The study of management is at a turning point. What began as the study of "best practice"
among large manufacturing firms has grown to encompass specialized fields ranging from finance to government. As the subject matter has changed, so has the role played by its masters. Business schools and management consultants used to spend most of their time training the inexperienced, bringing them up to speed on case studies of "excellent" companies. Now they also create their own theories to challenge the wisdom of businessmen. And those theories have the power to change the ways in which even the best companies do business.
The new scope and power of management theories have created an identity crisis. Are teachers of management like historians, distilling the wisdom of the world into a form. that others can absorb and imitate？ Or are they innovators, changing the world with their new theories and ideas？ And, if they are to be innovators, what are to be the doctrine and dogma from which their theories spring？ Bright management ideas abound, but two factors make it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. One is the "Hawthorne effect". Early in the twentieth century, managers at General Electric's Hawthorne plant began a study of how better lighting might increase productivity. They turned up the lights. Productivity went up. For exactitude, they also turned down the lights, expecting productivity to fall. It didn't; it went again. In fact, just about anything done to the Hawthorne workers increased productivity. They liked the attention.
Given workers' ability to respond positively to extra attention—however abjectly lunatic and misguided—a fallback criterion for measuring the success of a management theory is profits. But here the past seven years of steady economic growth, combined with roaring bull markets, have shown virtually all business ideas in their kindest light. For the time being, professors themselves are left with great leeway to decide which ideas are worth teaching and which are best forgotten. But the perspectives from which they make such decisions are changing fast.
Management schools first started cropping up in America at the tuna of the century. Their role was to mould a new type of top manager to run a new type of corporation: the diversified manufacturer. Paragon of the new breed of company was General Motors—as redesigned by Alfred Sloan, who also founded the Sloan School of Management at MIT. To tap economies of scale and scope GM was one of the first firms to organize management by function, creating a finance department, a marketing department, an engineering department and so on. This new organization, in turn, required a new breed of manager at the top—where the functional divisions came together—who could get the most out of the vast and specialized resources spread out beneath him.
The new breed of magnate had to understand the various skills he commanded, from finance to manufacturing. Few had time to gain all that knowledge on shop—and trading-room-floors. The new managers also had to be able to translate their knowledge into a common language, which often meant the rows and columns of management accounting. And, because of the complexity of their empires, they had to be more conscious of the theory and practice of organization.
In many ways, the logical culmination of this management philosophy was Harlod Geneen of ITT (MBA, Harvard). He created a vast conglomerate based on "management by numbers"—the idea that if one could read management accounts right, one could manage just about anything. But neither conglomerateers nor big manufacturers have had an easy time of late. Not only have economies shifted towards service industries, but the turbulence of recent years has encouraged the break-up of big firms into smaller chunks. Though the required "core" curriculum of most business schools still prepare
A．seem to be in doubt as to
B．are sure of
C．are inclined to decide
D．have no idea whatsoever
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