In Search of Evidence

Learning From Other Evidence-Based Practices
Peter Drucker views the professionalization of management as the most important
technological development of the twentieth century. He links the enormous economic
growth that took place in the nineteenth century to the development of “the
management profession.” His position is that, without professionalization of the field,
economic growth would have been significantly lower and organizations would have
not been able to make the contribution that is so common in our societies:
“But surely if management had not emerged as a systematic discipline, we could
not have organized what is now a social reality in every developed country: the
society of organizations and the “employee society”.
(Drucker, 1985).
Drucker stresses that organizations are systems in which a whole range of activities are
consciously and purposefully coordinated. Moreover, an organization’s right to exist is
determined by its capacity to coordinate economic activities more efficiently than the
market can. Joseph Bower notes this in connection to the assignment that managers
have in relation to this right to exist and the action and operational orientation that is
needed for that purpose:
“It is one thing to recognize that a corporation is a complex non-linear system
interacting with a very rich and changing environment. It is another to provide a
map of that system that permits managers to act in an intentionally rational
fashion”.
(Bower, 2000).
We know, of course, that intention rationality means trying to engage in systematic
thoughtful decision-making, despite human limits and, in particular, bounded
rationality. Intentional rationality is the same as rationality per se. Drucker argues for a
kind of management practice in which people work “systematically and methodically,”
and he makes mention of the “management profession.” However, Drucker’s
attribution of professionalization to management raises a critical question: if despite
human limitations, attempts to be intentionally rational aided management and
organizations in the twentieth century, how do we continue to develop management
as a profession in the twenty-first? One answer is the more systematic use of evidence
in management and organizational decisions, in particular, scientific evidence.