Paul Willman has written a highly relevant book that pointedly addresses both management theory and practice. Uniquely, it makes ample use of narrative.
Understanding Management: The Social Science Foundations (Oxford University Press, 2014) introduces masters level students with little prior knowledge to the diverse and fragmented field of management and it delivers with a coherent storyline across history. Willman’s ability to identify historical, cultural and philosophical lineages in this relatively young discipline is a masterful stretch. MBA and graduate business students will be pleasantly surprised with the author’s thick and textured narrative style as he clearly departs from the typical theory-heavy, critically light management text domination of the early twenty-first century.
The author’s philosophically inquisitive approach moves seamlessly between finance, organizational behavior, strategy, operations, quality control, marketing, anthropology and other key influences. Wading through a multitude of “academic branches” comprising the study of management, Willman assures us that “the tree is narrower at its roots” hence the search through history. Identifying his focus and nexus as “critical management” Willman’s book was “designed to help students who will be managers understand what may and may not work.” But in the process, Willman is committed to exposing students to experiments and interpretations of management across cultures and centuries.
The author makes every effort to open the minds of students to the rich and textured interaction between academic activity in management and the long reach of industrial practice. Accordingly, the book is seeded and sprinkled with a myriad of real-world coaching, consulting and firing line cases and examples.
Willman, for example, traces operations research back to the engineering approach to production management epitomized in Ford Motor Company’s successes and failures with the early Model T. Willman reveals how in the process of incorporating core principles of Taylor’s scientific management that Ford “generated huge growth in car ownership and market size” but also discovered that they were slow to retool for product innovation due to the serious flaw of “inflexibility.” Ultimately Willman walks the reader through the extreme breakthroughs and assets of engineering and Taylor-driven management in the auto industry and into the intervention of early industrial psychology and human relations as “the maintenance crew for the human machinery.” From the assembly lines of Ford we are ushered into the research of Harvard Professor, Munsterberg, who became increasingly concerned with fatigue, monotony and learning in industrial work. Accordingly, Willman establishes in Chapter 4, an increasingly human dimension to management. To establish his case, Willman cites Wren (2005):
“While the engineer studied mechanical efficiency, the industrial psychologist studied human efficiency with the same goal in mind of improved overall greater productivity” […] (p. 193).
As the former editor of the Tavistock-based Journal, Human Relations, Willman consistently provides equal time for the human capital and the people side of management. Of particular note is the fact that Willman repeatedly brings up issues of ethics in business. For example, Willman offers Nike as a case-in-point and prototype for unethical leadership and supply chain management. He reveals inhumane and questionable practices evidenced in his depiction of Nike’s “vertical architect” or “value chain organizer” in the chapter on “The Modern Corporation.” Willman acidically states that Nike’s “strategy may less attractively be described as a huge arbitrage play in which it uses production in low-wage economies to sell product in high-wage ones.” He goes on to state that:
“[…] in 1998 Nike was accused in San Francisco Superior Court of willfully misleading the public about sweatshop conditions in its Asian manufacturing […]. At the time, the average retail cost of a Nike shoe in US was $90, of which the labor cost was $3.37 […].”
Suffice to say that the reader will be repeatedly challenged with business practices that require scrutiny – a bonus in the learning and unraveling of management history.
The exposure of ethical quandaries is tempered with depictions of exemplary managerial practices as epitomized in the Toyota story. Willman assures us that “firms that innovate early and integrate HRM with production practices generate sustained performance improvement” essential to continuous improvement. Moreover, Willman points out that Toyota’s strategic use of benchmarking “provides a high chance of replicating their success” (p. 90).
Willman’s challenges to the reader also reach into those elements of managerial psychology that he labels the “anthropology of management.” For instance, he pointedly encapsulates the research of Mintzberg by offering that:
“[…] he found managers work at an unrelenting pace; that their actions are brief, various, and discontinuous; that they have action bias and do not get involved in much reflection […].”
The point here being that the reader is personally invited to analyze managerial behavior in the workplace and partake in individual self-reflection. Willman invites us to consider the spectrum of functional and dysfunctional behavior as well as the prospects for degrees of self-actualization.
The exposure of ethical quandaries in business is balanced with numerous examples of exemplary managerial behavior. Throughout the book, the author benchmarks best practices and optimal performance.
Refreshing is the author’s confession that he “tries to deliver a general understanding of the elements of management, not the detailed knowledge necessary for a specialist.” We quickly learn that management is derivative, opportunistic and eclectic.
Willman’s concluding chapter, “In search of a better past,” raises deeply rooted and at times quite troublesome issues such as the need “to understand why many management scholars with different approaches find it hard to talk to each other” (p. 285). The author persuasively posits that the management field is derivative, opportunistic, eclectic and fragmented and that “these four characteristics are likely to be enduring.” He argues that integrative, historical and culturally rooted approaches to the management field are needed. Accordingly, the author approaches a blueprint for a more inclusive and historically and philosophically situated approach to the study of management.
Overall, I find this book innovative with the prospect of inspiring graduate students as well as professionals in the management field. “Understanding Management” speaks to managers, operations professionals, researchers and MBA students who are ready to probe and discover a lineage and multidisciplinary field that is management. My concern is that the historical, philosophical and anthropological thrust of this extraordinary book may be misunderstood or trivialized by readers who prioritize metrics and hard data generated by management studies. Willman is not particularly a spokesperson for current and topical research. He rather wrestles with making historical and disciplinary sense out of a fragmented management field. He is an analyst and interpreter, not a voice for popular trends. I can offer testimony that this book is worth every minute spent reading and considering it. It can provoke, instigate heated debates, conjure up ethical battlefields, connect the dots on a surprisingly deep and diverse disciplinary lineage and be a game changer.
