A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Management Theory

Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529737356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione
• Index: Business

Conceived by Chris Grey, the Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap series offers an antidote to conventional textbooks. Each book takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on its head by providing a critical and sophisticated overview of the key issues and debates in an informal, conversational and often humorous way. In Management Theory, Todd Bridgman and Stephen Cummings uncover enduring myths about famous theorists, from Adam Smith and Max Weber to Frederick Taylor, Mary Parker Follett, Abraham Maslow and Kurt Lewin. By exploring how these myths became cast as the foundations of management, this accessible and engaging book generates new ways of thinking about what management could be today and in the future. Students can head to YouTube to watch a selection of specially-curated, bitesize videos- 20 Insights on Management Theory - which explain key topics relating to management theory. Lecturers can visit https://study.sagepub.com/bridgman to access a range of PowerPoint slides that can be used in their teaching.

Chapter 1 Why Another Book on Management Theory?

If you've ever studied management (or even if you haven't) you've probably heard of its founders and their theories – Adam Smith (the division of labour), Max Weber (bureaucracy) and Frederick Taylor (scientific management). In a management course these would be covered early on, usually as part of Chapter 2 in the textbook which lays out a brief history of the field. You would then have covered topics such as motivation, group dynamics, and organizational culture. Here, too, you would have encountered theorists whose ideas formed the foundations of those fields, such as Abraham Maslow (motivation), Kurt Lewin (group dynamics) and Ed Schein (culture). This book is about these and other foundational theories of management. By ‘management theory’ we mean ideas that are intended to explain and inform management practice. Theory can be expressed in the form of concepts, models, frameworks or general principles.

You might be asking why, if these theories already get extensive coverage in management textbooks, do we need this book? In this introductory chapter we answer that question, explain why we wrote the book, why we think you should read it, and provide a brief overview of the chapters to follow.

A view widely held by university lecturers is that students are not really interested in management theory, especially theories from the distant past. If you scan any management textbook, you will see that the theories they include are mostly decades old, developed when the world was very different. You might have heard the view that we're living in a ‘VUCA’ world characterized by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, where change is happening at a rate faster than ever before. In a VUCA world, knowledge becomes obsolete in ever-shortening timeframes. Why, then, would we want to continue to teach theories that you apparently aren't interested in and have little or no contemporary relevance?

We've taught management courses to tens of thousands of undergraduate and postgraduate students and know that students are interested in foundational management theories – particularly once they can see how understanding these origins can help them. A historical appreciation of management theory can help you think more critically about why certain ideas are so popular, why they may not work, and what the alternatives might be. Explaining the value of a historical appreciation of management's development is the task we set ourselves for the remainder of this chapter and, indeed, the book as a whole. It is a task that involves challenging some fairly widely held assumptions about management theories. These include assumptions that theories quickly become obsolete, that today's theories are fundamentally different and better than those from the past, and that the main reason for learning management theory is to become a better manager.

In challenging these views, we not only argue that management theories from the past remain relevant today, but that understanding the origins of these theories is more important than ever. We also argue that the way these theories are presented in management textbooks and taught to students prevents us from realizing their full learning potential. Sadly, many textbooks present a distorted view of the founders’ original ideas. As we explore later in this chapter, this can partly be attributed to the need for textbooks to condense theories into a simplified form that students can understand. However, we also believe there are ideological forces at play in management studies that obscure the original intent of theorists (many of whom were not theorists of management). Their theories are repackaged in a form that can be part of a manager's ‘took-kit’ – in other words, that can be used by managers in an attempt to improve the efficiency and productivity of their employees and to enhance the performance and profitability of their organizations. And through that process, the theory gets distorted and misunderstood.

Understanding how and why these misrepresentations happen gives us valuable insight into how management as a field of study has developed. It also creates a space for alternative ways of thinking about management to take hold. Given the pressing environmental, social and economic challenges the world faces today, it is a timely to think more creatively about people, organizations and how we work.

The Enduring Relevance of Foundational Theories in Management

I would like to believe that various kinds of experiences and decades of academic research would expand our knowledge base. So it is sometimes a bit of a shock to see how much we thought we already knew 50 years ago and how little our conclusions have changed.

Ed Schein (2015a: 7–8)

Ed Schein has made an enormous contribution to the field of management studies for more than half a century. You might be familiar with his model of organizational culture with its three levels: artefacts, espoused values and basic assumptions (we will discuss it further in Chapter 4). He has also been influential in popularizing other well-known management theories, such as Lewin's unfreeze-change-refreeze model of organizational change (covered in Chapter 5). We can't think of a person better placed to assess the current state of management theory than Schein. As can be seen from the quotation above, Schein does not think there's been as much progress over the last 50 years as many believe.

There is no doubt that the quantity of management research being produced is increasing every year. In most universities, the business school is important because of the high demand for business qualifications, and management is often one of the largest subjects within those schools. Most management lecturers are required to produce research. The pressures to publish have intensified in recent years because of funding and prestige that accrues to those universities that perform highly in research.

But it is also the case that most of this research has very little impact. Faculty are rewarded for publishing in highly-ranked academic journals and many of these are behind publisher paywalls. Calls are growing louder for research to be made freely available, but even when research is open access, the readership of these articles remains small. Schein argues that management research has splintered into sub-fields that have their own jargon and therefore exclude all but a small number of academic insiders. Even if students, employees and managers can make sense of the academic jargon, they are likely to find the research sets out only to fill some small gap in the discipline's knowledge base.

Schein is not the only person concerned about a decline in substantially new theories about management (Alvesson and Sandberg, 2012). We have talked to textbook authors who say it is desperately difficult to find new theories to include – or at least new ideas that offer more than foundational ones. Like Schein, we believe that the growth of management research has in fact obscured rather than superseded the insights generated by the field's founders. Consequently, there is much still to be gained in better understanding those foundations.

There is another problematic aspect regarding the lack of relevance of management research. In the absence of new theories generated by academics, others, especially management consultants, have sought to fill the void with theories of their own. Schein notes that these ideas, often generated by surveys and presented in the form of frameworks, have little connection to the research produced by academics. These theories are products of what Drezner (2017) calls the ‘ideas industry’ and are often enthusiastically promoted by ‘thought leaders’ in TED talks and on social media (Bell et al., 2019). Thought leaders ‘develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot’ (Drezner, 2017: 9). This is problematic because thought leaders are not like the traditional public intellectuals who encouraged people to question and challenge prevailing ideas in society. Thought leaders, says Drezner, are ‘intellectual evangelists’ who want us to accept their ideas uncritically and unconditionally. They demand true believers.

We think it is important for us all to be sceptical of claims made by thought leaders. While the promoters of popular management ideas always make claims to novelty, are they genuinely new ideas or recycled and repacked ideas from the past? The cyclical nature of management ideas has parallels with the fashion process, with ideas becoming popular before eventually fading and being replaced by more ‘cutting-edge’ ideas, only to re-emerge in some altered form in the future (Huczynski, 2006). Look at photos of what your parents wore when they were your age or listen to the music they liked then. You will see some differences, but (perhaps surprisingly, or painfully) you'll see and hear similarities as well. If we have no knowledge about the history of management theories, we cannot make accurate judgements about the claims of novelty made by thought leaders.

So, we argue that studying the origins of management theories helps us to be critical thinkers – a valuable skill to develop, particularly as a student. A principal aim of universities is to cultivate intellectual independence – to be exposed to a wide range of perspectives, to use these perspectives to generate different ways of understanding the world, to think critically about the strengths and limitations of all perspectives and, ultimately, to form our own judgements.

While we're on the subject of thinking critically about popular ideas, let's return to the claim that in today's VUCA world the pace of change, especially technological change, such as artificial intelligence, is unprecedented. Remember, this argument is put forward as a reason why we need not learn management theories from the past. Is the world really changing faster than before? There is certainly very troubling evidence that the Earth's climate is experiencing rapid change, but what about changes in the business world? To answer that question, we need to understand the past. Economist Robert Gordon believes there is good reason to be sceptical, pointing out that US productivity growth has slowed sharply in the past 50 years, compared to the rate of growth between 1870 and 1970. Gordon (2016) attributes this slowdown to a lack of technological advancement, with no disruptive innovation coming close to the transformations brought by commercial electricity, the internal combustion engine, refrigeration and the telephone.

We've gone some way to explaining why it's important to better understand management theories and where they came from. But, those theories already get extensive coverage in management textbooks. So why do we need this book to look again at them?

The Questionable Representation of Management Theories in Textbooks

There's a game you might have played called ‘telephone'. Players form a line and the first person whispers a message in the ear of the second person, who repeats the message to the next person, and so on. The final person announces the message to the group and this is compared with the original message. Typically, the message at the end is different from that at the beginning, often amusingly so. Sometimes players make errors in the retelling and unintentionally pass on a different message. And sometimes they deliberately change the message.

There's a similar dynamic at play regarding how theories are represented in management textbooks. The ideas the theorists originally developed and wrote about are often quite different from what students are presented with. How does this happen? We believe the management misrepresentation game works much like ‘telephone', with the message being distorted by both unintentional and intentional actions.

We don't want to be overly critical of textbook authors. Writing textbooks requires enormous effort because authors need to provide a broad overview of the field. Hundreds or even thousands of studies need to be included. Space considerations and the need to present these theories in a way that students can understand means that complex ideas are condensed and simplified. This inevitably means the nuances and caveats presented in the original get lost in the process of translation.

In addition, given the breadth of textbook coverage, it is probably unrealistic to expect textbook authors to have read all the original sources. They might have borrowed and adapted representations of these foundational ideas from other textbooks or from histories of the field written by others. Just like in the ‘telephone’ game, errors are perpetuated in the retelling and the repeated message becomes increasingly distant from the original.

It's unsurprising, then, that misrepresentations flourish. A good illustration of this is research on emotions. Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) is a leading neuroscientist who has put forward a theory of how emotions are made in the brain that challenges the commonly-held theory that emotions are like inner beasts that need to be controlled by rational thought. The ‘inner beast’ theory is based on Charles Darwin's ideas on natural selection and says that emotions are inherited through natural selection and are located in particular parts of the brain that trigger reactions in your body. So, if you see something scary, a ‘fear circuit’ in your brain will cause your heart rate to increase. This theory interprets our behaviour as a battle taking place in our brains between parts that control emotion and others that control our cognition. It's the theory embedded in the children's movie Inside Out, where Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger are individual characters competing to influence the actions of Riley. It's also reflected in legal systems which hold that in crimes of passion, where people are taken over by emotion, they are partly absolved of responsibility.

Barrett has developed an alternative explanation based on her laboratory studies. She argues that we cannot be at the mercy of animalistic emotions that battle against our rational thoughts because the brain does not have separate systems for emotion and cognition. Rather, emotions are constructed by brain-wide networks working together. Barrett believed her theory was novel until she stumbled across some academic papers from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, which made the same argument. While those researchers did not have access to her sophisticated neuro-technology, they concluded there was insufficient evidence to support the classical ‘inner beast’ theory. Mysteriously, this research never made its way into psychology textbooks.

As part of her detective work, Barrett read the original works of Darwin and of William James, the so-called founders of the classical approach. What she found shocked her. Darwin says virtually nothing about natural selection and James was actually arguing against the idea that is conventionally attributed to him. Barrett concludes that these misrepresentations of Darwin and James have endured for a century. This matters because companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft have spent billions developing software to read the signs of people's emotion, based on the classical view. It also matters because generations of students have been taught a fallacy.

We had a similar experience some years ago when we set out to find what Kurt Lewin wrote about the unfreeze–change–refreeze model of organizational change, probably the most popular theory in change management today. We've taught the model for years but had never been able to find Lewin's original writing on the theory. After an exhaustive search, we discovered he wrote very little about it and presented it differently to what textbooks attribute to him. As we explain in Chapter 5, the three-step organizational change model that we associate with Lewin was developed by others after his death and has been used to promote a top-down, leader-knows-best approach to changing organizations that has little resemblance to Lewin's idea.

Another set of misrepresentations that we have uncovered concerns Maslow's hierarchy of needs pyramid, likely the most famous symbol in management studies. As we discuss in Chapter 3, Maslow did not create the pyramid, and the criticisms textbooks routinely make of his theory were anticipated and accounted for in the 1943 article where he developed his hierarchy of needs. What started as a quite complex theory of human motivation has become a simplistic model that looks great in PowerPoint and is easy for students to remember. But it is not what Maslow created.

We don't expect many students to have read Maslow's 1943 article. The reality is that for most students of management (and we suspect many lecturers), their access to the field's foundational theories is via secondary sources and textbooks. That makes textbooks really important artefacts (Carroll et al., 2018). As we have discussed, we think much of the misrepresentation is unintentional. Textbook authors are required to condense and simplify theories for students, and just like in any reduction, elements of the original are inevitably lost. But just like in the game of ‘telephone', there also seems to have been purposeful efforts to distort the original message in ways their creators would not have foreseen and been happy with.

The Politics of Knowledge about Management

To explain this, we need to understand a little about how management as a field of study has developed. Management courses are now often the largest classes at university, but this was not always the case. Compared with long-established disciplines like psychology, sociology, anthropology and political studies, which have existed in various forms for centuries, management studies is young. Its birth is often traced (mistakenly, as we shall argue in Chapter 2) to Frederick Winslow Taylor's book The Principles of Scientific Management published in 1911.

Management schools have fought hard (and successfully) to establish themselves in u...