Management History

This book has two broad purposes. First, it seeks to determine whether or not there is a universal managementmodel through an examination of circumstance in a number of different nations and industries. Second, it bringsto a wider audience some of the leading research in the field of management history. In doing so, it highlights theimportance of the Management History Division of the Academy of Management in fostering and disseminating newunderstandings of management and its development. The book indicates that, while there has been much variance in managerial practices acrosstime and space, we can nevertheless speak of a universal managerial model.Emerging in association with Britain's Industrial Revolution, the spread of competitive pressures progressively demanded that enterprises respondin broadly common ways if they were to survive. These broad commonalities can be seen in the diverse industries that this book considers - the beefindustry of the Northern Plains of the United States in the nineteenth century, the trading activities of the Dutch East India Company, the UnitedStates and Australian railroads, and the manufacturing methods of the Ford Motor Company during the early twentieth century. In each of thesecircumstances, industries and firms had to constantly adapt to changes in both capital and consumer markets. This is evident even in the case of theFord Motor Company which, as James Wilson's chapter indicates, was in its early days flexible rather than Fordist, constantly adjusting productionand inventories in accordance with consumer demand. Such responses to global markets is also found in the realms of ideas and education, wherethe book's study of trends in business education highlights the growing dominance of commercialfactors and of intellectual concepts stemming from the United States.The power of management commonalities is also found in the book's study of Australia and the UnitedStates. In Australia, governments long sought to isolate the national economy from global trends so as toboost manufacturing and local employment. Ultimately, however, this proved unsuccessful as Australianproduction became increasingly uncompetitive. A severe process of economic readjustment, with oftenadverse social effects, is also found in the book's chapter on the United States, which highlights themajor changes that have occurred since the 1960s. This book also considers how managerialorganizations have been forced to adapt and the intellectual debates that have accompanied this.Finally, in Regina Greenwood's chapter, we have an account of the Management History Division of theAcademy of Management, an organization which has provided the fulcrum for thegeneration and dissemination of management history for the last 3 decades.