A Note: What Is "Management" Anyway?
As something different from hierarchical command-and-control, bureaucratic obedience-to-form-and-routine, & market higgling-haggling, that is; starting with Peter F. Drucker & ending up with Gary J. Miller…
Of all the young and interesting moral philosophers who brushed up against one another in early–1900s Vienna, Peter F. Drucker was one of the most interesting. But Drucker, when came to the United States, followed a very different trajectory (after getting Karl Polanyi his job at Bennington College) than any of the others. He became the U.S.’s BOSS management consultant and managerial theorist. Admittedly, he seem never to have taken himself completely seriously:
Bill Emmott: What we know, and don’t know, about the new geopolitical and geoeconomic order: ’When at some point in the 1990s we at “The Economist” described him as a “management guru”. Drucker wrote back that he had long believed that he had gained the title “guru” simply because the word “charlatan” was too long for a newspaper headline… <https://civita.no/notat/what-we-know-and-dont-know-about-the-new-geopolitical-and-geoeconomic-order/>
But he remained someone who always hunted the same game as the Polanyis, von Hayek, Schumpeter and company.
Pinned between them all and the shadow of Karl Marx, Peter F. Drucker sought his reconciliation of the antinomies of modern industrial society in the figure of the manager, whose social role was precisely to arrange things so that society could be an “association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Drucker’s manager is the trustee of civilization, a member of a Michael Polanyian-type priestly profession in which one works not so much for one’s principals as for the smooth, efficient operation of the system as a whole in a way that makes sense to and reconciles the interests of all stakeholders: freedom and community, efficiency and equity, order and disruption are then reconciled through the judgments and values of this particular honorable professional castes of managers.
“Management” is in some powerful way different from the form- and precedent-bound routines of bureaucracy. And it is certainly not the command-and-control of the state. Nor is it the higgling-haggling this-for-that of the market.
So what is it?