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Projects, Management, and Protean Times: Engineering Enterprise in the United States, 1870–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Benjamin W. Pinney
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Extract

The management of innovative work in high-technology fields has been a “hot” topic in recent years. In fields such as innovation management, product development, organization design, corporate strategy, economic sociology, organizational economics, engineering management, and knowledge management, scholars have examined subjects ranging from the sociology of creativity to the boundaries of firms in networked industries. They have remarked on the implications of contingent work, outsourcing, globalization, and the demise of the one-company career in studies concerned with issues from regional and national competitiveness to the evolution of labor markets and the social contract. Authors of articles and books published by the popular business press have trumpeted “nimble” and “virtual” organizational forms required by unprecedented conditions, and authors of scholarly essays have addressed the management of relentless change, the option-based valuation of interfirm networks, and knowledge in relation to organizational boundaries.

Type
Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , December 2002 , pp. 620 - 626
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) (2002). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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References

1. Accession AC4, box 165, folder 11, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

2. The noted literatures are vast, partially overlapping, conversations. Some general measures of interest in the theory and practice of managing innovation can be found in the membership rolls of professional societies and the formation of specialized journals: the Project Management Institute grew from under 8,000 members in 1990 to nearly 55,000 in 1999. The Technology and Innovation Management section of the Academy of Management grew from its founding in 1987 to 1,100 members in 2000. New or refocused academic journals include Technology Management (1994), the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management (1989), New Technology, Work and Employment (1986), the Journal of Product Innovation Management (1984), and a slew of popular business publications such as Wired (1993), Fast Company (1995), Red Herring (1993), and Business 2.0 (1998). Representative examples of recent writing include Malone, Thomas and Laubacher, Robert, “The Dawn of the Elance Economy,” Harvard Business Review 76 (Sept.-Oct. 1998): 145–52Google Scholar; Christensen, Clayton, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)Google Scholar; Tushman, Michael and O’Reilly, Charles, “The Ambidextrous Organization: Managing Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change,” California Management Review 38 (Summer 1996): 1–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Shona and Eisenhardt, Kathleen, “The Art of Continuous Change: Linking Complexity Theory and Time-Based Evolution in Relentlessly Shifting Organizations,” Administrative Science Quarterly 42 (March 1997): 1–34.Google Scholar

3. Abernathy, William, The Productivity Dilemma: Roadblock to Innovation in the Automobile Industry (Baltimore, Md., 1978)Google Scholar; Piore, Michael and Sabel, Charles, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; and Dertouzos, Michael, Lester, Richard, and Solow, Robert, Made in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).Google Scholar

4. The latter term comes from Piore and Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide. See also Sabel, Charles and Zeitlin, Jonathan, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization,” Past and Present 108 (Aug. 1985): 137-77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Best, Michael, The New Competition: Institutions of Industrial Restructuring (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar. Recent studies that show the history of alternative forms in the United States include Scranton, Philip, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization (Princeton, N.J., 1997)Google Scholar and Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800–1885 (New York, 1983); Sabel, Charles F. and Zeitlin, Jonathan, eds., World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (New York, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Filmmaking and other creative industries are outside my scope. See Faulkner, Robert R., “Short-Term Projects and Emergent Careers: Evidence from Hollywood,” American Journal of Sociology 92 (Jan. 1987): 879–909 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baker, Wayne E. and Faulkner, Robert R., “Role as Resource in the Hollywood Film Industry,” American Journal ofSociology 97 (Sept. 1991): 279–309 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caves, Richard, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge, Mass., 2000)Google Scholar; DeFillippi, Robert and Arthur, Michael, “Paradox in Project-Based Enterprise: The Case of Film Making,” California Management Review 40 (Winter 1998): 125-39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Bijker, Wiebe, Hughes, Thomas P., and Pinch, Trevor, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)Google Scholar served as a clarion call for these approaches. See also Latour, Bruno, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)Google Scholar.

7. See, particularly, Johnson, Stephen, “Three Approaches to Big Technology: Operations Research, Systems Engineering, and Project Management,” Technology and Culture 38 (Oct. 1997): 891–919 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hughes, Thomas and Hughes, Agatha, eds., Systems, Experts, and Computers: The System Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (Cambridge, Mass., 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also of note are Bugos, Glenn, Engineering the F-4 Phantom II: Parts into Systems (Annapolis, Md., 1996)Google Scholar; MacKenzie, Donald, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; and Lonnquest, John, “The Face of Atlas: General Bernard Schriever and the Development of the Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, 1953-1960” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1996 Google Scholar). Two recent books address the history of project management in some detail. Morris’s, Peter The Management of Proj’ects (London, 1994)Google Scholar provides an international perspective on the development of the field since 1955, relating this to both earlier practices and current debates in management theory. Boutinet’s, J. -P. Anthropologie du projet (Paris, 1996)Google Scholar offers a consideration of the history of the idea of projects, focusing on the cultural and political implications of these ideas in France. Several authors associated with the International Research Network on Organizing by Projects (IRNOP) have examined the underlying social bases of projecttype work, and the proceedings volumes produced from IRNOP conferences offer valuable insights. Selected essays from two IRNOP conferences have been published in the Scandinavian Journal of Management 11 (Fall 1995) and Lundin, Rolf A. and Midler, Christophe, eds., Projects as Arenas for Renewal and Learning Processes (Boston, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. In Strategy and Structure Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., marked off the origins of modern business enterprise in the United States by explicitly distinguishing the operation of railroads from their construction. In Chandler’s account, railway timetables were the original objects of management rationalization, and train scheduling had mandated the creation of hierarchical organizations, a development subsequently extended to managing throughputs in mass production industries. See Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), and The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). Chandler’s explicit setting aside of construction appears in Strategy and Structure, 21. Histories of management theory include Litterer, Joseph, “The Emergence of Systematic Management as Shown by the Literature of Management from 1870-1900” (Ph. D. diss., University of Illinois, 1959)Google Scholar and “Systematic Management: The Search for Order and Integration,” Business History Review 35 (Winter 1961): 461-76; Nelson, Daniel, AMental Revolution: Scientific Management since Taylor (Columbus, Ohio, 1992)Google Scholar; Wren, Daniel, The Evolution ofManagement Thought (4th ed., New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Guillen, Mauro E., Models of Management: Work, Authority, and Organizationin Comparative Perspective (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar; Waring, Steven, Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory since 1945 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991)Google Scholar; and Shenhav, Yehouda, “From Chaos to Systems: The Engineering Foundations of Organization Theory, 1879-1932,” Administrative Science Quarterly 40 (1995): 557-85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hounshell, David, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 (Baltimore, Md., 1984)Google Scholar, and Yates, JoAnne, Control through Communication: The Rise ofSystem in American Management (Baltimore, Md., 1989), which blend close inspection of practices with awareness of broader developments in business administration.Google Scholar

9. Perrow, Charles, “Pfeffer Slips!” Academy of Management Review 19 (April 1994): 192.Google Scholar Diverse examples of recent studies that reinforce the perception of World War II as a watershed include Kogut, Bruce, “The Network as Knowledge: Generative Rules and the Emergence of Structure,” Strategic Management Journal 21 (March 2000): 405-253.0.CO;2-5>CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hughes, Thomas, Prometheus Rescued (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Hughes, and Hughes, , eds., Systems, Experts, and Computers; and Kerzner, Harold, Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling (New York, 1992)Google Scholar.

10. “Matrix Organization Designs: How to Combine Functional and Project Forms,” Business Horizons 14 (Feb. 1971): 29-40, quotation at p. 29.

11. This emphasis is particularly drawn out in Beniger, James, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1986)Google Scholar.

12. In sociological approaches to technical environments, scholars have adopted ideas of “boundary objects” or “linguistic hybrids” to describe the mix of translation and transfer in exchanges. Examples include Star, Susan Leigh and Griesemer, James R., “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39,” Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387–420 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carlile, Paul, “A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development,” unpublished manuscript, 15 Aug. 2000 Google Scholar; Galison, Peter, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar.

13. Within the canonical organization theory literature, Tom Burns and Stalker, G. M. provide an early discussion of the importance of translation and liaison in managing innovation in The Management of Innovation (London, 1961), 155–73Google Scholar. Burns’s introduction to the 1994 edition of this book provides a sense of how the study of innovation was new territory in the minds of sociologists in the late 1950s (New York, 1994), vii-xx.