ABSTRACT
Most people still hear "business management" when they hear the word "management." So did I when I first began to study management, in the early 1940s. But even then I studied management not because I was interested in business but because I was interested in society, community, and organization. And management, I knew from the start, was the functioning, governing organ of that new phenomenon, "organization"—a phenomenon so new that the word did not even exist in its present meaning when I started to work in the late 1920s and did not become common usage until after World War II. Within a few years—surely no later than the early 1950s—I then had come to realize that management is the distinctive function of all organizations, whether business or not, and that its function is not an economic, but a social one. This was by no means a popular idea at the time. In fact the idea of management itself was then by no means a popular one. The Harvard Business School, for instance, wanted me to join its faculty in the late 1940s and I needed a job. But the then dean did not want me to teach management—he couldn't figure out what that could be. Still, it was a business school—the Graduate Business School at New York University—that, in the end, did invite me to teach management; neither government departments nor sociology departments nor economics departments—the faculties which, I then thought should be interested in management—had the slightest use for the bastard child.
