The need to take into account technique in analyses of social phenomena now seems obvious, given the place that it occupies in our industrialised societies, which George Friedmann, one of the founders of the sociology of work, said arises within a ‘technical civilisation’ (Friedmann, 1964). And technique does not exist on its own without the technical objects that the tools constitute. However, for a long time, objects considered as something belonging to the natural order, appeared as intruders in the human sciences (Blandin, 2002, p. 7).

What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.

Our intention in writing this book was to introduce objects – management tools – into the analysis of social, organisational and economic phenomena. Their lack of visibility up until now and their apparent banality seemed to ignore any substantial problems tools might pose. Readers will have understood that we are not interested in management tools in the way technicians or managers would be; our idea is to view tools, which are omnipresent in our society, as an analyser of the specific situations that mark our time and so deserve to be studied.

So now we know some of the reasons why possibilitivity gets squelched: the neuronal connectivity patterns that allow us to learn decrease the brain’s plasticity over time;

When I was a teen I had an image of myself as clumsy, heavy, and bereft of athletic ability. My harsh self-assessment was confirmed every time I missed the ball – a failure extracted from reality and stored as evidence of my clumsiness.

The notions of actor (although not all the theories discussed here use this exact term) and interaction are central for the authors of the theories reviewed in this chapter. It is not the properties of the humans that are prominent in these works but the interpersonal positioning that guides their relations, the way in which they interact in complex surroundings (network, action system, activity system, sign system, etc.) and the social dynamics that result. The four theses examined here are alike in many ways. Unlike critical approaches and certain institutionalist approaches their analysis does not include the effects of social superstructures. In these cases there are no external determinants, no overarching social influence. The accent is on the autonomy of the actors who have the means (construction of meaning, power to act, strategic capacity) that grant them the free space they exploit.

I believe that simulations are a natural part of human life. Look at small children. They frequently pretend to be various characters: a train conductor, a doctor, a postman.

At one time Ricardo Semler, the unlikely hero of this story, preferred playing guitar to working in business.

Ricardo, Mary, and Piotr are, beyond any doubt, Working Wonders. While they faced different challenges, their stories have much in common.

While the desire for cohesiveness and like-mindedness can threaten our ability to think big, possibilitivity may also fall prey to the social networks we inhabit.

For the authors brought together in this chapter, social asymmetries, and the balance and relations of power are at the heart of the analysis. Management tools are caught up in these relations which they often mediate and facilitate, or sometimes moderate or regulate. Although these approaches allow the construction of a critique of management tools, showing how far they serve projects of domination and exploitation, participate in forms of oppression and violence and produce suffering, nevertheless the way in which the different theses construct their critique are diverse but complementary. Taken together, these approaches allow us to move from the most global social functioning and its systemic effects to the oppressed individuals in their subjective experience.

I first visited Piotr Pawłowski when he was preparing his Ashoka candidacy in 1995.

The diversion into the anthropology of techniques that we have just taken should not induce one to underestimate the contribution of authors more directly concerned with management and the tools it deploys. Such authors have left their mark in texts analysing the functioning, structure and development of organisations in order to improve their performance. Their work is brought together in a body of works called ‘organisation theory’. Several lines run through this literature and various classifications have been put forward. We shall now examine two of the better known among them.