The management graduate, equipped with technical tools and visions of an efficient society, found himself in high demand as the First World War came to an end. But the post-1918 order also heralded other, more international visions. The doctrine of liberal internationalism, extolled by US President Woodrow Wilson, prompted the construction of institutions like the League of Nations ‘to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security’.272 Other organisations like the International Labour Office (ILO) were
established to address increasingly global problems such as poor working conditions and labour discrimination. Guided by the convictions of ‘peace, security, and freedom’, these institutions also drew on the efficiency movement of the age to help achieve their aims.273
The ILO was a productive site for managerial experimentation. As Sinclair details, the ILO’s adoption of Taylorism in the 1920s ‘grew out of its interest in the possibility of using scientific techniques to enhance worker welfare’.274 Some ILO officials from Europe had seen the application of such practices in their home countries and required little convincing to apply them to labour standards or economic technical assistance. These officials, many of whom were lawyers, embraced managerial tools and advocated the global dissemination of managerial knowledge. Accordingly, the first ILO Director-General created a special section to promote the international study of management. In 1924, ILO officials attended the first International
270 H. Kijne and J.C. Spender, ‘Introduction’, in J.C. Spender and H. Kijne (eds), Scientific Management:
Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Gift to the World? (Springer 2012) xi, xvi.
271 The MBA is one of the most popular degrees currently on offer in universities around the world: in 2002, the
US offered 700 MBA programmes, while 12,000 students were enrolled in the 120 programmes offered by British universities, see R. Protherough and J. Pick, Managing Britannia: Culture and Management in Modern Britain (Brynmill Press 2002) 4.
272 Preamble, Covenant of the League of Nations, 28 April 1919.
273 D. Kennedy, ‘The Move to Institutions’ (1987) 8 Cardozo Law Review 841, 986. 274 Sinclair, To Reform the World, 90.
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Management Congress, and were instrumental in setting up the International Management Institute (IMI) close to the ILO building in Geneva.275 The ILO’s response to major labour
challenges such as the Great Depression of the 1930s was to advocate ‘more, bigger, and better rationalisation’ as a solution to social discord.276 Their early activities and goals were thus highly conditioned by Taylor’s philosophy.
The ILO’s belief in scientific management was guided by the same technocratic and political attitudes prevailing in the US and Europe during the interwar period. ILO officials looked upon management as a way to ‘fan the Promethean sparks into flames to light the path of progress to be followed by mankind in a spirit of practical idealism’.277 These ideas were brought to bear within institutions like the ILO by prominent management experts and Taylorists. Thus, upon the creation of the IMI in 1927, Percy Brown, a management consultant and one-time president of the American Taylor Society, was appointed as deputy director. After resigning from the post a year later – although not before promoting the advantages of managerial practices in various sectors – he became a partner in the management consultancy firm McKinsey & Co.278
Brown’s journey is typical of the move from business to international research to academia which managers were making throughout the 1930s. They embodied Taylor’s aspiration that scientific management applied ‘with equal force to all social activities’.279 As his later career indicated, Brown also joined many other ‘efficiency men’ in establishing ‘a new professional service: management consulting’.280 At McKinsey and elsewhere, Brown and
his colleagues would be employed to provide advice to companies on planning and structures, but also to enhance organisational credibility among shareholders and the public.281 They did
so by redefining organisational aims and implementing strategic tools. In this way, they levelled the playing field between small and large businesses by reshaping them in a similar managerial image.282
275 Sinclair, To Reform the World, 91–2.
276 H. Haan, ‘Scientific Management and Economic Planning’ (1933) 166 Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 66, 70; C. Nyland et al., ‘Taylorism, the International Labor Organization, and the
Genesis and Diffusion of Codetermination’ (2014) 35 Organization Studies 1149, 1155 and 1157–8.
277 Haan, ‘Scientific Management and Economic Planning’, 74.
278 T. Cayet, ‘The ILO and the IMI: A Strategy of Influence on the Edges of the League of Nations, 1925-1934’,
in J. van Daele et al. (eds), ILO Histories (Peter Lang 2010) 251, 257–8.
279 Taylor, Principles, iv.
280 C. McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (CUP 2006)
8.
281 McKenna, World’s Newest Profession, 7.
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Private companies were not the only organisations to benefit from managerial expertise. Federal agencies and programmes had also adopted its methods, at least since the 1910s. This move to public organisations would accelerate under US President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Relying more on economic planning than in the preceding decades, New Deal politics still depended on expert disciplines to improve social welfare. Managers were recruited into that project, as exemplified by new schemes like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The TVA was established in 1933 to provide utilities and economic development for the Tennessee valley basin as one of the worst-suffering regions of the US during the great depression. Initiating this ambitious programme, the federal government relied on engineers, scientists, planners, and managers to accurately identify economic and social problems, and collect relevant data for their alleviation.283 Alongside the TVA, similar agencies and programmes sprung up and with them a growing demand for managerial experts to organise and optimise society.
It was this managerial phenomenon which commentators attempted to theorise during the 1930s and 40s. In The Managerial Revolution, political theorist James Burnham labelled New Dealism a ‘managerial ideology’.284 Writing in 1941, Burnham captured the power and popularity of management. The US federal government was not only employing a record number of managers but, according to Burnham, was being taken over by a new ‘managerial class’. Burnham observed this new class emerging between capitalist owners and workers to seize the state-owned means of production.285 He prophesied the transition from capitalism not
to socialism but to managerialism citing in evidence the similar managerial traits of the Nazi and Soviet states of the late 1930s. This managerial society would be guided by the philosophy of ‘coordination, integration, efficiency [and] planning’.286 And instead of being run by industrialists or workers’ dictatorships, managerial society would be characterised by the ‘drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class, by the social group or class of the managers’.287
In hindsight, Burnham was wrong to predict the demise of capitalism.288 Yet conceiving a new social system and hierarchy beyond the deeply entrenched capitalism-socialism binary
283 E. Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933-1990 (Princeton UP
1994) 80; P. Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (University of California Press 1949) 29–37.
284 J. Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (John Day 1941) 192.
285 Burnham had been an ardent Trotskyist until 1940, so despite rejecting historical materialism thereafter, traces
remained.
286 Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, 193. 287 Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, 72.
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of the time illustrates the ubiquity of managers and managerial ideas. Burnham’s theory also accurately captured just how far management had come in a few short decades. By the 1940s, management had become more than a method for alleviating low productivity among factory workers, applying now to private and public organisations in America and beyond. Management found a waiting audience in the bureaucratic office as much as the shop floor and in the mind of the progressive technocrat as much as the entrepreneurial businessman. Burnham thus captured society’s reimagination in efficiency terms.