Work, play and boredom - Ephemera

ephemera 11(4): 336-356 Work and play in management studies
articles Donncha Kavanagh
The birth and infancy of management studies
According to Wikipedia, ‘organizational studies is generally considered to have begun
as an academic discipline with the advent of scientific management in the 1890s’
(Wikipedia). Even if one is sceptical of Wikpedia’s collective wisdom, and even if one
might locate the discipline’s origins in the industrial revolution, there is much evidence
to suggest that the mid to late 19 th century marks the birth of management studies. For
instance, Barley and Kunda (1992) begin their story of the evolution of managerial
ideologies in 1870, while Eastman and Bailey (1998) start their story in 1890, as does
Guillén (1994) when he identified scientific management as the first management
model (Taylor published his famous article on the piece-rate system in 1895). Shenhav
(1995; 2000), begins his study of the (engineering) foundations of organization theory
in 1879; Wren (1997: xii) notes that ‘about 1880…the literature took a quantum jump as
a result of the workshop management movement’; the first business school (the
Wharton School of Finance and Economy) was founded in 1881; while Towne (1886),
one of the first engineers to see management as a new social role for engineers,
published his influential article, The Engineer as an Economist, in 1886. Significantly,
all of these events occurred in the United States of America, where new infrastructure
was being built at an unprecedented rate and scale.
While a ‘discipline’ is often understood as a branch of knowledge, I use the term to
describe a group of people who focus, in a sustained and collective way on studying,
representing and analysing a phenomenon of interest. The branch of knowledge is then
understood as an emergent outcome of the group’s work, as are more tangible
manifestations, such as educational programs, journals, academic positions and
institutions. In the case of management studies, the evidence indicates that, while earlier
writings and practices provided a rich background, the discipline first came to be in a
specific time and place, namely the (mainly north-east) United States in the late 19 th
century. The discipline, at that time, consisted of a self-selected group of various
spokespersons, philosophers, practitioners, opinion leaders, and apologists for the
managerial class, mostly working in larger firms, consulting houses, research
institutions, trade associations, employer groups, government agencies, think tanks,
publishers, business schools and universities. Guillén’s (1994) comparative study of the
emergence of management models in different countries makes it clear that the
discipline originated in the United States, with its ideas and methods spreading
subsequently to other countries. What distinguished the United States in the late 19 th
century was the development of large-scale enterprises, the concomitant emergence of a
new managerial class and a new ‘managerial ideology’. In contrast, even though the
industrial revolution of the 18 th century was centred on Great Britain and had its own
‘entrepreneurial ideology’, British managers turned their backs on their entrepreneurial
history – probably because of aristocratic contempt for commerce and industry – and
rejected American scientific management until well into the twentieth century (Bendix,
1956/1963: 25-33; Guillén, 1994: 208). In Germany, the social sciences remained
weakly institutionalised before 1929, while ‘industrial bureaucratization in Spain was
some thirty or forty years behind in terms of the American, British or German levels’
(Guillén, 1994: 164). In Russia, the emerging managerial class was subjected to, not
only the contempt of the landowning aristocracy, but also the strictures of government
control (Bendix, 1956/1963: 199-206). Thus, a unique set of circumstances enabled a
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