Editorial

Citation

Lamond, D. (2010), "Editorial", Journal of Management History, Vol. 16 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmh.2010.15816baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Management History, Volume 16, Issue 2

Welcome to the second issue of the 16th volume of the Journal of Management History (JMH). In this issue we have two sets of papers to proffer to you. Although it was not intended as a special issue, it happens that the first five papers represent something of a mini symposium related to management education. While the later two are more general in orientation, they too have a shared theme, with both being linked to seafaring.

General readers about management education, having inspected Chandler’s (1977) “visible hand” and Khurana’s (2007) “hired hands”, might be forgiven for seeing the USA at the turn of the twentieth century and then at the turn of the twenty-first century as the wellspring of the benefits and subsequent consequences, of business schools and management education respectively. We know though, from Spender (2005), in turn, that there were business schools in the USA in the middle of the nineteenth century and in Europe from before American Independence the third quarter of the eighteenth century. It is within this context that van Baalen and Karsten (2010) seek to provide an alternative explanation for the rise of modern business schools in The Netherlands. Management has a long history of trying to establish itself as a profession (see Spender, 2007). van Baalen and Karsten’s (2010) paper is novel in that it seeks to explain the rise of business schools in The Netherlands, not as a response to demands of industrializing companies for a new class of professional managers but, rather, as a legitimation process instituted by the, then, new engineering and accounting professions to enhance their social status.

The next two papers (Seeck and Laakso, 2010; Kuokkanen et al., 2010) examine the adoption of management paradigms in Finnish management research in the period 1937-2007 and then the Management paradigms in personnel magazines of Finnish metal and forest industries during the same period. Here again, Spender (2005; 2007) is instructive in setting the scene for such a pair of studies, having considered at length the idea of management as a profession, as “a group of people whose practice is shaped by training and credentialing against a proven and rigorous body of knowledge” (Spender, 2007, p. 2) and highlighting a gap between theory and practice, such that, in general, business school knowledge relates poorly to the needs of practicing managers.

Seeck and Laakso’s (2010) study sought to identify when and how the management paradigms have emerged and prevailed in Finnish management research during the period in question, by enumerating the types of management research projects and doctoral dissertations that have been funded by eight of the largest private and public research funding organizations in Finland. They represent this information in terms of which management paradigms, whether of foreign or local origin, appeared in the research proposals, when and for how long, and then compare these findings with the emergence and prevalence of management paradigms in management education, in order determine the extent to which the paradigms that are researched are also taught. In doing so, they also provide a basis for comparing and contrasting the development of management research in Finland with that in other countries.

The subsequent paper by Kuokkanen et al. (2010) considers a corollary issue – taken together, there is also the opportunity to determine which (if any) of the paradigms that researched and taught in Finnish business schools also appear as part of the practitioner conversations/representations in the staff (personnel) magazines of companies in Finnish industry (in this case, the metal and forest industries). Utilising content analysis, Kuokkanen et al. (2010) find that the practitioner magazines contain more normative (prescriptive) material than rational (analytical) information. They suggest that this content (largely related to aspects of employee well-being) is a function of the role of the magazines in generating a sense of belonging and togetherness among employees. From a management history methodology perspective, their work also reminds us that staff/personnel magazines can provide a data source when we are examining knowledge diffusion in different industries and countries.

Following on these two articles and the links (or lack of linkage) between what is researched, what is taught, and what is practiced in business, the importance of paying attention to practitioner thinking about business in developing effective leadership development experiences in management education is the focus of Isomura’s (2010) paper. Drawing on Chester Barnard’s writings about the way practitioners think and his insights on leadership, Isomura (2010) considers a series of questions about the reality business people are facing; the abilities and qualities they require to deal with that reality; and which educational method is effective in developing those qualities. In doing so, Isomura (2010) seeks to bridge the gap between the practitioners and professors.

My first publication in management history (Lamond, 1990) took as its subject, inter alia, the ways in which scholars had misunderstood/misrepresented Max Weber’s socio-historical analytical tool, the “ideal type”, in their depictions of his writings on bureaucracy and organisational forms. Weber’s (1946) “ideal type” of bureaucracy was constituted by a set of structural and functional characteristics. The more an organisation could be seen to possess those characteristics, the more appropriate it was to describe that organisation as a bureaucracy. Rather than understanding the ideal type as an archetype though, later writers presented the “ideal type” as Weber’s preferred organisational type, as the “best” type of organisational form. With this background, I was not surprised to read Simha and Lemak’s (2010) work examining the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and its subsequent (mis)representation.

But Simha and Lemak (2010) go beyond simply providing another re-presentation of Taylor’s work. They compared the responses of their introductory management course students to the course textbook portrayal of Taylor’s work with their responses to direct (non-identified) quotations from Taylor. On the one hand, students were asked the extent to which they agreed with statements about Taylor, for example that “Frederick Taylor was against labor unions”. In a separate questionnaire, students were asked to view a series of statements and make a judgement about the anonymous author. For example, students were presented with the following:“The writer is far from taking the view held by many manufacturers that labor unions are an almost unmitigated detriment to those who join them, as well as to employers and the general public. The labor unions … have rendered a great service not only to their members, but to the world, in shortening the hours of labor and in modifying the hardships and improving the conditions of wage workers.and then asked the extent to which they agreed with the statement that “The writer of the above paragraph is against labor unions”. Perhaps not surprisingly, Simha and Lemak (2010) found the students had more positive impressions of Taylor’s ideas, than of Taylor as represented in the textbook. They conclude with a statement about the importance of accurate presentation of seminal ideas to our students, using original source documents and enabling them to draw their own conclusions about those ideas and their associated criticisms.

The final two papers in this issue have a nautical theme, with Mack (2010) looking at the business of seafaring, as distinct from the business of shipping, and Coye et al. (2010) scrutinizing 30 historical mutinies to find lessons for leaders in modern organisations.

Globalization has been examined from many different angles in recent times, but not, so far, from the perspective of Norwegian seafarers and the isolated and multicultural shipboard social milieu that provides a unique context as they go about dealing with the challenges and impacts associated with their globalized work. An attempt at a more inclusive global history, Mack’s (2010) method of data collection is via narrative accounts of seafaring careers elicited from 41 Norwegian sailors (most of whom were active sailors at the time of the data collection) and provided by email, with a series of on-line prompts and follow-up messages provided, to access these globally dispersed and mobile participants. The result is an engaging exposition of responses from those sailors, related to a variety of diverse, multicultural, high technology environments. In the words of the sailor with which Mack (2010) concludes her paper, by the end:

… you have now a small idea about how a seaman’s life could be, even if it might have been boring for you sometimes. It does not hurt (you) to learn a little history.

Coye et al. (2010) move to the “dark side” of the business of seafaring in their examination of 30 mutinies between 1779 and 1975, via their historical narrative accounts. Their analysis, guided by voice and leadership theories, highlights identifiable patterns of behaviour amongst the authority figures in each of the cases examined, such that mutinies occurred when there was deficiency in the personal or technical competence of the leader, ship member concerns were ignored, and there was a communication gap between the levels in the hierarchy. They argue that corresponding enhancement of leader competence, implementation of processes to manage communication of concerns and elimination of communication gaps, reduce the likelihood of the seeds of upward defiance taking root.

Taken together, these papers make a contribution to scholarship in regard to the history of management thought, of research and teaching, and to a variety of important management subjects, including leadership, globalisation and organisational communication.

David Lamond