From Chaos to Systems: The Engineering Foundations of Organization Theory, 1879-1932.

Direct all correspondence to Yehouda Shenhav, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel 69978. The author thanks Steve Barley, Nitza Berkovitz, Daniel Breslau, Yinon Cohen, Frank Dobbin, Michal Frenkel, Mauro Guillen, Yitchak Haberfeld, David Hounshell, Sanford Jacoby, Gideon Kunda, Jim March, John Meyer, Anne Miner, Richard Scott, Ronen Shamir, Haya Steir, David Strang, Mark Suchman, Ilan Talmud, Ely Weitz, and three anonymous reviewers for comments or suggestions. The assistance and services received at the Wisconsin Historical Library; at the Wendt Engineering Library, the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and at the Engineering Societies Information Center Linda Hall Library East, New York City, are appreciated. Yasmin Alkalay, Ella Glasman, Alexandra Kalev, and Aviva Zeltzer provided valuable technical assistance. This research was supported by a grant from the Israel Foundations Trustees, Ford Foundation, 1994, and by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation administered by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. A version of this paper was presented at the ASA Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, August 1994. This paper traces the genesis of the systems paradigm in the study of organizations in the United States back to nineteenth-century engineering practices. The empirical analyses for the period 1879-1932 are based on primary data collected from three journals in which the study of organizations was first codified and crystallized: the Engineering Magazine, the American Machinist, and the ASME Transactions. The evolution of the systems paradigm was found to be a product of at least three forces that form one interacting gestalt: (1) the efforts of mechanical engineers who sought industrial legitimation and whose professional paradigm spilled over into the organizational field; (2) the Progressive period (1900-1917) and its rhetoric on professionalism, equality, order, and progress; and (3) labor unrest, which was perceived as a threat to stable economic and social order. The paper provides a cultural and political reading, rather than a functional and economic one, to the emergence of managerial thought and the evolution of organization theory.'

[1]  J. Gusfield,et al.  The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916. , 1965 .

[2]  Cecil J. Schneer,et al.  The Search for Order , 1960 .

[3]  Philip M. Marcus,et al.  The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business , 1979 .

[4]  Frank Dobbin,et al.  Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age , 1994 .

[5]  Judith A. Merkle.  Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement , 1980 .

[6]  M. Polen,et al.  Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present , 1979 .

[7]  Stephen J. Jaros,et al.  Models of Management: Work, Authority, and Organization in a Comparative Perspective , 1994 .

[8]  C. E. Wunderlin.  Visions of a New Industrial Order: Social Science and Labor Theory in America's Progressive Era , 1994 .

[9]  S. Barley,et al.  Design and devotion: Surges of rational and normative ideologies of control in managerial discourse. , 1992 .

[10]  Richard Hofstadter.  The Age of Reform , 1955 .

[11]  Daniel Nelson,et al.  Scientific Management, Systematic Management, and Labor, 1880–1915 , 1974, Business History Review.

[12]  J. Griffin.  Strikes: A Study in Quantitative Economics , 1939 .

[13]  W. Powell,et al.  The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields , 1983 .

[14]  J. Brecher.  The Origins of Job Structures in the Steel Industry , 1974 .

[15]  J. Alexander,et al.  Images of Organization , 1988 .

[16]  D. Calhoun.  The American civil engineer : origins and conflict. , 1960 .

[17]  Loren Baritz,et al.  The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry. , 1961 .

[18]  R. Lilienfeld,et al.  The Rise of Systems Theory , 1985 .

[19]  Tom R. Burns,et al.  The Management of Innovation. , 1963 .

[20]  Samuel P. Hays,et al.  Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 , 1960 .

[21]  Edwin T. Layton,et al.  The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession by Edwin T. Layton, Jr (review) , 2023 .

[22]  L. H. Jenks.  Early Phases of the Management Movement , 1960 .

[23]  Frederick Winslow Taylor,et al.  科学管理原理=The principles of scientific management , 2014 .

[24]  P. Miller,et al.  Hierarchies and American Ideals, 1900–1940 , 1989 .

[25]  M. Larson.  The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis , 1977 .

[26]  M. Zeitlin,et al.  "WHO GETS THE BIRD?" OR, HOW THE COMMUNISTS WON POWER AND TRUST IN AMERICA'S UNIONS: THE RELATIVE AUTONOMY OF INTRACLASS POLITICAL STRUGGLES* , 1989 .

[27]  Neil Fligstein,et al.  FROM THE TRANSFORMATION OF CORPORATE CONTROL , 2021, The New Economic Sociology.

[28]  E. W. Hawley.  Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an “Associative State,” 1921–1928 , 1974 .

[29]  JoAnne Yates,et al.  Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management , 1990 .

[30]  D. Stark.  Class struggle and the transformation of the labor process , 1980 .

[31]  A. Abbott.  The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor , 1988 .