Browse

This book rediscovers lost sources in the work of Mary Parker Follett and Chester Barnard, providing a foundation for management as a unique and coherent discipline. It begins by explaining that research universities, and the management field in particular, have splintered into smaller and less related parts. It then recovers a lost tradition of integrating management and the humanities, exploring ways of building on this convention to advance the unique art and science of business. By way of Follett and Barnard's work, the book demonstrates how the shared values, purposes, and customs of management and the humanities can be used to build an enterprise that will help to meet the challenges of business today. Igniting approaches to management that build on humanistic traditions is the ultimate goal of this book. Therefore, the text ends with two experiments—one in the classroom and one with a business executive—that take up this call and offer a perspective on where management must go next.

What must human agents know about what other humans – with whom they are connected – know, in order for the resulting web of ties among them to function as a social network? The explanatory success of social network theories depends critically on assumptions about what agents know, what they know about what other agents with whom they are connected know, and the extent to which they trust what they and the others know. This book develops a method for representing these states of knowledge, awareness, ignorance, etc., jointly, epistemic states, and the epistemic ties connecting the epistemic states of agents in a social network to one another. What each agent knows of and about the others and their knowledge comprise an epistemic network, more compactly, epinet, a symbolic representation of the epistemic glue that underlies and shapes the interactions within a social network. The study of epinets permits development of new theory about the structure and dynamics of social networks, as well as of more precise measurement instruments and techniques for testing and validating the theory. The result is a toolkit for modeling, measuring, and manipulating the epistemic structures underlying human interaction in ways that are as accessible to social network analysts as they are engaging to logicians and epistemic game theorists.