How we came to believe that leaders and managers choose an organization’s direction: professional identifi cation with the sciences of certainty

In the last chapter, I presented the case for a fundamental rethinking of the nature of organizations and the role of those who manage and lead them. That case rests fi rstly on the lack of persuasive evidence backing up the dominant explanations and prescriptions for organizing, managing and leading; and secondly, on the possible collapse of investment capitalism. In order to form a coherent idea of just what it is we are to rethink, we need, I believe, to understand how we have come to think about management and leadership as we now do, particularly how and why this thinking has come to be identifi ed with science (as in the natural sciences), for it is through this identifi cation that we have come to believe that leaders and managers choose what happens to an organization. This chapter will therefore provide a brief history of how the roles of manager and leader have evolved over the last century or so and what this means for how we now think about organizations. To start with, consider the origins of the words ‘manage’ and ‘lead’ in the English language and how the form of the modern corporation emerged.