Management Theory

Management theory refers to the range of theories that help explain the concept, purpose, and process of management in organizations. There are, of course, many definitions of management, with management as a concept and process arguably being traceable back to antiquity. However, the systematic development of management thinking is generally accepted to date from the late 19th century, when the emergence of large industrial corporations created the need for more effective management structures and processes. Of course, the growing demand for management skills at that time and since has not been confined only to large private-sector businesses but has also been manifest within government, public, and voluntary sector organizations, including schools, hospitals, and the like. As with management in general, the history of public relations as conceived of today was spawned in unison with management theory. As public relations has matured as a profession, arguably it has become more firmly rooted in assumptions and processes relevant to management theory. Indeed for many practitioners, a key goal and measure of their success is the achievement of comparable (managerial) status to that of other functional managers within their organization.

Perhaps one of the best-known definitions of management is that advanced by the early management scholar Henri Fayol in 1949, who maintained that management involves “to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to co-ordinate and to control” (p. 40). This so-called classical view of management implies that managers generally operate as essentially rational, analytical planners and decision makers directing the work of subordinates in such a way as to achieve prestated organizational goals. Of course, it is important to recognize that Fayol's essentially command-and-control perspective of management was formulated against a background of the 19th-century coal industry where the challenge was to manage large numbers of unskilled and often poorly educated workers. Here the emphasis was clearly on organizing and coordinating work activities to achieve the most efficient outputs.

In modern developed economies, the role of management in many of today's knowledge-based organizations is often seen as focusing on recruiting, retaining, developing, and empowering a highly skilled and educated workforce. But not all modern organizations are necessarily knowledge-based, nor are all workforces highly skilled and educated, and hence, management may have to operate along a continuum between at one extreme the classical command-and-control mode, and a more supportive, facilitating, and empowering mode as circumstances dictate.

Here it is also important to distinguish between operations management, which focuses on those decisions and actions concerned with day-to-day activities and problems, and the other extreme, strategic management decisions that will launch the firm on a trajectory that is expected to continue for a number of years; the long-term character of these decisions is what makes them strategic.

The classical view of management has come under sustained criticism during the latter half of the 20th century as empirical studies have revealed a quite different picture of what management involves and what managers do. Scholars such as Henry Mintzberg, John P. Kotter, Andrew Pettigrew, and Rosemary Stewart have pointed out that, in reality, management is often a very frenetic, unstructured, and largely reactive activity in which managers are forced to engage in a constant process of negotiation, bargaining, and compromise to get things done. Indeed, in 1994, critical management scholar Tony J. Watson has suggested, “Managing is essentially a process of strategic exchange because it shapes the overall activities of the organization and how it functions in its environment through the continual and continuous exchanging of information, favours, material and symbolic resources” (p. 37). This challenge to traditional conceptions of management have been taken further by the emergence of a critical management studies (CMS) and postmodern perspectives of organizations and management (see the work of scholars such as Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott; Martin Parker, and Tony Watson), which have emphasized how managerial values embedded in language systems, social practices, and decision routines have affected the traditional view of management as a rational objective practice focused on control and direction of resources. The CMS and postmodern perspectives focus the constructed nature of people and organizational reality, in which language systems and dialogue play a central part in creating and recreating organizational reality, and hence in shaping managerial roles and practices.

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