User:Silwilhith/workbench


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A Tale of two Management

An analysis of the traditional French-style of Management, its raise, transposition, decline, and the opportunity to rediscover it at the dawn of 21st Century.

Abstract


 * There’s nothing worse for a person, in my opinion, than holding mistaken views about the matters we’re discussing at the moment. Plato, quoting Socrates, in Gorgias

In each human societies, there is a leading way of thinking, a collective conscience, build out of local beliefs, education, history, social and economic situation, which is reflected by the language and institutions of the concerned society. Therefore when we think today to the “Fathers” of the Management Science, that is Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henri Fayol, we shall put in perspective what sort of local cultures they were immersed into, and how it could have influenced the design of their theories. And what parts are still relevant in our today’s cultures.

The overall idea coming out of Taylor’s methods was to maximise the productivity of an industrial or administrative organisation, employing workers who didn’t need to have the knowledge of the whole process, and wanting to replace a military-like management by a functional management. On the other side of the Atlantic, at the same time, Fayol was pushing forward a very structured way of organisation, using the army as a metaphor, insisting on the leadership capabilities of managers, and focussing on forecasts and process control together with a light bureaucracy.

However when looking at the nature of Taylor’s and Fayol’s respective societies, it appears that people involved where looking very different in term of education, skills, beliefs, motivations, mobility, hidden or visible social classes, religions, goals. USA workforce was supporting tremendous changes since 1860 with a massive immigration from European countries which were getting rid of their most unwanted workers. While France was having a relatively stable situation since 1871, sending less migrants compared to its neighbours, and enjoying all new innovations popping out of their engineers drawing tables.

The next 100 years have seen a huge production of theories and further refinements about the best ways to organise and manage an organisation. But most of researches were made in each specific fields of the researchers involved, scientific management, sociology, politics, economics, and few tried to combine the whole to depict the big picture of organisational management. And, it’s only recently that cross-cultural issues were taken into account to say that Business have to cope and adapt with local cultures if they want to maximise their profits.

When considering these two cultures and methods and analysing their local effectiveness, some important factors made me questioning how Fayol’s method was transposed and implemented in USA where it got almost more success than in France. Because I refute the idea that Fayol was militaristic and autocratic but, instead, collaborative (in the way French workers understand team collaboration) and collectivist.

The first point is to draw a portrait of the American and French societies at these times, through an analysis of their respective institutions. Next we must examine how Fayol was understood by Americans and what Fayol’s system was providing them with; considering what Fayol did actually meant and why. We would end by extrapolating what would have changed if Fayol’s system had kept his original sense.

We would certainly conclude by saying that each human society must design its own methods, not picking foreign systems without care and adaptations. The real issue concerns the ability to transpose ways and ideas from one human society to another, and about the awareness by one society of the “foreign culture” at the time of the transposition.

Introduction
Administration Industrielle et Générale of Henri Fayol (Dunod 1916) suffered of misinterpretations by English-readers due to natural restrictions/differences in cognitive concepts between languages. 90 years after do we still miss something important which may explain the relative high added-value productivity of French workers in France and the high quality standards of French products and services? Or was this method anyhow only applicable to the specific culture of the country where it was designed?

The first English translation of Fayol was written by John A. Coubrough in 1930 and published by IIOST Geneva where Lyndall Urwick was then working as management researcher. This translation suffers of many mistakes due to concepts of some French words which would need an explanatory sentence to keep their sense to the English reader.

The second translation, written by Constance Storrs in 1961 for Pitman, was of better quality but for 30 years Lyndall Urwick had promoted Fayol work from a poor source. And as Henri Fayol was dead in 1925, it was not possible to verify if thesis developed by Urwick were compliant with original thought. And the foreword of L. Urwick in the second edition shows that he was not perfectly understanding the French language.

For example, in Elements of administration written by Lyndall Urwick in 1944 for Harper and Row contains a very surprising chapter about the needs for control in an Organisation, referring to many scandals involving fraudulent behaviours of employees. Though Henri Fayol was simply writing “le contrôle consiste à vérifier” (the control is to check) that things are done according to defined plans, work requests and accepted methods. This is today simply called Quality Assurance.

But the subsequent raised question is about applicability of Fayol’s approach. When took and understood in its original meaning, Fayol sounds quite collectivist, if not Socialist. Therefore, regarding to the mainstream of management prevalent in USA at that time, it looks like these mistakes in translation were in fact quite appropriate to their American field of application.

We can then wonder what would have occurred if the translation kept all the original sense. Would Fayol’s approach being rejected in USA in the same way that it was in France after May 1968? Or would USA executives have turned into some collectivist management style?

It may seem obvious to us today that people issued from a particular country have a unique cultural identity, built from their educational system, their country’s history, their language, and their beliefs and customs. And that the management style must be adapted to this identity. The country’s institutions reflect tangibly and durably these cultural identities and we will use them as bearing points in this journey through origins of modern management.

It’s even more essential to know that this aspect was not taken into account at the time of Fayol’s system transposition.

Primary and craftsmanship education
????? (needs further researches)

French succession tradition
To maximise the (financial) heritage provided to children at parents death to help them rising on the social ladder.

American authoritarian management
F.W.Tayol was complaining in Shop Management about the Military organisation of the management. While French managers were complaining about workers' flemme (laziness).

Patterns of workers
Why American workers, unlike the rest of the World, didn't pass through an era of "bicycle transportation" during their Industrial Revolution stages? They swap directly from horses to petrol cars.