THE CAPITALIST PHILOSOPHERS

The sources of management theory—the history and the progenitors of the peculiar discipline of business forensics (but not actual lessons in management)—are detailed in this survey course. It’s the human story, such as it is, of the users of “human resources.” In these tales from the executive suites and their academic branch offices, Gabor (Einstein’s Wife, 1995, etc.) writes of a dozen men and one woman who developed the arcane art of business management. The thumbnail biographies, which describe the personality, stature, and accustomed tone of voice as well as the professional achievements of each subject, depict some pretty abrasive advisers to corporate bigwigs. There is Frederick Taylor, a mean man with a stopwatch. There are misfits Fritz Roethlisberger and Elton Mayo, Robert McNamara’s band of bean counters, and arrogant Herb Simon. But there are also clever Mary Follett and her “Boston marriage,” moral authority Chester Barnard, humanist outsiders Abraham Maslow and Douglas McGregor, wily old statistician W.E. Deming, and historians Alfred Du Pont Chandler and Alfred Sloan. Bringing up the rear is expansive, ubiquitous Peter Drucker. Gabor’s effort to elevate these savants of management theory to the same stature as the heroes of labor naturally fails. Since the depths of the Great Depression, the image of Chaplin in the cogs of Modern Times’s machine surpasses all the industrial-psychologizing talk of productivity, teamwork, motivation, and performance. And yet General Motors, General Electric, and all the majestic corporate sovereignties and their potentates remain interesting, and capitalism seems to be doing just fine. Gabor’s text will be of particular use to B-school scholars, human-resource practitioners, and the gurus of the command-and-control rights of corporate executives for the faces it gives to the theorists of employee empowerment. A well-composed synthesis of a little-understood profession’s recent personal history.