Management History

The usual readers of Management Decision, who, from time to time, may have sneaked a look in the “sealed section” that has been the Journal of Management History, might wonder why Management Decision would devote a whole issue to the topic. After all, Management Decision’s self-stated remit is to offer “thoughtful and provocative insights into current management practice” – it is a journal focussed on the practicalities of management and management decision making. That being said, one is reminded of Lewin’s (1951, p. 169) exhortation that: “There is nothing so practical as a good theory”. The purpose of this special issue is to identify and chronicle the ways in which contributions by early writers in management have been (or at least could have been) absorbed into current understanding and can inform the future development of management ideas – the issue then, is about good theory and is, therefore, most practical. There are few general management texts today that do not start with homage to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers on management and administration – Weber and bureaucracy, Taylor and scientific management, Fayol and the classical school of management, and so on. A quick “tiptoe through the tulips” of their (claimed) main ideas, a passing nod to Chester Barnard and Elton Mayo, and then it is on to Maslow, Mintzberg, Drucker, Porter et al., with nary a backward glance. The notion appears to be that these writers, mostly long dead, are only of “historical” interest, quaint in their ideas that more modern minds have evolved beyond in their thinking. Yet, as the quote at the head of this paper so cogently observes, the past is never fully gone – it is absorbed into the present and future, it stays to shape what we are and what we do. And so we need to consider the past more than merely en passant. There are also writers whose ideas are not widely explored or known, and even ignored (see, for example, Dye et al. (2005); and Nyland and Heenan (2005), both in this issue). Accordingly, the history of management ideas that are proffered in the various management/business tomes (with worthy exceptions such as Wren, 2004) are not only sparse, but also patchy and, ultimately, unbalanced. In consequence, we need to examine more closely the historical development of management concepts and practices, with a view to how they inform the present and “shape what we are and what we do”. This includes examination or re-examination of established historical management concepts; the historical and continuing role of the behavioural sciences in the development of management practices; historical analysis of management philosophies; methodologies for dealing with historical management materials; the importance of the historical perspective in understanding contemporary management; and historical aspects of such workplace features as quality