TOPIC 1: MANAGERS AND MANAGEMENT
Sub–topics:
What is management?
What do managers do?
Why do we have managers?
What is democratisation?
Revision Questions:
1. What are some definitions of management?
Management – the process of coordinating and overseeing the work activities of others so that their
activities are completed efficiently and effectively
‘The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real
management is developing people through work.’ (Abedi 1984)
Good management consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people
(Rockefeller 1920)
How have these changed over time?
Nowadays management is shared between many (divided in many levels of managers) and not just one major
superior. For example:
Manager – a manager is someone who coordinates and oversees the work of other people so that
organisational goals can be accomplished.
First–line management – managers at the lowest level of the organisation who manage the work of
non–managerial employees who are directly involved with the production or creation of the
organisations products.
Middle managers – managers between the first–line level and the top level of the organisation who
manage the work of first–line management.
Top managers – managers at or near the top level of the organisation who are responsible for making
organisation – wide decisions and establishing the goals and plans that affect the entire organisation.
2. What are Fayol’s four elements of management? Give an example of each in a modern–day
management setting.
Fayol’s four elements of management:
PLANNING
LEADING
ORGANISAING
CONTROLLING
Management function that
involves defining goals,
establishing strategies,
and developing plans to
integrate and coordinate
activities.
Example
as managers engage in
planning they:
– Define goals
– Establish strategies
for achieving those
goals
– Develop plans to
integrate and
coordinate activities
Management function that
involves working with and
through people to accomplish
organisational goals.
Motivating, leading and any
other actions involved in
dealing with people.
Example
Managers are leading when
they:
– Motivate subordinates
– Help to resolve work
group conflicts
– Influence individuals or
teams as they work
– Select the most effective
communication channels
– Deal in any way with
employee behaviour
issues
Management function that
involves arranging and
structuring work to
accomplish the
organisations goals.
Determine what needs to
be done, how it will be
done, and who is to do it.
Example
When mangers organise
they:
– Determine what tasks
are to be done
– Who is to do them
– How the tasks are to
be grouped
– Who reports to whom
and at what level
decisions are to be
made
Management function that
involves monitoring, comparing
and correcting work
performance.
Monitoring activities to ensure
that they are accomplished as
planned.
Example
to ensure that goals are being
met and that work is being
completed as planned, managers
must
– Monitor and evaluate
performance
– Actual performance must be
compared with the
previously set goals
– If there is any significant
deviations, it is
management’s job to get
work performance back on
track.
– Monitoring, comparing and
correcting
3. Why do we have managers?
Managers are important to organisations for three reasons.
First, organisations need their managerial skills and abilities in uncertain, complex and chaotic times.
Second of all, managers are crucial to getting things done in organisations.
Finally, managers contribute to employee productivity and loyalty; the way employees are managed
can affect the organisation’s financial performance and managerial ability has been shown to be
important in creating organisational value.
What did Fayol mean by the universality of management?
– Management is these four functions universally across all areas
All managers, independently of their organisational level, have to plan, organise, lead and control; however, the time
they give to each function varies depending on whether they are first–line managers, middle manager or top managers.
In relations to the manager’s functional area, there are some differences but also similarities in relation to managerial
roles being performed; however, all managers have to carry out the management functions of planning, organising,
leading and controlling within their respective organisational areas. Although there are distinctions between the
management of profit and not–for–profit organisations, there are many commonalities in terms of what managers have
to do in both of these types of organisations. While there are differences in degree and emphasis of both functions and
roles, managers in both small and large organisations perform essentially the same activates. Finally, there are some
major differences in preferred managerial practices between countries, which means that, in this area, the manager’s
job is led universal
4. Are the roles of managers described by Fayol and Mintzberg complementary or in conflict?
Management roles: specific categories of managerial behaviour expected of and exhibited by a manager.
Mintzberg – concluded managers perform ten different but highly interrelated roles.
Mintzberg’s managerial roles
Role
Examples of identifiable activities
INTERPERSONAL – managerial roles that involve people and other duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in
nature.
Figurehead
Greeting visitors; signing legal
documents
Leader
Performing virtually all activities that
involve subordinates
liaison
Acknowledging mail: doing external
board work; performing other activities
that involve outsiders.
INFORMATIONAL – managerial roles that involve receiving, collecting and disseminating information.
Monitor
Reading periodicals and reports;
maintain personal contracts
Disseminator
Holding informational meetings;
making phone calls to relay information
Spokesperson
Holding board meetings; giving
information
DECISIONAL – managerial roles that revolve around making decisions
entrepreneur
Organising strategy and review sessions
to develop new programs to bring about
changes
Disturbance handler
Organising strategy and review sessions
that involve disturbances and crises
Resource allocator
Scheduling; requesting authorisation;
performing any activity that involves
budgeting and the programing of
subordinates’ work
Negotiator
Participating in union contract
negotiations
The roles of managers described by Fayol and Mintzberg are somewhat complementary. There are many similarities
eg. DECISIONAL and ORGANISAING
5. Outline the skills used by different types of managers according to Katz.
Conceptual skills
Human skills
Technical skills
Definitions
the ability to think and to
conceptualise about abstract
and complex situations
the ability to work well with
other people individually and
in a group
Knowledge of and proficiency
in a certain specialised field.
Conceptual skills are needed
by all manager at all levels but
Katz proposed that these skills
become more important in top
management positions.
Katz said that said that human
skills remain just as important
at the top level of management
as they do at the lower level
Katz proposed that technical
skills become less important as
a manager moves into higher
levels of management, but
even top managers need some
proficiency in the organisations
speciality.
TOPIC 2: MANAGERS AND SOCIETY
Sub–topics:
Political economy
Democracy and hierarchy
Capital and labour
Industrial democracy
Industrial and post–industrial society
Globalisation
Examinable Reading:
Excerpts from Hobbes, Locke, Smith etc
Revision Questions:
1. What are the key tensions in the modern–day political economy?
The relationship between democracy and hierarchy.
• Thomas Hobbes (1651) – People are untrustworthy and need to be controlled.
Boss needs to be given a lot authority to stop everything from falling apart.
• John Locke (1690) – Citizens have natural rights to liberty, justice and property.
Systems of political economy should be based on basic freedoms
Rights to labour and rights to contracts
Right to justice
Based on liberal principles
– How much democracy should there be in the workplace
– How much authority should managers have
The relationship between industrial society and post–industrial society
Local/ global tension
2. How may managing be different in countries with different understandings of democracy and
hierarchy?
– Different laws, policies, rules and regulations
E.g. China told what to do and they do it and in Australia generally not told what to do.
3. What is the role of management in mediating between the interests of capital and labour?
Adam Smith (1776) and the Wealth of Nations
• Wealthy countries have:
– Have a highly structured division of labour (division of labour – the breakdown of jobs into narrow and repetitive
tasks)
– Have laissez faire economics
• The “invisible hand” of the market produces “social betterment”
Capitalism is our current economic system
4. What did Marx and Engels mean by alienation?
Karl Marx‘s theory of alienation describes the estrangement (German: Entfremdung) of people from aspects of their
human nature (Gattungswesen, “species–essence”) as a consequence of living in a society stratified into social classes.
Marx – Workers under capitalism don’t go into a job wanting to make something for their own because they like
making things, they go to work for money – their working live becomes reduced to a monetary relationship.
Employees become alienated by their work and it becomes replaced by an economic contract, no pride
of work if all your worried about is pay, no job satisfaction if all you get is pay, if all you are is treated
etc.
5. Do the concepts of mutualism and industrial democracy have any place in contemporary business?
Industrial democracy – an attempt to make organisations more democratic, to give workers more of a voice, to
lessen the hierarchy and to lessen the alienation that they feel because they fell as though they have a voice at work.
Democratisation of business
– co–operatives and mutualism
– trade unions
– works councils, consultative committees and codetermination
– employee share schemes
• Employee rights
• Employee participation/voice
6. What are the main differences between an industrial and a post–industrial society?
INDUSTRIAL:
Henri de Saint–Simon (1821) was the first thinker to analyse industrial (or developed) economies
Societies whose economies are dominated by engineering, manufacturing and factory production. This form of
society is capitalist and urban in its focus – it needs managers. It contrasts with earlier or traditional society which
was predominately rural and agrarian
Some attributes of the pre–industrial societies
o Limited production (i.e. artisanship vs. mass production)
o Primarily an agricultural economy
o Limited division of labor. In pre–industrial societies, production was relatively simple and the number of
specialized crafts was limited.
o Limited variation of social classes
o Parochialism—Social theories hold that communications were limited between human communities in pre–
industrial societies. Few had the opportunity to see or hear beyond their own village. In contrast, industrial
societies grew with the help of faster means of communication, having more information at hand about the
world, allowing knowledge transfer and cultural diffusion between them.
o Pre–industrial societies developed largely in rural communities. Capitalism developed largely in urban areas.
POST INDUSTRIAL:
Daniel Bell (1973) described The Coming of Post–Industrial Society
– A society with decreasing dependence on manufacturing and a greater reliance on the service sector. This
transition is seen as part of a stage of capitalism (“post–Fordism”). It needs different forms of
management
Daniel Bell provides six changes in social structure associated with the transition to a post–industrial society:
Within the economy, there is a transition from goods production to the provision of services. Production of such
goods as clothing and steel declines and services such as selling hamburgers and offering advice on investments
increase. Although services predominate in a wide range of sectors, health, education, research, and government
services are the most decisive for a post–industrial society.
The importance of blue–collar, manual work (e.g., assembly line workers) declines and professional (e.g.
lawyers, doctors, and engineers) and technical work (e.g. computer programmers) come to predominate. Of
special importance is the rise of scientists (e.g., specialized engineers, such as genetic or electric). Many mining
towns and similar settlements face large scale unemployment as a result of the increasing importance of both
theoretical knowledge with a simultaneous decline in manufacturing and increasing importance of
environmentalism. Many industrial towns residents are on benefits, such as the dole.
Instead of practical know–how, theoretical knowledge is increasingly essential in a post–industrial society. Such
knowledge is seen as the basic source of innovation (e.g., the knowledge created by those scientists involved in
the Human Genome Project is leading to new ways of treating many diseases). Advances in knowledge also lead
to the need for other innovations such as ways of dealing with ethical questions raised by advances in cloning
technology. All of this involved an emphasis on theoretical rather than empirical knowledge and on the
codification of knowledge. The exponential growth of theoretical and codified knowledge, in all its varieties, is
central to emergence of the post–industrial society.
Post–industrial society seeks to assess the impacts of the new technologies and, where necessary, to exercise
control over them. The hope is, for example, to better monitor things like nuclear power plants and to improve
them so that accidents like that at Three–Mile Island or Chernobyl can be prevented in the future. The goal is a
surer and more secure technological world. The doctrine of the precautionary principle is sometimes used in
preventing the worst aspects of new technologies, such as cloning and genetic engineering, when there is no
evidence of their negative impact.
To handle such assessment and control, and more generally the sheer complexity of post–industrial society, new
intellectual technologies are developed and implemented. They include cybernetics, Game theory and
Information theory.
A new relationship is forged in the post–industrial society between scientists and the new technologies they
create, as well as systematic technological growth, lies at the base of post–industrial society. This leads to the
need for more universities and university–based student. In fact, the university is crucial to post–industrial
society. The university produced the experts who can create, guide, and control the new and dramatically
changing technologies
7. How has globalisation changed business and management?
Local markets
Local production
Local consumption
National brands
Global markets
Multinationals
Growth of international trade
International division of labour
Mass consumption
“Total consumer environments”
Chains sell mass produced items from pens to computers
Goods made overseas
Logistics workers bring goods in
Sales staff serve
consumers
“Globalisation is political, technological and cultural, as well as economic. It has been influenced above all by
developments in systems of communication, dating back only to the late 1960s.”
TOPIC 3: EVOLUTION OF MANAGEMENT
Sub–topics:
Scientific management (Taylorism)
Fordism
Bureaucratic rationality
Anomie
Hawthorne Studies
Human relation
Examinable Readings:
– Gillies, J (ed.) 2014, ch. 2, pp. 44–47 and 50–53.
– Roethlisberger, FJ 1941, Management and Morale, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 7–26.
Revision Questions:
1. Identify and discuss briefly the key ideas of Frederick Taylor:
Setting standards
Develop a science for each element of an individual’s work with standardised work
implements and efficient methods for all to follow.
First–class man
Scientifically select workers with skills and abilities that match each job and train them
in the most efficient ways to accomplish tasks.
Mental revolution
Ensure cooperation through incentives and provide the work environment that reinforces
optimal work results in a scientific manner.
Functional foreman
Divide responsibility for managing and working, while supporting individuals in work
groups doing what they do best. Some people are more capable of managing, whereas
others are better at performing tasks laid out for them.
Taylor‘s four principles are as follows:
1. Replace working by “rule of thumb,” or simple habit and common sense, and instead use the scientific method
to study work and determine the most efficient way to perform specific tasks.
2. Rather than simply assign workers to just any job, match workers to their jobs based on capability and