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First management theorists or first recorded management theorists? I feel like there are similarly (or nearly as) advanced cultures in this approximate era for
by atdrummond 5y ago
First management theorists or first recorded management theorists? I feel like there are similarly (or nearly as) advanced cultures in this approximate era for whom we unfortunately have significantly less recorded material - and often what we do have was created by other civilizations (such as Rome itself or Greek city-states) who interacted with said people. These persons surely had theories of management for their assets, which undoubtedly would include slaves and indentured servants.
- usrusr 5y agoA semantic pedantry argument could be made that recorded material is what separates the theorist from the practitioner. Easily countered of course by remarking that records getting lost over the course of a few millennia shouldn't make a theorist less of a theorist. Personally, I'm fine with adding an implicit "that we know of" to every "first".
- pohl 5y agoOral traditon is a kind of lossy recording on oddly volatile media.
- usrusr 5y agoThanks for addressing the glaring hole I suspected my argument might have, PR accepted!
- kqr 5y agoAlso surprisingly robust! https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ See also how many cultures have a flood myth that's of similar age but seemingly arose independently.
- KineticLensman 5y ago> These persons surely had theories of management for their assets, which undoubtedly would include slaves and indentured servants. Yes, exactly. I'm sure the Egyptian pharaohs who built the pyramids a thousand years earlier had some theories regarding management.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoNeolithic humans made constructions that took a staggering amount of manpower over a very prolonged time. The story of how such things come to be is complex and has many variations over place and time. There's no "first management theorists" just humans and human society learning and evolving as it has since before we were even human. I find the concept of this article not just pointless but somewhat obnoxious in projecting a conceptual parallel between roman aristocratic slave holders and modern employment relations. Both have their pathologies but we shouldn't blend them into one category imo.
- yetanotherloser 5y agoI'm really pretty sure they did. In fact I'd go one step further and say a lot of Old and Middle Kingdom society WAS a peculiar kind of management theory. Those pyramids weren't built by slaves either. There is plenty of managerial advice in their literature. They even invented the careers-advice text... (be a scribe, my son; it's indoor work with no heavy lifting)
- Telemakhos 5y agoI wonder why Xenophon's _Oeconomicus_ didn't qualify as management theory. That's exactly what it is, and it dates back to classical Athena.
- unmole 5y agoAssuming Chanakya did write some version of the Arthashastra, it was roughly contemporaneous with Oeconomicus. I wonder if either of them reference any earlier related works.
- atdrummond 5y agoThanks - I wanted to cite Xenophon but couldn't decide if it was Oeconomicus alone or whether one could argue that the Lacedaemonion Politeia includes an assessment of Spartan economic management with regards to their Helot-based economy.
- Spooky23 5y agoYou always need to assume “recorded”. Humans have been around for 300,000 years and evidence for more complex culture and technology goes back about 60,000. People have always been as smart as they are, and getting other people to do work for you is probably the second or third oldest profession. I’m sure some ancient chieftain of a long forgotten tribe expounded on management theory eons ago.
- CRConrad 5y ago> Humans have been around for 300,000 years Humans have been around for millions of years. Modern humans have been around for 3 - 600,000 years.