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This research aims to compare the contributions of two authors and practitioners from the 1920s whose work was, to a certain extent, at odds with the dominant scientific management approach of the period.

In this paper, a comparative textual analysis of texts written by Sheldon and Follett in the 1920s has been performed. This technique consists of a hierarchical descendant classification, which we use to uncover the thematic universes that Sheldon and Follett create in characterizing the fundamentals of management activity.

This comparative textual analysis shows that Follett and Sheldon developed two different ways of relying on a singular fundamental principle of management: integration.

A comparative analysis of Follett and Sheldon’s work has never been attempted. While textual analysis has been used in management research, to the authors’ knowledge, such analyses are rare in research seeking to understand management history.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the way Mary P. Follett's ideas on management have emerged.

The research explores the different opportunities Mary P. Follett has regarding management issues. It also analyses Follett's way of reasoning in some of her conferences on management.

Follett's ideas on management have been based on her practical management experience and on her political philosophy. The paper particularly demonstrates that Follett was currently proceeding in three different areas: instantiation, conceptual linkage and deduction of management principles. A management problem becomes a particular instance of social interaction situation, within a broader category of problems and situations: that is what we identify as “instantiation”. Follett makes connections with concepts she has developed about democracy: that is what we named “conceptual linkage”. Deduction of management ideas is then made possible by combining instantiation and conceptual linkage.

This paper helps to explain why so many management authors have considered Mary P. Follett as a pioneer, a “prophet of management”.

Despite the breadth of knowledge on self and identity formation across the study of organizations, the field of organizational development and change has limited research on the construction of professional identity. Much has been written to describe the “self-concepts” of those practicing and researching in the field, but there have been no investigations that have explored how these “self-concepts” form. In addition, although women have contributed to defining the “self” in the field, men have held the dominant perspective on the subject. Thus, in this chapter, we address a disparity in the research by exploring the construction of professional identity in the field of organizational development and change, and we give voice to the renowned women who helped to build the field. Using the profiles of 17 American women included in The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers, we perform a narrative analysis based upon the concepts and models prevalent in the literature on identity formation. By disentangling professional identity formation of the notable women in the field, we can begin to see the nuance and particularities involved in its construction and gain deeper understandings about effective ways to prepare individuals to work in and advance the field.