The Future of Post-Human Management
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract
Is management really so important that Michael Eisner once claimed that “in every business, in every industry, management does matter”? (BR 2016) This fad of management can be contrasted with the qualified observation by Peter Drucker, who warned that “most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.” (BR 2016a)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), management (in relation to effectiveness and ineffectiveness) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no effectiveness without ineffectiveness (and vice versa) and that “effectiveness” is not necessarily “desirable” as conventionally assumed, just as “ineffectiveness” is not necessarily “undesirable” as traditionally thought.

Needless to say, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that management is not needed, or that those diverse fields (related to management)—such as social sciences, economic sociology, history, philosophy of business, personality studies, psychology of management, ecology, religion, political economy, organizational theory, information studies, optimizational theory, business ethics, strategic studies, scientific methodology, non-profit organizational behavior, social psychology, and so on—should be ignored. (WK 2016) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of management (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between effectiveness and ineffectiveness—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the bilateral theory of management) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about management (in relation to the dialectic relationship between effectiveness and ineffectiveness) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.