ABSTRACT

The thought of the utopian socialists offers interesting notions about how organizations should be conducted, involving aspects of both normative and rational control. The industrial and commercial system, whose tendencies seemed cruel and inefficient to the first thinkers of utopian socialism, slowly became more powerful. The first administrative ideologies were conceived by the thinkers of the so-called utopian socialism, and F. A. Hayek observed that the generalized use of the term ‘organization’ appeared in France after the Revolution. John Humphrey Noyes, who wrote a history of socialism in his country, studied the diverse communities and experiences that took place in the United States to explain the reasons of their repeated failures. Noyes’s writings clearly evidence that normative elements of control were already present in the protomanagement theory of the communitarian and utopian literature of the time, but there are also examples of the use of normative control at the level of administrative practices.