Abstract

Forgotten Foundations: Alternative Visions of the Good of Management and Enterprise at the Cusp of Management Science 1908-1928

Conventional histories of business present a view whereby the foundations of management science were revealed by thinkers like Frederick Taylor and Henry Gantt: men whose backgrounds in mechanical engineering were well suited to advancing the subject. In this view, the good of management – the end that management theory, practice and education sought to serve – was efficiency: the best financial ratio of outputs over inputs, or profit maximization; and the fundamental intellectual foundation the science of economics. By the 1930s, Luther Gulick could survey the field with confidence and state that “whether public or private, the basic ‘good’ is efficiency”. Presenting, or assuming, these beliefs to be universal or inevitable has discouraged alternative visions in the present and for the future. In this paper we examine three networks that developed alternative views of the good of enterprise and management. The work of Louis Brandeis, Mary Follett, and their associates in Boston; German business economists Heinrich Nicklisch and Eugen Schmalenbach and a circle of other influential graduates from the Leipzig College of Commerce; and the thinking of Henri Fayol and his supporters in France. Operating at the cusp of the formation, solidification and formalization of the subject of management, these networks put a great deal of effort and their extensive intellects into creating, in their own ways, visions of the subject, enterprises, and educational institutions that viewed: organizations as social beings; a management education not based on economics; conservation, social association or fraternity, and maximizing civic and community well-being as the goods of the fledgling field. We conclude by exploring the re-inventive power for business history, education and practice that recovering these forgotten foundations could enable today.