Managerialism

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Managerialism has evolved in relationship to the role of professional management within organizations. As organizations became progressively larger and hierarchical with increasing specialization based upon the division of labor (outlined in Max Weber's work), senior management recognized that “command and control” techniques over employees had to expand, and so began to move beyond traditional, inefficient methods. New scientific methods of administration were developed so that managers could monitor and regulate the workplace performance of employees. Frederick Taylor, an engineer, was the main promoter of “scientific management”—a mechanistic approach to managing employees step by step by breaking job tasks down to a series of component elements that promised huge increases in productivity by eliminating wasteful actions on the part of the worker. “Time and motion” observations were made by observing the amount of time and effort associated with manual labor, and management techniques were subsequently developed in order to maximize individual and group productivity. The assembly-line process is often associated with this approach by which managers control the entire process in exchange for rewarding workers financially. Workers were perceived to be passive instruments that could easily be replaced because the production process did not demand anything of them except manual dexterity and basic literacy. A set of micromanagement practices based upon a “one best way” philosophy emerged, and later adherents to the scientific management model brought in some further refinements.

In response to the structural–mechanistic models arising from the scientific management managerialist approach, less oppressive approaches were developed that took into account the potential for employees to assist and participate in the management of the organization. What is referred to as the organic–humanistic managerial approach developed in the 1920s and 1930s on the basis of sociological and psychological experimental organizational studies. The approach became a tool for those analysts, including Mary Parker Follett, Elton Mayo, Douglas McGregor, Herbert Simon, and Chris Argyris, who argued that greater forms of participatory management were the key to unlocking employee potential in organizations.

The famous Hawthorne experimental studies, which allowed researchers to understand the “unintended effect of the observer on the observed,” illuminated informal group relations within organizations and the need for managerial techniques to attempt to capture an important productivity [Page 545]and innovation dynamic. Successive organic–humanistic analysts worked to recognize the psychological as well as materialistic needs of employees and the consequent buy-in, which could be realized through greater participatory managerial models.

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