ABSTRACT
Modern scholars of the primitivistic persuasion tend to believe that the conditions of economic production in the ancient world were necessarily and drastically different from those attested in later periods of history. Attitudes and behaviours in the field of economics are admittedly conditioned by the intellectual, technical, material, and social context in which economic actors grow, live, and perform, as well as by their perception of the historical evolution of the material situation in previous times. Thus, the organization of production, agricultural or not, depends at all times on the need and/or the willingness of ‘entrepreneurs’ to reach a level of productivity that would make their effort worthwhile: only an economic system like those established by some Communist régimes in the twentieth century would be able to subordinate economic rationalism to social priorities, an endeavour that met limited success and saw the development of parallel economies (black market) ruled by profit. As a rule, the production of goods and services implies some degree of organization, which may or may not be affected by the overall structure of the society in which it takes place. Throughout history, the level of sophistication found in such an organizing process may have varied to a great extent, but attempts at theoreticizing that process never went beyond the construction of an empirical science, to the effect that there is no clear divide between an archaic ‘timeless, simple managing’ and a modern ‘positive management’. Sceptics may start with Allen’s Winnie-the-Pooh on Management (1994), where management is defined as ‘the art and science of directing effort and resources so that the established objectives of an enterprise may be attained in accordance with accepted policies’, an activity aimed at getting things done the right way through six distinctive functions:
defining the objective(s);
organizing the productive process;
motivating the personnel involved in that process;
training those people;
establishing communication between them and with the chain of command;
measuring and analysing the results of the operation.
