Question

1.What does Drucker mean when he suggests that communication should be sender and receiver oriented?

2.What does Drucker mean when he suggests that Management as a social science is always changing?

3.Why did business and non-profit leaders in the U.S. avoid using the word, 'management,' during the late 1920's and early 1930's? 

Answer 1

1. What does Drucker mean when he suggests that communication should be sender and receiver oriented?

Communication is central to the way that change happens in organizations. Performance outcomes emerge from the myriad of conversations that take place every day, both within the organization and beyond. These conversations form part of the formal, structured arrangements of the organization but, most importantly, they also arise spontaneously during informal interactions.

It is through the self-organizing interplay of these fragmented and dynamic networks of conversations that people make sense of what's going on and decide how to act. As the patterns and content of the conversations change, so does the organization.

At its core then, communication is a relational, participative and reflexive process of two (or more) people interacting with each other. It is not a linear activity, in which one person encodes a message and sends it to a recipient to be decoded ('noise willing') in a predictable, matter-of-fact sort of way.

From this perspective, the centre of gravity of leadership communication needs to shift from formal, structured message passing to joint sense making and relationship building. This point is echoed strongly by Drucker in the "four fundamentals of communication" that he sets out in his book Technology, Management and Society.

Communication is perception

Although there are hints of the sender-receiver model of communication in some of Drucker's language, he implicitly (and later explicitly) recognizes that communication is a relationship that requires mutual participation. His focus here is on what he calls the "percipient" of another's communication, rather than on the joint communication of people in interaction. But, that apart, the points he makes are equally valid. In particular:

Perception is not logic, it is experience. By this he means that what one perceives is always part of a bigger picture - "a configuration", as he calls it - rather than a series of isolated specifics.

The spoken language cannot be separated from gestures, tone of voice and the context set by, for example, the environment and the cultural backcloth. "In fact," he says, "without them, the spoken word has no meaning and cannot communicate."

People can only perceive what they are capable of perceiving in the light of their experience: "There is no possibility of communication unless we first know what the recipient, the true communicator, can see and why."

Communication is expectations

"We perceive, as a rule, what we expect to perceive. We see what we expect to see, and we hear largely what we expect to hear the unexpected is usually not received at all seen or heard but ignored mis-seen as the expected."

The mind attempts to fit impressions and stimuli into a frame of expectations.

Only if we seek to understand what others expect to hear, can we know whether communication "can utilize his expectations - and what they are - or whether there is a need for the 'shock of alienation' to break this tendency for perception to continue in line with current expectations.

Communication is involvement

Communication always makes demands on people, requiring them to "become somebody, do something, believe something."

Communication is most powerful if it fits in to the recipient's aspirations, values and purposes.

There is no communication, in any meaningful sense, unless the message appeals - at least partially - to the recipient's motivations and values.

Communication and information are different and largely opposite - yet interdependent

Communication is perception whereas information is logic. That is, information is "purely formal and has no meaning."

Communication is interpersonal whereas information is impersonal. Information becomes increasingly informative and more reliable the freer it is of emotions, values, expectations and perceptions.

In communicating, we perceive a configuration of stimuli, whereas information is always specific. "Information is, above all, a principle of economy" - the fewer the data, the better the information.

"An overload of information does not enrich, but impoverishes."

Information presupposes communication. For information to be 'received' and used, there must be some prior agreement around meaning, that is, some communication.

The more levels of meaning a communication has, and the less quantifiable it therefore is, the better it communicates.

"Communications ... may not be dependent on information. Indeed, the most perfect communications may be purely shared experiences, without any logic whatever. Perception has primacy rather than information."

Communicative interaction

Sadly, the sender-receiver model still informs the bulk of 'internal communication' activity in organizations. Drucker's implicit recognition that communication is not like this - and that it is a mutual process of people in relationship - is made explicit in his final paragraph:

"There will be no communication if it is conceived as going from the 'I' to the 'thou'. Communication only works from one member of 'us' to another. Communications in organization - and this may be the true lesson of our communications failure and the true measure of our communications need - are not a means of organization. They are a mode of organization."

This view of communication sees it as a fundamental aspect of organization. As sitting at its core. It does not look at it simply as a way of dealing with other, notionally more important aspects of organization. As such, although Drucker talks in terms of "from-to" rather than "between", his comments sit four-square with those perspectives (such as informal coalitions), which see organizations as complex social (or responsive) processes.

2. What does Drucker mean when he suggests that Management as a social science is always changing?

Largely influenced by his upbringing, Peter Drucker became interested in the idea of building a strong, functioning society. Peter Drucker first came into business and management due to his fundamental belief that a healthy, functioning society needed responsible and effective organizations.

Peter Drucker began his own consulting business which allowed him to work with companies like IBM and Procter & Gamble. He realized that the two most important things for a business to achieve were innovation and marketing.

Drucker taught that management is a liberal art and is about much more than productivity. To be an effective manager you must understand things like psychology, science, religion, and the other things that go into that subject.

Drucker observed that often managers would try to take charge of everything. This was usually out of a desire for control or the belief that they were the only person who could accomplish a task correctly. Because of this, he advocated strongly for the decentralization of management. He taught that managers needed to delegate tasks to empower their employees.

Another effect of the concept of the corporation was the establishment of the beginnings of management as a discipline, bringing out the notions of the:

• social and environmental responsibility of the organisation
• relationship between the individual and the organisation
• role of top management and the decision-making process
• need for continual training and re-training of managers with the focus on their own responsibility for self-development
• nature of labour relations
• imperatives of community and customer relations.

3. Why did business and non-profit leaders in the U.S. avoid using the word, 'management,' during the late 1920's and early 1930's?

After World War II they began slowly to see that management is not business management. It pertains to every human effort that brings together in one organization people of diverse knowledge and skills. And it can be powerfully applied in hospitals, universities, churches, arts organizations, and social service agencies of all kinds. These “third sector” institutions have grown faster than either business or government in the developed countries since World War II. And their leaders are becoming more and more management conscious. For even though the need to manage volunteers or raise funds may differentiate non-profit managers from their for-profit peers, many more of their responsibilities are the same—among them, defining the right strategy and goals, developing people, measuring performance, and marketing the organization’s services.

The overall prosperity of the United States in the 1920s overshadowed the chronic poverty of certain vulnerable populations. These were the same populations that had always been at risk in American history: children, older Americans, minorities, female-headed families, people with disabilities, and workers with unstable or low-paying jobs. The “new poverty” began with the famous stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. This is when many middle and upper-income families first experienced poverty in America. These were hard-working people who fully shared the values and ideals of the American dream, people who had enjoyed the strong economy of the 1920s and had bought the homes, refrigerators, and automobiles. The sudden and severe downturn of the American economy left many of these people in shock and denial. Between 1929 and 1933, unemployment in the United States jumped from 3.2 percent to 24.9 percent, almost a quarter of the official labor force.