Manager redirects to here. For use in sports, see Coach (sport) or Manager (baseball).

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"Management" (from Old French ménagement "the art of conducting, directing", from Latin manu agere "to lead by the hand") characterises the process of leading and directing all or part of an organisation, often a business, through the deployment and manipulation of resources (human, financial, material, intellectual or intangible). Early twentieth-century management writer Mary Parker Follett defined management as "the art of getting things done through people."

One can also think of management functionally, as the action of measuring a quantity on a regular basis and of adjusting some initial plan, and as the actions taken to reach one's intended goal. This applies even in situations where planning does not take place. From this perspective, there are five management functions: Planning, Organizing, Leading, Co-ordinating and Controlling. For others though, this definition, while useful, is far too narrow. The phrase "management is what managers do" is also prevalent, conveying the difficulty with which management is defined, the shifting nature of definitions, and the connection of managerial practices with the existence of a managerial cadre or class.

Management is known by some as "Business Administration", although this then excludes management in places outside business, eg charities and the public sector. University departments that teach management are nonetheless usually called "Business Schools". The term "management" may also be used as a collective word, describe the managers of an organization, for example of a corporation.

Historical development

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There are difficulties in tracing the history of management. Some see it as a by definition late modern (in the sense of late modernity) conceptualization. On those terms it cannot have a pre-modern history. Others, however, see management-like activities in the pre-modern past. Some writers trace the development of management thought back to Sumerian traders and ancient Egyptian pyramid builders. Slave-owners through the centuries faced the problems of exploiting/motivating a dependent but sometimes recalcitrant workforce, but many pre-industrial enterprises, given their small scale, did not feel compelled to face the issues of management systematically. But innovations such as the spread of Arabic numerals (5th to 15th centuries) and the codification of double-entry book-keeping (1494) provided tools for management assessment, planning and control.

19th century

Some argue modern management as a discipline began as an off-shoot of economics in the 19th century. Classical economists such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill provided a theoretical background to resource allocation, production, and pricing issues. About the same time, innovators like Eli Whitney, James Watt, and Matthew Boulton developed technical production elements such as standardization, quality control procedures, cost accounting, interchangeability of parts, and work planning. Many of these aspects of management existed in the ante-bellum (pre-1861) US slave economy. There, 4 million people were, as the contemporary usages had it, "managed" in profitable quasi-mass production.

By the late 19th century, marginal economists Alfred Marshall and Leon Walras and others introduced a new layer of complexity to the theoretical underpinings of management. Joseph Wharton offered the first tertiary-level course in management in 1881.

20th century

By about 1900 we find managers trying to place their theories on a what they thought was a thoroughly scientific basis (see scientism for the limits of this claim). Examples include Henry Towne's Science of management in the 1890s, Frederick Winslow Taylor's Scientific management (1911), Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's Applied motion study (1917), and Henry L. Gantt's charts (1910s). J. Duncan wrote the first college management textbook in 1911. In 1912 Yoichi Ueno introduced Taylorism to Japan and was first management consultant to create the "Japanese-management style". His son Ichiro Ueno pioneered Japanese quality assurance.

The first comprehensive theories of management appeared around 1920. People like Henri Fayol and Alexander Church described the various branches of management and their inter-relationships. In the early 20th century, people like Ordwat Tead, Walter Scott and J. Mooney applied the principles of psychology to management, while other writers, such as Elton Mayo, Mary Parker Follett, Chester Barnard, Max Weber, Rensis Likert, and Chris Argyris approached the phenomenon of management from a sociological perspective.

Peter Drucker wrote one of the earliest books on applied management: Concept of the Corporation (published in 1946). It resulted from Alfred Sloan (chairman of General Motors until 1956) commissioning a study of the organisation. Drucker has gone on to write 32 books, many in the same vein.

H. Dodge, Ronald Fisher, and Thorton C. Fry introduced statistical techniques into management. In the 1940s, Patrick Blackett combined these statistical theories with microeconomic theory and gave birth to the science of operations research. Operations research, sometimes known as "management science", attempts to take a scientific approach to solving management problems, particularly in the areas of logistics and operations.

Some of the more recent developments include the theory of constraints, Management by objectives, reengineering, and various information technology driven theories such as agile software development as well as group management theories such as Cog's Ladder.

As the general recognition of managers as a class solidified during the 20th century and gave perceived practitioners of management a certain amount of prestige, so the way opened for popularised systems of management ideas to peddle their wares. In this context many management fads may have had more to do with pop psychology than with scientific management theory.

Towards the end of the 20th century, business management came to consist of six separate branches, namely:

• Human resource management
• Operations management or production management
• Strategic management
• Marketing management
• Financial management
• Information technology management responsible for Management Information Systems

21st century

In the 21st century we find it increasingly difficult to subdivide management into functional categories in this way. More and more processes simultaneously involve several categories. Instead, we tend to think in terms of the various processes, tasks, and objects subject to management. A list of some of the areas of management can be found later in this article.

There are also branches related to nonprofits and government such as public administration, public management, and educational management. Further, management programs related to civil society organizations have also spawned programs in nonprofit management and social entrepreneurship.

It is also the case that many of the assumptions made by management have been under attack from business ethics, critical management studies, and anti-corporate activism.

One consequence is that workplace democracy has become both more common, and more advocated, in some places distributing all management functions among the workers, each of whom takes on a portion of the work. However, these models predate any current political issue, and may be more natural than command hierarchy. All management is to some degree democratic in that there must be majority support of workers for the management in the long term, or they leave to find other work, or go on strike. Hence management is becoming less based on the conceptualisation of classical military command-and-control, and more about facilitation and support of collaborative activity, utilizing principles such as those of human interaction management to deal with the complexities of human interaction. Indeed, the Ubiquitous command and control concept posits such a transformation for 21st Century military management.

Nature of the work

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In for-profit work, the primary function of management is to satisfy a range of stakeholders. This typically involves making a profit (for the shareholders), creating valued products at a reasonable cost (for customers), and providing rewarding employment opportunities (for employees). In nonprofit work it is also important to keep the faith of donors. In most models of management, shareholders vote for the board of directors, and the board then hires senior management. Some organizations are experimenting with other methods (such as employee voting models) of selecting or reviewing managers but this is very rare.

In the public sector of countries constituted as representative democracies, politicians are elected to public office. They hire many managers and administrators, and in some countries like the United States political appointees lose their jobs when a new president is elected to office. Some 2500 people serve at the pleasure of the Chief Executive, including all of the top US government executives.

Public, private, and voluntary sectors place different demands on managers, but all must retain the faith of those who select them (if they wish to retain their jobs), retain the faith of those people that fund the organization, and retain the faith of those who work for the organization. If they fail to convince employees that they are better off staying than leaving, the organization will be forced into a downward spiral of hiring, training, firing, and recruiting. Management also has a responsibility to innovate and improve the functioning of the organization.

References

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• Management Courses at MIT Sloan, OpenCourseWare
• Research on Organizations: Bibliography Database and Maps
• (United States) Academy of Management dedicated to the scholarship and practice of management.

Areas of management

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• Administrative management
• Accounting management
• Agile management
• Association management
• Change management
• Communication management
• Constraint management
• Cost management
• Crisis management
• Critical management studies (CMS)
• Customer relationship management
• Earned value management
• Educational management
• Enterprise management
• Facility management
• Financial management
• Human interaction management
• Human resources management
• Information technology management
• Integration management
• Interim Management
• Knowledge management
• Land management
• Logistics management
• Marketing management
• Operations management
• Organization development
• Perception management
• Procurement management
• Program management
• Project management
• Process management
• Personal management
• Product management
• Public administration
• Public management
• Quality management
• Records Management
• Resource management
• Risk management
• Skills management
• Social entrepreneurship
• Spend management
• Strategic management
• Stress management
• Supply chain management
• Systems management
• Talent management
• Time management

See also

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• Adhocracy
• Administration
• Conflict Style Inventory
• Design management
• Engineering management
• Futures Studies
• Knowledge visualization
• Leadership
• Management consulting
• Management development
• Management styles
• Management Technology
• Managing upwards
• Micromanagement
• Middle management
• Music management
• Organizational studies
• Public administration
• Senior management
• Social entrepreneurship
• Virtual management
• Peter Drucker's management by objectives
• Eliyahu M. Goldratt's theory of constraints
• Pointy Haired Boss —negative stereotypes of managers
• Management Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita

Lists

• List of management topics
• List of marketing topics
• List of human resource management topics
• List of economics topics
• List of finance topics
• List of accounting topics
• List of information technology management topics
• List of production topics
• List of business law topics
• List of business ethics, political economy, and philosophy of business topics
• List of business theorists
• List of economists
• List of corporate leaders
• List of companies

Timelines

• Timeline of management techniques

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