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Postmodern Management: Past-Perfect or Future-Imperfect?Author(s): Norman Jackson and Pippa CarterSource: International Studies of Management & Organization, Vol. 22, No. 3, PostmodernManagement & Organization: The Implications for Learning 2 (Fall, 1992), pp. 11-26Published by: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40397213 .

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Int. Studies ofMgt. & Org., Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 1 1-26 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 1992

Norman Jackson and Pippa Carter

Postmodern Management Past-Perfect or Future-Imperfect?

There seems to be a crisis in management, both in terms of practice and in terms of the discipline. The former might be seen as exemplified in the evidence of increasing numbers of companies experiencing seri- ous difficulties, as recession bites deeper, which were previously deemed replete with indicators of excellence. The latter can be found in the impression of ossification in the dominant orthodoxy of management theory, signified by ever more frequent outpourings of standard texts that all bear striking resemblance to each other, and that thus convey the sad awareness of the paucity of theoretical development in the mainstream over the last twenty years. At the same time, challenges to the orthodoxy tend to be either incorporated into it, or ignored by it - witness the continuing and continuous debate about where the boundaries of the discourse should be. Of course, there are genuflections in the direction of various "new" areas, such as ethics, but couched very much in ordinary language concepts, with no real

Norman Jackson is a Lecturer in the Management Division at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Pippa Carter is a Lecturer in the School of Manage- ment at the University of Hull, UK. This paper is a revised version of a paper presented at the International Workshop on Critical Stances on Management Learning in Organisations: "Postmodern Management: The Implications for Learning," held at EADA, Barcelona, in September 1989. It should be noted at the outset that, while it may be convenient to talk about the postmodern world, or postmodern management, or even, as Drucker (1990) does, the postmodern fac- tory, such terms are no more than heuristics. They imply that it is the world which has changed, rather than our understanding of it. Since postmodernism is a way of understanding, such usage must be recognized as being pragmatic rather than appropriate.

11



12 JACKSON AND CARTER (UK)

indication that the foundational theory has been adopted into the field, or even defined. Other "new" areas such as organizational culture have been ravenously seized upon and rapidly incorporated into mainstream theory and practice, only to be found wanting when bereft of their theoretical underpinnings, and then discarded. The problem is not that these and other such areas have nothing constructive to offer per se, but that their use is defined as viable only in certain ways which fit the precepts of this dominant orthodoxy - their worth is not defined by any evaluation of intrinsic potential but by how well they can be incoipo- rated into the assumptions, methods, and metatheory of a discipline that we would characterize as profoundly modernist. And, as such, in both theory and practice, management is suffering from the same deficiency that is afflicting modernism in virtually all its guises, and that has been articulated as the failure of the modernist project.

The response to this increasingly apparent failure of modernism has been dubbed postmodernism. While this phenomenon is subject to a variety of interpretations, we wish to use the term in the spirit of Lyotard's (1984) characterization of it as a natural consequence of modernism, but one that actively addresses modernism's shortcom- ings. This characterization usefully highlights the common element of postmodernism in all its many forms, the fundamental questioning of a totalizing rationality based on science.

Modernist explanations, particularly in management, seem to have reached their most refined forms in about the 1960s, but since then they seem to have found it nigh impossible to offer any further new insights into the management of organizations, however much the increasingly acknowledged inadequacy of existing explanations seemed to warrant them. The response to the hiatus has not been uniform, and in at least one manifestation has constituted an attempt to revamp existing modernist concepts, albeit stripped of their previous attach- ment to a basis in objective rationality. Such attempts have been no more successful than their modernist predecessors - witness the current crisis. An opposing postmodern approach seeks not to recycle old concepts but to redefine the very function of management and, on that basis, to reassess what should constitute the significant content of management education. This paper seeks to consider the implications and potential value of the insights of postmodernism for the discipline of management, and to highlight the advantages such an approach might offer in comparison to the current modernist approach.



POSTMODERN MANAGEMENT 13

Modernist management and postmodern thinking

To date, management has been a quintessentially modernist discipline, and, as such, has excluded certain structures of knowledge - forms of knowing - a priori. Management has been constituted as a form of hermetic knowledge that classed any approach that questioned its problematic as heretical. Mant (1979, pp. 12, 14) uses the term "the magic brotherhood" to describe management, and talks of it as surrounded by "a plethora of myths, shibboleths and incantations" (see also Heller, 1972; Handy, 1978). Modernism can be seen as characterized, ideally, by the use of science as the one proper means to solve social problems-what Habermas (1981, pp. 4-5) describes as "The belief, in- spired by modern science, in the infinite progress of knowledge and in the infinite advance towards social and moral betterment . . . modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative" (emphasis added). It is a doctrine that functions at, and is relevant to, all levels of social practice. And, characteristic of the domination by science is a totalizing, uncontestable quality, based on its imputed rela- tion to observation and objectivity - the concretely real and therefore objectively true. The inherent ability of modernism to de- fine its own rightness through its roots in value-neutral scientific rationality and the "one best way" cast any questioning of its tenets as self-evidenüy irrational and, worse, ideological - the Enlightened versus the unEnlightened.

Arguably, however, a major obstacle to the development of management knowledge has been just this albatross of scientific rationality. Management as an educational subject must be unusual in comprising a body of "knowledge," taught repeatedly, that is widely acknowledged to be deeply flawed, and as not producing the returns promised. This critique applies at a number of levels in terms of both message and medium. At the epistemological level, Maclntyre (1981), for example, argues that a stock of scientific management knowledge does not even exist, and that what is claimed as scientific is, rather, ideologically constrained. Similar claims of ideological bias are also made by writers such as Baritz (1975), on management research, and Alvesson (1987), on organization theory. Anthony (1986) argues that the aim of

management education is to change behavior, not understanding, and that this results in what he calls the "general banality" of management education (p. 140). Wassenburg (1977) argues further, that theories of




organization are generally impoverished and have poor explanatory power. Eilon (1985) notes that management theory and practice are both widely influenced by fashion and fad. Stone (1982) comments that approaches are often weak in terms of theory and empirical base, and similar comment is made by Clegg and Dunkerley (1977). Not surprisingly, the utility of management theory is also widely questioned, for example by Beyer (1982) and Eilon (1985). There is also a trenchant critique of the way management education is delivered. Freedman and Stumpf (1982) argue that the process is poorly understood, that techniques often have questionable validity and are un- generalizable, and that criteria are dominated by student satisfaction rather than intellectual rigor, a point also raised by Anthony (1986), who offers a pervasive critique of both content and institutional context. This list is by no means exhaustive: in every aspect of the field, at both micro and macro levels, there are writers expressing doubt about the integrity and effectiveness of management knowledge. As an example, Robbins (1991, p. 193) notes of theories of motivation:

The 1950s were a fruitful period in the development of motivation concepts. Three specific theories [i.e., Maslow, McGregor and Herzberg] were formulated during this period, which, though heavily attacked and now questionable in terms of validity, are probably the best known explanations for employee motivation.

It is unremarkable, however, that they are so well known when most organizational behavior textbooks, often uncritically, include them. What is surprising is the number of criticisms that are made without apparently having comparably significant impact on the practice of management education. Generally, the (intrinsically ideological) rationality of capitalism has effectively provided a filter both in terms of what subjects are held to be relevant to management, and in terms of what should be the correct content of those subjects (see also, e.g., Thompson, 1983). In fact, management could be seen as having a standardized international curriculum (based largely on North Ameri- can theory and practice), taught the world over and with only a rare nod in the direction of such concepts as national culture (see, e.g., Davies et al., 1989) - even then, usually in terms of how to impose a Western-style organization (the one best form) on any given culture. In the "people" area, for example, this orthodoxy has endowed management knowledge with a Tolkien-like quality. Organizations become a




kind of middle earth, where human reality is suspended and a new fantasy logic obtains - yet lived in all seriousness. Stories are told of Gandalf-like managers and GoUum-like trade union officials, people are motivated by quests for mystical tokens such as job satisfaction, congruency between individual and organizational goals, excellence, and so on. Sanctified as, and by, science, all this is not understood as fantasy, however, in the modernist world - it is all perfectly straight- faced, and granted the status of a life-and-death struggle.

Although "managerial" modernism is still definitely alive, as with other areas of human knowledge, there is evidence of postmodernist responses to its failings. These responses are typified precisely by Foster's (1985) distinction between reactive and resistive postmodernisms. The reactive response, in management no less than in other areas, has had the most immediate appeal, and can be characterized simplisticially as the call for increased levels of control (despite the simultaneous platitudes about increased personal freedom) and a regression to the values of a previous "golden age." While this is most obvious - in the sense of being available to observation - in the realm of disciplines such as architecture, it is also, though less overtly, present in the discipline of management, evidenced, for example, in the

increasingly common approach to problem solving of recycling old and discarded concepts - calls for a return to discredited approaches of a previous era. It is, indeed, the essence of reactive postmodernism that it seeks solutions in the past and the known, where, although efficacy might be in doubt, the all-important form of knowledge is not. As

Rogers (1990, pp. 25-26) has said of (reactive) postmodernism in architecture, it "has degenerated . . . into a shallow decoration, a self-

indulgent playing with symbols Early modernists sought to evolve new forms and building types appropriate for an industrial democratic society, their Post-Modernist successors have been reduced to tinker- ing with cornices and pediments." This seems to be precisely analo-

gous with the reactive postmodern approach to management. Characteristic of the reactive approach is that it deals in claimed

certainties, the perfection of the past, which is indeed its popular appeal - even though the past to which it refers is not the actual past but

merely a nostalgic illusion of it. Perhaps more importantly, it ignores the knowledge that it is an illusion that the past can ever be known, let alone certain (Foucault 1972). In contrast, the resistive version of postmodernism has little such comfort to offer, dealing as it does with




the real uncertainties of the world, the imperfect future, and thus achieving little popularity - though experience shows that popular appeal does not necessarily correlate with knowledge. Whereas reactive postmodernism can never offer more than more of the same thing recycled, resistive postmodernism does at least offer the possibility of a radically new understanding of management. Of course, it is precisely this newness that detracts from popular appeal: the language of reactive postmodernism is, in terms of signifiers, very much the old language of the discipline of management (although arguably the signifieds are considerably modified), while resistive postmodernism inescapably presents itself as a new language, which thus appears to make access to it more difficult. Though in the poststructuralist sense there appears to be a new language and a new text of reactive postmodernism in management, this language is, in practice and in principle, no more than a refurbished version of something that was a generation or two ago consigned to the attic of management knowledge. The fundamental deficiency in this is the singular inappropriateness of trying to solve new problems with old concepts (Beer, 1978; Carter and Jack- son, 1987). The language of resistive postmodernism, on the other hand, as a new language, offers the possibility of new understandings and thus, in a practical sense, the possibility of introducing new items to the agenda of management learning. This applies in terms of subject areas, but also to epistemological and pedagogic aspects.

Management as epistemology

The emergence of postmodernism - understood at its most basic as a loss of faith in the rational, in the unquestioned authority of objectivity, and in the efficacy of science in fulfillment of its "modernist project" - has provided an opportunity for a substantive expansion of our understanding of what management is all about. Whereas "before," entry into debate that challenged modernism was on the basis of modernism's precepts for itself, and was thus doomed to failure, the development of postmodernist theorizing, with its emphasis on inter- pretation, difference, ambiguity, uncertainty, and so on, provides a radically new framework from which to enter the debate. It has become possible to redefine the ontological and epistemological agenda. It is no longer necessary to accept modernism's definition of its own




lightness because this in itself is now open to question. In effect, we now exist in a truly revolutionary situation epistemologically (Jackson and Carter, 1991). Gouldner, in 1976, made the point that: "Rationality is ... the capacity to make problematic what had hitherto been treated as given" - a point that, in retrospect, seems almost a precept for postmodernism.

The theorizing that has established the framework for understanding which we now call postmodernism has taken as its first imperative this very principle. Nothing should be accepted simply on the basis of its own claims to veracity; all is open to question, indeed, all must be questioned. Postmodernism thus provides us with a long overdue and desperately needed opportunity to reexamine the role and content of both management and management education.

From the point of view of postmodernism, modernist management knowledge is often either laughable or dangerous, depending on one's degree of pessimism. The apparent compulsion to teach, and to em- ploy, strategies and techniques that, as has been noted, are known not to "produce the goods" makes management education, and management practice, seem either lemming-like - advocating and pursuing courses of action that are positively detrimental to the welfare and/or self-interest of the practitioner, such as prioritizing profit at the ex- pense of the ozone layer, or blandly uncaring about the ends that are supposedly being served, such as social good. It seems, indeed, that modernist management education is dogmatically determined within a particular and beyond-question context. The ends are served to the extent that they can be served within that particular framework.

A postmodernist approach, on the other hand, with its focus on the de-centering of the subject and the consequent intrinsic challenge to authority, denies the automatic validity of self-serving prescriptions furnished by a self-validating elite. The agenda would no longer be determined solely by narrow considerations of efficient creation of profit but would have to recognize more humanistic concepts such as play and the quality of life and the questioning of transcendent rationality. It would consist in defining the desired ends first of all on that basis, and then in producing solutions toward those ends whose effi-

cacy is principally determined by their ability to satisfy them, whatever

they may be. In its acceptance of the inevitable role of ideology, sub-

jectivity, relativity7 and power, postmodernism includes these elements in the process of judgment of solution efficacy, while the modernist




would see them as elements to be purged - indeed, might view their purging as superordinate to the efficacy of the solution in solving the problem at issue (Burrell, 1989).

Epistemologically, the difference between the two can be encapsu- lated by extrapolation of Foucault's distinction between total and general history. The total approach to knowledge is intrinsically modernist and is typified in management education - see, for example, Cohen, March and Olsen's (1972) "solutions looking for problems." Cunning- ham (1990) notes that management education is treated as if it is a unified body of essential knowledge that exists in nature and is there to be discovered by competent scientists - precisely the characteristics of "totalist" epistemologies. The problem-centered general approach de- fines relevance in terms of contribution to problem solution, rather than, for example, in terms of disciplinary boundaries, and is typically postmodernist. It is, moreover, from any but a modernist point of view, what must be most appropriate to management education, as it is to management itself, the problem-solving activity par excellence. Much of what constitutes the orthodox modernist management canon should no longer be taught as knowledge, but merely for its historical interest.

There is a certain irony in management's claims to its knowledge being based on scientific rationality. Science qua science would hardly tolerate knowledge known to be "untrue" being taught as "true." It is inconceivable that a scientific experiment that has failed should con- tinue to be taught as if it had succeeded. Imagine, for example, medical science following management education and practice, continuing to use treatments on patients that are known not to have the desired curative effect because they are, after all, ideologically sound, rather than medically efficacious. In passing, it is worth noting that "empirical," in its modern meaning, stems from medical practice where it referred to the use of techniques that were known to work although the mechanism by which they worked was not understood. In other words, treatments were considered successful if they solved the problem, irre- spective of whether they conformed to some normative preconception. Clearly, medicine was, and is, praxiological in essence. This is the exact opposite of modernist management education and practice. In this sense, management is less like a science and more like theology, requiring acts of faith on the part of its adherents and their acceptance of a belief that modernist management knowledge works, indepen- dently of whether it does or not. In medicine, where our biological




survival may be at stake, such survival is apparently an acceptable end for ends-related strategies, but in management, where, inter alia, our psychological survival may be at stake, we agree, by default, not to take this as an end worthy of prioritization. As with all "religions," the metatheory is sacrosanct, and if the compatible means to an end do not work, then their failure to work is a preferable situation than that the metatheory should be opened to question.

Possibilities (1)

Management is conventionally seen as an activity that achieves the efficient functioning of organizations, where efficiency is, essentially, defined in terms of provision of adequate rewards to ownership. While it must be recognized that there have been attempts, for many years, to claim that management fulfills a more socially oriented role, and while we would agree that this certainly ought to be the basis of understanding the process and the role of management, in practice, both currently and historically, all such understandings inevitably come second to

"adequate" profitability. This too is an issue that can be more fully addressed through postmodernist understandings.

It is our own view, however, that, if there is any justification for management at all, it is as a synergetic problem-solving activity. The

problems, and their rational solution, that have occupied management education in particular for most of its existence have been those problems that were identified through the filter of capitalism, and that have been treated hitherto as ubiquitous. The new epoch and its "new"

exigencies have both highlighted this feature and called it into question. These previous - and continuing-- problems are being recognized as far from ubiquitous and as at best partial.

As already argued, management as a discipline has notably failed to

produce any techniques that solve even what were considered to be the most pressing problems of managerial activity, and those techniques that have been developed have, for the most part, for some time been

recognized not merely as failing but also as either actually compound- ing the very situation they were meant to solve or creating new problems of equally pressing significance (see Eilon, 1985). Part of the

change of this new epoch, however, is that management is more

widely held responsible for the effects of its activity, and that the range




of effects is much wider than has traditionally been seen as the sphere of management decision making. Management is, willy nilly, forced to recognize and accept such responsibility.

As previously noted, postmodernism has been characterized as the flight from rationality. The risk is that we merely end up recycling old concepts, but without the appeal to rationality that used to accompany them. A good example of this approach is the renewed interest in the concept of leadership, in the context of which the new emphasis is on the move away from rational/legal styles toward charismatic styles, as explicated in a recent article in The Economist (1989). Inter alia, this article recounts the failure of motivation theory and suggests that go- ahead companies now resolve this major issue in terms of reward systems, communications, and leadership - none of which are exactly new concepts, and none of which were intended to deal specifically with the problem of motivation. Where are the grounds for assuming that the re-use of these "techniques" will now solve problems that they did not solve before? Could it be in the divestment of their previously essential claim to be "scientifically" rational? (To return to the archi- tectural analogy, Rogers [1990] points out that reference to the form without attention to its underlying logic and rationale descends into shallow and meaningless mimicry.) However, in the context of management at least, it appears to take less time to discover that a tech- nique does not work, the second time around. Even more recently, Kotter (1990) has argued that leadership has nothing to do with cha- risma. Instead, he suggests a distinction between leadership and management where the former is about coping with change and the latter about maintaining stability. Interestingly, in the light of our discussion, this argument is highly reminiscent of an argument that was popular a generation ago, when a distinction between management and adminis- tration was being sought, although in that case it was managers who were the copers with change. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

Possibilities (2)

The potential benefits offered to this arena by what Foster (1985) called the postmodernism of resistance are more complex and more subtle. In particular, the changes in the perception of the role and




responsibilities of management offer opportunities to change and de- velop the metatheory of management (Carter and Jackson, 1987). Our argument is that the whole form and content of management education needs a radical postmodernist reappraisal. This is not to suggest that existing practice should be discarded lock, stock, and barrel. What is required is a reassessment of the relevances of management education, and a thorough deconstruction of existing practice to try to discover what ends are served, what values are enshrined, and what good is done. For example, it is an unquestioning assumption that no decent management education should exclude the study of economics. Yet, we might ask what theory economics has ever produced that has been of value to management: macro theory is clearly beyond most managers' sphere of influence, and micro theory has not established its efficacy except to economists. Equally, with accountancy. To record and allocate the distribution of resources, the sources and uses of funds in organizations, might seem to be a laudable and even necessary activity. Yet the role of accountancy in organizations is more and more recognized to be important in terms of its superordinate, though hid- den, facility to exercise a mostly negative control function - although this is not what accountancy claims to teach. (For a realist account of accountancy, see Jackall, 1988, p. 105ff). Our own area, organizational behavior, has managed to achieve considerable notoriety by consis- tently teaching managers and potential managers that, while we all recognize that we (managers) work for money, workers do not, but seek more spiritual gratifications (Fein, 1976; Carey, 1977).

A group of masters students on a course in organization theory were once advised that if they were only going to read one book, it should be Rhinehart's "novel" The Dice Man (1972), which would serve ad-

mirably as a course text in organizational analysis. This is a pertinent example of a postmodernist approach - illustrating the idea of finding useful knowledge where it is, rather than assuming that it is where it

"ought" to be. And yet the role of such literature in management education is virtually nonexistent. The poststructuralist concern with textuality (which does not refer simply to the written word), means that any text has as much potential validity as any other text; what matters is what it says, rather than its literary provenance. This is an example of ends-related educational practice whose principle, we are suggest- ing, should be extended to the entire realm of management education. We are looking for a new curriculum for management education based




on praxis that should achieve desired social ends rather than the mere satisfaction of sectional interest.

One of the problems of postmodernism has been its association with libertarian sociopolitical ideals. Unlike critical rationalism (see, e.g., Habermas, 1985; Cooper and Burrell, 1988), postmodernism offers no grounds for excluding any particular form or content of discourse, which leaves the selection of ends as inescapably political - and this is, of course, simply a recognition of what obtains sub rosa under modernism. The moral rectitude of different political doctrines, while un- doubtedly of major philosophical interest, is to some extent independent of the probity of postmodernism as a mode of analysis (although it must be noted that some political philosophies, especially those of the right wing, even though they make opportunistic use of some of postmodernism 's insights, are in any case antithetical to it in principle, particularly as regards tenets of certitude and order).

It seems clear, however, that there are some parallels between the "natural" outcomes of a (resistive) postmodernist position and the outcomes of a critical rationalist one, notwithstanding the intense debate between the two modes of analysis: essentially, it seems that the ends would be congruent and what would be different would be the ontological status of those ends. The ontological status of the ends that we would advocate for an ends-related management education curriculum is not, however, at this stage, a particularly significant issue. More important is the nature of those ends, and that there should be general agreement on their desirability. Taking some general principles such as social emancipation, long-run survival of the planet, and the like, as op- posed to private profit, maintenance of the status quo, and protection of power, it becomes possible to suggest the sort of subjects that could, and perhaps should, be central to management teaching. Thus, we might make some fairly uncontentious statements about management in the present era, and follow the implications contained therein. For example:

• Either the presence or absence of ethical influences on managerial decision making clearly impacts on social welfare, at many possible levels; it would therefore be implied that managers should be as well educated about the issues of ethics as they are about discounted-cash- flow techniques.

• Managerial actions obviously have ecosystemic consequences, which would imply that managers should be educated about ecosyste-




mie functioning, rather than seeing everything as approximately at the level of the organization.

• Behavior can only be understood in terms of relations between signifiers and signifieds, which would imply that therefore the semiotics of human interaction should be central to management knowledge, rather than the almost counterintuitive approach of understanding everything at the level of observable behavior (see also Carter and Jackson, 1990).

At the epistemological level, we can suggest that, if the orthodox management canon is characterizable as a Foucauldian discourse, with all the immanent processes of exclusion which that implies, then managers need to be educated in how to integrate those views that are relevant but currently disempowered. At the pedagogic level, we might suggest that, if management educators act as purveyors/reproducers of this discourse, there must be an awareness of this in the process of teaching, and of learning, and a provision made for the inclusion of currently excluded interests.

Conclusion

Management education has been, in essence, education to become, and on behalf of, agents of capitalism. Yet it is promoted as, at the least, something socially neutral, and more often as unprejudiced social good through the scientific pursuit of efficiency. The emergence of a new postmodern era is necessarily reflected in management and it appears that this offers new opportunities for consideration of the role and content of management education- if "postmodern management" is indeed inevitable, the question is, will it be positive or negative, a force for good or for ill?

In a book called Business Ethics the question is raised whether, because the main objective of business is to make money, talk about ethics is irrelevant. The authors reject such pessimism and argue that, even though they can cite a recent example of unethical behavior where "businessmen" distributed hard drugs to seventh- and eighth- grade schoolchildren in a "certain Mid- Western city," in order to de- velop their drug habits, this is unusual. That there is a problem of

young people taking, and being encouraged to take, drugs is, of course, well known. What is more surprising is that the book in question was published in 1937 (Sharp and Fox, 1937). In other words, more than




fifty years later, not only have we not solved the problem, from an ethical or any other standpoint, but the problem has considerably worsened. We would offer this as a classic illustration of the points we have been putting forward here, and would, on this basis, pose several questions. Has a solution to this (at least) fifty-year-old problem of supplying drugs to schoolchildren, by whomever, been achieved? Has the problem of the general ethical conduct of business been resolved? And, if, after fifty years of modernist attempts to do this, the answer to these two questions is still no, is it likely that solutions that failed in the past are going to be any more successful when repeated - especially as the problems magnify?

Clearly, any attempt to regress to the "past-perfect" is delusory. The past was not perfect, the same or kindred problems existed then, and, what is more, the techniques used to solve them did not work then and there is no reason to suppose that they will work if used again. We are now in the "imperfect future" of the 1930s, and perhaps all that we can say is that we have so far failed to cope with the problems that were faced then. What is our own imperfect future? Are we going to stick dogmatically to the same cycle, and leave to (possible) future genera- tions the same problems that were left to us? Or should we try something different?

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