MANAGERIAL IDEOLOGY AND LABOUR RELATIONS
| Author | Alan Fox |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1966.tb00936.x |
| Date | 01 March 1966 |
| Published date | 01 March 1966 |
MANAGERIAL IDEOLOGY AND LABOUR RELATIONS
ALAN
Fox*
YOUR
self-styled ‘practical’ man
is
apt to deride theory. This usually means
simply that he has never been required to examine the curious jackdaw’s-
nest of unrelated assumptions, generalizations and hypotheses (i.e. theory)
upon which his behaviour is based. Keynes, the economist, made
a
characteristically waspish comment on the subject. ‘Practical men, who
believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are
usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Managers are often in
bondage, however, to many more sources of influence than this. The pur-
pose of this paper is to discuss certain of the practical man’s ideas on the
social organization of industry, to suggest their sources of origin, and to
examine their implications for the conduct of labour relations.
Such an undertaking
is
open to many pitfalls. Even to suggest what the
practical man’s ideas are may seem, in the absence of research on a large
scale, to be presumptuous. Admittedly, certain aspects have begun to be
explored. Hilde Behrend, for example, has discussed the assumptions im-
plicit in the use of financial incentive schemes.2 Over much of the field,
however, little systematic inquiry has been made, and it could be argued
that this renders discussion futile. Yet this need not be
so.
If
there is some-
thing approaching consensus among detached observers of industry that a
given pattern of ideas is sufficiently widespread among managers to be
noteworthy, a valid basis for discussion exists. This paper is written in the
belief that the observations of those with knowledge of the field would
support certain limited propositions of this nature.
SOURCES
OF
MANAGERIAL
IDEOLOGY
The diverse sources from which these ideas derive, and the manner in
which the ideas themselves have become popularized and simplified to the
level of ‘plain-man’s-folklore’, would themselves constitute
a
fascinating
subject of study. It is certainly out of no desire to neglect these complex
processes that concentration
will
be focused here on two schools of manage-
ment theory
-
the ‘scientific management’
or
‘classical’ school and the
‘human relations’ or ‘naturalistic’ school. Both have furnished ideas which,
along with diverse fragments of so-called ‘commonsense’ and cultural
beliefs, supply the theoretical underpinning of many managerial attitudes
*
Lecturer in Industrial Sociology, University of Oxford
1
J.
M.
Keynes,
General
Theov
of
Employment, ZntereJt and hfonty,
Macmillan
1957,
p.
383
2
‘Financial Incentives as the Expression
of
a System of Beliefs’,
British
Journal
of
Sociology,
June
1959
366
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