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Mary Follett was a gentle person, not an impressive or aggressive spellbinder, but of all the pioneers she, more than others, approached management through human values, psychology and the laboratory of collaborative work experience ([27] Gulick, 1977).
Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) lived and worked in the Boston, MA area during a time when modern management theory was in its infancy and scientific management was the dominant theory within business circles. Yet this woman who never met a payroll influenced business men at the time and foresaw management theories which were to become popular years later with the advent of the human relations school and beyond ([28] Humphreys and Einstein, 2003). For this reason, management scholars such as Peter Drucker acclaim her as the "Prophet of Management" ([13] Drucker, 1995).
The purpose of this article is to take a look at significant contributions of Follett through the lens of critical biography to put her work in the context of her life events, her mentors, and the other major influences on her work. We begin by taking a look at critical biography as a qualitative methodology.
Critical biography methodology
Critical biography is a qualitative method with which social historians research the individual scholar's or practitioner's critical incidents in life in order to explore and explain the subject's scholarly development and intellectual contribution, situated in the social and historical background of the subject. While critical biography researchers "pay particular attention to the historical context in which specific management ideas and practices were produced," ([1] Abraham et al. , 2009, p. 9), "'critical' implies an element of analytical distance" ([30] Jacobs, 2007, p. 105). Critical biography typically draws on letters, documents, interviews, and memos as a means of empirical investigation about the life of a particular subject ([41] Smith, 1994). As with all biography, the focus is on the life and experiences of an individual as gathered from personal interviews or documents ([12] Denzin, 1989). In critical biography, however, the researcher inserts himself or herself more directly in terms of drawing linkages and making interpretations.
The role of all qualitative narrative inquiry is to collect data from multiple sources and then present it in a structure that makes sense of the events described ([8] Cresswell, 2007) in a process...