Organisational Spaces and Intelligent Machines: A Metaphorical Approach to Ethics

AI & Soc (1995) 9:43-56 �9 1995 Springer-Verlag London Limited A I & S O C I E T Y

Organisational Spaces and Intelligent Machines: A Metaphorical Approach to Ethics

Luis Montafio Hirose Department of Economics, Universidad Autdnoma Metropolitana-lztapalapa, Mexico

If we were only to govern our actions by the reflection of the inert world's irrevocable laws in our own consciousness, we would be completely unmoral, or to put it better, amoral; Good and Bad would lack meaning for us... A. Caso

A System is an imaginary machine... A. Smith

A b s t r a c t : This paper tackles the main changes that have taken place in the mechanical worldview of simple, self-regulating and intelligent machines, and studies their repercussions at the ethical and organisational level. These views of machines agree with the scientific, human-relations and postmodern proposals in organisation theory, in that they are in fact reflections on human nature which depend on metaphorical devices within which the machine metaphor is central.

K e y w o r d s : Organisations; Social spaces; Metaphor; Modernisation; Ethics

Introduction

The prob lem of ethics wi th in organisa t ions is an old concern. It even precedes the very format ion o f the d isc ip l ine which studies them - Organisa t ional Analys is . This fact is in no way surpris ing since every organisa t ion which emerges into the social spec t rum does so under the inf luence of other inst i tut ional convent ions (Castoriadis , 1975), taking f rom these inst i tut ions a b lend o f values which, during a certain per iod o f t ime, jus t i fy and give d i rec t ion to the o rgan isa t ion ' s future conduct. In this sense, the organisat ion does not exis t in a pure form, but in fact appears as a meet ing place - and a p lace of confusion - where d iverse social d iscourses coexis t (Montafio Hirose, 1994). This br inging up to date o f inst i tut ional spaces, s imilar to that which occurs in the indiv idual subconsc ious over the years, is rooted in the metaphor ica l dimension within which individuals redefine their perception o f the world, overlapping

44 L. Montafio Hirose

it with a variety of themes. However, this metaphorical process is not confined exclusively to the sphere of institutional spaces but reaches deeper down into the great narratives which guide collective conduct.

The machine has been the central metaphor in the formal definition of organisations (Montafio Hirose, 1993). This has had a profound influence on the determination of organisational structures and processes, giving direction to important changes in the moral conception not only of organisations but also of society. Nevertheless, it is also important to show that the conception of 'the machine' in turn has undergone significant changes, in accordance with the spectacular advances achieved by science and technology, up to our current wondering about the real possibilities of constructing an intelligent machine. Two important antecedents of this project are the simple machine, present in scientific management, and the self regulating machine, central to the Human Relations School of Organisational Analysis. Without doubt, one of the fundamental aspects of the view of machines in organisations rests upon the division of labour. The latter is not, as is generally supposed, an effect of the increasing mechanisation of work, but is a result of man' s conception of machines.

Thus, perhaps one of the most relevant ethical organisations, as well as the constituent elements of the metaphorical process, deeply rooted within the analytical framework of Cybernetics. These two earlier movements, Scientific Management and Human Relations - are central to understanding of so-called postmodern organisations, which incorporate the most advanced technological developments, including the possibility of the intelligent machine. This will be the subject of the fourth section. Finally, by way of conclusion, we shall outline some comments which allow Organisational Analysis to enlarge the debate. To this end we shall introduce some elements of the most significant transformations in the metaphorical

process.

Division of Labour: The Forms of Solidarity

Division of labour has been widely studied. It has been treated from the beginning as a moral problem. Adam Smith, in his well known book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1976, was astonished by the advances achieved by the division of labour in the already famous pin factory, and placed this in the foreground of economic analysis. Nevertheless, the author warned of the grave dangers implied in terms of the deterioration of intellectual faculties and even requested the government to intervene in the matter:

The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his intervention in finding our expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. (...)His dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it (Smith 1937: 734-735).

Nevertheless, Smith fought throughout his work for the division of labour as the source of wealth. For this author, the division precedes the development of machines, since it is the exclusive attention to a task which gives rise to the discovery of new

Organisational Spaces and Intelligent Machines: A Metaphorical Approach to Ethics 45

methods of work which could be later mechanised. We can say that, from this perspective, the machine incorporates the functions of the human being.

From an economic point of view, it is the choice of the individual in pursuit of his own interests which causes the emergence of the division of labour. Against this view Emile Durkheim set up his proposals. For him the division of labour implies a moral basis which goes further than personal egoism, it is morality that leads to the division of labour. For Smith progress results from individual action, which can nevertheless be restrained by 'general rules' of morality, derived from the individual faculties of 'fellow feeling', reflection and imagination (Smith, 1976).

Durkheim approaches the problem of the division of labour from another ethical perspective by considering it to be one of the foundations of social order. The Division of Social Labour, his doctoral thesis, published in 1983, represents the first great work of this sociologist. Unlike the Scottish economist, for him the central value of the division of labour does not reside in economic achievement but in its potential as a mechanism of solidarity. This is not automatically derived from self- interest; it is the birth of a new morality, which has cooperation as its origin. The author distinguishes two types of solidarity: the mechanical, based on the similarities of individuals, and the organic, which is based on their differences. In the former, the individuals attract one another through their similarities and they find themselves linked to a common collective interest, which ensures that the individuals reproduce their fundamental similarities. On the other hand, organic solidarity, considered to be morally superior, is based on individual differentiation, and promotes more complex forms of collaboration. Cooperation, in general terms, is understood to be the distribution of roles for the carrying out of common tasks, which can be maintained by the division of simple work within which the tasks are similar, or of complex work characterised by the heterogenity of the activities to be performed. The latter implies the idea of specialisation which acquires a higher moral status; not only solidarity, but also social progress depends on it.

As for the mechanical and organic content of the forms of solidarity, the author is quite explicit. Thus, referring to the former, he says:

This word does not mean produced by mechanical and artificial means. We do not give it this name if not by analogy of the cohesion which unites within itself the elements of inert bodies, in opposition to that which constitutes the unity of living bodies. This naming has been justified by the fact that the link which thus unites the individual to society is identical to that which links the object to the person. Individual consciousness, considered in this aspect is simple dependence from the collective type (...) In those societies where this kind of solidarity is more developed, the individual does not own himself...; he is literally a thing which society makes use of (Durkheim, 1987, 141).

In its turn, organic solidarity gets its name from the analogy with superior animals in which every organ has a level of autonomy and specific functions. Durkheim establishes the superiority of the organic over the mechanical. Mechanical solidarity corresponds to primitive societies, dominated by feelings and common values. Individual rationality, incorporated into society, set itself up as the motive of progress. This improvement implied the development of a superior form of solidarity, the organic.

There are at least three criticisms to be made. Firstly, there is the concept of an evolutionism which does not take into consideration certain premodern collective forms based on the individuality of society (Starkey, 1992). Secondly, there is a clear dualism between society and individual, which has made it difficult to understand


the concrete forms of the social/individual, as well as groups, classes (Giddens, 1978), and organisations. Finally, the idea of a harmonious progressive social order confuses the social with the economic.

However, the economic ideal of progress based on the detailed division of labour raised its head, which left both general rules of morality and the organic nature of society out of consideration, taking up individualism - rationality and self-interested pursuits - as a source of development within society.

Scientific Management: Man-Machine or Machine-Man?

No other proposition of Organisational Analysis has met with such fierce criticism because of its mechanical nature as Taylorism (March and Simon 1958). The image of the worker reduced to a mere appendage of a machine has been a source of inspiration for the rejection of these practices. Let us remember the famous film, Modern Times, in which Charles Chaplin is swallowed up in the complex workings of the productive machine, not with the intention of crushing or destroying him, but of simply incorporating him into the machinery. This criticism is raised not only because of the economic intentions of the new practices, exploitation (Coriat, 1979), nor because of the effects of the detailed division of labour, deskilling (Braverman, 1974), nor because of the loss of meaning in the workplace, alienation (Friedman, 1963), nor because of the imposition of a new political project, discipline (Clegg, 1981), but also because of human resistance to being relegated to the inert status of a machine. In reality it is a double process of incorporation. The first consists in giving the machine a body, in copying the movements of the worker and in reproducing them, in the most efficient manner, in an inert object. In this way, every machine has an 'organic ' structure, by representing an extension of the bodily functions:

The condition of possibility of using artefacts, as a last resort of machines, of mobile bodies in space, is the prior reduction of the movements of the bodily organs, mobile in space, to mechanical movements, or to movements of the human body, turn up to be artificial or contrived in terms of the way they work (Gaos, 1992, 649).

The second moment signals man 's increasing dependence on machines, given the high degree of efficiency reached in terms of strength, precision, speed and capacity which machines possess in relation to some human capacities. So the relationship is inverted; the organisational capacity of the machine is such that man has to adapt himself to it, in a sense mechanise himself, generating at the same time specific forms of organisation aimed at this end. The most frequent example of this tendency can be observed nowadays in some of the most outstanding Japanese companies, where quality has ceased to represent an important problem, and where Total Quality Programmes have given way to those of Total Maintenance: i.e. total attention to the machine.

This Management, which called itself 'Scientific' , was not only so because of the systematisation of tasks, as Taylor claimed, but also because deep down it shared this determined search for irreducible elements, essential material, the ultimate reality. It was also because it professed to be universal, reproducible, without any consideration for the concepts of space and time. On ethical grounds it presented a moral orientation tending to the achievement of social harmony. In the first sentence of his book


The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, the author specifies the objective of management: 'To ensure maximum prosperity for the owner, together with the maximum prosperity for the owner, together with the maximum prosperity for each of the employees ' (Taylor, 1972, 19). This prosperity, however, is not restricted to a mere question of salary, but is seen as an opportunity for every individual to reach his maximum efficiency in diverse spheres of life. Nevertheless, this division of labour was aimed at increasing productive efficiency to the detriment of the development of intellectual activities. A worker is not paid to think but to work - as Taylor used to say. This image of a human being reduced to the machine's condition of existence, as an object, reflects the forms taken by the organisation of production. The mechanical aspect is not exclusively due to everyday interaction with the machine but to the fact that man is the subject of a formal administration which in fact denies him the opportunities which the project of modernity had promised, i.e. access to reason.

On the other hand, we can say that to this mechanical conception of work corresponds an organic view of organisational structures. The establishment of a Thinking Department (Friedman, 1977), responsible for carrying out planning activities, far away from the machine room, signified another division of labour, now in terms of a wider organisational structure. The functional collaboration of both parts then came about as the primordial objective of Scientific Management, but this lacked the moral value for which Smith and Durkheim fought.

Human Relations: Towards Self-Regulation?

The School of Human Relations has generally been reduced to a code of good conduct, to a model of public relations, to the recognition of spontaneous behaviour or to the discovery of small work groups. It is true that it has also been criticised for being a poor analytical scheme (Clegg, 1990), behind which is concealed a political project capable of establishing a powerful disciplinary system, based on manipulation (Baritz, 1974; Montafio Hirose, 1985). On the other hand, it has also been integrated as a break with or as a complement to Scientific Management. In spite of it being very tempting to review all of these topics, it is necessary to limit our consideration to the Cybernetics view which underlines it (Desmar~z, 1983; Montafio Hirose, 1987), and to introduce the metaphorical mechanisms which lie at the origin of self- regulation (Montafio Hirose, 1994).

Human Relations management was built upon a systematic base very close to the Cybernetic conception of self regulation. Amidst these ideas, we must single out Joseph Lawrence Henderson. This physiologist, a professor of the Philosophy of Science at Harvard University, was as strongly influenced by the work of the French doctor, Claude Bernard as by that of the Italian writer Vilfredo Pareto, from whom he acquired the concepts of 'internal environment ' , and 'equilibrium'. The former is taken from Bernard and has to do with the discovery of the constancy and conservation of the composition of blood, and was evidence for an internal environment - milieu intgrieur- which constitutes the 'condition of a free and independent life' (Henderson, 1970, 153). The latter is taken from Pareto, originally developed in a thesis on the subject of solid objects and later transferred to economics and finally to sociology.


Henderson worked out a model using these ideas, on the subject of which one of his prominent students, Norbert Wiener, commented:

There was also Professor Lawrence J Henderson, the physiologist, who combined some really brilliant ideas about the fitness of the environment with what seemed to me to be a distressing inability to place them in any philosophical structure... (Wiener, 1966, 166).

This Wienerian perspective, influenced by Henderson's developments, placed the emphasis on the concept of homeostasis, in other words on the ability of a system to resist the process of corruption and degeneration. We know that information plays a central part in the acquisition and maintenance of Cybernetic equilibrium. This is a 'negative entropy' and is a measure of the degree of system organisation (Wiener, 1969, 11). There then arises a symbiotic process: organisation as a cybernetic machine and cybernetics as an organisational conception. In this way, self regulation and organisation would appear inseparable and act as an important foundation for the Artificial Intelligence Project. The study of the organisational aspects of the machine hence became a privileged focal point in understanding the work just as it does in many of later technological developments:

Cybernetics is the first science which, after westem science's advances of the seventeenth century has established its method, has brought about its operational success, and has achieved the recognition of other sciences through its treatment of a physical system, the machine, not in the operation of its constitutive elements, but in the operation of its organisational features (Nordin, 1981,285).

Within this theoretical f ramework of self regulation, the concepts of internal environment and equilibrium are developed. Perhaps the most consummated proposal on the Human Relations School is that expounded by Fritz Roethlisberger and Will3am Dickson in their well known work, Management and the Worker, published in 1936. For these authors, organisations consist of an alliance of dual structures - or suborganisations. 'Technical' organisation is complemented by 'human' organisation, which in turn is divided into 'individual' and 'social ' organsiation. The social is then subdivided into the ' formal ' and ' informal' organisations (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1976). The first alliance accepts the distinction between material and the human fields, always emphasising their close links. The second attempts to differentiate the strictly personal from the social, finally, the third stresses the lack of connection between the planned organisation and that which in fact emerges from unexpected behaviour. So the project basically derives from an attempt to achieve an articulation between these two later organisations.

Hence an imbalance appears in this organisational duality, since the content of each of them varies in different ways and each of them requires different methods of qualitative control. So, for example, the change in the formal organisation can be very rapid and can meet few obstacles, while the informal organisation requires much longer periods of adjustment, during which time workers' resistance to change plays a dominant role. Thus Roethlisberger and Dickson implicitly raise the question of the adequacy of the forms of social organisation to meet the technological advances, in which the establishment of disciplinary mechanisms plays a fundamental role.

The relative autonomy required by the organisational system was achieved by means of the psychological process of internalisation of these external spaces. Thus, schematically speaking, we can say that informal organisation does not abstractly represent spontaneous behaviour. The authors of this movement (Roethlisberger


and Dickson, 1976; Mayo, 1933, 1945; Homans, 1959) realised that cooperation, as a joint operation, was not achieved exclusively in the formal organisation but that the informal one also played a fundamental role. Informal relations represent, from our point of view, institutional spaces which the individual has internalised over the years of her/his everyday life, such as religion, school, family and army. S/he possesses a set of values, beliefs of manners of participation and of behavioural guidelines, derived from specific ethical spheres, each one controlled by diverse disciplinary mechanisms.

Thus, the individual passes daily through different social environments. When s/he enters the workplace, for example, s/he finds her/himself not exclusively in a place of work, but s/he also reproduces at the same time a set of practices from other environments. By way of example, in the company from which these studies originated, the Hawthorne works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago, employee relations policies, has been renamed The Ten Commandments, by the employees. However, let us not forget that the informal organisation also shelters a set of defensive practices which hinder the smooth running of the formal administration. This constant movement linking the formal and the informal organisations prevents, from our point of view, the workplace from becoming solely a productive place:

For most of the supervisors the company represents more than the 'big bosses', New York, the stockholders, or board of directors. It is more than an economic unit with merely economic functions. The company is also an entity onto which they project their greatest hopes and fears (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1976: 368).

Organisational modernism separates the formal and the informal, not only in order to control those informal spaces which infringe the formal rules and hinder the progress of productivity, but also with the aim of taking advantage of them, rendering them the repositories of efficient disciplinary schemes. The family, the school, the prison, the church and the army are examples of social spaces with a very high disciplinary content. Through this movement we become aware of the need to anticipate open conflict through symbolic compensation (Pages et al., 1979).

Thus, we find a double metaphor in this movement. Firstly, that which views the organisation as a self-regulating machine, a precursor of the intelligent machine. Secondly, a process which makes the first possible, starting with the manipulation of social environments in the organisation, whose goal is to encourage a certain type of conduct through the promotion of a set of values which would diminish the negative aspects from the outside. 'This isn't a company but a big family' is a slogan from the 1930s which exemplifies this process well. In this sense, we may say that the capacity for self-regulation was directly associated with the degree of relative autonomy reached through the 'internalisation of the external'. It was not necessary to think about adapting to the external environment since it was possible to reproduce it, in functional terms, at the heart of the company. The idea of a company as a smalI society is perhaps the most representative metaphoric form of this second process. It later facilitated the operation of corporate culture.

The development of the Japanese productive system of Just in Time was formulated in order to accommodate the needs of the market in real terms and the growing capacity of productive diversification both being results of technological innovations. It encouraged the emergence of new organisational forms which tended to overlap the formal and informal spaces of the company (Montafio Hirose, 1994). The moral


values resulting from the organisational process modemisation, which originated mainly from the wider social field and were redefined in the informatal organisation, will no longer have the leading role which they once held in most industrialised countries. Nowadays, owing to the spectacular advances in technology - mainly in bid companies where the development of applied research holds a privileged position - the company has set itself up as the organisational model for all other social spaces - previously internalised. In other words it sets itself up as a promoter of wider social values. So, the school, the hospital, the state and even society itself have been the objects of profound restructurations which try to imitate the organisational forms originated in the productive model of the private sector (Ouchi, 1984).

Postmodern Organisations: An Ordered Intelligence?

Few concepts are as attractive and fashionable as that of the 'postmodern organisation'. However, this must be approached with caution so as not to fall into stereotyped ideas. The concept forms a central part of the contemporary debate about new organisational forms and their social implications (Parker 1992, 1992b; Tsoukas, 1992; Cooper and Burrel, 1988; Cooper, 1989).

The idea of social progress that strongly encouraged the division of labour, as much in its international versions (Smith, 1937) as in its social (Durkheim, 1987) and detailed versions (Taylor, 1972), now receives a new stimulus, starting from the study of industrial organisation. A new idea of organisation is proposed to substitute for the inflexibilities of the Scientific Management model. Although we could quote a whole set of characteristic elements of these new forms, we can synthesise them into one: their capacity for reprogramming, which is the basis of one of the most frequently mentioned concepts in the present process of restructuration; their flexibility.

This was the pioneering attempt carried out by Tom Burns and G M Stalker in their book The Management of Innovation, published in 1961. The authors suggest that the mechanical and organic managerial concepts are extreme poles of a continuum of possibilities. Both types represent rational forms of organisation. The first is characterised, amongst other things, by a specialised differentiation of functional tasks, which are constantly subject to technical improvements without any consideration of rights or obligations, and a set of technical procedures necessary to perform each task, as well as a hierarchical structure of control, authority and communication. The authors consider that this mechanical organisational form is adequate under conditions of relative stability. In contrast, the authors suggest the organic model is better when confronted with situations of change. This model is characterised, amongst other things, but the following elements: the contribution of specialised knowledge to global tasks, continual adjustment to individual tasks, a more collective responsibility and a much more open network of control, authority, and communication (Burns and Stalker, 1961; 120-121).

In this proposal, we can clearly observe the introduction of the concept of structural flexibility, preceding the discourse on post-Fordism put forward by the School of Regulation (Aglietta, 1979; Leborgne and Lipietz, 1988), and foreshadowing some of the central characteristics of the so-called 'postmodern organisation'.


Along the same lines of argument, Heydebrand sets his proposal within the context of post-industrial capitalism. This writer conceptualises the new organisational forms as the result of a transition process from an industrial capitalism to a post-industrial one. In a synthetical manner the author characterises this new form in the following way:

It would tend to be small or tend to be located in small units of larger organisations; its object is typically service or information, if not automated production; its technology is computerised; its division of labour is informal and inflexible; and its managerial structure is functionally decentralised, eclectic, and participative, overlapping many ways with nonmanagerial functions. In short, post-industrial organisations or those emerging from the transition tend to have a postbureaucratic control structure even though prebureaucratic elements such as clan like personalism, informalism and corporate culture may be used to integrate an otherwise loosely coupled, centrifugal system (Heydebrand 1989; 327).

We are currently witnessing a huge development of so-called information technology (Lyotard, 1989), which has substantially modified the forms taken by organisations, above all in the highly industrialised countries. On the one hand, there is the increasingly generalised use of these machines, and on the other, the high capacity they have for reducing the time of response. The introduction of industrial robots, expert systems, computer-assisted design and production, among others, have facilitated the emergence of the production system Just in Time. This, in turn, has required significant structural changes in the organisational field, promoting with it the materialisation of a new type of worker, called polivalent, who is characterised by being highly qualified in the achievement of diverse tasks and who has a high level of interaction with the machine. This polivalence is positively correlated with the development of general purpose machines, which present a higher level of productive flexiblility than their predecessors, special purpose machines. March and Simon (1958) comment that the second type gave rise to the Taylorist view of the worker as a labouring machine, whilst the first type corresponds to the modern view of the worker, i.e. computer man.

Productive flexibility, based on the high speed of response of JIT, facilitates the surpassing of the limitations produced by traditional systems of production, sometimes call Just in Case. This is based on the development of inventories as a central procedure in the combating of uncertainties, emanating from changes in demand from disarrangements in production lines caused by the difficulties of managerial coordination in the detailed division of labour.

Polivalence in no way causes harm to the division of labour in the factory. It is a question of a new modality however. This polivalence facilitates a greater rotation of posts and a continual reassignation of tasks. It provokes a greater capacity for adaptation to constant technological change, it allows the mitigation of the rigidities in order to meet production requirements. The division of labour does not reside more in the object of transformation than in organisational identification. In fact, the rotation of posts not only encourages the development of interpersonal relations which reduce the cost o f interdepartmental transactions (Aoki, 1990), but it also generates knowledge of the diverse components of the organisation, achieving, not an identification with the single post or job as would be the case in the detailed division of labour, but an identification with the organisation as a whole.

Art if icial Intel l igence has p layed an exceedingly outstanding part in the aforementioned changes. As its name suggests, it is an ambitious project; undoubtedly


one of the most ambitious projects that human rationality has ever been able to conceive. It is however, not a recent project since we find the first signals of it in a very distant past. One could, for example, say that the modem version of Cartesian dualism of the body and mind, is computer hardware and software (McCorduck, 1993). Nevertheless, the project is still in its first stages, and diverse contradictory positions present possible future scenarios. These vary between those which predict a realisation date of 2017 (Waltz, 1993), and those which maintain a sceptical attitude about its future (Putnam, 1993). The first group contemplates two different procedures, though not mutually exclusive: the heuristic search, based on the hypothesis of the physical systems of symbols by Newell and Simon (1972), and the theory of neuron networks (Waltz, 1993). In the past, the notion of Artificial Intelligence seems to have advanced more via the first procedure; perhaps its most spectacular results have been called expert systems, characterised by the handling of large volumes of information, dynamic searching processes and high processing speeds. This is far, of course, from being a true concept of AI. However, both the utilisation of these advances and the prospects of a project of such magnitude have greatly contributed to modifying not only our everyday practices but also the way in which we observe ourselves, and therefore, our own values.

In the field of Organisational Analysis we locate the proposal of March and Simon (1958) as a pioneer of a new approach. Some the Taylorist man-machine restrictions were apparently overcome by the updating of the mechanical metaphor. These authors advanced the previously mentioned concept of computer-man in order to characterise functionally the limited rational behaviour of human beings:

March and Simon do not make the mistake of claiming that the human being - the grey matter inside the skull - is built like a computer. Their basic assumption is that the human mind functions like a computing machine, just as Taylor's assumption was that the human body functions like a labouring machine.' (Kilduff 1993; 21)

Simon tried to apply the developments in this form of AI to the study of managerial decisions, basically in the field of so-called 'unprogrammed decisions' . These correspond in a big way to the decisions about which there is no archive of past experiences and in which the procedures of heuristic search acquire a significant relevance. This is made possible, as the author mentions, by the ease of imitating the logical functions of the brain which are, according to Simon, one of the most easiest to duplicate (Simon, 1977; 22).

The machine 's capacity for facing new situations, the opportunity for constant reprogramming and its high speed of response have all contributed to the development of new organisational forms. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that the metaphoric evolution of machines has known a certain continuity, it is also important to point out some basic ruptures which imply fundamental changes in social values. This, however, belongs to the concluding chapter.

Conclusions

All metaphor, as a vision of the world and startpoint of a discursive project (Foucault, 1971), establishes specific forms of behaviour. The machine has also been one of the great narratives which has left a deep imprint on the development of society and


its organisations (Montafio Hirose, 1993, 1994). However, the metaphoric process has met with a whole set o f accidents l inked to the changes caused by the advance o f technology. In this last section we will comment on three aspects which seem fundamental to this investigation.

A. Firstly, it should be pointed out that if it is indeed true that every analysed movement contains a certain mechanical view - the simple machine, the self-regulating machine and finally, the intelligent machine - each one of these assumes a certain organic form, and implies both a specific organisational form and a variation of the mechanical metaphor. The real organic metaphor in fact existed before the appearance of the mechanical option. This was one o f the conditions of social existence, predominant during the Medieval era, blurred by the arrival of rationality, as Merchant reminds us:

The image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing mother served as a cultural constraint, restricting the actions of human beings. One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold, or mutilate her body... As long as the earth was considered to be alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical behaviour to carry out destructive acts against it.' (Quoted in Capra 1982; 61)

B. On the other hand, we are currently witnessing the development of another metaphoric reversal, which, f rom our point of view, characterises the nature of postmodern organisation. This refers to the drastic reversal o f the metaphor, which sees the company as a small society. Society no longer finds itself incorporated into the company, but the company is that which establishes itself as a social model to imitate. The advances achieved, not only in terms of productive efficiency but also in terms of speed of response and ability to adapt, have placed the company at the very heart of current social development, forcing the other social protagonists to imitate its performance. It is no longer only the school, for instance which is internalised in the informal area of the company, but it is the company which sets the behavioural guidelines of the school. The premodern duality of values par excellence, the sacred and the profane, which had a limited and partial influence over the project of organisational modernity in Human Relations, has been replaced by the duality eff iciency/ineff iciency (Alberoni, 1992) in the postmodern project.

C. Finally, as Baudrillard (1983) reminds us, there is an important change of those elements of the discourse that ' become more real than reality' and thus deny validating their representations, without realising the emerging absurdity of its new function. We are surely referring here to an 'hyper-real ' ethical concept which could even promote irrational actions. Such are the cases, for example, o f the rush of nuclear weapons production, of the Excellence Programs, interpreted as an endless process (Aubert and Gaulejac, 1991) and of the speed of the machine, as Goas points out:

Such an image is that of the driver of a vehicle(...) The concept of a journey becomes an integral part of two others: that of a goal and that of a route towards it. Then the image taken to the extreme, is that of the cancellation of the route and the goal; therefore of the journey itself, it is another contradiction; it cancels itself out. (Goas 1992; 653)

Some aspects for social life, including some ethical aspects, must also be mentioned. First o f all, the development of new technologies seems not to have kept its promise


about the reduction of working time. High prices of new technologies and their elevated rate of obsolescence has provoked an increase of the number of hours dedicated to work - a reduction of holidays, and a growing overtime work and work done at home - because of the economic interest, by big companies, of having the greatest productivity from their investments. Spare time, which should be translated into privacy and freedom for enjoying life - music, reading, sports, family life and other activities - becomes more and more just an occasional distraction. This increasing time consecrated to work has had a very important effect not only in the living schedule but also in the manner we observe ourselves, by emphasising the workplace as the central aspect of our life, and then reinforcing the idea of the company as the model of social organisation.

Secondly, there are some ethical contradictions that derive from this metamorphical view of living organisations. We want to underline some primary aspects of self- regulating and intelligent machines. In the first case, as was already mentioned, there is a daily transit of the worker through different social spaces inside organisations. Organisation members must then reconcile different discourses which in some cases are greatly divergent, which can be emotionally destabilising. The second metaphor emphasises the speed of response to new environmental conditions through flexibility, and contracts formal and informal spaces. This trend is, however, led by the formal restrictions of production, giving rise to an ideal image of efficiency in which all organisation members are supposed to participate. This image has been quickly transferred to many other institutional spaces, for instance, the introduction of quality and excellence discourses in educational organisations.

The intelligent machine is certainly a project. We anticipate that in its future development it will face unavoidable conceptual and technical problems. It will also surely have to meet with problems of economics and implementation, which we think it will overcome because of the benefits which it promises. And not only because of those which it promises, but also because of those which it unconsciously brings about, as in the case of Biology:

The new Biology (...) borrows the fundamental concepts which have caused its theoretical advances (...) from the information sciences and artificial organisms (programmable and automated machines). (Atlan 1991; 52)

It is true that this has probably limited other projects again without realising it. The intelligent machine is probably still not a reality. However, the simple fact of announcing it modifies not only our expectations but also out ways of behaving. It deals with a project which both fascinates and terrifies us. Of all the problems in its path, there is one which worries us because it does not represent a visible obstacle. We mean ethics. Opening the doors to this discussion represents an act of 'non artificial intelligence'. Or, better still, it implies the potential to restore real meaning to the term 'artificial', not as something foreign and antagonistic to mankind, but as something produced by us for our own benefit.

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Organisational Spaces and Intelligent Machines: A Metaphorical Approach to Ethics

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