La tercera antropología de Kant

Management scholars have, like international lawyers, attempted to historicise their discipline. This has often taken them far back to the ancient world to locate management’s harbingers to begin to knit the discipline together. In his history of management thought, Daniel Wren cites the earliest recording of the vizier or supervisor in 1750 BC as a type of pre-modern manager. This supervisor existed in several contexts, including ancient Egypt. The managers of that time, according to Wren, sowed ‘the seeds for the managerial concepts we see reported in the Bible’.232 In another ancient setting, namely classical Greece, Aristotle is said to have

230 _{P. Drucker, ‘Peter Drucker’s Essential Tips for Managers in 2005’ (Wall Street Journal, 6 January 2005)}

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120818665027812913.

231 _{UN General Assembly, World Summit Outcome, A/RES/60/1, 24 October 2005, paras 15, 161–7}

https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_RES_6 0_1.pdf.

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inaugurated the spirit of scientific enquiry which paved the way for scientific management over two millennia later.233 _{More recently, the accounting practice of double-entry bookkeeping,}

which emerged in Italy during the late middle ages, inaugurated a spirit of evaluation and documentation which still characterises modern auditing techniques.234

As these generalities suggest, there is little to connect such broad developments to the highly professionalised management discipline of today. Some documentary practices such as double-entry bookkeeping remain a stalwart of modern accounting. Yet even this 15th century practice lacked the systematicity of modern techniques, having been applied irregularly in small companies.235

More convincing as management’s origin point is the Industrial Revolution and the economic and organisational upheaval it precipitated in late-eighteenth century England.236 Here, Wren attributes management’s rise to the capitalist division of labour. The specialisation of functions and division between worker and owner necessitated, for Wren, a new group to mediate the relationship between them. This was not only a theoretical concern, but a practical imperative of mass manufacturing which had created a massive workforce flooding into new industrial cities like Manchester from the countryside.237

Nonetheless, the replication of the factory model into the present day should not gloss over the many breaks which distinguish early management from its later forms. Inside the English factories, the manager was drawn from workers’ ranks and their authority from the trust (and sometimes fear) established among subordinates. Leading by their own force of personality, managers were not professionally trained and had little need for or access to standardised evaluation techniques. Thus, the emergence of a managerial ‘class’ was not accompanied by the kinds of managerial practices which are the focus of this study.

Although looking to such disciplinary harbingers, management scholars are broadly agreed that modern management was birthed by the American engineer Frederick Taylor during the 1890s. Originally intending to train as a lawyer like his father, Taylor decided to

233 _{Wren, The Evolution of Management Thought, 18.}

234 _{R.A. Bryer, ‘Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Birth of Capitalism: Accounting for the Commercial}

Revolution in Medieval Northern Italy’ (1993) 4 Critical Perspectives in Accounting 113.

235 _{Bryer, ‘Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Birth of Capitalism’, 113.}

236 _{British industrialisation went hand in hand with colonial expansion particularly in India, where many statistical}

practices resembling managerial tools were applied to classify colonial populations first by the British East India Company and later by British colonial administrators, including surveys and censuses, D. Chakrabarty, ‘Modernity and Ethnicity in India: A History for the Present’ (1995) 30 Economic and Political Weekly 3373, 3375.

237 _{Wren, The Evolution of Management Thought, 38–9; T. Morden, Principles of Management (McGraw-Hill}

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become an apprentice machinist in Philadelphia due to deteriorating eyesight as a teenager. Joining Midvale Steel Works as a machinist in 1878, Taylor quickly rose to the rank of chief engineer.238 At 25, Taylor introduced a technique at Midvale called ‘time study’ to observe individual workers and eliminate time-wasting, a technique which foreshadowed the development of his own management science.

At Midvale, and later at Bethlehem Steel, the largest US shipbuilding company at the time, Taylor observed the dynamics of the factory floor. He hoped to end ‘soldiering’ or workers’ tendency to work only to the level of the least productive of their colleagues.239 Taylor devised principles and tools of management to calculate, time, and record every minute component of the production process to stop this practice and ‘the waste of material things’.240 Such tools would allow managers to identify average production levels and thus sanction under-performance, reward productivity, and generally enhance organisational efficiency. As this new approach suggests, the role of the manager would be instrumental. The manager would garner productivity less through personal leadership than through the application of scientific laws and tools symbolised by the stopwatch and the ledger. To this end, Taylor instituted a host of techniques including time and motion studies, planned work layouts, improved posture, better lighting, costed plans, and budget projections.241

The purpose of these techniques has been much disputed. Taylor himself described the aim of securing ‘[m]aximum prosperity’ for both worker and owner.242 _{For him, prosperity was}

an economic calculation: ‘in the case of any single individual the greatest prosperity can exist only when the individual has reached his highest state of efficiency; that is, when he is turning out his largest daily output’.243 _{It is this economic rationale which has led some scholars to}

conclude that management’s purpose was to extract labour from workers in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible.244 This reading is supported by the context of Taylor’s efforts; he hoped to secure the greatest national efficiency for the United States at a time when it was

238 _{S. Cummings et al. (eds), A New History of Management (CUP 2019) 84–5.} 239 _{F. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (Dover Publications 1998 [1911]) 6.} 240 _{Taylor, Principles, iii and 9.}

241 _{Morden, Principles of Management, 5–6; Taylor, Principles, 9.} 242 _{Taylor, Principles, 1.}

243 _{Taylor, Principles, 2.}

244 _{Harry Braverman argues that management ‘starts … from the capitalist point of view … It investigates not}

labour in general, but the adaptation of labour to the needs of capital’, H. Braverman, Labour and Monopoly

Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (Monthly Review Press 1974) 86. See also J. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (University of

California Press 1980) 86: ‘the Scientific Management of Taylor was a system of social control’. Taylor and his disciples disputed this stating that management would secure ‘social harmony’ between classes, see R. Bendix,

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vying for global expansion.245 _{To quote Taylor again, efficiency would ‘so lower the cost of}

production that both home and foreign markets would be greatly enlarged, and we could compete on more than even terms with our rivals’.246 Emerging just when the US was seeking to establish itself as a global power, management fed into the country’s domestic and imperial aspirations.

1.2. ‘To make this competent man’: Taylor’s scientific management

The aim behind scientific management is elucidated by the practices it deployed as much as the wider political attitudes and aspirations of the time. Devising his principles of scientific management for the factory floor, Taylor instigated a managerial revolution in society through the organisation. And rather than seeking to improve the leadership skills of managers, Taylor looked to the performance of the workforce and the environmental factors inhibiting high productivity.247 _{This, to borrow from Miller and O’Leary, ‘implied a revolution in the nature}

of authority … from power over men to the administration of things’.248 _{With actions being}

recorded in such minute fashion, organisations would be regulated through ‘a complete change in the mental attitude of all the men in the shop toward their work’.249 Not only would workers themselves be conscripted into their own self-discipline, but others including factory owners, government leaders, the general population, and of course managers would also be recruited into this regulatory revolution. The point was to ‘train and to make this competent man’, the ideal worker who would perform his specialised tasks as efficiently as possible.250

Management entered and altered the everyday lives of factory workers in a relatively short space of time. This was due not only to the power of the factory owners who had begun to invest in Taylor’s services. Management science also built on contemporary American attitudes towards science. In his most famous text, Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor labelled management ‘a pure science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles’, which could be objectively applied.251 In this way, he tapped into the growing reputation of

245 _{Taylor, Principles, 5.} 246 _{Taylor, Principles, 4.} 247 _{Taylor, Principles, iii.}

248 _{P. Miller and T. O’Leary, ‘Accounting and the Construction of the Governable Person’ (1987) 12 Accounting,}

Organizations and Society 235, 252.

249 _{Taylor, Principles, 51.} 250 _{Taylor, Principles, iii.} 251 _{Taylor, Principles, iv.}

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science as objective mode of discovering the truth. Scientific management revealed that not only the natural world, but the social world too, could be objectively studied and ascertained. It could reveal a logic or set of laws underpinning not only the organisation, but society as a whole, offering principles and tools to effectively realise collective goals. Management held the promise of optimising the world by regulating the organisation and its staff.

Extolling the scientific credentials of management, Taylor also benefitted from a new approach to politics and political reform in 1900s America. Management emerged at a time of great economic and social change in the US. An expanding population and a growing urban workforce gave rise to a host of labour, educational, and sanitation issues requiring large-scale solutions. However, at the time, ideological party politics were considered both quaint and ill- equipped to resolve the problems of the modern world. Science was seen as offering the ideal solution to social upheaval and discord without the complaint of political interference. Taking the politics out of politics many progressive figures defined it ‘not in terms of good and evil, but in terms of knowledge, efficiency, and scientific planning against ignorance, error, and economic waste’.252 Taylorism represented the organisational arm of this technocratic imaginary.253 It not only fastened itself to the attitudes of the time, but also projected its own ‘scientific’ gaze onto society as a whole. It imagined the ‘competent man’ and efficient organisation as central units of societal progress.

1.3. The factory floor goes national