ABSTRACT
MANAGEMENT THEORY – A HISTORICAL DASH Even a cursory look at the proliferation of textbooks covering ‘management’ provides the reader with a sense of the difficulty of precisely defining this elusive concept (for example, Boddy 2005, Linstead et al. 2004, Cole 1998). There are, however, commonalities that emerge from a historical accretion of ideas about management which afford us a coherent way of seeing the development of management thinking. Such a historical perspective typically involves the identification of different stages in the focus of attention of, primarily Western, researchers. It is informative to consider who was doing the research, and the context in which this story evolves. We can identify two types of writers at the start of the journey, writers based, for the most part, in Europe and the USA. First, those thoughtful managers who reflected on what was happening in their organisations (notable manager-theorists including F. W. Taylor, L. F. Urwick and Henri Fayol) and second, social scientists who undertook formal studies as part of their professional work (for example, Elton Mayo, Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor and Fredrick Hertzberg). The former tended to work inductively, that is to rationalise and make sense of the experiences of being a manager in ways that were organised, or systematised, or which served to regularise patterns of behaviours. In other words it helped them (and others) make sense of their world. Social scientists on the other hand were more interested in pursuing a way of interpreting and understanding how management actions shape the way that organisations work, by employing the tools of their scientific trade. Perhaps the clearest expression of this form of work is in Mayo’s famous Hawthorne Studies in the 1920s, which are often claimed to be the foundation of what is now understood to be organisational behaviour. The output of both of these two early styles of writers on management differed in their focus. Often labelled the classical school of thought, the practising managers were interested in creating a coherent set of ‘rational’, in other words scientific, principles which concentrated on the structuring of activities in the work place. Social scientists on the other hand were, as their title suggests, more interested in what humans did, in other words their behaviour. Scientific managers were primarily concerned with the efficient use of resources, whereas social scientists were broadly interested in a range of human factors, including motivation (what drives people to do what they do), communication, the nature of communication in organisations, and later, what leaders do that makes them leaders. This is why they have been termed human relations theorists: scientists who took as their starting point interrelationships between people and the individuals themselves. Whilst both sets of early investigators shared commonalities in the rationale for their endeavour and writing, this distinction endures and remains visible. Heavy tomes on management theory by social and managerial ‘scientists’ continue to fail in the fight for virtual shelf space in bookshops across the globe against books written by professional management consultants and practitioners eager to encourage others to benefit from the remarkable and informative insights that they developed by being ‘successful’ managers. The echoes of these two approaches, or ‘academic lenses’, as we will see, still reverberate throughout the literature. It is worth expanding on some tenets, that is the basic assumptions, of the classical school. What was of prime importance here was not the cog in the machine but the machine itself, in other words how organisations could
and should be structured to maximise profit and improve worker efficiency. This was no idealised utopian daydream but a considered and systematic attempt to derive and apply genuine scientific principles. The most important early contributor to this school of thought was Frederick W. Taylor, considered to be the founder of scientific management whose approach to making organisations effective was improving efficiency at the ‘operative’ level, and therefore in contrast with Fayol’s focus on the top management level. Taylor believed that a ‘best way’ of completing a task could be identified and used as the basis for calculating a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, in his view, and importantly, obviating the need for conflict between ‘management and men’. The scientific school of management (Sheldrake 1996) brings together four interconnected elements: the systematic analysis of the process of production; the selection of appropriate workers and the training to become a ‘first class man’ at that task; the forging of a genuine connection between a science at work and a science of work; and a continuous and close cooperation between management and workers. Scientific management, together with Weber’s bureaucracy theory and Fayol’s administrative management theory are often considered together as representing the ‘traditional’ approach to management. In this approach an organisation can be seen as an ‘instrument’ which is designed to achieve certain objectives, set by those who initiate or control it. A structure can then be set up to best achieve those objectives. Individuals can be fitted into the structure and their behaviour explicitly organised and coordinated. The emphasis here is on a machine, or engineering, model and the resultant critiques of the traditional model centered around what was missing, or what was impoverished in this view of the organisation. What was insufficiently emphasised was the way in which organisational structure affects and interacts with the elements within that structure, and in particular the role of technology and humans who serve as essential features of that structure, the way that they work in groups and the motivations they possess. For the human relations writers, understanding human needs was of paramount importance in understanding organisations, and specifically organisations that were effective. Probably the best known of these researchers is Abraham Maslow, whose work on human needs (even though it has been extensively criticised since initial publication) was very influential and continues to be given prominence in curricula of management courses (as well as those of psychology and health and social care), from ‘A’ level to Masters awards in business schools. Maslow presented the idea of a hierarchy of human needs from satisfying ‘basic’ physiological needs (food) to the assumed ‘higher’ needs such as self actualisation, that is fulfilment of the need to achieve what you want to achieve. What ties the diversity of researchers that constitute this school of thought together is the focus on the individual. From the 1960s onwards we can begin to see the emergence of more sophisticated theories which sought to present and to enmesh a much more complex set of forces operating within organisations. For researchers engaged in this project, organisations were highly complex systems comprising of a dynamic mixture of people, procedures, technology and control. For them, focussing on either technical or social elements (expressed in their terms as subsystems) failed to do justice to the interaction of these forces or elements. Rather, it is the subtle and often hidden ways in which these forces entwine and combine that are the causative agents of organisational behaviour, and, importantly it is these interactions or contingencies that shed light on what makes an organisation effective.
