Description
During the 1990s Total Quality Management (TQM) became diffused to Burkina Faso. The overarching logic of privatization due to Structural Adjustment Programs prepared the ground for far-reaching changes in management practices.
Total Quality Management in the African
business community of Burkina Faso: a change
in perspective on knowledge development
Luchien Karsten and Bartjan Pennink
July 2007
CDS Research Report No. 25
ISSN 1385-9218
The CDS Research Report series
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Editor:
Dr. Pieter Boele van Hensbroek
Editorial Advisory Board:
Prof. Jelte van Andel
Prof. Catrinus Jepma
Dr. Menno Kamminga
Prof. Caspar Schweigman
Prof. Rien Seegers
Prof. Ton Schoot Uiterkamp
Prof. Jaques Zeelen
Abstract
During the 1990s Total Quality Management (TQM) became diffused to
Burkina Faso. The overarching logic of privatization due to Structural
Adjustment Programs prepared the ground for far-reaching changes in
management practices. TQM became exhorted as a new way of manufacturing.
This new management concept was presented as a crucial part of new corporate
success and put strong emphasis on empowerment of employers, customer
service and charismatic leadership.
Interviews with top and middle management in a range of Burkinabé companies
showed a willingness for mimetic learning but it turned out that translating the
concept into specific new practices by way of new routines remained a complex
matter. Although this management concept sometimes became part of the
dispositional practice of managers – a new habitus – company practices could be
better characterized as improvisation on quality improvement.
6
“It is not only the academics who are interested in
finding some answers to puzzling questions about
African organisations and how they work. African
managers are themselves daily confronted by such
questions; trained primarily in western management
theories and practices and frequently having western
managers as their only role model, how are they to
answer such questions?”
(Blunt & Jones, 1992: 107)
As long as lions do not have historians,
hunting stories will glorify the hunters.
(African proverb)
Introduction
1
Humans experience the world through a set of cultural beliefs, values and
concepts that are expressed and reaffirmed through a variety of root metaphors
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). In what follows the authors will use the ‘journey’
metaphor to describe how their views and experiences of knowledge
development in Burkina Faso changed over a period of ten years.
The focus on knowledge development started during a project of
cooperation between the University of Ouagadougou (capital city of Burkina
Faso) and the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). The purpose of the
project was to strengthen the Department of Management and Organization
within the existing Faculty of Economics of the University of Ouagadougou.
Initially, some Dutch lecturers were attached to the department and, as
supervisors, we lectured and trained African students in organization theory and
research methods during visits once a year. During the period 1994-2004, the
project provided opportunities for Business Administration students from
Groningen to do a half-year internship in Burkinabé organizations.
During our ‘journey’, we underwent a profound change in perspective on
Management Science. Initially, the students as well as ourselves took a
mainstream perspective and tried to apply a set of predefined and reified
concepts from Management Sciences. We shared the conviction that Western
organizational theories and management concepts, which had taken the form of
definitive and abstract knowledge, could travel easily from North to South. The
1
We are very grateful to our colleagues Mady Koanda, Florent Hien, Albert Ouedraogo, Honorine Illa , Serge Bayala and
Marcel Krabbendam for their valuable contribution to this paper and their support in establishing contacts with Burkinabé
companies. This paper was presented at the 11th international conference on “managing in a global economy “organized by
the Eastern Academy of Management held 26-30 June 2005 in Cape Town, South Africa. We gratefully acknowledge two
anonymous reviewers of EAM and two reviewers from the Centre for Development Studies as well as Fitum Ghebregiorgis
2
management concepts we might apply were viewed as self-contained packages
of knowledge that could be cut loose from their particular defining contexts and
be applied in other contexts. (Fincham & Roslender, 2004) We embraced the
New Institutional Theory, in particular the concept of mimetic isomorphism, to
explain the enormous increase and diffusion of fashionable management
concepts and related techniques (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). From this
perspective, we considered the internships as opportunities to strengthen
knowledge development in Burkinabé economic organizations. We assumed
that, like the Burkinabé society, these organizations needed knowledge
development to achieve increased productivity, effectiveness and resource-
utilization objectives.
However, during the initial years of the project, we began to notice that our
journey was exploratory, rather than one of applying established knowledge.
Initially, we had assumed the universal applicability of the cognitive
frameworks: our projects would automatically strengthen incremental
improvements in the management practices of Burkinabé organizations. This
presupposition was based on the objectivist perspective that regards knowledge
as a commodity that people possess and that can exist in a codifiable form
independent of the persons expressing it. The objectivist perspective looks at
knowledge as existing in a textual form, expressed in a language that has fixed
and objective meanings, and expressing a direct equivalence between words and
the entities they denote. This perspective also assumes that knowledge and
understanding can be developed free from individual subjectivity.
However, we developed doubts about the presupposition that African
companies should adopt our cognitive frameworks simply because they were
assumed to be rational and efficient and to embody progress. Learning from the
mediocre effectiveness of our initial approach, we decided to change our focus
and divert our journey in a process-orientated direction (Inns, 1996). Instead of
from Eitrea for their comments on an earlier version . The usual disclaimer applies.
3
focusing on the diffusion of particular management concepts, we became
interested in the adoption of such concepts in a particular African context and in
how local management knowledge might transform specific organizational
routines.
We had observed that particular African cultural patterns are conducive in
the African workplace and boardroom, but we actually did not understand why.
Initially, we even assumed that African cultural patterns might hamper the
applicability of Western views on management. Little by little, we began to
recognize that “African societies have built up a wealth of indigenous
knowledge in response to dynamic changes experienced in their environments.
This knowledge must be taken into account when one is trying to improve the
way an African organization is managed, how it is structured, and how decisions
are made” (Thairu, 1999: 267). We felt an urgent need to reconsider the
epistemological framework that we ourselves were using in order to better
understand local practices.
First, we explored the fads and fashions in management knowledge and the
way management concepts are manufactured and transferred (Abrahamson,
1996). Second, we directed our attention to an analysis of the reception of
management knowledge by African managers. We noted that, rather than being
passive recipients, they are actors who shape their views on management issues,
translate management concepts, and convert them into applicable approaches.
In other words, our perspective changed from one that conceived
management knowledge as a set of predefined, reified objects that can easily be
transferred to African organizations, into one that conceives management
knowledge as constructed by processes of translation. In the first perspective,
the manager is portrayed as a monologist who defines the objectives of the firm
and forces company members to behave accordingly (e.g. through Management
By Objectives). In the second perspective, knowledge is not regarded as a
discrete entity that can be codified and separated from people. Knowledge is
4
seen instead as the uniquely human capacity to make sense of information.
Although knowledge involves the mental processes of comprehension,
understanding and learning which take place in the mind, knowledge only
becomes relevant as ‘knowing how’, which is associated with the ability of an
actor to perform activities based on this knowledge. The practice-based
perspective views knowing and the development of knowledge as ongoing,
through the routine activities that managers and employees undertake. Through
dialogue and improvisation, existing knowledge is adapted to new situations.
Mangaliso (2001) notes that, particularly in the African context, managers have
to be dialogists who look for conversation and who shape discourses, sharing
with other participants in the organization the relevance of particular
management knowledge.
We embraced this second perspective and decided to explore the impact of Total
Quality Management (TQM) in Burkinabé organizations. The reason for this
focus was the popularity of the concept in Burkina Faso, as well as the stress
within TQM itself on the aspect of dialogue. During our research projects in
Burkinabé organizations, we had noticed a tension between the teachings of
TQM and actual management practices – the processes of translating the
concept of TQM into new routines within the economic organizations was an
ideal case study of contextualized knowledge development.
The objective of this paper is to describe and analyze the two different phases of
our ‘journey’ and to show how research on knowledge development can learn
from African experiences. In doing this, we use Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of
habitus to clarify what is involved in the practice of applying management
concepts in particular contexts.
The paper is divided into five sections. We start by exploring the changing
context of management thought, practice and teaching in Burkina Faso in the era
of structural adjustment (section 1). Next we sketch our initial orientation and
5
the research conducted within that framework, followed by an explanation of
our changed orientation and the research that we conducted in that phase
(sections 2 and 3). We then describe our analysis of the introduction of TQM
and the way this concept was implemented in Burkinabé economic organizations
(section 4). In the last section (5) we draw some conclusions concerning
management development by stressing the role of dialogue and improving
management curricula in African business schools.
Changing context of management orientations under Structural
Adjustment Programs
Located in the heart of West Africa, Burkina Faso is a land-locked, resource-
poor, Sahelian country with a population of about 12 million people. About 92
percent of the working population is active in agriculture. Burkina Faso has
experienced rapid rural and urban population growth; increasing exploitation of
arable land, vegetation cover and water resources; continuous struggles with
erosion and reduction of soil fertility, and a constant threat of desertification.
In the early 1980s, the World Bank began to pay increasing attention to
institution-building in Sub-Saharan Africa as a means to strengthen economic
development. It insisted that management and technical reforms of state-owned
enterprises were needed. After the debt crisis in 1982 and subsequent economic
recession, a period of Structural Adjustment Programs was started in Africa.
Programs containing privatization components made up half of the World
Bank’s loan portfolio at the end of 1987 (Dijk, 1994). The World Bank (1995)
stressed the importance of management in the economic development process by
suggesting that better management of public and private organizations was a
prerequisite for sustainable economic development. In 1989, the Burkinabé
government drafted a Policy Framework Paper, which announced plans to
6
improve the productivity of public investment and encourage private sector
development. In 1990, a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), which aimed at
boosting public finances and reviving the economy, was introduced. The IMF
granted subsequent loans (1991-93; 1993-96) to support economic and financial
improvement, such as the devaluation of the CFA franc by 50 percent in 1994.
In 1991, Captain Blaise Compaoré, who had seized power after a military coup
in October 1987, initiated a gradual liberalization of the military regime, with
the adoption of a multiparty constitution promulgated by referendum in June
1991, and the legislation of political opposition. Presidential, parliamentary and
municipal elections followed in December 1991, May 1992 and February 1995
(Santiso and Loada, 2003). The economic policy of Burkina Faso also became
linked to sub-regional developments through its involvement in the West
African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and the Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Efforts were undertaken to
liberalize the economy. A change from social solidarity to individualism, with a
subsequent weakening of the role of the State as ‘bienfaiteur’, could be noticed
in the region. The informal economy began to grow and privatized firms were
visited by consultants, who provided assistance in making the transition
(Tidjani, 2000).
The impact of this Structural Adjustment Program was reflected in
developments at the University of Ouagadougou, which had been officially
inaugurated in 1974. In order to respond to the needs of the changing economy,
the College of Economics (ESSEC), which had been set up in 1985, was
reformed in 1995 and established as the Faculty of Economics and Management
(FASEG), with a separate department specifically created to pay systematic
attention to issues of management development and organizational improvement
in the private sector. Following long strikes organized by students, which were
related to the national political crisis caused by the death of the journalist and
chief editor of L’Independent, Norbert Zongo (13-12-1998), and to students’
7
demands for improved conditions for their studies (Hagberg, 2002), there was a
massive failure of the first-year class and, in November 2000, the university was
reformed. It adopted a new structure to promote the professionalization of its
faculties (Guenda, 2003). Although FASEG was reshaped into Unité de
Formation et de Recherche (UFR) en sciences économiques et de gestion, this
had no impact on the content of the curriculum.
When the cooperation between the universities of Ouagadougou and
Groningen was initiated in the late 1980s, its focus was on strengthening the
institutional capacity for higher education (library, computer facilities, printing
facilities, transportation) and increasing the teaching capacity (participation in
courses and seminars by Groningen lecturers). This approach fitted Dutch
government policy as formulated in A World of Difference (1990), published by
the Minister of Developmental Cooperation Jan P. Pronk, which stressed that
development by, for and of the people is a key element in combating poverty
and promoting sustainable economic growth, equitable income distribution,
satisfaction of basic needs and involvement in the socio-economic and political
domains of society for as many people as possible. A subsequent Reverification
Report (1996) on development cooperation introduced ownership as a central
concept. The outcome was a flexible approach in which participation played a
key role (Schulper and Hoebink, 1999; Van der Veen, 2004). For the first time it
was admitted that the cultural identity of the receiving country should be the
starting point of cooperation (Nekkers, 2000: 55), but not much attention was
paid to the development of the private sector.
Phase one: Research on knowledge transfer
The cooperation between the universities of Ouagadougou and Groningen
started within this context. One element of the program was the opportunity for
8
several business administration students of the University of Groningen to do
their internship in Burkinabé economic organizations (1993-1997). These
internships had to be focused on organizational issues relevant to the local
managers, and before students left for Burkina Faso we had discussions with
them on the relevance of the Contingency Approach and on issues of cultural
difference. The Contingency Approach, an outgrowth of systems theory, states
that managers act and decide, depending on the particular situation. Thus, it
rejects the idea of universals, the idea that there is one best way. This approach
recognizes, for instance, that organizations within highly unstable environments
organize differently from firms in stable environments. The most successful
companies are considered to be those best adapted to their environment.
Despite this contextualism, the management knowledge that should be
applied is hardly questioned within this approach. Managers are seen as
professionals who are expected to be able to apply abstract knowledge to
particular cases (Abbott, 1988). We believed that even with their different
cultural background, Burkinabé managers, while cooperating with expatriate
managers and having had Western-style education, would imitate the success of
others and follow the examples of the West. Dimaggio and Powell (1983) have
called this ‘mimetic isomorphism’ and we supposed that this attitude could be
linked with the Contingency Approach recognizing that what may constitute
good management in one situation may not in another (Jaeger and Kanungo,
1990; Blunt & Jones, 1992).
Concerning cultural differences, we opted for the approach of the Dutch
researcher Hofstede (1993), who stresses that particular cultural values operate
in ways in which organization members’ discursive practices contribute to the
development of shared meaning. In his empirical research, Hofstede introduces
several dimensions to describe the culture of a country. West Africa is thus seen
as an area that ranks high in power distance, low in individualism, and has a
long-term orientation, while scoring ‘moderate’ on the dimensions of both
9
quality of life and uncertainty avoidance. We reminded students of Nzelibe’s
(1986: 11) statement: “whereas Western management thought advocates Euro
centrism, individualism and modernity, African management thought
emphasizes ethnocentrism, traditionalism, communalism/collectivism, and
cooperative teamwork”. We also discussed with students the tensions between
the ‘emic’ (from the insider’s point of view) and the ‘etic’ (from the outsider’s
point of view) understanding of organizational phenomena.
The first research projects started with the presumption that larger firms
within the formal industrial sector of Burkina Faso, still having expatriates on
their boards, would function with fairly conventional Western management tools
and work practices. Furthermore, it was assumed that transfer of knowledge,
which itself is formulated in terms of management concepts that are firmly
rooted in Western thought about planning and control, could enhance the
performance of these firms as long as the concepts and consecutive techniques
were balanced with local indigenous Burkinabé value systems. Cultural patterns
such as a respect for elders, consensus decisions, respect for authority, family
orientation and collectivism would simply have to be integrated in the design of
the research without interfering with the objectivist perspective of the research
projects.
At this point it is illustrative to review several of the initial research
projects on Burkinabé companies and assess the fruitfulness of the approach
taken in this first phase of our journey.
A review of research projects
2
– Faso Fani: cotton fabric manufacturer in Koudougou
Due to the combination of high quality cotton and suitable infrastructure
10
(railway and motorways), in the 1960s the Burkinabé government decided to
build a textile factory, named Vortex, north of the capital city. The first spinning
machines started to run in 1969; weaving machines and a printing department
soon followed.
In 1984 the company changed its name to Faso Fani and produced yarn,
textiles and in particular ‘pagnes’, which represented 75 percent of the total
turnover. While the results did not meet the expectations (Martens, 1989: 190),
serious attempts were made to rationalize the production process. Foreign
investment was attracted for technological improvements but part of the factory
continued to produce with the old equipment. Nevertheless, the company
became one of the pioneers in quality control circles. Due to the process of
privatization, the company was forced to rationalize its sales, and this became
the focus of the research. The wholesalers, who invented new designs and
placed orders with Faso Fani to produce them, had a strong influence on the
firm. Distributors kept stocks that were financed by Faso Fani and the products
were sold at prices which were still fixed by the government. Hofstede’s
framework concerning cultural differences was applied to assess the impact of
local policies compared with Western practices. This provided a setting to
propose a change in Faso Fani’s perspective on the market and to make it into a
more efficient one, based on Western concepts. For that purpose, a Porter (1980)
analysis concerning strategy was applied. The analysis showed that cheap
textiles from Asia aggravated the competitive situation and that local
wholesalers selling Faso Fani products were confronted with mounting stocks of
obsolete designs. Faso Fani, however, carried the burden. Ties between the
company and the wholesalers had to be unbundled, but it was unclear how top
management would translate this issue into a new company strategy.
Privatization was on its way but the Burkinabé board of Faso Fani was unable to
develop a new strategy and, in 2003, the company was dissolved.
2
An overview of all studies is given in appendix 1.
11
– Sosuco: sugar manufacturer in Banfora
Sosuco (Société Sucriere de la Commoé) was created in 1972 with the support
of a French company SOMDIAA (Société de Management des Industries
Alimentaires et Agricoles) and nationalized in 1985. The company managed an
agribusiness complex consisting of about 4,000 irrigated hectares of sugar cane,
a sugar refinery and a cubing plant. Sosuco produced about 30,000 tons of sugar
a year, which was insufficient to meet the demands of domestic consumption,
estimated to be 45,000 tons a year. During the (agricultural) campaign
(November till April) some 2,000 people and staff were employed and 4,000
casual workers were involved in harvesting.
In the context of the Structural Adjustment Program, Sosuco and the
Burkinabé government signed a contract to promote efficiency and
effectiveness. Top management had to strengthen its ability to understand and
control both the volatile external environment and the internal dimension.
Management was tasked to improve productivity, gradually reduce production
costs and increase the rate of sugar extraction. The World Bank had put pressure
on the government to speed up the privatization process, which was practically
implemented in 1990. Sosuco decided to develop a cost leadership strategy and
compete on sales prices.
The research project focused on the improvement of the cost structure of the
production line and on the design of a new strategy for the liberalized market. It
turned out that their cost of sugar production still remained too high compared
with the cost of sugar production in a similar firm in Ivory Coast. Using the
Activity Based Costing (ABC) management technique, the actual cost structure
was analyzed. ABC focuses on the drivers of the various cost types and assumes
that these costs are caused by various activities that must be controlled. Detailed
descriptions of the accounting system and an extensive collection of data were
not available due to a weak management information system. The
12
implementation of this technique through cost reduction management met quite
some resistance, and reducing production costs by firing people was not an
option due to particular socio-political circumstances. In order to help design a
new company strategy, a scenario approach was elaborated to study a range of
consequences of liberalization. The results suggested that Sosuco should
develop a strategy focusing on consumer prices as an instrument of
competitiveness, decrease the number of employees, accept lower profit levels
and focus on competitors from neighboring countries. Liberalization of the
market would force the firm to change and relate its corporate social
responsibility for the region with the building of a commercial firm. In this field
of market developments, technological improvements and corporate social
responsibility, it was not easy for Sosuco to survive. It turned out, however, to
be difficult to understand how top management would design a vision to sustain
its business through technological improvements and carry out its social role.
– Local Credit Bank in Manga (Region of Zoundweogo)
The Cellule Epargne Crédit et Commercialisation (CECC) located in Manga was
initiated by the Burkinabé government in 1983 and financially supported by the
Dutch government. The small bank provided microfinance facilities for
women’s organizations. From 1995 to 1997 research was focused on the
capacity of the bank to survive the withdrawal of the Dutch involvement and
introduction of local management. The aim of the research was to assist the
management of the bank to improve sustainability, focusing on treasury
management, micro finance and savings. The bank needed an analysis of the
external environment and a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and
threats) analysis was conducted to design a management strategy. Options
varied from concentrating on attracting new customers, stimulating people in the
region to create cooperatives (attracting new customers), and a search for new
partners. The alternatives seemed to provide some relevant input for
13
management to expand the project. An immediate impact could not be observed
but the bank is still in operation.
– A cereal bank in Kaya (region of Sanmatenga)
The development of a cereal bank was initiated by the Burkinabé government in
the late 1970s to strengthen the economic development of regions in an
integrated way. The Dutch government began to support this project by focusing
on soil fertility management. The research concentrated on the operational
functioning of the cereal bank by looking at the maintenance of stock and
purchasing of fertilizers and pesticides.
The stock of fertilizers was distributed in the region through small depots
in different villages but proper management of these depots was lacking. In
1997 the current Prime Minister of Burkina Faso, Ernest Yonli, had stated that
one of the weak points within the functioning of the cereal banks was their
management: “Les banques de céréales n’arrivent pas à attirer vers elles une
grande partie des producteurs/consommateurs” (Yonli, 1997: 184).
Based on various Western marketing tools and organizational principles
focusing on efficiency improvements, the research intended to assist farmers in
finding appropriate ways to finance fertilizers without the powerful mediation of
wholesalers who did not support the individual small farmers. For that purpose,
the depots had to be organized in a more efficient way, but it turned out to be
difficult to relate the interests of the individual farmers and the common interest
of the region. Subsequent research by Elshout (2001) established that the
different interests of individual farmers and those of the region (community) had
still not been settled.
14
Learning from the research projects
Reviewing the outcomes of these research projects in four different
organizations, we concluded that one of the principal weaknesses of the projects
was the objectivist assumption with which the research was undertaken.
Although the Contingency Approach was applied and cultural differences were
acknowledged, the young researchers were themselves approached by local
management as experts who would – based on their acquired management
knowledge – be able to advise on particular organizational issues. In all cases,
the research projects did not show how the managers made strategic choices nor
what strategic options they had. The researchers characterized the behavior of
management in these organizations as one of muddling through. The limiting
factor in this kind of research was that the managers were perceived only as
agents who were in a position to smoothly apply explicitly formulated and
systematically elaborated Western management knowledge in their specific
organization.
We had hardly any information about the way these concepts were
translated in the Burkinabé context. Was the difficulty of adopting these
concepts related to the lack of clearly defined goals and a rational approach to
attain those goals? Was local management well equipped to relate to the
meaning of Western management concepts? Did the meaning we attach to these
concepts really make sense in the specific setting in Burkinabé organizations?
Hernandez (1997) notes that the main reason for failure in applying the Western
concept of Management By Objectives – or in francophone countries, Direction
Par Objectifs (DPO) – was that it had not been properly translated within the
local African management style. Particular African cultural patterns and values
determine issues such as the time-frame and goal setting in a fundamentally
different way. Hernandez also notes that the presence of a large hierarchical
distance between management and employees in African companies prevented
15
negotiations about the processes of goal setting itself. To implement DPO
properly, the traditional African system of decision taking by unanimity ought to
be given its appropriate place in African firms because the need for harmony
and consensual unity is very strong (Hernandez, 1997). Hernandez concludes
that both the economic and the socio-cultural sphere should be integrated if DPO
is to be successfully implemented. For instance, the strong link between private
and professional life is a common phenomenon in Africa and should be
respected more: “il faut souhaiter qu’a terme la dimension communautaire
survive pour permettre comme au Japon, la naissance d'un management à
l'africain dont l'efficacité resultera de solidarité des membres de l’enteprise”
(Hernandez, 1997: 106). Hernandez’s warning and the results of our research
projects made clear that we had only looked at these organizations as adaptive
systems which were concerned with the development of capabilities (i.e.
appropriate knowledge, experience and skills, as Richardson coined it for the
first time in 1972) to manage new situations by making improvements and
amendments to existing practices. But how were these linked to the local
circumstances?
In courses on research methodology, we used the master theses of the
Dutch students to discuss with the Burkinabé Business Administration students
ways of improving research on the transfer of Western-based knowledge. They
considered it naive to reject foreign concepts in the way that defenders of the
radical disengagement theory do (Shahidullah, 1999). They pointed to the fact
that industrialization and globalization will influence market developments in
Africa anyway and that Western management concepts will seep into African
management education. On the other hand, we confronted them with the
following statement of Blunt and Jones (1992: 31): “whereas African
organizations may find that they can apply Western management concepts and
practices to their technical core with few major modifications, these imported
ideas and practices are generally found to be inadequate and/or inappropriate for
16
the organization’s relationship with their environments”.
Were we to conclude that Sub-Saharan African economic organizations
are suffering from mismanagement, poor management or inappropriate
management? We turned the question around and asked ourselves what kind of
management knowledge is transferred and how it is translated. On the basis of
the discussions we had with the Dutch and Burkinabé students and our own
visits to Burkinabé companies, we decided to study how African managers
interpret modern Western management knowledge based on their own habitus.
What about that preference of African people to sit together and start
conversations about community topics, while never taking final decisions until
all points of view have been expressed and shared (Ayittey, 1991)? Had not the
history of Africa shown that Africans have their own ways of organizing their
world of work (Reader, 1998)? Had ‘modernization’ by the colonizers not
neglected the native cultural traditions too much and transferred too much of the
ready-made Western management views to traditional African soil? Admitting
that some of the African management practices might indeed be hybrid – in the
sense that a Burkinabé management style could not be clearly defined – we
turned away from an approach where management knowledge is only dealt with
in a universalist way. We began to appreciate Weick’s (1995) view on the issue
of the organizing process itself (‘sensemaking’ and ‘enactment’) and decided to
look at Burkinabé economic organizations willing to implement Western
management knowledge and explore the dialogue between the dominant
Western logic and a novel African logic (Giroux and Taylor, 1995). What kind
of dialogue could that be?
17
Phase two: Exploring new orientations in our research by way of
epistemological renewal
In the first phase of our journey, the research projects had taken management
knowledge as a set of predefined, reified objects that organizations could adopt.
It was furthermore presupposed that prescribed procedures could be adapted,
implemented effectively and become integrated within existing local
management practices. Based on a perusal of other literature, we decided to
fundamentally change our perspective and look at management knowledge as
constructed by managers who are interested in its meaning and relevance to the
improvement of existing organizational practices.
Managers are henceforward seen as actors (Hollis, 1996) translating
management concepts that circulate in the literature as idealized, de-
contextualized accounts of other organizational c.q. management practices. In
our new view of knowledge development, the conception of the role of the
managers shifted from that of target-setters, who impose management concepts
like MBO onto others, to social persons, who appreciate the meaning of a
concept as related to its practical use. Managers cannot know the meaning of
words without knowing the environment within which the word is used
(Watson, 1997). We explored a new field of interest in the management
literature that focuses on organizational discourse, narratives and dialogue
(Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996; Linell, 1998; Grant, Keenoy and Oswick, 1998).
Barry (1997) indicates that the focus on language itself has an interesting
impact, for example, on the way a strategy is being shaped. “If story telling is
the preferred sense-making currency of human relationship among internal and
external stakeholders, then surely strategy must rank as one of the most
prominent, influential and costly stories told in organizations”. The key success
factor in changing organizations and guiding them through translation into new
directions is the capability of managers in sense-making (Weick, 1995). Good
18
managers can move the members of an organization towards a shared
understanding while acting jointly with them. Instead of telling others what to
do, good managers are those who talk with the employees about what could be
done.
We therefore decided to embrace this new epistemic perspective and to
look at organizations as learning sites of plural rationalities, rival sets of rules
for ‘closure’ and models of content, which, as social collectives, they produce,
reproduce and transform through ongoing, interdependent and goal-oriented
communication practices (Cf Mumby and Clair, 1997). This perspective fits
with Granovetter’s view (1985) that action and context are mutually and
intricately embedded in one another. Individual managers function within
institutions like the family or the firm, and they embody, realize, reproduce and
change those institutions through their daily activities. The focus on
communication intends to perceive the manager as someone who is stimulating
the development of shared thinking, which evolves from effective
communication during collaborative activities. Partnerships will construct a
collective vision which guides action (Stewart, 2001).
Arbnor and Bjerke (1997: 187-188) stress that, with the focus on
communication and language, the actor perspective takes central stage and “is
guided by what language means to people’s way of life as a means of expressing
and intermediating knowledge and information in the form of language [….].
What goes on in organizations can therefore be seen as a language game. The
actor’s approach thus postulates that the use of language is controlled by more
or less visible rules that give meaning to the symbols and the actions. We can
talk of language games as containing ideological symbols, language referential
and ideological rules in which different language games also reflect different
live practices”. Instead of looking at managers from a purely individualistic
point of view, where intention is the focal point and monologism the action, we
turned to a perspective based on interaction, in order to understand how
19
concepts make sense in a communication process. In this new view, managers
are perceived as acting persons who, with a set of particular dispositions, are
able to implement particular management knowledge.
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus
Thus, management becomes a social construction, which, through dialogical acts
between participants in conversations, establishes agreement on the applicability
of a particular management concept. This approach is similar to what the French
philosopher/sociologist Bourdieu labels ‘habitus’. He introduces this notion to
overcome the pernicious dualism between objectivism and subjectivism. “These
two moments, the subjectivist and the objectivist, stand in dialectical relation. It
is this dialectic of objectivity and subjectivity that the concept of the habitus is
designed to capture and encapsulate” (Bourdieu, 1988: 782). He notes that both
points of view have something valuable to offer but aims to move beyond the
incompatibility of the two views and find a perspective that can reconcile them.
He looks at an actor as a subject who is, above all, a doing person, active in and
interactive with the world around him; a person who thinks because he does,
rather than the other way round. “Habitus is a system of durable, transposable
dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring
structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and
representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without
predisposing a conscious aiming at ends or an expressed mastery of the
operations necessary to maintain them” (Bourdieu, 1993: 5). Habitus is
composed of embodied dispositions, aesthetic perception and appreciation
patterns, as well as cognitive and normative interpretative frameworks. “These
dispositions and templates provide an individual with a habitus which provides a
‘feel for the game’ (‘sens du jeu’): it enables an infinite number of moves to be
20
made, adapted to the infinite number of possible situations which no rule,
however complex, can foresee” (Bourdieu quoted in Margolis, 1999: 70).
In other words, habitus embodies the idea of people's habitats and habits,
and highlights the deeply woven tapestry of individuals in the social context.
This system of dispositions inclines actors to act in particular ways acquired
through internalized knowledge of all the dispositions that the rules of the game
offer them as players. It can produce an infinite number of practices that are
relatively unpredictable but also limited in their diversity (Bourdieu, 1990: 55).
A manager can produce a variety of demeanors that belong to a certain class of
demeanors underlying the lifestyle of a particular group. This practical sense
will tell him (or her) what to do and when to do it. This is not informed by a set
of hard and fixed rules but by a set of embodied dispositions which together
make up the habitus. The habitus does not come with a precise set of rules, since
rules belong to the conscious mind, whereas habitus is internalized, hidden
beneath the surface, in the unconscious and in the body. It enables the actor to
produce subjective and individual responses. He can liberate himself from the
necessity of sticking to the rules and regulate improvisation.
With the habitus as point of reference, we decided to approach the
manager as a subject who, above all, is a doing person, active in and interactive
with the world around him. The manager does not experience an organizational
culture as a mental program (Cf Hofstede) but as a set of habitual practices
which enact a meaningful world.
Individuals interact with each other in a field in which practices become
constituted. These practices consist of dialogic actions. The language used in
these interactions serves to set up spaces of common action (Taylor, 1999). A
field presents itself to each actor as a “space of possibles” (Bourdieu, 1993: 64).
A field is a network or configuration of relations between positions actors take
in that field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 97). Bourdieu does not deny that, in
such a field, power relations play a dominant role. Unequal positions are
21
determined by a variety of power structures, which, in their turn, depend on the
background and status of the actors, i.e. their socio-economic positions. These
power relations, however, do not prevent interactions between members of an
organization in terms of a field that is open to communication and dialogue. The
relationship between habitus and field can be described as the interference of
dispositions (the feel for the game) and the position (the game itself). Bourdieu
sometimes uses examples from sports to illustrate his point of view. While
having a sense of the game, actors behave like football or tennis players who do
not apply a priori principles to their play but rather, with their intimate
understanding of the object of the game, have the practical flexibility to know
when and how they should behave. This “sense of the game” refers ultimately to
a sense of one’s relations with others and what these other actors will regard as
correct, given certain broadly shared but not definitive understandings (King,
2000).
With Bourdieu’s formula, “habitus + field = practice”, at hand, we
embarked on a new approach to understanding Burkinabé management
practices, recognizing the fact that the habitus of a manager can reflect a
reactionary attitude as much as a progressive one.
The case of Total Quality Management in Burkina Faso
Through interesting conversations with our Burkinabé colleagues and the
Burkinabé business community, we learned about a growing interest in
management concepts such as quality circles, continuous improvement and,
more recently, Total Quality Management (TQM). Since 1961, Quality Control
Circles (QCC) have been introduced in Japanese firms as a bottom-up
management strategy. QCC are small groups of six or seven people, organized
to help solve job-related quality problems in the company. “The Japanese Union
22
of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) had relentlessly advocated the circles
through their many chapters in the country. Top management got involved early,
so did middle management and foremen. The JUSE created a corporate
association with a mass constituency which explains its success” (Locke, 1996).
QCC gained popularity in the 1980s due to the success of the Japanese
economy. Locke (1996) even sees it as one of the concepts that led to the
collapse of the American management mystique with its pretension of providing
universally applicable knowledge.
In 1984, the Burkinabé government took the initiative through a
governmental body, the Direction de Controle et de Suivi des Societes d'Etat
(DCSE), to explore the applicability of QCC (Sawadogo, 1993). After some
field studies, a QCC project was launched in 1989. A Japanese engineer from
JUSE, Miyauchi, was invited to explain to an audience of one hundred and fifty
Burkinabé businessmen and civil servants how QCC had changed management
practices by reflecting Japanese cultural values and norms of social interaction.
Five Burkinabé companies decided to implement QCC. The World Bank agreed
to financially support the initiative.
During 1991, other Japanese engineers paid visits to Burkina to train local
trainers and assist in the dissemination of the QCC concept. The concept
obtained its own translation in ‘groupe progres permanent’ (GPP). Five other
Burkinabé firms and civil service departments decided to implement this
approach. In January 1992, the Association Burkinabé des Cercles de Qualité
(ABCERCQ) was launched, with financial support from Japan, to propagate and
diffuse the new approach. A delegation of Burkinabé businessmen was invited
on a study mission to Japan to learn on the spot about quality circles. An expert
from the World Bank showed that the implementation of quality circles had
obtained some success in Africa (Dia, 1996). In 1998, the Burkinabé
government created the national standardization unit to disseminate information
about standards, technical specificities and codes of practices, training on quality
23
and certification of companies, conforming to these standards.
The following year, the consultant Lim from Singapore delivered a report
that evaluated the ten-year experience with quality circles (Lim, 1999).
Although overall the report was positive, it expressed some particular concerns
that mainly had to do with a lack of active engagement by top management. It
turned out that top management was neither interested in quality circles nor
visibly engaged in discussions concerning the needs of the circles to get the
approach implemented. Organizations had hardly developed clear visions about
the effects of quality circle projects and subsequent strategies. Top management
lacked knowledge about the content of quality circles and were not adequately
trained to apply quality circle tools and road maps. Leadership and motivation
was lacking to implement quality circles effectively.
Transformation of organizations did not take place and necessary cultural
changes had not been taken into consideration. Lim advised that quality circle
coordinators should ‘engineer’ changes in both rank and file as well as top
management. Problem-solving activities should be based on team-based training
and experiential learning. The local trainers, however, should learn, try out and
improve by adapting QCC to the local context. The foremost issue was that
leadership should manifest itself physically by example. He noted that there
were only a few managing directors who were driving excellence and quality
improvements. Besides the low involvement of top management, he concluded
that managers in general manifested a lack of knowledge about the ways to
change organizational structures to effectively implement quality.
During the following years, the members of ABCERCQ met annually for
a few days to attend workshops and to share knowledge and experiences. In
order to strengthen the interest of top management in quality issues and make
them responsible for its implementation, ABCERCQ broadened its scope,
reached out for a more holistic view and turned its interest to Total Quality
Management (TQM). In 2001, WAEMU launched a broader quality program
24
with the assistance of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization
(UNIDO) and the European Union for a period of four years (with a 14 million
Euro budget). UNIDO stressed that managers’ misconceptions about continuous
improvements are the most important source of difficulties. Managers too often
expect instant results whereas it takes time before the benefits of quality
management become visible. In 2002, ABCERCQ changed its name into
l’Association Burkinabé pour le Management des Cercles de Qualite
(ABMACQ) stressing the fact that quality management was not just a vision and
strategy but had to become the new style of working. What was needed, above
all, was a proper translation into Burkinabé management practices.
Beyer et al. (1997) had shown how the concept of TQM could end up
with very different results in similar institutional settings. Whereas in one firm
management encouraged local experimentation, in another firm a tightly
implemented process was embraced and deviations were considered errors. In
other words, the concept allowed for rigidity as well as flexibility and creativity.
Apparently there was no agreement about the definition of quality. Initially this
was one of the great barriers to management’s rapid adoption of practices that
intended to improve quality. But very soon that negative view changed into a
challenge. “Because of the vagueness of the concept and its correlates, firms and
industries were free within a certain range to interpret it, position it, and adopt
those practices that fit particular corporate traditions and industry imperatives”
(Cole, 1999: 11). Its ambiguity provided managers with freedom to determine,
in their own language, their visions of continuous improvement. “The rhetorical
TQM exploded into a broadly used, ambiguous term with unclear organizational
implications” (Zbaracki, 1998: 603). Despite its ambiguity, the goals of (total)
quality management are to improve product performance and zero-defect
production, which will lead to improved customer satisfaction. Although the
migration of this management concept was speedy, Balance (1995: 4) draws the
conclusion that “in developing countries the pace of acceptance (of this and
25
similar concepts) is far too slow”.
Because TQM as a management concept was quite vague (Deming never
used the term (Petersen, 1999)), it offered enough opportunities for Burkinabé
management to design its own leadership and vision on the topic. The concept
certainly gained ground while the overarching logic of privatization – as
propagated by the Structural Adjustment Programs – stimulated the urgency for
far-reaching changes in Burkinabé management practices. TQM was embraced
as a new way of operating Burkinabé economic organizations. The vagueness of
the concept opened the way for multiple interpretations and a constructivist
procedural approach to the implementation of TQM. With a certain pathos,
TQM obtained the status of a mantra, which increased its popularity.
Research projects on Total Quality Management in Burkina Faso
Having explored some key issues concerning leadership, professional identities,
the position of middle managers, the role of language and the shaping of a
managerial habitus in Burkinabé organisations as prerequisites for the study of
quality issues, we decided to direct our attention to the implementation of TQM.
A range of different companies, located in industrial parks in Ouagadougou and
Bobo Diaolasso and operating in agro-industry, food and industrial production,
were visited and interviews were held with managers and employees in order to
gain an understanding of the actual application of TQM. The young Dutch
researchers were assisted by Burkinabé Business Administration students to help
overcome language barriers. Topics such as leadership, teamwork, customer
service, organisational culture and learning were covered.
26
Box 1. A review of new research projects
Sodepal (Ouagadougou)
Sodepal (Société d’ Exploitation de Produits Alimentaires) was founded by Madame
Zoundi in 1978. Besides the bakery, the company has a patisserie and biscuit production.
In 1992 Sodepal, in cooperation with a French company, started to produce ‘farine
infantile’ to counter the malnutrition of Burkinabé children. Sodepal recently installed a
Service Department to deal with the delivery, promotion and selling of their products. The
managing director has a policy to prefer women as employees. She indicated that quality
control of the products and the production process is essential to safeguard the continuity
of her company.
Brakina, beer producer (Ouagadougou)
Brakina is a large brewery with more than 300 employees and production locations in
Ouaga and Bobo Diaolasso. It produces a variety of brands of beer, including Brakina,
SoBeBra, Castel and even Guinness, and has a licence to produce various soft drinks like
Coca Cola, Sprite and Fanta. The company applies strict quality controls to comply with
license criteria. Continuous inspection by staff of the laboratory guarantees quality.
SNCitec, chemical plant (Bobo Diaolasso)
SNCitec (Société Nouvelle Huilerie et Savonnerie) is a production plant and a subsdiary
of a French multinational. It manufactures various kinds of oils, soap, animal food, peanut
sauce and sesame crackers. The French company still plays the supervisory role by
regularly sending staff to inspect and assist.
Sofitex, cotton mill (Bobo Diaolasso)
Sofitex is the largest group of cotton mills in Burkina Faso focussing on export. The
company has put in place quality control circles and controls the whole logistic channel,
from seed to customer, in order to minimize the risk of lawsuits and penalties.
Brafaso, non-alcoholic beverage producer (Ouagadougou)
Brafaso is a new company challenging Brakina, which for years had a monopoly in the
beverage industry. Brafaso produces only non-alcoholic beverages but intends to start
producing beer as well. The production line is newly imported from Germany and the
process is fully automated with local operators running it. The management team is
composed of Africans who have long careers and familiarity with the topic of quality
control.
Tan-Aliz, tanning company (Ouagadougou)
Tan-Aliz was privatized in 1992 but, thanks to its two factories, it still has a monopoly in
the tanning industry. The general director is very concerned about quality control.
Fasoplast, plastics manufacturer (Ouagadougou)
Fasoplast has installed quality control circles. Members of the management team
indicated that the general director encouraged initiatives from the shop floor. Although
the management style has changed from an authoritarian to a participative approach, the
attitude of cooperation between middle managers and employees did not yet reflect this.
27
All the companies in these research projects indicated that they were familiar
with TQM. In general, the interviewed managers were in favor of TQM but
admitted that its translation into practice was complicated and sometimes
stagnated in their respective companies. It was difficult to trace the script of
routines that reflect new practices based on TQM, which might indicate that
TQM has become part of routine and normality and is no longer conspicuously
executed except in specifically planned contexts (Mueller & Carter, 2005).
A variety of reasons for the lack of implementation was expressed:
• The level of illiteracy in the firms is high and makes a proper
understanding of TQM difficult.
• Access to the internal informal communication within an
organization (“ordre de bavardage” according to Etchegoyen (2004:
135)) requires particular language skills (languages other than
French are spoken) and makes translation a complicated matter.
• The hierarchical structure in the company prevents the
implementation of a participative approach between middle
managers and employees.
• Systematic attention to improving worker satisfaction is lacking.
• A system of continuous training is required but difficult to put in
place.
• Motivation amongst employees and trust in top management are
low.
Even if managers had appropriated the techniques of TQM, it was unclear
how far it had become an integral part of their managerial habitus. One
commercial manager illustrated this by saying: “Bosses in Africa have often
been to Europe to learn about cooperation with employees, asking their opinion,
but when they get back to Africa they will still act like the boss, and allow no
room for opinions of lower ranked employees. This is true for bosses in all
28
ranks. It seems that cultural assumptions about how bosses should behave are
more influential than schools. But of course they will tell you what they have
learned in the Western schools”. Apparently, cognitive mimetic learning has
taken place but a fundamental shift in the habitus of the Burkinabé manager
does not seem to be prevalent yet. The willingness to share a new policy based
on TQM with other participants in the organization has not yet resulted in a new
management logic.
Does this have to do with culturally specific forms of organizational
structures not yet being adapted? The majority of the organizations that have
been studied are still coordinated in a hierarchical and bureaucratic way, which
keeps managers in a position that requires communication in monologues of
planning and control. If we distinguish four stages in the development of quality
management starting with quality inspection (1930s), quality engineering
(1950s), quality assurance (1970s) and total quality management (1990s), we
may say that, overall, the organizations that have been studied can be positioned
between quality engineering and quality assurance.
The one feature most lacking in these analyses was the role of dialogue.
During discussions on these outcomes with Burkinabé students during the
research seminars in Ouagadougou, the students indicated that they would have
difficulties themselves in translating management concepts into particular
African realities because training in this kind skill is still missing.
Because the employees spoke Moré or another local language that the
Dutch students did not speak, the researchers had support from Burkinabè
students in understanding what happened at shop-floor level. But even with this
language assistance, it was difficult to determine how TQM techniques were
actually embedded in organizational practices. As Falola (2003) indicates, the
issue of mastering a foreign language in order to grasp the essentials of the
implementation of a particular management concept has yet to be promoted in
the African context. This seems to be the case as much in West Africa as in East
29
Africa. “To some critics, English is the language of domination, colonialization
and imperialism. At one level, it allows the West to dominate Africa, at another
level, it enables elites to dominate the country. Many defenders of culture and
tradition think that the use of English is undermining the preservation and
practices of home-grown institutions” (Falola, 2003: 239). Although Falola does
not agree with these critics, he admits that the variety of local languages in
African countries reflects a diversity and heterogeneity within the population
and workforce which should be explored. Kamoche (1999: 55) notes that “the
essence of African culture is in reality a melange of about 2,000 linguistic
groups that fall into Bantu, Hamitic, Nilotic, Arabic, Asian, European and other
subcategories. Cameroon has over 200 ethnic groups, while Kenya has about
40”. In Burkina Faso about 80 different ethnic groups live together and about the
same number of languages are spoken.
During the conversations about the research results, Burkinabé students
suggested that the activities undertaken by managers to improve quality issues
could be seen as a particular ability to improvise. This was a very interesting
comment. The issue of improvisation has recently attracted notable attention in
management literature. Improvisation does not refer to a sudden intervention to
solve a fluctuation in regular organizational routines, but is “a practice which
contains a different vision of work in organizations” (Ciborra 1999 A: 142).
Ciborra further notes (1999 B: 78) that “improvisations are
simultaneously rational and unpredictable, planned and emergent, purposeful
and blurred, effective and irreflexive, perfectly discernible after the fact, but
spontaneous in its manifestation”. Improvisation is not inherently a good thing
(Crossan e.a., 2005) but Kamoche (2002: 7) notes that it can restore “a sense of
pro-activity in individuals (and teams) and the potential for experimentation
outside the often rigid structures of planned organisational change”.
If managers in Burkinabé economic organizations improvize frequently
beyond the planned organizational coordination, then the analysis of situated
30
actions will have to be redefined. One such step is stressed by Mangaliso (2001)
who notes that in the South African context Ubuntu embodies the beliefs, values
and behaviours of a large majority of the South African population. Ubuntu may
guide the development of managerial practices into new forms of TQM that
include the capacity to improvise. Ubuntu reflects what people value both in
their social life and in their work in economic organizations. Ubuntu is
characterized by reciprocity and humanizes social interactions, and in that sense
shows a family resemblance with the purpose of TQM. Similar concepts will
have to be explored for the West African setting (Karsten & Illa, 2005). The
cases studied so far indicate that the Japanese concept of TQM shares features
that are cherished in the African business context. The translation process,
however, has not yet been crafted into a new approach during the time these
research projects were executed.
Conclusions
The journey we have made so far has provided discovery, exploration and
personal transformation. It has shaped an atmosphere in which many kinds of
transitions and transformations concerning the transfer of knowledge have been
experienced (Gabriel, 2004). The adoption of management concepts does not
necessarily follow from their scientific credibility and it certainly is not solely
determined by economic or technological factors. “For ideas to be adopted in
practice, institutional circumstances have to be conducive” (Guillen, 1994: 1).
During the years of cooperation with the University of Ouagadougou’s Faculty
of Economics and Management, we began to recognize the relevance of this
statement. Our journey started as a project with the clear goal of assisting local
initiatives in Burkina to become organizations that improve efficiency by
diffusing management knowledge as it is acknowledged and formulated in an
31
explicit way.
Midway in this journey, the perspective changed into a processual
approach for which we needed a new framework. Management became,
epistemologically speaking, approached from a constructivist perspective. An
actor dimension together with Bourdieu’s habitus provided a new framework.
We became critical of unwarranted assumptions about the transferability of
management knowledge in the form of Western management concepts,
techniques and methods to the African continent.
If concepts that have been developed in the West are to be diffused in
Africa, their diffusion will be to the extent that they can offer insights about a
range of options available for crafting African organizations. We believe that the
framework we began to design during the second part of our journey may help
to recognize the tremendous variety in the African management context. African
managers, like other employees, bring their indigenous thought-systems to the
organization to interpret, construct and ascribe meaning to actions that take
place (Kamoche, 1999). Conversations and dialogue may assist accepted
customs, beliefs and practices from family life to become respected in industrial
work life. A team of authors who call themselves An Afro-centric Alliance
(2000:72), representing different African management institutes, warned
correctly that it would be meaningless to ask for one single ‘Afro-centric’ view
of the organization and its management. There is simply too much variety to be
recognized. In this sense Dia’s statement (1991:47) is still relevant: “l’Afrique
peut se développer sans perdre son âme, à condition que ses dirigeants y
introduisent une forme particulière de management jusqu’à présent trop souvent
ignorée.” African-ness in management has still to be identified.
Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is a helpful guide for exploring the way Burkinabé
management actions provide a sense of community that structures the discourse
and coordination of the Burkinabé manager and business man/woman. It
expresses the embeddedness of management practices in Africa. It also shows
32
that translating management concepts from the industrialized business world
into an African setting will involve a change in the interpretations of these
concepts. Coordinating an economic organization based on such a habitus will
create a context of discourse that promotes innovation and learning. Above all, it
may stimulate interactive rationality amongst actors who prefer to structure their
interactions rather than their own way of reasoning. Burkinabé managers may
gain from the transfer of organizational improvements and management views
as they prevail in the Western world, however, they may gain even more if they
promulgate a habitus which is based on interactive rationality. One way to
promote the development of that kind of habitus is to design a business school
program that strengthens the ability to translate these modern management
concepts into forms that reflect a particular African meaning or, in other words,
obtain African-ness. This African-ness creates a synthesis between the
constructivist perspective, which states that modern management knowledge has
to be translated within the African context through dialogue, and the
communitarian perspective, which calls for a return to the source and restores
the position of flesh and blood communities that comprise Africa.
There is no better way to conclude our own journey than to refer to a
wonderful metaphor of the well-known African author, Amadou Hampâté Bâ. It
is a nice illustration of what interactive rationality means to us and of how we
have become pupils of master Tierno Bokar. In Bâ’s novel Oui mon
commandant (1954), Bokar instructs his pupils that there are three truths: mine,
yours and The Truth. He compares the latter to the full moon and then writes:
“My truth, like your truth, are only fractions of The Truth. They are the sickles
of the moon, located in different parts of the perfect circle of the full moon.
Most of the time, when we talk, we listen only to ourselves, our sickles of the
moon turn their backs to each other; and the more we talk, the more they
distance themselves from the full moon, in other words, from The Truth. We
33
first have to turn, one towards the other, become conscious that the other exists,
and begin to listen to the other. Then our two sickles of the moon will turn
towards each other, get closer to each other little by little, and perhaps, finally,
meet each other in the great circle of The Truth. It is there, and only there, that
conjunction can take place”
3
.
3
“Ma verité, comme ta verité, ne sont que des fractions de la Verité. Ce sont des croissants de lune situés de part
et d’autre du cercle parfait de la pleine lune. La plupart du temps, quand nous discutons et que nous n’écoutons
que nous-mêmes, nos croissants de lune se tournent le dos; et plus nous discutons, plus ils s’éloignent de la
pleine lune, autrement dit de la Vérité. Il nous faut d’abord nous retourner l’un vers l’autre, prendre conscience
que l’autre existe, et commencer à l’écouter. Alors nos deux croissants de lune vont se faire face, se rapprocher
peu à peu et peut-être, finalement, se rencontrer dans le grand cercle de la Vérité. C’est là, et là seulement, que
peut s’operér la conjunction.” Bâ, A.H. (1994), Oui, mon commandant, Arles, Actes Sud.
34
Appendix 1
List of research projects in economic organizations in Burkina
Faso conducted by Dutch business administration students from
the Faculty of Organization and Management of the University of
Groningen (1994-2005)
Name Title Dissertation
approved
1 Steven Stolp Le marketing au CNSF, une contribution? 1994
2 Ilse H. van der
Veen
Le pagne de Faso Fani au Burkina Faso,
une reconnaissance du marche
1995
3 Ina Konterman Prendre les renes:La Caisse de Manga 1995
4 Daan Tiernego La Viabilité de la Caisse de Manga 1996
5 Ingrid van
Zutphen
La Caisse d'Eparne, de Crédit et de
Commercialisation (CECC) à Manga
1997
6 Maurice J.T.H.
Willemsen
Which direction to choose in a liberalized
market, the case of Sosuco
1996
7 Doreen Smits Cost based activity systems; the Sosuco case 1997
8 Esther E.
Beneder
L'approvisionnement et la distribution des
intrants agricoles au Sanmatenga
1998
9 Bianca Kamps Middle management in Burkina Faso 1997
10 Lucy Kuis Leadership styles in Burkinabé companies 1997
11 Reinout B. Brons Leadership in layers, an orienting study on
leadership in Africa
1998
12 Aart Jan
Zwartscholten
Speaking of African Management 1999
13 Patrick de Lange L’Habitus du directeur Burkinabé 1999
14 Claudine Koers The professional in Burkina Faso in
cultural perspective
2000
15 Henriëtte S.
Scheele
Business Development in Burkina Faso 2000
16 Tessa van de
Wiel
Talking Burkina Faso 2002
17 Ilona Pouels Management of meaning 2000
18 Sharon Becker Cooperation in Burkinabé management
teams
2004
19 Elly Lont Quality management in Burkina Faso,
dialogue or monologue
2004
20 Erik Cazemier The use of TQM in Burkina Faso 2005
35
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41
About the authors:
Luchien Karsten is Professor in the Foundations of Management, Faculty of
Management and Organization, University of Groningen, the Netherlands,
Visiting Professor at Nottingham Trent Business School and at IGR-IAE of the
University of Rennes I. During 1988-2005 he has been coordinator of a project
between the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) and the University of
Groningen (the Netherlands). Trained as economist and philosopher, his
research interests focus on time and organization and the actual development of
time-space orientation in organizations. Additionally, he is interested in
management concepts that are used to describe and analyse organizations in
different contexts and continents as well as the history of multinationals.
Bartjan Pennink is Assistant Professor in Research Methodology at the Faculty
of Management and Organization, University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
Besides lecturing in the regular program of business administration, he also
contributes to some MBA programs like TSM business school and courses for
PhD students in business administration (NOBEM). During 1991-2003 he was
involved in the project between the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)
and the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). His research, leading to his
doctoral thesis, focuses on the way managers cooperate in teams, how they cope
with different perceptions about a similar management topic and how they cope
with diversity in management teams. Beside this main focus, he is interested in
African management and business research methodology. Since January 2006 he
is coordinator of a project between the Institute of Finance Management in Dar
es Salaam (Tanzania) and the University of Groningen.
CDS Research Reports
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the Role of Business Conglomerates in the Case of Chili, 1983-1992, No 1
A. Maatman, C. Schweigman, A. Ruys, Synopsis of a Linear Programming
Study of Farmers' Strategies on the Central Plateau in Burkina Faso, No
2
N.Hermes, New Explanations of the Economic Success of East Asia:
Lessons for Developing and Eastern European Countries, No 3
State, Society and Ethnicity in Developing Countries: Lessons from the
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M. Thissen, P. Kerkhof, The Dynamics of Reform Policy: a new political
economy model with an application to Egypt, No 5
R. Lensink, O. Morrissey, Aid Instability as a Measure of Uncertainty and
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N. Hermes, W.Salverda (eds.), State, Society and Development: Lessons for
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E. Sterken, Demand for Money and Shortages in Ethiopia, No 9
C. Lutz (ed.), Food Markets in Burkina Faso, No 10
ZhongXiang Zhang, Why has the Energy Intensity fallen in China’s
Industrial Sector in the 1990s ?, No 11
P. Boele van Hensbroek (ed), African Renaissance and Ubuntu
Philosophy, .No 12
44
R. Lensink and O. Morrissey, The Volatility of FDI, not the Level, affects
Growth in Developing Countries, No 13
F. K. Hien, L’Entrepreneuriat Feminin au Burkina Faso : Une Etude
Exploratoire, No 14
C. Lutz, Food Markets and Food Security in West Africa, No 15
C. Schweigman, Developmental Research in Africa : Some Lessons, No
16
M. Kamminga, On Global Justice, No. 17
P. Weesie en J. van Andel, On Biodiversity and its Valuation, No 18
C. Schweigman, Food Security: Opportunities and Responsibilities, Or:
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to Lifelong Learning in Southern Africa, No 21
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South African Literature, No 22
Visser, H. Van der Heuvel-Disler (eds.), Family Fictions, No. 23
Fitsum Ghebregiorgis and Luchien Karsten, Human Resource
Management in Eritrea: Current and Future Trends, No. 24
doc_176216290.pdf
During the 1990s Total Quality Management (TQM) became diffused to Burkina Faso. The overarching logic of privatization due to Structural Adjustment Programs prepared the ground for far-reaching changes in management practices.
Total Quality Management in the African
business community of Burkina Faso: a change
in perspective on knowledge development
Luchien Karsten and Bartjan Pennink
July 2007
CDS Research Report No. 25
ISSN 1385-9218
The CDS Research Report series
COLOFON:
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Editor:
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Editorial Advisory Board:
Prof. Jelte van Andel
Prof. Catrinus Jepma
Dr. Menno Kamminga
Prof. Caspar Schweigman
Prof. Rien Seegers
Prof. Ton Schoot Uiterkamp
Prof. Jaques Zeelen
Abstract
During the 1990s Total Quality Management (TQM) became diffused to
Burkina Faso. The overarching logic of privatization due to Structural
Adjustment Programs prepared the ground for far-reaching changes in
management practices. TQM became exhorted as a new way of manufacturing.
This new management concept was presented as a crucial part of new corporate
success and put strong emphasis on empowerment of employers, customer
service and charismatic leadership.
Interviews with top and middle management in a range of Burkinabé companies
showed a willingness for mimetic learning but it turned out that translating the
concept into specific new practices by way of new routines remained a complex
matter. Although this management concept sometimes became part of the
dispositional practice of managers – a new habitus – company practices could be
better characterized as improvisation on quality improvement.
6
“It is not only the academics who are interested in
finding some answers to puzzling questions about
African organisations and how they work. African
managers are themselves daily confronted by such
questions; trained primarily in western management
theories and practices and frequently having western
managers as their only role model, how are they to
answer such questions?”
(Blunt & Jones, 1992: 107)
As long as lions do not have historians,
hunting stories will glorify the hunters.
(African proverb)
Introduction
1
Humans experience the world through a set of cultural beliefs, values and
concepts that are expressed and reaffirmed through a variety of root metaphors
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). In what follows the authors will use the ‘journey’
metaphor to describe how their views and experiences of knowledge
development in Burkina Faso changed over a period of ten years.
The focus on knowledge development started during a project of
cooperation between the University of Ouagadougou (capital city of Burkina
Faso) and the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). The purpose of the
project was to strengthen the Department of Management and Organization
within the existing Faculty of Economics of the University of Ouagadougou.
Initially, some Dutch lecturers were attached to the department and, as
supervisors, we lectured and trained African students in organization theory and
research methods during visits once a year. During the period 1994-2004, the
project provided opportunities for Business Administration students from
Groningen to do a half-year internship in Burkinabé organizations.
During our ‘journey’, we underwent a profound change in perspective on
Management Science. Initially, the students as well as ourselves took a
mainstream perspective and tried to apply a set of predefined and reified
concepts from Management Sciences. We shared the conviction that Western
organizational theories and management concepts, which had taken the form of
definitive and abstract knowledge, could travel easily from North to South. The
1
We are very grateful to our colleagues Mady Koanda, Florent Hien, Albert Ouedraogo, Honorine Illa , Serge Bayala and
Marcel Krabbendam for their valuable contribution to this paper and their support in establishing contacts with Burkinabé
companies. This paper was presented at the 11th international conference on “managing in a global economy “organized by
the Eastern Academy of Management held 26-30 June 2005 in Cape Town, South Africa. We gratefully acknowledge two
anonymous reviewers of EAM and two reviewers from the Centre for Development Studies as well as Fitum Ghebregiorgis
2
management concepts we might apply were viewed as self-contained packages
of knowledge that could be cut loose from their particular defining contexts and
be applied in other contexts. (Fincham & Roslender, 2004) We embraced the
New Institutional Theory, in particular the concept of mimetic isomorphism, to
explain the enormous increase and diffusion of fashionable management
concepts and related techniques (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). From this
perspective, we considered the internships as opportunities to strengthen
knowledge development in Burkinabé economic organizations. We assumed
that, like the Burkinabé society, these organizations needed knowledge
development to achieve increased productivity, effectiveness and resource-
utilization objectives.
However, during the initial years of the project, we began to notice that our
journey was exploratory, rather than one of applying established knowledge.
Initially, we had assumed the universal applicability of the cognitive
frameworks: our projects would automatically strengthen incremental
improvements in the management practices of Burkinabé organizations. This
presupposition was based on the objectivist perspective that regards knowledge
as a commodity that people possess and that can exist in a codifiable form
independent of the persons expressing it. The objectivist perspective looks at
knowledge as existing in a textual form, expressed in a language that has fixed
and objective meanings, and expressing a direct equivalence between words and
the entities they denote. This perspective also assumes that knowledge and
understanding can be developed free from individual subjectivity.
However, we developed doubts about the presupposition that African
companies should adopt our cognitive frameworks simply because they were
assumed to be rational and efficient and to embody progress. Learning from the
mediocre effectiveness of our initial approach, we decided to change our focus
and divert our journey in a process-orientated direction (Inns, 1996). Instead of
from Eitrea for their comments on an earlier version . The usual disclaimer applies.
3
focusing on the diffusion of particular management concepts, we became
interested in the adoption of such concepts in a particular African context and in
how local management knowledge might transform specific organizational
routines.
We had observed that particular African cultural patterns are conducive in
the African workplace and boardroom, but we actually did not understand why.
Initially, we even assumed that African cultural patterns might hamper the
applicability of Western views on management. Little by little, we began to
recognize that “African societies have built up a wealth of indigenous
knowledge in response to dynamic changes experienced in their environments.
This knowledge must be taken into account when one is trying to improve the
way an African organization is managed, how it is structured, and how decisions
are made” (Thairu, 1999: 267). We felt an urgent need to reconsider the
epistemological framework that we ourselves were using in order to better
understand local practices.
First, we explored the fads and fashions in management knowledge and the
way management concepts are manufactured and transferred (Abrahamson,
1996). Second, we directed our attention to an analysis of the reception of
management knowledge by African managers. We noted that, rather than being
passive recipients, they are actors who shape their views on management issues,
translate management concepts, and convert them into applicable approaches.
In other words, our perspective changed from one that conceived
management knowledge as a set of predefined, reified objects that can easily be
transferred to African organizations, into one that conceives management
knowledge as constructed by processes of translation. In the first perspective,
the manager is portrayed as a monologist who defines the objectives of the firm
and forces company members to behave accordingly (e.g. through Management
By Objectives). In the second perspective, knowledge is not regarded as a
discrete entity that can be codified and separated from people. Knowledge is
4
seen instead as the uniquely human capacity to make sense of information.
Although knowledge involves the mental processes of comprehension,
understanding and learning which take place in the mind, knowledge only
becomes relevant as ‘knowing how’, which is associated with the ability of an
actor to perform activities based on this knowledge. The practice-based
perspective views knowing and the development of knowledge as ongoing,
through the routine activities that managers and employees undertake. Through
dialogue and improvisation, existing knowledge is adapted to new situations.
Mangaliso (2001) notes that, particularly in the African context, managers have
to be dialogists who look for conversation and who shape discourses, sharing
with other participants in the organization the relevance of particular
management knowledge.
We embraced this second perspective and decided to explore the impact of Total
Quality Management (TQM) in Burkinabé organizations. The reason for this
focus was the popularity of the concept in Burkina Faso, as well as the stress
within TQM itself on the aspect of dialogue. During our research projects in
Burkinabé organizations, we had noticed a tension between the teachings of
TQM and actual management practices – the processes of translating the
concept of TQM into new routines within the economic organizations was an
ideal case study of contextualized knowledge development.
The objective of this paper is to describe and analyze the two different phases of
our ‘journey’ and to show how research on knowledge development can learn
from African experiences. In doing this, we use Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of
habitus to clarify what is involved in the practice of applying management
concepts in particular contexts.
The paper is divided into five sections. We start by exploring the changing
context of management thought, practice and teaching in Burkina Faso in the era
of structural adjustment (section 1). Next we sketch our initial orientation and
5
the research conducted within that framework, followed by an explanation of
our changed orientation and the research that we conducted in that phase
(sections 2 and 3). We then describe our analysis of the introduction of TQM
and the way this concept was implemented in Burkinabé economic organizations
(section 4). In the last section (5) we draw some conclusions concerning
management development by stressing the role of dialogue and improving
management curricula in African business schools.
Changing context of management orientations under Structural
Adjustment Programs
Located in the heart of West Africa, Burkina Faso is a land-locked, resource-
poor, Sahelian country with a population of about 12 million people. About 92
percent of the working population is active in agriculture. Burkina Faso has
experienced rapid rural and urban population growth; increasing exploitation of
arable land, vegetation cover and water resources; continuous struggles with
erosion and reduction of soil fertility, and a constant threat of desertification.
In the early 1980s, the World Bank began to pay increasing attention to
institution-building in Sub-Saharan Africa as a means to strengthen economic
development. It insisted that management and technical reforms of state-owned
enterprises were needed. After the debt crisis in 1982 and subsequent economic
recession, a period of Structural Adjustment Programs was started in Africa.
Programs containing privatization components made up half of the World
Bank’s loan portfolio at the end of 1987 (Dijk, 1994). The World Bank (1995)
stressed the importance of management in the economic development process by
suggesting that better management of public and private organizations was a
prerequisite for sustainable economic development. In 1989, the Burkinabé
government drafted a Policy Framework Paper, which announced plans to
6
improve the productivity of public investment and encourage private sector
development. In 1990, a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), which aimed at
boosting public finances and reviving the economy, was introduced. The IMF
granted subsequent loans (1991-93; 1993-96) to support economic and financial
improvement, such as the devaluation of the CFA franc by 50 percent in 1994.
In 1991, Captain Blaise Compaoré, who had seized power after a military coup
in October 1987, initiated a gradual liberalization of the military regime, with
the adoption of a multiparty constitution promulgated by referendum in June
1991, and the legislation of political opposition. Presidential, parliamentary and
municipal elections followed in December 1991, May 1992 and February 1995
(Santiso and Loada, 2003). The economic policy of Burkina Faso also became
linked to sub-regional developments through its involvement in the West
African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and the Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Efforts were undertaken to
liberalize the economy. A change from social solidarity to individualism, with a
subsequent weakening of the role of the State as ‘bienfaiteur’, could be noticed
in the region. The informal economy began to grow and privatized firms were
visited by consultants, who provided assistance in making the transition
(Tidjani, 2000).
The impact of this Structural Adjustment Program was reflected in
developments at the University of Ouagadougou, which had been officially
inaugurated in 1974. In order to respond to the needs of the changing economy,
the College of Economics (ESSEC), which had been set up in 1985, was
reformed in 1995 and established as the Faculty of Economics and Management
(FASEG), with a separate department specifically created to pay systematic
attention to issues of management development and organizational improvement
in the private sector. Following long strikes organized by students, which were
related to the national political crisis caused by the death of the journalist and
chief editor of L’Independent, Norbert Zongo (13-12-1998), and to students’
7
demands for improved conditions for their studies (Hagberg, 2002), there was a
massive failure of the first-year class and, in November 2000, the university was
reformed. It adopted a new structure to promote the professionalization of its
faculties (Guenda, 2003). Although FASEG was reshaped into Unité de
Formation et de Recherche (UFR) en sciences économiques et de gestion, this
had no impact on the content of the curriculum.
When the cooperation between the universities of Ouagadougou and
Groningen was initiated in the late 1980s, its focus was on strengthening the
institutional capacity for higher education (library, computer facilities, printing
facilities, transportation) and increasing the teaching capacity (participation in
courses and seminars by Groningen lecturers). This approach fitted Dutch
government policy as formulated in A World of Difference (1990), published by
the Minister of Developmental Cooperation Jan P. Pronk, which stressed that
development by, for and of the people is a key element in combating poverty
and promoting sustainable economic growth, equitable income distribution,
satisfaction of basic needs and involvement in the socio-economic and political
domains of society for as many people as possible. A subsequent Reverification
Report (1996) on development cooperation introduced ownership as a central
concept. The outcome was a flexible approach in which participation played a
key role (Schulper and Hoebink, 1999; Van der Veen, 2004). For the first time it
was admitted that the cultural identity of the receiving country should be the
starting point of cooperation (Nekkers, 2000: 55), but not much attention was
paid to the development of the private sector.
Phase one: Research on knowledge transfer
The cooperation between the universities of Ouagadougou and Groningen
started within this context. One element of the program was the opportunity for
8
several business administration students of the University of Groningen to do
their internship in Burkinabé economic organizations (1993-1997). These
internships had to be focused on organizational issues relevant to the local
managers, and before students left for Burkina Faso we had discussions with
them on the relevance of the Contingency Approach and on issues of cultural
difference. The Contingency Approach, an outgrowth of systems theory, states
that managers act and decide, depending on the particular situation. Thus, it
rejects the idea of universals, the idea that there is one best way. This approach
recognizes, for instance, that organizations within highly unstable environments
organize differently from firms in stable environments. The most successful
companies are considered to be those best adapted to their environment.
Despite this contextualism, the management knowledge that should be
applied is hardly questioned within this approach. Managers are seen as
professionals who are expected to be able to apply abstract knowledge to
particular cases (Abbott, 1988). We believed that even with their different
cultural background, Burkinabé managers, while cooperating with expatriate
managers and having had Western-style education, would imitate the success of
others and follow the examples of the West. Dimaggio and Powell (1983) have
called this ‘mimetic isomorphism’ and we supposed that this attitude could be
linked with the Contingency Approach recognizing that what may constitute
good management in one situation may not in another (Jaeger and Kanungo,
1990; Blunt & Jones, 1992).
Concerning cultural differences, we opted for the approach of the Dutch
researcher Hofstede (1993), who stresses that particular cultural values operate
in ways in which organization members’ discursive practices contribute to the
development of shared meaning. In his empirical research, Hofstede introduces
several dimensions to describe the culture of a country. West Africa is thus seen
as an area that ranks high in power distance, low in individualism, and has a
long-term orientation, while scoring ‘moderate’ on the dimensions of both
9
quality of life and uncertainty avoidance. We reminded students of Nzelibe’s
(1986: 11) statement: “whereas Western management thought advocates Euro
centrism, individualism and modernity, African management thought
emphasizes ethnocentrism, traditionalism, communalism/collectivism, and
cooperative teamwork”. We also discussed with students the tensions between
the ‘emic’ (from the insider’s point of view) and the ‘etic’ (from the outsider’s
point of view) understanding of organizational phenomena.
The first research projects started with the presumption that larger firms
within the formal industrial sector of Burkina Faso, still having expatriates on
their boards, would function with fairly conventional Western management tools
and work practices. Furthermore, it was assumed that transfer of knowledge,
which itself is formulated in terms of management concepts that are firmly
rooted in Western thought about planning and control, could enhance the
performance of these firms as long as the concepts and consecutive techniques
were balanced with local indigenous Burkinabé value systems. Cultural patterns
such as a respect for elders, consensus decisions, respect for authority, family
orientation and collectivism would simply have to be integrated in the design of
the research without interfering with the objectivist perspective of the research
projects.
At this point it is illustrative to review several of the initial research
projects on Burkinabé companies and assess the fruitfulness of the approach
taken in this first phase of our journey.
A review of research projects
2
– Faso Fani: cotton fabric manufacturer in Koudougou
Due to the combination of high quality cotton and suitable infrastructure
10
(railway and motorways), in the 1960s the Burkinabé government decided to
build a textile factory, named Vortex, north of the capital city. The first spinning
machines started to run in 1969; weaving machines and a printing department
soon followed.
In 1984 the company changed its name to Faso Fani and produced yarn,
textiles and in particular ‘pagnes’, which represented 75 percent of the total
turnover. While the results did not meet the expectations (Martens, 1989: 190),
serious attempts were made to rationalize the production process. Foreign
investment was attracted for technological improvements but part of the factory
continued to produce with the old equipment. Nevertheless, the company
became one of the pioneers in quality control circles. Due to the process of
privatization, the company was forced to rationalize its sales, and this became
the focus of the research. The wholesalers, who invented new designs and
placed orders with Faso Fani to produce them, had a strong influence on the
firm. Distributors kept stocks that were financed by Faso Fani and the products
were sold at prices which were still fixed by the government. Hofstede’s
framework concerning cultural differences was applied to assess the impact of
local policies compared with Western practices. This provided a setting to
propose a change in Faso Fani’s perspective on the market and to make it into a
more efficient one, based on Western concepts. For that purpose, a Porter (1980)
analysis concerning strategy was applied. The analysis showed that cheap
textiles from Asia aggravated the competitive situation and that local
wholesalers selling Faso Fani products were confronted with mounting stocks of
obsolete designs. Faso Fani, however, carried the burden. Ties between the
company and the wholesalers had to be unbundled, but it was unclear how top
management would translate this issue into a new company strategy.
Privatization was on its way but the Burkinabé board of Faso Fani was unable to
develop a new strategy and, in 2003, the company was dissolved.
2
An overview of all studies is given in appendix 1.
11
– Sosuco: sugar manufacturer in Banfora
Sosuco (Société Sucriere de la Commoé) was created in 1972 with the support
of a French company SOMDIAA (Société de Management des Industries
Alimentaires et Agricoles) and nationalized in 1985. The company managed an
agribusiness complex consisting of about 4,000 irrigated hectares of sugar cane,
a sugar refinery and a cubing plant. Sosuco produced about 30,000 tons of sugar
a year, which was insufficient to meet the demands of domestic consumption,
estimated to be 45,000 tons a year. During the (agricultural) campaign
(November till April) some 2,000 people and staff were employed and 4,000
casual workers were involved in harvesting.
In the context of the Structural Adjustment Program, Sosuco and the
Burkinabé government signed a contract to promote efficiency and
effectiveness. Top management had to strengthen its ability to understand and
control both the volatile external environment and the internal dimension.
Management was tasked to improve productivity, gradually reduce production
costs and increase the rate of sugar extraction. The World Bank had put pressure
on the government to speed up the privatization process, which was practically
implemented in 1990. Sosuco decided to develop a cost leadership strategy and
compete on sales prices.
The research project focused on the improvement of the cost structure of the
production line and on the design of a new strategy for the liberalized market. It
turned out that their cost of sugar production still remained too high compared
with the cost of sugar production in a similar firm in Ivory Coast. Using the
Activity Based Costing (ABC) management technique, the actual cost structure
was analyzed. ABC focuses on the drivers of the various cost types and assumes
that these costs are caused by various activities that must be controlled. Detailed
descriptions of the accounting system and an extensive collection of data were
not available due to a weak management information system. The
12
implementation of this technique through cost reduction management met quite
some resistance, and reducing production costs by firing people was not an
option due to particular socio-political circumstances. In order to help design a
new company strategy, a scenario approach was elaborated to study a range of
consequences of liberalization. The results suggested that Sosuco should
develop a strategy focusing on consumer prices as an instrument of
competitiveness, decrease the number of employees, accept lower profit levels
and focus on competitors from neighboring countries. Liberalization of the
market would force the firm to change and relate its corporate social
responsibility for the region with the building of a commercial firm. In this field
of market developments, technological improvements and corporate social
responsibility, it was not easy for Sosuco to survive. It turned out, however, to
be difficult to understand how top management would design a vision to sustain
its business through technological improvements and carry out its social role.
– Local Credit Bank in Manga (Region of Zoundweogo)
The Cellule Epargne Crédit et Commercialisation (CECC) located in Manga was
initiated by the Burkinabé government in 1983 and financially supported by the
Dutch government. The small bank provided microfinance facilities for
women’s organizations. From 1995 to 1997 research was focused on the
capacity of the bank to survive the withdrawal of the Dutch involvement and
introduction of local management. The aim of the research was to assist the
management of the bank to improve sustainability, focusing on treasury
management, micro finance and savings. The bank needed an analysis of the
external environment and a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and
threats) analysis was conducted to design a management strategy. Options
varied from concentrating on attracting new customers, stimulating people in the
region to create cooperatives (attracting new customers), and a search for new
partners. The alternatives seemed to provide some relevant input for
13
management to expand the project. An immediate impact could not be observed
but the bank is still in operation.
– A cereal bank in Kaya (region of Sanmatenga)
The development of a cereal bank was initiated by the Burkinabé government in
the late 1970s to strengthen the economic development of regions in an
integrated way. The Dutch government began to support this project by focusing
on soil fertility management. The research concentrated on the operational
functioning of the cereal bank by looking at the maintenance of stock and
purchasing of fertilizers and pesticides.
The stock of fertilizers was distributed in the region through small depots
in different villages but proper management of these depots was lacking. In
1997 the current Prime Minister of Burkina Faso, Ernest Yonli, had stated that
one of the weak points within the functioning of the cereal banks was their
management: “Les banques de céréales n’arrivent pas à attirer vers elles une
grande partie des producteurs/consommateurs” (Yonli, 1997: 184).
Based on various Western marketing tools and organizational principles
focusing on efficiency improvements, the research intended to assist farmers in
finding appropriate ways to finance fertilizers without the powerful mediation of
wholesalers who did not support the individual small farmers. For that purpose,
the depots had to be organized in a more efficient way, but it turned out to be
difficult to relate the interests of the individual farmers and the common interest
of the region. Subsequent research by Elshout (2001) established that the
different interests of individual farmers and those of the region (community) had
still not been settled.
14
Learning from the research projects
Reviewing the outcomes of these research projects in four different
organizations, we concluded that one of the principal weaknesses of the projects
was the objectivist assumption with which the research was undertaken.
Although the Contingency Approach was applied and cultural differences were
acknowledged, the young researchers were themselves approached by local
management as experts who would – based on their acquired management
knowledge – be able to advise on particular organizational issues. In all cases,
the research projects did not show how the managers made strategic choices nor
what strategic options they had. The researchers characterized the behavior of
management in these organizations as one of muddling through. The limiting
factor in this kind of research was that the managers were perceived only as
agents who were in a position to smoothly apply explicitly formulated and
systematically elaborated Western management knowledge in their specific
organization.
We had hardly any information about the way these concepts were
translated in the Burkinabé context. Was the difficulty of adopting these
concepts related to the lack of clearly defined goals and a rational approach to
attain those goals? Was local management well equipped to relate to the
meaning of Western management concepts? Did the meaning we attach to these
concepts really make sense in the specific setting in Burkinabé organizations?
Hernandez (1997) notes that the main reason for failure in applying the Western
concept of Management By Objectives – or in francophone countries, Direction
Par Objectifs (DPO) – was that it had not been properly translated within the
local African management style. Particular African cultural patterns and values
determine issues such as the time-frame and goal setting in a fundamentally
different way. Hernandez also notes that the presence of a large hierarchical
distance between management and employees in African companies prevented
15
negotiations about the processes of goal setting itself. To implement DPO
properly, the traditional African system of decision taking by unanimity ought to
be given its appropriate place in African firms because the need for harmony
and consensual unity is very strong (Hernandez, 1997). Hernandez concludes
that both the economic and the socio-cultural sphere should be integrated if DPO
is to be successfully implemented. For instance, the strong link between private
and professional life is a common phenomenon in Africa and should be
respected more: “il faut souhaiter qu’a terme la dimension communautaire
survive pour permettre comme au Japon, la naissance d'un management à
l'africain dont l'efficacité resultera de solidarité des membres de l’enteprise”
(Hernandez, 1997: 106). Hernandez’s warning and the results of our research
projects made clear that we had only looked at these organizations as adaptive
systems which were concerned with the development of capabilities (i.e.
appropriate knowledge, experience and skills, as Richardson coined it for the
first time in 1972) to manage new situations by making improvements and
amendments to existing practices. But how were these linked to the local
circumstances?
In courses on research methodology, we used the master theses of the
Dutch students to discuss with the Burkinabé Business Administration students
ways of improving research on the transfer of Western-based knowledge. They
considered it naive to reject foreign concepts in the way that defenders of the
radical disengagement theory do (Shahidullah, 1999). They pointed to the fact
that industrialization and globalization will influence market developments in
Africa anyway and that Western management concepts will seep into African
management education. On the other hand, we confronted them with the
following statement of Blunt and Jones (1992: 31): “whereas African
organizations may find that they can apply Western management concepts and
practices to their technical core with few major modifications, these imported
ideas and practices are generally found to be inadequate and/or inappropriate for
16
the organization’s relationship with their environments”.
Were we to conclude that Sub-Saharan African economic organizations
are suffering from mismanagement, poor management or inappropriate
management? We turned the question around and asked ourselves what kind of
management knowledge is transferred and how it is translated. On the basis of
the discussions we had with the Dutch and Burkinabé students and our own
visits to Burkinabé companies, we decided to study how African managers
interpret modern Western management knowledge based on their own habitus.
What about that preference of African people to sit together and start
conversations about community topics, while never taking final decisions until
all points of view have been expressed and shared (Ayittey, 1991)? Had not the
history of Africa shown that Africans have their own ways of organizing their
world of work (Reader, 1998)? Had ‘modernization’ by the colonizers not
neglected the native cultural traditions too much and transferred too much of the
ready-made Western management views to traditional African soil? Admitting
that some of the African management practices might indeed be hybrid – in the
sense that a Burkinabé management style could not be clearly defined – we
turned away from an approach where management knowledge is only dealt with
in a universalist way. We began to appreciate Weick’s (1995) view on the issue
of the organizing process itself (‘sensemaking’ and ‘enactment’) and decided to
look at Burkinabé economic organizations willing to implement Western
management knowledge and explore the dialogue between the dominant
Western logic and a novel African logic (Giroux and Taylor, 1995). What kind
of dialogue could that be?
17
Phase two: Exploring new orientations in our research by way of
epistemological renewal
In the first phase of our journey, the research projects had taken management
knowledge as a set of predefined, reified objects that organizations could adopt.
It was furthermore presupposed that prescribed procedures could be adapted,
implemented effectively and become integrated within existing local
management practices. Based on a perusal of other literature, we decided to
fundamentally change our perspective and look at management knowledge as
constructed by managers who are interested in its meaning and relevance to the
improvement of existing organizational practices.
Managers are henceforward seen as actors (Hollis, 1996) translating
management concepts that circulate in the literature as idealized, de-
contextualized accounts of other organizational c.q. management practices. In
our new view of knowledge development, the conception of the role of the
managers shifted from that of target-setters, who impose management concepts
like MBO onto others, to social persons, who appreciate the meaning of a
concept as related to its practical use. Managers cannot know the meaning of
words without knowing the environment within which the word is used
(Watson, 1997). We explored a new field of interest in the management
literature that focuses on organizational discourse, narratives and dialogue
(Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996; Linell, 1998; Grant, Keenoy and Oswick, 1998).
Barry (1997) indicates that the focus on language itself has an interesting
impact, for example, on the way a strategy is being shaped. “If story telling is
the preferred sense-making currency of human relationship among internal and
external stakeholders, then surely strategy must rank as one of the most
prominent, influential and costly stories told in organizations”. The key success
factor in changing organizations and guiding them through translation into new
directions is the capability of managers in sense-making (Weick, 1995). Good
18
managers can move the members of an organization towards a shared
understanding while acting jointly with them. Instead of telling others what to
do, good managers are those who talk with the employees about what could be
done.
We therefore decided to embrace this new epistemic perspective and to
look at organizations as learning sites of plural rationalities, rival sets of rules
for ‘closure’ and models of content, which, as social collectives, they produce,
reproduce and transform through ongoing, interdependent and goal-oriented
communication practices (Cf Mumby and Clair, 1997). This perspective fits
with Granovetter’s view (1985) that action and context are mutually and
intricately embedded in one another. Individual managers function within
institutions like the family or the firm, and they embody, realize, reproduce and
change those institutions through their daily activities. The focus on
communication intends to perceive the manager as someone who is stimulating
the development of shared thinking, which evolves from effective
communication during collaborative activities. Partnerships will construct a
collective vision which guides action (Stewart, 2001).
Arbnor and Bjerke (1997: 187-188) stress that, with the focus on
communication and language, the actor perspective takes central stage and “is
guided by what language means to people’s way of life as a means of expressing
and intermediating knowledge and information in the form of language [….].
What goes on in organizations can therefore be seen as a language game. The
actor’s approach thus postulates that the use of language is controlled by more
or less visible rules that give meaning to the symbols and the actions. We can
talk of language games as containing ideological symbols, language referential
and ideological rules in which different language games also reflect different
live practices”. Instead of looking at managers from a purely individualistic
point of view, where intention is the focal point and monologism the action, we
turned to a perspective based on interaction, in order to understand how
19
concepts make sense in a communication process. In this new view, managers
are perceived as acting persons who, with a set of particular dispositions, are
able to implement particular management knowledge.
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus
Thus, management becomes a social construction, which, through dialogical acts
between participants in conversations, establishes agreement on the applicability
of a particular management concept. This approach is similar to what the French
philosopher/sociologist Bourdieu labels ‘habitus’. He introduces this notion to
overcome the pernicious dualism between objectivism and subjectivism. “These
two moments, the subjectivist and the objectivist, stand in dialectical relation. It
is this dialectic of objectivity and subjectivity that the concept of the habitus is
designed to capture and encapsulate” (Bourdieu, 1988: 782). He notes that both
points of view have something valuable to offer but aims to move beyond the
incompatibility of the two views and find a perspective that can reconcile them.
He looks at an actor as a subject who is, above all, a doing person, active in and
interactive with the world around him; a person who thinks because he does,
rather than the other way round. “Habitus is a system of durable, transposable
dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring
structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and
representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without
predisposing a conscious aiming at ends or an expressed mastery of the
operations necessary to maintain them” (Bourdieu, 1993: 5). Habitus is
composed of embodied dispositions, aesthetic perception and appreciation
patterns, as well as cognitive and normative interpretative frameworks. “These
dispositions and templates provide an individual with a habitus which provides a
‘feel for the game’ (‘sens du jeu’): it enables an infinite number of moves to be
20
made, adapted to the infinite number of possible situations which no rule,
however complex, can foresee” (Bourdieu quoted in Margolis, 1999: 70).
In other words, habitus embodies the idea of people's habitats and habits,
and highlights the deeply woven tapestry of individuals in the social context.
This system of dispositions inclines actors to act in particular ways acquired
through internalized knowledge of all the dispositions that the rules of the game
offer them as players. It can produce an infinite number of practices that are
relatively unpredictable but also limited in their diversity (Bourdieu, 1990: 55).
A manager can produce a variety of demeanors that belong to a certain class of
demeanors underlying the lifestyle of a particular group. This practical sense
will tell him (or her) what to do and when to do it. This is not informed by a set
of hard and fixed rules but by a set of embodied dispositions which together
make up the habitus. The habitus does not come with a precise set of rules, since
rules belong to the conscious mind, whereas habitus is internalized, hidden
beneath the surface, in the unconscious and in the body. It enables the actor to
produce subjective and individual responses. He can liberate himself from the
necessity of sticking to the rules and regulate improvisation.
With the habitus as point of reference, we decided to approach the
manager as a subject who, above all, is a doing person, active in and interactive
with the world around him. The manager does not experience an organizational
culture as a mental program (Cf Hofstede) but as a set of habitual practices
which enact a meaningful world.
Individuals interact with each other in a field in which practices become
constituted. These practices consist of dialogic actions. The language used in
these interactions serves to set up spaces of common action (Taylor, 1999). A
field presents itself to each actor as a “space of possibles” (Bourdieu, 1993: 64).
A field is a network or configuration of relations between positions actors take
in that field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 97). Bourdieu does not deny that, in
such a field, power relations play a dominant role. Unequal positions are
21
determined by a variety of power structures, which, in their turn, depend on the
background and status of the actors, i.e. their socio-economic positions. These
power relations, however, do not prevent interactions between members of an
organization in terms of a field that is open to communication and dialogue. The
relationship between habitus and field can be described as the interference of
dispositions (the feel for the game) and the position (the game itself). Bourdieu
sometimes uses examples from sports to illustrate his point of view. While
having a sense of the game, actors behave like football or tennis players who do
not apply a priori principles to their play but rather, with their intimate
understanding of the object of the game, have the practical flexibility to know
when and how they should behave. This “sense of the game” refers ultimately to
a sense of one’s relations with others and what these other actors will regard as
correct, given certain broadly shared but not definitive understandings (King,
2000).
With Bourdieu’s formula, “habitus + field = practice”, at hand, we
embarked on a new approach to understanding Burkinabé management
practices, recognizing the fact that the habitus of a manager can reflect a
reactionary attitude as much as a progressive one.
The case of Total Quality Management in Burkina Faso
Through interesting conversations with our Burkinabé colleagues and the
Burkinabé business community, we learned about a growing interest in
management concepts such as quality circles, continuous improvement and,
more recently, Total Quality Management (TQM). Since 1961, Quality Control
Circles (QCC) have been introduced in Japanese firms as a bottom-up
management strategy. QCC are small groups of six or seven people, organized
to help solve job-related quality problems in the company. “The Japanese Union
22
of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) had relentlessly advocated the circles
through their many chapters in the country. Top management got involved early,
so did middle management and foremen. The JUSE created a corporate
association with a mass constituency which explains its success” (Locke, 1996).
QCC gained popularity in the 1980s due to the success of the Japanese
economy. Locke (1996) even sees it as one of the concepts that led to the
collapse of the American management mystique with its pretension of providing
universally applicable knowledge.
In 1984, the Burkinabé government took the initiative through a
governmental body, the Direction de Controle et de Suivi des Societes d'Etat
(DCSE), to explore the applicability of QCC (Sawadogo, 1993). After some
field studies, a QCC project was launched in 1989. A Japanese engineer from
JUSE, Miyauchi, was invited to explain to an audience of one hundred and fifty
Burkinabé businessmen and civil servants how QCC had changed management
practices by reflecting Japanese cultural values and norms of social interaction.
Five Burkinabé companies decided to implement QCC. The World Bank agreed
to financially support the initiative.
During 1991, other Japanese engineers paid visits to Burkina to train local
trainers and assist in the dissemination of the QCC concept. The concept
obtained its own translation in ‘groupe progres permanent’ (GPP). Five other
Burkinabé firms and civil service departments decided to implement this
approach. In January 1992, the Association Burkinabé des Cercles de Qualité
(ABCERCQ) was launched, with financial support from Japan, to propagate and
diffuse the new approach. A delegation of Burkinabé businessmen was invited
on a study mission to Japan to learn on the spot about quality circles. An expert
from the World Bank showed that the implementation of quality circles had
obtained some success in Africa (Dia, 1996). In 1998, the Burkinabé
government created the national standardization unit to disseminate information
about standards, technical specificities and codes of practices, training on quality
23
and certification of companies, conforming to these standards.
The following year, the consultant Lim from Singapore delivered a report
that evaluated the ten-year experience with quality circles (Lim, 1999).
Although overall the report was positive, it expressed some particular concerns
that mainly had to do with a lack of active engagement by top management. It
turned out that top management was neither interested in quality circles nor
visibly engaged in discussions concerning the needs of the circles to get the
approach implemented. Organizations had hardly developed clear visions about
the effects of quality circle projects and subsequent strategies. Top management
lacked knowledge about the content of quality circles and were not adequately
trained to apply quality circle tools and road maps. Leadership and motivation
was lacking to implement quality circles effectively.
Transformation of organizations did not take place and necessary cultural
changes had not been taken into consideration. Lim advised that quality circle
coordinators should ‘engineer’ changes in both rank and file as well as top
management. Problem-solving activities should be based on team-based training
and experiential learning. The local trainers, however, should learn, try out and
improve by adapting QCC to the local context. The foremost issue was that
leadership should manifest itself physically by example. He noted that there
were only a few managing directors who were driving excellence and quality
improvements. Besides the low involvement of top management, he concluded
that managers in general manifested a lack of knowledge about the ways to
change organizational structures to effectively implement quality.
During the following years, the members of ABCERCQ met annually for
a few days to attend workshops and to share knowledge and experiences. In
order to strengthen the interest of top management in quality issues and make
them responsible for its implementation, ABCERCQ broadened its scope,
reached out for a more holistic view and turned its interest to Total Quality
Management (TQM). In 2001, WAEMU launched a broader quality program
24
with the assistance of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization
(UNIDO) and the European Union for a period of four years (with a 14 million
Euro budget). UNIDO stressed that managers’ misconceptions about continuous
improvements are the most important source of difficulties. Managers too often
expect instant results whereas it takes time before the benefits of quality
management become visible. In 2002, ABCERCQ changed its name into
l’Association Burkinabé pour le Management des Cercles de Qualite
(ABMACQ) stressing the fact that quality management was not just a vision and
strategy but had to become the new style of working. What was needed, above
all, was a proper translation into Burkinabé management practices.
Beyer et al. (1997) had shown how the concept of TQM could end up
with very different results in similar institutional settings. Whereas in one firm
management encouraged local experimentation, in another firm a tightly
implemented process was embraced and deviations were considered errors. In
other words, the concept allowed for rigidity as well as flexibility and creativity.
Apparently there was no agreement about the definition of quality. Initially this
was one of the great barriers to management’s rapid adoption of practices that
intended to improve quality. But very soon that negative view changed into a
challenge. “Because of the vagueness of the concept and its correlates, firms and
industries were free within a certain range to interpret it, position it, and adopt
those practices that fit particular corporate traditions and industry imperatives”
(Cole, 1999: 11). Its ambiguity provided managers with freedom to determine,
in their own language, their visions of continuous improvement. “The rhetorical
TQM exploded into a broadly used, ambiguous term with unclear organizational
implications” (Zbaracki, 1998: 603). Despite its ambiguity, the goals of (total)
quality management are to improve product performance and zero-defect
production, which will lead to improved customer satisfaction. Although the
migration of this management concept was speedy, Balance (1995: 4) draws the
conclusion that “in developing countries the pace of acceptance (of this and
25
similar concepts) is far too slow”.
Because TQM as a management concept was quite vague (Deming never
used the term (Petersen, 1999)), it offered enough opportunities for Burkinabé
management to design its own leadership and vision on the topic. The concept
certainly gained ground while the overarching logic of privatization – as
propagated by the Structural Adjustment Programs – stimulated the urgency for
far-reaching changes in Burkinabé management practices. TQM was embraced
as a new way of operating Burkinabé economic organizations. The vagueness of
the concept opened the way for multiple interpretations and a constructivist
procedural approach to the implementation of TQM. With a certain pathos,
TQM obtained the status of a mantra, which increased its popularity.
Research projects on Total Quality Management in Burkina Faso
Having explored some key issues concerning leadership, professional identities,
the position of middle managers, the role of language and the shaping of a
managerial habitus in Burkinabé organisations as prerequisites for the study of
quality issues, we decided to direct our attention to the implementation of TQM.
A range of different companies, located in industrial parks in Ouagadougou and
Bobo Diaolasso and operating in agro-industry, food and industrial production,
were visited and interviews were held with managers and employees in order to
gain an understanding of the actual application of TQM. The young Dutch
researchers were assisted by Burkinabé Business Administration students to help
overcome language barriers. Topics such as leadership, teamwork, customer
service, organisational culture and learning were covered.
26
Box 1. A review of new research projects
Sodepal (Ouagadougou)
Sodepal (Société d’ Exploitation de Produits Alimentaires) was founded by Madame
Zoundi in 1978. Besides the bakery, the company has a patisserie and biscuit production.
In 1992 Sodepal, in cooperation with a French company, started to produce ‘farine
infantile’ to counter the malnutrition of Burkinabé children. Sodepal recently installed a
Service Department to deal with the delivery, promotion and selling of their products. The
managing director has a policy to prefer women as employees. She indicated that quality
control of the products and the production process is essential to safeguard the continuity
of her company.
Brakina, beer producer (Ouagadougou)
Brakina is a large brewery with more than 300 employees and production locations in
Ouaga and Bobo Diaolasso. It produces a variety of brands of beer, including Brakina,
SoBeBra, Castel and even Guinness, and has a licence to produce various soft drinks like
Coca Cola, Sprite and Fanta. The company applies strict quality controls to comply with
license criteria. Continuous inspection by staff of the laboratory guarantees quality.
SNCitec, chemical plant (Bobo Diaolasso)
SNCitec (Société Nouvelle Huilerie et Savonnerie) is a production plant and a subsdiary
of a French multinational. It manufactures various kinds of oils, soap, animal food, peanut
sauce and sesame crackers. The French company still plays the supervisory role by
regularly sending staff to inspect and assist.
Sofitex, cotton mill (Bobo Diaolasso)
Sofitex is the largest group of cotton mills in Burkina Faso focussing on export. The
company has put in place quality control circles and controls the whole logistic channel,
from seed to customer, in order to minimize the risk of lawsuits and penalties.
Brafaso, non-alcoholic beverage producer (Ouagadougou)
Brafaso is a new company challenging Brakina, which for years had a monopoly in the
beverage industry. Brafaso produces only non-alcoholic beverages but intends to start
producing beer as well. The production line is newly imported from Germany and the
process is fully automated with local operators running it. The management team is
composed of Africans who have long careers and familiarity with the topic of quality
control.
Tan-Aliz, tanning company (Ouagadougou)
Tan-Aliz was privatized in 1992 but, thanks to its two factories, it still has a monopoly in
the tanning industry. The general director is very concerned about quality control.
Fasoplast, plastics manufacturer (Ouagadougou)
Fasoplast has installed quality control circles. Members of the management team
indicated that the general director encouraged initiatives from the shop floor. Although
the management style has changed from an authoritarian to a participative approach, the
attitude of cooperation between middle managers and employees did not yet reflect this.
27
All the companies in these research projects indicated that they were familiar
with TQM. In general, the interviewed managers were in favor of TQM but
admitted that its translation into practice was complicated and sometimes
stagnated in their respective companies. It was difficult to trace the script of
routines that reflect new practices based on TQM, which might indicate that
TQM has become part of routine and normality and is no longer conspicuously
executed except in specifically planned contexts (Mueller & Carter, 2005).
A variety of reasons for the lack of implementation was expressed:
• The level of illiteracy in the firms is high and makes a proper
understanding of TQM difficult.
• Access to the internal informal communication within an
organization (“ordre de bavardage” according to Etchegoyen (2004:
135)) requires particular language skills (languages other than
French are spoken) and makes translation a complicated matter.
• The hierarchical structure in the company prevents the
implementation of a participative approach between middle
managers and employees.
• Systematic attention to improving worker satisfaction is lacking.
• A system of continuous training is required but difficult to put in
place.
• Motivation amongst employees and trust in top management are
low.
Even if managers had appropriated the techniques of TQM, it was unclear
how far it had become an integral part of their managerial habitus. One
commercial manager illustrated this by saying: “Bosses in Africa have often
been to Europe to learn about cooperation with employees, asking their opinion,
but when they get back to Africa they will still act like the boss, and allow no
room for opinions of lower ranked employees. This is true for bosses in all
28
ranks. It seems that cultural assumptions about how bosses should behave are
more influential than schools. But of course they will tell you what they have
learned in the Western schools”. Apparently, cognitive mimetic learning has
taken place but a fundamental shift in the habitus of the Burkinabé manager
does not seem to be prevalent yet. The willingness to share a new policy based
on TQM with other participants in the organization has not yet resulted in a new
management logic.
Does this have to do with culturally specific forms of organizational
structures not yet being adapted? The majority of the organizations that have
been studied are still coordinated in a hierarchical and bureaucratic way, which
keeps managers in a position that requires communication in monologues of
planning and control. If we distinguish four stages in the development of quality
management starting with quality inspection (1930s), quality engineering
(1950s), quality assurance (1970s) and total quality management (1990s), we
may say that, overall, the organizations that have been studied can be positioned
between quality engineering and quality assurance.
The one feature most lacking in these analyses was the role of dialogue.
During discussions on these outcomes with Burkinabé students during the
research seminars in Ouagadougou, the students indicated that they would have
difficulties themselves in translating management concepts into particular
African realities because training in this kind skill is still missing.
Because the employees spoke Moré or another local language that the
Dutch students did not speak, the researchers had support from Burkinabè
students in understanding what happened at shop-floor level. But even with this
language assistance, it was difficult to determine how TQM techniques were
actually embedded in organizational practices. As Falola (2003) indicates, the
issue of mastering a foreign language in order to grasp the essentials of the
implementation of a particular management concept has yet to be promoted in
the African context. This seems to be the case as much in West Africa as in East
29
Africa. “To some critics, English is the language of domination, colonialization
and imperialism. At one level, it allows the West to dominate Africa, at another
level, it enables elites to dominate the country. Many defenders of culture and
tradition think that the use of English is undermining the preservation and
practices of home-grown institutions” (Falola, 2003: 239). Although Falola does
not agree with these critics, he admits that the variety of local languages in
African countries reflects a diversity and heterogeneity within the population
and workforce which should be explored. Kamoche (1999: 55) notes that “the
essence of African culture is in reality a melange of about 2,000 linguistic
groups that fall into Bantu, Hamitic, Nilotic, Arabic, Asian, European and other
subcategories. Cameroon has over 200 ethnic groups, while Kenya has about
40”. In Burkina Faso about 80 different ethnic groups live together and about the
same number of languages are spoken.
During the conversations about the research results, Burkinabé students
suggested that the activities undertaken by managers to improve quality issues
could be seen as a particular ability to improvise. This was a very interesting
comment. The issue of improvisation has recently attracted notable attention in
management literature. Improvisation does not refer to a sudden intervention to
solve a fluctuation in regular organizational routines, but is “a practice which
contains a different vision of work in organizations” (Ciborra 1999 A: 142).
Ciborra further notes (1999 B: 78) that “improvisations are
simultaneously rational and unpredictable, planned and emergent, purposeful
and blurred, effective and irreflexive, perfectly discernible after the fact, but
spontaneous in its manifestation”. Improvisation is not inherently a good thing
(Crossan e.a., 2005) but Kamoche (2002: 7) notes that it can restore “a sense of
pro-activity in individuals (and teams) and the potential for experimentation
outside the often rigid structures of planned organisational change”.
If managers in Burkinabé economic organizations improvize frequently
beyond the planned organizational coordination, then the analysis of situated
30
actions will have to be redefined. One such step is stressed by Mangaliso (2001)
who notes that in the South African context Ubuntu embodies the beliefs, values
and behaviours of a large majority of the South African population. Ubuntu may
guide the development of managerial practices into new forms of TQM that
include the capacity to improvise. Ubuntu reflects what people value both in
their social life and in their work in economic organizations. Ubuntu is
characterized by reciprocity and humanizes social interactions, and in that sense
shows a family resemblance with the purpose of TQM. Similar concepts will
have to be explored for the West African setting (Karsten & Illa, 2005). The
cases studied so far indicate that the Japanese concept of TQM shares features
that are cherished in the African business context. The translation process,
however, has not yet been crafted into a new approach during the time these
research projects were executed.
Conclusions
The journey we have made so far has provided discovery, exploration and
personal transformation. It has shaped an atmosphere in which many kinds of
transitions and transformations concerning the transfer of knowledge have been
experienced (Gabriel, 2004). The adoption of management concepts does not
necessarily follow from their scientific credibility and it certainly is not solely
determined by economic or technological factors. “For ideas to be adopted in
practice, institutional circumstances have to be conducive” (Guillen, 1994: 1).
During the years of cooperation with the University of Ouagadougou’s Faculty
of Economics and Management, we began to recognize the relevance of this
statement. Our journey started as a project with the clear goal of assisting local
initiatives in Burkina to become organizations that improve efficiency by
diffusing management knowledge as it is acknowledged and formulated in an
31
explicit way.
Midway in this journey, the perspective changed into a processual
approach for which we needed a new framework. Management became,
epistemologically speaking, approached from a constructivist perspective. An
actor dimension together with Bourdieu’s habitus provided a new framework.
We became critical of unwarranted assumptions about the transferability of
management knowledge in the form of Western management concepts,
techniques and methods to the African continent.
If concepts that have been developed in the West are to be diffused in
Africa, their diffusion will be to the extent that they can offer insights about a
range of options available for crafting African organizations. We believe that the
framework we began to design during the second part of our journey may help
to recognize the tremendous variety in the African management context. African
managers, like other employees, bring their indigenous thought-systems to the
organization to interpret, construct and ascribe meaning to actions that take
place (Kamoche, 1999). Conversations and dialogue may assist accepted
customs, beliefs and practices from family life to become respected in industrial
work life. A team of authors who call themselves An Afro-centric Alliance
(2000:72), representing different African management institutes, warned
correctly that it would be meaningless to ask for one single ‘Afro-centric’ view
of the organization and its management. There is simply too much variety to be
recognized. In this sense Dia’s statement (1991:47) is still relevant: “l’Afrique
peut se développer sans perdre son âme, à condition que ses dirigeants y
introduisent une forme particulière de management jusqu’à présent trop souvent
ignorée.” African-ness in management has still to be identified.
Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is a helpful guide for exploring the way Burkinabé
management actions provide a sense of community that structures the discourse
and coordination of the Burkinabé manager and business man/woman. It
expresses the embeddedness of management practices in Africa. It also shows
32
that translating management concepts from the industrialized business world
into an African setting will involve a change in the interpretations of these
concepts. Coordinating an economic organization based on such a habitus will
create a context of discourse that promotes innovation and learning. Above all, it
may stimulate interactive rationality amongst actors who prefer to structure their
interactions rather than their own way of reasoning. Burkinabé managers may
gain from the transfer of organizational improvements and management views
as they prevail in the Western world, however, they may gain even more if they
promulgate a habitus which is based on interactive rationality. One way to
promote the development of that kind of habitus is to design a business school
program that strengthens the ability to translate these modern management
concepts into forms that reflect a particular African meaning or, in other words,
obtain African-ness. This African-ness creates a synthesis between the
constructivist perspective, which states that modern management knowledge has
to be translated within the African context through dialogue, and the
communitarian perspective, which calls for a return to the source and restores
the position of flesh and blood communities that comprise Africa.
There is no better way to conclude our own journey than to refer to a
wonderful metaphor of the well-known African author, Amadou Hampâté Bâ. It
is a nice illustration of what interactive rationality means to us and of how we
have become pupils of master Tierno Bokar. In Bâ’s novel Oui mon
commandant (1954), Bokar instructs his pupils that there are three truths: mine,
yours and The Truth. He compares the latter to the full moon and then writes:
“My truth, like your truth, are only fractions of The Truth. They are the sickles
of the moon, located in different parts of the perfect circle of the full moon.
Most of the time, when we talk, we listen only to ourselves, our sickles of the
moon turn their backs to each other; and the more we talk, the more they
distance themselves from the full moon, in other words, from The Truth. We
33
first have to turn, one towards the other, become conscious that the other exists,
and begin to listen to the other. Then our two sickles of the moon will turn
towards each other, get closer to each other little by little, and perhaps, finally,
meet each other in the great circle of The Truth. It is there, and only there, that
conjunction can take place”
3
.
3
“Ma verité, comme ta verité, ne sont que des fractions de la Verité. Ce sont des croissants de lune situés de part
et d’autre du cercle parfait de la pleine lune. La plupart du temps, quand nous discutons et que nous n’écoutons
que nous-mêmes, nos croissants de lune se tournent le dos; et plus nous discutons, plus ils s’éloignent de la
pleine lune, autrement dit de la Vérité. Il nous faut d’abord nous retourner l’un vers l’autre, prendre conscience
que l’autre existe, et commencer à l’écouter. Alors nos deux croissants de lune vont se faire face, se rapprocher
peu à peu et peut-être, finalement, se rencontrer dans le grand cercle de la Vérité. C’est là, et là seulement, que
peut s’operér la conjunction.” Bâ, A.H. (1994), Oui, mon commandant, Arles, Actes Sud.
34
Appendix 1
List of research projects in economic organizations in Burkina
Faso conducted by Dutch business administration students from
the Faculty of Organization and Management of the University of
Groningen (1994-2005)
Name Title Dissertation
approved
1 Steven Stolp Le marketing au CNSF, une contribution? 1994
2 Ilse H. van der
Veen
Le pagne de Faso Fani au Burkina Faso,
une reconnaissance du marche
1995
3 Ina Konterman Prendre les renes:La Caisse de Manga 1995
4 Daan Tiernego La Viabilité de la Caisse de Manga 1996
5 Ingrid van
Zutphen
La Caisse d'Eparne, de Crédit et de
Commercialisation (CECC) à Manga
1997
6 Maurice J.T.H.
Willemsen
Which direction to choose in a liberalized
market, the case of Sosuco
1996
7 Doreen Smits Cost based activity systems; the Sosuco case 1997
8 Esther E.
Beneder
L'approvisionnement et la distribution des
intrants agricoles au Sanmatenga
1998
9 Bianca Kamps Middle management in Burkina Faso 1997
10 Lucy Kuis Leadership styles in Burkinabé companies 1997
11 Reinout B. Brons Leadership in layers, an orienting study on
leadership in Africa
1998
12 Aart Jan
Zwartscholten
Speaking of African Management 1999
13 Patrick de Lange L’Habitus du directeur Burkinabé 1999
14 Claudine Koers The professional in Burkina Faso in
cultural perspective
2000
15 Henriëtte S.
Scheele
Business Development in Burkina Faso 2000
16 Tessa van de
Wiel
Talking Burkina Faso 2002
17 Ilona Pouels Management of meaning 2000
18 Sharon Becker Cooperation in Burkinabé management
teams
2004
19 Elly Lont Quality management in Burkina Faso,
dialogue or monologue
2004
20 Erik Cazemier The use of TQM in Burkina Faso 2005
35
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41
About the authors:
Luchien Karsten is Professor in the Foundations of Management, Faculty of
Management and Organization, University of Groningen, the Netherlands,
Visiting Professor at Nottingham Trent Business School and at IGR-IAE of the
University of Rennes I. During 1988-2005 he has been coordinator of a project
between the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) and the University of
Groningen (the Netherlands). Trained as economist and philosopher, his
research interests focus on time and organization and the actual development of
time-space orientation in organizations. Additionally, he is interested in
management concepts that are used to describe and analyse organizations in
different contexts and continents as well as the history of multinationals.
Bartjan Pennink is Assistant Professor in Research Methodology at the Faculty
of Management and Organization, University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
Besides lecturing in the regular program of business administration, he also
contributes to some MBA programs like TSM business school and courses for
PhD students in business administration (NOBEM). During 1991-2003 he was
involved in the project between the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)
and the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). His research, leading to his
doctoral thesis, focuses on the way managers cooperate in teams, how they cope
with different perceptions about a similar management topic and how they cope
with diversity in management teams. Beside this main focus, he is interested in
African management and business research methodology. Since January 2006 he
is coordinator of a project between the Institute of Finance Management in Dar
es Salaam (Tanzania) and the University of Groningen.
CDS Research Reports
R. Lensink, N. Hermes, Regulatory Change and the Allocation of Finance:
the Role of Business Conglomerates in the Case of Chili, 1983-1992, No 1
A. Maatman, C. Schweigman, A. Ruys, Synopsis of a Linear Programming
Study of Farmers' Strategies on the Central Plateau in Burkina Faso, No
2
N.Hermes, New Explanations of the Economic Success of East Asia:
Lessons for Developing and Eastern European Countries, No 3
State, Society and Ethnicity in Developing Countries: Lessons from the
1990s; Lectures by Naomi Chazan, Martin Doornbos, Jan Pronk and
Caspar Schweigman at the occassion of the festive opening of the Centre
or Development Studies, February 1997, No 4
M. Thissen, P. Kerkhof, The Dynamics of Reform Policy: a new political
economy model with an application to Egypt, No 5
R. Lensink, O. Morrissey, Aid Instability as a Measure of Uncertainty and
the Positive Impact of Aid on Growth, No 6
N. Hermes, W.Salverda (eds.), State, Society and Development: Lessons for
Africa, No 7
T. Thiombiano, La Loi de Pareto: une loi sur l'inégalité ou sur la
pauvreté? Réponses théorique et empirique, No 8
E. Sterken, Demand for Money and Shortages in Ethiopia, No 9
C. Lutz (ed.), Food Markets in Burkina Faso, No 10
ZhongXiang Zhang, Why has the Energy Intensity fallen in China’s
Industrial Sector in the 1990s ?, No 11
P. Boele van Hensbroek (ed), African Renaissance and Ubuntu
Philosophy, .No 12
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R. Lensink and O. Morrissey, The Volatility of FDI, not the Level, affects
Growth in Developing Countries, No 13
F. K. Hien, L’Entrepreneuriat Feminin au Burkina Faso : Une Etude
Exploratoire, No 14
C. Lutz, Food Markets and Food Security in West Africa, No 15
C. Schweigman, Developmental Research in Africa : Some Lessons, No
16
M. Kamminga, On Global Justice, No. 17
P. Weesie en J. van Andel, On Biodiversity and its Valuation, No 18
C. Schweigman, Food Security: Opportunities and Responsibilities, Or:
the Illusion of the Exclusive Actor, No 19
C. Schweigman, La Sécurité Alimentaire: Opportunité et Responsabilité.
Ou: l’Illusion de l’Acteur Exclusif, No 19a
A. Adegbidi, H. Dedehouanou, S. Kpenavoun, C. Lutz, Dix Ans de
Libéralisation du Marché de Mais au Bénin, No 20
P. Boele van Hensbroek, H. Schoenmakers (eds), From Social Exclusion
to Lifelong Learning in Southern Africa, No 21
M. van der Waal, Helen Wilcox (eds.), Experience and Identity in Recent
South African Literature, No 22
Visser, H. Van der Heuvel-Disler (eds.), Family Fictions, No. 23
Fitsum Ghebregiorgis and Luchien Karsten, Human Resource
Management in Eritrea: Current and Future Trends, No. 24
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