Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution - Review

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 2001  by Andrew Hargadon

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Yehouda Shenhav. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 247 pp. $49.95.

Manufacturing Rationality begins by asking, What are the ideological roots of modern management? This is an important question for those interested in the social, cultural, and political origins of modern organizations and organization theories. As an answer, Shenhav describes how our modern concept of management, as both an ideology and a practice, was a byproduct of engineers' efforts to legitimize and extend the boundaries of their emerging profession at the turn of the twentieth century. This group of actors, independent of capitalists or the working class, created a new discourse based on instrumental rationality that became not only "the underpinning ideology of management, but a prism through which social and cultural issues were interpreted and determined" (p. 18). Shenhav charts this discourse during the formative years of industrial organizations, from 1880 to 1932, to illustrate how engineers translated their emerging models of engineering rationality from the design and operation of machines to th e design and operation of organizations.

This book provides evidence that modern management's explicit focus on rationality, standardization, and systematization was rooted less in the quest for efficiency than in struggles for legitimacy and power by the emerging profession of engineers as managers. Mainstream management history portrays managerial rationality as a natural and inevitable outcome of modernization (e.g., Chandler, 1977). From this perspective, the role of professional managers evolved naturally between owners and workers as an inevitable solution to the increasing size and complexity of industrial enterprises. The story Shenhav tells is not about the efficient evolution in organizational forms but about the social and political movements that, masked in such rationality, shaped the early years of industrial management. Shenhav argues that the emergence of management in its current form-as well as our explanations for this emergence-rests on the very assumptions of rationality that engineers first introduced into the discourse on mana gement to legitimize and extend their influence in organizations. To Shenhav, modern management represents both

an ideology of managerial rationality and a practice of management systems. The ideology of managerial rationality is built from instrumental rationality, which reduces human action to a set of cause-and-effect relationships and gives them meaning in the organized pursuit of efficiency and profit. The practice of management systems entails the development and application of explicit routines to rationalize human action within organizations, beginning with the shopfloor systematization of work typical of scientific management but extending to more white-collar activities such as cost-accounting systems and standardized hiring and reward practices.

For its evidence this book combines an extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the two leading engineering periodicals from 1880 to 1932 with historical descriptions of the industrial and political movements of that time. The dates of this analysis are significant for several reasons. First, this 50-year period witnessed the origins of management as both an ideology and a practice, beginning with the first swell of literature to address the topic of management in industrial organizations directly and ending with the 1932 publication of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, which signaled the widespread recognition of the role of professional managers as distinct from owners. Second, this period also saw the ascendance of the machine in organizations. In the preceding century, the accuracy, productivity, and affordability of these machines-the lathe, the mill, and other mechanized metal and wood-working tools-turned the promise of interchangeable parts and mass production into reality for inc reasing numbers of organizations (Hounshell, 1984; Hughes, 1989). At the turn of the twentieth century, industry and the public alike recognized and even glorified this new machine age and, apropos of Shenhav's analysis, the engineers that introduced it (Hughes, 1989).

As the machine spread through American industry, engineers reshaped the technological and organizational landscape. During this time, the engineering periodicals American Machinist (founded in 1877) and Engineering Magazine (founded in 1891) served as the means of communication for this rapidly growing field, providing an arena for engineers to discuss both technical and political issues surrounding their work. As a result, they now provide a record of how this new class of actors socially constructed their organizational and technical world. Throughout this time, the role of engineer evolved from designing the machines to designing the production lines that housed the machines. This increased influence meant responsibility for rationalizing the human components of these larger systems and was evident in the emergence and legitimacy of such movements as scientific management. From engineering the production line, it was a small step to rationalize other activities of the organization with systems that promise d to reduce uncertainty by identifying and standardizing more efficient routines. And engineers expanded their domain from the shopfloor to the corporate offices by introducing systems targeted toward the operation of organizations rather than machines, applying the principles of scientific management and industrial engineering to administrative tasks. These managerial systems legitimized the profession of engineering by invoking the ideology of rationality--that every action in organizations can and should be instrumentally rational and thus can and should be engineered to increase the efficiency of the overall system.