Disciplinary Links Between Scientific Management and Strategy Development

We investigate the incidence of links between the historical discipline of scientific management and the modern study of strategy development. Despite a century’s separation, these two disciplines share noticeable commonality in their trajectories and their approach to management. We conducted a for...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cameron, Bruce Gregory, Pertuze, Julio A.
Format: Working Paper
Language:en_US
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/102853
Description
Summary:We investigate the incidence of links between the historical discipline of scientific management and the modern study of strategy development. Despite a century’s separation, these two disciplines share noticeable commonality in their trajectories and their approach to management. We conducted a forward search of the impact of scientific management, finding influences on accounting, human resource management, and the creation of the modern MBA. We then conducted a backward search of the roots of strategy development, including a novel directed reference tree search by citation count. We find overlap between these two searches in organization theory, operations research, and industrial psychology. Further, we identify disciplinary oscillation between quantitative process studies and context-based ethnographic research in the study of management questions.