Keywords

Section A. Is Not a Profession

Since the Second World War, an American ideology and movement related to the term “management and managerialism” has become influential worldwide. The emergence and development of this management ideology was outlined in a classic comparative study by Reinhard Bendix (1956/1974) and more recently by Mauro Guillén and Marie-Laure Djelic, who explained how American management ideas were transferred to other countries (Guillén 1994; Djelic 1998). In this paper, we will explore the question of why it seems so difficult in general to professionalize management not only in these new contexts, but also in the original American context.

The rather limited historical literature on the professionalization of management, at least relative to the literature on the managerialization of professions, emphasize that there has been a clash between an allegedly American model or ideology of management (later referred to as managerialism) and alternative ways of justifying organizational authority in Europe since the Second World War. The main alternatives to the justification of authority by management knowledge were justification by other kinds of expertise (like medicine or engineering) and also by arguments related to political and industrial democracy. The purpose of this chapter is firstly to discuss why it has been so difficult to professionalize management, and secondly to argue that a perspective that emphasizes the plurality of sources of managerial authority, and diversity in management qualifications depending on time and context, may be useful if the aim is to find out how and why management has not yet become a profession.

In the chapter, we will, first, outline the historical and scholarly arguments for and against the idea that management may become a profession. The literature referred to mainly departs from a view of professionalization based on Abott’s jurisdictional perspective and a Neo-Weberian emphasis on social closure. These perspectives have been criticized both from an institutionalist perspective (Scott 2008) and from a European point of view for not taking sufficiently into account the societal context of management and professions, for instance, the industrial relations systems and welfare states in Europe (Whitley 1995; Adams 2015; Brante 2013). A perspective that to a greater extent draws on an institutional and more contextual approach to professions and professionalization in history is needed if the purpose is to understand the (so far) failed professionalization of management.

Secondly, and in alignment with such an argument, we will depict how Norwegian and European industrial and public management faced a challenge from American management ideas and managerialism. We outline how this happened in three periods (Taylorism, post-Taylorism, managerialism), when institutions and authority patterns in different societies and social spheres were contested in distinct ways. Authority may be related to functional spheres in society (e.g. technology and engineering, medicine, “the market”), or societal institutions/procedures (laws and settlements regulating industrial and political democracy and welfare states. Thirdly, we discuss the implications of our case for the discussions relating to the role of managerialism and professionalism in reforms and in the future of organizations and societies.

Prospects of Professionalizing Management: US Versus Europe

Historically, industrial management in Northern Europe has, to a larger extent than in the US, been legitimized by disciplinary knowledge. This was the case not only in manufacturing, but also in the administrative apparatus of the state, i.e. in order to justify authority, managers had to refer to expertise in engineering, economics or medicine, for instance. In the American management tradition, on the other hand, authority was to a greater extent derived from knowledge of management itself, or so-called general management (Byrkjeflot and Halvorsen 1996).

Management was the twentieth-century scholarly term used to describe justifications of authority while managerialism and later “leaderism” was a late twentieth- and twenty-first-century term, just like there has been a movement from studying professions to professionalism (Evetts 2010). Recent scholarship argues that management peaked its status in the 1950s and 1960s. Now, managers prefer to speak of leadership to describe their work rather than management (Brocklehurst et al. 2010; Reed 2016). This does not necessarily mean that a shift in justifications of managerial authority has occurred. It could be that the original managerial ideology has become institutionalized and taken for granted (Djelic 2016), which means that new words like “leaders”, just like post-New-Public-Management (post-NPM) are mainly providing a new framework for understanding old practices under new circumstances.

According to Klikauer (2015, p. 1105), “Managerialism justifies the application of its one-dimensional managerial techniques to all areas of work, society, and capitalism on the grounds of superior ideology, expert training, and the exclusiveness of managerial knowledge necessary to run public institutions and society as corporations.” Also in the US public sector, a stronger belief in separating politics and administration has prevailed, meaning the idea that public and private management was alike has had a stronger influence (The Wilsonian versus Weberian approach). Later, the rise of New Public Management expanded this view of the omnipotence of management to the public sector in many other parts of the world. One may perhaps speak of a paradox then, as the idea of management has expanded into new spheres of industry and society during the latter decades, while there has not been a simultaneous expansion of a distinct management profession (Grey 1997). This may relate to another paradox: while top executives’ wages have increased continuously, there has not been a similar increase in managerial autonomy and power—rather the opposite (Mizruchi and Marshall 2016).

Both the scientific-management and human relations movements in management sought to develop management into a science and profession (Guillén 1994). Many arguments have been presented for why such a management profession is needed or why it is likely to develop in the future (Parsons 1937; Reed and Anthony 1992; Khurana and Nohria 2008; Leicht 2016). However, there are not many signs of the institutionalization of a distinct management profession in the occupational structure. As argued by Khurana (2007), even in the US it is hard to see a general management profession emerging. Several cases of professionalizing management specialties have been observed (Hodgson et al. 2015). Rather than a confirmation of a trend toward professionalization of management as such, however, this development may show the problems with integrating the various tasks associated with management in a unified system of knowledge and profession. The financial crisis also undermined the belief in management. Some business school activists, such as Khurana, have sought to restore management status as an occupation in the wake of that crisis, but their call for a “code of conduct” for management does not appear to have been very successful (Khurana and Nohria 2008).

Arguments Against and for Management as Profession

Richard Whitley is among those, along with Andrew Abbott and Chris Grey, who have presented arguments for why management has not become, and is not likely to become, a profession. Like most analysts addressing this topic, Whitley departs from the explosive growth and attraction of business education both in the US and on a global level.Footnote 1 This institutional expansion did not result in professionalization, mainly due to the nature of management knowledge as a “congery of overlapping yet disconnected topics, results and pronouncements with little in common except its institutional base (the business school)” (Whitley 1984, p. 387; see also Byrkjeflot 1998).

Whitley has argued consistently that management is a multidisciplinary field of knowledge, much more context-dependent than other so-called “sciences”, and that it therefore cannot be professionalized (Whitley 1984, 1995). In so doing, he underlines the challenge to obtain one unified and standardized set of knowledge persuasive enough to justify managerial authority across all variances of sectors, divisions of labor, skill formations and industrial relations systems. Whitley concludes: “The process of professionalization of managerial skills on the basis of academic knowledge is, then, unlikely to develop very far, even in Anglo-Saxon societies where ‘professionalism’ represents an important occupational ideal” (Whitley 1995, pp. 102–3).

Andrew Abbott also targets management knowledge as he claims “… despite efforts, the area of business management has never been made an exclusive jurisdiction” (Abbott 1988, p. 103). In his view, management knowledge suffers from lack of content due to extreme abstraction. Consequently, several professions and experts compete, claiming that their knowledge covers the entire field of managerial activity. While Whitley points to the lack of a coherent, standardized management science as a reason for why management did not become a profession, Abbott’s main point is the lack of social closure due to unsuccessful claims from expert groups on possessing useful, exclusive and abstract knowledge.

Grey (1997) argues that most professions, for example, medicine or accounting, have a fragmented knowledge base (Grey 1997, p. 713). On the other hand, the widespread attraction of management as a technical practice is, according to Grey, ignored by those who reject management as a profession. The growing influence of “management-speak-industry” is in one sense a jurisdiction (Grey 1997, pp. 705, 721). In sum, Grey agrees that it is difficult to define management as a profession as of today, but seems not to exclude the possibility that management may become a profession. In his view, a successful professionalization rests on the ability of managers and management educators to distance themselves from those whose interests lie in controlling managers’ behaviors. In so doing, Grey emphasizes to what extent the knowledge base can justify autonomy, concluding that lack of autonomy is the main reason management cannot yet be labelled a profession.

While Chris Grey and other scholars from a critical management perspective state that management gains its high status from the claim that management is a science, Peter Drucker, who has been granted the status as “father of management” also argued that management cannot be a science in the way the British and Americans use the word. Drucker wanted to approach management as a liberal art or more in accordance with the German term geistenwissenschaft. He criticized the proponents of science for putting too much emphasis on efficiency and centring on “where can I be applying my beautiful gimmick” (Drucker 1974, p. 508, 1986, p. 227). Similarly, Enteman claims that American managerialism has been a failure because, “as management education grew, it increasingly divorced itself from its humanist background and pretended to be applied economics” (Enteman 1993, p. 168).

This scholarly debate on whether or not management is a profession highlights some of the struggles over definitions within the sociology of professions. Broadly speaking there have been two approaches, one emphasizing power or conflict, the other lists up various attributes distinguishing professions from other occupations. The attribute-approach usually refers to a body of abstract or scientific knowledge provided through higher education, monopoly controlled by a professional association, and a state certificate, as well as a high degree of autonomy supported by a code of ethics (cf. Brante 2011, p. 5). The power-approach emphasizes how occupational groups seek monopoly, power and status by claiming altruistic motives and exclusive knowledge (Sarfatti-Larson 1977; Freidson 1970; Abbott 1988). Recently, scholars like Julia Evetts have tried to overcome the struggles over the defining characteristics of professions within the sociology of professions by speaking of degrees of professionalism, and analyzing professionalism as a value or ideology (Evetts 2010, p. 124).

It is our contention that it is hard to speak of management as a profession, irrespective of these various approaches on what constitutes a profession. There is a fundamental difference between medicine and management in terms of how the division of labor has historically been structured, distributed and justified. Unlike doctors and lawyers, managers don’t need a formal education or a license to practice, and states have not taken much interest in establishing such licensing. People would not be equally skeptical of having a layman as their manager as of having a layman as their surgeon. The managers, particularly in top executive positions in private firms, are more like politicians, who are often also amateurs or self-learned, and may thus be distinguished from the educated professional classes. This fundamental difference still exists. In some sectors of societies, however, the managers have to have the same education as those they are set to manage in order to be qualified and selected.

Most scholars arguing for the existence of a management profession point to what is perceived as a new process of imposing organizational “logics” to occupational fields previously dominated by professional “logics”. For instance, physicians in the National Health Service in the UK think that their jurisdiction is circumscribed by a new health management profession. Noordegraaf and Van der Meulen similarly argue that a management profession has emerged in Dutch healthcare, although they admit the various schools providing education in healthcare management “provide no clear ‘instruments’ for defining and standardizing work” (Noordegraaf and Van der Meulen 2008, p. 1067). This may indeed be the case, but most research relating to public sector reforms still conclude that doctors and other health professions have been able to maintain a rather powerful position by developing hybrid roles. The managerialization of public sector thus can be used as an opportunity by various professions to (re)gain occupational control. Consequently, the status of management as such becomes unclear. Noordegraaf (2015, p. 1) has recently called for making “organizing a normal part of professional work – instead of a hybrid, ‘uneasy’ combination of professional and managerial principles”.

Loosening the dichotomy between professionalism and organizations has been the primary objective for scholars promoting the concept of “hybrid professionalism” (Noordegraaf 2015). These scholars were not the first to object to the premise of an inherent conflict between professions and organizations. By combining historical, national, political and cultural contexts with theoretical analyses, a group of Northern European scholars studying professions showed a mutual relationship between professionalization and bureaucratization in Europe (Burrage and Torstendahl 1990; Conze and Kocka 1985). This historical–sociological approach stems from the insight that Nordic and Continental European professionalism is somewhat more integrated with bureaucracy and the state than Anglo-Saxon professionalism.

The professionalization of management based on a business management model is even less likely in such contexts than in the case of the United States, due to the strength of a civil servant tradition and a “privatbeamte” ethos, i.e. an ethos where private management is modelled upon the state (Conze and Kocka 1985). While battle over occupational fields in the tradition of Abbott (1988) has dominated the American context, the focus in this Northern European tradition has been more on the relationship between the state, public bureaucracies and institutions providing frames and contexts for the development of professions.

Disciplinary knowledge has been regarded as a major source of managerial power in Northern Europe. Moreover, the idea of industrial democracy and the institutionalization of tripartite cooperation (state, unions, employer associations) in macro-governance, as well as worker and user influence at shop-floor, has been an important alternative source of managerial authority—particularly in the Nordic countries, but also in Germany. Partly for this reason, Brante (2013) has found that the idea of a professional field involved in continuous jurisdictional conflicts does not fit that well with the Nordic context.

Rather, what characterized the professional field in Norway, for instance, was a high degree of state regulation and involvement in the development of an industrial sphere. The state involvement in developing welfare state professions also provided a strong impetus for cooperation across professional fields and across public and private sectors in the Nordic countries. However, proponents of managerialism seeking to import the American management tradition to Northern Europe argued that management demands specific knowledge and skills. The ideological battle over the foundations for and framing of management may be illustrated by the development in Norway.

We can identify three waves of efforts to import American-style management in Norwegian industry and public sector (Table 3.1). First, at the beginning of the 20th century: Taylorism; secondly, from the 1950s onwards: Post-Taylorism; thirdly, from the 1980s: managerialism (Byrkjeflot and Halvorsen 1996). Consultants, business practitioners and educators with ambitions to establish management as a science and a profession used the American model as their inspiration. The three waves provided opportunities to professionalize management, but in all three cases these efforts were unsuccessful. This case will be used here to illustrate the challenges of making management a profession in societies with a tradition for linking organizational expertise to other kinds of disciplinary expertise, as well as expertise linked to political–democratic processes. The Norwegian trajectory is of interest more generally since these waves were part of a transnational push for professionalization of management in the post-Second World War area, and the Norwegian authority patterns and industrial structures were also more similar to rest of Europe than the American authority patterns and industrial structures.

Table 3.1 An overview of attempts to professionalize management in Norway 1900–2010: Taylorism, post-Taylorism and managerialism
Full size table

Taylorism: The Management Challenge to Engineering Dominance

At the turn of the nineteenth century, engineers had gained a dominant position in Norwegian industrial management and they were not challenged by any other profession until the rise of business economists in the 1980s. During 2009–2016, however, engineers have increasingly returned to top positions in industrial management (Amdam and Kvålshaugen 2016). Engineering did not provide input to a managerial profession as much in Norway as it did in the US (Shenhav 1999). Previous studies have concluded that functional competencies, rather than general management skills, have persisted as the most important source of authority in Germany and the Nordic countries (Byrkjeflot and Halvorsen 1997; Amdam and Kvålshaugen 2016). Thus, management has been an occupational field open for competition between professions rather than evolved into a management profession.

The ambition among some engineers to develop engineering into a profession that also took care of managerial tasks may be illustrated by the opening of Norway’s only institute of technology in 1910. This event sparked a debate over whether management education should be integrated into the curricula. Engineers inspired by Fredrik W. Taylor’s scientific management called for more management competencies based on an analysis of the economic success of the US and Germany in relation to the UK, claiming that the attention and perfection of organizational development was the key explanation (Halvorsen 1982, p. 160). However, although Taylorism sparked some interest among Norwegian engineers and industrialists, these ideas did not have serious impact, on either the education system or the practice of management. In addition, workers resisted Taylorism in Norway; as in most countries, they unionized and gathered political strength (Halvorsen 1982, p. 135; Guillén 1994, p. 109).

The industrial structure of Norway consisted mainly of small- and medium-sized enterprises, making the control of workers and the creation of efficient organizational structures less urgent challenges. These traits contributed to the rejection of Taylorism. Achieving authority was more about convincing the main owners that the managers possessed adequate competencies and knowledge. Thus, the engineering profession emphasized scientific and technological competencies as their source of authority, legitimizing occupational control of industrial management.

The Norwegian response to Taylorism in the first wave shed light on the contested nature of management authority and the problems with the argument about management in itself as a source of authority. Like the US, Norway did not have a dominant pre-modern elite culture like the field of literature in UK or middle class “bildung” in Germany. One could therefore expect that aspiring managerial professions were more inclined to follow the American trajectory since engineers dominated industrial management, and their main challenge in gaining managerial authority was acceptance from financial owners. As in the US, Norwegian engineers sought authority through knowledge, but they rejected Taylorism. Instead, Norwegian engineers cultivated technology as science and bildung as their source of authority, inspired by their close relation to the German engineering tradition. This case underlines the importance of including contextual explanations, and questions targeting sources of authority.

Post-Taylorism: The Joint Management Tradition

After the Second World War, the rather fragmented attempts at importing American-style managerialism were replaced by an institutionalized push for diffusion of American models of management and organization (Carew 1989, p. 161). Once more, engineers challenged these efforts to import American-style management, now in the shape of human relations personnel management. A committee set up to reform engineering education argued against introducing management courses at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, claiming that their task was to “educate engineers not technical business economists” (Owe et al. 1952, p. 34). In their view, management competencies were best obtained through learning by practical experience. The Norwegian response to post-Taylorism turned the argument from American ideology of general management upside-down; instead of regarding management as a generalist skill, engineering knowledge was the generalist skill and management was a kind of specialization within engineering.

Despite the efforts made by the Marshall mission and the Norwegian Productivity Institute, human relations did not evolve into a central knowledge base for Norwegian managers, nor a starting point for professionalization of management. Although originally inspired by the human relations-tradition, the scholars funded by this institute directed the field of management and organizational knowledge into an alternative direction, focusing on workers’ co-determination—the joint management model. This was quite similar to an alternative model later known as the Japanese management model. 

In Norway, industrial democracy rose to a prominent position on the political agenda during the 1950s and 1960s (Slagstad 1998, p. 412). Both the major trade union and the Labour Party aimed for policies that gave workers more influence in corporations. They sought to empower workers by giving them codetermination over day-to-day operations, which again was believed to raise productivity. A grand research project aiming to test if self-governed worker-groups could raise productivity and ease employer–worker relations made a major impact on Norwegian regulations on industrial relations (Thorsrud and Emery 1969). The institutionalized tripartite cooperation encouraged industrial managers to justify their authority not so much by referring to their expert knowledge as to their formal role in the administration of the joint management system. However, this way of justifying managerial authority was not sufficiently flexible or dynamic to face the changes taking place in the industrial structure as a consequence of international competition. Consequently, this alternative to post-Taylorism could not serve as foundation to the professionalization of management.

At the same time, employers reported that most engineers were overqualified for the technical aspects of their work tasks, and showed disinterest and lack of motivation for the administrative aspects (Holter 1961, p. 155). Discussions over the experiments and reports, along with radicalization and critiques against industrial society, led to a decline in confidence among Norwegian engineers in terms of their managerial abilities (Nygaard 2013, p. 284). In effect, knowledge in science and technology had lost its power as a source of managerial authority as well. Combined with a development towards financialization, this laid the foundation for the transfer of managerial dominance from engineers to business economists, demonstrating that management was an occupational field open for competition.

Managerialism, Kenningism and New Public Management 1980–2010

The engineers’ declining occupational control over industrial management coincided with the rise of a third wave of promoting managerialism and general management in Norway. Both the introduction of a modest form of divisionalized organizational structure in the public and private sectors, and the financialization of business in Norway, had a certain taste of Americanization. One management consultant in particular, George Kenning, pushed Norwegian industrial managers in this direction. Kenning, who had managerial experience from the automobile industry in the US, was brought in as part of the Marshall aid, and was frequently used as a management consultant by Swedish and Norwegian industry (Kalleberg 1991; Byrkjeflot 2002, p. 114).Footnote 2 In Norway, the shipbuilding company Aker became the main hub for Kenning’s influence (Kalleberg 1991). Kenningism’s popularity in a closed circle of managers boosted the confidence of top managers, but also gave birth to a counter-movement in the defence of traditional forms of management based on professional and local norms (Byrkjeflot 2002). At the end of the 1980s, the ideals of general management and financialization through internal markets was beginning to make an impact even outside the business community.

The very same managerial principles that Kenning formulated were also implemented in the Norwegian public sector, this time under the catchword of “unitary management”. The ambitions on behalf of management were particularly strong in hospitals, but there were similar reforms in schools, universities and social services. The New Public Management movement in Norway was at first slow-moving, but there was a new strong push for reforming the public sector in the 2000s, with major reforms transforming the railways, hospitals and the postal services into enterprises. Furthermore, accountability mechanisms and management by results were introduced, as major principles in all state agencies and several agencies were merged and reestablished as state enterprises. Since then the reform activism has continued, although under new labels like post-NPM and New Public Governance.

Both Kenningism and joint management can be interpreted as modernist challenges to established organizational cultures. As noted by Kenning himself when discussing organizations, Norwegians referred to voluntary organizations, unions, political parties and so on, but not firms (Utnes 1955). Kenningism was a counter-movement both to popular democracy, with its emphasis on local and national political organizations, as well as to the democracy at work movement (joint management). Both forms of democracy challenge the ideology of general management as a source of authority because managers cannot justify their right to manage in such a system by referring to their formal position and management qualifications alone.

The Kenning controversy in the 1990s may have strengthened the mutual disrespect that developed between unions and academics taking an interest in industrial development on the one hand, and the Kenning supporters among a small group of top executives in Norway. The paradoxical outcome was that central industrial managers claimed to support the democracy at work movement in public, while they at the same time adopted many of Kenning’s ideas of strictly hierarchical management (Sørhaug 1996). From the outset, a broader specter of American ideas of managerialism was mainly appropriated by actors in the practice field. This separation between the practice field and the academic field was an obstacle to the professionalization of management. Norway was not unique in this; the field of management knowledge connected much less with the academic system in all European countries than in the US and there was a great deal of resistance against importing the American management model among academics as well as educated industrialists.

Conclusion

Most scholars seem to agree that management cannot be labelled a profession, albeit with disagreement over explanations. We departed from Grey’s (1997) critique of Abbott (1988) and Whitley’s (1984, 1995) rejection of management’s status as a profession. In Grey’s view there exists a paradox, in that management as technical practice (managerialism) is widely acknowledged to be actually expanding, whereas managers as an occupational group have “failed to perpetuate its elite status” (Grey 2017, p. 124). While Abbott and Whitley in different ways explain the lack of closure with reference to the nature of management knowledge, Grey argues that other successful professions possess similar kinds of diverse knowledge bases. Thus, according to Grey, the lack of closure around management must be explained otherwise, and among his favorite explanations is the “new capitalism”, which has undermined the traditional sources of legitimization for managerial power—knowledge about how to cooperate and how to control workers. Grey paradoxically predicts the end of management along with the expansion of managerialism (2017).

What constitutes a profession has proven to be a contested question within the sociology of professions. Our contention is that management hardly qualifies as a profession whether drawing upon the attribute-, closure- or more recent discursive approach. It has not been possible for managerial elites educated in business schools or similar institutions either to achieve closure over, or institutionalize, a distinct field of knowledge qualifying for management positions. The failure to professionalize top management in business is particularly crucial if seen from the perspective that industrial management is the hallmark of managerialism. Evidently, scholars arguing for the existence of a management profession point to management specialties within public and private organizations below the top management level, such as accounting, human resources or project management. However, these diversifying movements towards professionalizing management specialties demonstrate the problem with developing an integrated profession rather than the opposite. Moreover, the managerialization of the public sector may spark a professional response empowering the traditional professions rather than establishing a new managerial profession of government.

Although it seems difficult to professionalize management, it is not impossible for the professionalization to take place. In fact, recent developments render the future prospects for professionalization of management ambiguous. Some of the obstacles for professionalizing management have become weaker, such as labor unions, along with this the idea and institutions associated with tripartite governance and Nordic representative industrial democracy. The increasing impact of financialization may be noted as a reason for this development along with globalization, but this also undermines the autonomy of management. The rise of New Public Management has followed in the wake of a movement proclaiming critiques of professional power, and for making public organizations more business-like with general managers in charge, as in private firms. It has been argued that the influence of this reform approach was stronger in Anglo-Saxon countries than in continental Europe and the Nordic countries. Instead, the latter countries maintained many of the characteristics of the established framework, qualifying their reform paths to become “neo-Weberian” (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011; Byrkjeflot et al. 2018).

Values of democracy and expertise, as well as institutions and elites that are associated with such values, are supposed to balance each other in democratic and liberal societies. In such societies, and particularly in times of crisis and politization, managerial authority in itself (as general management expertise) may be difficult to justify. Recent events, like the financial crisis and the rise of right-wing and other kinds of populism, may indicate that we are in a period demanding new kinds of balancing acts, and new kinds of justifications for management. There is no lack of management scholars on a quest to professionalize management (Khurana and Nohria 2008; Romme 2017), but so far it has been difficult to identify any push in this direction in the “real world”.