I’ve been thinking of management as a technology for some time.
Month: June 2016
“One thing that cannot be said of the “new” organization, however, is that it is new.
In 1983, a Harvard Business School professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, beat the would-be revolutionaries of the nineties to the punch when she argued that rigid “segmentalist” corporate bureaucracies were in the process of giving way to new “integrative” organizations, which were “informal” and “change-oriented.” But Kanter was just summarizing a view that had currency at least as early as 1961, when Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker published an influential book criticizing the old, “mechanistic” organization and championing the new, “organic” one. In language that eerily anticipated many a dot-com prospectus, they described how innovative firms benefited from “lateral” versus “vertical” information flows, the use of “ad hoc” centers of coordination, and the continuous redefinition of jobs. The “flat” organization was first explicitly celebrated by James C. Worthy, in his study of Sears in the 1940s, and W. B. Given coined the term “bottom-up management” in 1949. And then there was Mary Parker Follett, who in the 1920s attacked “departmentalized” thinking, praised change-oriented and informal structures, and—Rosabeth Moss Kanter fans please take note—advocated the “integrative” organization.”
“That Taylorism and its modern variants are often just a way of putting labor in its place need hardly be stated: from the Hungarians’ point of view, the pig iron experiment was an infuriatingly obtuse way of demanding more work for less pay. That management theory represents a covert assault on capital, however, is equally true. (The Soviet five-year planning process took its inspiration directly from one of Taylor’s more ardent followers, the engineer H. L. Gantt.) Much of management theory today is in fact the consecration of class interest—not of the capitalist class, nor of labor, but of a new social group: the management class.”