Those who demand ‘holistic approaches’ and call for an ‘integrated perspective on humans’ that sees ‘humans in their totality’ are sure to find a sympathetic audience. ‘Holistic learning’ sounds much better than the narrower ‘cognitive learning’. ‘Holistic medicine’ sounds friendlier than ‘functional medicine’.
It is no wonder, then, that this ‘search for holism’ has spilled over into management – ‘holistic management’, too, rolls off the tongue in a way ‘specialized management’ does not.
‘Holistic management’ means more than just paying attention to the various different component parts of an organization – that alone would be a trivial recommendation. Rather, holism is meant to be an antidote to the ‘fragmentation of our lives’. Holistic approaches in management and consultancy aim to develop the ‘deeper parts of our self’ by integrating ‘mind, body, and soul’ more completely into organizations. The perfect organization would not only be more successful, more innovative, and more flexible, it is claimed, but its members would also be ‘full of life’ again.
The talk about holism in consultancy and management is an expression of a longing for a much simpler time, a time when people were not yet subject to the contradictory demands of friends, families, and organizations, when people were still perceived as the ‘whole person’, with its various needs, not only in private life but also at work, when there was no painful split between ‘private self’ and ‘public self’.
But these separations and differentiations are precisely characteristic of modern society. The dissolution of tribal and class affiliation enables people to become members of different and mutually independent social systems, such as the organization, family, and friendship group just mentioned. Beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, politics, law, and the economy separated themselves from religion, and with this separation there emerged for the first time the ability of people to make individual decisions to join organizations that have very different expectations from those involved in the circle of friends or the nuclear family.
Admittedly, the holistic use of the human being by organizations still takes place in certain pockets of modern society. In the field of organizational studies, these are called ‘greedy organizations’. The term was coined by Lewis A. Coser to refer to organizations which demand exclusive loyalty from their members by trying to control, limit, or even prevent their commitment to roles elsewhere. Such demands are typically found in religious organizations such as Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Church of Scientology, in communes pursuing new, utopian ways of living, and also in small revolutionary groups such as the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, or Action Directe.
The attraction of these greedy organizations lies in the fact that they offer their individual members security through simplicity. Within their structures, there is no longer a need for a person to play various separate roles; people who get involved in these groups thus can do so as ‘whole persons’, with all their wishes, hopes, and fears. This can be an advantage for an organization, because it gives it the same access to the whole person that previously existed in feudal societies. But this claim to be holistic – and the advocates of holism should not forget this – necessarily brings with it a loss of individuality.
