Corporate Hand in Academic Glove: The New Management's Struggle for Academic Recognition-The Case of the Harvard Group in the 1920's
In 1909, John Jay Chapman, a professor at Harvard, issued a very harsh indictment of American universities: "As the boss has been the tool of businessmen in politics, so the college president has been his agent in education."(1) Thorstein Veblen made a similar accusation in his book The Higher Learning in America. Veblen warned against letting industry's values engulf the modern university, and pointed out the external manifestations of that dangerous process: opulent campus buildings, changes in the character of the board of trustees, the supplementation of teacher salaries through research foundations, and so on. Veblen did not see this as a deliberate conspiracy, but rather as a deplorable tendency to go too far, and he accused university presidents of ignoring the danger. He took particular exception to the universities' concern for public opinion, which in his eyes cheapened the autonomous scientific spirit, and represented the first fatal step towards the take-over of the universities by the business sector. As an initial measure to remedy this situation, he suggested completely abolishing the board of trustees as an institution.(2) In the second and third decades of the century, however, this was a minority view. The accelerated development of the universities paralleled and promoted the ascendancy of the Progressive movement, and was in turn fueled by it. Before Progressivism, American higher education had no link with the social system and everyday life, such as the colonial colleges had had with the colonial society that financed them. The goal of university studies in the nineteenth century could best be described as self-seeking. The colleges of the time prepared young people to devote themselves to God, and the college boards were composed primarily of clergymen. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, this situation changed. The clergy were gradually replaced by businessmen, and the symbiosis between the business and academic worlds expanded. The close relationship between these two subcultures gave rise to what George M. Marsden has called a "service station mentality,"(3) signally manifested in the development of a pragmatic vocational orientation in the universities, and the introduction into the academic sphere of the social sciences in general and management sciences in particular. This essay examines the special orientation of the discourse that developed in the management faculties, an orientation that was the result of their close relationship with the business sector they were set up to serve. The Harvard group is used as an example here because it expressly took the lead in disseminating the ideal of a service university. My contention is that the unique discourse that developed in the period when the management faculties were establishing themselves had a definitive influence on the development of the human-relations trend in industry, creating very progressive management norms. However, while this trend fostered a commitment to humanistic professional ethics in labor relations and raised management culture to a higher level, it also produced an extremely conservative corporate ideology. Although this ideology arose in the context of the Progressive movement, it represented a reaction against parts of that movement's political legacy. The Business Administration Faculty in the Service of the Nation The strong movement towards the incorporation and bureaucratization of firms had already raised weighty questions back at the beginning of the century--how was the liberal ethos to be preserved in a place where modern business organization was becoming a new kind of property, and the individual's chances of survival depended on his entering some form of association? What shape would liberal democracy take? What would happen to little entrepreneurs when they had to compete with big ones, and what would happen to the ordinary worker? Social Darwinism had begun to lose steam as a rampant laissez faire philosophy threatened to annihilate the coveted equal opportunity of the American dream. …
Représentation graphique et pensée managériales : le cas de la Harvard Business Review de 1922 à 1999
L'objectif de cette these est d'effectuer une analyse de l'histoire de la gestion, de 1922 a 1999, au travers des representations graphiques. Nous avons choisi la Harvard Business Review en raison de sa parution particulierement precoce, de la representativite qu'elle donne des principaux courants de recherche enseignes et de l'interet apporte aux graphiques. Partant d'une interrogation relative aux graphiques en tant que langage, nous elaborons une classification de plusieurs formes graphiques : les diagrammes, les schemas, les cartes et les representations a l'echelle d'objets. Cette analyse nous amene a caracteriser les dessins selon des dimensions fonctionnelle et structurelle. Nous tenons compte, parallelement, des concepts mobilises dans les representations. Cette analyse permet d'observer certaines evolutions historiques de la gestion perceptibles dans la Harvard Business Review, ainsi que deux ruptures intervenues a la fin des annees 1950 et au debut des annees 1980. Notre etude porte egalement sur les textes accompagnant les graphiques au travers de quatre etudes de cas concernant les graphiques de relations au sein de l'organisation, les schemas reflexion-action, les dessins refletant des metaphores et enfin les matrices 2*2 possedant des elements graphiques. Cette analyse, mettant notamment en jeu le concept de « rationalisation » et la notion de « technique manageriale », indique une remise en cause tardive des principes du management scientifique de Taylor et vient renforcer l'idee d'une rupture au debut des annees 1980.
School Principals and Education Law: What do they know, what do they need to know?
Principals now work in complex and challenging environments where uncertainty and change are the hallmarks of their roles and responsibilities. As such, the knowledge and capability demands on principals have expanded, including those related to education law. While these matters attracted some research interest a number of years ago, there has been little recent work in the area of principals and education law. This article reports on an exploratory study into aspects of the legal knowledge held by Tasmanian government school principals, particularly concerning non-sexual physical contact between teachers and students. The research was undertaken using a small-scale, mixed-methods research design, which required principals to respond to various legal scenarios. Three key findings emerged from the study. First, principals used two different levels of working knowledge about education law  one related to legal problems, and the other to legally-related routine activities. Second, on the particular topic of physical contact, some knowledge held by principals was not legally accurate. Third, for major legal issues, participants indicated that they acquired access to information from legal experts. The situation for routine legal matters was less clear, although in-service training and practical experience were identified as potential sources of knowledge. Participants recognised the importance of a sound knowledge of education law, especially for dealing with security and safety issues and preferred to access further information through in-service training. Notably, the findings of the study are broadly consistent with those from earlier Australian and international research, suggesting that much remains to be done in the area of principals’ education law knowledge.