SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Business Administration
No 2009:1:
Of Managers, Ideas and Jesters
Guje Sevón ()
and Liisa Välikangas ()
Abstract: Ours is an argument for ideas that become us. Illustratory
is a statement by a well-known management author who lamented the
difficulty of “escaping one’s past ideas”. Viewing himself a prisoner, his
past published ideas had devoured him: they limited his ability to imagine
or credibly present new, different ideas. The predicament reflects the
perspective we wish to develop in this paper: Ideas may be seen as our
embodiments rather than what is more often put forth, externalized as
objects that we create and dismiss at will. We argue that a way of looking
at ideas is to start by considering humans, and managers, as spokespersons
for out-there ideas, which inhabit them at a time of readiness. People
become possessed; they become imprisoned by certain ideas that they then
begin to perform. A jester is an example of a performer of an idea of a
fool even if occasionally, as we argue in this paper, the jester may also
counterbalance the cognitive inertia of managers. We draw attention to the
common difficulty managers have, to move beyond the particular idea that
has become them, once – like the jester - they have begun performing the
idea(s).
Keywords: manager; ideas; jesters; change; (follow links to similar papers)
18 pages, January 20, 2009
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