Management

Category: Fields of research

Management refers to the theoretical knowledge and practical application of that scientific knowledge with the goal of improving economic efficiency and labor productivity of the work processes and business practices. Although handling large quantities of workers, materials, and information has been practiced for millennia by people who led great projects and enterprises, scientific study of the management process only started with the work of Frederick W. Taylor (1856–1915). Scientific management, also known as Taylorism, presented in Taylor’s book, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), is the science of managing someone else's work under capitalism. Taylor wanted to achieve the highest possible productivity of labor by applying scientific methods, and he hoped that everyone, including workers, would see the rationality of his approach. He saw big organizations as behaving similarly to machines, and consisting of many interdependent parts. The basic principles of Taylorism are the separation of the work process from the skills of workers, the separation of ideas from execution, and that all mental work should be removed from the plant and concentrated in the planning department, in order to use the knowledge monopoly to control every step of the work process. The practical goal was to break each task that a worker does into the smallest unit and to optimize it. Once the process of perfecting the performance of the task is finished next step is to teach every worker to perform that task in that particular optimal way. Some of the most influential and notable theorists of scientific management are: Henry Ford, Fritz J. Roethlisberger, William J. Dickson, Elton Mayo, Chester I. Barnard, Herbert A. Simon, James Burnham, Abraham Maslow, Peter Drucker, Geert Hofstede, Philip Kotler, Henry Mintzberg, and Ohmae Kenichi.

Research on the Impact of Management on Society

Elton Mayo, in the period from 1927 to 1933, conducted empirical research at the Western Electric Company factory, which was located in Hawthorne, a suburb of Chicago, so the whole study is known as the "Hawthorne Study". The first part of the study investigated the effects of improving technological working conditions on the productivity of manual workers. Mayo and his colleagues concluded that changing working conditions was not a decisive factor in increasing productivity, but the workers, who were the subject of the study, had a sense of specialness because they had been chosen to be part of the study. The fact that they were elected and given attention gave the workers a sense of group belonging and the impression that they had control over their work.

In the further phase of the research, twenty thousand interviews were conducted with employees of all of the plants of that company. The interviews revealed the existence of great apathy, hostility toward managers, and the existence of informal norms among workers. Mayo used the results and conclusions of this research to study the entire industrial society. He concluded that there is a mass apathy among workers in the industries due to the inhumane management of the workers. He believed that the solution was not only in improving the real position of workers and in more humane relations at work, but also in the global change in the structure of industrial society.

In current capitalism, this resource is controlled by managers and capitalists. According to Wright, for bureaucracy (including political and economic leaders), authority is not a resource in itself, but the organization is a resource controlled by a hierarchy of authority. Organizational resources are the basis for exploitation because ordinary workers would be in a better position if the management of companies were democratized.

In the book Monopoly Capital (1966), co-authored by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, monopoly capitalism is presented as a system in which firms do not compete over prices, but compete in sales. The basic feature of such a system is progressive rationalization. Another important feature of monopoly capitalism is that large corporations have broad shareholder ownership and are controlled by managers rather than stockholders.

Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), studies how the work of manual workers has changed since the time of Karl Marx. The main conclusion of his study is that there was a massive decrease in the skills and knowledge of manual workers in the sphere of industrial production in the twentieth century. Such a reduction in the skills and knowledge of workers is not the product of chance, but of the systematic action of the capitalists to weaken the organized labor movement. The main method by which the deskilling of workers was achieved was by the application of principles of Taylorism. Craftsmen had great theoretical and technical knowledge in the 18th and 19th centuries, while the application of Taylorism separated skill and knowledge, so the worker stopped being a craftsman and became a living tool of the machine. Braverman believes that the scientific management movement is of invaluable importance in shaping modern corporations and that it rules the world of production. Experts in human relations and industrial psychology are becoming a service department for the maintenance of human machinery. Taylorism has brought control over workers and the work process to a whole new level. In addition, the increase in productivity achieved by Taylorism did not lead to a proportional increase in wages; on the contrary, there was a reduction in wages. Braverman believes that the loss of control, knowledge, and reduction of wages that workers have experienced is the essence of Taylorism.

In his book Manufacturing of Consent (1979), Michael Burawoy examines how directors and managers in companies obtain consent from workers, that is, how they manage to persuade them to cooperate with management. Management in companies gives up strict control over workers and the work process, so workers have the impression that they have greater rights, and their dissatisfaction is reduced. The consent of workers to exploitation, despite oppression and low wages, is also created by manipulating and inciting conflict between the workers themselves.

Barbara Ehrenreich introduced the concept of the professional-managerial class in their article “The Professional-Managerial Class”, which was published in the book edited by Pat Walker Between Labor and Capital (1979). This class consists of well-paid experts and managers who do not own the means of production, but who, within the reproduction of capitalism, play the role of maintaining capitalist culture and capitalist social relations. This class acts against the interests of the working class in many ways. Engineers produce technologies that benefit the ruling class, while managers introduce a higher level of social control of workers within the production relationship. This class also directly affects the reduction of autonomy and skills of workers (deskilling), because it eliminates the need for highly qualified workers (the position of foreman) who previously organized the production process. The uniqueness of the interests of this class is reflected in the need to appropriate the surplus labor created by the working class, while, at the same time, they want to preserve autonomy in relation to the ruling class.

References:

Abercrombie. Capital, Labour and the Middle Classes (1983);

Baran. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (1966);

Braverman. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974);

Burawoy. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (1979);

Burns. The Management of Innovation (1961);

Ehrenreich. “The Professional-Managerial Class”, in ed. Walker, Pat. Between Labor and Capital (1979). Women in the Global Factory (1983);

Galbraith. The New Industrial State (1967);

Glass. Social Mobility in Britain (1954);

Goldthorpe. The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies (1992);

Gouldner. Wildcat Strike: A Study in Worker-Management Relationships (1954);

Mills. White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951);