ABSTRACT
The essence of management is that it is about.people. Since human nature has not changed in the past centuries and is unlikely to change in the present, the process of management will basically remain the same. It differs less from period to period than from country to country. A French management researcher who compared three technically identical subsidiaries of a French aluminum corporation in France, the USA and the Netherlands has shown management processes on the shop floor to be dramatically different in the three cases, managers and subordinates in each country following traditions that were already in place two centuries ago. Technological innovations did not change these traditions. Technology will change some practices of organizations but not many others which rest on values embedded in the surrounding society and transferred from generation to generation.
