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9 - Remaking Management History: New Foundations for the Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2017

Stephen Cummings
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington
Todd Bridgman
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington
John Hassard
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Michael Rowlinson
Affiliation:
University of Exeter

Summary

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2017

A new history of management can inspire thinking differently.

Returning to our original target (management history as it is portrayed in management textbooks), we conclude this book by asking: if we were to redesign and promote a new management history in the pages of these introductory works, what might that new history look like? What might it contain? How could it be presented? What might we define as management’s fundamental purpose for a student or a manager? Furthermore, how might this new history change the way we think about management and organization studies, and – given the influence that management has on life in the twenty-first century – how might rethinking in this way help us to think differently about how we organize and measure our lives more generally?

While participating in a Harvard Business School roundtable discussion on the value of management history, a top-level executive put it this way: “It’s always hard to communicate any sort of abstract idea to someone else, let alone get any acceptance of it. But when there is some agreement on the factual or historical background of that idea, the possibilities for general agreement expand enormously.”

Kreitner and Cassidy, Management (12th ed., Reference Kreitner and Cassidy2008, p.36)

Before outlining a history of management, management textbooks justify the excursion in a number of typical ways. Oftentimes, these justifications begin by acknowledging a likely reticence on the part of the reader: a reader who would probably share Robbins and others’ earlier described views along the lines that ‘history is of little value and thus of little interest’. Familiar acknowledgements in this respect are that:

Some people question the value of theory and history. Their arguments are usually based on the assumptions that history has no relevance to contemporary society, and that theory is abstract and of no practical use.

The problems and opportunities facing organizations today are complex and changing. All of society’s institutions feel the pressure of a new and very challenging environment. But even in the rush to an exciting future, no-one should sell history short.

Having attempted to dispel any negative predispositions, history is then justified in the following related ways:

Understanding the historical context of management provides a sense of heritage and can help managers to avoid the mistakes of others.

Knowledge gained through past experience can and should be used as a foundation for future success.

Understanding the origins of management thought will help you grasp the underlying contexts of the ideas and concepts presented in the chapters ahead.

(Bateman and Snell, Reference Bateman and Snell2009, p.41)

History is important because it can put current activities in perspective.

Our theories about management – what it is, what it entails, what works, what doesn’t – advance as we develop new ideas.

An understanding of the evolution of management helps current and future managers appreciate where we are now and continue to progress toward better management.

(Samson and Daft, Reference Samson and Daft2012, p.35)

In short, management history is important because it makes initiates feel good about management’s past, puts present advances in perspective, and helps us build upon these in order to continue the evolution. Kreitner and Cassidy’s quotation at the head of this chapter reflects this template, but also a deeper rumination on this point. It utilizes the prestige of Harvard and the persona of a ‘top-level executive’ to bring home its message and explain that agreement on a historical background ‘expands the possibilities for general agreement enormously’.

The counter-history we have presented in this book is written in opposition to these reasons for management history. Rather than thinking about management’s past because it makes us feel good about our heritage, we argue that this may breed smugness and complacency, reduce fundamental questioning and encourage a continuation of the status quo with regard to what we assume are fundamental foundations.

Rather than just putting the past in perspective, we would rather promote a history that could blur things a little, and encourage questioning the present state of management. Is the story of management really one of evolutionary advance, for example?

Rather than using the agreed evolution as a foundation for the future, we would argue that standing on the shoulders of the shallow interpretations of giants presented in textbook histories may reduce our interest in thinking in other directions.

Rather than a history designed to help us to pin down and agree about management, we have sought to develop an alternative history that would contribute to a plurality of views, and, by association, disagreement.

Why oppose conventional views in this way? Primarily because these assumptions about the purpose of management history encourage homogeneity and agreement rather than diversity and debate; and, as we outlined in Chapter One, a contest of ideas rather than a filing cabinet of settled precedents is what drives substantive innovation. In this way, we argue that the benefits of an agreed upon history of management are outweighed by the negatives brought about by a field stagnating.

We believe that we should have the awareness and confidence as a field now to question our assumed foundations. So, for example, when Davidson et al. (Reference Davidson, Simon, Woods and Griffin2009, p.60) provide their ‘Summary of Key Points’ from their textbook’s history and explain to readers that ‘Understanding the historical context of management and precursors of management and organizations provides a sense of heritage … Management has always been concerned with planning, leading, organizing and controlling’, we think we should be able to ask the question: ‘How do we know that the abstract idea “management” has always just been concerned with planning, leading, organizing and controlling?’ Might it not have been concerned with other things at some point? And if so, and we are interested in diversity and the innovation that the acceptance of diversity can bring, wouldn’t it be a good idea to seek these out?Footnote 1

This book has aimed to promote questions like this, questions that should cause us to think again, think differently, and think otherwise about what management is, or could be.

Recapping A New History of Management

We began this book by stating our view that if we are to think differently about management, we must first rethink management history, and signalled our intent to take aim at the conventional history of management as an unnoticed barrier to innovation: particularly in the form it is most often experienced by management initiates, management textbooks. The approach of these histories, which we have indicated again here through reviewing what such textbooks see as the purpose of management history, justifies present practices and makes it less likely that they will be challenged.

In Chapter One, we outlined our aim to develop a new history of management to counter the assumptions that this conventional view promotes; we surveyed the current narrow and homogeneous map of management history; and outlined a Foucauldian approach for a deeper and more critical historical understanding of moments that have been defined as key in management’s development.

In Chapter Two, Management’s Formation: The Importance of the Liberal Context, we put the case for seeing management arising not with neo-liberal or laissez faire economics, industrialization and increasing order and control (the causes that conventional management history recognizes), but social and moral liberalism and the decline of slavery: a factor that conventional management histories are curiously silent about. In order to do this, we looked afresh at the work of Adam Smith, so often identified as management history’s first pioneer.

Smith’s treatment in textbook histories is generally limited to a few sentences about his pin factory example and how Smith’s ‘classic economics treatise’ promoted the division of labour, which then required a gradual continuity of increasing control of workers administered by a growing class of professional managers. But looking further into Smith’s work reveals a different view of the role that liberalism may have played in creating the context in which management emerged and the role Smith could have in our conceptualization of management.

Smith’s real intellectual innovations were not the importance of laissez faire economics and the efficiency that the division of labour brings, but the view that slavery and other forms of repressing a human’s ‘sacred freedoms’, such as being able to dispense with a person’s labour as he or she sees fit, were misguided: ethically, fundamentally, but also economically.

Hence, after an age where the ruling question was ‘Am I leading in proper conformity to moral, natural, or divine laws?’; and then in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘Am I governing with sufficient intensity and attention to maximize our state’s power against other states?’, our own liberal age begins with a new problematization: ‘Are we self-limiting the degree of government to enable the progress of sociability and civilization while optimizing “mutual enrichment” for all states and all people?’

In this context, the importance of management can be seen to emerge as we seek ways of governing and controlling people less, not more. In Book V of The Wealth of Nations (a Book seldom taken account of even by those who profess to know what Smith wrote), Smith spent some time reflecting on the nature of good management and defines it as being the opposite of force and violence: a form of persuasion that is a better means of getting things done in a modern liberal world – even though ‘insolence’ causes people to revert to force instead. Smith’s words in this regard could form a useful basis for our understanding of management.

Following on from our reframing of the historical context that gives rise to the greater study of management, our third chapter, To What End? The Nature of Management’s ‘Classical’ Approach, looked again at what history suggests as the aim of management theorizing. Identifying the division of labour and industrialization as origins and F. W. Taylor and the Classical Management theorists as ‘fathers’ identifies, by association, the aim of management theory as being to determine how greater efficiency can be achieved. But a re-investigation of the environment that led to the popularization of management in the United States in the first years of the twentieth century suggests that the foundational aim might instead be understood to be conservation, or sustainability.

The conventional historical narrative employs an efficiency-obsessed Taylor as a hero/anti-hero: a noble leader of the rise of management studies and a flawed villain whose simplistic views must be overcome. Subsequently, textbook histories tell us that management began when a highly mechanistic worldview was applied to work and organization, but since then we have developed a better, more humane understanding, culminating in recent ideas about ethics and sustainability. But by looking anew, we can see Smith’s ethics of sociability as a foundation stone of management, and by looking more broadly at Taylor’s Scientific Management, we can see that it captured the wider imagination through its association with a specific political issue of 1907–1912: Theodore Roosevelt and his deputy Gifford Pinchot’s quest to help the American people grasp the importance of ‘conservation’ (or what we might call sustainability) after decades of laissez faire expansion in North America. How might theorizing about management happen differently if we believed (and taught) that its founding and fundamental end was not mechanistic efficiency, but rather, sustainability, or in Pinchot’s words: ‘the wisest use of resources for the benefit of the greatest number of people for the longest possible time’?

If the manager is the actor in the modern liberalizing context that gives rise to management studies, the organization is his or her stage. In Chapter Four, The Birth of Organization Studies: Or What We Could Learn from Sociologist Max Weber, we rethought the traditional view of Max Weber’s legacy for management.

Conventional management histories deploy the character of Weber as a pioneer in organization science in two ways. First, as a serious and renowned thinker whose interest in the things that management took itself to be about added credence to the emerging field. Second, as the avid promoter of bureaucracy – his support of which has come to be seen as wrong-headed as more decentralized and ‘organic’ forms of organization have come to the fore. However, if we explore more of what Weber wrote, rather than just what his later interpreters chose to translate, we find a much more complex figure. Weber could see why and how bureaucracy would come to be the dominant organizational form in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the form’s advantages in this context, but he was troubled by what its dominance, and its promotion of a particular part of the human psyche, would mean for humanity.

We argued that recognizing Max Weber’s foundational insight as being not that bureaucracy is great, but that forms of organization emerge out of specific socio-political contexts. Influenced by this insight, and Weber’s promotion of an anti-positivism when studying social action, encourages scholars of management and organization to see all cases as context specific and be wary of general theories of management.

In Chapter Five, we changed tack. While the emergence of the Business School is not covered explicitly in most histories of management, its formation promotes particular forms of management knowledge, and it is therefore key to the historical development of management studies. The Institution of the Business School developed a counter-history of this formation.

Events since the 1940s have narrowed the view of what a good business school should be and do, and the idea that Harvard is the original and best school in the business lies behind this development. But Harvard did not spring ‘fully formed’ into the model that we associate with it and business schools more generally today. Its form was contested and it could have turned out differently. However, this contest and these alternative pathways are overlooked in favour of a smooth evolution where the present is a continuity of the past.

One of the most interesting, potentially foundational, but now largely forgotten, relationships in the history of management is that between HBS Dean Wallace Donham and British process philosopher A. N. Whitehead. Together, these two discussed, articulated and advanced a very different view of what a business school could be: one with a new broader type of pedagogy that would not only inspire business people, but rejuvenate Western learning and society.

Since then, this dream has been diminished and a curious discourse whereby HBS is criticized for being overly managerialist and at once aped by its competitors and opponents has emerged. Understanding how this happened and recognizing that the formation of the Business School is not an objective given, but the result of particular historical networks and contingencies, can help us think again about the form that these Schools could take.

Chapter Six formed a lynchpin in our book. The Discovery of the Human Worker is an ironic title for this chapter on Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne Studies. After the presentation of the ‘classical’ machine-laden influences on management, Elton Mayo’s research is presented as evidence for a kinder and more scientific management theory. But what if the research on which his ‘human relations’ school was founded was not all that it seems? How would the good guys turning out to be not so good change our view of management’s history? This chapter brings into focus the wider contextual factors influencing Mayo’s research. It deconstructs and starts to critique a habitual revelatory narrative in textbooks: one where Western Electric – an authoritarian, bureaucratic corporation, ignorant of human factors – is enlightened by the arrival of behavioural scientists from Harvard and their ‘discovery’ of human relations at work.

In so doing, this counter-history describes not only how Mayo constructed a narrative for explaining the findings from Hawthorne, but also how his social networks and politics influenced the kinds of ‘human relations’ evidence claimed for by his Harvard Group. Mayo’s political ideology was successful in that it convinced business leaders that his agenda would alleviate their concerns, with this network of influence extending to the executives of the Hawthorne Works. Contrary to the orthodox narrative of management studies, which suggests a theoretical and practical paradigm-shift in the wake of ‘human relations’ behavioural experimentation, the alternative impression from our analysis is that Mayo and his team did not so much turn the sociological tide at Hawthorne as swim briskly with it.

As such, we argue that Hawthorne and Mayo’s legacy is a negative one for our field. Promoting the universal theory that showing human interest will make people more productive, and presenting this as an advance on the ideas of truly great thinkers like Weber and Smith, was a great leap backwards (recall that Weber warned again such general theories), and lowered the bar for subsequent management theorizing that would be slotted into the general advance of management.

Textbook Distortions, Chapter Seven, dealt with the negative consequences of having placed Mayo and Hawthorne on a pedestal. It explored how modern textbooks began to arrange seminal ideas from theorists who came after Mayo into the conventional historical narrative and simplify these ideas into easy-to-use intervention tools in the latter decades of the twentieth century. The 1970s saw the emergence of the management textbook divided into stratified chapters and sections, and illustrated in ways conducive to modern forms of lecturing large cohorts of students. Into these textbooks, management ideas from previous decades were distilled into digestible blocks, and placed in a continuum by a history of how these blocks built upon one another. However, our counter-history outlined how research by the likes of Kurt Lewin, Herbert Maslow and Douglas McGregor was twisted and compromised, and asked how our understanding of the development of management studies might be otherwise if we processed ideas like theirs differently.

The penultimate chapter of our book, The Invention of Corporate Culture, dug deeper to examine another element that can be seen as leading to the ‘dumbing down’ rather than the ‘evolving up’ of management. In addition to management textbooks presenting simple frameworks as general theories, management consultants and management academics sought to develop ‘solutions’ to business success for an increasingly enthusiastic market. In this way, the general theory that good organizations are those that have a strong corporate culture emerged and is presented as one of management history’s latest discoveries in textbooks.

But what is the science behind this discovery? Chapter Eight developed a counter-history of the creation of ‘corporate culture’ since its emergence in the early 1980s and roles played by management consultants, management academics and practicing managers in this development. We discussed how the assumptions about culture produced by mainstream writers can suppress, for example, forms of employee opposition and resistance and serve essentially to reproduce corporate ideology and the status quo at the expense of critical thinking and change. In short, we argued that the development of our understanding of the importance of culture reflects a continuation of the limited Mayoist view of what a management theory should be and do.

At the time of writing this book, the latest generalizable and prescriptive management theory presented in this vein on the continuum of management history in introductory textbooks is that new thinking about sustainability should be central to the good management of an organization. But we believe there is a danger (if we do think sustainability is more than just this current decade’s general theory of the ‘best way’) that sustainability too will be filed and superseded in keeping with the conventional form and narrative of management history as the textbooks we use roll through their umpteenth editions. The good news, however, which we have sought to stress throughout the counter-historical endeavours of this book, is that management history is not immutable. It could have been different and thus could be made different now. And promoting alternative histories of management can work as an antidote to the superficiality and complacency bred by management’s conventional history.

Ultimately, the purpose of the counter-histories developed in this book was not to dismiss what we currently regard as management’s history, but to provide alternatives that would stimulate more debate about management’s backstory and its role in producing a certain kind of knowledge (and how this in turn may repress thinking otherwise). It was written in response to the quotations with which the book began from William Matthews and Michel Foucault, and the idea that without critical questioning, the little that we remember of our past becomes inevitable, both as the truth about the past and for our future horizons too. The effort was to encourage thinking differently about the past as a spur to thinking otherwise for the future; or to use what Gilles Deleuze (Reference Deleuze1988, p.96) called the ‘culmination’ of Foucault’s work, ‘the searing phrase [from his penultimate book]: “to get free of oneself”’. Our aim has been to help separate ourselves enough from conventional assumptions so that we may reflect back on them, unsettle and subsequently remake the foundations of our field.

Presenting an Alternative History for the Future of Management

And isn’t the past inevitable, now that we call the little we remember of it ‘the past’?

William Matthews, from the poem Cows Grazing at Sunrise

The object is to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.

Michel Foucault, from The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2

Our specific target in this enterprise has been the form in which most management initiates or students experience management history directly: introductory textbooks. And while we have advocated throughout this book a deeper engagement with the elements that are seen to constitute the keys aspects of management and history (and, indeed, those that are not), we accept the fact that when teaching at this level, attention spans are short and pages in textbooks are limited. Hence, we do not expect textbook authors or lecturers to devote a massive chunk of their limited resources to management history. But we do think that encouraging thinking beyond a history that congratulates the present, to one that promotes critical questioning and alternative perspectives, one that may encourage innovative management theorizing and practice, is possible. And with this in mind, we finish this book with the presentation of an alternative management history module similar in size but not in content or formation to those found in most management textbooks.

A History for the Future of Management

Philosophical and Ethical Foundations: Adam Smith

Management emerges as an alternative means of organization as liberal societies evolve and explore alternatives to traditional coercive forms of control.

Having determined management to be about the achievement of technical efficiency in the early twentieth century, histories of management claim Adam Smith as an important forebear and pick out certain aspects of his second book The Wealth of Nations. These are his supposed promotion of laissez faire economics, industrialization and the division of labour. But this focus makes far more of these aspects than Smith intended.

However, if one does want to claim Smith as a foundation, there is much of interest in his body of work with regard to management. Looking at the Theory of Moral Sentiments, we find useful ethical foundations for understanding why and how people cooperate and work together. Theory of Moral Sentiments starts from the premise that we are not selfish beings, but social beings, and seeks to explain why. Smith’s theory is that we are empathetic to the experience of others and so are predisposed to be social beings, to seek to be respected and respectable (or ‘loved and loveable’ beings, as Smith put it) and to work together for the greater good.

Looking through the lens of The Theory of Moral Sentiments enables us to see that The Wealth of Nations was written in response to an emerging laissez faire economics rather than in favour of it, and the division of labour used as evidence of the theory of moral sentiments. We can divide labour and trade because we trust that people will empathize with others and want to be seen as good and fair in their dealing. Hence, we can allow a liberalization of controls because this ‘fellow feeling’ will hold things together while enabling the advance of civilization.

But this liberal system still needs to be managed to ensure that essential services and the gains from this economic system are delivered fairly and that those born in less fortunate circumstance still have the opportunity to rise. And this is the specific topic of Book V of The Wealth of Nations where Smith writes extensively about good management and defines it against more coercive approaches to getting things done in organizations.

Having Adam Smith as a founding father enables us to see that management emerges as traditional authoritarian forms of social and economic control based on birth-right and privilege decline and liberal meritocracies arise in the modern age. In these settings, we should facilitate progress through good management rather than force or coercion. And we may define management in this context as fundamentally being about finding alternatives to coercion that help achieve progress for mutual gain.

The Rise of the First Management Theorists

The original ‘good’ that management theory sought to advance was conservation, or the reduction of needless waste.

Frederick W. Taylor and his contemporaries in the early twentieth century are regarded as the first management theorists. Taylor advocated extreme forms of the division of labour designed to minimize waste.

Taylor’s work gained notoriety and popularity as a solution to the biggest political problem in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century: how to stem the tide of rampant laissez faire industrial development. The appeal designed to combat this, developed by Gifford Pinchot and President Theodore Roosevelt, was termed ‘conservation’.

As part of this campaign, lawyer Louis Brandeis gathered together a group of workplace consultants and found that Taylor’s ideas repackaged under the banner of Scientific Management could make management, as a new, important subject, appear objective and politically neutral.

Conventional management histories look back with hindsight and claim efficiency of performance as management’s fundamental aim. Efficiency was certainly a key part of Taylor’s system, but looking more deeply at why and how management emerged, we can argue that it had the elimination of waste and a desire to achieve conservation and sustainability for the greater good as the end that efficiency aimed towards. In the words of Gifford Pinchot, we should see the aim of management as being ‘to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time’.

The Birth of Organization Science

The first social scientist of management argued that forms of organization and management were culturally specific. Therefore, we should be wary of general theories.

If Smith is the theorist who outlines the important contextual or environmental changes that lead to the rise of management; and Taylor and his network the first seen to develop a comprehensive theory of what management should do; Max Weber may be the first to theorize the organizational stages upon which management takes place.

Max Weber is identified in conventional management histories as the father of organization science because he may have been the first person to focus on the emergence of particular organizational forms. He is most famous for his extensive study of the emergence of bureaucracy within a Protestant Industrial zeitgeist, but conventional management history zeros in on him as a forebear because machine bureaucracy is seen as a match for early mechanistic and naive management theorizing. Weber is thus (mistakenly) believed to have advocated for bureaucracy as the one-best-way of organizing.

But looking at Weber more closely, a key foundational lesson that we could learn from this anti-positivist (who argued for the study of social systems through interpretive means) is that organizations emerge in particular ways in response to particular socio-cultural conditions and aims. Hence, no one type of organization may be deemed the best, general theories may be misleading, and we must adopt a contingency approach that is sensitive to local contexts.

The Global View of Management

We should appreciate a range of cultural traditions and draw insight from them for ways of organizing and managing.

Most cultures and civilizations can be seen to have developed organizations, as well as ways of achieving the greatest good for the largest number for the longest time, and ways of encouraging people to work together without coercion for mutual gain. However, conventional management history’s narrow gaze focusses on management emerging in response to industrialization, performance efficiency, planning, organizing, and controlling through organizational forms like machine bureaucracies. Therefore, management’s emphasis has largely been on the cultural contexts in which these ideas were formed. As a result, what people write about in management history and what management is understood to be comes mostly from an Anglo-American perspective. While this may advance agreement about what management is, it limits diversity, and, we would argue, innovation. If we believe diversity and innovation are important, we should encourage research into other sites where different forms of management may been practiced.

The Form of the Business School?

Institutions and pedagogies for teaching business have gravitated to a standard format, but this development is now being questioned.

The collegiate Business School is the institution through which most management research and instruction takes place. Following the lines of the conventional history of management, it is generally believed that business schools must have economic science at their core and pedagogy focussed on applying general management theories to solve business cases. But as Weber’s research would suggest, the form of a business school will be a reflection of the beliefs and concerns of the times in which it was founded. And indeed, earlier Business Schools were configured differently.

In the late 1920s and 1930s, key thinkers considered how the form of the business school could be different from the narrow orthodoxy that was emerging. People like Wallace Donham at Harvard Business School argued for incorporating multiple perspectives beyond owners and managers of organizations, questioning assumptions about the values of business, and advocated for the reflective development of theory based on a broad view of practice as a way forward for an academy that had become too focussed on theory for its own sake. While this view did not prevail, it should give us pause for thought. How might business schools be different today if we built them according to current concerns, rather than aping traditional forms and the prestige associated with them?

A Procession of General Theories of Management Success

Management has seen a procession of general theories promoted, but while the rise and fall of these theories appears to indicate progression, from a broader historical perspective, it looks like a series of fads.

The theory that if managers show people that they care about them they will be more efficient or productive was seen as a breakthrough in the 1930s when Elton Mayo and his team of Harvard researchers promoted it.

While later researchers would find that the studies were bogus in many important respects and that it was money as much as human relations that led to the productivity gains (as earlier theorists like Taylor would have predicted), the idea that the Human Relations School was an advance stuck. The Hawthorne Studies did not alter a belief that had now seeped into the fabric of management: that its fundamental and universal aim was efficiency. It continued with and deepened this idea while providing a new universal theory for achieving this. This had the unfortunate effect of fuelling a belief in a quest for new simplistic general theories, or a ‘one-best way’ of management. Max Weber would have advised against this.

After Mayo’s Human Relations movement proved there was a great demand for ‘management science’ of this sort, the conception and expansion of management as a university subject with a range of sub-disciplinary elements created a need to fill in a broader backstory of contributing theories to this new and increasingly influential ‘science’.

The nuanced thinking of innovative and diligent social scientists like Kurt Lewin, Abraham Maslow and Douglas McGregor was developed and repackaged into a series of theoretical developments and advancements along the management continuum from Smith, Taylor, Weber and Mayo. However, their ideas were often transformed into general and prescriptive n-step theories for approaching management. Plugging them into an evolutionary narrative in this way does not do justice to the original material.

In the 1980s, as the bestselling management textbooks moved into the ongoing production of multiple editions, new ‘advances’ were added to the annals of management history.

New general theories, often developed in association with a booming management consultancy industry, follow in the footsteps of ‘leaps’ like the Hawthorne Studies and the distillation of the ideas of academics like Lewin and Maslow. Theories like the idea that successful organizations have a strong, unified or homogeneous culture, as ‘proven’ by the Excellence movement; or that successful managers follow a systems approach, are superseded in later decades and editions by assertions that good organizations and managers are now trying to be ‘ethical’ or interested in ‘globalization’ or ‘diversity management’. Each of these discoveries is offered as a further advance along the continuously evolving continuum of management.

What Will Become of the Latest ‘Advances’?

There is a danger that given management’s now established cycle of adding the latest general theories to the pile, issues such as sustainability and ethics (which could be viewed as fundamental to management) might come to be seen as just other ‘fads’.

At the time of writing this book, sustainability is the latest big idea on the chain of the management continuum.

At the end of textbook histories in 2016, readers are told that a ‘“New Industrial Revolution” … not unlike the one [we] underwent in the eighteenth century … will be led by organizations that are able to apply sustainable management practices [This] will require real change, because business-as-usual is no longer an option’ (Robbins et al., Reference Robbins, Bergman, Stagg and Coulter2015, p.65).

But perhaps fundamental change and innovation could come instead from less hyperbole about sustainability and ethics being new ideas that change everything, and more reflection upon how they could be regarded as the foundation stones of management that Smith and Pinchot considered them to be.

Rather than being the latest management approach on the evolutionary conveyer belt of history, taking a broader view and seeing Adam Smith’s ethics and Pinchot/Brandeis/Roosevelt’s aim of conservation as what management was originally built upon, could encourage more fundamental change in management theorizing and practice.

Footnotes

1 Indeed, management history has a long tradition of claiming dubious empirical evidence to justify universal principles. James D. Mooney – dubbed ‘the Affable Irishman’ (Wren, Reference Wren1972: 346ff.), set out with history professor, Alan C. Reiley, to ‘expose the principles of organization, as they reveal themselves in various forms of human group movement, and to help industry protect its own growth through a greater knowledge and use of these principles’. Mooney introduced his history, titled Onward Industry, thus: ‘Organization in the formal sense means order, and its corollary, an organized and orderly procedure. To find and correlate the formal principles that make this order is the aim of this book’ (Mooney and Reiley, Reference Mooney and Reiley1931/1947, p.ix-x). It is no surprise then that he should find formal principles of organization, and that they should be coordination, scalar hierarchy and the functional division of labour. Mooney and Reiley (Reference Mooney and Reiley1931/1947, p.4) admitted (perhaps sensing an obvious question in advance of it being asked) that Ancient people did not speak in these modern terms. But he was not fazed by this epistemological problem: ‘That the great organizers of history applied these principles unconsciously proves only that their technique was inherent in their genius’. Thus, he remained confident in his claim that his principles were universal and consequently, would hold true in the future as well.

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