Management & Organizational History

The conventional history of the labour process suggests that Taylorism played a key role in the development and popularization of production management techniques in general, and work science in particular.This paper argues that the work of Herman von Helmholtz, Eadweard Muybridge, and Etienne-Jules Marey helped establish a broader ideology of the labour process encompassing physiological, psychological and psychodynamic elements of human behaviour. Through the medium of chronophotography, this ideology offered a visual vocabulary of efficiency which pre-dated the work of Frederick Taylor and continues to influence management research and practices today.

This article evaluates two divergent views of the future of occupation identification by core industry employees. The first asserts that occupational identities are waning as identity-challenging managerial techniques reshape classic worker identities. The second contends that frontline workers are developing new repertoires of resistance that sustain robust occupational identities. Underlying these views, respectively, is an implicit teleology and a cyclical notion of labour history that posits trade unions as the locus of identity formation and resistance. Contemporary instances of occupational identification render these assumptions problematical. Drawing from an underground coalmining industry case study, we show how miners achieve a shared occupational identity through narrative resistance to individuating managerial techniques. We conclude that (a) labour movement decline and heightened managerialism spell neither the end of occupational identification nor of oppositional resistance, and (b) the historical unidirectionality and labour organizational essentialism contained in the two rival accounts of occupational identification are untenable.

Practicing managers, the users and consumers of management theory, are arguably not applying theories as they were originally conceived. They are using an ontologically based version of theory that is only tenuously related to its epistemological origins. Turning Lewin's famous dictum on its head, we argue that for the management practitioner there really is nothing so good as a practical theory.

1892 saw the publication of Brewery Management by C. Howard Tripp,the first book in the sector to address problems of management, as opposed to the technical problems of brewing.This article explores the growth of management knowledge in this sector, correcting the tendency to focus on manufacturing when exploring the roots of management. An examination of Tripp's account also indicates some of the barriers to the spread of management practices. The analysis, informed by institutionalist perspectives, suggests that we pay careful attention to the structural and cultural influences on management practices.