The Rise of Entrepreneurial Management Theory in the United States

Abstract

This article challenges the historiographical commonplace that twentieth-century American management discourse was dominated by bureaucratic aspirations to objective expertise and rational planning. Proposing the category of “entrepreneurial management” to describe the countervailing tendency, it demonstrates the persistence of intellectual interest in managers who used the personal qualities of leadership to enlist enthusiasm among subordinates for their firm's initiatives. By the mid-twentieth century, these managerial leaders were commonly described as “entrepreneurs.” Through a reading of early twentieth-century writing on “human factor” management and Depression-era “human relations” theory, the article shows that intellectual interest in entrepreneurial leadership thrived during a period typically characterized as the height of scientific management and corporate bureaucracy. Analyzing Peter F. Drucker's postwar management writing in detail, the article concludes by arguing that the “entrepreneurialism” of the late twentieth century did not represent a break with the established managerial project, only the strengthened authority of one existing tendency within a variegated intellectual field.

Changing the guard: Organizational science and social psychology in the US army

“…A core feature of this was the embrace of “change.” In many articles and speeches, Starry and others outline how the Army must continuously accept change and seize opportunities provided by the American state, civil society, technological innovation, or geopolitics. This is much like Drucker's line of argument: “[w]e need to encourage habits of flexibility of continuous learning, and of acceptance of change as normal and as opportunity” (Baker, 2021, p. 217). While working at Ford Aerospace in 1987, Starry's thought remained clear about how organizations such as the military or large industries should cope with change:

One of the most elemental complications in running things is change.

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“…There had been a thread throughout American management theory, even since the 1920s, that entrepreneurial values of the individual initiative had a huge, if sometimes intangible, role in the management of organizations. Frank H. Knight, an economics professor, was critical of Fredrick Taylor's “scientific management” and espoused the manager as an entrepreneur who could inspire and direct subordinates (Baker, 2021). Management could obsess about input/output and technical efficiency, eventually creating embittered employees.…”

“…Frank H. Knight, an economics professor, was critical of Fredrick Taylor's "scientific management" and espoused the manager as an entrepreneur who could inspire and direct subordinates (Baker, 2021). Management could obsess about input/output and technical efficiency, eventually creating embittered employees.…”

“…However, this connection between the Army, the behavioral and organizational sciences, and postindustrial political economy has been relatively underexplored in the literature. There has been a recent trend of research about management theory in the broader business and economic history of the 1970s–1980s (Baker, 2021; Maclean et al, 2017; Murphy, 2020). Parallel to this, there was a groove of historical explorations about the relationships between the Cold War and the human sciences (Bell & Isaac, 2012; Dayé, 2020; Mirowski, 2012; Solovey & Cravens, 2012).…”

Motivationspsychologen als politische Aktivisten: Zur Politik der Selbststeuerung in den USA der langen 1960er Jahre

“…Und im Unterschied zu den Aktivierungsprogrammen des Taylorismus war das Ziel nicht Effizienzsteigerung durch Rationalisierung von Produktionsabläufen, sondern die Einübung von Techniken zur Selbstmobilisierung jenseits industrieller Strukturen (vgl. Baker 2021 ).…”