Weir, David T.H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6750-6722 (2023) Humans as Horses: A Revisionist Approach to the Conventional Foundational Story about “Management”. In: Mills, Albert J. and Deal, Nicholous, (eds.) A World Scientific Encyclopedia of Business Storytelling. Singapore, World Scientific Publishing Co, pp. 75-95

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Abstract

This chapter reviews the self-regarding tradition as taught in Western business schools concerning the assumed process by which the concept of “management” entered our discourse. It is usually presented as a product of the Renaissance and subsequently the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions in which Cartesian dualism and Taylorian scientific management were logical staging posts. Some add Adam Smith and his frame of the market economy as central parts of this canonical tradition (Crowley and Sobel, 2010). However, etymological analysis places “management” as a term of art rather earlier and as a borrowing from an Italian term related to the taming and control of horses introduced to Europe through the Arabian horse lineages from the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean with their Arab and Andalucian trainers. These horse trainers were known by a term derived from the Latin “manus,” a hand. Thus, “management” entered our vocabulary as a term for a craft based on handwork rather than as a demonstration of a scientific cognitive consciousness. These words came through stables rather than studies, through fields and farms rather than offices. Similarly, Machiavellian politicking literature follows a borrowing from an extant tradition already widespread in the Islamic world.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
DOI:	10.1142/9789811273476_0004
School/Department:	York Business School
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/6356

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