“The Art of Good Management”

Abstract

This paper is derived from a study of work and trade unionism in the British pottery industry in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It is an attempt to open up the history of pottery management's labour strategies for debate, given the relatively slight attention the subject has received in general or with regard to this important period. Ceramic historians, in common with labour and social history, have neglected the detailed study of management, while contemporary writers on the Potteries often lapsed into a “demonology” when dealing with pottery manufacturers. In contrast to the more famous volumes on social conditions in the Potteries by Shaw or Owen and Warburton's examination of trade unions, the early-twentieth-century pottery-owners have not been the subject of sustained analysis. Yet an orthodoxy of sorts has developed, which sees the industry's management as typically crude and unchanging in technique. Economists such as B. R. Williams or geographers like Yeaman have been unchallenged in their assertions that owners could almost dispense with labour-control strategies in the light of the workforce's passivity and the tranquility of industrial relations in the industry.