Classical Management

Conceptual Overview

At the turn of the 20th century, general management—as a professional field and body of knowledge—did not exist. In railroad companies, a massive industry, practitioners such as David McCallum developed management ideas and techniques. These individuals were not concerned with building and capitalizing upon a professional community. Such an agenda formed through intermediaries between the practitioners and the general business-oriented public; for example, Henry Varnum Poor (great-grandfather of historian Alfred Chandler) disseminated McCallum's work through a popular railroad journal. Poor published on general aspects of railroad operations such as financing, regulation, and social issues. Practitioners, too, eventually began to publish. Joseph Slater Lewis, general manager of an engineering firm, published the earliest comprehensive analysis of industrial administration in the United Kingdom in 1896. Lecturing was also a vehicle; in 1900, Henri Fayol gave his first talk on general management at a meeting of mining and metallurgical engineers in Paris

Frederick Winslow Taylor focused on engineering and shop management, and his work—popular in the United States, Europe, Russia, and Japan—opened and filled markets for managerial expertise in factories. However, Taylor's focus was the plant seen from the viewpoint of the superintendent, and thus he disregarded sales and general administration. Practitioners filled this gap; for example, in the early 1900s, Pierre du Pont extended Taylor's ideas of cost control to [Page 164]develop the return-on-investment measure of overall company performance. At the same time, Fayol, a practitioner-turned-lecturer, argued that poor management could destroy technical expertise and that a good administrator with mediocre technical skills was more useful than an expert technician with mediocre administrative skills. However, he argued this before a technical audience.

In 1910, Frank Gilbreth, a follower of Taylor, led a breakaway group from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) called the Society for the Promotion of the Science of Management (later the Taylor Society, then the Society for the Advancement of Management, and finally the American Management Association). Taylor refused to attend, asserting that the group belonged inside the ASME. The separation of management from engineering has been called a management movement. It had a thriving popular literature; magazines with a broader scope than Poor's were founded, such as System (later Business Week in 1900) and Factory in 1907. Other professional associations also formed. In 1918, Fayol founded the Centre d'Etudes Administratives in Paris and in 1919, Benjamin Rowntree founded the Oxford Management Conferences.

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