Wenzel Matiaske, Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg (Germany)

 

Hundred years ago, Henri Fayols “Administration Industrielle et Générale”, a milestone in the history of organisational thought, was published. This centenary motivates the editors of the Management Revue to launch a stream on the history of organisational studies. In the forthcoming volumes, and rather on an infrequent basis, we would like to publish contributions which not only introduce the reader to one or several, interrelated seminal works of organisational theory, but also provide accompanying commentaries and an analysis of their history of effects.

 

The reason for this format is, given our discipline’s forgetfulness of history, to provide orientation, which not only serves teaching and young management scholars. While reference to classic thought contributes to scientific advancement in other fields of the social sciences, in our field some research issues are being addressed repeatedly – without putting the associated arguments and findings in an adequate historical context. In this respect, addressing the history of thought should be understood as a contribution to the advancement of management research.

 

We would like to avoid a strict delimitation of the era being addressed. Contributions on contemporaries of Fayol like Frederik Winston Taylor, Frank B. and Lillian Gilbreth or Henry L. Gantt und Karol Adamiecki are as welcome as contributions are on Fayol’s predecessors or successors. By no means we are exclusively committed to the “engineers of the organisation”; economists, legal scholars and particularly the labour science community and psychologists should also be given due attention. A temporal upper boundary shall nevertheless be the 1970s, when, most notably induced by Alfred D. Chandler, strategic management and the reflection on it started to thrive.

 

This stream will be open to submissions until the end of 2017 in the first place. It will be maintained and edited by Wenzel Matiaske (Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, Germany). Submissions shall accord with the formatting guidelines of the management revue. Please submit your manuscripts electronically via our online submission system using “Stream Echoes of an Era” as article section.