Operation Phoenix 14: A study of living and working in a technological society

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE BEHAVIOURAL SCIENTISTS TO MODERN MANAGEMENT THEORY AND THUS TO TOMORROW'S WORLD. In instalments 12 and 13, in my search for reliable pointers to the nature of tomorrow's world, I have been looking into the business of management. I have painted a picture of a fairly smooth and uniform development of management between 1750 and 1955, the period I am referring to as yesterday's world. Then I identified a period between 1955 and 1975 which I have called the years of turbulence during which a veritable avalanche of ideas about management/work/quality of life and man‐at‐work‐in‐society poured over the scene. I later made the point that this avalanche was Western in its origin and its application and that while it made its noisy progress across the Western stage something different — something much more silent and far more effective — was taking place in Japan, based on an entirely different set of principles. I then went on to identify the basic tenets of this new management style which has originated in Japan over the past twenty‐five years or so.