Evolution of Managment - Research Paper Example

While the subject is broad, it poses various limitations for those studying it. The dynamism of management was historically attributed to its varied functions and wide scope of applications. The same has been going to show until today; wherever we look, it is hard to imagine the permissibility of the various workings of different organizations without its operational framework -- management. Of interest also are the added factors to play in management’s dynamism. The most visible and overbearing presence is the organizational environment’s locomotion, which is invariably referred to as “change”.

This change successfully goaded the existing management principles, theories, applications, or practices to differing and sometimes, conflicting directions. Moreover, it did not cease to break barriers and exploit uncharted waters, but inevitably reaped the organizational response through the management’s continuum of developments. Indeed, the future of the study of management is teeming with possibilities. However, it is essential in every study to achieve a retrospective understanding of the field, especially one as broad as management.

Moreover, to effectively reflect this retrospective understanding, one may attempt to peek on the field’s personal application. . In fact, it is noteworthy how these early management proponents tend to tie their management theory or principle to their specialization. The pattern is not hard to notice – the law adept (i.e., Max Weber) pushed his bureaucratic management; engineers and mathematicians preferred the scientific and quantitative schools while psychologists gave preference to the behavioral school.

Though these thinkers’ background gave them the authority to speak and explain management according to their fields, they did not acknowledge the inherent limits of their fields and their consequent theories. Barnett (n.d.) stated the prevalent difference in assumptions governing the working people and their organizations. Though it may be relatively easy to pinpoint how these independent notions started, it is difficult to understand why the proponents saw no need to synthesize and integrate their findings to one, uniform school of thought.

In fact, it is observable how a management theory tries to either erase the validity of the preceding theory or give it an entirely different perspective. Though the ‘new’ theory seeks to improve its preceding one, it is stripped of the valid assumptions made by the preceding theory. In other words, the new theory entirely discredits the preceding one; it fails to make sense of the whole idea of improving the previous theory. The key to this pattern is the base assumptions of each school of management.

These assumptions are the foundations of each theory or principle. Thus, pointing out the need for improvement in a theory’s foundation on which the whole theory is based is equivalent to a head-on disagreement. In perusing the evolution of management, one may conclude that the schools of thought