The manager: an occupation in search of legitimacy and the invention of the UniversityBased Business School, 1881-1941.

A critique of the manager as a profession and the business school as its enabler. Managing as an occupation has such a taken-for-granted and dominant presence in contemporary society that its historical origin is not even scrutinized or, in a few cases, explored by academic accounts. The manager as a professional is so hard -wired into the collective imaginary and into the social and economical fabric that we are not able to question its immense influence on reality through the powerful organizations hes in control. He has become so natural that he passes unnoticed by many philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians and anthropologists who try to understand the genealogy and the actors of the social, institutional and economical crisis we have lived nowadays. This essay will attempt to understand the genealogy of this profession and how it has been legitimized by The Business School as an institution. It will draw information and insights from existing accounts on the topic which have used of primary and secondary sources to build an argument mainly the studies of Rakesh Khurana, to name the main one: From higher aims to hired hands: the social transformation of American business schools and the unfulfilled promise of management as a profession , and some other articles published by the same author. One of the hypothesis aimed to be fulfilled is whether the manager has been one of the actors responsible for the crisis society currently lives as a whole and whether the Business School has been one of the enablers, as an institution, for the construction of the manager as an actor. This study will focus its lenses over the period that comprises from 1881 to 1941 when the professionalization project of management stood at the core of the business schools agenda a period in which business schools have spread its tentacles throughout Americas colleges and universities seeking its institutionalization. Its observed that the equivalent of todays modern manager emerged in the late 1870s as a vaguely defined entity with a miniscule representation on the total population. This number had risen significantly by the 1900 which National statistics, although scarce, give us some evidence that the number of proprietors, officials, managers and inspectors in the transportation and communications industries have increased from 12,501 in 1870 to 67,706 in 1900, more than 5 times. By the 1920s, managers were already a sizeable and universally

recognized occupational class. For example, the 1920 United States occupational census estimated that there were 2,612,525 executive and manager positions in business. This dramatic growth hasnt occurred by chance. The invention of the manager as a class and its institutionalization driven by big corporations and the Business School are at the core of its rapid development over such a short period of time: less than 50 years. According to Khurana, one of the most influential accounts was put forth by the Harvard business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in his classic The Visible Hand. Note. For Chandler, Khurana continues, modern management grew naturally out of the large corporations that arose to take advantage of the national markets created by late nineteenthcentury advances in manufacturing, transportation, and communications. Before the Civil War, Chandler notes, there was no such thing as big business by any modern definition. The typical business organization was a small enterprise, usually run by an individual owner or a few partners. Such firms often focused on one or two economic activities and operated within a restricted geographic realm. Chandler suggests that the small-firm structure was inherently unreliable and inefficient. Slight and unanticipated changes in the business cycle often doomed a business; indeed, most businesses, then as now, died in infancy. Moreover Chandler argues, the quality and quantity of goods produced by such enterprises were unpredictable because workers largely controlled the manner and pace of work. Chandler and others working from this perspective claim that the replacement of the markets invisible hand by the visible hand of management in the modern business firm represented a kind of Darwinian triumph. A superior form of organization, better suited to evolving economic conditions, had replaced its unreliable and inefficient predecessor . Hence, it has been in the name of efficiency and productivity that the manager arises as the visible and concrete hand responsible to change the capitalist corporation from a unpredictable and extremely chaotic one to a more predictable and less chaotic one. The manager was born with the fate and duty to control and legitimize the aim of the organization to maximize profits by expansion of its business and rationalization of its costs and inefficiencies. Different from some other professions that were born with a very specific and meaningful social purpose, such as the teacher, the physician and the lawyer, the manager activities and interests sit in between the owner of the capital and the consumer or customer of its organization. The manager doesnt

have his own will or governance if not to fulfil the desires of its both stakeholders: the capitalist and the consumer. Therefore it becomes very questionable from where the manager shapes and forms its own ethics. If hes blindly following the demands from either the capitalist or the consumer, can we consider, as for other professions, the manager as an autonomous actor?