Management Science

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Management science is the experimental study and systematic application of a coordinated process for reaching individual and collective goals by working with and through human and nonhuman resources to continually improve value added to the world.

In historical non-Western civilizations, management topics were addressed by Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese mandarins, pre-Hispanic American chiefs, and Arabic scholars like Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406). However, in Western civilization after the Protestant Reformation, worldly prosperity achieved through hard work in this life became a sign of divine approval, and individuals became motivated to exercise self-discipline at work to earn eternal salvation. Adam Smith (1723–1790) provided the economic rationale for free trade and capitalism to increase individual, group, and national wealth—while critiquing the effects of the division of labor. During the Industrial Revolution, the technological development of steam power, railroad transportation, enormous factories, and production changes required new management skills to rapidly handle large flows of material, people, and information over great distances.

Frederick W. Taylor (1856–1915) was the first to develop a science of the management of others’ work for controlled adaptation of labor to the needs of financial capital in his 1911 work, The Principles of Scientific Management. His model was the machine with its cheap, interchangeable parts, each of which does one specific function. Taylor attempted to do to complex organizations what engineers had done to machines, and this involved making individuals into the equivalent of machine parts. Just as machine parts were easily interchangeable, cheap, and passive, so too should the human parts be the same in the machine model of organizations.

This approach involved breaking down each task to its smallest unit to figure out the one best way to do each job. Then the engineer, after analyzing the job, would teach it to the worker and make sure the worker performed only those motions essential to the task. Taylor attempted to control each element of work and to limit human behavioral variability in order to increase productivity.

The results were profound. Productivity under Taylorism went up dramatically. New departments, such as industrial engineering, personnel, and quality control, arose. There was also growth in middle management as there evolved a separation of planning from operations. Rational rules replaced trial and error; management became formalized and effectiveness increased. Henry Ford (1863–1947) successfully applied scientific management processes in the mass production of inexpensive automobiles using the assembly line. He reduced car assembly time from 728 hours to 93 minutes and increased market share by 40 percent.

Of course, scientific management did not come about without criticism. First, the old-line managers resisted the notion that management was a science to be studied, not a status that was conferred at birth or by inheritance or acquired through an intimidating physical presence or force of personality. Second, many workers resisted the dehumanization of their work due to managerial overcontrol of the labor process in a way that ignored workers’ conceptual and craft skills and deprived them of discretionary time-motion options and work design input. The industrial engineer with a clipboard and a stopwatch, standing over workers to control their task motions and work pace, became a hated figure and led to group resistance.

To counter and complement Taylor’s emphasis on external control of labor, three major approaches have developed over the years, focusing on the following managerial emphases: internal flexibility, internal control, and external flexibility.

First, with respect to emphasizing the internal flexibility of managers, the human relations approach, based on the experiments of Fritz J. Roethlisberger (1898–1974) and William J. Dickson (1904–1989) described in Management and the Worker (1939), demonstrated that work is not merely a mechanical, physical act but an expression of multiple psychosocial needs requiring managerial flexibility. When managers give special attention to employees, productivity is likely to improve regardless of whether working conditions improve—the Hawthorne effect. In The Functions of the Executive (1938), Chester I. Barnard (1886–1961) reinforced this view of the organization as a social system requiring employee cooperation and acceptance of workplace authority. Kurt Lewin (1890–1947), in Frontiers in Group Dynamics (1946), further demonstrated that human work systems could not be understood—much less improved—without factoring in the social-psychological impact of group dynamics in decision making and work performance.

Second, with respect to emphasizing the internal control of managers, Max Weber (1864–1920) maintained that efficient, impersonal coordination of standardized procedures by means of a hierarchy of formal authorities to ensure bureaucratic internal control of labor was the prototypical new role for managers in any organization. Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) further demonstrated, in The New Science of Management Decision (1960), that the internal organization of firms was the result of decisions made by managers facing uncertainty about the future and costs in acquiring information in the present. Under decision theory, Simon claimed that managers have only “bounded rationality” and are forced to make decisions not by “maximizing” but by “satisficing,” that is, setting an aspiration level that, if achieved, they will be happy enough with. If the aspiration level is not achieved, managers will try to change either their aspiration level or their decision to internally control labor.

Third, with respect to emphasizing external flexibility, Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, in Organization and Environment (1968), maintained that the context of fastpaced uncertainty and global risks required modern managers to creatively adapt and acquire external resources to thrive. They argued that a rapidly changing external environment demanded a dynamic, opensystems approach to management with an organizational feedback structure more like an “adhocracy” than a bureaucracy. One of the first contingency theorists, Fred E. Fiedler, in Leader Attitudes and Group Effectiveness (1958), argued that managerial performance depended (was contingent) upon the manager’s match with three situational factors: leader member relations, task structure, and position power.

In summary, the four major approaches to management compete and complement each other, requiring both control and flexibility to demonstrate managerial excellence.

SEE ALSO Labor; Management; Taylorism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barnard, Chester I. 1938. The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fayol, Henri. [1916] 1949. General and Industrial Management. Trans. Constance Storrs. London: Pittman.

Fiedler, Fred E. 1958. Leader Attitudes and Group Effectiveness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Lawrence, Paul, and Jay Lorsch. 1967. Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lewin, Kurt. 1947. Frontiers in Group Dynamics. Human Relations 1 (2): 143–153.

Mayo, Elton. 1933. The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. New York: Macmillan.

Roethlisberger, Fritz J., and William J. Dickson. 1939. Management and the Worker: An Account of a Research Program Conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Simon, Herbert Alexander. 1960. The New Science of Management Decision. New York: Harper.

Taylor, Frederick. 1911. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper.

Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Trans. and eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

Joseph A. Petrick