MGMT 110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Jeremy Bentham, Elton Mayo, George Ritzer
CHAP 2: ONE BEST WAY?
1. What is One best way?
- May aageet ideas redued aageet to siple priiples or oe-best-way odels
- Wherever economic activity has spread across the globe, general management theories have spread
with them, often suggesting that there is one best way to manage – what today is often called best
practice
2. Fast forward to Industrial Revolution
a) Industrial Revolution
- The principle of early modern management was the efficient extraction of value from the labor that
was employed
- Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations:
• Capitalism is an economic system founded on the sanctity and dominance of private
property rights organized through markets
• The majority of people sell their labor power in a market for labor to owners of capital
(Capitalists) which is consolidated in an enterprise
b) Challenges associated with mass expansion size
- The aster i harge rather tha ompany that held control
- How could a single master exercise control over so many?
- How was the master to achieve effective governance over a vastly increased scale of operations?
• Internal contracting
• Standards highly variable (tyranny or benevolence)
• Origins of trade unionism
• Downward pressure form finance and upward pressure from trade unions led o
standardization of workplace routines (often based on military models)
3. Weber and Bureaucracy
a) About Bureaucracy
- Bureaucracy is a form of organizational design, where action is as result of rule based procedures
- People do not follow rules because of the personal characteristics or charisma of the officer holder.
They follow rules. ‘atioal legal authority of ureaucracy
- People obey orders as rational-legal precepts because they believe that the person giving the order
is acting in accordance with a code of legal rules and regulations – this is the form of authority
within bureaucracy
b) Pros and cons of bureaucracy
PROS
CONS
• Fairly predictable and offered opportunities for
careers and for individual members to specialize
in what they most enjoyed and to develop these
skills
• Limit arbitrary power and privilege
• Free people from arbitrary rule by powerful
patrimonial leaders (because it is based on
rational legality)
• If everyone was subject to abstract, impersonal
rules, this quality could be something menacing
rather than comforting
• Creates a iro age of odage, a hierarhy of
offices that interlock and intermesh, through whose
intricacies people employed in the organization
might seek to move, with the best hope for your
future being that you would shift from being a small
cog in the machine to one that was slightly more
important
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
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