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Management history : absorbing the past to understand the present and inform the future /
The usual readers of Management Decision, who, from time to time, may have sneakeda look in the "sealed section" that has been the Journal of Management History, mightwonder why Management Decision would devote a whole issue to the topic. After all, Management Decision's self-stated r...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
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| Otros Autores: | |
| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
[Bradford, England] :
Emerald Group Pub.,
[2005]
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| Colección: | Management decision ;
v. 43, no. 10. |
| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | The usual readers of Management Decision, who, from time to time, may have sneakeda look in the "sealed section" that has been the Journal of Management History, mightwonder why Management Decision would devote a whole issue to the topic. After all, Management Decision's self-stated remit is to offer "thoughtful and provocativeinsights into current management practice"--It is a journal focussed on thepracticalities of management and management decision making. That being said, one is reminded of Lewin's (1951, p. 169) exhortation that: "There is nothing so practical asa good theory". The purpose of this special issue is to identify and chronicle the waysin which contributions by early writers in management have been (or at least couldhave been) absorbed into current understanding and can inform the futuredevelopment of management ideas - the issue then, is about good theory and is, therefore, most practical. There are few general management texts today that do not start with homage to thelate nineteenth and early twentieth century writers on management andadministration - Weber and bureaucracy, Taylor and scientific management, Fayoland the classical school of management, and so on. A quick "tiptoe through the tulips"of their (claimed) main ideas, a passing nod to Chester Barnard and Elton Mayo, andthen it is on to Maslow, Mintzberg, Drucker, Porter et al., with nary a backward glance. The notion appears to be that these writers, mostly long dead, are only of "historical"interest, quaint in their ideas that more modern minds have evolved beyond in theirthinking. Yet, as the quote at the head of this paper so cogently observes, the past isnever fully gone - it is absorbed into the present and future, it stays to shape what weare and what we do. And so we need to consider the past more than merely en passant. There are also writers whose ideas are not. Widelyexplored or known, and evenignored (see, for example, Dye et al. (2005); and Nyland and Heenan (2005), both in thisissue). Accordingly, the history of management ideas that are proffered in the variousmanagement/business tomes (with worthy exceptions such as Wren, 2004) are not onlysparse, but also patchy and, ultimately, unbalanced. In consequence, we need toexamine more closely the historical development of management concepts andpractices, with a view to how they inform the present and "shape what we are and whatwe do". This includes examination or re-examination of established historicalmanagement concepts; the historical and continuing role of the behavioural sciences inthe development of management practices; historical analysis of managementphilosophies; methodologies for dealing with historical management materials; theimportance of the historical perspective in understanding contemporary management;and historical aspects of such workplace features as quality control, cultures, andoccupational health and safety. The art of editing a special edition - bringing together at one time a series of papersallegedly developed round a common theme and then representing them as a cogentwhole- is one with often Zen-like qualities: we learn about the art by observing andstudying those examples where the editor(s) has not succeeded. And it may be seen byothers that this issue can be added to the Zen collection, but I hope not. I have beenfortunate in attracting to the issue a series of papers that have been informed by andthat, in turn, inform the theme identified in the call for papers. The rest of this paper isconcerned with the demonstration of the Gestalt that this collection of papersrepresents, together with a contribution to the discussion about the ownership andcontrol of management knowledge. Lenses on management history: the current. IssueEarlierin 2005, Spender spoke at the EURAM conference about managementeducation, providing some history of the search for academic legitimacy and theownership and control of management knowledge. While his paper Spender (2005) has not received the attention accorded to those of his North American counterparts, itprovides a particularly apt introduction to this issue. The current chorus of criticism about management education in general, and MBAprograms in particular (see, for example, Mintzberg, 2004; Pfeffer and Fong, 2004), isnot anything new (Spender, 2005). Spender (2005) takes us back before the generallyaccepted beginnings of management education in the early twentieth century to itsgeneses in the fourteenth century and, later, in the German Cameralist schools of theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He argues that much of the subsequent history ofthe professionalisation of management has been about a search for legitimacy, ownership and the control of management knowledge. Spender (2005) concludes thatwe might do better to shift our thinking from the "manager as administrator" to the"manager as artist" and to reorient our educational efforts accordingly. Similar effortsto move the practice of management beyond administrative process to consider othermetaphors of organisation as a basis for leading them have found articulate championsin Morgan (1997) and Bolman and Deal (2003), whose works appeared initially in thelate 1980s and early 1990s (long enough ago, it seems these days, to count as ofhistorical interest themselves). Perhaps one of the reasons that the Cameralists have been not been given theirmerited prominence in discussions of management pedigrees is because, as Jackson(2005) points out in his exploration of the eighteenth century Cameralist antecedents ofbureaucracy, administration and public policy are areas left alone by. Mostmanagementtexts. Indeed, Max Weber's exposition of bureaucracy has all butdisappeared from recent textbooks and, when it does appear, it is more often than notpresented quite inappropriately (see Lamond, 1990; Dye et al., 2005). At a time whenthere is so much talk about the "business of government" and the citizen as consumerof government services, this is perhaps not surprising. Of course, public policy (and itsadministration) not only exists, but also represents a critical component of the contextwithin which companies and economic activity are embedded. Jackson (2005) examines the work of eighteenth century Cameralist, Johann Gottlobvon Justi, to shed new light on the evolution of the theory and practice of bureaucracy, and the influence that the Cameralists had on Max Weber's concept of bureaucracy asthe rule-bound application of rules. In doing so, Jackson (2005) reinforces theimportance of the Cameralist pedigree to our understanding of the development ofadministration and management, suggesting it would be timely to investigate furtherthe development of administration in early modern Europe. Noting Spender's alternate characterisation of the manager as artist, we mightexpand this exploration to include the notion of the manager as "author" of themanagerial script. This is, in a sense, what Hamilton and Hamilton (2005) do in theirpaper, "Timeless advice: Daniel Defoe and small business management". Daniel Defoeprobably is best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, but he was also an earlyentrepreneur who late in his life published a business text called The Complete EnglishTradesman. If, as Napoleon had suggested, Britain was a nation of shopkeepers ("unenation de boutiquiers"), then, in Defoe, the boutiquiers had a strong supporter who sawthem, along with the merchants and tradespeople, as the backbone of British society. Previously. Publishedin: Managerial Management Decision, Volume 43, Number 10, 2005. |
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| Notas: | Title from e-book title screen (viewed Dec. 19, 2005). |
| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource |
| Bibliografía: | Includes bibliographical references. |
| ISBN: | 1845448731 9781845448738 |
| ISSN: | 0025-1747 ; |