To manage is, etymologically, to act or operate (agere ) with one’s hand (manus). In that sense, ‘management’ could be seen as a ‘genetic feature of humanity’.
Chapter 1 in Czarniawska, Barbara (ed), 2016, A Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies, Edward Elgar.
The broad usage of the term, though, is in reality quite recent. Starting in the 1950s, ‘management’ has progressively imposed itself as a new form of global ‘religion’, with its many churches (business schools), its missionaries (consultants of different kinds), its priests (academics and all forms of gurus), its rituals (many forms of managerial practices, fads and fashions) and its followers (managers, decision makers but also all of us) who regularly turn, for advice and inspiration, to the ‘texts’ and the ‘encyclicals’ (managerial literature and press). Furthermore, management has expanded and entered into areas of social and human life that until recently had been structured and ruled by very different kinds of logics. The consequence has been a managerialization of ‘nearly everything’. Hence, management has reached a status of taken-for-grantedness, a kind of naturalness that makes it essentially transparent and invisible to us, even though it is highly structuring of what we do and even of who we are. This is where a history of management not only can but in fact should help. Management is an institution and as such it is not a natural biotope. The fact that we manage – rather than for example nurture – our organizations or our relationships is certainly not neutral. Our very capacity to think about alternatives, however, implies as a first step a capacity to de-naturalize the existing dominant template – management. And a potent tool for de-naturalizing, and hence fragilizing, institutions is the historical deconstruction of the social, economic, political and cultural dynamics that have made them what they are today. With this in mind, what are the more specific tasks we need to undertake, in the coming years, as historians of management? I propose that we need, first, to debunk present and future management fads and fashions by underscoring the cyclical rather than linear nature of management time. Second, we should focus on the articulation of a history of management with a history of contemporary capitalism and its institutions. Third, we should explore the transnational institutionalization of the dynamics of performativity, within private firms but also well beyond. Finally, we have to unearth power dynamics behind the institutionalization of management as an institution – beyond claims of neutrality and de-politicized practice.