Abstract
In this chapter, we explore Xenophon’s philosophy of management and identify nine dimensions of business management, as well as the competencies (the knowledge, skills, and virtues) that good management requires. The scientific contribution of this chapter does not only consist in the fact that this is the first publications in which Xenophon’s philosophy of management is systematically analyzed. Historical analysis can also help to question the self-evidence of our contemporary conceptualization of management. Xenophon’s philosophy of management enables us to criticize the contemporary focus on profit maximization and to articulate an intrinsic relation between business and society; to criticize the contemporary disconnectedness of business management and to develop a broader set of individual competencies and know-how that is required for business managers; to criticize the contemporary focus on management and control; and to rehabilitate the role of business management as ability and capacity that involves know-how, actual engagement, and virtuous competencies. Finally, this concept of management challenges contemporary conceptualizations of the differences between private and public management in political philosophical debates.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
At first sight, it seems to be strange to consult Socrates’ vision on business management, as he is normally seen as very negative about profit making and business (Plato 2013). Because the historical comparison between the Socrates of Plato and Xenophon is beyond the scope of this chapter, we purely focus on Socrates contribution to the question what is (business) management as it appears in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus in this chapter.
- 3.
Although Xenophon himself explicitly talks about slaves, we conceive the term in more neutral terms as subordinates. On the one hand, Xenophon’s description of the role and treatment of slaves resonates with modern ways of treating employees as we will see. On the other, both slaves and employees can be formally seen as subordinates of the business manager who is the owner of the assets.
- 4.
Throughout this chapter, he or his can be replaced by she or her.
- 5.
While historically, direct labour is primarily associated with pain and suffering, Xenophon associates it with joy and pleasure. This may be explained by the fact that he, as business manager, is free to engage in direct labour while his employees are necessitated to engage in direct labour in order to survive. This may also explain why Karl Marx criticized Xenophon’s “characteristic, bourgeois instinct” (cited in Strauss 1989: 203). At the same time, we could argue that Xenophon’s appreciation of direct labour helps us to criticize the disconnection between the workforce and the management level that can often be observed in contemporary bureaucratic organizations (see §3).
- 6.
According to Aristotle, females are naturally subordinate because of their limited rationality (Aristotle 1944: 1260a9-15).
- 7.
In this, Xenophon deviates from the classical idea that in economic affairs, “the rule by many is not good; one should be master, one be king,” which can be found in Homer’s Illias and is cited and confirmed by Aristotle Metaphysics (Aristotle, 1933: 1076a3ff).
- 8.
Xenophon wrote another book on leadership, based on his experience of a military campaign in which the Greeks fled for the Persians by fighting their way back to Greece (Xenophon 1989). Although there are several overlaps between Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and Anabalis, a further comparison between the two works is beyond the scope of this chapter, which focusses on business management in general and not on leadership only. See for an analysis of Xenophon’s concept of leadership, Humphreys (2002).
- 9.
Xenophon is against profit maximization as such and his notion of the limitation of the economic sphere by the political sphere resembles Aristotle’s conceptualization in this respect (Aristotle 1944). The further comparison between Aristotle and Xenophon is beyond the scope of this chapter.
- 10.
Framing the particular episteme involved in business management in terms of individual competency solves an interpretation problem (Bragues 2007), as Xenophon calls management an episteme and a technè in this book, and is actually consulting a good practitioner in management in the second half of the book, and is not only looking for universals or ideas that can be applied in different cases of business management. Although Agamben is right in his observation that management is less epistemic and more a way of being (Agamben 2007: 17), he misses this threefold notion of competency as a combination of episteme, arête and technè.
- 11.
The question whether political and economic management can be reduced to each other in a general concept of management that holds for both domains, or whether the two remain separate aspects of steering is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Blok 2019).
- 12.
In this respect, Xenophon can be seen as predecessor of Fiedler’s contingency management theory, especially its acknowledgment that there is no absolute best way to manage the business, and the situational character of the management style of the manager (cf. Fiedler and Garcia 1987).
- 13.
I would like to thank Cristina Neesham and Marian Eabrasu for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
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Blok, V. (2022). Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management. In: Neesham, C., Reihlen, M., Schoeneborn, D. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_27
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