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Honoring the life and works of Peter Drucker (1909-2005)
Edited by Robert Cowan
Introduction
Peter Drucker is renowned in both academia and business for his insightful contribution to the growth of business studies and his attitudes towards management practice. His writings have been instrumental in developing management direction across the decades. By the 1950s Drucker was already considered probably the best-known writer in the world on both the philosophical and practical aspects of industrial management, and since then his reputation has grown to the point of being called the "father of modern management" ([26] Hargreaves, 2006). He became a legend in his own time as a major shaper of today's management thought among both business scholars and managers. His books about society established him as a leading social writer ([51] Schwartz, 1998).
For many, he is regarded as one of the greatest thinkers in management. His works show not only his ability to generate dialogue around management practices and processes, but also his concern and sensitivity towards consumers ([14] Drucker, 1989). Drucker advocated that "the purpose of business is the customer" ([14] Drucker, 1989, p. 85) and disagreed with the classical economists' view that implies the purpose of business is profit maximisation. He argued that:
profitability is not the purpose of business enterprise and activity, but a limiting factor on it. Profit is not the explanation, cause or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but the test of their validity ([8] Drucker, 1954, p. 33).
Drucker initially wrote about the emergence of big business as a social reality (e.g the concept of the corporation), one of the more important developments in the recent socio-economic history of the Western World. As pre-eminent institutions of society, corporations exert significant social power, for which they have to take responsibility; and the managers of these corporations have to take a leading role, which is not compatible with the inflated CEO salaries we have seen during the 1980s and 1990s on which Drucker made despairing comments ([26] Hargreaves, 2006). The collapse of companies like Enron and the 2008 financial crisis highlight both the applicability of Drucker's work and the way the dynamics of consumerism have changed over time. Drucker was concerned with the lack of congruency between the behavior...