ABSTRACT
The field of management emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century as the machines of mass production captured the minds and hearts of the industrialized world. As true of all disciplines that emerged during that time, management’s beginnings were heavily rooted in the mechanistic worldview pioneered by the father of modern physics and mathematics, Sir Isaac Newton. Just as Newton visualized the universe as working like a clock driven by unbending physical laws, organizations of the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries were seen as manufacturing firms with long, impersonal assembly lines with workers performing narrow, mindless tasks under the direction of managers who relied on formal authority, precise procedures, financial incentives, and unyielding rules to control workers’ behavior.
