Managing Unto this Last

Abstract

What should a manager die for? An answer to this question can reveal how a manager should live. In other words, unveiling the core commitment of a manager will define the profession itself in a meaningful way. This single question has been pursued throughout the paper. Many management professionals and teachers will dismiss the key words of this paper – commitment, courage, passion – as personal values that have nothing to do with the management profession. That exactly is the point of this paper: a road map to bring life back into management practices. The radical reorientation of management education proposed in this paper - putting "life" back into the heart of management practices and education - is still a higher benchmark for the United Nation's principles of Responsible Management Education, which has been adapted by over 300 business schools.The paper is divided into three sections. After the introduction, in the first part, the paper exposes the problem at hand by showing how the denial of semiotics within management science leads to the generation of only "actions", and not "practices". The paper argues that this denial of "social" makes managerial vocation an anomaly of doing something without passion. In the second part, why "the Last" requires managerial attention is argued. In the final section, a proposal to reverse the situation is delineated. One proposal is to change the nature of managerial education by aiming to produce the Gramscian organic intellectuals. A second proposal is that managers are, in fact, "producers of knowledge" (rather than users of knowledge), and there is a need to revalorise this segment of knowledge produced in context. A perceptive reader will also realise how these proposals, and the paper at large, makes an attempt at uniting two distinct schools of Hegelian (based on dialectics) and Heideggerian (based on interpretativism) thoughts on the corridors of management education in post-colonial contexts.