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The Rise of Entrepreneurial Management Theory in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2021

Erik Baker Open the ORCID record for Erik Baker [Opens in a new window]
Erik Baker*
Affiliation:
History of Science Department, Harvard University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: ebaker@g.harvard.edu
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Abstract

This article challenges the historiographical commonplace that twentieth-century American management discourse was dominated by bureaucratic aspirations to objective expertise and rational planning. Proposing the category of “entrepreneurial management” to describe the countervailing tendency, it demonstrates the persistence of intellectual interest in managers who used the personal qualities of leadership to enlist enthusiasm among subordinates for their firm's initiatives. By the mid-twentieth century, these managerial leaders were commonly described as “entrepreneurs.” Through a reading of early twentieth-century writing on “human factor” management and Depression-era “human relations” theory, the article shows that intellectual interest in entrepreneurial leadership thrived during a period typically characterized as the height of scientific management and corporate bureaucracy. Analyzing Peter F. Drucker's postwar management writing in detail, the article concludes by arguing that the “entrepreneurialism” of the late twentieth century did not represent a break with the established managerial project, only the strengthened authority of one existing tendency within a variegated intellectual field.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2023 , pp. 195 - 219
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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2 Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (New York, 1964; first published 1921), 276.

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4 The templates for these two interpretive tendencies remain Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977); and Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974).

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10 Which is not to deny the significance of the structure of the labor process for the production of shop-floor ideology. See Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago, 1979).

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21 Sombart, Quintessence.

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31 Smith, “Approach to Business Policy,” 15. On Depression-era white-collar radicalism see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, 1996).

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46 Whitehead, Leadership in a Free Society, 109.

47 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 173–4. Generations of critics have argued against the soundness of the Mayo group's interpretation of the Hawthorne data. Levitt, Steven A. and List, John A., “Was There Really a Hawthorne Effect at the Hawthorne Plant? An Analysis of the Original Illumination Experiments,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3 (2011), 224–38Google Scholar; Hassard, John, “Rethinking the Hawthorne Studies: The Western Electric Research in Its Social, Political, and Historical Context,” Human Relations 65 (2012), 1431–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But for our purposes what matters is not whether they got the science right but what this interpretive evolution reveals about changes to the intellectual framework the Harvard team was operating within.

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49 Roethlisberger and Dickson, Management and the Worker, Part II; Mayo, Human Problems, 94.

50 Elton Mayo, The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization (Andover, MA, 1945), 115; Roethlisberger and Dickson, Management and the Worker, xiv.

51 William R. Waters, Entrepreneurship, Dualism, and Causality: An Appreciation of the Work of Joseph Schumpeter (PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 1952; published online by the Mayo Research Institute, 2012, 139.

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72 Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 16.

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77 Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 186, 258.

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