Development of management thought: Selected contributors and their ideas. Volume I, Chapter I. Introduction

Abstract

This collection of articles and summaries of the work of early management thinkers and practitioners was completed as part of a doctoral seminar on Management Thought History & Development (W605) I took in the Spring, 1978 at the Graduate School of Business at Indiana University-Bloomington with Dr. John F. Mee (PhD Ohio State). At that time Dr. Mee was the Mead Johnson Professor of Management at Indiana and former president of the Academy of Management. Dr. Mee, himself, was a student of one of the figures covered in this collection, Dr. Ralph C. Davis (1930-39). Today, the Mee prize is given annually by the Academy for the best paper in Management History.

This collection is organized by following Dr. Mee’s philosophy that management thought and practice must be understood within the context of the times they were developed. Thus, after the front matter, the collection of articles, bios, and summaries of the works of those who contributed to management thought in the first seventy years of the twentieth century is organized chronologically by decade. Each decade begins with a summary of the events social, economic, technological, and political events that occurred during that period. Contributors to management thought appear during the decade in which their best known work was published or made public. The contributions of many of these individuals spanned beyond the decade in which they are classified in this collection.

Copyright © Richard C. Hoffman, 1978, 2017.