Overview
- Explores the philosophy of definition to develop a theory of meaning with the potential to bring the tool called language under human control
- Provides a basis for dissolving conflict that does not require any conflict resolution, personal growth, compromise, meditation or religious or political conversion
- Presents a model for communicating about the exercise of power
- Exposes the widespread tendency for specialists to generalize without due regard to the consequences outside their field
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Table of contents (19 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Confusion in Language Usage
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Front Matter
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Resolving Terminology Confusion in Management and Project Management
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Front Matter
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Keywords
About this book
This book identifies ten linguistic traps in our everyday language usage and provides philosophical justification for a method of determining internally consistent definitions of groups of related terms that avoid all ten traps. Various examples and applications of this method are given throughout.
The book demonstrates how the seemingly straightforward matter of our understandings of the meaning of words can have major implications for the exercise of power. This book illustrates how this insight originated from management research into project governance that found lack of agreement on the definition of that term, as well as on many other important management terms. To resolve this, the impacts of evolution, philosophy and linguistics upon our everyday language usage were investigated. The research documented in this book found that the human tool called language works well for describing physical objects but has difficulty producing a common understanding of the meaningof concepts - a problem not restricted to the management field. That field is simply a microcosm that exposes a much more widespread linguistic usage problem affecting our personal, religious and political lives; one that existed at the time of Plato and Aristotle and has laid hidden for millennia.This book includes a lexicon of 70 commonly used but confused or contested management terms, as well as a further 18 such project management terms, all developed by applying its definitional method. The terms include governance, power, ethics, leadership and their associated groups of terms. The book explores how disagreement can be resolved using these new clear definitions and extends this into an analysis of who ‘good’ ethics are good for. It also incorporates a section on “how to speak management and actually know what you are talking about”, written in the style of an ‘idiots guide’ or ‘guide for dummies’. This identifies common, everyday circumstances in which lack of agreed definitions cause avoidable confusion and provides the book’s focus on conflict dissolution rather than on conflict resolution.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dr Stephen McGrath completed his PhD at the University of Southern Queensland. He researched the cross-discipline impacts of ‘generic’ project, program and portfolio management methodology and terminology, particularly relating to governance, across civil infrastructure and IT. This led him to identify and propose various means of avoiding linguistic traps that generate unnecessary conflict in project management as well as in general management and daily life. He is a civil engineer and Fellow of both the Institution of Engineers Australia and the Australian Institute of Project Management. He is also a senior member of the Australian Computer Society. He has 40 years of experience in developing, planning and delivering civil infrastructure projects as well as strategy and business development projects across the roads, busways, rail, marine and aviation areas of transport. He also led the team that developed the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads ‘OnQ’ project management system that has been in operation since 2000 and has now been used in delivering more than $20B of civil infrastructure, business development and IT projects. He has 11 papers published in international journals on the subjects of governance, steering committees, program management, program and project management methodology, stakeholders, accountability and responsibility.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Speaking Management
Book Subtitle: How to Spot Language Traps and Resolve Contested Management Terms
Authors: Stephen Keith McGrath
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2213-7
Publisher: Springer Singapore
eBook Packages: Business and Management, Business and Management (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-16-2212-0Published: 06 January 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-16-2215-1Published: 07 January 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-981-16-2213-7Published: 05 January 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 342
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Management, Business Ethics, Project Management, Philosophy of Language, Human Resource Management, IT in Business