![12 M,anagement - Theory and Practice. Chapter Ohe
Negotiator's Role: Managers spend considerable time in the task of negotiations. He negotiates with
the subordinates for improved commitment and loyalty, with the peers for cooperation, coordination
and integration, with workers and their unions regarding conditions of employment, commitment,
productivity and with the government about providing facilities for business expansion etc.
These negotiations are an integral part of the manager's job for only he has authority to commit
organisational resources and is the nerve centre of information. .
Though the different roles of a manager are discussed separately for convenience, they are, in fact
inseparable. The manager has to perform these roles simultaneously by integrating one with the another.
Thus, the major role of the manager is integrating all the roles while playing the managerial role or
performing his tasks. Infact, the manager cannot play anyone role isolating the other roles. As a
strategist, the manager has to integrate all the roles in decision-making and performing his tasks. (See
Exhibit 1.1).
Exhibit 1.1 Key Roles ofM~nagers
Henry Min~berg concluded that the job of a top manager contains ten interrelated roles. The importance of each role and the
amount of time demanded by each probably varies from one job to another. These roles are as follows:
Figurehead Acts as legal and symbolic head; performs obligatory social, ceremonial or legal duties (hosts retirement
dinners, luncheons for employees, and plant dedications; attends civic affairs; signs contracts on behalf
of firm).
Leader
Liaison
Monitor
Disseminator
Spokesman
Entrepreneur
Disturbance Handler
Resource Allocator
Negotiator
Motivates, develops and guides subordinates; oversees staffing, training, and associated activities
(introduces Management By Objectives [MBO], develops a challenging work climate, provides a sense
of direction, acts as a role model).
Maintains a network of contacts and information sources outside the top management in order to
obtain information and assistance (meets with key people from the task environment, meets formally
and informally with corporate division managers and the CEOs of other firms).
Seeks and obtains information in order to understand the corporation and its environments; acts as
the nerve centre for the corporation (reviews status reports from vice-presidents, reviews key indicators
of corporate performance, scans Wall Street Journal and key trade journals, joins select clubs and
societies).
Transmits information to the rest of the top management team and other key people in the corporation
(chairs staff meetings, transmits policy letters, communicates five-year plans).
Transmits information to key groups and people in the task environment (prepares annual report to
stockholders, talks to the Chamber of Commerce, states corporate policy to the media, participates in
advertising campaigns, speaks before congressional committees).
Searches the corporation and its environment for projects to improve products, processes, procedures,
and structures; then supervises the design and implementation of these projects (introduces cost
reduction programmes, makes plant trips to divisions, changes forecasting system, brings in subcontract
work to level the workload, reorganises the corporation).
Takes corrective action in times of disturbance or crisis (personally talks with key creditors, interest
groups, congressional committees, union leaders; establishes investigative committees; revises
objectives, strategies, and policies).
Allocates corporate resources by making and/or approving decisions (reviews budgets, revis4;js
programme, scheduling, initiates strategic planning, plans personnel load, sets objectives.)
Represents the corporation in negotiating important agreements; may speak directly with key
representatives of groups in the task environment or work through a negotiator; negotiates disagreements
within the corporation by working with conflicting division -heads (works with labour as negotiator;
resolves disputes, negotiates with creditors, suppliers and creditors).
Source: H. Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work, Harper & Row, New York, 1973, pp. 54-94.
Now, we shall study another aspect of management i.e., management levels.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25992507-250524015558-266ed3a0/85/Management-Theory-And-Practice-Text-Cases-1st-Edition-P-Subba-Rao-Venkatram-Tej-Kumar-23-320.jpg)
![Chapter Two. Development ofManagement Thought 31
The next approach developed towards management is systems approach. Now, we shall study the
system approach to management.
(f] SYstems "PPI"t)ach tt) ManaGement
Organisation:
Unified,
proposeful
system
composed of
interrelated
parts.
A system is a set of interrelated but separate parts working towards a common purpose. The arrangement
of elements must be orderly and there must be proper communication facilitating interaction between
the elements and finally this interaction should lead to achieve a common goal.
Thus, systems approach to management views the organisation as a unified, purposeful system
composed of interrelated parts. Hence, managers have to deal with the organisation as a whole rather
than dealing separately with various segments of an organisation. This approach also gives the managers
to see the organisation as a whole and as a part of the larger external environment. Systems theory
reveals to us that the activity of any segment of an organisation, affects in different degrees, the
activity of every other segment.19
Systems-oriented managers would make decisions only after they have identified impact of these
decisions on all other departments and the entire organisation. The essence of the systems approach
is that each manager cannot function in isolation and within his organisational boundary of authority
and responsibility of the traditional organisational chart. They must intertwine their departments with
the total organisation and communicate with all other departments and employees and also with other
organisation"
s.2
0
Key Concepts ofSystems Approach
(i) Subsystem: Subsystems are those parts which make up the whole system. Each system in turn
may be a subsystem of a still larger system. Thus, a department is a subsystem of a factory, which is
a subsystem of a firm, which is a subsystem of an industry, which is a subsystem of a national
economy, which is a subsystem of the world economic system.
(ii) Synergy: Synergy is the situation in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In
organisational terms, synergy means that departments that interact co-operatively are more productive
than they would be, if they operated in isolation.
(iii) Open System: It is a system that interacts with its environment. All organisations interact with
their environment, but the extent to which they do so varies.
(iv) Closed system: It is a system that does not interact with its environment.
(v) System Boundary: It is the boundary that separates each system from its environment. It is rigid
in a closed system while flexible in an open system.
(vi) Flows: A system has flows of information, materials and energy. These enter the system from the
environment as inputs (like raw materials), undergo transformation process within the system (like
production process) and exist in the system as outputs (like products/services). (Fig.2.2 shows the
flows and feedback in an open system).
(vii) Feedback: It is the part of system control in which the results of actions are returned to the
individual, allowing work procedures to be analysed and corrected.
Systems approach helps the dynamic and interrelated nature of organisations to plan for actions and
anticipate consequences and mutual effects. It helps the general managers to maintain balance among
various subsystems and the organisation. Thus a major contribution of the systems approach results
from its strong emphasis on the interrelatedness or mutuality of various subsystems of the organisation.
Treatment of the organisation as an open system is another contribution of systems approach.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25992507-250524015558-266ed3a0/85/Management-Theory-And-Practice-Text-Cases-1st-Edition-P-Subba-Rao-Venkatram-Tej-Kumar-42-320.jpg)
![Chapter Two • Development ofManagement Thought 33
When Ratan Tata visited the home of the designer Ralph Lauren last year, the two car enthusiasts
spent much of the time in the garage admiring Lauren's car collection, including the classic 1955
Jaguar XKD. Now Tata is poised to take over Jaguar. Tata Motors said on Thursday it was beginning
detailed talks with Ford Motor about buying the Jaguar and Land Rover brands, confirming what
investors and analysts in India, Detroit and Britain have expected for months. Tata said it wanted to
reach an agreement over the next few weeks.
For Ratan Tata, 70, the takeover will cap 16 years of transforming one of the world's most diverse
and unusual conglomerates, the Tata Group. Through 98 companies, Tata creates and sells products
ranging from steel to tea to watches, making the company's name ubiquitous in India. Under Ratan
Tata, the name has started to reverberate around the globe as well. A string of international deals
has diversified Tata to the point where more than half its'-revenue this year will come from outside
India.
Tata's increasingly global outlook is also bolstering the overseas ambitions of other Indian companies.
Going overseas was necessary, Ratan Tata said. In the late 1990s, the group's truck unit recorded a
loss that was the biggest in Indian history, he said in a recent interview in Tata's headquarters in the
leafy Colaba district of Mumbai. "We were so dependent on one economy. I decided we needed a
broader view."
Since then Tata has done dozens of deals, buying businesses as diverse as the Tyco Global Network,
Daewoo Commercial Vehicles, the Moroccan chemical company Imacid, Tetley Teas and, most
audaciously, the US$11 .3 billion ($12.8 billion) takeover of the British steel maker Corus last year, a
company several times the size of Tata Steel. The group's 27 listed companies have a market capital
of more than US$70 billion, and the group reported after-tax profit of US$2.8 billion the last financial
year, a 33 per cent increase from the year before, in part because of the Corus acquisition.
The Corus deal garnered Ratan Tata rare criticism, analysts wondering whether he had taken on too
much. Corus "came to us; we didn't seek them out", he said, and it was a deal he could not pass up.
In "one swoop we were in Europe, where we weren't before. That opportunity was going to happen
once. "
The Tata Group is an unusual corporate enterprise. Started in 1868 by Jamshedji Tata, one of India's
dwindling group of Parsis, the group has often seemed to value employees as much as profits
(paying laid-off Tata Steel employees for the rest of their lives when the company made cuts, for
example), and has prided itself on fair practices, rather than cut-throat manoeuvring or paying
bribes, a practice still prevalent in some of corporate India.
Indeed, Ratan Tata seems the most unlikely of corporate titans - almost preternaturally humble,
unabashedly open about the company's mistakes and about the fact that he never really wanted to
be an industrialist. He studied architecture at Cornell University. After decades of working for the
family business, he says he is considering opening a small architecture firm when he retires.
He is a distant relative of the founder - his father was adopted by the wife of one of Jamshedji's sons.
Never married, he lavishes attention on his dogs, writes thank-you notes to employees who do him
favours, and is often spied on Sundays driving alone Marine Drive In Mumbal in one of the several
cars he owns.
"None of us observers of the Tatas could have predicted that he would grow and blossom the way he
has and be in total charge of the company the way he has," said R.M. Lala, the author of several
books about the family and companies, and a one-time direc;tor of the Tata Trust, a charity that
finances health care and education projects in India. Other executives and companies may have
made more money in India, Mr. Lala said, "but Tata is still the most respected name in Indian
industry".
As company chairman, Ratan Tata has been instrumental in carrying on the family legacy and turning
what was a loosely aligned group of companies that shared one name into a group with seven
business lines and centralised management. It is a business plan he developed in the most unlikely
of settings: he spent three months at his mother's bedside at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Centre in Manhattan in 1981. At the time, he was chairman of Tata Industries, then a small part of
the group responsible for new ventures.
When he was named chairman in 1991 he started reining in some of the company's independently
minded managers and giving the parent company sizable equity stakes in its offspring.
The process was not easy, he wrote in a 2003 epilogue to The Creation of Wealth, a book about the
Tatas.
"If I reflect on what these 10 years have been for me personally, they have been a mixed bag," he
wrote. "There is some satisfaction that l'veseen the group come together in many ways ... [but] at
the same time there is a sense of frustration at the resistance to change from many of my colleagues
that I have seen through this period of time. "](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25992507-250524015558-266ed3a0/85/Management-Theory-And-Practice-Text-Cases-1st-Edition-P-Subba-Rao-Venkatram-Tej-Kumar-44-320.jpg)
Management Theory And Practice Text Cases 1st Edition P Subba Rao Venkatram Tej Kumar
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- 6. MANAGEMENT THEORY AND PRACTICE (Text & Cases) Dr. P. Subba Rao Professor and Convener, Executive MBA Program School ofBusinessAdministration University ofPapua New Guinea Papua New Guinea (Australia) Formerly: ProfessorandDean Faculty ofCommerce and Management Sri Krishnadevaraya University Anantapur -515 003 (AP), INDIA E-mail: pulapas@rediffmail.com Assisted by: Venkatram Tej Kumar (MS in BA and MIS) Texas Tech University at Lubbock, USA Hal GJlimalayaGpublishingGJIouse MUMBAl" NEWDELHI" NAGPUR " BANGALORE" HYDERABAD" CHENNAI" PUNE" LUCKNOW"AHMEDABAD" ERNAKULAM" BHUBANESWAR"INDORE
- 7. © Authors No part of this publication should be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without the prior written permission of the editors and publisher. Published by Branch Offices: New Deihl Nagpur Bengaluru Hyderabad Chennal Pune Lucknow Ahmedabad Ernakulam Bhubaneswar Indore OTPby Printed by .First Edition : 2010 Mrs. Meena Pandey for HIMALAYA PUBLISHING HOUSE PVT. LTD., "Ramdoot", Dr. Bhalerao Marg, Girgaon, Mumbai - 400004. Phones: 2386 01 70/2386 38 63, Fax: 022-2387 71 78 Email: hlmpub@vsnl.com Website: www.hlmpub.com "Pooja Apartments", 4-B, Murari Lal Street, Ansari Road, Darya Ganj, New Deihl - 110 002. Phone: 23270392, 23278631 Fax: 011-23256286 Kundanlal Chandak Industrial Estate, Ghat Road, Nagpur - 440 018. Phone: 2738731, 3296733 Telefax: 0712-2721215 No. 16/1 (Old 1211), 1st Floor, Next to Hotel Highlands, Madhava Nagar, Race Course Road, Bengaluru - 560 001. Phone: 22281541, 22385461, Telefax: 080-22286611 No. 3-4-184, Lingampally, Besides Raghavendra Swamy Matham, Kacl'liguda, Hydrabad - 500 027. Mobile: 09848130433 No. 85/50, Bazullah Road, T. Nagar, Chennai - 600 017. Phone: 044-28144004/28144005 First Floor, "Laksha" Apartment, No. 527, Mehunpura, Shaniwarpeth, (Near Prabhat Theatre), Pune - 411 030. Phone: 020 - 24496323/24496333 C-43, Sector - C, Ali Gunj, Lucknow - 226 024. Phone: 0522-2339329 114, "SHAlL", 1"1 Floor, Opp. Madhu Sudan House, C.G.Road, Navrang Pura, Ahmedabad - 380 009. Phone: 079-26560126, Mobiles: 09327324149,09314679413 39/104 A, Lakshmi Apartment, Karikkamuri Cross Rd., Ernakulam, Cochin - 622011, Kerala. Phone: 0484-2378012, 2378016, Mob- 09344199799 5 Station Square, Bhubaneswar (Orissa) - 751 001. Mobile - 9861046007, E-mail:-orissa@himpub.com Kesardeep Avenue Extension, 73, Narayan Bagh.Flat No. 302, IlIrd Floor, Near Humpty Dumpty School, Narayan Bagh, Indore (M.P.) Mob-09301386468 Sri Siddhl Softtek Bengaluru Geetanjall Press Pvt. Ltd. Nagpur ISBN : 978-81-84888-10-2
- 8. CONTENTS Chapter - 1 Nature and Functions of Management 1- 18 (A) Introduction (B) Definition of Management (C) Management: A Science or an Art? (D) Management: A Profession? (E) Management vs. Administration (F) Management Functions (G) Managerial Skills (H) Managerial Roles (I) Management Levels (J) Functional Areas of Management (K) Universality of Management Principles (L) International management Key Terms, Questions, References. Chapter - 2 Development of Management Thought 19 - 38 (A) Introduction (B) Scientific Management (C) Administrative Management (D) Towards Human Relations Approach (E) Human Relations Approach (F) Systems Approach to Management (G) Contingency Approach (H) Human Resource Managerial Approach (1) Management Science Approach (J) Recent Trends and Paradigm Shifts (K) Conclusion Key Terms, Questions, References. Chapter - 3 Social Responsibilities of Business 39 - 50 (A) Introduction: Traditional View, Modern View (B) Social Responsibilities of Business (C) Influence of Environment Key Terms, Questions, References. Chapter - 4 Business Ethics and Value-Based Management 51 - 62 (A) Ethics (B) Business Ethics (C) Unethical practices (D) Business Code of Conduct (E) Value-Based Management Key Terms, Questions, References. Chapter - 5 The Planning Process 63 -78 (A) Introduction (B) Nature of Planning (C) Need for Planning (D) Typesj Hierarchy of Plans (E) Steps in the Process of Planning (F) Advantages and Limitations of Planning (G) Planning practices in Japan, USA and China Key Terms, Questions, References. Chapter - 6 Objectives of Business 79 - 94 (A) Introduction (B) Formulating Objectives (C) Characteristics of Effective Objectives (D) Importance of Objectives (E) Nature of Objectives
- 9. Chapter - 7 Chapter - 8 Chapter - 9 Chapter - 10 Chapter - 11 Chapter - 12 Chapter - 13 (F) Formulation of Objectives (G) Reasons for Change of Objectives (H) Management by Objectives Key Terms, Questions, References. The Strategic Management Process (A) Why Strategy? (B) What is Strategy? (C) Why Strategy is More Complex? (D) Strategic Management (E) Strategic Management Process Key Terms, Questions, References. Decision Making (A) Introduction (B) Problem and Opportunity Finding (C) Nature of Managerial Decision-Making (D) Approaches to Decision-Making (E) Types of Decisions (F) Process of Decision-Making (G) Boards and Committees in Decision-Making: Group Decision-Making (H) Tools and Techniques of Decision-Making (I) Decision-Making under Abnormal Conditions (J) Decision-Making Practices Abroad Key Terms, Questions, References. Organisation Theory (A) Organisation (B) Classical Theory of Organisation (C) Neo-Classical Theory of Organisation (D) Modern Theory of Organisation Key Terms, Questions, References. Organisational Structure (A) Introduction (B) Organisational Design (C) Nature of Organising (D) Structuring Organisation (E) Approaches to Organisational Structure (F) Line and Staff Organisation (G) Responsive Organisations (H) Global Organising - Key Terms, Questions, References. Delegation, Decentralization and Span of Management (A) Introduction (B) Delegation of Authority (C) Centralisation and Decentralisation (D) Span of Management Key Terms, Questions, References. Organisational Culture and Effectiveness (A) Definition (B) Creating Organisational Culture (C) Approaches to Organisational Culture (D) How Employees Learn Organisation Culture? (E) How to Measure Organisational Culture? (F) Organisational Effectiveness (G) Nature of Organisational Effectiveness Key Terms, Questions, References. Change Management and Organisational Development (A) Organisational Change: Meaning and Types (B) Technology and Change 95 - 122 123 - 150 151 - 164 165 - 190 191 - 202 203 - 220 221 - 240
- 10. Chapter - 14 Chapter - 15 Chapter - 16 Chapter - 17 Chapter - 18 Chapter - 19 (C) Resistance to Change vs. Inviting Change: Reasons (D) Approaches to Organisational Change (E) Planning and Implementing Change (F) Organisational Development (G) The OD Process (H) OD Interventions/Techniques Key Terms, Questions, References. Human Resource Management: Organisational Context (A) Meaning and Definition (6) What is HRM? (C) Personnel vs.HRM (D) Significance of HRM (E) Functions of HRM (F) Objectives of HRM (G) Organisation Design and Line and Staff (H) Evolution and Development of HRM Key Terms, Questions, References. Human Resource Development (A) Significance of HRD (6) Concept of HRD (C) Scope of HRD (D) Need for HRD (E) HRD Objectives (F) HRD Framework (G) Functions of HRD Managers (H) Attributes of an HRD Manager Key Terms, Questions, References. Performance Appraisal and Development (A) Introduction (6) Strategic Management and Performance Appraisal (C) Meaning, Need and Purpose of Performance and Development (D) Who Will Appraise? (E) Performance Analysis and Development (F) Methods of Performance Appraisal (G) System of Performance Appraisal (H) The Post Appraisal Interview (I) Managerial Appraisal (J) Use of Performance Appraisal (K) Problems of Performance Appraisal Key Terms, Questions, References. Employee Training (A) Introduction (6) Stages in Training (C) Stage-2: Designing the Training Programme (D) Stage-3: Implementation (E) Stage-4: Evaluation of Training Programme (F) Special Aspects of Training Key Terms, Questions, References. Directing (Morale, Committees and Coordinating) (A) Directing (6) Morale (C) Committees (D) Coordinating Key Terms, Questions, References. Motivation: Concepts and Theories (A) Introduction (6) Motivating (C) Types of Motivation (D) Theories of Motivation Key Terms, Questions, References. 241 - 278 279 - 292 293 - 322 323 - 350 351 - 366 367 - 392
- 11. Chapter - 20 Communication 393 - 416 (A) Meaning (B) Management Information System and Information Technology (C) Methods of Communication (D) Communication Channels (E) Communication Networks (F) Organisational Communication (G) Barriers to Communication Key Terms, Questions, References. Chapter - 21 Leadership 417 - 444 (A) Introduction (B) Leader vs Manager (C) Leadership Theories (D) Leadership Styles (E) Followership Styles- A New Approach (F) Outstanding Leaders (G) Leadership Skills (H) Leadership Under Cross-Cultural Environment (I) Women and Leadership (J) Global Leading Key Terms, Questions, References. Chapter - 22 Foundations of Group Behaviour 445 - 462 (A) Groups (BT Types of Groups (C) Stages of Group Formation and Development (D) Groups at the Workplace: Formal-Informal (E) Group Structure Key Terms, Questions, References. Chapter - 23 Controlling 463 - 488 (A) Introduction (B) Feedback and Feed-forward Control (C) Basic Process of Control (D) Control Techniques (E) Problems of Control Process (F) Requirements for Effective Control (G) Overall Control Techniques (H) Global Control Key Terms, Questions, References. Chapter - 24 Operations Management 489 - 498 (A) The Operations Function (B) Decision-Making in Operations (C) Product Design (D) Who Will Appraise? (E) Process Selection (F) Facilities Design (G) Inventory Management (H) Quality Planning and Control Key Terms, Questions, References. Chapter - 25 Recent Trends and Paradigm Shifts 499 - 504 (A) Introduction (B) Deregulated Environment (C) Competition and Customisation CD) Paradigm Shifts in Management Principles (E) Conclusion: Situational Approach to Management Principles Chapter - 26 Methods of Case Analysis 505 - 512 (A) Introduction (B) How to Analysis a Case? (C) Participating in a Class Discussion (D) Methods of Case Discussion (E) Conclusion Index 513 - 518
- 12. (A) (8) (C) (D) (E) (F) (G) (H) (I) (J) (K) (L) CHAPTER 1 Nature and Fun.ctions of Management CHAPTER OUTLINE Introduction Definition of Management Management: A Science or an Art? Management: A Profession? Management vs. Administration Management Functions Managerial Skills Managerial Roles Management Levels Functional Areas of Management Universality of Management Principles International Management Key Terms, Questions, References LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this chapter you should be able to: • Understand the concept of management • Analyse various definitions of management and evolve features of management • Discuss the functions of management, viz., planning, organising, staffing, directing and controlling • Have a detailed idea of management levels, managerial skills and managerial roles • Judge whether management is science or art • Defend how management is a profession? • Know whether management principles are applicable to profit and non-profit organisations?
- 13. 2 Manal/ement - Theory and Practice • Chapter One ()penlnll Case - Do WE NEED A PROFESSIONAL MANAGER? Mr. Raghuram started a small scale venture of steel melting unit in 1986 in Bangalore and later developed it into an integrated plant by 1992. He was managing the plant successfully and was the market leader in terms of pricing as he was a low cost producer. In 1998, his son, Mr. Nitin Sai after completing his MBA joined him in business. After the completion of two months Mr. Nitin told his father, at the dining table' "Daddy", this is not the way of doing business." Mr. Raghuram was astonished how this fresh MBA is discounting all his experience and market leadership. Mr. Raghuram replied: "My dear son, you are wrong, it is not just your theoritical knowledge, but also the long experience that counts in business." Then Mr. Nitin explained to his father the lacunas in business, starting from releasing a product without a plan and how the same product idea was hijacked L (4) Intrt)du~tlt)n by his competitor _and also the, inappropriate organisation structure that resulted in low employee productivity. He also pOinted out that his father's way of operating is concerned for only work but not people and its consequence of low employee job satisfaction and morale. Mr. Raghuram felt very happy about his son's analysis and asked him: "My dear son, you see, still I am successful. I have been earning profit." Mr. Nitin replied, "My dear father, you would have been much more profitable and efficient, had you introduced professional management in your business. 'Late is better than never.' Let us work in that direction from tomorrow onwards......" This case indicates that today's business requires professionalism and modern management techniques to be competitive. Some companies like Reliance Industries, Procter and Gamble, Hindustan Lever, lTC, Dr.Reddy's Labs HDFC Bank, Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) Limited etc. are most successful and on the other side some companies like Kolleru Paper Mills Ltd., Agrifural Chemicals Ltd., Binny Mills and Panyam Cements belong to the unsuccessful category. Similarly, wefind some outperforming companies like Infosys Technologies and WIPRO. While other companies like Nava Bharat Ferro Alloys Ltd., Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT) Ltd. and Hindustan Cables Limited are low on the performance graph. Some companies like Tata, the Birla Group and Gujarat Gas Company expand and diversify their activities whereas the activities of other companies shrink day by day, subsequently recording low performance rates. Companies of the same industry are being affected by the same environmental factors. Some companies attract a number of customers while some other companies repel them. Employees prefer to be identified with some companies while they prefer to be unemployed in case of some other companies. Why do companies perform differently when they operate under the same environmental conditions, serve the same customer, use the same raw material and technology and employ the people with similar skills? The .answer for this question. invariably, is management practices. Thus 'Management' makes remarkable difference between the companies regarding their performance in terms of productivity, products, sales, profitability, service to the customer, employee welfare etc. Management plays a vital role in deciding the destiny of business as well as non-business organisations. This background urges us to know what management is? Now, we shall discuss the meaning of the term 'management.' .
- 14. Chapter One. Nature and Functions ofManagement 3 (13) [)efinitif)n f)f Manallement Management: Art of getting things done through others Managers formulate objectives based on mission Mary Parker defines the term management as "the art of getting things done through others."I But research studies concluded that management is a field of endeavour that combines art and science.z Ivancerich, Donnelly and Gibson, define the term management as "the process undertaken by one or more persons to coordinate the activities ofother persons to achieve results not attainable by any one person acting aione."3 Managers perform a number of activities, in addition to coordination. Further, this definition covers only one resource, i. e., human resources and does not focus on material resources and financial resources. John A.Pearce and Richard B.Robinson included all kinds of resources in their definition on management. According to them, "Management is the process of optimiZing human, material and financial contributions for the achievement of organisational goals."4 This definition ignores the integrated aspect of the contribution of all resources towards the attainment of organisational goals. According to Harold Koontz and Heinz and Weihrich, Management is "the process of designing and maintaining an environment in which individuals, working together in groups, efficiently accomplish selected aims."s This definition ignores the external environment through which most of the stakeholders interact with the company. Now, we shall define the term management as designing, providing and maintaining a conducive internal environment in tune with the opportunities and challenges of the external environment through planning, organising, directing and controlling all resources and operations in order to achieve effective organisational strategies efficiently. The analysis of the above definitions provide the following aspects of management: • The purpose of management is to formulate effective (right) organisational strategies and to achieve them efficiently (productively) based on the mission's objectives and goals. • Management deals with both internal and external envir:onment. • Management is concerned with all kinds of resources, viz., human, financial, material, machines, technology and technical know-how. • Management functions include: planning, organising, directing and controlling. • Managers should possess varied skills in order to playa variety of roles. • It applies to managers at all levels in an organisation. • Management is applicable to all kinds of organisations, i.e., both profit and non-profit oriented organisations. • Management vs. Administration. • Management is both an art and a science in order to create a surplus. • Management needs to be a profession to achieve goals continuously with an incremental efficiency. Now we shall discuss each of these aspects of management. Purpose of Management: To Achieve MOST Managers basically formulate Mission, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics (MOST). Management is essential to achieve the MOST. The organisational mission is the basic reason for its existence. Mission provides a statement of what the company stands for, i.e., its purpose for existence. For example, the mission statement of a commercial bank is: "A vibrant bank committed to excellence in performance through customer satisfaction." Managers formulate objectives based on this mission. Objectives are the ends towards which the activity is aimed. This goal is precise and is expressed in clear and specific terms. For example, the objective of a company is to earn profits whereas the goal is to earn certain percentage of profit on capital employed.
- 15. 4 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter One Management formulates strategies in order to achieve the goals. Strategy is a unified, comprehensive and integrated plan that relates the strategic advantages of the firm with the opportunities of the environment. For example, entering the car financing business in order to enhance the sales is a strategy to achieve the goal of earning profit on capital employed. Tactics is an action programme through which strategies are executed. Thus the purpose of management is to achieve the company's mission, objectives and strategies. Management Deals with Internal and External Environment Management while formulating strategies, studies and analyses both internal and external environment. Internal environment consists of organisational structure, finances, marketing, production and human resources. External environment consists of STEPIN viz., Social and Cultural, Technical, Economic, Political, International and Natural (see Fig.I.1). • • • • • • • • • • Management and Environment • • • • • • • • • External Social Technical , Internal ... " , ... ' Human , , , , , Resources , .................. , 1 ... , ... , ... , ... ... ' ... Management of ... IMaterial I Business/Non-Business IMachines & I Resources I Organisation ITechnology • Customers/Clients ... , ... T , ... , ... , ... , ... , ... IFinancial I , , ... Resources , ... , ... , ... , ... Environment' Economic Political Environment Management is concerned with all kinds of resources Managers manage and utilise all kinds ofresources like financial resources, human resources, materials resources etc., in the process of achieving their strategies and goals. (e) ManaGement: A §~Ien~e vr an Art1 We should know what is science and what is an art before discussing whether management is a science or an art? What is a Science?: Science is a body of knowledge developed systematically, based on observation, measurement, experimentation and drawing inferences based on data. The knowledge can be verified through cause-effect relationship. The knowledge provides principles, theory and laws. Management satisfies the characteristics of science like: • Body of knowledge is developed systematically. Management knowledge is developed through a number of systems like input-output system, organisational system, functional system etc. • Management knowledge is developed through observation, measurement and experimentation. • Inferences are drawn based on data analysis.
- 16. Management: both science and art Chapter One. Nature and Functions ofManagement 5 Management is a developing science. However, management cannot be equated with exact sciences like physics and chemistry. Most of the managerial activities like decision-making, planning, organizing and directing cannot be an exact science. What is an Art?: Art is understanding how a particular activity can be done. Art can be acquired by conscious effort and practice. Management is getting things done by and through other people. They have to continuously analyse the environment and formulate the plans and strategies. They have to modify the strategies based on environmental changes. The principles of management and theories of management cannot be implemented as learnt, in the real world. They are to be applied after making necessary modifications based on the real life situations. Thus, management is both a science and an art as it acquires the characteristics of both. (See Box 1.1). Dhirubhai never followed the textbook style of management. Instead, he evolved a unique style, which combined the American style of entrepreneurship, with the Japanese focus on the latest technology. And to this, he added the innate shrewdness of a Gujarati businessman. Analysts feel that he was a perfect manager of time, money and men and exhibited a passion to find solutions to problems. Dhirubhai started Reliance at a time when most companies in India were owned by the government, and the private players were given step-motherly treatment by the government while offering licenses and permits. Similarly, when most Indian business houses depended on government - owned, financial institutions for funds, Dhirubhai raised capital from the public by offering shares of his companies. Source: http://www.icmrindia.org/free%20resources/casestudies/Dhirubhai-Leadership%20Case%20Studies.htm. The next question to be answered: Is management a profession? ([)) ManaGement: .. Vr()'essl()n'l Any occupation to be called a profession should satisfy the following: (i) Body of knowledge: Management knowledge is developed systematically and scientifically based on research studies, experiments, experiences and observations. Further, management literature is continuously developed by researchers and practitioners. (ii) Development and updating the knowledge: Management knowledge has been developing continuously. Managers should update their knowledge by learning and acquiring the latest developments through training, executive development and formal study. (iii) Professional Journals: There should be professional journals to publish the findings of research studies. There are a number of professional journals all over the world to publish the findings of research studies and latest developments in management: Harvard Business Review, Vikalpa, Decision, Indian Management and Indian Journal of Industrial Relations. (iv) Professional Associations: There should be professional associations in order to monitor and enable professional development. Further, they implement the code of conduct. Management professional associations in India include: All India Management Association (AlMA), National Institute of Personnel Management, Institute of Chartered Accountants of India etc. (v) Code of Conduct: The professionals should behave ethically while discharging their duties. AlMA, National Institute of Personnel Management, Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and other professional organisations formulate the code of conduct. (vi) Specialised Educational Qualifications: There should be specialised educational qualifications for employment for professional jobs. Specialised educational institutions are established to impart
- 17. 6 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter One specialized education. Indian Institutes of Management and Departments of Management in the Universities are established to provide specialized management education leading to Post-graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) and Master of Business Management (MBA) degree. Management satisfies all the characteristics of a profession. Therefore, management is a profession like medicine and law. (-=) ManaGement VI. 4dmlnlltratlvn Management involves executing plans and strategies Different writers and management thinkers view management and administration differently. There is no unanimity among the writers regarding these two concepts. According to one section of writers, administration involves policy making, formulation of vision, mission, objectives and strategies. As such, administration is the function of the top level management. Further, administration decides the organisational structure and prepares the organizational plans. Management involves executing the plans and strategies and carrying out various activities determined by the administration. It directs- and controls the subordinates. Thus, management is the function of lowerievel people in the company. The second view has been advocated by E.F.L. Brech.' According to E.F.L.Brech, management is a comprehensive and integrated term. Management includes planning, organizing, directing and controlling. According to him, management can be classified into two categories viz., administrative management and operative management. Administrative Management: Administrative management represents the top level management pertaining thinking and planning functions. Administrative management performs the functions of formulation of vision, mission and strategies. It includes board of directors, managing director, general managers and chief managers. Operative Management: Operative management represents the lower level management covering execution and implementation functions. It performs the functions ofexecution, directing and controlling which involves the contribution of middle level managers and lower level managers. The third view has been advocated by Peter F. Drucker. According to him, the term administration is applicable to non-profit organisations like government organisations, service-oriented hospitals and educational institutions, military, churches, temples etc. The main activity of administration is planning, organizing, directing controlling and rendering services. Thus, governance of non-profit organisations is called administration. Governance of business organisations is referred to as management. Thus, management is concerned with business organisations and profit-oriented organisations. It is measured by the efficiency in profit-making and administration is measured by efficiency in rendering services. (.=) ManaGement .=un(;tlvnl As indicated earlier, management is the process of planning, organizing, staffing, directing and controlling the efforts of organisation members in utilising all resources to achieve organizational goals, objectives and mission. Management is a process as it operates the activities systematically. Fig.l.2 presents the management process. Functions of management include planning, organising, staffing, directing and controlling. Planning consists of the activities involved in choosing courses of action to achieve organisational objectives. It is deciding in advance what to do, when to do, how to do and who will do it, in order to
- 18. Chapter One. Nature and Functions ofManagement 7 • • • • • • • • • • • • • The Management Process • • • • • • • • • Plan: What should be achieved? Organisations: Grouping of jobs Planning Company mission is the basis for planning. Planning is deciding in advance what should be done. Managers think logically to achieve goals. Organising Organising is the process of linking and arranging t-------~-------~ activities in a sequence. It includes allocating work, authority and resources. Staffing Staffing is acquiring, developing, utilising I+---...J and compensating human resources necessarily to achieve organisational r-----t goals. Human resources help the process of converting inputs into output and achieving customer satisfaction. Directing Controlling Directing involves leading, influencing and motivating the I-____________~ Controlling is to make people to perform organisational sure that the organisation tasks and to convert input into ' is moving towards its output. It includes: mission and objectives. • Motivation • Leadership • Communication achieve these objectives. Both long-term and short-term plans are necessary to achieve goals. It is necessary for the management to adopt certain assumptions or premises with regard to external factors that serve as a background for the planning function. Some companies have adopted the practice of contingency planning in view of growing difficulty of predicting future environmental conditions. Planning is a part of the activities of all managers. Organising involves the grouping of jobs into a framework for coordination and direction. Formal organisations may be portrayed by use of an organisation chart. Careful structuring of an organisation is beneficial in terms of clarifying lines of command and eliminating gaps and overlaps. However, extremely detailed organisation structures may be dysfunctional. Once job content is determined, jobs and activities must be grouped to devise an overall structure. Decisions affecting organisational structure involve values and goals for both enterprises and individuals. Organisations are structured based on product, function, geography, customer and project. The matrix structure has evolved as a result of complex environments, markets and technology. It combines both functions and projects. Organisational culture reflects not only social values and expectations, but also the unique set of values, beliefs and behaviours that characterise each organisation. StafIituJ Staffing is planning, organising, directing and controlling of procurement, development, compensation, integration and maintenance of people for the purpose of contributing to individual, organisational and social goals. Thus, building an effective organisational team requires planning and control of human resources. This process requires the performance of the functions like job analysis, human resources
- 19. 8 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter One planning, recruitment, selection, induction, placement, training, executive development, wage and salary administration, leadership, teamwork, motivation, grievance procedure, disciplinary procedure etc. Once the employee is employed, his development needs are identified through performance appraisal. Once these needs are identified, the employee will be trained/developed with the application of on-the- job and off-the-job methods. Staffing function is also kno,¥n as human resource management. The next logical function after completing planning, organising and staffing is the execution of plan. The important function of management at any level is directing the people by motivating, commanding, leading and activating them. The willing and effective cooperation of employees for the attainment of organisational goals is possible through direction. Tapping the maximum potentialities of the people is possible through motivation and command. Thus, direction is an important managerial function in securing employee's contribution. Coordination deals with the task ofblending efforts in order to ensure successful attainment of organisational objectives. After planning, organising, staffing and directing the various activities, the performance is to be verified in order to know whether the activities are performed in conformity with the plans and objectives or not. Controlling also involves checking, verifying and comparing of actual performance with the plans, identification of deviations, if any and correcting of identified deviations. Thus actions and operations are adjusted to predetermined plans and standards through control. The purpose of control is to ensure the effective operation of an organisation by focusing on all resources - human, material, finance and machines. Financial control is attained through a number of means viz., financial statements interpreted through ratio analysis and budgets. Managers should have required skills in order to perform the functions discussed above. Now, we shall discuss managerial skills. (f7) ManaGerial iklill According to Robert L.Katz7 , there are three types of managerial skills viz., technical skills, human skills and conceptual skills. Fig.I.3 presents the managerial skills. • • • • • • • • • • Managerial Skills at Different Levels • • • • • • • • • ~ ... C, i:i: Top Level Managers (More Conceptual Skills) Middle Level Managers (More Human Skills) Lower Level Managers (More Technical Skills) :!!! .-;:: &r ~ ~ 8 § (j :!!! :!!! .-;:: .-;:: &r &r '" J ~ ~ :i J1 ~ - -
- 20. Technical Skills: Proficiency in Performanin.9 the content of the job Chapter One • Nature and Functions ofManagement 9 Technical skills are the proficiency in working with machines, tools and techniques in human resource management, financial management, marketing management and production management. Managers at all levels should possess technical skills. Those at the lower level should possess more of technical skills whereas managers at the top level possess less technical skills compared to those at middle and lower levels. Human skills include the ability to work with people tactfully, interpersonal proficiency, ability to build, maintain and work in teams and create an open environment. Managers at all levels should possess these skills. Conceptual skills include the ability to draw the total, integrated, comprehensive and the macro view of the company, situations and the ability to develop solutions for the probable problems and challenges. Top level managers should possess more ofconceptual skills compared to those of lower level managers. (Ii) ManaGerial ~()Ies Managers perform different roles as shown in Fig. 1.4. As can be seen from the figure, formal authority gives rise to three inter-personal roles and three informational roles. The two sets of roles enable the manager to play the four decisional roles. • • • • • • • • • • Roles of a Manager • • • • • • • • • Formal Authority and Status I Interpersonal Roles • Figurehead • Leader • Liaison 1 Informational Roles • Monitor • Disseminator • Spokesman I Decisional Roles • Entrepreneur • Disturbance Handler • Resource Allocator • Negotiator Source: Henry Mintzberg, "The Manager's Job", in James Brain Quinn, Henry Mintzberg and Robert M. James, "The Strategy Process," Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1988, p. 27..
- 21. 10 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter One The important interpersonal roles of managers are: Figurehead Role: Managers perform the duties of a ceremonial nature as head of the organisation, a strategic business unit or department. Duties of interpersonal roles include routine, involving little serious communication and less important decisions. However, they are important for the smooth functioning of an organisation or department. Leader Role: The manager, in charge of the organisation/department, coordinates the work of others and leads his subordinates. Formal authority provides greater potential power to exercise and get the things done. Liaison Role: As the leader of the organisation or unit, the manager has to perform the functions of motivation, communication, encouraging team spirit and the like. Further, he has to coordinate the activities of all his subordinates, which involves the activity of liaison. Manag.er emerges as the nerve centre of his organisation/department in view of his interpersonal links with his subordinates, peers, superiors and outsiders. Therefore, the manager has to play the informational role effectively to let the information flow continuously from one comer ofthe organisation to other comer. The information roles of a manager include: Monitor's Role: As a result of the network of contacts, the manager gets the information by scanning his environment, subordinates, peers and superiors. Managers mostly collect information in verbal form often as gossip, hearsay, speculation and through grapevine channels. Disseminator's Role: The manager disseminates the information which he collects from different sources and through various means. He passes some of the privileged information directly to his subordinates, who otherwise have no access to it. The manager plays an important role in disseminating the information to his subordinates, when they don't have contact with one another. Spokesman's Role: Some insiders and/or outsiders control the unit/department or the organisation. The manager has to keep them informed about the developments in his unit. He has to keep his superior informed of every development in his unit, who in tum inform the insiders and outsiders. Directors and shareholders must be informed about financial performance. Customers must be informed about the new product developments, quality maintenance, government officials about implementation of law etc. Information is an important and basic input to decision-making. The managers playa crucial role in decision-making system of the unit. Only the manager can commit the department to new courses of action and he has full and current information to initiate and implement the decisions that determine the department's or organisational strategy. The decisional roles of the manager are: Entrepreneurial Role: As an entrepreneur, the manager is a creator and innovator. He seeks to improve his department, adapt to the changing environmental factors. The manager appreciates new ideas and initiates new developmental projects. (See Box 1.2). According to Peter F. Drucker, "the manager has the task ofcreating a true whole that is larger than the sum ofits parts, a productive entity that turns out more than the sum of the resources put into it." Disturbance Handler Role: Entrepreneurial role describes the manager as the voluntary initiator of change, the disturbance handler role presents the manager as the involuntarily responding to pressures. Pressures of the situation are severe and highly demand the attention of the manager and as such the
- 22. Chapter One. Nature and FUllctions ofManagement 11 The Japanese love fresh fish. However, the waters close to Japan have not held many fish for decades. So to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever. The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring in the fish. If the return trip took more than a few days, the fish were not fresh. The Japanese did not like the taste. To solve this problem, fishing companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer. However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen and they did not like frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price. So fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little thrashing around, the fish stopped moving. They were tired and dull, but alive. Unfortunately, the Japanese could still taste the difference. Because the fish did not move for days, they lost their fresh-fish taste. The Japanese preferred the lively taste of fresh fish, not sluggish fish. So how did Japanese fishing companies solve this problem? How do they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan? If you were consulting the fish industry, what would you recommend? Too Much Money As soon as you reach your goals, such as finding a wonderful mate, starting a successful company, becoming independently wealthy or whatever, you might lose your passion. You don't need to work so hard so you relax. You experience the same problem as lottery winners who waste their money, wealthy heirs who never grow up and bored homemakers who get addicted to prescription drugs. Like the Japanese fish problem, the best solution is simple. It was observed by L. Ron Hubbard in the early 1950 's. "Man thrives, oddly enough, only in the presence of a challenging envlronment."- 1. Ron Hubbard The Benefits of a Challenge The more intelligent, persistent and competent you are, the more you enjoy a good problem. If your challenges are the correct size, and if you are steadily conquering those challenges, you are happy. You think of your challenges and get energized. You are excited to try new solutions. You have fun. You are alive! How Japanese Fish Stay Fresh? To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks. But now they add a small shark to each tank. The shark eats a few fish, but most of the fish arrive in a very lively state. The fish are challenged. Recommendations Instead of avoiding challenges, jump into them. Beat the heck out of them. Enjoy the game. If your challenges are too large or too numerous, do not give up. Failing makes you tired. Instead, reorganize. Find more determination, more knowledge, more help. If you have met your goals, set some bigger goals. Once you meet your personal or family needs, move onto goals for your group, the society, even mankind. Source: BeMobile <stella.bita@bemobile.com.pg> manag'er cannot ignore the situation. For example, workers' strike, declining sales, bankruptcy of a major customer etc. The manager should have enough time in handling disturbances carefully, skilf~lly and effectively. Resource Allocator's Role: The most important resource that a manager allocates to his subordinates is his time. He should have an open-door policy and allow the subordinates to express their opinions and share their e~pe·rienc~s. This process helps both the manager and 'his subordinates in making effective decisions. In addition, the manager should empower his subordinates by delegating his authority and power.
- 23. 12 M,anagement - Theory and Practice. Chapter Ohe Negotiator's Role: Managers spend considerable time in the task of negotiations. He negotiates with the subordinates for improved commitment and loyalty, with the peers for cooperation, coordination and integration, with workers and their unions regarding conditions of employment, commitment, productivity and with the government about providing facilities for business expansion etc. These negotiations are an integral part of the manager's job for only he has authority to commit organisational resources and is the nerve centre of information. . Though the different roles of a manager are discussed separately for convenience, they are, in fact inseparable. The manager has to perform these roles simultaneously by integrating one with the another. Thus, the major role of the manager is integrating all the roles while playing the managerial role or performing his tasks. Infact, the manager cannot play anyone role isolating the other roles. As a strategist, the manager has to integrate all the roles in decision-making and performing his tasks. (See Exhibit 1.1). Exhibit 1.1 Key Roles ofM~nagers Henry Min~berg concluded that the job of a top manager contains ten interrelated roles. The importance of each role and the amount of time demanded by each probably varies from one job to another. These roles are as follows: Figurehead Acts as legal and symbolic head; performs obligatory social, ceremonial or legal duties (hosts retirement dinners, luncheons for employees, and plant dedications; attends civic affairs; signs contracts on behalf of firm). Leader Liaison Monitor Disseminator Spokesman Entrepreneur Disturbance Handler Resource Allocator Negotiator Motivates, develops and guides subordinates; oversees staffing, training, and associated activities (introduces Management By Objectives [MBO], develops a challenging work climate, provides a sense of direction, acts as a role model). Maintains a network of contacts and information sources outside the top management in order to obtain information and assistance (meets with key people from the task environment, meets formally and informally with corporate division managers and the CEOs of other firms). Seeks and obtains information in order to understand the corporation and its environments; acts as the nerve centre for the corporation (reviews status reports from vice-presidents, reviews key indicators of corporate performance, scans Wall Street Journal and key trade journals, joins select clubs and societies). Transmits information to the rest of the top management team and other key people in the corporation (chairs staff meetings, transmits policy letters, communicates five-year plans). Transmits information to key groups and people in the task environment (prepares annual report to stockholders, talks to the Chamber of Commerce, states corporate policy to the media, participates in advertising campaigns, speaks before congressional committees). Searches the corporation and its environment for projects to improve products, processes, procedures, and structures; then supervises the design and implementation of these projects (introduces cost reduction programmes, makes plant trips to divisions, changes forecasting system, brings in subcontract work to level the workload, reorganises the corporation). Takes corrective action in times of disturbance or crisis (personally talks with key creditors, interest groups, congressional committees, union leaders; establishes investigative committees; revises objectives, strategies, and policies). Allocates corporate resources by making and/or approving decisions (reviews budgets, revis4;js programme, scheduling, initiates strategic planning, plans personnel load, sets objectives.) Represents the corporation in negotiating important agreements; may speak directly with key representatives of groups in the task environment or work through a negotiator; negotiates disagreements within the corporation by working with conflicting division -heads (works with labour as negotiator; resolves disputes, negotiates with creditors, suppliers and creditors). Source: H. Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work, Harper & Row, New York, 1973, pp. 54-94. Now, we shall study another aspect of management i.e., management levels.
- 24. Chapter One. Nature and Functions of Management 13 (I) ManaGement Le-vels Top level managers: Senior executives Management includes all the managers of a company. Management is classified as managers at different levels viz., top level managers, middle level managers and lower level managers. Top level managers are the senior level executives of the company including the Managing Director or President Vice-Presidents, General Managers, Chief Managers of the company, etc. Top level management particularly the Managing Director or President of the company is responsible for the overall management and performance of the company. Top level management formulates objectives, policies and corporate level strategies of the company. Top level managers lead and motivate the middle level managers. They coordinate the activities of middle level managers. Middle level managers are responsible for coordination of the activities of various departments. Middle level managers include managers of various departments like Production department, Marketing department, Finance department, Human Resource Department and Research and Development department. These managers are responsible for the success or failure of their departments. Middk level managers formulate the objectives, goals and strategies of their departments based on those of the organisation. In addition, middle level managers lead, motivate and coordinate the activities of the lower-level managers. Lower level managers are responsible for the work of the operating staff working with them. Lower level managers are also called First-Line or First-Level or Junior Managers. They direct, lead, motivate and coordinate the activities of the operating employees. These managers mostly supervise the operating employees while they perform their work. As such, the lower level managers are also called 'Supervisors,' Fig~ 1.5 presents management levels. • • • • • • • • • • Different Management Levels J • • • • • • • • • Top Level Management '" General Manager/ Vice-President Managing Director/President + General Manager/ Vice-President ~~d~'::.:.~- --It------r------.-------.------, Management Manager Manager Manager Manager Manager Production Finance Human Resources Marketing Research and ----------1 Development ---------- I I I Lower Level Manager Manager Manager Manager Management Materials Sched~ling Quality Control Assembly
- 25. 14 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter One (J) r=unctlvnal A.-eaS vf ManaGement Functional areas of management: Production, marketing, finance and human resource Managers are also classified based on the functional areas of management. The functional areas of management include: production, marketing, human resource, finance, research and development. The functional managers include: production manager, marketing manager, finance manager, human resource manager and manager-research and development. Functional managers mostly perform the activities of their respective functional area. As such, they fail to see the total company. General managers view the total company in an integrated and comprehensive approach. They also see the total of the sub-units and subsidiary companies besides integrating and coordinating the activities of the production department, marketing department, finance department and human resources department. General managers formulate strategies at the corporate and the business unit level. (1) Unl~e.-sallb' vf ManaGement V.-Inclples Organis(ltions are basically of two types, viz., profit-oriented organisations and non-profit oriented organisations. Business organisations are also called profit-oriented organisations. Non-business organisations belong to the second type. They are also called social organisations. Non-profit organisations include colleges, universities, churches, temples, government hospitals, clubs, service societies etc. Management principles and functions are applicable to both profit-oriented and non-profit organisations. There are varied differences among different types of non-profit organisations. The differences may be both to do with the different expectations of influencing bodies and also the special nature of revenue generation in terms of resources. Exhibit 1.2 presents the characteristics and difficulties of the management in non-profit organisations. However, it can be stated that the concepts, techniques and principles of management are applicable to both profit and non-profit organisations. As such, it is said that management principles are applicable universally. Exhibit 1.2 Characteristics and Likely Difficulties of Management in Non-Profit Organisations Characteristics Likely Difficulties ObJe'ctives and Expl)ctatlons: • Complicates planning '.Multiple service objectives and expectations • High incidence of political lobbying. • Expectations of funding bodies' influence. • Difficulties in delegating/decentralizing responsibilities and Market and Users: decision-making. • Beneficiaries of services not necessarily contributors of • Service satisfaction cannot be measured in financial terms revenue/resources. • Influence from funding bodies maybe high. Resources: • Emphasis may be on finance rather than service. • High proportion from Government! Sponsors. • Objectives may be addressed to sponsors as much as • Received in advance of services. clients. • May be multiple sources of funding (L) Inter-natif)nal ManaGement Management styles and practices vary from country to country based on the cultures. However, there may be similar styles and practices in countries with more or less similar cultures. In addition, the levels of economic development and structure of the economy also determine the management styles. There is broad distinction between the Japanese management and American management. Exhibif 1.3 provides the characteristics of Japanese management and American management.
- 26. Chapter One. Nature and Functions ofManagement 15 Exhibit 1.3 Characteristics of Japanese Management and American Management • • • • • • • Japanese Managment American Management Life Time Employment: Japanese companies used to provide. Short-term employment life time employment to the people. Now this concept is changed to life time employability. .In other words the companies continue the employment of those employes who continuously acquire new skills required by the company from time to time. Slow evaluation and promotion • . Rapid evaluation and promotion Non specified career paths • Specialised caree.r paths: Software industry in USA encourages multicareer paths Implicit control mechanisms • Explicit control mechanism Collective decision-mechanisms • Individual decision making: American companies particularly software companies have been practicising group decision-making Collective responsibility • Individual responsibility Holistic concern • Segmented concern Management styles and approaches vary widely between the western countries and the eastern countries. • Individualistic approach is more predominant in the west particularly in the USA while the group approach is more predominant in the east particularly in Japan. • Decisions are mostly made by the top management in USA and are pushed downwards. Decisions in Japan are mostly made by the interaction and participation of both top level management and lower level employees. • Employees volunteer to assist the management in the eastern countries whereas in western countries employees do riot take up the work unless otherwise the work is formally assigned to them. • Information flows freely through all directions in eastern countries, whereas it flows with a direction though a particular channel in the western countries. • Employees in USA strive for individual achievements and rewards whereas the employees in Japan strive for group achievements and rewards. • Team work is the culture of the Japanese firms and individual work is the culture of American firms. • Employees in Japan are mostly prefer empowerment while their counterparts in the USA prefer close supervision. • Japanese organisations used to employ the people throughout the life time. But, the globalisation and information technology made the Japanese organisation to develop the human resources of their employees, enhance their employability and provide employment. As such the employee turnover is almost nil in Japanese firms. • Employment in USA is for a short run. The USA companies fire the employees quite often as they follow 'hire-and-fire' policy. As such the employee turnover is high in the USA. • Japanese organisations follow humanistic approach in employing and managing people while the American companies follow mechanistic approach or 'use and throw' policy in managing people. • Japanese organisations follow long run and relationship-oriented approach whereas American companies follow short-run and pure-business oriented approach in managing business. ,
- 27. 16 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter One Different approaches to management include systems approach, the contingency approach, human resources management approach and management science approach. Different approaches to management have been discussed in detail in the next chapter, i.e., Development of Management Thought. Ct)n~ludlnlt Case PRODUCE THE BEST AT THE FIRST TIME ITSELF A prominent business group introduced on test market basis' a ready-to-drink natural fruit juice in January 1981 for the first time in India. The product received appreciation from a number of quarters including the doctors in the first three months itself. Later, the company introduced the product in a number of other markets in the country. In fact the product posed a challenge to the then existing local brands of soft drinks in the country. The CEO of the company announced the success of the company in bringing and popularizing a new product at affordable price even to the low income group people in a function on 30th July, 1981. To his surprise the CEO saw a piece of news in the newspaper next day morning that around 10 people were admitted in a hospital due to ill-health consequent upon consuming his company's product. The company received such complaints in the following days also. The company thoroughly investigated the product samples in the reputed laboratories in the country. The laboratories reported that: Iey Terms • Management • Mission • Objectives • Science • Art • Planning • Organising • Human Skills • Directing • Interpersonal Role (i) preservatives used in the product are not as per the product standards and (ii) the packing material used was also not as per the planned programme of the product development. After further enquiry, the company found that there was no checking and verification of the the preservatives used in the product and the packing material used. The company realised the need for control and immediately established a quality control unit in the production department. The company withdrew all the products from the market and tendered apology to tlie customers. The company took six months to regain the customers confidence and restore the demand. The company incurred an- additional expenditure of about Rs.100 crores for this mistake. We can understand from this case incident that controlling is as essential as planning, organizing, staffing and directing in order to perform the management functions efficiently. • Decisional Roles • Administration • Resources • Strategies • Technical Skills • Profession • Staffing • Conceptual Skills • Controlling • Information Role 1. What is management? Critically comment on various definitions on management. 2. What are the functions of management? Explain each of them. 3. What are the managerial skills? Who should have more of conceptual skills? 4. Comment on different managerial roles. ,
- 28. Chapter One. Nature and Functions ofManagement 17 5. Is management Science or Art? Defend Y0ur answer with examples. 6. What are the features of a profession? Does management satisfy these features? 7. Comment on different levels of managers. Explain their functions. 8. Discuss the differences between management and administration. lJefe.-ences 1. James A.F.Stoner, Management, Prentice Hall of India (P) Ltd., New Delhi, 1984, p.7. 2. John A.Pearce and Richard B.Robinson, Management, McGraw-Hill, 1989, p.4. 3. Ivancerich, Donnelly and Gibson, Management: Principles and Functions, Richard D.Irwin Inc., Homewood, 1991, p. 5. 4. John A.Pearce and Richard B.Robinson, op.cit., p.4. 5. Harold Koontz and Heinz Weilinch, Essentials ofManagement, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1990, p.4. 6. E.F.L.Brech, Principles and Practice of Management, Pitman, London, 1971. 7. Robert L.Katz, Skills ofAn Effective Administrator, Harvard Business Review, January-February 1955, pp.33- 42 and Robert L.Katz., Retrospective Commentary, Harvard Business Review, September-October 1974, pp.101- 102.
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- 30. CHAPTER 2 Development of Management Thought (A) Introduction (B) Scientific Management (C) Administrative Management (0) Towards Human Relations Approach (E) Human Relations Approach (F) Systems Approach to Management (G) Contingency Approach CHAPTER OUTLINE (H) Human Resource Management Approach (I) Management Science Approach (J) Conclusion Key Terms, Questions, References. LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this chapter you should be able to: • Know the contributions of Robert Owen, Charles Babbage, F.W.Taylor, Henry Gnatt and The Gllbreths to Scientific Management • Understand the Principles of Scientific Management and also critiCisms leveled against them • Analyse the contributions made by Henry Fayol and Max Weber to Administrative Management • Appraise the Fayol's Principles of Management and criticism leveled against them particularly due to globalisation and information technology • Comment on the contributions of Mary Parker Follett, Chester I Barnard and Elton Mayo to Human Relations School • Evaluate the contributions of human relations approach to management thought • Understand the contributions of Systems Approach to management, Contingency approach to management, HRM approach and Management Science Approach to management
- 31. 20 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter Two ()penlnll Case PRACTICE TO THEORY Mr. N.R.Narayana Murthy and Mr. Y.C. Deveshwar were appointed as Chairma:1 of the board of governors 11M - A and C respectively. Both are engineers from lIT and neither went to a B-school, but now they'll chair the board of governors of the two most prestigious management institutions in the country. No doubt their roles are titular but when you have people like Deveshwar and Murthy around, you don't expect their personalities not to rub on to the school. So, how different will their tasks be? At the strategic level, it will be the same-of imparting a vision. In terms of academic excellence, the IIMs (especially A, B, and C) lack nothing. But the next big leap for them will come only when they are able to produce managers who can successfully lead even in times of turbulence. At the tactical level, there may be more work to be done. UM-A has, of late, been losing ground to 11M-B. Knowing Murthy-incidentally, he's worked at 11M-A, too-he'll push for regaining the lead. That apart, entrepreneurship is another area that he may want the school, best known for its general management skills, to focus on. Deveshwar will likely drill his "lead or leave" philosophy into budding managers. For, despite being in an industry worst persecuted worldwide, he has managed to keep ITC flying high. So, he would want the quant-heavy IIM-C to go up on the B-school rankings. Both ways it's going to be a learning experience. As different thinking approaches have emerged into Schools of Management Thought, the thinki'ng approaches of these two practising managers would contribute to the development of management thought further. (Source: Adapted from Business Today, May 12, 2002.) , (4) Intrt)du~tlt)n The principles of management as in the case of other disciplines, have their impact on the practice of management. The nature ofmanagement principles include: universal applicability, dynamism, relative but not absolute limits due to human behaviour and the like. Anumber ofpractitioners, thinkers and academicians ofmanagement have contributed to the formation and development of management principles, thought and approaches. The importance oforganisation and administration in the bureaucratic states ofantiquity was manifest in the interpretations ofearly Egyptian papyri, extending as far back as 1300 B. C. 1 The same kind of records exist for ancient China. Practical suggestions for proper public administration and admonitions to choose honest, unselfish and capable public officers were included in Confucius' parables.2 Even though the records of early Greece and Rome do not offer much insight into the principles of management, existence of Athenian Commonwealth and the Roman Catholic Church indicates a consideration of management principles and functions. In military organisations too, principles of management have been considered. Although certain important principles have been applied in recent times, several others were considered long back in military organisations. Public administrators also considered several management principles for administering the people properly. The study of theories is more important as they guide management decisions, they shape our organisation, make us aware of the business environment and are a source of new ideas. Now, we shall study these theories in order to know how the management thought is developed, principles of management are evolved and different approaches to management are designed. The first among the management theories is scientific management.
- 32. Chapter Two. Development ofManagement Thought 21 (13) Sc;lentlflc; ManaGement 8abage advocated: division of labour and time study F. W. Taylor: father of scientific management The forerunners of Scientific Management theory are Robert Owen, Charles Babbage and Henry Robinson Towne. Robert Owen, who was the manager of different cotton textile mills between 1800 and 1828, was the first person to pay attention to labour welfare. He suggested a change in the attitude of industrialists towards workers. He worked up to his maximum possible extent for the amelioration of working conditions of workers and thereby tried to win over their confidence. He stated that men should not be treated as secondary and inferior to machines. Besides Robert Owen, there were some scientists who thought of making improvements in the management by observing the scientific techniques. Prominent among them was Charles Babbage, a leading British mathematician at Cambridge University from 1828-1839. He studied the working conditions of factories in England and France and observed that most of the factory class used to work on the basis of estimates and imagination. They were tradition-oriented rather than scientific- minded. Two pioneering works of Babbage are The Differential Engine and On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers. He stated that the methods of science and mathematics could be applied to the solution of the factory's problems. Contribution of Babbage • Babbage stressed that good machines and efficient workers do not inevitably ensure success in business. Good management that directs and controls machines and workers is the most crucial element in successful business. • He advocated, like Adam Smith, the principle of division of labour.3 He also suggested the use of time study techniques.4 • Babbage conceived an analytical machine as far back as 1833 which was a forerunner of today's digital computer. So he was a visionary much ahead of time. • He considered all aspects of contemporary management thinking-mutuality of interest between employees and employer, production control, incentive pay, quality control, wage and salary administration, profit sharing, operations research, preventive maintenance and research and development. It is rightly stated "He wrote a premiere of management before the world is able to read it and he invented the computer before its time." McFarland indicates: "To Babbage goes the credit for advocating in relation to industrial problems in fundamental thinking which preceded the formulation of a science of management." Hence the background for the formulation of the science ofmanagement was provided initially by Charles Babbage. Afterwards, credit has been given to F.W.Taylor for enunciating the area of scientific management. Frederick Winslow Taylor, known popularly as the father of scientific management and a classicist in management theory, was the first person who insisted on the introduction of scientific methods in management. He made for the first time a systematic study of management and evolved an orderly set of principles to replace the trial and error methods then in vogue.
- 33. Principles of scientific management: Time and motion study, differential Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter Two F.W.Taylor made a humble beginning by joining as an apprentice in a small machine-making shop in Philadelphia in the 1870s. Later he became a machinist in 1878 at the Midvale Steel Works in Philadelphia (USA). Afterwards he rose to the position of a machinist foreman. He observed that workers were not enthusiastic and were doing as little as possible, just adequate to maintain their job. Instead of becoming angry at the outlook of workers, Taylor sympathized with them. He wrote "When a naturally energetic man works for a few days besides a lazy one, the logic of the situation is unanswerable: Why should I work hard when that lazy fellow gets the same pay that I do and does only half as much work?"5 Taylor formed opinions on the basis of his observations. There was an uncompromising nature on his part and he never tried to satisfy his opponents. He was a man of firm convictions. After leaving the Midvale Factory, he joined Bethleham Steel Company: wherein he introduced scientific management. But there was strong opposition from all the managers because of his uncompromising nature and this led to the termination of his services unceremoniously. After leaving Bethleham in 1901, he wrote his pioneering work 'Shop Management.' Besides this, he wrote several other books and among them the pioneering work was Principles and Methods of Scientific Management (1911). The contributions to scientific management evolve into principles. These principles are called principles of scientific management. They include: (i) Time and Motion Study: Workers were performing their work haphazardly before the era of scientific management. F.W.Taylor observed that a number of movements of the workers at the work place were unnecessary and consequently they were taking more time to do the job than necessary. payment, group harmony, Hence, he proposed time and motion study. This study involves the following aspects: standardisation. Observing the various motions (movements) of the worker at the work place etc. • Identifying the necessary and unnecessary movements in carrying out the work • Elimination of unnecessary movements, • Observing the time required for each of the necessary movements with the help of a stop watch • Developing shorter and fewer motions and • Standardising the motions and time Thus, this study developed the best way of doing the job, replacing the old rule of thumb knowledge of the workers. (ii) Science, but not Rule of the Thumb: Scientific management suggests doing the work systematically, determining the work clearly and sequentially, standardisation of motions and time for each motion and allotment of fair work to each worker. Thus, scientific management eliminated the rule of the thumb at the workplace. (iii) Differential Payment: F.W.Taylor suggested differential piece rate,system. He fixed the standard level of production. Those employees who produce less than the standard production received low piece rate and employees produced above the standard production received higher piece rate. Differential piece rates are introduced in order to motivate the employees to produce more than the standard level and enhance productivity. (iv) Group Harmony: F.W.Taylor emphasised upon group harmony which can be achieved through satisfying the needs of the group members, eliminating the dissatisfaction and frustration of group members, maintaining the sound interpersonal relations among the group members and involving them in various group activities. (v) Cooperation Between Workers and Management: He also advocated sound employee-employer relations which should result in cooperation between workers and the management. Sound employee- employer relations can be achieved in the following ways:
- 34. Chapter Two. Development ofManagement Thought 23 • Management should understand the workers' needs and take steps to satisfy them. • Workers should understand the organisational requirements like increasing productivity, sales, profitability etc. and maximising their contribution. (vi) Methods Study: F.W.Taylor believed that a methodological and systematic movement of materials ensure fast movement of materials in the factory, avoidance of unnecessary transportation of material from one stage to another stage of production, reduction of distance from one machine to another machine, reduction of the transportation time etc. (vii) Scientific Selection and Training: He suggested the scientific selection of employees based on job analysis and using various selection tests. He also suggested providing training and development facilities to all the employees based on training needs. This process helps the organisation to exploit the employers' potentialities and faculties for organisational success. (viii) Standardisation: Taylor advocated the importance of standardisation tools, instruments, working hours, working conditions, quality of work, cost of production etc. (ix) Separation of Planning from Execution: He advocated separation of the planning function from the execution function. He advocated that superviso~s perform planning function whereas workers perform execution functions.6 . Taylor got an excellent opportunity in 1912 to explain his scientific management philosophy when he was invited to give a testimony before the house of Representatives Committee. Some of the extracts from his testimony are as follows: • Scientific management involves a complete mental revolution on the part of the working men engaged in any particular establishment or industry - a complete mental revolution on the part of these men as to their duties towards their work, towards their fellowmen and towards their employers. • Employer and employees both realise that when they substitute friendly co-operation and mutual helpfulness for antagonism and strife, they are together able to make surplus so enormously greater than it was in the past that there is ample room for a large increase in wages for the workmen and an equally great increase in profits for the manufacturer.7 Thus, Taylor advocated a total mental revolution on the part of management and workers. Even though his scientific management was confined to management at the shop level, he indicated the possibility and significance of the scientific analysis of the various aspects of management. To sum up, he stressed the following: . (i) Replacement of rule-of-thumb by science. (ii) Achieving harmony in group action rather than discord. (iii) Attaining maximum output in place of restricted output. (iv) Scientific selection, training and placement of workers and (v) Development of all workers to the fullest extent possible for their own and their enterprise's highest priority. F.W.Taylor's contribution was criticised on the following grounds: (i) The consideration of the word 'Scientific' before 'Management' was criticised since what actually is meant by scientific management is nothing but an approach to management. Oi) His principles were mostly confined to production management. He ignored other functional areas of management like finance, marketing, personnel and accounting. (iii) His functional foremanship violates the principle of unity of command.
- 35. 24 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter Two (iv) Trade unionists criticised Taylor's principles as the means to exploit workers due to the reason that wages of the workers were not increased in direct proportion to the increase in productivity. Despite the criticism leveled against Taylor's scientific management, the techniques advocated by him were further refined by his followers like Henry L.Gantt, Frank B.Lillian and M.Gilbreth. Henry L.Gnatt (1861-1919) had worked on several projects jointly with F.W.Taylor. He had modified Taylor's incentive system when he worked independently. He abandoned the differential rate system as having too little motivational impact, introduced 50% bonus to those workers who could complete a day's work. He also introduced bonus to the supervisors for each worker who could complete a day's work and additional bonus, if all the workers reached it, with a view to enable the supervisors to train their workers to do a better job. Gnatt also built upon Owen's idea of rating an employee's work publicly. Frank B.Gilbreth (1868-1924) and Lillian M.Gilbreth (1878-1972) made their contributions to the scientific management movement as a husband and wife team. Although both of them collaborated on fatigue and motion studies, Lillian also focused on ways of promoting the individual workers' welfare. According to her, the ultimate aim of scientific management was to help workers reach their full potential as human beings. According to them, a worker would do his/her present job, prepare for the next highest job and train his/her successor, all at the same time. Thus every worker would always be a doer, a learner and a teacheJ;'.8 The developments in the scientific management approach and principles led to the development of administrative management. Now, we shall discuss the contributions to administrative management. (e) Admlnlstratl''e ManaGement Henry Fayol was a major contributor to administrative management approach. Henry Fayol started his career as a mining engineer in 1860 in a colliery company in France. In 1866, he was appointed as the manager of the collieries and remained in this position for 22 years. In 1888, when the company's financial position was critical, he was appointed as the General Manager. He held this position with his expertise for 30 years and retired in 1918, at a time when the company had become one of the biggest coal companies in France. His observations on the principles of general management first appeared in 1916 in French under the title Administration Industriella et Generale, and this was translated into English in 1949 under the title General and Industrial Administration.9 Faylol: Division This book contains two parts: the first part is concerned with the theory of administration and the second of business part with the discussion on training for administration. activities into six Fayol felt that the activities ofbusiness could be divided into six groups: (i) Technical; (ii) Commercial; groups (iii) Financial; (iv) Security; (v) Accounting; and (vi) Managerial. Fayol felt that the first five were well known and as a result, devoted most of his book to an analysis of the sixth. He classified the managerial group into six sub-groups, viz., forecasting, planning, organising, coordinating, commanding and controlling. Fayol stated the qualities required by managers to be physical, mental, moral, educational and technical. As a matter of fact, he emphasised that as
- 36. Chapter Two • Development ofManagement Thought 25 one goes higher up in the levels of management, the administrative knowledge and skills become relatively more and more important, and technical knowledge and skill less important. Fayol's Principles of Management In addition, Fayollisted out fourteen principles of management. They are: (i) Division of Labour: The more people specialise, the more efficiently they can perform their work. This principle is epitomised by the modern assembly line. (ii) Authority: Managers must give orders so that they can get things done. While their formal authority gives them the right to command, managers will not always compel obedience unless they have personal authority (such as relevant expertise) as well. (iii) Discipline: Members in an organisation need to respect the rules and agreements that govern the organisation. To Fayol, discipline results from good leadership at all levels of the organisation, fair agreements (such as provisions for rewarding superior performance) and judiciously enforced penalties for infractions. (iv) Unity of Command: Each employee must receive instructions from only one person. Fayol believed that when an employee reported to more than one manager, conflicts in instructions and confusion of authority would ultimately result. (v) Unity of Direction: Those operations within the organisation that have the same objective should be directed by only one manager using one plan. For example, the personnel department in a company should not have two directors, each with a different hiring policy. (vi) Subordination of Individual Interest to the Common Goal: In any undertaking, the interests of employees should not take precedence over the interests of the organisation as a whole. (vii) Remuneration: Compensation for work done should be fair to both employees and employers. (viii) Centralisation: Decreasing the role of subordinates in decision making is centralisation, increasing their role is decentralisation. Fayol believed that managers should retain final responsibility, but should at the same time give their subordinates enough authority to do their jobs properly. The problem is to find the proper degree of centralisation in each case. (ix) The Hierarchy: The lines of authority in an organisation are often represented today by the neat boxes and lines of the organisation chart that runs in order of rank from the top management to the lowest level of the enterprise. (x) Order: Materials and people should be in the right place at the right time. People in particular, should be in the jobs or positions in which they are most suited. (xi) Equity: Managers should be both friendly and fair to their subordinates. (xii) Stability of Staff: A high employee turnover rate undermines the efficient functioning of an organisation. (xiii) Initiative: Subordinates should be given the freedom to conceive and carry out their plans, even though some mistakes may result. (xiv) Esprit de Corps: Promoting team spirit will give the organisation a sense of unity. To Fayol, even small factors could help to develop the spirit. He suggested, for example, the use of verbal communication instead of formal, written communication whenever possible.10 It may be stated that F.W.Taylor and Henry Fayol together gave an almost complete theory of management. Taylor studied with utmost care the lowest level of industrial hierarchy whereas Fayol, on the other hand, worked from the top of the industrial hierarchy downward. The universality of the principles of management could be understood throughout the treatise of Fayol. He should be regarded as the father of modern management theory since he was first to emphasise that better management is not merely a question of improving the output of labour, but of planning of the subordinate units of an organisation.
- 37. 26 Improve the performance of socially significant organisations Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter Two Criticism of Fayol's Principles The contributions of Henry Fayol were criticised as hereunder. • The principles of unity of command and unity of direction are redundant in modern private organisations. Most ofthe private organisations after the announcement ofliberalisation, privatisation and globalisation are dynamic in order to meet the customer's needs before the customers identify or realise them. • The dynamic organisations are team-based, loosely structured, flat organisations and they change their structures based on strategy (structure follows the strategy principle) etc. Orders and commands flow through different directions in teams and loosely structured organisations. Similarly, direction also flows through various directions in modern organisations. Thus, these two principles are not applicable in modern organisations. • The principle of scalar chain is also not applicable in modern organisations as the information requests for carrying out the work flow in different lines. • Many modern organisations implemented business process reengineering (BPRE) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). These two techniques are based on team work and need the employees with multiple skill sets as the team members are required to carry out multiple activities. As such, the principles of division of labour and specialisation are not applicable to those organisations which implemented BPRE and ERP. • Fayol's principles indicate that organisations are a closed system. But most of the organisations today are open systems. As such, Fayol's principles are not applicable to the organisations based on open systems. • Fayol's principles like unity of command, unity of direction, division of labour, specialisation and span of management are applicable to tall and mechanistic organisations. Mechanistic organisations are insensitive to employees' social and psychological needs. Further, they do not use the employees skills and potentialities to the maximum extent. Max Weber (1864-1920) felt the need for controlled regulations particularly in large organisations where thousands of people are employed and developed a theory of bureaucratic management, which emphasizes on a strictly defined hierarchy governed by clearly defined regulations and lines of authority.11 For Weber, the ideal organisation was a bureaucracy. Today, we view bureaucracies as vast, impersonal organisations that put impersonal efficiency ahead ofhuman needs. But Weber sought to improve the performance of socially significant organisations by making their operations productive.12 (I)) T()wards liuman ~elatl()ns 4ppr()a~h Mary Parker and Chester I Barnard developed the theories on the basic framework of classical school, but they introduced many new elements in the area of human relations and organisational structure. Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) was convinced that labour and management shared a common purpose as members of the same organisation. But she believed that the distinction between superiors (order givers) and subordinates (order takers) hi~dered natural partnershipY She developed a behavioural model of organisational control. In her model, control was sponsored by and oriented towards the group. Self control was exercised by both individuals and groups, with the result being shared control or power.
- 38. Chapter Two. Development ofManagement Thought 27 According to Barnard (1886-1961), people work together to achieve organisational goals as individually they are not able to accomplish and at the same time they must also satisfy their individual goals. The central thesis of Barnard is that an organisation should balance its goals with the needs and aims of employees for its efficient functioning and survival. He also stressed the use of informal groups effectively, even when they work at cross-purposes to achieve management objectives, sometimes, in order to ensure organisational survival. He believed that executives had a duty to install a sense of moral purpose in their employees. He also stressed considerable attention on the role of individual worker as "as the basic strategic factor in an organisation."14 (1:) liuman ~elatlt)ns .4pprt)ac;h The human element was recognised even in the Scientific Management School. The human relations approach is the outcome of reactions of classical theorists like Mary Parker and Chester I Barnard. Elton MayolS and his associates pointed out that the techniques of scientific management are not adequate and they do not contribute to individual and organisational goals. The essence of human relations approach is that workers should be treated as human beings but not as mere factors of production. Workers' needs, feelings, attitudes, values and desires are extremely important. The theme of human relations approach is that (i) organisational situation should be viewed in social terms as well as in economic and technical terms and (ii) the social process ofgroup behaviour can be understood in terms of the clinical method analogous to the doctor's diagnosis of the human organism.16 An intensive and systematic analysis of human factor was made in the form of Hawthorne Experiments. Elton Mayo is generally recognised as the father of human relations approach although a number of professors of the Harvard Business School and managers of Hawthorne Plant of Western Electric Company USA where the experiments were conducted between 1924 and 1933 had been associated with him. The series of experiments conducted may be classified as: (i) Phase 1. Illumination Experiments This experiment was conducted to know the impact of illumination on productivity. The experiment involved the prolonged observation of two groups of employees making telephone relays. The intensity of light under which one group worked (test group) systematically varied while the light was held constant for the second group (control group). The productivity of the test group and control group increased. The researchers concluded that some other variables were contaminating the effects of the light changes. (II) Phase 2. Relay Assembly Test Group A small group of workers was placed in a separate room and a number of variables were altered - like wages were increased, rest periods of varying lengths were introduced, the workday and work week were shortened. The supervisors, who acted as observers, also allowed the groups to choose their own rest periods and members of their own groups and to involve in decision making regarding suggested changes. Performance tended to increase over the period but it also increased and decreased erratically. (m) Phase 3. Interviewing Programme Mayo initiated a three year long interviewing programme in 1828, covering more than 21,000 employees to find out the causes for increased productivity. The emphasis of this phase was on human relations rather than on working conditions. This programme initially proved to be useless as employees often
- 39. 28 Human Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter Two gave stereotyped responses. This led the interviewers towards asking indirect questions. Then the employees began to air their feelings freely. The point demonstrated by this interviewing programme is central to the human relations approach. And for the first time, the importance of the informal work group is recognised. Then, the bank wiring room experiment was set up in order to find out how informal work groups operate. (Iv) Phase 4. The Bank Wiring Observation Room Experiment (1931-32) In this experiment, 14 male workers were formed into a work group and intensively observed for seven months in the bank wiring room, engaged in the assembly of terminal banks for the use in telephone exchanges. The employees were paid individual wages and a bonus based on group effort. It was expected that highly efficient workers would bring pressure on others for increased output and high bonus. However, the expected results did not come about and indeed the group developed specific mechanisms to protect themselves based on certain sentiments: The rate buster sentiment The chiseler sentiment The squealer sentiment don't turn out too much work. don't turn out too little work. don't tell superiors anything that would harm an associate. The officious sentiment don't act too officious in performing duties, conform rather to work group norms. Work group norms, beliefs, sentiments had a greater impact in influencing individual behaviour than did the monetary incentives offered by the management. Thus, the Hawthorne Experiments indicated that employees were not only economic beings but social and psychological beings as well. The researchers concluded that employees would work better had they believed that the management was concerned about their welfare and supervisors paid special attention to them. This phenomenon (subsequently labelled the Hawthorne effect), has remained quite controversial to this day. The concept social man, according to Mayo, motivated by social needs, wanting, rewarding, on-the- job relationships and responding more to work-group pressures than to management control - was necessary to complement the old concept of rational man motivated by personal economic needs.17 There is a departure from the scientific management approach regarding the influence of engineering factors for increase in productivity. Mayo had rediscovered Robert Owen's century-old dictum that a true concern for workers, 'those vital machines', paid dividends. relations approach: democratic leadership. training. group • dynamics and motivation • This approach suggested that the democratic style of supervision yields more benefits than task- centred leadership by informal organisation than by formal organisation. In addition, the researchers recognized the significance of a manager's style and thereby stressed on management training. • More attention was paid on teaching management skills rather than technical skills to people. (See Box 2.1) • Finally their work led to a new interest in group dynamics, group process and group reward rather than individual worker. • Another contribution of human relations approach was that business organisation is more than the logical arrangement of work functions and social factors should also be considered in designing an organisation structure. This school is characterised by a genuine interest in organic (humanistic) structure rather than mechanistic structure. • Workers' output is determined by the group norms but not by the time study and motion study. • Workers are motivated not only by the money but also by non-financial rewards.
- 40. • Chapter Two • Development ofManagement Thought 29 Premji firmly believes that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things. The key to this is creating highly charged teams. He takes a personal interest in developing teams and leaders and invests personal time in his managers. Managers agree that Premji is happy to work alongside them, making sales calls with the marketing team, and is said to welcome criticism. A just boss, if a stern master. "1 demand of others only what 1 demand of myself," he says. That's fine if you also happen to enjoy working fifteen hours a day. Mistakes are not penalized but deception is akin to waving a red flag in front of a raging bull. There 's a legend (true!) that Premji once preferred to face a tough, three-month strike rather than rehire an employee who had submitted fraudulent expense accounts. "The person said he was traveling in first class, when in fact he was traveling in second class and pocketing the difference," he recalls, "that was unacceptable." To be able to predict the future and rightly predict it is what differentiates smart managers from managers. And Premji has proved himself as a manager with a finger on the pulse of the world. The future, according to him, will see significant changes in technology, economy and society. "But what will remain unchanged is the need of the customer for an organization with a human face." < Source: http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/management/azim-premji-his-strategy-for-wipro_189075.html< Human Relations: Definition Human relations pertains to motivating people in organisations in order to develop teamwork which effectively fulfils their needs and leads to achieving organisational goals. Thus human relations: strive to create a positive and conducive work environment, focuses on people, has the ultimate goal of increase in productivity and seeks to build human cooperation towards achievement of organisational goals. Major Concepts in Human Relations: According to experts in human relations, organisations should be viewed as a social system with economic and social dimensions. The work environment should be conducive for the restoration of man's dignity. Sound human relations encourage people to work together. It is determined by the nature of the leader, the work environment and the work (Fig.2.l). • • • • • • • • • • Human Relations in Action: Basic Model • • • • • • • • • Wr k Work r--------., Individual~ I The I .-Leader I Organisation I L _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ~ Environment Work Basic Model The humanistic approach is based on two assumptions viz. (i) the organisation is a system designed to produce or distribute a product or a service at a reasonable price and (ii) the organisation is a social •
- 41. 30 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter Two system through which individuals try to find expression for their needs, goals and aspirations. The basic model for this approach should be employer participation, job satisfaction and increased productivity. The Individual: According to the neo-classical theory, individual behaviour is affected by feelings, sentiments and attitudes. An individual is motivated not only by economic factors but also by social factors. Due consideration should be given to economic and social factors in motivating employees. The Work Group: The social group is the centre of focus of human relations studies. The Hawthorne studies proved that the informal work groups exert tremendous influence over workers' behaviour patterns. Work is a social interaction, where workers are more satisfied as members in a social group. The Organisation and the Work Environment: An industrial organisation is a techno-economic and social system. Hence, it is necessary to understand rational as well as non-rational and formal as well as informal aspects and the work environment of an organisation. Positive work environments are characterised by factors like: clearly stated goals, incentives to improve performance, performance feedback, employee involvement in decision-making, rules to the minimum extent, interesting and challenging work and the like. The Leader: The leader has to use all types of resources including human resources in the process of attaining organisational goals. Proper utilisation of human resources enables the leader to achieve these goals effectively. Aleader can contribute significantly for high productivity by creating a conducive and free-work environment. Criticisms ofthe Human Relations Approach (i) Scientific Validity: Although the Hawthorne Experiments profoundly influenced the managers in managing their employees, the studies had many weaknesses of design, analysis and interpretation. Whether Mayo and his colleagues' conclusions are consistent with their data is still the subject of lively debate and considerable confusion.IS These studies had a clinical bias as they discounted theory and stressed on radical empiricism. Most of the conclusions are not supported by adequate scientific evidence. (ii) Shortsighted: The following points confirm the shortsightedness of this approach: (i) it lacks adequate focus on the work; (ii) human relations tend to neglect economic dimensions of work satisfaction and (iii) human relations research is concerned with only operative employees but not managerial and supervisory personnel. (iii) Over-concern with happiness: The Hawthorne studies suggested that happy employees would be productive employees. But studies have failed to establish a positive correlation between happiness and productivity. (iv) Misunderstanding of Participation: Many of the post-Hawthorne human relationists expected that participation would reduce resistance to formal authority and would ensure worker's support for organisational goals. But recent studies indicate that employees want to be utilised properly. (v) The Mystery surrounding group decision-making: Research evidence on the supe'riority of group decision-making to individual decision-making is conflicting and inconclusive. The entire thinking of group decision-making is mystical. (vi) Conflict: The human relationists failed to recognise positive aspects of conflict like creative force in society. They believed that conflict is always bad and should be minimised. (vii) Anti-Individualist: The human relations movement is anti-individualist. The concept of individualism and individual behaviour which is predominant in an organisational setting is overridden by the concept of group decision-making and group behaviour. Human relations approach failed to stescribe completely individuals in the work place. (viii) Total Work Environment is not considered: Work environment comprises of organisational structure, its culture and climate, labour-management relations, social environment etc. But the human relations approach considered only social environment as the total work environment.
- 42. Chapter Two. Development ofManagement Thought 31 The next approach developed towards management is systems approach. Now, we shall study the system approach to management. (f] SYstems "PPI"t)ach tt) ManaGement Organisation: Unified, proposeful system composed of interrelated parts. A system is a set of interrelated but separate parts working towards a common purpose. The arrangement of elements must be orderly and there must be proper communication facilitating interaction between the elements and finally this interaction should lead to achieve a common goal. Thus, systems approach to management views the organisation as a unified, purposeful system composed of interrelated parts. Hence, managers have to deal with the organisation as a whole rather than dealing separately with various segments of an organisation. This approach also gives the managers to see the organisation as a whole and as a part of the larger external environment. Systems theory reveals to us that the activity of any segment of an organisation, affects in different degrees, the activity of every other segment.19 Systems-oriented managers would make decisions only after they have identified impact of these decisions on all other departments and the entire organisation. The essence of the systems approach is that each manager cannot function in isolation and within his organisational boundary of authority and responsibility of the traditional organisational chart. They must intertwine their departments with the total organisation and communicate with all other departments and employees and also with other organisation" s.2 0 Key Concepts ofSystems Approach (i) Subsystem: Subsystems are those parts which make up the whole system. Each system in turn may be a subsystem of a still larger system. Thus, a department is a subsystem of a factory, which is a subsystem of a firm, which is a subsystem of an industry, which is a subsystem of a national economy, which is a subsystem of the world economic system. (ii) Synergy: Synergy is the situation in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In organisational terms, synergy means that departments that interact co-operatively are more productive than they would be, if they operated in isolation. (iii) Open System: It is a system that interacts with its environment. All organisations interact with their environment, but the extent to which they do so varies. (iv) Closed system: It is a system that does not interact with its environment. (v) System Boundary: It is the boundary that separates each system from its environment. It is rigid in a closed system while flexible in an open system. (vi) Flows: A system has flows of information, materials and energy. These enter the system from the environment as inputs (like raw materials), undergo transformation process within the system (like production process) and exist in the system as outputs (like products/services). (Fig.2.2 shows the flows and feedback in an open system). (vii) Feedback: It is the part of system control in which the results of actions are returned to the individual, allowing work procedures to be analysed and corrected. Systems approach helps the dynamic and interrelated nature of organisations to plan for actions and anticipate consequences and mutual effects. It helps the general managers to maintain balance among various subsystems and the organisation. Thus a major contribution of the systems approach results from its strong emphasis on the interrelatedness or mutuality of various subsystems of the organisation. Treatment of the organisation as an open system is another contribution of systems approach.
- 43. 32 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter Two t I • • • • • • • • • • The Flows and Feedback In the Open System • • • • • • • • • IExternal I 1 IEnvironmentJ ! Input(Resources) Output • Human Transformation • Products • Capital r-------. • Services • Materials T :!(.!' t Feedback According to Herbert B.Hicks and C.Ray Gullett,21 the characteristics of systems approach to management are: (i) Dynamic: The process between subsystems within an organisation is dynamic. (ii) Multilevel and multidimensional: An organisation can interact with other organisations and the economy at various levels and in multifarious ways. (iii)Multimotivated: Since the organisation is dynamic and has multiple goals, an act in the organisation may be motivated by several motives. (iv) Probabilistic: Management would be mostly probabilistic as it is operated under a highly turbulent and dynamic environment. (v) Multidisciplinary: Systems theory of management is contributed by various disciplines. (vi) Descriptive: Instead of providing certain prescriptions, this theory describes the features of organisation and management. (vii)Adaptive: All the subsystems should be adaptable and accommodate to the changes in other subsystems. (t7) Ct)ntlnaencY 4pPI"t)ilch Contingency approach is also called situational approach. This approach was developed by managers, consultants and researchers who tried to apply the concepts of the major schools to real life situations. They sought to know the causes for the success of methods in one situation and failure in another situation. Advocates of this approach answered that results differ because situations differ, as such a technique that works effectively in one situation will not necessarily work in all cases. Hence managers have to identify the technique which will best contribute to the attainment of the management's goal in a particular situation, under particular circumstances and at a particular time. Classical theorists suggest work implication for increase in productivity whereas behavioural scientists suggest job enrichment. But the manager under contingency approach should find out which method will work better in that particular situation. This approach builds upon systems approach. The composition of a particular situation or system will help to know the technique best suited to that particular situation or system. (See Box 2.2). •
- 44. Chapter Two • Development ofManagement Thought 33 When Ratan Tata visited the home of the designer Ralph Lauren last year, the two car enthusiasts spent much of the time in the garage admiring Lauren's car collection, including the classic 1955 Jaguar XKD. Now Tata is poised to take over Jaguar. Tata Motors said on Thursday it was beginning detailed talks with Ford Motor about buying the Jaguar and Land Rover brands, confirming what investors and analysts in India, Detroit and Britain have expected for months. Tata said it wanted to reach an agreement over the next few weeks. For Ratan Tata, 70, the takeover will cap 16 years of transforming one of the world's most diverse and unusual conglomerates, the Tata Group. Through 98 companies, Tata creates and sells products ranging from steel to tea to watches, making the company's name ubiquitous in India. Under Ratan Tata, the name has started to reverberate around the globe as well. A string of international deals has diversified Tata to the point where more than half its'-revenue this year will come from outside India. Tata's increasingly global outlook is also bolstering the overseas ambitions of other Indian companies. Going overseas was necessary, Ratan Tata said. In the late 1990s, the group's truck unit recorded a loss that was the biggest in Indian history, he said in a recent interview in Tata's headquarters in the leafy Colaba district of Mumbai. "We were so dependent on one economy. I decided we needed a broader view." Since then Tata has done dozens of deals, buying businesses as diverse as the Tyco Global Network, Daewoo Commercial Vehicles, the Moroccan chemical company Imacid, Tetley Teas and, most audaciously, the US$11 .3 billion ($12.8 billion) takeover of the British steel maker Corus last year, a company several times the size of Tata Steel. The group's 27 listed companies have a market capital of more than US$70 billion, and the group reported after-tax profit of US$2.8 billion the last financial year, a 33 per cent increase from the year before, in part because of the Corus acquisition. The Corus deal garnered Ratan Tata rare criticism, analysts wondering whether he had taken on too much. Corus "came to us; we didn't seek them out", he said, and it was a deal he could not pass up. In "one swoop we were in Europe, where we weren't before. That opportunity was going to happen once. " The Tata Group is an unusual corporate enterprise. Started in 1868 by Jamshedji Tata, one of India's dwindling group of Parsis, the group has often seemed to value employees as much as profits (paying laid-off Tata Steel employees for the rest of their lives when the company made cuts, for example), and has prided itself on fair practices, rather than cut-throat manoeuvring or paying bribes, a practice still prevalent in some of corporate India. Indeed, Ratan Tata seems the most unlikely of corporate titans - almost preternaturally humble, unabashedly open about the company's mistakes and about the fact that he never really wanted to be an industrialist. He studied architecture at Cornell University. After decades of working for the family business, he says he is considering opening a small architecture firm when he retires. He is a distant relative of the founder - his father was adopted by the wife of one of Jamshedji's sons. Never married, he lavishes attention on his dogs, writes thank-you notes to employees who do him favours, and is often spied on Sundays driving alone Marine Drive In Mumbal in one of the several cars he owns. "None of us observers of the Tatas could have predicted that he would grow and blossom the way he has and be in total charge of the company the way he has," said R.M. Lala, the author of several books about the family and companies, and a one-time direc;tor of the Tata Trust, a charity that finances health care and education projects in India. Other executives and companies may have made more money in India, Mr. Lala said, "but Tata is still the most respected name in Indian industry". As company chairman, Ratan Tata has been instrumental in carrying on the family legacy and turning what was a loosely aligned group of companies that shared one name into a group with seven business lines and centralised management. It is a business plan he developed in the most unlikely of settings: he spent three months at his mother's bedside at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in Manhattan in 1981. At the time, he was chairman of Tata Industries, then a small part of the group responsible for new ventures. When he was named chairman in 1991 he started reining in some of the company's independently minded managers and giving the parent company sizable equity stakes in its offspring. The process was not easy, he wrote in a 2003 epilogue to The Creation of Wealth, a book about the Tatas. "If I reflect on what these 10 years have been for me personally, they have been a mixed bag," he wrote. "There is some satisfaction that l'veseen the group come together in many ways ... [but] at the same time there is a sense of frustration at the resistance to change from many of my colleagues that I have seen through this period of time. "
- 45. 34' Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter Two All in all, he wrote, ' "it has been a hard and sometimes unrewarding experience". Outsiders do not see it that way. The Tata family has been "all about building businesses and being farsighted about it", said Tarun Jotwani, the chief executive of Lehman Brothers in India. What Ratan Tata has done very well is be the strategic and ethical head, while providing a "culture of integrity", Mr Jotwani said. Ratan Tata's reign may come to an end soon. He said he was considering retiring after one of his pet projects, the $US2500 People's Car, hits showrooms this year. Tata has no heirs, and there is no likely family member to take over his role, meaning the man who 'brought the Tata Group to the rest of the world may be the last Tata to run the company. Source: http://www.smh.com.aulbusiness/ratan-tata-genius-who-is-indias-gift-to-world-20080106-1 kg8.html ' (Ii) liuman ~el()UI"(;e Manaaement APPI"()a(;h Human resource is a principal and central sub-system and resource of an organisation. Both the human resource system and the entire organisation operate under the same environmental factors. Greater the effectiveness and productivity of human resources, the more will be the effectiveness of the organisation. Most of the managers say, our greatest asset is people. Human resource management approach is developmental. It is concerned with the growth and development of people toward higher levels of competency, creativity and fulfilment. The human resource management approach is supportive.22 It helps employees to develop through training and development and other techniques of human development. It also develops more responsible and committed persons through the creation of conducive organizational climate, strong culture, attractive reward system, free and challenging work environment, team spirit and the like. This approach assumes that increased capabilities and expanded opportunities for people will lead directly to the improvement ofthe organizational effectiveness and efficiency. Employee job satisfaction will also be a direct result when employees make use of their resources to the fullest extent. Thus, the human resource management approach reveals that sound management of human resources through proper training and development, judicious salary administration, creating conducive work environment, providing challenging job and maintaining sound industrial relations result in the employee contribution for achievement of organizational goals. (I) Manaaement S(;len(;e APPI"()a(;h Science is a systematically organized body of knowledge based on proper findings and exact principles and is capable of verification and general application. Science is systematic in the sense that certain relationships between variables have been ascertained, principles and their limitations have been . discovered, tested and established. Facts are determined based on events or things observed initiaily with the help of scientific methods. The accuracy of the facts are verified through observations on a continuous basis. Thus, the knowledge obtained must be verifiable in scientific method. Any subject to be called science must have the following characteristics: (i) Systematic body of knowledge (ii) Method of scientific enquiry (iii) Should establish cause and effect relationship (iv) Principles should be verifiable (v) Should ensure predictable results I,
- 46. Chapter Two. Development ofManagement Thought 35 (vi) Should have universal application. Management has a systematized body of knowledge pertaining to its field. The scientific character of management is well supported by mathematical models and operations research. A manager can also take appropriate decisions based on decision science like any scientist. The principles underlying time and motion studies, market research, morale, motivation, job satisfaction etc. are developed based on scientific enquiry. Many management principles like planning, direction, organisation, motivation, morale etc., establish cause and effect relationship. Management principles like unity of command, span of control and unity of direction can be verifiable. Those in the category of job satisfaction, morale and job enrichment ensure predicable results. Almost all the management principles are universally applicable. (J) CC)ncluslC)n However, it must be pointed out that management cannot be an exact science like physics, chemistry and natural science. According to Peter F.Drucker, management can never be an exact science. Further, management cannot be an exact science as business is highly dynamic and business conditions change continuously. Management can be a social science as it mostly deals with human beings. CC)ncludlnll Case A Surfeit of Gurus They follow a path pioneered by the likes of Norman Vincent Peale-dea-d eight years, this Christmas eve-Steven Covey and Tom Peters. A few decades ago, they would have considered themselves lucky to find a sturdy soap box; today, people pay good money to listen to them talk. India has its own management-evangelists, people like Shiv Khera, Arindam Chaudhuri, Rajesh Aggarwal, Mukesh Khetrapal and Asit Ghosh. None of them boasts the pedigree of Peters (McKinsey) or the oratorical skill of Covey. But none is short of either kind of management platitudes Khera's thought that "Winners don't do different things, they do things differently", or theories, like Theory 'I, Chaudhuri's wholly-Indian approach to management. "When something is expressed in the form of a theory, people can relate to it". Becoming a motivational speaker is a great career move. Khera charges Rs.20,SOO for a three-day workshop; Chaudhuri, Rs.2S,OOO for a half-a-day's programme; and Aggarwal, Rs.9,7S0 for a 12-week course. Aggarwal doesn't have the educational qualifications one would expect of a guru, and his last job was as an administrative assistant with H- P. Jogesh Nayar, MD, Koshika Telecom says that "There are certain things they teach that can be useful for your everyday life." Arun Kumar of Hughes Software, Ravi Bhoothalingam, formerly of the Oberoi Group, Punj Lloyd's Subhash Jagota, the Hero Group's Pankaj Munjal, and Jindal Polyster's Shyam Jindal have all attended workshops conducted by Khera or Chaudhuri. The speakers, expectedly, have rather immodest opinions of what they do. "We inspire people to motivate themselves," says Khera. And Aggarwal promises to "shape the destiny of individuals." Thus, we understand from the contributions of various Management gurus that Gurus don't say different things, they just say things differently, all with the motive of successful management. (Source: Adapted from Business Today, July 6, 2001.)
- 47. 36 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter Two Iey Terms • Group Harmony • Authority • HRMApproach • Management Science Approach • Time Study • Unity of Command • Motion Study • Human Relations • Synergy • Functional Foremanship • Work Group • Open System • Standardisation • Systems Approach • Closed System • Division of Labour • Contingency Approach • Differential Payment Vuestlvns 1. What is scientific management? Discuss the contributions made to scientific management. 2. Discuss the principles of scientific management in detail. J. Why and how the principles of scientific management have been criticised? 4. Explain the contributions made to the Administrative Management. 5. Discuss,in detail Fayol's principles of management and their relevance to the modern companies. 6. Comment on the Hawthorne Experiments and their outcome. 7. What is human relations? Discuss the contributions to and major concepts in human relations. 8. Appraise the systems approach to management. What are its features? 9. Write short notes on: (i) Contingency approach to management (ii) HRM approach to management (iii) Management Science Approach to management. ~eferencel 1. A.Lepawsky, Administration, Alfred A.Kropt. Inc., 1949, pp. 78-81. 2. L.S.Msu, The Political Philosophy of Confucianism, E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., New York, 1932, p.124. 3. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers, London, 1832, p.v. 4. Ibid., p.132. 5. F.W. Taylor, Shop Management in Scientific Management, Harper & Row, New York, 1947, p.31. 6. Ibid., pp.36-37. 7. Ibid., pp.26-30. S, James A.F.Stoner and R.Edward Freeman, Management, Prentice Hall of India (P) Ltd., New Delhi, 1992, p 33. 9. Henri Fayol, General Administration, Sir Issac Pitman and Sons Ltd., London, p.3. 10. Henri Fayol, Industrial and General Administration, J.A.Coubrough. transInternational Management Institute, Geneva, 1930. 11. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisations, Free Press, New York, 1947. 12. James A.F. Stover and R. Edward Freeman, op.cit., p.36. 13. Mary P. Follett, The New State, Glowcester Mass, Peter Smith, 1918. 14. James A. F. Stoner and R. Edward Freeman, op.cit., pAO. 15. Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1933, p.29. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid.
- 48. Chapter Two. Developmellt ofManagement Till/light 37 18. Gary Yunker, The Hawthorne Studies: Facts and Myths, Faculty Working Papers, Department of Psychology, Jacksouville State University, Summer, 1985. 19. Kenneth E. Bowlding, General Systems Theory-A Skeleton ofSciellce, Management Science, April 1956, pp.197- 208. 20. Seymour Tilles, The Manager's Job - A System's Approach, Harward Business Review, January-February 1963, pp.73-81. 21. Herbert G. Hicks and C. Ray Gullett, Organisation Theory and Behaviour, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1975, pp.209-221. 22. Keith Davis, Human Behaviour at Work, McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., New York, 1990.
- 49. "This page is Intentionally Left Blank"
- 50. CHAPTER 3 Social Responsibilities of Business CHAPTER OUTLINE (A) Introduction: Traditional View, Modern View (B) Social Responsibilities of Business (C) Influence of Environment Key Terms, Questions, References. LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this chapter you should be able to: • Understand the rationale behind the traditional view of social responsibility of business • Evaluate why the modern view of social responsibility of business has emerged • Discuss the arguments for and against social responsibilities of business • Discuss the social responsibilities of business towards consumers/customers, employees, shareholders/ stockholders, Government, other business firms and community • Scan the external environment and analyse its impact on business
- 51. 40 Management - Theory and Practice • C~apt61' Three t)penlna Case SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES: DR. REDDY'S SETS UP FOUNDATION FOR HEALTH EDUCATION Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd. has launched a social initiative which aims to promote health education in the country. The Dr. Reddy's Foundation for Health Education will be launching its first postgraduate diploma course in healthcare management in December 2001. Dr. Reddy's will be initially investing Rs.30 lakh in the foundation's programme, he said, adding that the company had not set a investment ceiling. nutritionists, dieticians, pharmacists and bioscience graduates to enhance their skill-sets. The Foundation has developed curriculum, backed by the support and contribution of eminent doctors and medical bodies to prepare individuals take up patient education as a career in the country. Thus, the Foundation would like to contribute to develop the core aspects of health care. The foundation by continually engage in a dialogue with the medical fraternity and addressing the rising challenges in healthcare delivery and management has been committed to social responsibility. The foundation's objective was to create "qualified healthcare professionals who would complement and add value to the existing healthcare system, and work with the medical fraternity to offer an integrated multi- disciplinary approach to good health". The Foundation would be launching health education programs to encourage students from backgrounds like Thus, Dr. Reddy's Lab's business objective is not only profit maximisation but also includes taking care of the society's needs and contributing to solving the health problems of the people (Source: Adapted from Deccan Chronicle, February 23, 2001.) (4) Intrvdut;tlvn I Friedman: Business's business is business From the above case incident, it creates a curiosity in our cognition to know what is social responsibility? Now, shall we discuss the concept of social responsibility? In traditional societies, the prime purpose of business was profit maximisation. Even as late as 1970, Milton Friedman stated that 'the business ofbusiness is business'. In other words, the only objective of business is the making of profits. Friedman argues that the profit earned by business belongs exclusively to the shareholders of the business and these profits cannot be diverted to any other social purpose. He defended his argument by saying that "if the executive uses corporate resources for social ends, he is using the money for the purposes for which it was not intended... "1 He further states that "there is one and only one social responsibility of business-to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits..."2John Lodd expressed a similar opinion in 1970, saying "it is improper to expect organisational conduct to conform to the ordinary principles of morality..."3 However, most academicians, economists, socialists, philosophers, politicians and even businessmen and bankers do not compromise with these opinions . It is doubtful whether these opinions hold good today, especially during the post liberalisation era. T.A.Mathias felt that "moral behaviour pays....at least in the long run."4 An enlightened approach aims at long-run objectives and not mere short-run gains.The days of traditional views are gone. Now, we shall study the modern view towards social responsibilities.
- 52. Chapter Three. Social Responsibilities ofBusiness 41 It is now being increasingly recognised that business is not an end in itself. It is only a means to an end. That end is man, be it a worker, customer, consumer or any member of society. It is also recognized that business is a social and economic institution which cannot live in isolation. Modern view: Not as the be- all and end-all of the business's operations The establishment and development of business is dependent on the contributions made by society. Society has to bear the cost and consequences of the establishment and operation of business. It has to allot land, supply water and other materials, provide infrastructural facilities and develop and provide human resources. In addition to this, consumers who are members of society, allow the business to continue its operations by creating effective demand for the goods and services produced/rendered or distributed by the business. Thus, business is mostly dependent upon society. Realising this, most of the businessmen today feel that their objective is not merely profit maximisation but it also consists of contributing something towards solving the problems of their employees, consumers and society at large. Here it is appropriate to state that, "a socially and ethically conscious firm and its managers should, therefore, look upon profits not as the be-all and end-all of their operations.."5 'Social Audit' is one such technique used to measure petJormance. TABLE 3-' Summary of Major Agruments for and against Social Responsibility for Business For Social Responsibility • It is in the best interest of a business to promote and improve the communities where it does business. • Social action can be profitable. • It is an ethical thing to do. • It improves the public image of the firm. • It increases the viability of the business system. Business exists because it gives society benefits.Society can amend or take away its charter. This is the 'iron law of responsibility.' • It is necessary to avoid government regulation. • Sociocultural norms require it. • Laws cannot be passed for all circumstances.Thus, business must assume responsibility to maintain an orderly legal society. • It is in the stockholders' best interest. It will improve the price of stock in the long run as the stock market will view the company as less risky and open to public attack. • Society should give business a chance to solve social problems that the government has failed to solve. • Business is considered by some groups to be the institution with the financial and human resources to solve social problems. • Prevention of problems is better than cure-so let business solve problems before they become critical. Against Social Responsibility • It might be illegal. • Business plus government equal monolith. • Social actions cannot be measured. • It violates profit maximisation. • The cost of social responsibility is too great and would increase prices too much. • Business lacks social skills to solve societal problems. • It would weaken the balance of payments because price of goods will have to go up to pay for social programs. • Business already has too much power. Such involvement would make business too powerful. • Business lacks accountability to the public. • Such business involvement lacks broad public support. 'Source: Adapted from R.Joseph Monsen, Jr., The Social Attitudes of Management, in Joseph W.McQuire, ed., Contemporary Management (Englewood Cliffs,N.):Prentice Hall, 1974), p.616, Quoted in Certo and Peter, p.222. Thus, it is accepted today that the business has to discharge its responsibility towards society. The concept of 'Social Responsibility of Business' includes responsibilities towards itself, shareholders, employees, other business firms, government, customers/consumers, creditors and the society. This declaration also emphasised certain main features of Social Responsibility of Business, viz. • In addition to making a fair and adequate return on capital, business must be just and humane, as well as efficient and dynamic.
- 53. 42 Management - Theory and Practice. Chapter Three • The social responsibilities of business can best be assumed in an atmosphere of freedom with the least possible restraint on healthy competition. • Every business has an overriding responsibility to make the fullest possible use of its resources, both human and capital. • It highlights the respective roles of the enterprises, the shareholders, the workers, the customers, the management and the community. • It laid emphasis on the reciprocal duties between business and the community. (13) it)c;lal ~eIPt)nllbllltlel t)f l3ullnell Now, we shall study the social responsibilities of business towards different stakeholders, viz., consumers/ customers, employees, shareholders/stockholders, other business firms, state and community. The social responsibilities of Business, in the Indian context are presented in Fig. 3.1. • • • • • • • • • • Business's Social Responsibilities Towards Different Groups • • • • • • • • • + Towards Owners/ Shareholders • Fair Dividend • Solvent and Efficient Business • Optimum Use of Resources • Planned Growth • Effective Communication + Towards Government • Payment of Taxes, Custom Duties etc. • Abide by the Laws • Observe the Policies • Maintain Law & Security Business Firm's Responsibilities I + Towards Employees • Meaningful Work • Job Satisfaction • Fair Salaries & Benefits • Best Quality of Worklife • Succession Planning and Development + Towards Society • Employment Without Discrimination • Employment to Disadvantaged Persons • Community Welfare Services • Business Morality • Maintaining Pollution Free Environment • Maintaining Ecological Balance +- Towards Customers • Fair Price • Superior Quality • Superior Service • Superior Product DeSign • Quick and Complete Information + Towards Inter-Business • Fair Competition • Cooperation for Sharing of Scarce Resources and Facilities • Collaboration for Maximisation of Business Efficiency Responsibilities Consumer satisfaction is the ultimate aim of all economic activity. This includes: ~~~:~~ers: • the goods must meet the needs of the consumers of different classes, tastes and the purchasing Meet the needs power; of the consumers • they must be reasonably priced, be of a dependable quality and of sufficient variety; • the sale of such goods must be followed by after sales service to ensure advice, guidance and maintenance; • there should be a fair and wide spread distribution of goods and services among all the sections of consumers and community and
- 54. Chapter Three. Social Responsibilities ofBusiness 43 • there should be prevention of concentration of goods in the hands of a limited number of producers, purchasers or groups. In other words, business owes to itself the primary obligation to give a fair and square deal to its customers and consumers. They should be charged a fair and reasonable price which should be well within their reach. The supply of goods should be of uniform standard and of reasonably good quality. Their distribution must be widespread as to be within the easy reach of the consumer. No business should directly or indirectly indulge in profiteering, hoarding or creating artifiGial scarcity. Business should not mislead the consumer and community by false, misleading and exaggerated advertisements, because obscene advertisements are demoralizing the society and a danger to public morals. Consumer satisfaction is the ultimate aim of all economic activity. But adulteration of goods, poor quality, failure to give fair measure, lack of service and courtesy to the customer, misleading and dishonest advertising, are all examples of violation of its obligations by a business enterprise towards the consumers. Therefore, free competition must be allowed to operate and should be encouraged by anti-monopoly legislation. Where certain monopolies are accepted as unavoidable or in public interest, the price of their toleration has to include the government's right to impose any controls that may be needed to check undue monopoly power. Legislation is required to prevent deception and fraud being practiced on consumers, and where essential goods are in short supply, their fair distribution should be ensured. Moreover, internal accountability to consumers should be extended. The Memorandum ofAssociation (MoA) of public limited companies and state enterprises should embody a specific declaration of these wider responsibilities of management. The management should encourage the establishment of the Consumers' Advisory Councils/Committees so that these bodies could represent the grievances of consumers to the management. The consumers themselves have social responsibilities to their fellow-consumers. If they passively submit to exploitation, they help to lower the standards of service. Equally, they are a support to consumers' associations which, by investigation and reporting on the comparative prices and quality of products, can assist them in making a more informed choice of their purchases. Responsibilities It is the basic responsibility of the enterprise to produce wealth and also to provide opportunities for towards . meaningful work. The management should develop its administration in such a way so as to promote employees: Fair a spirit of cooperative endeavour between employers and employees. There should be a sense of ~:~de~ctive work participation between capital, on the one hand, and labour and skill, on the other, in their objective environment towards prosperity and progress. The cooperation of workers can be won by creating conditions in and protection which workers are enabled to put forward their best efforts in the common task as free men. This of human rights. means recognition: • of the workers' right to a fair wage; • of the right to participate in decisions affecting their working life; • to membership of the trade union; • to collective bargaining and • to the right to strike. Management should give workers opportunity to develop their capabilities through training, education and enjoyment of freedom to the greatest possIble extent. Management should develop among workers a sense of belonging to the business a~d provide them with healthy living conditions, cheap houses, leisure and amenities, profit-sharing and an efficient system of communication.
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- 56. of religious dogma and the adoption of another for purely material ends—has been the cause of more controversy than any other incident of his life, and has always been used as a main stronghold and point of attack by his enemies. There is not much defence to offer for the act, for Heine, in spite of a Voltairean scorn of dogma and creed, possessed a deep tinge of religious feeling, and that he felt keenly the humiliation of his position—to use no harsher term— can be seen by the following expression regarding it. "Is it not foolish?" he writes to a friend. "I am no sooner baptized than I am cried down as a Jew: I am now hated by Jew and Christian alike." And again, in speaking of another converted Jew who is engaged in preaching his newly-acquired doctrine: "If he does this from conviction, he is a fool: if he does it from hypocritical motives, he is worse. I shall not cease to love Gans, but I confess I had far rather have learned instead of this that he had stolen silver spoons. That you, dear Moser," he continues, "should think as Gans does I cannot believe, although assured. I should be very sorry if my own baptism should appear to you in any favorable light. I assure you if the laws permitted the stealing of silver spoons I should not have been baptized." The jest has its pathos as well as its wit, for Heine's pecuniary prospects were always precarious, and the fatal baptism, which only brought upon him the pity and contempt of his friends and doubled the insults of his enemies, defeated its own ends and contributed nothing to his material needs. Heine's personal history is unusually obscure. An interesting and valuable Life of him has been written by Herr Adolph Stroeltmann, but the author's materials are avowedly scanty, and the Heine memoirs, which have long been watched for with hungry eyes by the critics and biographers, are still withheld from publication by members of the family, with the prospect that they will never be given to the public. He was born at Düsseldorf on the Rhine December 13, 1799. "On my cradle," he writes, "fell the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning-glow of the nineteenth"—words not a little significant of the lifelong sense within him of the genius of a bygone age and the spirit of a coming
- 57. one. His boyhood was passed during the time of Napoleon's supremacy in the Rhine provinces, and among other changes wrought under French jurisdiction was the establishment by imperial decree of certain state schools called "lyceums," at one of which Heine received the greater part of his school-education. The town was garrisoned by French troops, and here it was that the boy became acquainted with the old French drummer whom he afterward commemorates so charmingly in the sketch of his childhood known as the "Buch Le Grand." These early influences must certainly have been at the root of that passion for French ideas and French manners which characterized his later years, just as his boyish visions of the Great Emperor as he passed through Düsseldorf never quite lost their enchantment in after life, and long blinded him to the real meaning of Bonapartism. Twice he saw Napoleon—once in 1811, and again in the following year—and his impressions are worth recording, especially as they are given in his most characteristic manner: "What were my feelings when I saw him with my own favored eyes!—himself, hosannah! the emperor! It was in the avenue of the court-garden at Düsseldorf. As I pushed my way among the gaping people I thought of his battles and his deeds; and yet I thought at the same time of the police regulations against riding through the avenue on pain of a five-thaler fine, and the emperor rode quietly through the avenue and no policeman stopped him. Never will his image vanish from my memory. I shall always see him high upon his steed, with those eternal eyes in his marble imperial face looking down with the calmness of Fate on the guards defiling by. He was sending them to Russia, and the old grenadiers looked up to him in such awful devotion, such deeply-conscious sympathy, such pride of death!— Te, Cæsar, morituri salutant! Sometimes a secret doubt creeps over me whether I have really seen him, whether we really were his associates; and then it seems to me as if his image, snatched from the meagre frame of the present, melts ever more proudly and more imperiously into the
- 58. twilight of the past. His name already sounds like a voice from the ancient world, and as antique and heroic as the names of Alexander and Cæsar." Even to Heine, Napoleon was the representative of the great principles of the Revolution: moreover, he assumed at one time the rôle of liberator of the Jews by conferring on them civil and political rights, while in his armies positions of the highest distinction, dependent only on personal merit, awaited them. But this too ardent hero-worship did not last. "Take me not, dear reader, I pray, for an unconditional Bonapartist," he says sorrowfully on the battle-field of Marengo. "My homage does not touch the actions but the genius of the man, whether his name be Alexander or Cæsar or Napoleon. I did love him unconditionally until the Eighteenth Brumaire: then he betrayed liberty." And again, later: "It is true, it is a thousand times true, that Napoleon was an enemy of freedom, a crowned despot of selfishness:" "he could deal with men and personal interests, not with ideas; and that was his greatest fault and the reason of his fall." "At bottom he is nothing but a brilliant fact, the meaning of which is still half a secret." Among Heine's home-influences during his childhood that of his mother stands most prominent for good, and he never speaks of her but with reverence and affection. Of the character of his father very little is known. Harry, as the boy was originally named, was destined for a business career, as his parents were unable to send him to the university, and he was placed for this purpose in a banker's office in Frankfort. The situation was exceedingly distasteful to him, and he left it at the end of two weeks. Another attempt was made to establish him in the banking-business at Hamburg under the charge of a millionaire uncle, one of Hamburg's most worthy and respectable citizens, who plays an important part in the earlier part of Heine's career. Here he remained about two years, but with little better result than before. His Hamburg life seems to have been a failure in almost every sense. He got into trouble with certain of his uncle's relations, fell in love with one of his cousins, who shortly after married a more successful rival, and chafed under the dreary monotony which a business life offered to his susceptible
- 59. temperament; until finally his uncle, seeing that he was in every way unfitted for his occupation, determined to send him to the University of Bonn, under the condition that he should fit himself for the legal profession. Thus Heine was pledged, as it were, from the first to his conversion—a fact all the more remarkable as Solomon Heine, the uncle, was a sturdy adherent of the Jewish faith himself. The next five years were passed, with certain intervals, at the universities of Bonn, Göttingen and Berlin, and the elder Heine must have watched with some natural concern the career of his wilful protégé, who pursued anything but the course of study marked out for him, and turned his attention mainly to Oriental and mediæval literature, history, philology and other congenial pursuits, quite to the detriment of his professional studies. It was during the years of his university life that he appeared before the world as an author. His first volume of poems was published in 1821, soon followed by the two tragedies of Ratcliffe and Almanzor—deservedly the least popular of all his works—and the first volume of the Reisebilder. Never were the writings of an unknown author greeted with a speedier recognition, and he stepped at once into the full sunshine of his fame. Nevertheless, fame alone without its more substantial benefits could not free him from a pecuniary dependence on his uncle which was often as humiliating as it was indispensable. "Had the stupid boy learned anything," replied the latter once when congratulated upon his distinguished nephew, "he would not need to write books;" and these words betray an abundant source for those wearisome and ceaseless misunderstandings between uncle and nephew which only ceased with the former's death, and indicate perhaps one reason for the unhappy temper of the young author's genius. There is but one theme in nearly all the early poems of Heine, and more particularly in those of the Lyrisches Intermezzo. The sorrows of an unhappy love are sung with a passion and a fervor such as one finds only in the higher forms of poetry. He adopted for his verse the old mediæval ballad-metre, preserving in a wonderful degree the limpid simplicity of the original, and infusing into it, as into all that
- 60. comes from his pen, the modern sentiment and spirit. He calls upon all external Nature to share his sufferings, and invests every natural object with an intense personal interest which belongs only to that people whose egoism has outlived centuries of obliterating influences. The following songs, although they are very familiar ones, illustrate particularly well the characteristics just mentioned. I give them in the original, as they suffer unusually by translation:
- 61. Und wüssten's die Blumen die kleinen, Wie tief verwundet mein Herz, Sie würden mit mir weinen, Zu heilen meinen Schmerz. Und wüssten's die Nachtigallen, Wie ich so traurig und krank, Sie hiessen fröhlich erschallen Erquickenden Gesang. Und wüssten sie meine Wehe, Die goldenen Sternelein, Sie kämen aus ihrer Höhe, Und sprächen Trost mir ein. Die alle können's nicht wissen, Nur eine kennt mein Schmerz: Sie hat ja selbst zerrissen, Zerrissen mir das Herz. Or— Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass, O sprich, mein Lieb, warum? Warum sind denn im grünen Gras Die blauen Veilchen so stumm? Warum singt denn mit so kläglichem Laut Die Lerche in der Luft? Warum steigt denn aus dem Balsamkraut Hervor ein Leichenduft? Warum scheint denn die Sonn' auf die Au So kalt und verdriesslich herab? Warum ist denn die Erde so grau Und öde wie ein Grab?
- 62. Warum bin ich selbst so krank und so trüb, Mein liebes Liebchen? Sprich! O sprich, mein herzallerliebstes Lieb, Warum verliessest du mich? Heine could never write in any of the classic metres, and an amusing anecdote is related by Maximilian Heine, the younger brother of the poet, of an attempt once made by the latter at hexameter verse. This brother, Max, was at the time in one of the upper classes of the Gymnasium, and, pluming himself greatly on his own proficiency in the composition of hexameters, urged the young poet to try his skill in the same direction. Heine complied, and came in due time to read to his brother the result of his efforts. Hardly had he reached the third line when Max broke forth impatiently: "For Heaven's sake, dear brother, this hexameter has but five feet!" and he pompously scanned the verse. When convinced of his error Heinrich petulantly tore the paper into bits, exclaiming, "Shoemaker, stick to your last!" and nothing more was heard about hexameters until two days later, when Max was awakened early one morning to find his brother at his bedside. "Ah, dear Max," he began with a piteous air, "what a fearful night have I passed! Only think! Directly after midnight, just as I had gone to sleep, I felt a mountain's weight upon me: the unhappy hexameter had come limping on five feet to my bedside, demanding of me, in terrible tones and with the most fearful threats, its sixth foot. Shylock could not have insisted more obstinately upon his pound of flesh. It appealed to its primeval classic right, and left me with the most frightful menaces, only on condition that I never again in my whole life would meddle with a hexameter." The time of Heine's entrance in the field of literature was no unfavorable one for an individual genius like his own. The so-called Classic and Romantic schools of Germany had each in its own direction reached the ultimate limits of its development. Schiller was dead, Goethe was at work upon the second part of Faust and the Westöstliche Divan, while such of the Romantic writers as were left had penetrated far into the realms of mediæval mysticism to bring to
- 63. the light only wild and distorted forms of imagery and the most extravagant creations of morbid fancy. In Heine, who could sing of love and moonlight and nightingales with the best of them, they thought they had found a new champion to revive their now declining glory, little dreaming that ten years later, in his famous essay on the Romantic school, he was destined to deal their cause its deathblow and disperse for ever the lingering mists and spectres of German Romanticism. Nevertheless, all Heine's earlier writings, prose as well as verse, show very clearly the influence of the school. "I am tired of this guerrilla warfare," he writes in 1830, "and long for rest. What an irony of fate, that I, who would rest so gladly on the pillow of a quiet, contemplative inner life—that I should be destined to scourge my poor fellow-countrymen from their comfortable existence and stir them into activity—I, who like best to watch the passing clouds, to invent (erklügeln) metrical magic, to hearken to the secrets of the spirits of the elements and absorb myself in the wonder-world of old tales,—I must edit political annals, preach the topics of the time, stir up the passions!" A little later comes the news of the Revolution in Paris, and all these vague romantic longings have vanished into air, melted away by the beams of the July sun. These tendencies may have first roused the determined hostility with which the followers of Goethe greeted the new poet and indignantly repelled the claims of his friends for his succession to Goethe's lyric muse. There was, at all events no love lost between the great Goethe himself and his younger contemporary. Goethe simply ignored Heine, and the latter, though he could not reciprocate in this way, did not spare his mighty rival certain home-thrusts on his most vulnerable side. He made a pilgrimage to Weimar in 1824 on his return from the famous Harz journey, but he is exceedingly reticent on the subject, and the following humorous account from the Romantische Schule is almost the only one to be had of the visit. "His form," he writes, "was harmonious, clear, joyous, nobly- proportioned, and Greek art could be studied in him as in an antique: his eyes were at rest like those of a god. It is generally the distinguishing mark of the gods that their gaze is steadfast, and their
- 64. eyes do not wander in uncertainty hither and thither. Napoleon's eyes had this peculiarity also, and therefore I am convinced that he was a god. Goethe's eyes were as divine in his advanced age as in his youth. Time had covered his head with snow, but it could not bend it. He bore it ever proud and high, and when he reached forth his hand, it was as if he would prescribe to the stars their course in the heavens. There are those who profess to have observed the cold lines of egotism about his mouth, but these lines belong also to the immortal gods, and above all to the Father of the gods, the great Jupiter, with whom I have already compared Goethe. In truth, when I visited him in Weimar and stood before him, I glanced involuntarily aside to see if the eagle and the thunderbolts were at hand. I came very near addressing him in Greek, but when I noticed that he understood German I told him in German that the plums on the road between Weimar and Jena tasted very good. I had pondered in so many long winter nights over all the lofty and profound things I should say to Goethe if I should ever see him, and when at last I saw him I told him that the Saxon plums tasted very good; and Goethe smiled with the same lips that had once kissed the fair Leda, Europa, Danäe, Semele, and so many other princesses or even ordinary nymphs."—"My soul is shaken," he cries elsewhere, "and my eye burns, and that is an unfavorable condition for a writer, who should control his material and remain beautifully objective (hübsch objektiv bleiben soll), as the Art School requires and as Goethe has done. He has become eighty years old by it," he adds with incomparable irony, "and minister, and well-to-do (wohlhabend). Poor German people! this is thy greatest man!" To all this there is a keenly personal edge, but the real gulf between the two lies deeper than wounded vanity on the one side and possible jealousy on the other, and is as wide and impassable as Heine's own distinction between the Hellenic and the Judaic views of life. Heine, vitally absorbed in all the questions that the present brought, and in the very heat and stress of its conflicts, watched the "Great Pagan" in the fulness of his years crystallizing his life's experience in beautiful and polished, but ever more and more lifeless, forms of verse, striving toward pure Hellenism, as Goethe's followers called his
- 65. imitation of classic forms, withdrawn from all the social and political problems of the day far into the realms of scientific research; and he cried out impatiently about coldness, indifference to the true interests of mankind—compared Goethe's creations to the Greek statues in the Louvre, with no humanity in them, but only divinity and stone. But Goethe, with his theory of color, with his botany, anatomy, osteology and the rest, had caught a spark from what was to be the genius of a future generation, and this Heine was not prophet enough to see. The time, we have said, was favorable for Heine's entrance into literature: it was anything but favorable for the rôle which he began almost at once to play—that of political and social agitator. The political atmosphere of Germany during the years that preceded the July Revolution was stifling in the extreme. The famous War of Liberation had freed the people from the grasp of Napoleon, but seemed only to have increased the weight of home despotism: the press was subjected to searching government investigation, and as a result all political opinions were suppressed in the daily journals, which in lieu of politics supplied little else but theatrical and musical gossip. This was no condition of things for Heine, who could never move in prescribed paths in any direction, and who had to submit to seeing his work scarred and mutilated by the red pencil of the censorship; and he began to look toward France as a land of refuge in case of accident, as it were, until finally, after the July Revolution, the Rhine became a Jordan and Paris a New Jerusalem to his longing eyes, and he emigrated thither, to the land of freedom and "good cheer," to return but once again to his native country. There is no real evidence of his exile being a compulsory one, but under such circumstances his life at home must have been at best a precarious one. According to his own delightfully humorous account, he had learned from an old councillor at Berlin who had passed many years at the fortress of Spandau how unpleasant it was to wear chains in winter. "'If they had only warmed our chains for us a little they would not have made such an unpleasant impression: they ought, too, to have had the forethought to have them perfumed with
- 66. essence of roses and laurel, as they do in this country.' I asked my councillor if he often had oysters at Spandau. He said, 'No: Spandau was too far from the sea. Meat,' he said, 'was quite rare there too, and there was no other kind of fowl than the flies which fell into the soup.' And so, as I really needed recreation, and Spandau was too far from the sea for oysters, and the Spandau fowl-broth did not tempt me especially, and the Prussian chains were very cold in winter and quite detrimental to my health, I resolved to journey to Paris, and there, in the fatherland of champagne and the Marseillaise, to drink the one and to hear the other sung." Few particulars of Heine's Parisian life are known, notwithstanding that during its earlier period he reached the zenith of his fame and popularity, and lived, according to his own statement, like a god—a life to end, alas! only too soon. He set himself during these years to the task of bringing about a mutual understanding between the French and the German people, and with this end in view he wrote his famous essays on the Romantic School and Religion and Philosophy in Germany, and sent to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung those letters on the politics and art of the day which give one of the most brilliant and vivid pictures in existence of Paris under the "Citizen" monarchy. Well for Heine if those bright Parisian days had lasted! He was overtaken only too soon by a fate as terrible as any that martyr was ever called upon to endure. His nervous organization had always been an exceedingly sensitive one, and he had long suffered from severe and frequent headaches. During the latter part of his life in Paris his health gradually declined, until in 1848 he received his deathblow in a stroke of paralysis which left him almost blind, crippled and helpless, and subject to frequent attacks of intense physical agony—a blow which did not kill him, however, for eight years. His patience—nay, his heroism—through all his lingering torture was the testimony of every one who was a witness of his sufferings; and, what was more wonderful, he retained the powers of his mind in undiminished vigor to the very end. He died in February, 1856, poor as he had almost always lived, and almost in obscurity, for the world had withdrawn from the
- 67. spectacle of so much suffering, and only a few friends remained to him to the last. Such a death is terribly sad, but its heroism has all the pathos and nobility of real tragedy, and atones in more than full measure for a life that was not always heroic. Can it atone as well for a literary name that was not wholly untarnished? Nothing can quite justify certain literary sins which Heine at times committed, but when such offences are noted down it is best to let them go. Heine's life was certainly one of unremitting warfare—one long record of personal attacks on his enemies, of broils with his critics, of unblushing license of speech, of undaunted adherence to the ideas for which he lived and wrote—one long cry of protest against the outward conditions of life and society as he found them, which rings in those strange minor tones of feeling that are the keynote of his genius, rising sometimes to an almost childish petulance, and sinking again into chords of the truest pathos. Where is his place and what was his achievement it is very hard to say. He was one of those figures which arise here and there in the history of literature—of men intensely penetrated with the spirit of the age in which they live, who are alike bitterly impatient of its follies and its conservatism. They cannot see far into the future, they cannot always estimate the past: their genius is not universal, but it has always something of the vitality of present interest about it, and is subject in no common degree to the errors of contemporary judgment. Byron was another such figure, and, though his genius had almost nothing in common with Heine's, the ideas for which they fought were very nearly the same—ideas which were the outgrowth of the Revolution, by which they sought to stem the tide of reactionary feeling that set in so strongly from every direction, in religion and politics as well as in literature, during the early part of our own century. Their method of fighting, too, was the same, for they both used their own persons as weapons in their cause; but where Byron's egotism becomes dreary and oppressive, Heine's awakens that vivid feeling of interest which comes usually with personal intercourse alone. He uses himself, along with and as a part of his material, in such a way that his very
- 68. egotism lends to his writings the greater part of their force and originality, and becomes one of the most potent instruments of his irony and wit. Heine chose for himself the sword of the soldier rather than the poet's laurel, but he chose to fight alone, and the nineteenth century is not the age nor its society the field for single-handed combat. That he seems to have felt this himself, one of his latest poems from the Romancero will show. I give it in Lord Houghton's admirable translation: it is called ENFANT PERDU.
- 69. In Freedom's war of "Thirty Years" and more A lonely outpost have I held in vain, With no triumphant hope or prize in store, Without a thought to see my home again. I watched both day and night: I could not sleep Like my well-tented comrades far behind, Though near enough to let their snoring keep A friend awake if e'er to doze inclined. And thus, when solitude my spirits shook, Or fear—for all but fools know fear sometimes— To rouse myself and them I piped, and took A gay revenge in all my wanton rhymes. Yes, there I stood, my musket always ready, And when some sneaking rascal showed his head My eye was vigilant, my aim was steady, And gave his brains an extra dose of lead. But war and justice have far different laws, And worthless acts are often done right well: The rascals' shots were better than their cause, And I was hit—and hit again, and fell! That outpost is abandoned: while the one Lies in the dust, the rest in troops depart. Unconquered, I have done what could be done, With sword unbroken and with broken heart. This little poem represents rather pathetically, and in a certain sense the limitations of Heine's genius; for it is impossible not to feel that his genius never found its highest expression—that confined within a narrower channel its force would have been irresistible where now it is only brilliantly dispersive. It seems as if literature in its proper
- 70. sense had lost something by Heine's personal enlistment in all the conflicts of his day—as if the man of ideas had tried to approach too closely and too curiously to the realities of life, and had only succeeded in bringing into glaring prominence the irreconcilable nature of the forces at work in the world and in ourselves; and never was reconcilement less possible between the real and the ideal than at the time of which we speak. This is the meaning of the Weltschmerz and the maladie du siècle of which we hear so much, and everything seemed to conspire to render Heine its chief representative. But a negative judgment is not enough for a final estimate of Heinrich Heine. Much of his service to literature and to mankind was of a very positive character. As a man of letters he created a prose style unequalled in clearness and brilliancy by anything previously known in German literature—Goethe's prose is ponderous in comparison—and its influence will be felt long after certain of its mannerisms have passed into oblivion. His wit is destined to immortality by reason of the serious purpose that underlies it. It has a spontaneity which no wit exercised merely for its own ends can ever have. Those who call Heine frivolous and a mocker, simply because he can jest at serious things, can only know him very superficially or else must be ignorant of the real part which humor has to play in the world. Perhaps there never was a writer who shook himself so free of all conventionalities of style. His very mannerisms—and his writings abound in them—have a spontaneity about them, and only become affectations in the innumerable imitations which cluster around all his literary productions. This is his service to literature: his service to posterity was as great. He did some goodly service in the "War of Liberation of humanity," if in no other way, by setting the example of a man who could speak unflinchingly for principles at a time when such utterance was not easy. It will not be possible to follow up these general statements with any further examination of Heine's life or his writings. It has been the present purpose to indicate only in the broadest outlines the scope
- 71. and general character of the man and his work, and leave to the reader to prove the truth of what has been said by his own investigation. There is no single literary figure that is better worth the task of study than Heine, and to sum up briefly what this article has been mainly designed to show, we must pronounce him if not one of the greatest, at least one of the most original, figures in all literature. A. Parker.
- 73. DAWN. WHAT was thy dream, sweet Morning? for, behold! Thine eyes are heavy with the balm of night, And, like reluctant lilies, to the light The languid lids of lethargy unfold. Was it the tale of Yesterday retold— An echo wakened from the western height, Where the warm glow of sunset dalliance bright Grew, with the pulse of waning passion, cold? Or was it some heraldic vision grand Of legends that forgotten ages keep In twilight, where the sundering shoals of day Vex the dim sails, unpiloted, of sleep, Till, one by one, the freighting fancies gay, Like bubbles, vanish on the treacherous strand? John B. Tabb.
- 76. MRS. MARCELLUS. BY A GUEST AT HER SATURDAYS. All the celebrated creatures whom Fate or the lecture-committee chance to bring to our town profess themselves amazed that Mrs. Marcellus should continue to make this little-celebrated locality her home. The comment has a double import, containing at once a compliment and the reverse. If therein be conveyed an intimation that Hurville as a place of residence is devoid of those varied opportunities for self-improvement, gayety and æsthetic culture which render existence in the great centres so diversified and so charming, or even should the insinuation go so far as to clearly express the indubitable fact that it is a crude, ragged little town, with a few staring red brick business-houses fronting each other on the muddy or dusty or frozen main street (according to the season), and a numerous colony of wooden cottages dotted around "promiscuous" as an outer fringe—nay, should Hurville even be apostrophized as a "hole," as it was once by a lecturer who came during the mud-reign and failed to draw a house,—why, even the most enthusiastic Hurvillian need take no offence. But whatever the town may be, think what our fellow-townswoman, Mrs. Marcellus, is! One of the greatest favorites our lecture-committee secures for us each year, a dramatic reader with a stentorian voice and a fine frenzy rolling around loose in his eye, expressed the whole thing in what I may call a Shakespearian nutshell by a happy paraphrase of the great bard. "It was not," said Mr. Blankenhoff, "that people appreciated Hurville less, but Mrs. Marcellus more." That settled it. I have been very frank, as you see, about Hurville, because, although many of our business-men, in a sort of small beer of local patriotism, insist upon taking up the utterly untenable position that Hurville is the only "live town" in the country outside of New York and Chicago, I am unable to recognize this astonishing vitality
- 77. myself, and I always say that if Hurville is "live," I should like to know what something dead looks like, acts like, and especially buys and sells like. The commerce of the place has been completely stagnant for several years, and in Hurville, if ever anywhere, is it a mystery to one half the world how the other half lives. I believe both halves would now be one complete and thoroughly defunct whole were it not that the vital spark is kept alive in both sections by Mrs. Marcellus. Her position in a community so provincial, and in many respects so narrow-minded, as that of our little place, has always been an exceedingly singular one; yet she was lifted to the throne of leadership of our choicest circle on her arrival, and has wielded the sceptre uninterruptedly ever since, without the slightest breath of disaffection having arisen among her courtiers. When she first came to Hurville, fifteen years ago, she was a young widow of thirty, very handsome, very travelled, very cultured, very stylish and passably rich. She is all this yet, and much more that is good and lovable as well. On the left-hand side of the account there is nothing to make a blur except that she is now a motherly lady of forty-five, instead of being, as she was when she first came, just on the last step of the stairs where girlhood shuts the door in a woman's face finally—at thirty. Her coming to Hurville was rather odd, and at first she had not the slightest intention of remaining. Her object in visiting the place was to negotiate the sale of the residence she now occupies, the best house in the town yet, and fifteen years ago considered a very imposing mansion—so much so that when the railroad came the heavy men of the community insisted on the track being laid in such a way that passengers inside the cars could get a full view of the Marcellus house as they whizzed by. The house was built for the father of Mrs. Marcellus's husband, a sharp old fellow who came to the town when the general impression prevailed that Hurville was going to make Chicago shut up shop, and ultimately to see the grass grow in what are still very thriving thoroughfares of the city of New York. Old Marcellus made all the money out of Hurville that the town will afford for the next half century at least, and died in the shanty
- 78. he had always lived in just as the builders were putting the last touch on that elegant mansion, which was supposed to be but the first of a series of princely residences which when completed would make Fifth Avenue and Walnut street wonder what they were begun for if thus so early they were done for by the wealth and enterprise of Hurville. Old Marcellus's son never came to Hurville. He was educated abroad, and married this lady, a young New Yorker, at her home. He was in poor health and died in Paris, leaving his wife a good deal of property, including this house, and two little daughters to take care of. She stayed a few weeks at the hotel of those days, a most comfortable one—for, though the building was of frame and the furniture old and shabby, travellers often say that the meals were better and the bed-linen cleaner and better aired than in the present imposing Dépôt Hotel—and finding no one willing or able to buy the Marcellus house at anything like its value, she one day astonished everybody by saying that the house was now withdrawn from sale and that she was going to live in it herself. What a sensation occurred when her furniture arrived! She had brought over all her elegant belongings from Paris, those being days when household effects which had been in use by Americans abroad for a year were passed free of duty at the custom-house. Even now you can scarcely find in any community a house more beautifully furnished than Mrs. Marcellus's. She still uses the things she brought from France, and never allows her head to be turned by any vagaries respecting house-decoration. Her pale-yellow satin drawing-room furniture is charming, a real reminiscence of Marie Antoinette's at the Little Trianon at Versailles. Bronzes and marbles of chaste and beautiful subjects, water-colors and oil-paintings signed by noted names, fresh flowers in lovely abundance at all seasons of the year,—oh, it is a rare home of beauty and culture! And the best of it is, as Mrs. Marcellus often tells us at her pleasant dinner-parties or her cozy Saturday evenings, that by living in Hurville she can enjoy this agreeable and ladylike mode of existence, can do what we know she does for the poor, can subscribe to all periodicals of the day in any
- 79. way worthy, can entertain her friends often—to their great delight, all loudly exclaim—without being haunted by the slightest shadow of anxiety regarding her income. If she had continued to live in New York she would by this time probably be bankrupt, for a similar manner of living in that costly city would be a dozen times more expensive than it is in Hurville. As it is, she even lays up money; and when her daughters both married, as they did on the same day five years ago, Mrs. Marcellus astonished all the wedding-participants by announcing to them the growth of a plum to the credit of each which she had planted and preserved for them in the hothouse of an old reliable banker's safe in Boston. I have mentioned Mrs. Marcellus's Saturday evenings. They are the sole means of intellectual exchange Hurville possesses. In fact, without them our mental condition must have degenerated long ere this into something analogous to that of the cabbage, for most of us are too poor to take trips to the cities to brush up our brains, and we have no public or private library worthy the name in the place. Of late even our lecture-course—which used to be renowned as one of the most successful in the country, for a small town—has dwindled down almost to nothing, the hard times affecting this as everything else. No, not everything: hard times make no difference in Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays, thank the powers! Every Saturday evening we gather around that yellow satin furniture, inspect once more those oft-inspected pictures (always discovering new beauties in them), try to air a little art-jargon concerning the statuettes and bric-à-brac, look over the last new periodicals, sniff the flowers and say "How sweet!"—the women always asking how she keeps them with the gas, and Mrs. Marcellus always answering that she doesn't: she has them changed. At nine o'clock tea and etceteras are served up. The fine tea-service of rarest old blue Nankin is laid out upon a tablecloth of daintiest linen deeply embroidered with blue of a corresponding shade. Tea-cakes and pâtés whose ingredients are to be found in no cookery-book whatever greet the delighted and unexpectant palate. With her white, shapely, graceful hands Mrs. Marcellus tenders us these luscious lollipops and again and again refills the steaming
- 80. bowl. At eleven o'clock precisely the neat and pretty maid, who always wears a white cap, brings in Mrs. Marcellus's small bedroom lamp; and this means good-night to visitors. These evenings are the pride and comfort of the town, and it is a point of honor with those of us who know we are welcome to attend every Saturday without intermission. Whenever the gathering chances to be small you may be sure that the cause of it is to be found in a weather-condition when to say "raining cats and dogs," "blowing great guns" or "snowing like Siberia" is to use a comparison quite feeble and inexpressive. But even on such occasions a few gentlemen always contrive to drop in. They are sent by their wives when these cannot come, and they always find Mrs. Marcellus her amiable, reposeful self, whom no chances of temperature can affect. On a particularly stormy and disagreeable Saturday of the past winter I hesitated long about making my usual call. Not that I did not want to go, nor that I cared much for the weather, but it seemed to me impossible that on such a night Mrs. Marcellus should take the trouble to light her gas-jets (always supplemented by a large, softly- beaming oil-lamp for the centre-table) or ignite the splendid roaring fire of wood and coal mingled which, burning redly in a deep, low, richly colored grate of brass and steel, gives in winter the finishing touch of comfort and home-likeness to that delicious yellow satin drawing room. In summer the grate is entirely removed, and the vacant space is filled with flowering plants, tastefully framed by the hanging mantelpiece valance above and long, narrow, gracefully draped curtains at the sides, which take away all look of bareness from that central point of interest in every apartment, the fireplace. Yet the prospect of spending in my own cheerless room and quite alone the only evening of the week on which circumstances permit me to sit up at all late was scarcely flattering. I have to be at the store every morning before eight, and therefore on every night but Saturday I retire at an hour of a primitive earliness only equalled by that prevailing in well-regulated nurseries. On Sunday mornings I am able to sleep rather late, but pay for the privilege by the enforced juxtaposition of the heavy breakfast sausage with the tough dinner
- 81. roast beef, my landlady, in a fit of the contraries, always advancing dinner many hours on the day when of all others it should be very much retarded, and would be if the digestive apparatus of the American people had any rights which the landlady of the period were bound to respect. But these details have small bearing on the story I am relating. To resume: Driven out, in spite of the stormy weather, by the cheerlessness of my room, I hastened on the Saturday evening in question to seek the warm and comforting shelter of Mrs. Marcellus's abode. All was as serene within that model home as if the raging elements themselves had been subdued by the grand white hands of Mrs. Marcellus, and at her order had been stuffed with eiderdown and covered with yellow satin by a Paris upholsterer. How soothing to the rasped nerves was this interior—the crackling fire, the lights, the flowers, the soft rays from the lamp falling on the gray silk dress and the lace headdress of Mrs. Marcellus as she sat at the solid, large round centre-table with a basket of gay-colored embroidery- silks before her! Besides myself there were five visitors, all gentlemen of course, and most of them individuals who are not much given to loquacity. The lack of conversation was somewhat marked. Still, no one felt any obligation to keep the ball of small talk rolling. Mrs. Marcellus says that when people come to see her she wants them to converse or to keep silent as the spirit moves. The wings of silence brooded over this gathering again and again, yet no one felt guilty. There were many pleasant and home-like sounds— the tintinnabulation of the teaspoons and sugar-tongs, the pricking of the needle through the stiff linen, the whirl of a book-leaf, the laying down of card upon card in the game of solitaire which some one was playing, the bloodless execution of a paper-knife cutting apart the sheets of a newly-arrived magazine, the rustling of the Saturday's local paper, delivered just at dusk and not opened till now, the fresh ink made doubly pungent in the warm atmosphere till it yielded to the pressure of the summer-like temperature and dried up—like the rest of us.
- 82. "It is odd," said Henry L. Thompkins at length, closing a novel which he had been reading by slow instalments at Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays for the last year at least, and whose finis he had now reached, "that so many authors write love-stories." "Why shouldn't they," said Mrs. Marcellus, "when so many readers like to peruse them?" "Who likes to peruse them?" "Why, you do, I should think, else you would have laid down that book long ago. You've been perfectly absorbed in it: there have been chapters which made your color come and go with their exciting interest. I've watched you;" and she shook her needle at him accusingly. I scarcely remember how it was that when upon this the conversation became animated it instantly drifted into love-stories and love-affairs and jiltings and heart-breakings, and all the rest of it. Everybody had something to say which he fancied had never before been said about the tender passion; and suddenly a proposition fell from the lips of Mrs. Marcellus which certainly took the company by surprise. She said that she wished, just for curiosity's sake, every one present would tell her about the last love- affair he had had. It would really be fun: she wished they would. Objections and modest declinings were unanimous at first, of course, but our hostess insisted; and finally this conditional agreement was decided upon: that her desire should be acceded to, provided Mrs. Marcellus would relate her own experience in this line and tell the company the particulars of her last love-affair. She instantly consented, though I thought I detected a flying blush tinge her cheek at the rush of recollections brought about by the proposal. The first autobiographer was Henry L. Thompkins himself. Mr. Thompkins is the principal banker of our place, and, from the almost dead level of Hurvillian impecuniosity, he is considered to be a man of colossal fortune. He is very well off in respect to wealth, and has been a widower for many years. In the grief and loneliness which
- 83. engulfed him at the loss of his wife, he told us, he had sought solace in the warm affections of his sister, a widow lady with a large number of sons, and had recklessly adopted her boys and promised to be a father to them—an engagement which had placed him in such a position toward a lot of young spendthrifts that by actual experience he was now fully qualified to perform the part of the testy old uncle of Sheridan's plays, whose principal duty in life is to shake a stick in his nephew's face and exclaim, "Zounds! you young rascal!" or "Egad! you young dog!" But instead of one scapegrace nephew he had half a dozen to bleed him. During one of his visits to his sister, who lived in the West, he found there, also on a visit, a young lady who made a marked impression upon him. She was rather good-looking, kind, sensible and quiet in her ways. For her sake he lengthened his visit: every day her influence over him became stronger. On the final Sabbath of his stay it happened that of all the household he and she alone were able to attend service. The sermon had a distinct bearing on the sanctity of wedded life. As they walked home he resolved to sound her feelings on the subject of marriage. He began by saying that he was glad to see she was a friend of his family, because that empowered him to ask her this question: Would she like to become a member of it? She blushed, bit her lip and said, as Heaven was her judge, she would, but she had no fortune of her own, and she had seen too much of married life in poverty to dare to enter it under those circumstances. "Poverty!" exclaimed Mr. Thompkins: "you need have no fear of that. I will see that you have every comfort—indeed, every luxury." The girl was so startled she stood still in the street and gazed at him, tears flooding her handsome eyes. "Oh, Mr. Thompkins," she murmured, "you are the best man in the world, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But I have felt from the first moment how really noble and generous you are; and it was only last evening I told Edward, when he took me to the Minstrels, that I believed if he'd muster up courage to ask his uncle for money enough to set him up in business, and tell him he wanted to marry and settle down, that you would do it." The only thing consoling about the affair was, that the girl never suspected anything. She married his eldest nephew, whom
- 84. he has since set up in business three consecutive times (three consecutive failures following), and the couple are now rearing a plentiful crop of grand-nephews, who, though still young, have already developed to perfection the paternal eye for searching out the main chance, and invariably expect—nay, obstreperously claim— a full line of costly presents at Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving and all the anniversaries of everybody's birthday, wedding and demise. We were very glad that Mr. Thompkins so framed the concluding sentence of his story as to allow us to laugh. We knew very well, from the character of the second speaker, that we should require all our store of thrills and shivers for his recital. He was a long, thin, red-headed man named McLaughlin, who by perseverance had absorbed the most of the leather and findings trade of Hurville and round about, but was always talking of the brilliant and exciting early days of his career, when, fired by a story he had read of the dangers and pleasures of life before the mast, he resolved to run away, and did run away, to sea. His love-story was a wild and inconsequent recital, with staccato stops, of an adventure he had when he was a sailor and his vessel lay in one of the ports of India for some weeks —at Calcutta, I think. Anyhow, there were tiger-skins mixed up in it, and elephants' tusks, and long, moist, horrible serpents trailing after people, and a house where his lady-love lived which was provided with traps and secret panels in the walls and other such trifles; and the lady-love was a native woman who desired to renounce the faith of her people for him, but was interfered with by a cochineal-colored father of a very unpleasant sort, who rampaged around twirling the lance he used in pig-sticking, and often finishing off his enemies with a poisoned creese, such as you read about. Of course there was nothing left for McLaughlin but to fight a duel with this unreasonable parent—a duel which suddenly became contagious, the whole population of Calcutta joining in it; the foreseen conclusion of the terrific narrative being of course that everybody was killed except McLaughlin. No one dared even to smile at this sanguinary catastrophe, for McLaughlin was really a fiery-tempered fellow, and
- 85. on more than one occasion had been known to back his opinions by inserting his hand under his right coat-tail to find an additional argument wherewith to enforce a similarity of political views. Nevertheless, our hostess slyly asked if it could be possible that the native lady who had wished to relinquish the faith of her cochineal- colored fathers was the amiable—and she might have said, the essentially pale and milk-and-watery—lady who was known to the community as Mrs. McLaughlin, and who would have been, save for the storm, "one of ours" to-night. Mac said, Of course not; but what was the use of sitting down to talk about the jogtrot events of these later years, during which destiny and leather had bound him, as it were, to Hurville? He thought we wanted romance while we were about it. No. 3 was our military man, an ex-brigadier-general who still wears the Kossuth hat of his grade, and who holds, to the satisfaction of all, the berth of postmaster at Hurville. Like most amateur army- officers, the general thinks that as regards military tactics he is a very Napoleon, and he has so impressed this opinion on Hurville that we know full well, though the country at large may not, exactly what brigadier-general it was by whom the stamping out of the rebellion was principally performed. In the various engagements which have taken place between the armies of Europe during the last decade none have had so satisfactory a termination as they might had our postmaster-general (if I may so compound him) been in command of the field. The French, for instance: it seems a great pity that that brilliant people should not have put themselves in communication with Hurville, if only by wire, at the time of the disastrous Prussian war. There was our general, every Saturday evening at Mrs. Marcellus's, winning the most stupendous victories for them on a large map of the seat of war, with little flags mounted on pins stuck all over it; and it was really exciting to see how the general caused the Prussian standard to retreat at Sedan, the tri-color advancing in triumph at the head of an overwhelming body of troops rushing upon the enemy en masse, hemming him in on all sides, while the stirring tones of an imaginary brass band entoned the glorious
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