| "Management" (from Old French ménagement "the art of
conducting, directing", from Latin manu agere "to lead by the hand") characterises
the process of leading and directing all or part of an organization, often a business,
through the deployment and manipulation of resources (human, financial, material, intellectual or intangible). One can also think
of management functionally, as the action of measuring a quantity on a regular basis and of adjusting some initial plan, and as the actions taken to reach one's intended goal. This applies even in situations where
planning does not take place. Situational management may precede and subsume purposive management.
A governing body is a term used to describe a group formed to manage an organization, such as a sports league.
Historical development
Some writers trace the development of management thought back to Sumerian traders
and ancient Egyptian pyramid builders.
Slave-owners through the centuries faced the problems of exploiting/motivating a
dependent but sometimes recalcitrant workforce, but many pre-industrial enterprises, given their small scale, did not feel compelled to face the issues of
management systematically. But innovations such as the spread of Arabic
numerals (5th to 15th centuries) and the codification of double-entry book-keeping (1494) provided tools for management assessment, planning and
control.
19th century
Modern management as a discipline began as an off-shoot of economics in the
19th century. Classical economists such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill provided a theoretical background to resource allocation, production, and pricing issues. About the same time, innovators like
Eli Whitney, James Watt,
and Matthew Boulton developed technical production elements such as
standardization, quality control procedures, cost accounting,
interchangeability of parts, and work planning.
By the middle of the 19th century, Robert Owen, Henry Poor, and M. Laughlin and others introduced the human
element with theories of worker training, motivation, organizational
structure and span of control. Compare the analyses of Karl Marx and of Friedrich
Engels.
By the late 19th century, marginal economists
Alfred Marshall and Leon Walras and others introduced a new layer of complexity to the theoretical underpinings of management.
Joseph Wharton offered the first tertiary-level course in management in
1881. By about 1900 we find managers trying to place
their theories on a thoroughly scientific basis. Examples include Henry Towne's Science of management in the 1890s,
Frederick Winslow Taylor's Scientific management (1911), Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's Applied motion study (1917), and Henry L. Gantt's charts (1910s). J. Duncan wrote the first college management text book in 1911.
20th century
The first comprehensive theories of management appeared around 1920. People like
Henri Fayol and Alexander Church described the various branches of management
and their inter-relationships. In the early 20th century, people like
Ordwat Tead, Walter Scott and J. Mooney applied the principles of psychology to management, while other writers, such as Elton Mayo, Mary Parker Follett, Chester Barnard, Max Weber,
Rensis Likert, and Chris Argyris approached the phenomenon of management
from a sociological perspective.
Peter Drucker 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 organisation. Drucker went on to write 32 books, many in the same
vein.
H. Dodge, Ronald Fisher, and Thorton C Fry introduced statistical
techniques into management. In the 1940s, Patrick Blackett combined these statistical theories with microeconomic theory and gave birth
to the science of operations research. Operations research, sometimes known as "management science", attempts to take a
scientific approach to solving management problems, particularly in the areas of
logistics and operations.
Some of the more recent developments include the theory of
constraints, reengineering, and various information technology driven theories such as agile software development. The theory of constraints approach describes management
decision-making as a continuous cycle of three basic questions —
- What to change?
- To what to change?
- How to make the change happen?
As the general recognition of managers as a class solidified during the 20th century and gave perceived practitioners of
management a certain amount of prestige, so 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 management theory.
Towards the end of the 20th century, management came to consist of a number of separate branches, including:
21st century
In the 21st century we find it increasingly difficult to subdivide
management into categories in this way. More and more processes simultaneously involve several categories. Instead, we tend to
think in terms of the various processes, tasks, and objects subject to management.
Areas of management
Related topics
External links
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