Manufacturing the Employee: Management Knowledge from the 19th to 21st Centuries [Paperback]

Contemporary thinking about management is still frequently presented as a set of universal, eternal verities. In this fascinating book Roy Jacques presents a discursive history of industrial work relationships in the United States which powerfully demonstrates that they are not.

A central concern is to show that current `common-sense' in management forms an historically and culturally specific way of thinking about work and society which is often inappropriate for `managing for the twenty-first century'. The author is equally interested in revealing the cultural basis for American management ideas, currently exported round the world as an objective science, disconnected from its cultural and historical roots.

Contemporary thinking about management is still frequently presented as a set of universal, eternal verities. In this fascinating book Roy Jacques presents a discursive history of industrial work relationships in the United States which powerfully demonstrates that they are not.

A central concern is to show that current `common-sense' in management forms an historically and culturally specific way of thinking about work and society which is often inappropriate for `managing for the twenty-first century'. The author is equally interested in revealing the cultural basis for American management ideas, currently exported round the world as an objective science, disconnected from its cultural and historical roots.

`Roy Jacques has, in this book, produced a most remarkable and fascinating analysis both of the nature of the history of managment knowledge and of episodes within that history. It is a book which could and should be read with pleasure and profit by almost anyone with an interest in management and organizations. It directly, coherently and accessibly challenges much current commonsense about management and to my way of lcÖ