To Manage Is Not to Control: Or the Folly of Type II Errors

Abstract

W begin with a vision: If a domain of tasks can be mapped to a formal logic, and if that logic orders the behavior of a large and complex organization, then that organization becomes a decision machine whose operations are entirely unambiguous and whose output occasions no surprise. To create such an organization is a monumental feat, requiring an intelligence of the order of Laplace's demon; or, as Madison might have put it, So perfect a system is not for men. But in the world of administration, the vision persists and is most prominently revealed in the contemporary pursuit of a curious device-the management control system. This idea, this concept, fortified by our increased capacity to apply formal sciences (mathematics and logic) to social situations, has so pervaded the discipline of applied management science as to have become its central preoccupation. In its literature, now vast in proportion, the term itself (MCS) has been used to cover and to commend a variety of formulas-PPB, PERT, CPM, MBO, Command and Control, and all manner of information systems. That these have not as a group produced striking successes, that many of them show a sustained record of failure, has not served to diminish either the expected utility or the normative appeal of the concept. Enthusiasm remains high, efforts to secure foolproof management control systems continue unabated, promising to perpetuate what must now appear as an unending cycle of vaunted introduction and veiled discard.