Abstract
Managerial ecology is embedded within a complex set of historical
relationships. The institutions and processes of resource and
environmental management have traditionally been the means by which a
select few (managers) have side stepped democratic politics and
environmental ethics in favour of top-down anthropocentric
administration. By assuming an unlimited capacity to eliminate
indeterminism and achieve certainty through science and technology,
resource management (as conceptualized and practiced) has proven itself
to be extremely undemocratic and unsustainable with respect to human
communities and biophysical ecosystems. Recent developments within the
science of ecology have challenged managerial approaches to nature by
shifting attention away from the "balance of nature" paradigm
that permitted certainty, command, and control toward a "flux of
nature" paradigm focused on coping with uncertainty and complexity
in dynamic and interconnected ecological systems. The change in emphasis
within managerial ecolo gy from "control" to
"coping" strategies has the potential to undermine control
while highlighting the importance of political and moral ecology -- that
is the need to make good ecological decisions in the presence of
conflict and in the absence of universal Truth. However, the shift from
a confident ecological science of control to a tentative and ambiguous
science of coping has also encouraged the relocation of projects of
managerial control from biophysical systems onto the behaviours,
attitudes and values of individual human beings and the collective
behaviour of their societies and cultures. By describing the ambivalent
responses to this shift within the field of resource and environmental
management, the paper questions the legitimacy of managerial approaches
to natural and cultural worlds, while clearing a path for recognizing
and re-imagining alternatives.
L'ecologie gestionnaire fait partie d'un reseau complexe
de relations historiques. Traditionnellement, les institutions et les
procedes associes a la gestion des ressources et de l'environnement
ont ete des moyens grace auxquels un petit nombre de personnes (les
gestionnaires) a contourne les politiques democratiques et
l'ethique environnementale en faveur d'administrations
anthropocentriques descendantes. En attribuant a la science et a la
technologie une capacite illimitee d'eliminer l'indeterminisme
et de parvenir a des certitudes, la gestion des ressources (telle
qu'elle est pensee et pratiquee) a demontre qu'elle etait
grandement antidemocratique et non viable pour les collectivites
humaines et les ecosystemes biophysiques. De recents developpements dans
la science de l'ecologie ont remis en question les approches
gestionnaires de la nature en deplacant l'attention auparavant
portee au paradigme << equilibre de la nature >> (associe a
la certitude, l'ordre et le controle) vers le paradigme <<
flux de la nature >> (qui met l'accent sur la capacite de se
debrouiller avec l'incertitude et la complexite de systemes
ecologiques dynamiques et interrelies). Dans l'ecologie
gestionnaire, le passage d'une strategie de << controle
>> a une strategie de << debrouillardise >> permet
d'ebranler le controle tout en soulignant l'importance de
l'ecologie politique et morale, c'est-a-dire le besoin de
prendre de bonnes decisions ecologiques lors de conflits et en
l'absence de verite universelle. Ce passage d'une science de
l'ecologie confiante et en controle a une science incertaine et
ambigue qui prone la debrouillardise a transforme des projets de
controle gestionnaire de systemes biophysiques en comportements,
attitudes et valeurs humaines individuelles et en comportements
collectifs associes aux societes et cultures. En decrivant les reactions
ambivalentes a ce changement dans le champ de la gestion des ressources
et de l'environnement, cet article questionne la legitimite des
approches gestionnaires des univers naturels et culturels, tout en
ouvrant la voie a la reconnaissance et a la << re-imagination
>> de solutions de rechange.
Keywords
Resource and environmental management, managerial ecology,
complexity, control, coping
Managerial Ecology and Its Discontents
Management is a tertiary skill -- a method, not a value. And yet we
apply it to every domain as if it were the ideal of our civilization
(Saul 1995: 200).
This paper attempts to understand how "management," what
the philosopher John Ralston Saul calls a tertiary skill and method, has
become a central value that guides how environmental issues are
understood and addressed. As Paehlke and Torgerson observe, faith in
management has a pervasive influence over environmental imaginations.
If there is a problem, better management is often assumed to be the
solution. This assumption has deeply influenced the rise of advanced
industrial societies and now guides much of the response to
environmental problems (Paehlke and Torgerson 1990: 5).
Understanding how and why managerial solutions dominate responses
to complex environmental issues is crucial if we are to address the
numerous crises developing in the field of resource and environmental
management. The institutions and processes of resource and environmental
management have traditionally been the means by which a select few
(managers) have side stepped democratic politics and environmental
ethics in favour of top-down human-centered administration. By assuming
an unlimited capacity to eliminate indeterminism and achieve certainty
through science and technology, resource and environmental management --
as conceptualized and practiced -- has proven itself to be extremely
undemocratic and unsustainable with respect to human communities and
biophysical ecosystems. Recent developments within the science of
ecology, however, have challenged managerial approaches to nature by
shifting attention away from the "balance of nature" paradigm
that permitted certainty, command, and control toward a "flux of
nature" paradigm focussed on coping with uncertainty and complexity
in dynamic and interconnected ecological systems (Botkin 1990, Pimm
1991, Thompson and Trisoglio 1997).
This paper argues that changes in ecological science have the
potential to undermine management as a central value and dominant way of
framing environmental issues while clearing a space for radical
alternatives. Indeed, ecological scientists who are focussed on
understanding the complexity of the natural world have argued that the
"era of management is over" (Ludwig 2001: 758). This
observation has led scholars in the field to increasingly stress the
importance of political and moral ecology -- that is the need to make
good ecological decisions in the presence of conflict and in the absence
of universal Truth (Peet and Watts 1996, Keil et al 1998, Cortner and
Moote 1999, Torgerson 1999, Coward et al 2000). However, the shift from
a confident ecological science of control to a politicized science of
coping has also encouraged the relocation of projects of managerial
control from biophysical systems onto the behaviours, attitudes and
values of individual human beings and their collective expressions in
societi es and cultures. By exploring the negative effects of the
decline of control and the rise of coping, the challenges and
complexities of contemporary resource and environmental management can
be clarified and spaces can be made available to recognize and
re-imagine alternatives to managerial ecology.
Managerial ecology, or the unquestioned faith in management as the
solution to deep seated ecological and social problems, is founded on
the belief in, and desirability of, control (Evemden 1985, Ehrenfeld
1991, Luke 1997). Despite laudable attempts at redefinition, in an age
of rampant capitalist globalization, progress continues to be equated
with the ability of human beings to increasingly control external
biophysical nature and internal human nature through scientific
understanding and technological organization (Parker 2002: 3). The
Progressive Era (1890-1920) in the United States, which gave birth to
the conservation movement, and later the field of resource management,
embraced the vision of efficient and effective control projects (Hays
1974). Gifford Pinchot, the American father of conservation, promoted
managerial ecology in direct opposition to the ideas of John Muir and
the preservationists who advocated versions of moral ecology. John Muir
and the preservationist movement emphasized the importanc e of aesthetic
and spiritual appreciation of nature. Their movement was based on
deontological arguments focussed on the intrinsic value of the natural
world. Pinchot's conservation movement was founded on a
consequentialist, or utilitarian ethic, which emphasized the
instrumental, economic and functional value of nature conceptualized as
a collection of natural goods and services (Oelschlaeger 1991). The
managerial essence of Progressive Conservation is perhaps best
illustrated in Pinchot's insistence that "the first duty of
the human race is to control the earth it lives upon" (1967:45).
Parallel to the development of Pinchot's ideas were those of
Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor's Principles of Scientific
Management, published in 1911, inaugurated a scientific management
movement aimed at commanding and controlling the labour of human beings.
By using time and motion studies and applying scientific principles to
the labour processes of Fordist production lines, scientific managers
were able to maximize the efficiency of mass production (Morgan 1986).
Taylor and Pinchot's ideas were eventually widely embraced across
the industrial world throughout the twentieth century, both in
capitalist and communist nations, despite significant early resistance
in the United States (Saul 1993). Taylor's scientific management
was contested by workers and some politicians who branded him and his
ideas "the enemy of the working man" (Shenhav 1999). However,
despite this resistance by workers, scientific management gained
widespread application across the political spectrum. Scientific
management was "adapted in varying forms by both the Soviet and the
Nazi regimes. Lenin structured his economic reforms on his version of
scientific management...Stalin turned it into a Communist truth. The
first Soviet Five-Year Plan was drawn up with the help of leading
Taylorist advisors imported from the United States. As a result some
two-thirds of Soviet industry was built by Americans" (Saul
1993:120). Along similar lines, Pinchot's conservation movement
suffered ongoing criticism from the preservationist movement of John
Muir throughout the twentieth century. The preservationist movement went
on to form the foundations of modern environmentalism in such
organizations as the Sierra Club -- founded by Muir. However, throughout
the twentieth century it was the Conservation movement and the practice
of resource management that became institutionalized in government
departments and ministries across the world (Neimark and Mott 1999).
Contemporary theories, practices and experiences in resource and
environmental management increasingly call into question the projects of
managerial command and control epitomized by Pinchot and Taylor. While
resource and environmental management continues to share many of the
fundamental philosophical orientations of the Progressive Era, the
legitimacy and effectiveness of scientific resource management has been
disputed on a number of fronts. Ecological scientists question the
feasibility of control by drawing on the insights of complex systems
science, which understands nature as a dynamic, self-organizing system
in continuous chaotic flux as opposed to an image of nature as a
collection of linear mechanisms striving toward predictable equilibrium
states (Botkin 1990, Pimm 1991, Kay and Schneider 1994, Capra 1996,
Levin 1999). Political ecologists question the justice and legitimacy of
top-down management, the deleterious constraints placed on resource use
by capitalism, and the importance of making distin ctions between
politics and administration (Torgerson 1999, Sandilands 2002, Garside,
this volume, Hudson, this volume). Environmental ethicists and others
interested in exploring moral ecology question the human arrogance of
controlling "nature," when it is understood as collections of
instrumentally valued resources (Evernden 1993, Szabo, this volume).
These criticisms have combined with ongoing resource management failures
in forestry, fisheries, wildlife and agriculture to produce explosive
conflict and uncertainty, resulting in what many refer to as a
"worldwide crisis in resource management" (Holling et al 2000:
342).
The worldwide crisis in resource management calls attention to the
failed project of managerial ecology, which Carolyn Merchant (1980: 238)
summarizes as the desire to "maximize energy production, economic
yields and environmental quality through ecosystem modeling,
manipulation, and prediction of outcomes." Merchant (1980: 239)
notes that managerial ecology involves the deployment of
"scientifically trained advisors to government agencies,
industries, and universities [to] help ... formulate rational policy for
resource use." In The Death of Nature (1980), Merchant locates the
historical roots of this utilitarian approach to organizing the
human/nature relationship in the ideas of the natural philosophers of
Restoration England and the Enlightenment -- most notably Sir Francis
Bacon (1561-1626), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Sir Isaac Newton
(1642-1727), and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). These philosophers formed
the intellectual foundations for Pinchot and Taylor's progressive
projects of Conservation and Scient ific Management. The next section of
this paper will focus on the science associated with Pinchot and
Taylor's managerial approaches.
Science and the Crisis in Managerial Ecology
The scientific roots of the crisis in resource management stem from
the recognition that reductionist Newtonian science, and the Cartesian
and Baconian Enlightenment project of commanding and controlling nature
has inherent limits. Rene Descartes' plea (quoted in Oelschlaeger
1991: 87) for European men to become the "masters and possessors of
nature" is now recognized as a form of patriarchal arrogance and
hubris that ends up producing fragile and degraded ecosystems. Francis
Bacon's call (quoted in Glacken 1973: 474) for scientists to
enlarge "the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things
possible" is increasingly seen as impractical due to the inherent
limitations associated with predicting and controlling complex
self-organizing adaptive systems. Developments within ecological science
have largely undermined the legitimacy of managerial ecology by
questioning the assumptions embedded in the Newtonian model of the
universe -- assumptions that permitted the belief in certain knowledge
and the ab ility to control nature as if it were a machine. Ecological
science increasingly draws on post-Newtonian models, metaphors and
methods which focus on the science of complex systems. Complex systems
science understands reality as a nested collection of adaptive
ecological systems that are in constant evolutionary flux with periods
of rapid change and domains of fragile, adaptive stability (Capra, 1996,
Levin 1999). This new scientific paradigm focuses on complexity,
uncertainty and limits to predictability and control. It subsequently
calls on resource managers to recognize the necessity of coping with
irreducible uncertainty and adapting to complexity in dynamic and
interconnected ecosocial systems (Thompson and Trisoglio 1997, Berkes
and Folke 2000, Mitchell 1998, Ludwig 2001).
Complex systems science presents a different worldview from that of
Descartes, Newton and Bacon. Katherine Hayles (1991) contrasts Newtonian
and Post-Newtonian scientific paradigms with the metaphors of the clock
and the waterfall.
Whereas the Newtonians focused on the clock as an appropriate image
for the world, chaos theorists are apt to choose the waterfall. The
clock is ordered, predictable, regular and mechanically precise; the
waterfall is turbulent, unpredictable, irregular, and infinitely varying
in form. The change is not in how the world actually is -- neither
clocks nor waterfalls are anything new -- but in how it is seen (Hayles
1991: 8).
Complexity, as Sardar and Ravetz (1994: 565) note, "has
demolished the notions of control and certainty in science." With
the disintegration of Newtonian science and its focus on simplistic
control and universal certainty, has come a science that emphasizes the
necessity of coping with complexity and universal uncertainty. Science
must now "characterize and cope with uncertainty rather than...roll
back the frontiers of ignorance" (Waltner-Toews et al 2003: 26).
These changes in science have important implications for the meaning,
theory and practice of managerial ecology. However, the rise of
Post-Newtonian science has not resulted in a wholesale rejection of the
idea of management, rather it has resulted in redefinition, redeployment
and relocation of management, managers and the managed.
When complexity is discovered in nature the consequences for
managerial ecology differ depending on whether the observer understands
complexity to be epistemological or ontological (Kwa 2002). Ontological
understandings of complexity present complexity as an irreducible fact
of nature. This leads to the recognition of absolute limits in the
ability to control complex systems, leaving would-be managers with no
other choice but to cope and adapt to this reality. Epistemological
understandings claim that what appears to be complex, uncertain and
ultimately unknowable is actually complicated and muddled -- further
research, additional data and improved models will reveal law-like
order, mechanical structure and design principles amenable to control
and re-engineering, in what appears initially as irreducibly complex and
uncertain (Hayies 1999, Kwa 2002). According to epistemological
perspectives, complexity is not a fact of nature, but a reflection of
the deficiencies of the observer and their tools. The argument follows
that if complex reality is studied long enough and at the right scale,
an underlying Newtonian mechanism will emerge with laws that can be
predicted and ultimately controlled (Rasch and Wolfe 1999, Kwa 2002).
(1)
A second reason for the maintenance of a managerial stance in
post-Newtonian complex systems science is the fact that complexity has
not been "discovered" equally across scales and in differing
natural and social contexts. For the most part, complexity has been
discovered in large scale biophysical and socioeconomic systems, rather
than in the behaviours, values and beliefs of individual human beings
and their local communities. This has led to the widespread belief that
the dynamics of biophysical and socioeconomic systems must largely be
coped with, while human behaviours, attitudes, values and beliefs are
appropriate targets to be coercively controlled or carefully
disciplined. The need to think of resource management in terms of
disciplining humans is hinted at by Bruce Mitchell (1998: 284) when he
observes that "it is often presumptuous to believe that humans
'manage' environment and resources. More realistically, humans
manage their interactions with environment and resources." When
applied in resource management, insights from post-Newtonian ecology
undermine the belief in easily identifiable causative laws or
controlling levers in the biophysical world. In post-Newtonian
managerial ecology, humans are represented as elements in nested systems
with managerial control focussed on their interactions with those
systems (Wilson and Bryant 1997; Mitchell 1998; Berkes and Folke 2000,
Waltner-Toews et al 2003). Scientific understanding of the biophysical
world and the nature of human existence is dramatically altered and from
the managerial perspective humans have no other choice but to become
responsible managers of themselves and their interactions with complex
systems. Given this focus, the way in which humans are understood and
defined becomes important when attempting to understand contemporary
resource and environmental management.
The most influential complex systems models, applied to resource
management issues, theorize human nature along neo-liberal lines and
often result in forms of politics that are technocratic and moralistic
(Taylor 1997, 2002).
In technocratic formulations, objective, scientific, and
(typically) quantitative analyses are employed to identify the policies
that society as a whole needs in order to restore order or ensure its
sustainability or survival -- policies which individuals, citizens, and
countries should then submit to in their own best interests. In
contrast, moralistic formulations reject coercion and instead rely on
appeals to individuals to change their values and actions so as to
maintain valued social or natural qualities of life. Yet, in many senses
appeals for technocratic planning and moral change are allied. To
command people's attention, exponents invoke the severity of the
crisis and the threat to the social or natural order. They appeal to
common, undifferentiated interests as a corrective to inadequate
governance that stems either, in the technocratic view, from
scientifically ignorant leaders or, in the moral view, from corrupt,
self-serving or naive ones [...] By emphasizing people's common
interests in remedia l environmental efforts, these views steer
attention away from the difficult politics that result from
differentiated social groups and nations having different interests in
causing, and different interests in alleviating, environmental problems.
Dominant social groups are spared scrutiny; their agency is thus
privileged. At a more subtle level...special places are reserved in the
proposed social transformations for their exponents -- the technocrat
would be the analyst or policy advisor; the moralist, the guide,
educator, or leader (Taylor 2002: 12).
The representation of persons in many complex systems models tend
to reflect Enlightenment assumptions of humans as possessive
individualists such as those promoted by Thomas Hobbes and neoclassical
economic theory (Hayles 1991, 1999). Post-Newtonian complex systems
science, when applied in management contexts, tends to theorize the
human in decidedly reductionist terms. In proposals flowing from
computer-based complex systems simulations, for example, the nature of
people and other "agents" are most often understood as
self-interested possessive individualists or "cellular
automata" that pursue optimization strategies in constructed
decision environments (Levin 1999). These "agents" respond to
binary choices constrained by the engineered environment of the
simulation model. In these models, the human being is reduced to a
morally responsible, yet strategic, calculating agent whose behaviour is
constrained through the design of incentives and disincentives which
make up the choice environment (Barry et al 199 6, Hayles 1999). There
is no complexity to be discovered at the level of the individual agents
in complex system models based on cellular automata. Complex dynamics
only emerge as the collective choices of individual agents are
aggregated and dynamically evolve over time (Hayles 1996, Knights and
Morgan 1990). These computer simulation models are a classic case of the
fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead 1925), where the
constraints programmed into the model (individualized, competitive, self
maximizing behaviour) are taken to be an ontological fact that forms the
context out of which complexity emerges and management lessons are
learned (Hayles 1999).
Neoliberal views of human nature are simultaneously optimistic and
revolutionary, disruptive and conserving of the Newtonian status quo,
depending on whether human agents, economic processes or biophysical
systems are considered complex or relatively simple. Neoliberal theories
present individuals who are responsible and rational, moral yet
calculating. These neoliberal agents offer managerial ecologists both
moralistic and technocratic options for management because "...the
rational individual will wish to become [morally] responsible for the
self, for.. .this will produce the most palatable, pleasurable and
effective mode of provision for security against risk. Equally, the
responsible individual will take rational steps to avoid and to insure
against risk,. in order to be independent rather than a burden on
others" (O'Malley 1996:199-200).
Humans who accept the insights of complex systems science and
post-Newtonian ecology seem to have no other choice than to become
responsible managers -- albeit internally focussed managers of their
values, motivations and behaviour rather than externally oriented
managers of the biophysical world. Due to the widespread acceptance of
neoliberal views of human nature in societies dominated by globalized
forms of corporate capitalism the radical potentials of post-Newtonian
ecology are severely restricted. On the one hand, humans are presented
with a moral role that represents a radical break from the hubris of the
Enlightenment -- humans become responsible natural elements in
self-organizing systems. They manage or cope, as subjects of larger
systems which they are made by and help to co-create. On the other hand,
humans are forced into a rational calculative role that reflects the
egoism of the Enlightenment and contemporary neoliberalism where they
become managers of an internalized Hobbsian Leviathan. Coerce d into
making rational choices in the context of generalized economic scarcity,
contemporary economic agents are forced to control and carefully use
their behaviours, attitudes and values based on a rational calculation
of interests vis-a-vis the incentives and disincentives programmed into
commodified decision environments. While most post-Newtonian complexity
theorists frame their discussions of natural and human resource
management in the language of democratic deliberation and stakeholder
participation, there are strong forces acting against this realization
in practice. The tensions that exist between humans conceptualized as
holistic elements of larger systems and sovereign individuals rationally
selecting behaviours, attitudes and values in highly controlled decision
environments creates the potential for moralizing and technocratic
politics to develop as a direct result of post-Newtonian ecology applied
to resource management.
The questioning of Newtonian science has had important implications
for the meaning, theory and practice of management. The specific
implications for resource and environmental management turn on how
complexity is understood, where it is discovered, and how the human is
theorized. If systems are understood to be ontologically complex,
observers are more willing to admit fundamental limits on control and
are likely to advocate coping with and adapting to this fundamental
reality. However, the discovery of ontological complexity in one realm,
often leads to the transfer of control from the complex and uncertain to
what is believed to be relatively simple and known. Resource and
environmental management shows signs of recognizing both ontological and
epistemological complexity, which arranges itself differently depending
on who the observers are, and how they understand social and ecological
systems and their inter-relations. The erosion of Newtonian science in
resource and environmental management has not only resulted in proposals
for an array of new managerial designs, but has also resulted in an
expansion of the meaning of management itself. A brief examination of
the etymology of management helps to clarify some of these changes.
Etymological Roots of Management: Controlling, Caretaking and
Coping
Peter Holm (1996: 179), in reference to fisheries management notes
that "management is a control strategy by which processes or people
are handled indirectly through a system of representation..." He
goes on to note that, "management is based on the existence of a
symbolic system that corresponds to, but greatly simplifies, some
'real' system, which can thereby be brought under rational
control." Management, according to Holm, involves a two step
process where a complex reality is first reduced and made amenable to
handling, and then is controlled through strategic interventions.
The meaning of management as handling and rational control entered
the English language in the 16th century from the Italian maneggiare
which referred to the training of horses (Williams 1983). From the Latin
root manus, or hand, "management" entered the English language
strictly associated with handling, controlling and directing the
movements of a species of wild nature (OED 1989). Through management,
wild and unpredictable horses were broken and administered through their
paces, trained to trot, gallop, and high step by controlling their
separate movements and gait in time and through space. In the context of
environmental issues, it is interesting to note that management has its
roots in the domestication of a wild animal with associated notions of
taking charge, directing and controlling wildness to eliminate
uncertainty and create usable behaviours. Management-as-control implies
a handling procedure, a directing and steering presence over animals,
processes, workers, and things. To be successful, manage rs must
eliminate or drastically reduce the complexity, wildness and freedom of
all those targeted for management. Indeed from the perspective of
management, wildness, freedom, diversity and complexity often represent
"problems" demanding solutions through control, handling and
training.
While control continues to be the most dominant meaning associated
with management, during the early 17th century the meaning of
management, as controlling, training, and directing (maneggiare) was
influenced and confused by the entrance into the English language of the
French word menager, meaning to use carefully (OED 1989). With its Latin
root mansionem -- meaning a dwelling or household, the introduction of
menager, affected the meaning of management with a different location
(the household vs. the horse coral), a different set of activities
(housekeeping vs. horse training), and a different set of attitudes
(caretaking and stewardship instead of command and control). From the
perspective of resource and environmental management the French
"menager" refers to a mode of management made possible once a
species or natural process has been domesticated -- taken into the human
household, stripped of its wildness, complexity and uncertainty and
prepared for optimal use.
The careful use meaning of management introduces a positive moral
role for managers in the image of gardening, stewardship and custodial
or pastoral care (Brody 2000). However, management as careful use should
not be understood apart from management as control, since it requires a
relatively controlled environment, either materially or symbolically, to
exist before it can successfully operate. Management as careful use
requires a domesticated sphere of action which can oniy successfully
come into being after managerial control has broken wildness and reduced
uncertainty and complexity to a predictable mechanism. Throughout the
17th and 18th centuries there was confusion in the use of the term
manager with its meaning encompassing both the identity of trainer and
director (maneggaire) and that of a careful housekeeper, husband,
custodian, and steward (menager) (GED 1989). This confusion persists to
this day and is understandable given the practical connections that
exist between management as control and manag ement as careful use.
Careful use can not successfully proceed until a predictable, mapped
out, "manageable" object has been created through the
effective application of control. Control can take material (e.g. horse
breaking) or discursive (e.g. map making) forms. When attempting to
manage wild animals, for example, management as careful use can not
successfully occur until the animals have been domesticated, their
movements and behaviours made predictable and placed under the control
of a human master or owner. (2)
Management as careful use places humans in the role of middle men
and custodians, optimizing the use of resources that have been
previously mapped out and staked, it implies and requires a controlled
sphere of action before it can successfully proceed. Indeed, the
etymology of careful use or stewardship implies a tri-partite
relationship between owners, stewards and wards. As Catherine Roach
(2000: 69) observes, "Stewardship involves three parties: the
steward, that for which the steward cares, and the party at whose behest
the steward does the caring. The concept implies both connection and
separation in this three-way relationship, and the relation is often
conceived along the lines of hierarchy. All three parties are
inextricably connected by their interest in one another, but significant
differences of power exist among the three." Management as careful
use implies the position of a middle man, reliant on the controlled
environment of the domestic sphere to operate, but always under threat
of chaos and th e loss of an order amenable to careful use (Cooper
1986). Once wildness has been broken and domestication and ownership
have been achieved, husbandry, stewardship and custodial management can
come into existence and be successfully pursued. (3) Wildness and
disorder always threaten domesticity and order, management as careful
use therefore points up towards control and down to a third meaning of
management epitomized by the position of the ward or the managed (Roach
2000).
From Control and Caretaking to Coping
In addition to the historic control and caretaking roots of
management, there is a third meaning of the word which is finding
increasing contemporary expression, both colloquially and within the
field of resource management. The third meaning of management implies
the opposite of controlling, directing and careful use and is often
invoked in adaptive and ecosystem management when command and control
techniques are recognized to have failed due to uncertainty, complexity
and surprise.
Rather than meaning to control and to use carefully, 'to
manage" can also mean to simply cope with a situation, person,
problem or complex process (Thompson and Trisoglio 1997). We use this
colloquial meaning of management...when we say, "I just managed to
get this paper done on time, or "I just managed to pay rent this
month." When we utilize management in these ways we are referring
to situations far removed from that of a controlling authority and from
being in a position to map, plan, simplify, direct, husband or steward
reality to serve our wishes.