Sociology of Management - Introduction

 

Sociological theory  finds its place in management education as soon as one tries to come up with ideas of values, norms, roles, action, and communication, and with accounts of inequality, power, the sacred, community, mobility, the individual, and protest in the attempt to describe any one event in school.

We know that management begins and ends with calling certain procedures, products and events suboptimal, thus blocking self-organisation within work and establishing coordination by management within organisation.

 Management is a new profession, which appears in the 19th Century as the profession that raises and solves problems of coordination and control in large organisations, mainly in industry and business (Chandler 1977, see also Chandler 1962 and 1990). It is a story worth considering in its own right that the management of industrial enterprises both relies on ways of designing, steering, and controlling large organisations used for centuries in armies, hospitals, monasteries, courts, and city governments and tries to distinguish itself from the concomitant traditional knowledge, skills and competencies.

Management is one of the most important vehicles for switching from value-rational action to purposive-rational action in Max Weber's (1978) terms and thus for replacing traditional values and an understanding of organisations as fulfilling some kind of higher duty by self-found and self-defined purposes and new ideologies of entrepreneurial liberalisation, technological progress and growth of wealth.

Material, social and temporal complexity intertwine, calling for an understanding of a design, steering, and control of organisations able to calculate any of these three dimensions in terms of the other two.

Management proper does not invent or design but adopts and moderates the division of labour, hierarchical order, technological process, and individual motivation found in the organisation's societal environment and translated selectively into the organisation.

Management theory  assumes that organisation functions perfectly; problems stemming from organising are not negated but neutralised in order to develop a theoretical calculus focusing on other problems (Gutenberg 1929: 26). These other problems run under the heading of costs and returns, means and ends, and are to be found not within the organisation but in the markets it deals with and within the technologies it relies on (Gutenberg 1983).

Reflections on a Half-Century of Organizational

Sociology

Article  in  Annual Review of Sociology · August 2004

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.30.012703.110644

A Sociology of Management in Management Education

Chris Steyaert, Timon Beyes, Martin Parker (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education, London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 91–104

29 Pages Posted: 26 Apr 2014 Last revised: 10 Oct 2019

Dirk Baecker - Witten/Herdecke University

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2429259

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