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Introduction
It is critical that pioneers of any discipline reflect on the foundations of their respective fields (Verma, 1994). With this in mind, it is unsurprising that the first management theorists and practitioners were those that wrote the most on the “fundamentals of management” (Wren and Bedeian, 2009). As such, the 1920s can be considered as a major moment for management studies or a seminal milestone in the history of the development of ideas in management. Numerous markers attest the fact that this decade was decisive not only in fostering a general will to professionalize the activity of management but also in establishing the principles fundamental to moving from an empirical to a structured approach of management. Thus, the activities of the Taylor Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) during this time both demonstrate a desire to equip the discipline with a structured body of principles (Brown, 1925; Sinclair, 1980). Moreover, the period also boasted a number of militant and active contributions from management practitioners. Although some of these individuals were critical of scientific management, they all shared a common desire to provide managers with skills and expertise so as to increase the efficiency of organizational systems, all in the context of increasingly turbulent business; the case of Henry Dennison’s contributions and experiments is typical in this respect (Bruce, 2015).
That being said, we are interested in the foundations of management as they emerged in their heterodox form during the 1920s. A body of research has focused on the period’s emblematic contributors to management, and within this research, a quantitatively important number of works have dealt with individuals that were explicitly linked to the movement of scientific management during the 1920s: Henry Gantt, Frank Gilbreth, Harrington Emerson, among others. Some of this research highlights the singular contributions of some of these thinkers and critics of scientific management (Grachev and Rakitsky, 2013; Graham, 2013; Hoffman, 2007; Muhs, 1982; Nadworny, 1957; Petersen, 1986). The present study focuses on two authors and management practitioners from the 1920s who both proposed an approach to management that itself both differed from and complemented that of scientific management: Mary Parker Follett and Oliver Sheldon.
Mary Parker Follett has been canonized as a pioneer of management (Graham, 1995; Sethi,...