670

Conceptual No(e>
Is There Anything "New" in Management?
A "Rip Van Winkle" Perspective
H. R. SMITH and ARCHIE B. CARROLL
University of Georgia
Fulmer and Wren recently began asking the
question "Is There Anything 'New' in Manage-
ment?" Their approach was to look at the "state
of the art" in 1974 as compared with 1938 by
placing side by side two books on the subject
"t he new management" published in those
years (1,3).
What Is "New?"
In their study, these authors were clearly
more impressed by "sameness" than by "new-
ness." They see in our field "shifts but no radical
innovations". "We have learned more," they say,
but our "basic problems" are much the same.
Our "tools and concepts" have been "sharp-
ened," but we still "stand on the shoulders of the
pioneers" (2).
The authors were struck, not so much by the
conclusion reached by Fulmer and Wren, as by
the fact that their work contained no definition
of "new". Accordingly, the first problem be-
came finding a more precise point of departure.
It was especially important to ask to whom, and
for what purpose(s), does "newness" matter.
What is "real l y" new is not at all the same thing
for an historian and for the person who must
H. R. Smith (Ph.D. Louisiana State University), Professor of
Management, and Archie B. Carroll (D.B.A. Florida State
University), Associate Professor of Management, are at the
University of Georgia.
Received 6/23/77; Revised 9/8/77; Accepted 10/25/77;
Revised 12/15/77.
every day make pragmatic use of the "state of
the art".
Opting for an "operati onal " definition, we
looked closely at the kind of "chips down" deci-
sions about what is "new" required by the pat-
enting process. In three ways, those dynamics
spoke to the problem of "newness" in manage-
ment.
First, to be patentable what is new must be
fully described fairly completely thought
through from the standpoint of "workability".
Fulmer and Wren suggest that Mary Parker Fol-
lett's 1920s discussion of "the law of the situa-
t i on" makes management-by-objectives (MBO)
a third of a century later not really new. In the
perspective of the patent analogy, there would
be here no bar to securing a patent.
Second, a pragmatic definition must point
primarily toward the here and now. Thus if a pat-
ent is not applied for within one year after pub-
lication, it is not patentable and a 40 year per-
spective thereby becomes quite beside the point.
Ovex a long period of time, many new things
wi l l have come, made their contribution, and
been replaced.
Third, to be patentable means to be useful
as well as new. But with patents, the "newness"
decision must be made before it can be known
whether or not there is also usefulness, another
commentary on a 40 year time perspective. Al-
though much that passes for new turns out not
to be particularly useful and will come and go,
we are compelled to explore for usefulness
whatever seems now to be usefully new until
Academy of Management Review - July 1978
the arrival of the next possibilities seems to make
exploring them more appropriate.
Enter Rip Van Winkle
The assumption of a "Rip Van Wi nkl e"
awakening after 40 years begs most of the "new-
ness" issue by judging what managers once
did with 20-20 hindsight. Evidently, there must
be room in our thinking for old problems in new
guises, old solutions in updated approaches, and
"sharpened" "tools and concepts."
Perhaps we can intermingle patent prag-
matics with a Rip Van Winkle perspective. Sup-
pose, for example, a Rip Van Winkle who, be-
fore he or she began a 40-year sleep, was a very
promising young manager. If such a person sud-
denly appeared, after being "out of i t " for 40
years, what attitudes, understandings, and skills
would he or she now need to develop to be-
come again a competently functioning mana-
ger?
The specifics here might be classified into
context and content matters. The former are
those characteristics of our larger environment
that have changed especially dramatically in re-
cent decades. Content refers to the dimension
of the manager's job including tools, ideas,
problems, and techniques. In this realm, too, a
Rip Van Winkle returnee would figuratively al-
most have to learn to walk all over again.
Context Concems
We can identify a number of context un-
derstandings that our Rip Van Winkle manager
must now gain anew. Let us begin with the new
role of government, recognizing that its size
alone is not only overwhelming, but the many
areas in which our manager now finds govern-
ment are quite staggering. When our manager
fell asleep 40 years ago, he or she knew virtually
nothing about, as problems, the environment,
energy, consumerism, occupational safety and
health, deceptive advertising, discrimination in
employment, product liability and the like, es-
pecially problems requiring governmental inter-
vention for solution. Though one may well argue
that those problems have been "around" for
quite a long time, they were not perceived ear-
lier to be the problems they are today, nor was
there the present managerial preoccupation
with these concerns.
Other "new" social-environmental trends
that we must teach our awakened manager in-
clude the changed objectives of business in gen-
eral and of the employer in particular. Stated
simply, we would have to give the person a com-
prehensive course in business and society with
particular attention to concepts such as "social
responsbility," "social costs," "social contract,"
"pluralistic social systems," "ecology" even,
in fact, teaching him or her what a Ralph Nader
is!
To properly train our manager in what is
"new" in management's social environment to-
day, we will probably hold special sessions to ac-
quaint the individual with the changed role of
women (including the fact that the company
now has female and black board of director
members), business ethics (once more some
new terms to learn "Watergate," "Equity
Funding," "Texas Gulf Sulphur"), new concepts
of employees and work ("Flexitime," "4-Day
Work Week," "j ob enrichment," the "rebellious
rank and fi l e," "white collar unions," "ombuds-
person," "privacy rights," "organization man,"),
and ideas emanating from ownership's "new"^
claims on business ("shareholder proposals,"
"corporate gadflys," "Campaign GM, " "Project
on Corporate Responsibility," "public direc-
tors," and "insider dealings"). Our manager will
also be startled to find that business is no longer
held in the esteem of forty years ago and to find
the consequences of this for his or her new man-
agerial role.
Regarding the technological "newness" our
manager will now face, we note that the experts
have estimated that close to 90 percent of all the
scientists who ever lived are still alive today! The
computer is perhaps more symbolic of our tech-
nological gains than anything else. Though Ful-
Conceptual Notes
mer and Wren say "Computers a product of
the early 1800s and Charles Babbage, although
recent refinements and extensions are appar-
ent " (2, p. 74), we feel this grossly understates
the "newness" of what has happened since Bab-
bage's Difference Engine and Analytical Engine.
Differences are so staggering as almost to defy
comparison. Certainly by our operational defini-
ti on, the computer of today would be termed
very "new". In any event, our manager of the
1930s had no idea what computers might mean
to professional life. The effects of technology,
the systems complexity, the upgraded job skills,
the emergence of scientific and professional
workers, and the emphasis on R & D, are all new
dimensions of the technology milieu.
We will elaborate hardly at all on what is
" new" in the political and economic environ-
ments. Suffice it to say that we would be anxious
to see our manager's face when we indicate that
a peanut farmer from a small town in South
Georgia is now President of the United States!
Though that in itself does not tell one what is
" new" in the political sphere for management,
its richness in symbolism is undeniable. Our
awakened manager might be quite taken aback
by what has occurred in the economic environ-
ment. Of particular interest might be that we
now have high unemployment side by side with
inflation, and that we now have tremendous
productivity concerns that he or she would not
quite understand.
Though it is not possible to summarize all of
what has happened " new" in the contextual en-
vironment since 40 years ago, we would want to
be sure our Rip Van Winkle manager was i n-
formed about such key and fundamental oc-
currences as the growth and product prolifera-
tion of large corporations, the rise of multina-
tionals, the shortening of product life cycles
while R & D costs escalate and the R & D time
dimension grows, the intensification of compe-
tition at the world level, new capital financing
problems, and rising expectations on the part of
populations all around the globe.
In summary, the rules of the game have sig-
nificantly changed and are continuing to change )
for modern organizations. Since the contempo- f '
rary environment poses both threats and op-
portunities for management, the leaders of our '
organizations are having to adopt more enlight-
ened philosophies toward it to maximize their
long range gains in a turbulent milieu. The en- '
lightened posture is one which embraces the ,
concept of corporate social responsiveness fully,
suggesting further that management by way of *
social responsibility be the modern business ori-
entation. Taken together, the various facets of
the environment the context in which busi-
ness resides pose a challenge of heretofore ^
unimagined magnitude for our Rip Van Winkle !
manager. f
Content Concems f
Our awaking Rip Van Winkle will find a very p
different world from the standpoint of the con-
tent of organizations' internal affairs. In that
realm, then, what must a manager understand ;
in the 1970s to be effective in his or her work L
that a counterpart would not have understood in f
the 1930s? Let us note first that there has '
emerged since World War II a fundamentally al- t
tered approach to the way managers must han- f
die human resources. So fundamental has this
change been, so challengingly different is an or- ^
ganization's approach to employees today com-
pared with 40 years ago, that our Rip Van Winkle
will almost certainly have to achieve a profound |^
metamorphosis in attitudes. Only insofar as he
or she succeeds in adjusting one's mental out-
look can the employer feel reasonably assured .
that it will be worthwhile also to teach him or
her new techniques for interacting with em-
ployees. ^
Remember that when our 40-year sleeper ;
lay down to "nap, " the Hawthorne studies had j
just been completed and neither scholars nor
practitioners had begun at all definitively to as- ;
sess what they might mean. But as of the 1930s,
though it is clear in the perspective of history that
Scientific Management was not really a "Gos-
Academy of Management Review - July 1978
pel," managers were still overwhelmingly very
much more attitudinally in tune with the "com-
mand" approach of a Frederick W. Taylor than
with the "human relations" thinking of an Elton
Mayo.
Remember, too, that with the intervention
of "the Great Depression" and World War II, it
was not until the 1950s that managers began
really to take hold of the idea that workers'
wills/needs/preferences were henceforth to
be a major dimension of the management proc-
ess. Since then, furthermore, it would be diffi-
cult to exaggerate how great a preoccupation
this has become. To that preoccupation our
awakened Rip Van Winkle would have to accom-
modate his or her thinking and attitudes before
he or she could be of any use in implementing
modern approaches to human resources man-
agement.
Space permits little more than a listing of
the kinds of understandings which should go in-
to "retreading" our awakened sleeper. But quite
a number of concepts are in the "highly likely"
category and all of these are firmly within our
operational definition of "newness".
Thus, the manager should probably be ex-
posed to Theories X and Y, if only because the
person will so often see and hear this terminol-
ogy. Similarly, an exposition of Maslow's hier-
archy of needs woul d also help him or her un-
derstand the prevailing rationale for much that
is being done on the human behavior front. A lit-
tle knowledge of Systems 1-2-3-4 would help
conceptualization in profile terms how different
styles of managing people look vis a vis one an-
other as woul d knowing something about the
managerial grid. One of the most pragmatically
valuable things a modern Rip Van Winkle mana-
ger might be asked to do would be to familiarize
oneself with Argyris' classic Personality and Or-
ganization. From there he or she could be
pointed to the so-called and tremendously sig-
nificant "paradox of control , " which would
greatly assist thinking about interpersonal dy-
namics. With these understandings, the mana-
ger could pursue questions relating to conflict
resolution, and perhaps especially to the prob-
lems and processes involved in resistance to
change.
Our manager will also have to struggle with
the complex interrelationships that somehow re-
late job satisfaction with productivity, the no-
tion of job enrichment, participative manage-
ment, the perils and intricacies of communica-
tion, personnel management, leadership, and
organization development. Attention will also
have to be directed to "contingency theory", as
well as to MBO. Both of these latter concepts
would meet our definition of "new". In the cat-
egory of quantitative tools and methods, " new"
approaches would encompass Program Evalua-
tion and Review Technique (PERT), mathemati-
cal programming, queueing theory, inventory
models, sophisticated management information
systems, and simulation especially the devel-
oping concepts of simulating managerial
thought via the computer.
From the standpoint of content as well as
context matters, management during our "Rip
Van Winkle's" 40-year sleep became considera-
bly more complex. Not only have the number
and difficulty of the manager's problems greatly
increased, but these have been accentuating sig-
nificantly more rapidly than simplifying solu-
tions have been emerging. The modern mana-
ger's deeper-lying frustrations are more dramat-
ically highlighted by noting: as problems have
been mounting, and as experimenting and re-
search toward solutions have greatly prolifer-
ated, today's managers may be less confident
about what they do and why than they were 40
years ago. Quite possibly, this would be the most
crucial new learning an awakened "Rip Van
Wi nkl e" would have to incorporate into a man-
agerial philosophy.
Conclusion
Clearly what is " new" in management, in
the perspective of a "what-wil l now-have-to-be-
learned?" operational definition of "newness,"
woul d be a formidable challenge for a manager
Conceptual Notes
whose education was interrupted years before.
This challenge would necessarily begin with a
sizable element of "brainwashing," getting rid
of deeply ingrained but now anachronistic ways
of thinking.
Given the comprehensiveness and difficulty
of this re-education operation, a first more spe-
cific conclusion takes off from a saying in our
language "you can't get there from here". In
principle, our hypothetical "Rip Van Wi nkl e"
could surely be "retreaded". But who among us,
given this choice, would not prefer to take on
instead a brand-new MBA who had spent the
last 20 years daily and deeply immersed in the
world in which he will now have to function?
A second, more concrete conclusion looks
at implications more broadly. Fulmer and Wren
refer to Ecclesiastes 1:9 where it is observed that
there is nothing new under the sun. Perhaps, at
the level of fundamentals, civilization is and
always has been confronting the same prob-
lems, forever hoping that "this ti me" there is at
hand a real key to their solution. Here, of
course, is Sisyphus, rolling his stone again and
again up the hill, ali of the time knowing that it
will immediately tumble down again. But if that
is the relevant image here, we nevertheless have
no choice but to solve age-old problems as best
we can with the attitudes, understandings, and
skills now at our disposal undismayed by the
prospect of having again and again to endeavor
to solve the same problems by putting to work
to the best of our ability what we have learned
in the meantime.
REFERENCES
Fulmer, Robert M., The New Management (New York:
The Macmillan Company, 1974).
Fulmer, Robert M., and Daniel A. Wren. "Is There Any-
thing 'New' in Management?" journal of Management,
Vol.2, No. 2 (1977), 71-75.
3. Hildage, H. T., T. G. Marple, and F. L. Meyenberg. The
New Management (London: McDonald and Evans, 1938)
Dreams of Humanization and the Realities of Power
WALTER R. NORD
Washington University
For several decades American organizational
psychologists have dreamed of and sought to
create humanized organizations. While it is not
Walter R. Nord (Ph.D. Washington University) is r'rofessor
of Organizational Psychology at the Graduate School of Busi-
ness Administration at Washington University, St. Louis, Mis-
souri.
Received 7/17/77; Accepted 9/28/77; Revised 11/16/77.
clear exactly what a humanized organization is,
various writers seem to agree that in humanized
organizations members are: (a) treated as ends
rather than as means; (b) engaged in meaning-
f ul , challenging work; (c) encouraged to develop
1 This manuscript is an extension of a paper presented at the
1976 meetings of the American Psychological Association in
Washington, DC.