Some see management as a late-modern (in the sense of late
modernity) conceptualization. With the changing workplaces of the
Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries,
military theory and practice contributed approaches to managing the newly popular
factories.
Early writing Written in 1776 by
Adam Smith, a
Scottish moral philosopher,
The Wealth of Nations discussed efficient organization of work through
division of labour. Smith described how changes in processes could boost productivity in the manufacture of
pins. While individuals could produce 200 pins per day, Smith analyzed the manufacturing steps and, with 10 specialists, enabled the production of 48,000 pins per day. before
wage slavery eclipsed chattel slavery. Salaried managers as an identifiable group first became prominent in the late 19th century. As large corporations began to overshadow small family businesses, the need for personnel management positions became more necessary. Businesses grew into large corporations and the need for clerks, bookkeepers, secretaries and managers expanded. The demand for trained managers led college and university administrators to consider and implement plans to establish the first schools of business on their campuses.
20th century At the turn of the twentieth century, the need for skilled and trained managers had become increasingly apparent. The demand occurred as personnel departments began to expand rapidly. In 1915, fewer than 1 in 20 manufacturing firms had a dedicated personnel department. By 1929, that number had grown to over one-third. Formal management education became standardized at colleges and universities. Colleges and universities capitalized on the needs of corporations by forming business schools and corporate-placement departments. This shift toward formal business education marked the creation of a corporate élite in the US. By about 1900, one finds managers trying to place their theories on what they regarded as a thoroughly scientific basis (see
scientism for perceived limitations of this belief). Examples include
Henry R. Towne's
Science of management in the 1890s,
Frederick Winslow Taylor's
The Principles of Scientific Management (1911),
Lillian Gilbreth's
Psychology of Management (1914),
Frank and
Lillian Gilbreth's
Applied motion study (1917), and
Henry L. Gantt's charts (1910s). J. Duncan wrote the first
college management
textbook in 1911. In 1912
Yoichi Ueno introduced
Taylorism to
Japan and became the first
management consultant of the
"Japanese management style". His son Ichiro Ueno pioneered Japanese
quality assurance. The first comprehensive theories of management appeared around 1920. The
Harvard Business School offered the first
Master of Business Administration degree (MBA) in 1921. People like
Henri Fayol (1841–1925) and
Alexander Church (1866–1936) described the various branches of management and their inter-relationships. In the early 20th century, people like Ordway Tead (1891–1973),
Walter Scott (1869–1955), and J. Mooney applied the principles of
psychology to management. Other writers, such as
Elton Mayo (1880–1949),
Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933),
Chester Barnard (1886–1961),
Max Weber (1864–1920, who saw what he called the "administrator" as
bureaucrat,),
Rensis Likert (1903–1981), and
Chris Argyris (born 1923) approached the phenomenon of management from a
sociological perspective.
Peter Drucker (1909–2005) wrote one of the earliest books on applied management:
Concept of the Corporation (published in 1946). It resulted from
Alfred Sloan (chairman of
General Motors until 1956) commissioning a study of the
organization. Drucker went on to write 39 books, many of which were in the same vein. H. Dodge,
Ronald Fisher (1890–1962), and Thornton C. Fry introduced statistical techniques into management studies. In the 1940s,
Patrick Blackett worked on developing the
applied-mathematics science of
operations research, initially for military operations. Operations research, sometimes known as "
management science" (but distinct from Taylor's
scientific management), attempts to take a
scientific approach to solving decision-problems and can apply directly to multiple management problems, particularly in the areas of
logistics and operations. Some of the later 20th-century developments include the
theory of constraints (introduced in 1984),
management by objectives (systematized in 1954), the (developed by
Reinhard Höhn in post-war Germany),
re-engineering (the early 1990s),
Six Sigma (1986),
management by walking around (1970s), the
Viable system model (1972), and various
information-technology-driven theories such as
agile software development (so-named from 2001), as well as group-management theories such as
Cog's Ladder (1972) and the notion of
"thriving on chaos" (1987). As the general recognition of managers as a class solidified during the 20th century, it conferred a certain amount of prestige on perceived practitioners of the art/science of management. Hence, the way opened for
popularised systems of management ideas to peddle their wares. In this context, many
management fads may have had more to do with
pop psychology than with scientific theories of management. Business management includes the following branches: •
financial management •
human resource management •
management cybernetics •
information technology management (responsible for
management information systems ) •
marketing management •
operations management and
production management •
strategic management 21st century Branches of management theory also exist relating to
nonprofits and to government: such as
public administration,
public management, and
educational management. Further, management programs related to
civil society organizations have also given rise to programs in nonprofit management and
social entrepreneurship. Many of the assumptions made by management have come under attack from
business-ethics viewpoints,
critical management studies, and
anti-corporate activism. This could include violations to a company’s
ethics policy. As one consequence,
workplace democracy (sometimes referred to as
Workers' self-management) has become both more common and more advocated, in some places distributing all management functions among workers, each of whom takes on a portion of the work. However, these models predate any current political issue and may occur more naturally than does a
command hierarchy. == Nature of work ==