ABSTRACT
Sune Carlson wrote in his Preface to Executive Behaviour (Carlson, 1951, pp. 9–10) forty years ago, after quoting Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperment in Three Primitive Societies:
the reader must not be misled into thinking that this is an anthropological study of sex and temperment of managing directors. It is something much less fascinating and spectacular; it is merely an attempt to study the behaviour of the directors in their daily work. Nevertheless, in the course of this work I have often felt as I believe a social anthropologist must feel when he has to study the big chiefs of an unknown tribe. I have seen many strange things and generally I have lacked the necessary hypotheses to arrange my observations in a neat theoretical system. I have often felt lost and bewildered. But if one is completely lost, it is not a bad plan, says Barbara Wootton, to try to make a note of nearly everything that one can see. “After a time, something that makes sense may emerge from some regions of what till then looked like complete confusion.” This is exactly what I have done, and the ideas that have emerged I have put into this book. I sincerely hope that they make some sense, or that if they do not, they will at least stimulate discussion and in that way be fruitful for further research.
