ABSTRACT
Press, 1987. (Short and overly fulsome biographical sketches, but includes a number of important figures not often found elsewhere.)
Drury, H.B., Scientific Management: A History and Criticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1915. (Contains some excellent biographies of the principal figures in the field-Taylor, Gantt, Gilbreth and Emerson, plus others-drawn from interviews and personal knowledge.)
Gabor, A., The Capitalist Philosophers, New York: Times Business, 1999. (Good profiles of managers and others influential in the business world over the past century.)
Ingham, John N. and Feldman, Lynne B., African-American Business Leaders: A Biographical Dictionary, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. (An excellent collection of studies of little-known figures.)
Jeremy, D.J. (ed.), Dictionary of Business Biography, London: Butterworths, 1984-6, 5 vols. (A massive undertaking, covering many hundreds of British entrepreneurs from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1980s. This work is highly inclusive, and includes studies of all senior figures during this period, not just the ‘successes’; an indispensable reference work.)
Leavitt, J.A., American Women Managers and Administrators: A Selective Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Leaders, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. (A very important study of an often overlooked group of business leaders and managers.)
Piramal, G., Business Maharajahs, New Delhi: Viking, 1996. (Indispensable to anyone studying business in India.)
Tsutsui, W.M., Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. (Not biographies as such, but good profiles of leaders and their ideas.)
Urwick, L.F. (ed.), The Golden Book of Management: A Historical Record of the Life and Work of Seventy Pioneers, London: Newman Neame, 1956. (Now long out of print, but very useful; rescues from obscurity dozens of otherwise unknown but very important figures.)
Urwick, L.F. and Brech, E.F.L., The Making of Scientific Management, London: Management Publications Trust, 1947-9, 3 vols; repr. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994. (Volume 1 includes biographies of thirteen pioneers, including Taylor, Fayol, Follett and Babbage.)
Warner, M. (ed.), IEBM Handbook of Management Thinking, London: International Thomson Business Press, 1998. (Around 150 in-depth biographies, focusing mostly on theorists and researchers but with a good selection of practitioners also (Ford,
Matsushita, Ibuka, etc.). Recently featured on a Financial Times list of the ten most important management books.)
Witzel, M. (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of Management, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001, 2 vols. (Over 600 biographies of management thinkers and practitioners from the classical world to the present day, edited by the present writer. Includes many important figures from Europe and East Asia not included in other collections, but omits a number of the theorists included in Warner, above.)
Wren, D. and Greenwood, R.G., Management Innovators: The People and Ideas That Have Shaped Modern Business, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (Highly important study by two leading US management historians: essential reading, as are all of Wren’s other works.)
