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In his newest book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel, who is often rated one of the world’s top ten management consultants, recognizes Roy’s book Manufacturing the Employee. Having personally called it “one of the most thoughtful business books I have ever read,” Gary writes, “A heartfelt ‘thank you’ is also due Professor Roy [Stager] Jacques, whose book, Manufacturing the Employee, helped me to better understand how our management orthodoxies came to be, and how they might be overturned” (:xiii). The central point is that although people have been organizing for millennia, they have been managing for only a bit over a century. The word “management” derives from the Italian maneggiare, meaning to handle animals, especially horses. It represents a “management movement” that formed between about 1880 and 1920.

“Management” emerged from the late-industrial factories of the US, the newly-emerging mass producers such as US Steel, Armour and Ford. It was a response to the problem of staffing the factory, getting people to (a) show up for work and (b) do as they were told. The radical change represented by “management” was that, unlike earlier forms of industrial organizing, it was less military, less punitive. It was based on creating positive relationships between employer and employee which would lead the worker to want to do the job. The goal of management through its history has been worker compliance. Today, this legacy is embedded in both the form and the content of management education.

With the growing knowedge intensity of work in recent decades, mere compliance is increasingly inadequate to achieve business success. When the work is highly discretionary, the worker who only does enough to avoid getting fired does not do enough to produce a successful organization. Management today must produce worker initiative. However, the disciplinary, paternalistic management that produces compliance works against producing initiative. As a result, “management” theory and education must be re-conceived for a new era of business. This has been echoed by major management figures such as Henry Mintzberg in his Managers Not MBAs, which has been the subject of much comment in the last decade.