Abstract
As an introductory statement to the volume, this chapter argues for the importance of an interactionist approach to the study of management, offices and management-related activities. Encompassing themes such as achieving understanding, providing direction and coordinating activities with others across an endless array of humanly engaged and contested theaters, management-related concerns are central to the human condition itself. We argue that the concept of management holds generic applicability across multiple settings. Any person or group who attempts to influence or otherwise shape the behaviors or experiences of another person or group may be seen to engage in management-related activities. Likewise, any person or group who is the target of some influence endeavors on the part of others may be seen as being managed. It is in this context that we frame the larger project of this workâdeveloping a pragmatist research agenda for the study of management as everyday activity .
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Notes
- 1.
It is about c700BCE that we start to find more complete preserved records of early or classical Greek literature and scholarship. Among the early Greek authors who discuss management-related issues in more notable fashions are the poets or fictional authors Homer (c700BCE), Hesiod (c700BCE), Aeschylus (c525-456BCE), Sophocles (c495-405BCE), Euripides (c480-408BCE), and Aristophanes (c450-385BCE); the ethno-historians Herodotus (c484-425BCE), Thucydides (c460-400BCE), and Xenophon (c430-340BCE); and the rhetoricians Gorgias (485-380BCE), Isocrates (c435-388BCE), and Demosthenes (c384-322BCE). Plato (c420-348BCE) and Aristotle (c384-322BCE) not only represent consequential counterpoints to one another in many respects, but their contributions to the literature on organizational life tower above all others.
Although the post-Alexandrian Greeks (c300BCE) lost much of the analytical emphasis of the classical scholars cited here, and it was on this later base that the Romans built their versions of scholarship, one still finds some important considerations of management-related concerns in the writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero (c106-43BCE), Sextus Julius Frontinus (c35-103), Quintilian (c35-95), and Cornelius Tacitus (c55-120). While Cicero does not achieve the breadth or the depth of the scholarship associated with Plato or Aristotle, Cicero is not only a scholarly Roman rhetorician, but is also an outstanding philosopher. Cicero engages an exceedingly wide range of matters pertaining to influence work and resistance in an assortment of political and legal arenas. Among the pre-Renaissance Christian scholars who maintain aspects of Roman and Greek scholarship, those who have most explicitly and consequentially contributed to analyses of management-related themes through their writings are St. Paul (c3-64), St. Augustine (c354-430), Alcuin (c732-804) and Thomas Aquinas (c1225-1274).
- 2.
For example, a 2016 search of Google Books for the key phrase âproject managementâ generates more than one million results and WorldCat, a research search engine of university library holdings, identifies more than 111,000 unique books in the area.
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Grills, S., Prus, R. (2019). Management in the Making: The Pervasive and Enduring Challenge. In: Management Motifs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93429-7_1
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