ABSTRACT
Insight into today's economic and financial problems comes, in this revealing book, from an understanding of how and why the practice and the teaching of management has developed as it has. Gordon Pearson, who has spent equal parts of his long career as a practising manager and a management educator, clarifies through rigorous historical review the difficult issues around management with which we struggle today, such as why management custom and practice so often lead to contravention of the law. Pearson reviews how management became a practice and body of understanding, the development of its crucial role in economic progress, and then how its corruption came about as a result of malign theory, leading to the dominance of the bonus payment culture and short term deal-making that plague us today. Understanding management's past, suggests Pearson, will help its improvement for the future. Contributing to that understanding, this challenging book sheds light on how management might be renewed and on the benign role it could play if freed from the restraints of inappropriate economic theory. This book is not just a history or a sociological analysis of management. It gives a broad, practically informed, critical view of the subject that will be welcomed by any reader with a professional or an academic interest in practice, theory, and context.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |4 pages
Prologue
part |73 pages
The Emergence of Management
chapter |17 pages
Creating the First Economic Surplus
chapter |18 pages
An Economic Theory of Industry and Commerce
chapter |17 pages
Industrialization and Management Responsibilities
chapter |17 pages
The Developing Economic and Political Context
part |95 pages
The Rise of Professional Management
chapter |24 pages
New World, Big Business and Educating Management
chapter |18 pages
Division of Management Labour
chapter |27 pages
Theories of Management
chapter |21 pages
Management in Practice
part |65 pages
The Educated Fall of Management
chapter |24 pages
Seduction by the New Strategic Management
chapter |22 pages
Friedman and Business-Friendly Government
chapter |15 pages
Business Schools versus Management Education
part |19 pages
Management for New Responsibilities