Oct. 5. 13.00-15.00. Recruiting and leading management consultants Tuesday Oct. 12. 13.00-15.00. Title to be announced Tuesday Oct. 19. 13.00-15.00. Bridging the culture sector and industry: Challenges and opportunities Final seminar: Paper presentation (roundtable presentation) Thursday Oct 21 13.00-15.00. Zackariasson, Styhre and Wilson (2006); Tschang (2007) Alexander Styhre, Dept. of Business Administration Owen-Smith (2001) Bechky (2006) Ola Bergström, Dept. of Business Administration Bergström & Knights (2006) Bergström, Hasselblad & Kärreman (2009 Gideon Kunda Tel Aviv university, Visiting professor Dept. of Business Administration Evelina Wahlquist, Dept of Economic. geography Thursday Oct. 28. 13.00-15.00 Alexander Styhre, FEK Mandatory participation Munos (2009) Sundgren & Styhre, (2003) Lindahl and Nina Modig Løvendahl (1995) Examination • The examination is based on two papers being submitted individuallly or in groups of two students. The first paper is compulsory but gives no grade and is based on the literature seminar readings (instructions in course PM), the second is based on the writing of a paper. The third, onehour lecture will introduce the exam assignment. • Grading will be based on the totality of five criterias: (1) problem discussion, (2) theoretical framework, (3) presentation of the case/argument, (4) theoretical and practical contributions, (5) overall readbility and stylistic skills. All five parameters will be graded from 1-10 points. Low pass: 25; High pass: 37,5 points. • More details about the paper writing exam in the third lecture (Sept. 7, 13.00-14.00). Why a course on knowledge-intensive and creative (KI&C) industries? • The intellectual content of work has increased during the Post-WWII period; higher degrees of education and more technology and sciencebased professions. Sectors include technology-based companies, health care, event management, music industry, and a wide area of other industries. • Professional work is more complicated to control as intellectual capital cannot be fully accessible for managers. Workers ”control their means of production.” • Professional work is based on professional ideologies, motivational aspects, communicative skills, and other behavioural factors. • Technology and machinery play a key role in contemporary work but always in association and collaborations with human capital. • The management of KI&C industries is often indirect and subtle, concentrating on the joint construction of meaning. • In general, a need for understanding how knowledge-intensive and creative organizations function. Lecture 1: Knowledge-intensive firms and creative industries • • Growth of knowledge intensive and creative work: (1) in employment In the UK: “[T]here is little doubt that sectors characterized by knowledge work are growing, in some cases quite rapidly. For example, the science and technology sector as a whole has been growing on average between 4% and 16% annually over the last 15 years”. (Robertson & Swan, 2004: 129) • In the U.S.: “Lower skilled jobs now account for 16 percent of the workforce, but service employment has grown only 4 percent since 1960. Nor do managerial and sales work account for most of the increase in white-collar work. Today 1.5 and 4 percent more Americans work respectively as managers and salespersons than in 1950. The largest expansion in white-collar employment has occurred among professional and technical occupations, Since 1950 professional and technical employment more than doubled, growing from 8 percent to 18 percent of the workforce. In fact, by 1991, professional and technical workers had become the largest sector surpassing even clerical workers and operatives”. (Barley & Kunda, 2006: 55-56. • “Non-academic science and engineering (S&E) jobs grew at more than four times the rate of the total U.S. labor force between 1980 and 2000. S&E employment increased by 159% between 1980 and 2000, an average annual growth rate of 4,9%, in comparison to 1,1% for the entire labor force”. (Powell and Snellman, 2004: 205) • • • • • • (2) In patents Growth after 1987 from 80,000 to 170,000 patents annually in the U.S. Eightfold increase in university patents in the period 1976-1998 (Powell and Snellman, 2004: 204) (3) In research interests Many studies and publications addressing knowledge-intensive industries , creative industries, and professional service firms (e.g. accounting firms and law firms) The shifting focus of the economy • “By 2009, Wal-Mart employed about as many Americans (1.4 million) as the 20 largest U.S. manufacturers combined, and 9 of the 12 largest employers were retail chains.” (Davis, 2009: 30) • In 2002, “the pharmaceutical industry accounted for 2 percent of the Fortune 500 companies, but 57 percent of these companies’ total profit.” (Brody, 2007: 57) • During the 1970s, pharmaceutical companies “averaged 8,9 per cent profit as a percentage of revenue” in comparison to 4,4 per cent for all Fortune 500 industries. In the 1980s, 11,1% compared to 4,4% and in the 1990s 15,1% compared to 4.1%. (Lexchin, 2006: 11) • Pharmaceutical industry has a persistent higher return on investment than other industries. Definitions • • Knowledge economy “We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technological and scientific advances as well as equally rapid obsolescence. The key components of a knowledge economy include a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources, combined with efforts to integrate improvements in every stage of the production process, from the R&D lab to the factory floor to the interface with the customer”. (Powell and Snellman, 2004: 201) • • Knowledge-intensive firms “The category of knowledge-intensive companies . . . refers to firms where most work is said to be of an intellectual nature and where well-educated, qualified employees form the major part of the work force” (Alvesson, 2001: 863) • • • • • “Typical examples of companies in this category are law and accounting firms, management, engineering and computer consultancy companies, advertising companies, R&D units, and high-tech companies” (Alvesson, 2000: 1101) The creative industries defined “Those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill, and talent, and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. (Task force at Dept. of Culture, Media, and Sports, 1998, cited in Roodhouse, 2006: 52) • Knowledge-intensive work is often specialized, based on university education and the access to professional skills. • Creative work is commonly less professionalized, i.e., is less “monopolized” and sheltered by entry-barriers (e.g., the case of video game developers) and more focused on aesthetic and sensible knowledge. Shared theme in KI&C industries: “Competetive advantage through people” • “It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” Steve Jobs, Founder, Apple • “KIFs are particularly good examples of contemporary forms of ‘people dependent’ organizations. As such they are said to embrace the ideology of ‘entrepreneurialism’ as the pervasive structure of governance.” (Robertson & Swan, 2004: 124) • • “[T]he creative process is sustained by inspiration and informed by talent, vitality and commitment (i.e., a need to create rather than to consume): this makes creative work volatile, dynamic and risk-taking, shaped by important tacit skills (or expertise) that are frequently submerged (even mystified) within domains of endeavour. Hence, the crucial relationship between creativity and innovation (i.e., the process of development of original ideas toward their realization/consumption) remains unruly and poorly understood.” (Jeffcut, 2000: 125. Emphasis added) Leading and managing knowledgeintensive and creative work (1) • How to manage creativity (Elsbach, 2009): (1) Encourage creative thinking • “(1) build organizational environments that support creative thinking (e.g., decentralize supervision, create cross-functional collaborations, open communication channels) . . . (2) reward behaviors known to lead to creative output while removing punishments for these same behaviors (e.g., reward risk-taking, and learning of information outside of one’s area of expertise, and remove punishment for failures and non-conformity)” (Elsbach, 2009: 1043) • (1) Implies novel organization forms, (2) implies new managerial practices promoting new thinking. Leading and managing knowledgeintensive and creative work (2) • (2) Control through norms and identities (Elsbach, 2009) • Management control in KI&C industries commonly a combination of “hard” and “soft” forms of control. • “Knowledge-intensive firms, which typically draw heavily upon cultural-ideological modes of control, are specifically singled out as organizational forms that use social identity and the corporatization of the self as a mode for managerial control”. (Kärreman & Alvesson, 2004: 151. Emphasis added) • • • • • • “[W]e will use the label socio-ideological control for attempts to control worker beliefs and technocratic control for attempts to directly control worker behavior . . . In the technocratic type, management works primarily with plans, arrangements, and systems focusing behavior and/or measurable outputs”. (Kärreman & Alvesson, 2004: 152) “The basic idea of management, as conventionally understood, that of a separation between the planning and execution of tasks, is hardly at all a key feature of KIFs. KIFs in this sense by definition are non-managerial: the more it makes sense to talk about knowledge-intensive activity, the less it becomes relevant to employ a (conventional) management model of thinking.” (Alvesson, 2004: 121) “KIFs tend to be characterized by stronger inputs of normative control than is common in most other organizations. Some KIFs do rely heavily on technocratic form of control—soft rules and procedures as well as measurements by performance indicators—but these are included in, and fuel, normative control by operating in a non-mechanical way, influencing the idea, expectations, and subjectivities of people.” (Alvesson, 2004: 137) Three examples of managerial challenges in KI&C work • • • Study of residents: Physicians in training are unwilling to become leaders in their clinics until they are fully skilled; yet they want physicians as doctors (a ”prisoner’s dilemma); a need for ”de-paradoxify” the predicament of the physicians and redefine the physicians profession as being both ”scientific” and ”administrative”. [Professional identities and competing institutional logics] Study of architects: The profession is considered a ”creative industry” but architects commonly perceive their own work as being devoid of creative elements; how can management recognize the creative competence without making the architects cynical about their work? A few solutions: Seminars, field trips, joint discussions, etc. reaffiriming the architect’s sense of having specialized skills and competencies. [Professional identities and motivation] Study of management consultants: Consultants were running their own ”private brand” within a well-known consulting firm, yet they needed to learn new things from their colleagues to further reinforce their expertise and identities but threr were no traditions in the firm to enange in joint thinking and collaborations? How can management create a sense of community among a group of individual experts. [professional knowledge sharing] Literature: Nordenflycht (2010) and Townley et al. (2009) • Three characterstics of KIFs: Knowledge intensity, low capital intensity, and a professional workforce. • 1. Bonding (punishment for low performance), Reputation (positive rewards), appearance, ethical codes. The concept of “Cat herding” • 2. Relatively little reliance on investors and venture capital. (could be disputed! The cases of e.g., Biotech) • 3. Highly skilled co-workers. • “I use the term professionalized workforce to refer specifically to the presence of the other, two institutionally features of professionalization: ideology and self-regulation.” (Nordenflycht, 2010: 163) • • “A professional ideology consists of a set of norms, manifested both in explicit ethical codes enforced by professional associations and internalized preferences, often developed during professional training.” (Nordenflycht, 2010: 163) Townley et al. (2009) • Creative industries relies on ”intellectual property” (British dept. of Culture, Media and Sport, 1998) (Townley et al., 2009: 939) • Creative work” deals with ”expressive or aesthetic tastes rather than utilitarian needs.” (Townley et al., 2009: 939) • Distinction between (1) intellectual, (2) social, (3) creative and cultural capital, and (4) economic capital. ”Aesthetic knowledge” in creative work • “Aesthetic knowledge offers fresh insight and awareness and while it may not be possible to put into words, it enables us to see in a new way”. (Taylor and Hansen, 2005: 1213. Emphasis added) • • “Intellectual knowledge is driven by a desire for clarity, objective truth and usually instrumental goals. On the other hand, aesthetic knowledge is driven by the desire for the subjective, personal truth usually for its own sake”. (Taylor and Hansen, 2005: 1213) • “Aesthetic knowledge is embodied, It comes from practitioners understanding the look, feel, smell, taste and sound of things in organizational life.” (Ewenstein and Whyte, 2007: 689. Emphasis added) • Example: Architect work In summary • KI&C accounts for a growing part of the aggregated economy in the West. • KI&C hires highly specialized co-workers, being committed to their work and having strong professional beliefs. • While traditional industries have used direct (inspection of work speed) or bureaucratic control (e.g., routines specified, output control) of co-workers In KI&C industries are indirectly controlled through attitudes, beliefs, norms, professional identities etc. it is a form of ”soft control” or ”unobtrusive control.” Input variables Traditional industries Knowledge-intensive work Financial resources High Ranging from high (e.g., pharmaceutical industry) to basically covering labour costs (e.g., the university) Intellectual resources Of some importance in specialist or expert professions located in certain functions Basic production factor Tangible resources (e.g., technology, laboratory equipment) Determines the production system (as in the process industry) Plays a key role but always in collaboration with expertise (e.g., in the case of CAD systems in architect offices) Forms of control Direct or bureaucratic control Leadership practice Monitoring activities through key performance indicators and planning Indirect and based on identities and motivation (“socio-ideological control”) Motivation and symbolic management; indirect control through input variables such as time in project work. Organization forms Divisionalized and bureaucratic organizations Network-based organizations, project work, and flexible organization arrangement (“postbureaucratic organizations”). Managerial challenges Maximize output at any given stock of resources (ROI); avoid conflicts with coworkers Motivate co-workers to contribute to the shared activities. Lecture 2: The concepts of professionalism • Profession is a major term in the sociology and organization theory vocabulary. • • Definitions “[P]rofessionalism is a set of institutions which permits the members of an occupational to make a living while controlling their own work.” (Freidson, 2000: 17) • • • • “The ideological core of professionalism is its claim to a discretionary specialization.” (Freidson, 2000: 109) “We define professional work as occupational incumbents: (a) whose work is defined by the application of theoretical and scientific knowledge to tasks tied to core societal values (health, justice, financial status, etc.), (b) where the terms and conditions of work traditionally command considerable autonomy and freedom from oversight, except by peer representatives of the professional occupation, and (c) where claims to exclusive or nearly exclusive control over a task domain are linked to the application of the knowledge imparted to professionals as part of their training” (Leicht and Fennell, 2008: 431) Professional work • “Professionalization: The result of a successful professional project; an occupation is professionalized to the extent that it successfully defines a set of work tasks as their exclusive domain, and successfully defends that domain against competing claims.” (Leicht and Fennell, 2001: 8) • • In professional work ”[T]he ratio of indeterminacy to technical rules in professional work has to remain at a high level.” (Malhotra and Morris, 2009: 899) • Three types of professional work: normative (lawyers), technical (engineers) and synchretic (accountants) (Malhotra and Morris, 2009) • “In fact, profession is more often defined as an occupation which tends to be colleague-oriented, rather than client oriented”. (Larson, 1977: 226) History of professionalism (1) • • Forerunner: The medieval guild “The craft guild was a formal association of specialized artisans, the masters, whose authority was backed by superior political sanctions” (Epstein, 1998: 685) • “Economic explanations of the craft guild assume that it performed one or more of the following functions: it acted as a cartel, both as buyer of raw materials ad as a seller of its products; it enforced quality standards which lowered asymmetries in information, particularly outside the local marketplace where the products were little known; it provided members with intertemporal transfers of income in highly unstable markets, smoothing the trade cycle and it served as a bargaining unit in narrow markets in which agents held market power; it supplied cheap credit in underdeveloped financial market with high information costs; it operated as a political and administrative unit that protected its members from expropriation by opportunistic urban elites, who in exchange demanded that it collect capital tax and tie apprentices so as to provide cities with a ready military force; or finally and most noxiously, it was rent-seeking organization that lobbied for economic privilege from the state”. (Epstein, 1998: 685-685. Emphasis added) • • • • • • History of professionalism (2) • Professionalism tied to formal education and interest organizations • “All the learned professions were tied, in principle, to one organizational base for the transmission of knowledge: The traditional university. Until its reform was achieved, the university hindered rather than helped the production of systematic scientific and technical knowledge . . . It appears, in fact, that the number of large hospitals in Paris was one of the main reasons why Paris became the world’s capital of medical science in the first half of the nineteenth century. Overcoming the ancien régime of guild barriers, these hospitals brought together surgeons and physicians, thus allowing physicians to incorporate the localized structural pathology, which surgeons had spontaneously applied, and to start the scientific study of specific diseases”. (Larson, 1977: 24) • A ”Weberian view” of profession: the ”monopolization of power” • “[T]he professional project is an organizational project; it organizes the production of producers and the transaction of services for a market; it tends to privilege organizational units in the system of stratification; it works through, and culminates in, distinctive organizations—the professional school and the professional association”. (Larson, 1977: 74. Emphasis added) • Professions in-between markets and democratic institutions • “The professions, neither democratic nor capitalist, played an important role in efforts to shape and (at times) to constrain capitalist development in relation to standards of a broader social well-being.” (Brint, 1994: 16) History of professionalism (3) • Most recent period: • “Beginning in the 1960s, social trustee professionalism fell under increasingly attack for its apparent lack of correspondence to the organizational realities of professional life.” (Brint, 1994: 39) • • “The rise of expert professionalism” (Brint, 1994): Expertise plus market value. • e.g., the university: From “elite institution” (the “ivory tower”) to a “student factory” or “teaching machine”: • “In 1900, there were about three tertiary education students per 10,000 worldwide. By 1950, this number had increased eight-fold to 25. By 2000, it had increased another six-fold to 166”. (Frank and Meyer, 2007: 289) • The case of physicians: From “professional elite” to “health care managers”. Expert professionalism and managerialist governance • Managerialism • “Managerialism is a mode of thought and action based on a desire to control, enhance efficiency, normalize and suppress conflict and promote the universalization of sectional managerial interests.” (Kuhn, 2009: 685686) • • “Professionals operating under managerialism are thus subject to both the normative control of the profession and the bureaucratic control of the corporate enterprise, leading to both a continual self-surveillance and a narrow technical rationality.” (Kuhn, 2009: 685-686) • Case: health care • Two logics: (1) medical professionalism, (2) business-like heath care. • “The two logics continue to co-exist and neither in can be considered dominant.” (Reay and Hinings, 2009: 630) Professional jurisdiction • In order to operate as legitimate professionals, actors need domains of jurisdiction. i.e., domains of legitimate expertise. • In many cases, domains of jurisdiction are sites for struggle between groups of professional workers (e.g., obstetricians and midwives, surgeons and radiologists, scientists and nonscientists, etc.). • The higher the boundary between domains of jurisdiction, the more “successful” the professionalization (e.g., the case of being a “medical doctor” and an “author”) • “Jurisdiction is contested through public, legal, and workplace claims, for control over task areas . . . These jurisdictional claims act to shift both relations between professional groups and the boundaries of their core work domains.” (Bechky, 2003: 721) • Boundary work (Gieryn, 1983); draw the line between domains of responsibility and authority. • “Boundary work also a useful ideological style when monopolizing professional authority and resources in the hands of some scientists by excluding others as ‘pseudoscientists.’” (Gieryn, 1983: 787-787) Managing professions • Professional work is characterized by different situations that needs to be evaluated and individually handled: • “In actuality, the assumption of relative homogeneity within the profession is not entirely useful: there are many identities, many values, and many interests . . . We call these groupings within professions ‛segments’ . . . We shall develop the idea of professions as loose amalgamations of segments pursuing different objectives in different manners and more or less delicately held together under a common name at a particular period in history.” (Bucher and Strauss, 1961: 326) • • • • • • Professional work is often based on professional ideologies rather than distinct practices: “Collins (1979) found a surprisingly weak correlation between the requirements of educational credentials and the skills/knowledge requirements of jobs. On the basis of empirical observation he argued that education serves to socialize prospective professionals into status cultures by drawing a line between insiders and outsiders”. ”. (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 178) Ideology and self-regulation “I use the term professionalized workforce to refer specifically to the presence of the other, two institutionally features of professionalization: ideology and self-regulation.” (Nordenflycht, 2010: 163) “A professional ideology consists of a set of norms, manifested both in explicit ethical codes enforced by professional associations and internalized preferences, often developed during professional training.” (Nordenflycht, 2010: 163) “Ideologies provide frameworks for judging both how patients should be helped and what is harmful for patients”. (Strauss, et al., 1964: 365) Becoming a professional: The role of identity and ideology • Professional ideology: The totality of belief guiding the professional in his or her day-to-day work • Professional ideologies are learned in tertiary training (at the university) and when being socialized into the profession. • “Student contestation of dominant ideologies is integral to the transformation that occurs during elite professional socialization . . . the process of becoming professional includes learning to think critically and to question assumptions. Far from being unwilling dupes of ideological indoctrination, students are selfreflective, and they strategically accommodate and resist the ideologies of their education. During professional socialization, they must confront and rationalize their future status as a means of facilitating and thus legitimizing the reproduction of elite privilege”. (Schleef, 2006: 4) • • Danielle, a law schools student at “Graham university” who “firmly believed during her first year of law school that most lawyers were overpaid and took advantage of their powerful position in society, now says without criticism: ‘Lawyers work really, really hard . . . the money is deserved. I think lawyers are really, really smart. I think they are very articulate and on top of things’”. (Schleef, 2006: 2) • “Elites-in-training” “contest, rationalize, and ultimately enthusiastically embrace their dominant position in society”. (Schleef, 2006: 4) • “The most important audience for professional ideology . . . is the professionals themselves—they need to believe in the higher mandate that the professionals are alleged to embody”. (Schleef, 2006: 5) Case: Management consultants • Management consultants represents ”the World’s newest profession” (McKenna. 2005. See also Kärreman and Alvesson, 2004) • Management consulting is not highly institutionalized, i.e., there are low formal entry barriers to the profession. • Causality between formal competence and effects is weak or precarious. Consultants need to have a belief in their methods or tools. • Management consultants are often recruited from ”elite schools” (business schools and engineering schools) • Symbolic resources play a key role in performing the management consulting services (”the only guys wearing black suits in LA are management consultants and FBI”). • Systems for knowledge sharing become of key importance (Werr and Stjernberg, 2003). Professional and occupational groups covered in the course • • • • • • Pharmaceutical researchers (Mats Sundgren) Game developers (Peter Zachariasson) Architects (Fredrik Nilsson) Management Consultants (Ola Bergström) Artists (Evelina Wahlgqvist) Event projects managers (Göran Lindahl) In summary • Professions and professional ideologies structure specific fields of expertise. • Professionalization is a social process aimed at imposing entry-barriers and controlling domains of expertise. • The management of professions is mostly indirect and through ideologies, norms and beliefs. Forms of capital • • • • • • • • Social capital “[T]he knowledge embedded within, available through, and utilized by interactions among individuals ad their networks of interrelationships” (Subramaniam and Youndt, 2005: 451), Human capital “[T]he knowledge, skills, and abilities residing within and utilized by individuals” (Subramaniam and Youndt, 2005: 451), Social capital is demanded to fully exploit human capital: “To effectively leverage investments in human capital, it may be imperative for organizations to invest in the development of social capital to provide the necessary conduits for their core knowledge workers to network and share their expertise. Organizations that neglect the social side of individual skills and inputs and do not create synergies between their human and social capital are unlikely to realize the potential of their employees to enhance organizational innovative capabilities”. (Subramaniam and Youndt, 2005: 459)