The Comparative Management Theory Jungle

Abstract

The proliferation of different con-ceptuai approaches to comparative management theory makes it opportune to review, analyze, evaluate, and classify the various orientations, to examine the roots of this diversity and to propose a framework for synthesis. A systematic and comprehensive conceptualization about business management is of relatively recent origin. Scholars reviewing the evolution of management thought^ generally trace it back to the scientific manage-ment movement which gained remarkable momentum with the publication of Frederick W. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. From there on the field of business management attracted a great number of eminent thinkers who all contributed in some form to a systematic identifica-tion, classification, and interpretation of managerial problems, and thus pro-vided a theoretical underpinning for the management discipline. However, differences in emphasis or neglect of certain crucial aspects led soon to the development of various theoretical orientations, some of which developed as "schools of management," each with its own focus, instrumentarium, and following. Professor Harold Koontz described and analyzed this situation in an admirable article entitled "The Management Theory Jungle."^ He attempt-ed to bring some order into this "jungle" by grouping the various major contributions to management theory into six schools of thought: the man-agement process school, the empirical school, the human behavior school, the social system school, the decision theory school, and the mathematical school. But whatever the differences in orientation or emphasis of the