Clipping the wings of theorists: the unacknowledged contribution to management thought from the shopfloor

Abstract

Mainstream as well as critical management history literature typically establishes theorists as the most consequential protagonists in the process that created the default blueprint for employee superintendence. Accordingly, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the new capitalists and their agents (the emerging management class), were theoretically ill-equipped to oversee large scale productive transformation. Hence, they turned to experts, mostly scholars who straddled the worlds of academia and the nascent enterprise of industrial consulting. In this version of events, employees are represented in strawman terms, as either passive or predictable; in either case, as hostile but unsophisticated actors. This article presents and defends an alternative portrayal. It argues that management thought was not born of purely theoretical perspectives but, rather, is the product of a contest between theory and what employees, acting as intellectual equals, revealed to employers and pundits when theories were being applied.

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