Cyclical history

I was reading an article in BusinessWeek about trends that lead companies and the marketing in our contemporary society. The article is called "Scientific management is past its peaks." The author, Roger L. Martin, comments that current trends rely on highly developed statistical analysis and complex softwares that strongly influence the process of decision making. Martin points out that this over reliance on scientific analysis may have reached its developmental limit. That is, where else can this method go? If the computer performs all the analyses, it might-as-well make the decisions and carry them through as well. Why do we need managers and decision makers? Statistics can tell whether we need the brand new cell phone with all the works (and of course, advertisements will compel us and make us buy the phone). Well, I don't need a camera on my phone, so why should I buy one with such feature? This is exactly the point that Martin wants to make: different people have different needs and different uses for products. What we need to do is to understand more these people and their needs, and be a little less concerned on the numbers about them. Martin sees a come back of qualitative analysis.

Two things came to my mind as I read the article. First, it reminded me that history is cyclical. If we simply think in terms of historical periods, we can see that certain characteristics from a previous period, disregarded in the present period, return in the next period. For example, the Middle Ages were marked by a strong religiosity and spirituality. The Renascence valued the exactitude of scientific methods. The Baroque period saw an increase in religiosity. Maybe the scientific hype of the 20th century is reaching a point in which the person has to be reconsidered.

This leads me to the second aspect that came to my mind. I am involved in the field of education, and although it is taught that we need to consider the wide diversity of students, and provide them with appropriate resources for their learning and development, what is found in most studies is exactly what Martin mentioned in his article: statistics leading the decisions. The students may be diverse, but for the purposes of allocation of needed resources, they are just numbers. Standardized tests only reinforce this trend. I am not generalizing and stating that all that is done in education is number crunching; great qualitative studies provide the complement knowledge that the quantitative approach alone cannot provide. So, on the same lines as Martin's claims, I too would see education moving to a more humanistic arena. However, since the field of education is normally a little behind other fields in terms of methodological and ideological development, the scientific approach may not have reached its peak yet, but as I said, history is cyclical, and the wheel of fortune is always turning.