MANAGEMENT THEORY OF MARY PARKER FOLLET:
Modern management theory owes a lot to a nearly-forgotten woman writer, Mary Parker Follett.
Mary Parker Follett was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. She studied at
the Thayer Academy, Braintree, Massachusetts, where she credited one of her teachers with influencing many of her later ideas. In 1894, she used her inheritance to study at the Society for Collegiate Instruction of Women, sponsored by Harvard, going on to a year at Newnham College in Cambridge, England, in 1890. She studied on and off at Radcliffe as well, starting in the early 1890s.
In 1898, Mary Parker Follett graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe. Her research at Radcliffe was published in 1896 and again in 1909 as The Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Mary Parker Follett began working in Roxbury as a voluntary social worker in 1900. In 1908 she became chair of the Women's Municipal League Committee on Extended Use of School Buildings. In 1911, she and others opened the East Boston High School Social Center. She also helped found other social centers in Boston.
In 1917, Mary Parker Follett took on the vice-presidency of the National Community Center Association, and in 1918
published her book on community, democracy, and government,The New State.
Mary Parker Follett published another book, Creative Experience, in 1924, with more of her ideas about the creative interaction of people in group process. In 1926, she moved to England to live and work, and to study at Oxford. In 1928, Follett consulted with the League of Nations and with the International Labor Organization in Geneva. She lived in London from 1929 with Dame Katharine Furse of the Red Cross.
In her later years, Mary Parker Follett became a popular writer and lecturer in the business world. She was a lecturer at the London School of Economics from 1933.
Mary Parker Follett advocated for a human relations emphasis equal to a mechanical or operational emphasis in management. Her work contrasted with the "scientific management" of Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915) and evolved by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, which stressed time and motion studies.
Mary Parker Follett stressed the interactions of management and workers. She looks at management and leadership holistically, presaging modern systems approaches; she identifies a leader as "someone who sees the whole rather than the particular." Follett was one of the first (and for a long time, one of the few) to integrate the idea of organizational conflict into management theory, and is sometimes considered the "mother of conflict resolution."
In a 1924 essay, "Power," she coined the words "power-over" and "power-with" to differentiate coercive power from participative decision-making, showing how "power-with" can be greater than "power-over." "Do we not see now," she observed, "that while there are many ways of gaining an external, an arbitrary power —- through brute strength, through manipulation, through diplomacy —- genuine power is always that which inheres in the situation?"
Mary Parker Follett died in 1933 on a visit to Boston. After her death, her papers and speeches were compiled and published in 1942 in Dynamic Administration, and in 1995, Pauline Graham edited a compilation of her writing in Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management. The New State was reissued in a new edition in 1998 with helpful additional material.
Her work was mostly forgotten in America, and is still largely neglected in studies of the evolution of management theory, despite the accolades of more recent thinkers like Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker called her the "prophet of management" and his "guru."
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Background
Born in Massachusetts to a well-off Boston family, Follett was a brilliant scholar who graduated at 12. She was educated at the Thayer Academy, Boston, and Radcliffe College, Massachusetts. At 20, she attended an annexe of Harvard University called the Society for Collegiate Instruction of Women. In 1890, as a student of 22, she spent a year at Newnham College in Cambridge, England and went on to Paris as a postgraduate student. Graham describes Follett as a polymath, and records that she read law, economics, government and philosophy at Harvard, and history and political science at Newnham.
While at Cambridge, Follett gave a paper which she later developed into her first book, The House of Representatives. This was taken seriously enough to be reviewed by Theodore Roosevelt in the American Historical Review of October 1896.
Follett's family life was difficult. Her father, to whom she was close, died when she was in her early teens. Her mother was an invalid with whom Follett did not get on very well. From an early age Follett ran the household, and later she also ran the family housing business. Eventually, Follett broke all family ties and went to share a home with her friend, Isobella Briggs. Over the next 30 years, Isobella provided a stable domestic background, while her social connections were helpful to Follett's work. When Isobella died in 1926, Follett lost her home life as well as her closest friend.
Later that year she met Dame Katherine Furse, an English woman who was strongly involved with the Girl Guide movement. Follett later moved to England to share a house in Chelsea with Furse.
Follett the social worker
Follett was expected to become an academic, but instead she went into voluntary social work in Boston, where her energy and practicality (as well as her financial support on occasions) achieved much in terms of community-building initiatives. For over 30 years, she was immersed in this work, and proved to be an innovative, hands-on manager whose practical achievements included the original use of schools as out-of-hours centres for community education and recreation. This was Follett's own idea, and the resulting community centres became models for other cities throughout America.
Follett set up vocational placement centres in Boston school centres, and represented the public on the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Board. From 1924, she began to give regular papers relating to industrial organisation, especially for conferences of the Bureau of Personnel Administration in New York. She became, in effect, an early management consultant, as businessmen began to seek her advice about their organisational and human relations problems.
In 1926 and 1928, Follett gave papers for the Rowntree Lecture Conference and to the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. In 1933, she gave an inaugural series of lectures for the new-founded Department of Business Administration (now the Department of Industrial Relations) at the London School of Economics (LSE).
Later in 1933, Follett returned to America, where she died on the 18th December of that year, aged 65.
Key texts
The New State was written during 1918, and argues for group-based democracy as a process of government. Through this book, Follett became widely recognised as a political philosopher. It was based on her social work experience rather than on business organisation, but the ideas it contains were later applied in the business context.
The New State presented an often visionary interpretation of what Follett viewed as a progress of social evolution, and the tone is occasionally infused with religious poesy. The text argues that democracy 'by numbers' should give way to a more valid process of group-based democracy. This form of democracy is described as a dynamic process through which individual conflicts and differences become integrated within the search for overall group agreement. Through it, people will grow and learn as they adapt to one another's views while seeking a common, long-term good.
The group process works through the relating of individuals' different ideas to each other and to the common interests of the group as a whole. Appropriate action would, Follett held, become self-evident during the consultation process. This would eventually reveal a 'law of the situation', representing an objective which all could see would be the best course for the group as a whole to pursue. Conflict or disagreement were viewed as positive forces, and Follett considered social evolution to progress through the ever-continuous integration of diverse viewpoints and opinions in pursuit of the common good.
The New State envisages the basic group democratic process following right through to the international level, feeding up from neighbourhoods via municipal and state government levels into the League of Nations. Sometimes, Follett refers to an almost autonomous group spirit, which develops from the community between people, as the group process begins to work.
The Creative Experience was also written during 1918, and again focused on democratic governance, using examples from business to illustrate ideas. Dynamic Management - The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett and Freedom and Co-ordination were both published posthumously and edited by L Urwick. Freedom and Co-ordination collects together six papers given by Follett at the LSE in 1933, and these represent the most developed and concise distillation of her thoughts on business organisation.
Follett's business writings extended her social ideas into the industrial sphere. Industrial managers, she saw, confronted the same difficulties as public administrators in terms of control, power, participation, and conflict. Her later writings focused on management from a human perspective, using the new approach of psychology to deal with problems between individuals and within groups. She encouraged businessmen to look at how groups formed and how employee commitment and motivation could be encouraged. The participation of everyone involved in decisions affecting their activities is seen as fundamental, in that Follett viewed group power and management through co-operation as the obvious route to achievements that would benefit all.
Follett's views on power, leadership, authority and control
Follett envisioned management responsibility as being diffused throughout a business rather than wholly concentrated at the hierarchical apex. Degrees of authority and responsibility are seen as spread all along the line. For example, a truck driver can act with more authority than the business owner in terms of knowing most about the best order in which to make his drops. Leadership skills are required of many people rather than just one person, and final authority, while it does exist, should not be over-emphasised. The chief executive's role lies in co-ordinating the scattered authorities and varied responsibilities that make up the organisation into group action and ideas, and also in foreseeing and meeting the next situation.
Follett's concept of leadership as the ability to develop and integrate group ideas, using 'power with' rather than 'power over' people, is very modern. She understood that the crude exercise of authority based on subordination is hurtful to human beings, and cannot be the basis of effective, motivational management control. The power of single individuals, Follett considered, could erode overall organisational and social achievement, and she advocated the replacement of personal power with the authority of task or function and with the 'law of the situation' as revealed through group process consultation. Partnership and co-operation, she sought to persuade people, was of far more ultimate benefit to everyone than hierarchical control and competition.
Follett viewed the group process as a form of collective control, with the interweaving experience of all who are performing a functional part in an activity feeding into decision-making. Thus, control is realised through the co-ordination of all functions rather than imposed from the outside.
Follett's four fundamental principles of organisation
Follett identified four principles that she considered basic to effective management co-ordination:
- Coordination as the 'Reciprocal Relating' of all factors in a situation - relating the factors in a situation.
- Coordination by direct contact - direct communication between all responsible people involved, whatever their hierarchical or departmental positions.
- Coordination in the early stages - involving all the people directly concerned, right from the initial stages of designing a project or forming a policy.
- Coordination as a continuing process - keeping co-ordination going on a continuous basis, and recognising that there is no such thing as unity, but only the continuous process of unifying.
The context of evolutionary progress
Follett's thinking was ahead of her time, yet was founded on a conviction of social, evolutionary progress which, from our hindsight perspective, is flawed by the course of subsequent history. She lived through momentous times, when social and technological change seemed to make a new order inevitable. The destruction caused by the First World War also seemed to dictate the clear need for a determined effort to create a social order which would not break down so disastrously. Simultaneously, the war created pressures in both England and America to include labour participation in management, and led to a growth in internationalist ideas and to the birth of the League of Nations. Like other writers of the time, Follett made leaps of the imagination that grew out of the factual changes that were actually taking place. Her view was rational and progressive, and she could not know the degree to which some things would remain constant, undermining the apparently inevitable dynamic of social 'progress'.
From the end of the same century which Follett saw begin, we have only too full a knowledge of the Second World War, and countless other conflicts, of the discrediting of Russian Communism, and of worsening ethnic divisions and continuing human barbarities. The progressive, internationalist vision seems to be, from our contemporary perspective, a fast-receding dream.
Yet, while Follett's optimistic expectation of radical social change were largely mistaken, she drew from it the imaginative vision to transform at least some of her convictions into ideas about ways of living and working that have contributed much to both social and management practice. In fact, it is almost disheartening to read Follett and realise that she clearly and strongly stated, so many years ago, ideas that are being proffered as 'new' today and that are still rarely practised in any sustained way.
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