International Studies of Management & Organization

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Some Effects of Fayolism

Karin Holmblad Brunsson

To cite this article: Karin Holmblad Brunsson (2008) Some Effects of Fayolism, International
Studies of Management & Organization, 38:1, 30-47, DOI: 10.2753/IMO0020-8825380102

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30 KARIN HOLMBLAD BRUNSSON (SWEDEN)

Int. Studies of Mgt. & Org., vol. 38, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 30–47.
© 2008 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 0020–8825 / 2008 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/IMO0020-8825380102

KARIN HOLMBLAD BRUNSSON

Some Effects of Fayolism

Abstract: In the early twentieth century, the French industrialist and writer Henri
Fayol argued that management consists of a set of activities that are common to
all organizations. This has proved a durable idea. All over the world, universities
and business schools, management consultants, and management gurus teach rec-
ommendations for good management. Disregarding the complexity and confusion
of managerial practice, they recommend order. Recommendations that are found
lacking provide arguments for new recommendations and new types of order. In
this paper, it is argued that management fashions are a consequence of Henri
Fayol’s notion of general management and the general acceptance of this notion.
It is suggested that a contingent notion of management—as the one proposed by
the U.S. engineer and consultant Frederick Taylor—describes managerial practice
more accurately.

Most people agree that organizations are there to do different things, in one respect
or another. This is true of such diverse undertakings as hospitals, banks, and indus-
trial corporations, even pizzerias. There is no point in setting up identical pizzerias
in adjacent buildings. Pizzerias should specialize. They may bake different types
of pizzas, charge different prices, serve their customers in different ways, have
different types of interior decoration, add different types of desserts, or be located
differently. Only if they purport to be unique will organizations have a fair chance
of success; this is the general supposition.
The idea of management contradicts this notion of organizations as units, which
concentrate each on its own specialty. To the contrary, management is based on
the presumption that organizations resemble one another. This presumption is
far-reaching, for it expects organizations to be so much alike that a particular

Karin Holmblad Brunsson teaches management at Uppsala University and works as a

consultant. Her company address is Allmänna Ord i Sverige, Magnusvägen 6B, SE-177 31
Järfälla, Sweden (tel.: +46 8 580 250 08; fax: +46 8 580 250 57; e-mail: karin.brunsson@telia.
com).
30
 SOME EFFECTS OF FAYOLISM 31

profession—that of managers—is called for. Management and managers may be

defined in different ways, however, depending on whether you take a contingent,
bottom-up view on organizations, as did the U.S. engineer and consultant Frederick
Winslow Taylor (1911/1998), or view organizations from a top-down perspective,
as did the French industrialist and writer Henri Fayol (1916/1984; 1916/1999). If
you accept Henri Fayol’s top-down perspective you see organizations as so much
alike that you find that the actual work of managers ought to have many properties
in common. Henri Fayol’s notion of general management also means that it makes
sense to set up professional training for managers, as Fayol proposed.
In this paper, I discuss the two perspectives on management with reference to
the concept of management fashions. I ask what this concept implies, why it has
emerged, and what the effects of a continual discussion of management fashions
may be.
A management-fashion concept means that there are also management recom-
mendations that are not seen to belong to management fashions. I try to describe
some such recommendations and to demonstrate their conformity with the notion
of general management.
I take management recommendations to mean suggestions for how managers
should act or behave in order for their organizations to become efficient, effec-
tive, and prosperous, whether in monetary or other terms, and find that such
recommendations may refer to other management recommendations, rather
than managerial practice. When management evolves as a normative discipline,
managerial practice may be seen to be irrelevant, and management recommenda-
tions become all the more important. I suggest that the concept of management
fashions is one outcome of such a development and that this concept distracts
academics and others, thereby at the same time solidifying the notion of general
management.
I conclude with some speculation: how would management have fared had Henri
Fayol been less influential and Frederick Taylor appreciated in his place?

Management fashions are ephemeral management

recommendations

In the past eighteen months, we have heard that profit is more important than revenue,
quality is more important than profit, that people are more important than profit, that
customers are more important than our people, that big customers are more important
than our small customers, and that growth is the key to our success.

—Pascale 1990, 18–19

Estimates indicate that over two dozen management techniques, or sets of manage-
ment recommendations, disappeared between the 1950s and 1980s, but that the
frequency of new management recommendations has increased since the latter
part of the 1980s (Carson et al. 2000; Jackson 2001). More recent recommenda-
32 KARIN HOLMBLAD BRUNSSON (SWEDEN)

tions appear to have a shorter life span than those of previous decades (Carson et
al. 1999).
These new management recommendations are often severely criticized. Critics
claim that they are vague enough to allow for different interpretations and alterations
and that they include contradictory propositions and misleading metaphors—“an
odd mixture of management jargon and homespun folk wisdom” (Wooldridge and
Kennedy 1996, 55; see also Larsen and Häversjö 2001; Nørreklit 2003). They are
used as new labels for old habits, it is argued, to help organizations make their
management procedures legitimate (Meyer 1996), or else they simply state the
obvious in a complicated way (Ferguson 1997).
Specific management recommendations are criticized for being unrealistic and
too exotic. Human resource management, for example, has been called “a utopian
cul-de-sac” (Purcell 1999, 38). Total quality management is accused of adopting “a
normative thrust” and “an evangelical line” that excludes consideration of evidence
that might challenge or qualify its assumptions and recommendations (Wilkinson
and Willmott 1995, 15). And the arguments for the balanced scorecard are seen
to be “repeatedly untenable and open to interpretation . . . full of postulates . . .
untenable by appeals to authority, argumentation ad populum, argumentation ad
ignoratio elenchi” (Nørreklit 2003, 609).
Management recommendations that claim to be empirically based, as for instance
“management by wandering around” (Peters and Waterman 1982) or benchmark-
ing (Womack et al. 1990), have been challenged. As it turned out, the “excellent”
management recommendations did not lead to excellent financial performance,
but rather the contrary (see e.g., Clayman 1987), and benchmarking was deemed
a waste of time (Womack and Jones 1996).
In addition, there are often diverging versions of whether new recommendations
have made an impact on managerial practice or whether they are essentially texts in
much-discussed management books (e.g., Jackson 2001 on business process reen-
gineering; Olve, Roy, and Wetter 1997/1999; Lindvall 2001 on the balanced score-
card; and Easton and Jarrell 2000 and Nielsen 2004 on total quality management).
Even though surveys show that companies tend to take on more recommendations
over time, there is scant evidence as to how these recommendations are employed
(Micklethwait and Wooldridge 1996). Their impact may be mainly rhetorical, in
which case they do not affect practice as their proponents avowed.
The frequency of new management recommendations, contradictory evidence
as to their usefulness, and difficulties of finding out whether they are actually of
use to managers in different types of organizations have led academics to question
the tenacity of new management recommendations. They have coined the phrase
management fashions to refer to management recommendations that they see as
popular, though ephemeral.
The management-fashion concept is derogatory. It stereotypes particular manage-
ment recommendations that set out to improve organizational performance by intimating
that they are only temporarily attractive to managers and perhaps only conceptually so,
 SOME EFFECTS OF FAYOLISM 33

and that they are just “transitory collective beliefs” (Abrahamson 1996, 257; Parker and
Ritson 2005; Strang and Macy 2001). By alluding to fashions in clothing, the manage-
ment-fashion concept suggests nonfunctionality, because such fashions rarely imply
improvement, but rather take an interest in change as such (Sellerberg 1987).
A discussion of management recommendations in terms of fashions implies,
first, a dissatisfaction with the existing recommendations; second, an ambition to
improve these recommendations; and third, a sentiment that efforts at improve-
ment, at least some of them, fail. It implies, further, that there are management
recommendations that should not be seen to belong to any management fashion.
If this were not the case, management fashions would include all management
recommendations, and the concept would not add to our understanding of different
management recommendations.
Which recommendations, more specifically, should be classified as lasting and
nontransitory may certainly be contested. Here I use management textbooks to
provide an overall idea of which management recommendations are not generally
seen to be part of any management fashion.

Students of management learn to plan, organize, coordinate,

control, and command

If you ask a manager what he does, he will most likely tell you that he plans,
organizes, co-ordinates, and controls.

—Mintzberg 1975, 49

The management textbook Principles of Management (which first appeared in 1955,

was called Management in its tenth edition in 1993, and has been translated into
sixteen languages) defines management in terms of order: “From its instigation, the
textbook’s implicit warning is of the anarchy and chaos that ensues wherever there
is no management” (Harding 2003, 27). The functions of managers are described in
the same way over the many editions of the book: managers are to plan, organize,
staff, direct, and control, and these functions “are stated as absolute truths, to which
there can be no objection” (Harding 2003, 36).
A typical management education is similarly ordered. What the Best MBAs Know
(Navarro 2005) claims to provide insights into the topics that comprise the most
prestigious MBA curricula. Here different areas of study are divided into topics
that are further subdivided into schemata, “steps” or “processes.” The processes
may include a number of separate models. Management is seen to be a question of
defining and classifying in order to improve organizational decision making.
This ambition to create order, as well as most of the contents included in the
concept of management, conforms with the postulates of Henri Fayol, whose defini-
tion of management is still seen to comprise “management” (Fells 2000; Harding
2003; Smith and Boyns 2005).
34 KARIN HOLMBLAD BRUNSSON (SWEDEN)

Henri Fayol included planning, organizing, coordinating, and controlling and

(after some discussion) commanding in his concept of management (1916/1999).
This means that managers should be responsible for the following:
1. defining what they wanted to accomplish
2. creating the lines of authority and responsibility along which the orders
flow to start the work
3. issuing the commands by which the entire organization is set in motion
4. establishing the sequence of the work
5. continuously monitoring and correcting the work once it had begun (Gray
1984, 5)
Despite little evidence as to the relationship between these activities and
organizational performance (Burgoyne, Hirsch, and Williams 2004), successive
management recommendations, such as those of Henry Mintzberg, John Kotter,
and Colin Hales, draw on Fayol’s ideas in important respects (Fells 2000). To this
day, management students learn the acronym POSDCORB (planning, organizing,
staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting) in order to remember
what their job is about (Watson 2001).
The fact that some management recommendations are understood as tenable
and to lack “fashionable” connotations does not mean that they reflect managerial
practice, however.

Managerial practice is tainted by disorder

Empirical studies of managers’ work have led academics to recognize management

as an art, a performance, or as some combination of habit and impulse (Mangham
1990; Simon 1973; Winter 1987, 161). Organizations are complex and messy,
inhabited by people with conflicting needs and unfulfilled desires, with decision
makers who understand the information they receive only partially, and with an
unclear relationship between talk and action.
Studies of the daily life of managers show people whose working days are
quite chaotic (Carlson 1951/1991; Mintzberg 1973/1980; Stewart 1967; Tengblad
2002). Managers spend much of their time with people, they form alliances and
build networks within as well as outside their organization, and their work is not
always idyllic. Managers must put up with all sorts of resistance and irrational
argumentation (Jönsson 1996), they must yield to requests for unnecessary infor-
mation (Feldman and March 1981), and they must make allowances for private
grievances of their subordinates (Holmblad Brunsson 2002). Managers may be
frustrated by having to instruct their subordinates, to the point of resenting them
(McCormack 1984). Even generally approved organizational change often meets
with unexpected consequences and resistance (Feldman 2004).
Organizational procedures are no simple combinations of rules that facilitate
foresight, coordination, and cooperation. Instead, they are used as arenas for negotia-
 SOME EFFECTS OF FAYOLISM 35

tion and power games (Heclo and Wildavsky 1974; Jönsson 1982; Wildavsky 1975).
They are performed perfunctory, without anybody taking much notice (Larsen and
Dragsdahl 2000), “creatively” to avoid too much paperwork (Walgenbach 2001),
or just to keep people busy (Feldman 1989).
Procedures may even be used as window-dressing devices, to help organiza-
tions present themselves in an orderly manner to the outside world (Czarniawska
and Jacobsson 1989; Høgheim, Monsen, and Olson 1989; Jacobsson 1984; Olsen
1970), sometimes to allow for contradictory presentations (Brunsson 1995) or
actions that contradict these presentations (Brunsson 2003). Many procedures are
intertwined and affect performance in a multifarious way (Feldman 2003). Rather
than enabling organizations, procedures may preclude their swift adaptation to
changes in the environment (Wallander 1999; Weick 1987).
To sum up, academics find managerial practice to be a confusing set of rela-
tionships, improvisations, counterproductive activities, and inadvertent events
that do not at all correspond to the order management recommendations describe.
Nevertheless, for many years they asked for an empirically based management
theory. They envisaged the establishment of stable relationships among relevant
variables, which would make management into a science.

Management theories tend to dissolve

Some asked for partial theories, such as a modified theory of organizational choice,
a theory of organizational attention, and a theory of learning under conditions of
organizational ambiguity (March and Olsen 1975, 156). They wanted a normative
theory of “acting before you think,” which should help explain management in
situations when managers or their organizations do not know what they are doing
(March 1976, 79).
Others asked for a comprehensive management theory. They imagined that, with
time, such a theory would emerge. Henri Fayol saw the absence of a management
theory as an important reason why management (administration in French) was
neglected by the higher educational institutions in France. He saw the classifications
and recommendations in his major book Administration Industrielle et Générale
(General and Industrial Management; 1916/1984, 1999) as a first rudimentary
theory, to be discussed and refined with time.
In the mid-1950s, management guru Peter Drucker found grounds “for the
hope that, twenty years from now, we shall be able to spell out basic principles,
proven policies and tested techniques for the management of worker and work”
(1954, 288).
Ten years later, in the mid-1960s, the future Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon
declared himself “positively exhilarated by the progress we have made . . . to-
wards creating a viable science of management and an art based on that science”
(after Locke 1998, 151). At the same time, the Swedish Professor Eric Rhenman
criticized Henri Fayol for being too dogmatic (1965). Fayol’s principles were too
36 KARIN HOLMBLAD BRUNSSON (SWEDEN)

crude to provide clear guidelines to managers, Rhenman maintained and asked for
a management theory that does not prescribe but describes. Such a theory should
bring insights as to what goes on in organizations, clarify the relationships between
different phenomena, and predict the effects of alternative undertakings.
In the mid-1980s, however, this optimism somehow evaporated. Management
was declared a soft science that must rely on a multitude of theories: “Unfortunately,
in the ‘soft sciences’ we have no reason to expect that a single set of theories will
ever be able to explain or predict phenomena” (Gray 1984, 2).
In the mid-1990s, after some forty years of management studies, Peter Drucker
found the question what to do to be the central challenge facing managers (1994,
3). Once more, management was regarded as an immature discipline, one hundred
years or so behind economics: “The discipline still awaits its John Maynard Keynes,
Friedrich Hayek, or Milton Friedman. It lacks rules of debate, so the discipline
remains open to anybody with an axe to grind” (Micklethwait and Wooldridge
1996, 18).
In the early twenty-first century, academics found a dramatic expansion and
rapid flow of management knowledge across continents and social sectors, but at
the same time they acknowledged that they had no clear answer to the question of
what management knowledge is (Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall 2002, 5). Their
confusion testifies to the difficulties of constructing management recommendations
based on empirical findings: “The theories tend to dissolve when put into testable
form” (March and Simon 1958, 32).
To conclude, not only is the concept of management fashions a token of dissat-
isfaction, but this appears to be true of all management recommendations, because
they do not capture the essentials of managerial practice. When this is not the case,
management recommendations take on an importance in their own right.

Management recommendations describe the essence of

management

Universities and business schools tend to disregard the work of managers, as

described by empirical studies of management, and rely instead on management
recommendations. The rationale provided for this stance is not, however, that it
has proved unfeasible to construct one management theory out of a confusing and
disorderly managerial practice, but rather that a theory based on practice would
prove conservative. Such a theory would depend on existing activities and would
not set out to change them, it is argued (Drury and Dugdale 1992). Many popular
books on management see turbulent change as an important characteristic of current
organizational environments. In their view, an urgent task of managers is to adapt
to change, even enjoy and actively promote change (see, for example, the recom-
mendations formulated by Bennis and Nanus 1985/1997 and Kotter 1988).
With these arguments, it makes sense for those who construct management
recommendations to regard managerial practice as irrelevant, ignore its character-
 SOME EFFECTS OF FAYOLISM 37

istics, and base their recommendations on normative notions of good management.

Recommendations, by definition, refer to the future; thus, they are less restrained
by human commitments and limitations than any theory derived from practice.
There are many possible futures and no definite criteria for assessing them. The
authors of management recommendations therefore have considerable freedom
and may provide accessible definitions of management by describing order and
rationality.
Consequently, new management recommendations are presented as improve-
ments in their own right, with only vague references to any problems to be solved.
They may refer in a general manner to “experience,” or to the inadequacies of “the
old model” or “traditional methods” (e.g., Cole 2000; Greatbatch and Clark 2002,
2005; Kaplan and Norton 1992; Lindvall 2001); base their recommendations on
scarce, sometimes anecdotal empirical evidence (for a critique, see Mintzberg
1994); and couple their own recommendations loosely to existing management
recommendations. When the new recommendations—the solutions—are good
news, it does not appear necessary to connect them to particular problems to be
solved (Brunsson 1995).
Such new recommendations (which may in fact be fairly old) include new ways
of calculation (e.g., activity-based costing) and of combining accounting and plan-
ning (e.g., the balanced scorecard), new ways of control (e.g., total quality manage-
ment), as well as new principles of organization (e.g., process organization, skunk
organization). A new type of management may also be recommended, suggesting
that new or different activities should be included in the management concept (this
is true, e.g., of human resource management, management by objectives, culture
management, management by wandering around, and one-minute management).
Management recommendations have become so fundamental to discussions
about management that even studies of managerial practice are set against a back-
ground of general and orderly management. Only in comparison with management
recommendations does managerial practice appear disorderly, incoherent, and con-
fusing; without such a comparison, explicit or implicit, practice might not appear
at all disorderly, chaotic, or confusing (Brunsson and Sjöblom 2001). This means
that orderly management, as constituted by management recommendations, is ap-
prehended to provide a truer description of management than one constructed from
empirical studies of managerial practice. How management ought to be performed
has become more important than how it is actually performed, even to those who
study managerial practice.
Management has evolved as a normative discipline. The abundance of new
management recommendations, further underscored by the management-fashion
concept, testifies to the importance attributed to management recommendations. Al-
though these recommendations may be outlined as highly complex and “technical,”
they are general recommendations of the kind Henri Fayol favored nevertheless. In
contrast to Frederick Taylor’s management recommendations, these recommenda-
tions are designed to be applied equally in all kinds of organizations.
38 KARIN HOLMBLAD BRUNSSON (SWEDEN)

The notion of general management is the common ground

Like Henri Fayol, Frederick Winslow Taylor believed that all kinds of organiza-
tions, irrespective of their production, size, or location, need management and
managers. But Taylor’s principles of scientific management are based on the task
idea (1911/1998, 17)—on specialization and standardization—and regulate the
relationship between managers and their subordinates. Like the workers, man-
agers must specialize, Taylor insisted. Different managers will plan the work,
make inspections, adjust the machines, and instruct the workers. The managers of
scientific management shall work in close cooperation with the workers, instruct
them, and take an interest in their improvement. This means that managers must
be persuaded to take on new duties and responsibilities. Scientific management
implies a more equal division of the responsibility between the management and
the workmen (ibid., 10).
Taylor’s management principles are general principles in the sense that Taylor
expected work in all kinds of organizations to be managed by managers. But in
contrast to Fayol, Taylor expected the particular activities that managers were
to perform to vary depending on the production and situation of the individual
organization.
Henri Fayol’s notion of general management, on the other hand, defines the
activities that managers are to perform. The managers Fayol described were
distant from the employees who did the work, and Fayol expected an increasing
separation between management and the actual work of the organization. This
explains why managers need elaborate planning procedures and an independent
control function. Obviously, distant managers do not have as many opportunities
to see for themselves what ought to be done and what has been accomplished as
those who are directly involved in monitoring the work. Distant managers have to
rely on reports. They need plans to avoid unconnected, nonlogical activities and
unwarranted changes of direction and inspectors to provide impartial information
about the efficiency of the work.
With the notion of general management come managers who may be employed
by any organization. Where Frederick Taylor saw managers as technical experts
who should know the work to be performed better than those who performed it
and whose competence was unique, Fayol envisaged organizational experts. All
types of organizations should ask for their expertise. With the notion of general
management, managers became interchangeable, much like the workers of scientific
management. From such a perspective, it makes sense to see managers as a coherent
group of professionals and to instigate a general management education. Accord-
ing to Fayol, all types of organizations, families as well as business corporations
and the state, need the same type of management. Management therefore should
permeate elementary as well as higher education.
In his foreword to Fayol’s General and Industrial Management (1949), the
British management consultant Lyndall Urwick lamented the fact that the French
 SOME EFFECTS OF FAYOLISM 39

word administration had been translated into management. Although he found

this to be both an accurate and convenient translation, Urwick pointed out that
management may take on a number of meanings—even, according to the Concise
Oxford Dictionary, that of “trickery, deceitful contrivance.” A close association to
these ideas, said Urwick, “is unlikely to enhance the dignity either of the subject
or of those who practice the activity” (1949, xiii).
Urwick was wrong about this last statement, of course. Fayol’s ideas have proved
immensely successful. Universities and business schools all over the world now
teach management as a subject in its own right, independent of engineering or any
other discipline. Although curricula vary depending on national contexts, they
tend to converge over time, and homogeneity is expected to increase (Engwall and
Zamagni 1998). Management is a true token of globalization: it is treated as such a
uniform set of activities that it requires the same type of knowledge in all kinds of
organizations all over the world (Kotter 1988). General management recommen-
dations seem to belong to the type of abstract information that is rapidly diffused,
irrespective of its practical usefulness (Strang and Meyer 1993).
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than a hundred thousand
students graduate every year from MBA programs in different parts of the world.
This is more than three times the number of law degrees and more than seven times
the number of medical degrees (Navarro 2005). In Sweden, more than 10 percent
of the university graduates specialize in management. The number of management
graduates has increased by almost 500 percent over the past twenty-five years
(Alvesson 2006).
An MBA education is seen to provide “business executives from all walks of
life and in every layer of management with the most powerful arsenal of analytical
weapons ever assembled to fight the corporate wars” (Navarro 2005, 3).
Although an obvious objective of management education is to prepare students
for a professional career in business, its very general character is also praised. Says
the admissions director of one MBA program: “What’s so wonderful about the MBA
is that it provides fundamental skills that you can use whenever and wherever you
need them” (Gilbert et al. 2004, 17).
The notion of general management provides the raison d’être for this education,
for making managers into professionals and for an abundant management literature.
At the same time, it may be argued that precisely this notion causes management
theories to fail, management recommendations to appear inadequate, and discus-
sions on management fashions to appear. Moreover, in view of the commonsense
sentiment that successful organizations are, indeed must be, fundamentally different,
the notion of general management appears counterintuitive and even puzzling.
But such skepticism is again counterbalanced by the heavy investments already
made in the notion of general management. Despite any suggestions of nonfunc-
tionality inherent in the concept of management fashions, for a variety of reasons,
some of which are highly functional, new management recommendations also
benefit managers, as well as those who study management.
40 KARIN HOLMBLAD BRUNSSON (SWEDEN)

New management recommendations provide alternatives

Managers may employ new management recommendations because they expect

the new recommendations to facilitate their work, or because they have adopted
institutionalized ideas about the importance of appearing rational and progressive,
thus wanting to modernize their organizations and make them legitimate in the eyes
of their stakeholders (Abrahamson 1996; Huczynski 1993; Meyer 1996). They may
also use new recommendations as an argument for anything they happen to covet
(Stewart and Davis 1993). By introducing the same management recommendations
as everyone else, organizations reduce their responsibility for their own manage-
ment (Czarniawska and Joerges 1996; Huczynski 1993).
Managers may participate in the debate on new management recommendations.
They may even discuss whether some of the recommendations that they employ
are or will be looked on as management fashions. In practice, they may follow
particular recommendations or ignore them. They may ignore them in practice
and keep them as a rhetorical device or abandon them all together. Whichever the
case, new management recommendations provide them with alternative ways of
discussing and perhaps even handling their practice.
New management recommendations are equally functional to universities and
business schools. In an academic setting, little should be taken for granted, and new
knowledge should be developed and criticized. Thus, academics, like consultants
and “management gurus,” criticize the management recommendations taught at
universities and business schools. They develop new management recommenda-
tions, and criticize these recommendations in turn. They discuss to what extent and
how particular recommendations have been implemented.
New management recommendations also provide academics with additional
research agendas. Academics study the recommendations of management con-
sultants (e.g., Czarniawska-Joerges 1988), popular management literature (e.g.,
Furusten 1999), or management gurus (e.g., Clark and Salaman 1996; Jackson
2001) and make the study of management fashions a particular research topic (e.g.,
Abrahamson 1996; Borgert 1992; Kieser 1997; Røvik 1996).
In this manner, new management recommendations and the very critical concept
of management fashions divert academics from confronting the underlying impli-
cation that the relevant way of apprehending management is through the notion of
general management. Their criticism of new management recommendations—and
their preoccupation with the tenacity of certain recommendations—implies that
there are other, better ways of managing, whether already existing or to be devel-
oped. Thereby, by means of their very criticism, they unquestioningly help solidify
the notion of general management.
As time goes by and more money and energy are invested in the concept of
general management, people who teach or study management will have even
stronger incentives in discussing various aspects of this concept, rather than
the relevance of the concept as such. New or complicated management rec-
 SOME EFFECTS OF FAYOLISM 41

ommendations help detract attention from the underlying premise of general

management, and so does the concept of management fashions. Instead, the
notion of general management becomes so obvious that it does not merit any
special attention.

When many are Fayolists, they do not register as such

Although widely recognized and often mentioned in reference books and manage-
ment textbooks, Henri Fayol has received little recognition compared to Freder-
ick Taylor. The principles of scientific management have been much discussed,
much derided, and are often publicly disclaimed. In particular, they are seen to
lead to reductionism, to make organizations inflexible by breaking down work
processes into isolated parts (Freedman 1992). To what extent employees have
been given autonomy, or whether or not “Taylorism” (i.e., a mechanistic view
on work in organizations) dominates the workplaces, is still a much-discussed
topic. People who favor certain management recommendations may be accused
of being “neo-Taylorists.” And those who argue that, in many cases, technical
and organizational changes only serve to increase the fragmentation of work and
the supervision of workers may be seen to support a neo-Taylorist interpretation
(Lomba 2005, 72).
Any correspondent criticism of Fayol’s notion of general management is
strangely absent from the organizational and managerial discourse. Fayol’s ideas
are often mistakenly classified as a European version of scientific management,
and Fayol has been consigned to the “rubbish bin” of management history (Parker
and Ritson 2005, 1351).
As seen from a Google search, where “Taylorism” and “Taylorist” yield 212,000
and 80,600 hits, respectively, there is hardly any “Fayolism” (only 539 hits) and
even fewer “Fayolists” (only 29 hits as of January 20, 2007). And, in fact, to
declare oneself a “Fayolist” or “neo-Fayolist” would be meaningless. Because
Fayol’s notion of general management is accepted to the point of being taken for
granted, these epithets would not help clarify which type of management they ad-
dress; there are too many “Fayolists” to make this concept interesting. How could
it be otherwise? The next section discusses a reevaluation of Frederick Taylor’s
management principles.

What if Henri Fayol was wrong?

To summarize, Henri Fayol’s concerns of some ninety years ago have made such an
impact that it is no longer important whether or not management recommendations
correspond to any part of managerial practice. The notion of general management
remains unchallenged, but arguments for a normative theory are being substituted
for attempts to construct empirically based management recommendations, with
the implication that what management ought to be has become more important
42 KARIN HOLMBLAD BRUNSSON (SWEDEN)

than what it actually is. Management recommendations are seen to be so important

that it is even interesting to discuss which recommendations are only temporarily
attractive and may thus be classified as management fashions.
Meanwhile, empirical studies of what managers actually do continue to show
a mish-mash of far from orderly activities. After many years of management stud-
ies, a Swedish professor concluded that this mish-mash might actually be what
management is all about: “One cannot help wondering if, perhaps, all these intel-
ligent, successful managers indulge in managerial work characterized by brevity,
variety and fragmentation because it is an efficient way of running a company!”
(Jönsson 1996, 146).
Perhaps Henri Fayol was wrong. Perhaps the notion of general management (or
general administration) is mistaken, and there exist in practice only a vast number
of different types of management, all depending on the situation of a particular
organization and on the position and personality of the individual manager. If this
is true, the notion of general management may have to be reconsidered.
The effects of a denunciation of the notion of general management would
probably be considerable. As a first and modest step, I propose some speculation
on this topic.
Had Henri Fayol’s ideas not been dismissed as just another version of Frederick
Taylor’s but scrutinized in their own right, the very notion of general management
might have been disputed and Fayolism renounced. A scientific, engineering-type
of management concept might have prevailed instead.
Management recommendations would then be more tightly coupled to manage-
rial practice. They would describe the specialization and standardization of work
from a bottom-up perspective of the type Taylor endorsed. Which specialization
and standardization to undertake would be contingent on where management
should be performed. This does not mean that division of labor must be carried
out to its extreme; a bottom-up perspective on management may well combine
with moderate specialization and standardization. To which extent organizations
should engage in planning, organizing, and other general managerial activities,
and how, would likewise depend on organization-specific criteria, such as the
production in which the organization is engaged, its size, and the qualifications
of its personnel.
If academics, managers, or others interested in management had questioned
Henri Fayol’s notion of general management, the idea of top-down management
would have been equally disparaged. There would be fewer general management
recommendations and fewer contested management fashions. Rather than constitut-
ing full-time curricula, management education, if it still existed, would serve as a
complement to other types of training. “Fayolism” and “neo-Fayolism” would be
expressions with negative, perhaps ludicrous, connotations. But if you declared
yourself “a Taylorist,” people would not understand. A bottom-up perspective
would then be inherent in the very concept of management, just as Frederick
Taylor suggested.
 SOME EFFECTS OF FAYOLISM 43

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