Business as service? Human Relations and the British interwar management movement

Abstract

To what extent should business have an implication of service when its fundamental purpose is profit-seeking? We explore this issue through a contextually informed reappraisal of British interwar management thinking (1918–1939), drawing on rich archival material concerning the Rowntree business lectures and management research groups. Whereas existing literature is framed around scientific management versus human relations schools, we find a third pronounced, related theme: business as service. Our main contribution is to identify the origins in Britain of the discourse of corporate social responsibility in the guise of business as service. We show that this emerged earlier than commonly assumed and was imbued with an instrumental intent from its inception as a form of management control. This was a discourse emanating not from management theorists but from management practitioners, striving to put the corporate system on a sustainable footing while safeguarding the power, authority, and legitimacy of incumbent managerial elites.

Editorial: Crafting review and essay articles for Human Relations

“…A brave and seldom taken choice is to conclude that a topic has been largely exhausted and that scholars are best advised to move on to other territory. At their best, historical reviews make important connections between distinct authors and specific contributions that were previously un-noticed or unexploited and that spur new pathways forward for research (see, for example, Maclean et al’s (2022) historical analysis of the British origins of CSR discourses). The major difficulty faced by authors of historical reviews is to go beyond merely telling a story of how a topic has been developed and to make a compelling theoretical contribution.…”

Employing historical methods and perspectives in corporate governance

“…In recent papers on British management ideas between the wars, Maclean et al (2020) uncover far greater openness to new management ideas amongst British managers with significant implications for our understandings of the historical evolution of corporate governance. They explored the influence of the lecture series and management research groups initiated by Quaker industrialist Seebohm Rowntree in developing a notion of 'business as service' as the discernible roots of corporate social responsibility, distinct from the scientific management and human relations schools within British management from which power, authority and legitimacy stemmed (Maclean et al, 2022). Perchard and Gildart (2022) explore such notions of a service culture amongst managers and how this affected the promotion of management ideas and governance within nationalised corporations and how diverging ideological traditions (informed both by the changing politics of industry and that of society) led to clashes between managers and with government.…”

“…As work by Harvey and Maclean (2008), Maclean et al (2005Maclean et al ( , 2016Maclean et al ( , 2020Maclean et al ( , 2022, Perchard and MacKenzie (2021) and Price et al (2018) demonstrates, this more pluralistic approach might be applied to further explorations of corporate governance advancing further questions of the exercise of capital, ideology, power, trust and social networks. Price et al (2018), for example, combine content analysis and critical historical discourse to explore changes in the UK corporate governance code.…”

Crisis Leadership: The Art of Navigating Organizational Change During the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…During the transformation process, leaders become performance referents for employees. In the pandemic situation, leaders also play a role in protecting employees that face a lot of uncertainty (Maclean et al, 2022). On the other side, employees see the leaders as inspiring to perform the transformation during the pandemic.…”