Abstract
Inspired by Koselleck’s approach to conceptual history, this essay presents a semantic analysis of management. Our inquiry into what management is, focuses on lingual and cognitive wholes of meaning and signification. The essay undertakes a periodization of management history, in an attempt to formulate expectations for a dystopian future management by artificial intelligence. Five periods are distinguished. Each period entails a specific characterisation for three questions: what is the activity of managing, what or who is managed, and who manages? Starting from managing-by-hand, successive differentiation of meaning occurs with regard to different elements of the management relationship (object, activity, agent), followed by a rescaling of the whole relationship into an attitude that can be applied anywhere by anyone. The implication is a dissociation between manager and decision-maker. The essay also speculates how plausible this evolution makes non-human managers (i.e. artificial intelligence). Throughout these five periods, hierarchy is an immanent feature of management. For each period, the essay discusses differentiated meaning, corresponding social reality and characterizes its hierarchy and justification.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) constitutes our main source of analysis. It is online source and can be reached at oed.com. The meanings of specific word and the changes in the meanings can be followed historically over the examples given according to the first usage in history of English.
Etymonline.com is online etymology dictionary, which constitutes its database by using more than 50 different printed dictionaries. (Database sources can be found at https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/sources).
References
Blok, V. 2019. Xenophon’s philosophy of management. In handbook of philosophy of management, ed. C. Neesham and S. Segal, Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48352-8_27-1.
Blok, V. 2020. What is (business) management? Laying the ground for a philosophy of management. Philosophy of Management 19(2): 173–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-019-00126-9.
Boissonnade, P. 2013. Life and work in Medieval Europe. New York: Routledge.
Bray, A. 2001. Why is it that management seems to have no history? Philosophy of Management 1(1): 21–25. https://doi.org/10.5840/pom20011124.
Buchanan, B. G. 2005. A (very) brief history of artificial intelligence. AI Magazine 26(4): 53–53.
Davis, K. 1965. The urbanization of the human population. Scientific American 213(3): 40–53. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0965-40.
Davis, J. H. 2004. An Annual Index of U. S. Industrial Production, 1790–1915. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 119(4): 1177–1215. https://doi.org/10.1162/0033553042476143.
De Cremer, D. 2020. Leadership by algorithm. Hampshire: Harriman House.
Farr, J. R. 2003. World eras volume 9: Industrial Revolution in Europe, 1750–1914. Farmington Hills: Thompson & Gale.
Fields, G. 1999. Urbanization and the transition from agrarian to industrial society. Berkeley Planning Journal 13(1)https://doi.org/10.5070/BP313113032.
Finlay, R. 1981. Population and Metropolis: the demography of London 1580–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Floridi, L. 2008. Artificial intelligence’s new frontier: Artificial companions and the fourth revolution. Metaphilosophy 39(4–5): 651–655. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.2008.00573.x.
Florio, J. 1611. Queen Anna’s New World of words. London: Melch Bredwood.
Friberg, A. 2021. Venturing beyond Koselleck’s Erwartungshorizont: on the category of the utopian. Rethinking History 25(3): 263–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2021.1936819.
George, C. S. 1972. The history of management thought. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Haenlein, M., and A. Kaplan. 2019. A brief history of artificial intelligence: on the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence. California Management Review 61(4): 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/0008125619864925.
Hale, J. R. 1954. England and the Italian Renaissance. London: Faber and Faber.
Haynes., M. S. 1991. The Italian Renaissance and its influence on western civilization. New York: University Press of America.
Hearn, M. 2022. The fin de siècle and the multiple temporalities of historical periodization. Rethinking History 26(1): 32–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2031802.
Heaton, H. 1985. Avrupa İktisadi Tarihi. [The history of European Economy]. İstanbul: Teori.
Hellerma, J. 2020a. Koselleck on Modernity, Historik, and Layer of Time. History and Theory 59(2): 188–209. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12154.
Hellerma, J. 2020b. Negotiating presentism: toward a renewed understanding of historical change. Rethinking History 24(3–4): 442–464. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2020.1848132.
Henschke, A. 2017. Ethics in an age of surveillance. NY: Cambridge University Press.
Hoad, T. F. 1996. The Concise Dictionary of English etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huang, M. H., R. Rust, and V. Maksimovic. 2019. The feeling economy: managing in the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI). California Management Review 61(4): 43–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/0008125619863436.
Koselleck, R. 2002. The practice of conceptual history: timing, history, spacing concepts. Standford: Standford University Press.
Koselleck, R. 2004. Futures past: on semantics of historical time. New York: Colombia University Press.
Maclntyre, A. 1984. After Virtue: a study in Moral Theory. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
Mansel, P. 2010. Levant: splendour and catastrophe on the Mediterranean. London: Yale University Press.
Mintzberg, H. 1973. The nature of managerial work. New York: HarperCollins.
Muldoon, J. M., and D. B. Marin. 2012. John Florio and the introduction of management into the English vocabulary. Journal of Management History 18(2): 129–136. https://doi.org/10.1108/17511341211206816.
Myers, B. A. 1998. A brief history of human-computer interaction technology. Interactions 5(2): 44–54. https://doi.org/10.1145/274430.274436.
Paul, J., and K. Meshkat. 2013. Johnson’s relations: visions of global order, 1601–1630. Journal of Intellectual History and Political Thought 2(1): 108–140.
Rodkey, F. S. 1933. The attempts of Briggs and Company to Guide British Policy in the Levant in the interest of Mehemet Ali Pasha, 1821-41. The Journal of Modern History 5(3): 324–351. https://doi.org/10.1086/236032.
Schwarz, L. D. 1992. London in the age of Industrialisation: entrepreneurs, labour force and living conditions, 1700–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Seele, P., and L. Zapf. 2017. Die Rückseite Der Cloud. Eine Theorie Des Privaten Ohne Geheimnis. A Theory of the Private Without Secrecy] Dordrecht: Springer: [Behind the Cloud.
Tambe, P., P. Cappelli, and V. Yakubovich. 2019. Artificial intelligence in human resources management: challenges and a path forward. California Management Review 61(4): 15–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0008125619867910.
Teich, M., and R. Porter. 1996. Industrial Revolution in National Context: Europe and the USA. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Temple, W. 1940. The Hope of a New World. New York: MacMillan.
Vlami, D. 2009. Entrepreneurship and Relational Capital in a Levantine Context: Bartolomew Edward Abbott, the ‘Father of the Levant Company’ in Thessaloniki (Eighteenth-Nineteenth centuries). The Historical Review/La Revue Historique 6: 129–164. https://doi.org/10.12681/hr.242.
Wedgwood, H. 1872. A Dictionary of English etymology. London: Trübner & Co.
Wren, D. A., and A. Bedeian. 2009. The Evolution of Management Thought. 6th Edition. New Jersey: John Wiley.
Young, A. T. 2021. The political economy of feudalism in medieval Europe. Constitutional Political Economy 32(1): 127–143. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-020-09324-4.
Yu, Z., Z. Liang, and P. Wu. 2021. How data shape actor relations in artificial intelligence innovation systems: an empirical observation from China. Industrial and Corporate Change 30(1): 251–267. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/dtaa063.
Zaleznik, A. 1977. Managers and leaders: are they different. Harvard Business Review 55(3): 67–78.
Zammito, J. 2004. Koselleck’s philosophy of historical time(s) and the practice of history. History and Theory 43: 124–135. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2004.00269.x.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) for its financial support to this research under the scholarship of post-doctoral research program BIDEB 2019.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Erkal, H., Vandekerckhove, W. Management – from Farms to Arms and Further on. Philosophy of Management 23, 1–16 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-023-00245-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-023-00245-4