This week I sat in for a professor in her Managerial Communication course, and I taught a class on the classical theorists of organizational and scientific management. As the overall metaphor for these early theories is a machine I designed an exercise for the students using metaphors to conceptualize various companies and work related systems. I got this idea from Gareth Morgan’s book, Images of an Organization, which looks at the use of metaphor as a conceptual tool to understand and study organizations. Much of Gareth Morgan’s work is in the use of creative imagery combined with organizational theory to better understand modern management structures.
After having discussed the classical theory approach with the students and asking them to examine why the machine was the metaphor used to describe these theories, I then asked them to come up with a metaphor for Baruch College. The first metaphor they shared was a beehive. The students thought that there was a Queen Bee, who directed everything at Baruch though nobody really knew who that was. The students and the faculty were all of the busy worker bees that came and went, offering their work up to the hive at all times. The whole class, myself included, thought this metaphor worked well for conceptualizing Baruch. I then asked the students what did this beehive produce, what was Baruch’s main production? With not much enthusiasm, one student answered ” well..um… I guess it is knowledge or something like that” I couldn’t stop from laughing out loud. The next metaphor was a labyrinth…
Very provocative. Tell us more about the labyrinth metaphor.
At the risk of sounding even more pedantic than I am, I point out that “queen” is a lousy metaphor for the brood-mother of a beehive, who does nothing but eat and lay eggs. She directs nothing.
When it comes to classroom teaching at Baruch, it’s not clear to me that there’s any central figure in charge. Some departments/programs do have a common syllabus and exams for all sections of a course, but many departments don’t. Curriculum decisions are made by curriculum committees at department and school levels, and these are mostly driven by faculty. But once a course gets through the approval process, almost no one other than the folks teaching it has any idea of what’s actually going on in classroom.
I think of college teaching, at Baruch and elsewhere, as being among the most anarchic activities in our society. And I think that’s mostly a good thing. If there were some central figure directing what we do, whether publicly or in the shadows, most of us would be so bored with what we’re doing we’d fall asleep alongside our students.