Organizational Processes and the Development of Managers: Some Hypotheses

Abstract

recent years complex organizations of all kinds, but particularly industrial bureaucracies, have given widespread attention to an elusive phantom called management develepment. The importance of the subject cannot be gainsaid, for as one leading manpower expert has put it: Whether a company is well run or not depends on the policies it follows in developing executives. Yet as far as running the firm is concerned one of our most distinguished contemporary industrial sociologists has stated: In the area of managing managers we have minimal knowledge and a great deal of speculation. This paper attempts to fill some of the lacunae in sociological knowledge of managers, managing, and management, fields certainly not unplowed by sociologists but, equally, areas in which we require more empirical work to assess existing sociological theory. The paper attempts an inductive contribution to the development of theory in industrial sociology by relating one empirical study to some of the best known and most ...