Dmitrijs Kravcenko

5: The Law of the Situation – Mary Parker Follett

January 26, 2016 Dmitrijs Kravcenko

Mary Parker Follett

Mary Parker Follett (September 3, 1868 – December 18, 1933) was an American social worker, management consultant, and philosopher who did trailblazing work in the fields of organizational theory and organizational behavior. This episode is a review of one of Follett’s lectures, The Giving of Orders, contained in a collection of Follett’s lectures and writings that was assembled by Lyndall Urwick at the end of her life in an effort to preserve her ideas for others. Follett believed that exploring “the science of the situation” involved both management and workers studying the situation together. In many ways, Follett was ahead of her time in emphasizing the need for systems thinking (understanding “the whole situation”) and espousing the belief that workers should have a much more prominent role in functions that had traditionally been considered the province of management such as planning and execution of work.

Follett identified the importance of cross-organizational processes within hierarchical organizations, which was an important development supporting matrix-style organizations such as DuPont in the 1920s. She advocated non-coercive power-sharing in the workplace based on the use of her concept of “power with” rather than “power over.” Follett coined the term “win-win” in conflict resolution. She believed organizations would benefit from embracing conflict as a means of achieving diversity and integrated solutions rather than merely compromising.

Follett viewed organizations as networks of groups rather than as hierarchical structures, and paid special attention to the influence of human relations within the group. In the text for the podcast, The Giving of Orders, Follett revealed her pragmatist approach to management through taking a responsible attitude toward experience, depersonalizing orders through identifying and obeying the “law of the situation,” and balancing supervision with worker autonomy.

Follett disagreed with interpretations of scientific management that reduced managers to giving orders and charging workers to comply with those orders. In her view, “the essence of scientific management the attempt to find the law of the situation” (p. 33). A manager’s job was “not how to get people to obey orders, but how to devise methods by which we can best discover the order integral to a particular situation” (p. 33). Follett was an early advocate of systems thinking, advising leaders and works to “study the entire situation.” She believed that “the joint study of the problem [prepares] the attitude for integration” of diverse perspectives on situations encountered. Follett believed that workers were just as capable as managers of determining the law of the situation through the “authority of expertise.” It is the situation that determines what needs to be done, not managers alone because of their positions within the organizational hierarchy.

Join us as we discuss Follett’s alternative take on the scientific management practices discussed in Episodes 1 and 2.

You may also download the audio files here:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Also read an exclusive TAOP essay, “A Letter About Mary Parker Follett,” by Albie Davis.
Read with us:

Follett, Mary Parker. “The giving of orders.” Scientific foundations of business administration (1926), 29-37.  Available through the Mary Parker Follett Network (scroll to page 10 of the hyperlinked document).

To Learn More: 

Davis, A.M. (2015) When Webb met Follett: Negotiation Theory and the Race to the Moon, Negotiation Journal, 31(3), 267-283.

 

 

4: Carnegie Mellon Series #1 – Organizational Routines

December 21, 2015 Dmitrijs Kravcenko
In our first episode on the Carnegie-Mellon School, we examine selected passages from March & Simon's book Organizations and Cyert & March's book A Behavioral Theory of the Firm to address the rise of scholarly thought on matters of organizational routines

3: Theory of Human Motivation – Abraham Maslow

December 1, 2015 Dmitrijs Kravcenko
We discuss "A Theory of Human Motivation" by Abraham H. Maslow, one of the most famous psychology articles ever written. Originally published in 1943, it was in this landmark paper that Maslow presented his first detailed representation of Self-Actualization - the desire to become everything that one is capable of becoming - at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of human needs. What Maslow is most famous for, however, is the pyramid of human needs.

2: General and Industrial Management – H. Fayol’s Theory of Administration

November 10, 2015 Dmitrijs Kravcenko

Henri Fayol

Henri Fayol (1841 – 1925) was a French mining engineer and director of mines who developed a general theory of business administration broadly compatible with scientific management of Frederick Winslow Taylor. These two gentlemen are widely acknowledged to have been foundational to modern management theory but, unlike his North American contemporary, Fayol was more concerned with strategy and macro-management. Consequently, he did not devote as much attention to measurement, control and other aspects of scientific management as Taylor did, recognizing instead that organizations consist of people who need to be led and whose activities must be coordinated and organized. Fayol foreshadowed ‘soft’ concepts of management such as esprit de corps, employee initiative and feedback.  In contrast to Taylor’s belief that the design and organization of work were the exclusive province of the technically educated (engineers mainly), Fayol wrote that authority and responsibility derived from one’s position in the organization and not purely technical knowledge. He decried the way engineers were educated at the time, arguing that too much emphasis was placed on mathematics and technical skill that he thought were of limited use managing people. Henri Fayol is best known for his contribution to articulating and establishing the theory of management as we know it today.

For this episode, we are reading part of his central 1916 work, General and Industrial Management (first translated into English in 1929, but not published in the United States until 1949). In this work Fayol clearly outlined the five distinct elements of management and the fourteen principles that he believed should guide managers in administering those elements. In Episode 2 we are concerned with Fayol’s articulation of the 14 principles presented in Chapter 4. Fayol’s description of the principles and their interdependence was one of the earliest formal theories of management and is still one of the most comprehensive. While many of them may seem like common sense, this was not the case 100 years ago, so Fayol is really a prominent figure whom we are keen to discuss. And, as the title for this episode suggests, he repeatedly emphasized that his principles were to guide and not to prescribe (which, let’s face it, is very contemporary!).

Like Chester Barnard (1938) who followed him, Fayol synthesized his theories of management in organizations from his personal experience working in and eventually becoming the director of a mining company that employed around 10,000 people. Fayol believed it was possible to improve efficiency in organizations through better managerial practices. The profundity of his thinking is reflected in that in the Foreword to the 1949 English translation for publication in the U.S., Urwick lamented that the translators used “management” in lieu of Fayol’s term “administration” because of the multiple meanings of the word “management” versus the more precise meaning of “administration,” at least in 1949.

Similar to Taylor, Fayol argued that his flexible approach to management based on general principles could be applied to all kinds of business concerns. Accordingly he stressed the importance (and the practice) of forecasting and planning as key to adapting his ideas and techniques in any sort of situation. Like Taylor, Fayol’s 14 Principles are now considered to be common sense because they are part of a common practice of management. A practice that he was instrumental in establishing. At the time Fayol wrote, they were revolutionary concepts for organizational management. We will explore this further during the Episode.

As noted in the Foreword to the 1949 edition of General and Industrial Management, Fayol was a successful turnaround specialist of his day. When he became the Director of Commentry-Fourchambault in 1888, the company was in serious financial decline. Through application of his ideas and the help of people he had previously trained, Fayol executed a series of restructuring and the company experienced a dramatic reversal of fortune. Because of this success, there was much interest in his ideas in France. Alas, his contributions were largely unknown in the English-speaking countries until 1949, at which point principles such as these were no longer new (33 years later!), which probably explains why he is not as well known as his U.S. counterpart – F.W. Taylor. We hope to rectify that in this, and possibly, another future episode on Henri Fayol.

You may also download the audio files here:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Read with us:

Fayol, H. (1949). General and Industrial Management, trans. Constance Storrs. Pitman: London.

We read Part 2, Chapter IV: General Principles of Management. Note: The linked document is of a reprint and therefore the chapter name and pagination differs from the original text.

To Learn More: 

Wren, D.A. and Bedeian, A.G. (2009). The Evolution of Management Thought (6th Ed.), Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ.

See Chapter 10, The Emergence of Management Process and Organization Theory (pp. 211-227).

 

1: Principles of Scientific Management – F.W. Taylor’s One Best Way

October 12, 2015 Dmitrijs Kravcenko
Presents the seminar text that defined Taylorism and scientific management, a ‘scientific’ approach to managing people and work process design.