Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

Design and Devotion
The Evolution of Management Thought
Notes made by Liew Jiek
University of Bristol

Barley and Kunda
•

Challenge the idea that management has remained
constant over the past 150 years and that its development
has been characterised by a movement from coercive to
rational and ultimately to normative control
...
Industrial betterment

2
...
Welfare capitalism/Human relations

4
...
organizational culture/quality

Bendix (1956)
•

Bendix wrote of an increasing preoccupation with
the social-psychological aspects of work
...


•

Similar readings from Scott (1959) and Wren
(1972)
...


Industrial Betterment

Scientific Management (Frederick
Taylor)

1870 - 1900

1900 - 1923

Normative

First phase (ended in the late 1800s),
managerial discourse sought to
legitimate coercive shop floor
practices
...


Welfare Capitalism/Human Relations

1923 - 1955

Normative

As the white-collar labor force grew,
the discourse began to emphasise
normative control: the idea that
managers could regulate workers by
attending not only to their behaviour
but to their thoughts and emotions
...


Organizational culture/ quality

1980 - present

Normative

Increased attention on employee
loyalty and commitment
...


•

Robert Owen (1813) and James Montgomery (1832) what tracts espousing the those that
would become known as “industrial betterment”, and later, “welfare capitalism”
...


•

Started in the railroad industry when Cornelius Vanderbilt and others began founding YMCA
along trunk lines to minister to the railroaders’ physical and spiritual needs, in hopes that the
YMCAs would stem drunkenness and foster a more reliable workforce
...
To meet demand for
labor, owners turned to recent immigrants, and foreign customs and behaviours led to alien
notions of work and employment relations, and thus labor relations became increasingly
confrontational
...

To solve the problem of tension in the workforce, early advocates of industrial betterment’s
second motif spoke of improving the “conditions of the workingmen” (Olmstead, 1900) rather
than of improving working conditions
...


•

Industrial betterment’s third motif: Systems based on cooperation are more advanced than
systems based on conflict
...


•

Industrial betterment’s final motif: profitability
...


Scientific Management,
1900 - 1923
•

The response consisted of attempts by managers with engineering backgrounds to apply the principles of
their discipline to the organisation of production
...
Accordingly, industry’s problems
could be solved by developing more rational methods by managing the shop floor
...
(Litterer, 1963)

•

Their common denominator is as Shenhav (1994) suggested, an attempt to enhance productivity by
specifying cause and effect in the production process
...
Henry Towne (1886) argued before the ASME that because no management
associations existed, the ASME should fill such a role
...
Taylor thought his perspective more reasonable than welfare capitalism and
considered welfare programmes a “joke”
...


•

Scientific management’s rhetoric revolved around three tenets:

1
...
the axiom that all people are primarily rational

3
...


•

Taylor argued that when placed in jobs appropriate to their abilities and fairly paid, even
the least-skilled worker could immediately recognize the superiority of rationally
optimised work procedures
...


•

However, enthusiasm for efficiency called after WW1
...
As the practices were institutionalised they no longer required
justification
...
The efficiency movement’s inability to
substantially reduce waste and lower costs, as well as its more obvious failure to bring
about an industrial utopia, led many advocates to modify their stance
...


Welfare Capitalism/Human Relations
1923 - 1955
•

The resurgence of welfare capitalism after WW1 marked the rekindling of interest in normative
control
...


•

The resurgence of welfare capitalism in the 1920s is best viewed as an attempt to modify and extend
rationalism’s promise to the realm of employment relations
...


•

The two most influential variants of the new industrial and personnel psychology-testing and
ergonomics- remained firmly grounded in a Taylorism ethos
...


•

Ergonomists, who were heavily influenced by Lilian Gilbreth’s work, attributed differences in
performance to environmental and physiological factors, thereby sustaining scientific management’s
emphasis on individualism, rationalism and scientific intervention
...
Yet, by legitimating a concern with human factors in the
workplace, it paved the way for the emergence of a new ideology of normative control: the grouporiented rhetoric of the human relations movement
...
Social interaction and group affiliation were deemed necessary for human fulfilment
and, by implication, harmony in the workplace
...
However, precisely
because group norms were emergent, there was no guarantee of their consistency with managerial
objectives
...


•

The rhetoric of human relations resembled that of industrial betterment in several key aspects
...
Both construed conflict as
pathological
...


•

But whereas IB sought to address industry’s problems by socializing employees through the
communities in which they lived, the HR movement sought to transform the firm itself, and more
importantly, management into a cohesive collective
...
Also, managerial
spokespersons began to claim that HR practices were costly and delivered few results (Baritz,
1960)
...
The spread of the mainframe computer not
only launched a new technical infrastructure, it popularised the language of cybernetics, which
would provide a new lexicon for managerial discourse (Beniger, 1986)

•

The launching of Sputnik in 1957 raised fears the the Soviets might best the USA in the
technical competition that underwrote the Cold War
...
Science and
engineering once again became economically and culturally central
...
Both reports argued that managerial education lacked a coherent core
and that managerial training should be as rigorous as other professional training
...


•

Together, these developments created a context hospitable to a wave of managerial theorising
in a more rational key
...


Systems Rationalism,
1955 - 1980
•

The Arthur D
...


•

The Operations Research Society of America was established in 1952, and a year later its sister
organisation The Institute for Management Science, was formed
...


•

As OR and management science grew more prominent, the general tenor of managerial discourse began to
change
...


•

During the 1950s, Newman (1951), Drucker (1954), Koontz and O’Donnell (1955), and others published
volumes detailing the “principles” and “functions” of management
...

However, the new systematisers wrote of general processes rather than specific practices
...


•

The process theorist’s recommendations were decidedly calculative even when they were not quantitative, i
...

management by objectives (MBO) originally proposed by Drucker (1954)
...
But whereas SM drew on mechanical engineering, systems rationalism appropriated concepts
from electrical engineering and computer science
...
Proponents
argued that, like computer programmes, organisations could be controlled by managing boundaries between
“subunits” and by regulating the “input/output interfaces” between the organisation and its environment
...
However, because system analysis was so
abstract, the new vision of expertise differed from the “functional” expertise that Taylor had advocated
...
Managers who understood an organisational system could
presumably control a firm’s performance without knowing details
...


•

However, system rationalism lacked an explicit model of the workforce
...
As in economics, when the workforce was considered, employees were portrayed either
as automatons who responded mechanically to structural changes or as rational actors whose involvement in
work was instrumental
...
It appeared as though loyalty to the
firm could no longer be taken for granted, even among the professional labor force
...
A
variety of commentators began to argue that curing industry’s ills would demand a rededicated workforce as
well as greater flexibility and creativity
...


Organisational Culture and Quality,
1980 - present
•

In the rush to adopt rational systems of control, firms were said to have sacrificed moral authority, social
integration, quality and flexibility
...


•

The postulate of rationality’s declining returns underwrote culture theory’s first tenet: Economic performance in
turbulent environment requires the commitment of employees who make no distinction between their own
welfare and the welfare of the firm
...


•

Although shared beliefs and values might blur the boundaries between self and organisation, such
commitment was said to imply no loss of individualism or autonomy
...


•

The rhetoric’s second tenet was that strong cultures can be consciously designed and manipulated
...


•

Management was advised to exorcise unwanted thoughts and feelings from the workforce and to replace
them with beliefs and emotions that benefited the organisation
...
The third tenet was that value conformity and emotional commitment
would foster financial gain
...
”

•

The rhetorics of organisational culture, commitment and quality gathered forces as
American managers once again evoked a normative ideology in the face of
foreign competition and global dependency
...
Proponents
of each claimed that organisations are, or should be, collectives
...


•

Accordingly, all three blurred the boundaries between work and non-work, and between managers and workers
...


•

As sentient, social beings, employees were said to perform more diligently when they were committed to a collective whose
ideals they valued
...


•

In contrast, the second set of rhetorics: scientific management, and systems rationalism, emphasised rational control
...


•

Each portrayed the firm as a machine, either mechanical (SM) or computational (SR), that could be analysed into its
component parts, modified, and reassembled into a more effective whole
...


•

Furthermore, both assumed that employees were calculative actors with instrumental orientations to work
...
Since compliance was therefore unproblematic, control could be readily exercised by manipulating systems
...




---