[Marxism] Slavery and the development of modern management techniques

["Clinton Fernandes" <cfer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

      An excerpt from the Journal of Management Studies, Vol 40, Issue 8, 
December 2003.

      THE DENIAL OF SLAVERY IN MANAGEMENT STUDIES, by Bill Cooke.

      This article is about the wrongful exclusion of American slavery from 
histories of management. There is at least an argument that this is of 
intrinsic relevance to management studies. This is a part empirical revision 
that writes in a missing link with one of the most significant, and devastating 
social processes to have affected Africa, Europe, and the Americas in the 
modern era. This revision extends what is recognized as the collective 
understanding of our field.

      If this is not enough, however, there is additional significance in 
relation to the construction of management history, and the purposes that that 
history serves. This derives from a view of history that its writing is as much 
about the present in which it is produced, as it is about the past. History is 
'never for itself. It is always for someone' (Jenkins, 1991, p. 17); and as 
Cooke (1999, p. 83) points out, 'the way history is written, the choices made 
in selecting and ignoring past events are shaped by prevailing, albeit 
competing power relations and their associated ideologies.'

      From this position, what is called history, but might more accurately be 
called historiography, contributes to the legitimization of present day 
institutions, practices, and bodies of knowledge; but also to emergent and 
established critiques thereof. Thus, a standard history in which management 
first emerges on the US railroads from the 1840s onwards (Chandler, 1977) 
associates it with what is often represented as an heroic, frontier extending 
episode in the history of the United States. Extending Pushkala Prasad's (1997) 
identification of the intra- organizational imprints of the myth of the 
frontier, this association can be seen to give management a broader social and 
cultural legitimacy.

      A history which constructs an alternative narrative, in which American, 
and particularly US pre-Civil War slavery is a site of the birth of management 
(as is the case here) gives management quite different associations, with 
oppression and exploitation. This history would imply quite a different view of 
the social legitimacy of management in itself. In making its case, presenting 
data and the interpretations of non-management historians, it would also 
undermine any claim of the heroic model to be based in the only empirically 
true representation of the past.

      Of course, such a history would equally challenge any version of the 
history of management which explicitly or otherwise excludes slavery. Every 
version I have seen does so exclude; this a general phenomenon. It is the case 
even of critical approaches to management, including those which present 
alternatives to orthodox historiography (e.g. Jacques, 1996), and/or point to 
other historical instances of management's complicity in the worst forms of 
oppression (e.g. Burrell, 1997) on management in/of the holocaust). The 
implications that this article has for these versions does vary according to 
their historical/historiographical approach and position, and these are 
addressed in the conclusion. There are implications are for the whole of 
management studies, though; and it is management studies as a whole which has 
excluded - indeed denied - slavery.
     
      A Prima Facie Case 

      At the time of writing, this is feels like quite a remarkable claim, and 
indeed part of my main thesis is that it is unprecedented. But even the 
briefest prima facie consideration of the organization, scale, and significance 
of slavery provides strong support. Martin Luther King's use of metaphor 
associated with the production line and bureaucracy (Morgan, 1986) is neither 
anachronistic or unique. Fogel (1989, p. 28) confirms this with a quotation 
from Bennet Barrow's Highland plantation rules: 'A plantation might be 
considered as a piece of machinery. To operate successfully all its parts 
should be uniform and exact, and its impelling force regular and steady.'

      Equally telling is Olmsted, who wrote in 1860 of one plantation (1860, 
pp. 53-4): 'The machinery of labor was ungeared during a day and a half a week, 
for cleaning and repairs, experience having proved here, as it has in 
Manchester and New York, that operatives do very much better work if thus 
privileged . . . Regarding only the balance sheet of the owners ledger it was 
admirable management.' In this short paragraph Olmsted employs the machine 
metaphor; suggests a conscious proto-Hawthorne manipulation of rest periods and 
uses the very word 'management' to describe this. In repeating a parallel he 
makes elsewhere with Manchester and New York (1860, p. 27), Olmsted also by 
implication locates the plantation within a global, capitalist, economy.

      Elsewhere, in one of the few direct references to slavery in management 
histories, Jacques (1996, p. 42) claims that the US Civil War 'is usually 
represented as either a contest between state and national authority or a fight 
to end slavery. It was in part both these things, but it could more 
appropriately be termed the country's Industrial Revolution. By 1865, the 
industrializing North of the US had politically demolished the feudal economy 
of the manorial South.'

      This is not a received view amongst contemporary historians (see 
McPherson, 2001). Fogel (1989) shows that if the North and the 'feudal' and 
'manorial' South were considered separately, and ranked among countries of the 
world 'the South would stand as the fourth most prosperous country in the world 
in 1860. The South was more prosperous than France, Germany, Denmark or any of 
the countries of Europe' (1989, p. 87). The South was also continuing to 
industrialize, albeit more slowly than the North, on the basis of slave labour; 
and it was in reality not a separate country but an integral, and according to 
Richards (2000) the most politically powerful, part of the burgeoning US state 
and capitalist economy. Fogel states: 'throughout the eighteenth century, the 
great plantations of the sugar colonies . . . were the largest private 
enterprises of the age, and their owners were among the richest of all men. The 
same can be said of the cotton plantations in the United States on the eve of 
the Civil War' (Fogel, 1989, p. 24).

      Of course, the eve of the Civil War takes us well into the time period of 
1840 onwards in which orthodox histories (Chandler, 1977; also Wren, 1972) have 
management emerging on the railroads. According to Taylor (1999, p. xxvi), by 
1860 'capital investment in slaves in the [US] south - who now numbered close 
to 4 million, or close to one third of the population - exceeded the value of 
all other capital worth including land'. US slavers could therefore literally 
have claimed 'our people are our greatest asset'. Management studies is 
concerned with a field which can define itself as about 'the process of getting 
activities completed efficiently with and through other people' (Robbins, 1994, 
p. 3). Yet it has not exhibited even superficial curiosity about how these four 
million enslaved people were managed, at the very time and in the very nation 
where it claims management to have been born, in a set of long established, 
economically important organizations.
     
      The Structure and Approach of the Article 

      As I have already stated, this is the case for the range of differing 
understandings that there are of management. Considering these understandings 
collectively, and trying despite their difference to account for the exclusion 
of slavery is not without its methodological problems. But as the next section 
demonstrates, none of the three main schools of managerial thought Grey (1999) 
identifies (technical, elite, and political) sees the management of people who 
were slaves as having anything to do with modern management.

      That section will also explore why this is the case. Recognizing the 
vastness and diversity of the field Grey quite helpfully follows Reed (1989) in 
identifying exemplar texts for each of the schools; and he also argues despite 
their differences they together constitute a taken for granted understanding of 
what management is. These exemplars, and this taken for granted understanding 
are then examined to reveal the often implicit logic which appears to have led 
to the denial of slavery.

      Subsequent sections of the article will in turn refute the three main 
components of this logic. The third section will analyse slavery's relationship 
with capitalism, and its role in the emergence of industrial discipline. The 
fourth section will review how slave plantations were managed, and the fifth 
section will set out the extent to which there was a distinctive management 
occupational category in the ante-bellum south. The material that is drawn on 
in these three sections, aside from one or two primary sources, is the work of 
political, social, and economic historians of slavery. That these are secondary 
rather than primary sources actually lends strength to the underlying claim of 
denial. The material which management studies has ignored is not obscure hard 
to retrieve primary data; but the often publicly acclaimed (e.g. David 
Brion-Davis, cited below, has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and 
the National Book Award for books on slavery) and widely reviewed work of those 
with a longstanding and substantial institutional presence in the academy.

      The conclusion assesses the implications of the preceding sections on 
their own terms, in relation to management history/historiography more 
generally, and for various versions of that history. In so doing it proposes a 
more postcolonialist understanding of that history; but at the same time 
suggests that this should not be seen as the only, or even primary significance 
of the article. If there is to be one message above all to arise from this 
article, the conclusion suggests, it is that with which it started - that 
management studies has wrongly excluded slavery; and that that exclusion is 
properly termed a denial.
     


      The Standards on Slavery 

      When it comes to slavery's actual, rather than metaphorical, presence in 
management there is little to be found. The standard histories of management 
either make no mention at all of ante-bellum slavery in the modern context (for 
example, Pollard, 1968; Wren, 1972), or alternatively explicitly exclude it 
from modernity, as we have already seen with Jacques (1996). An explanation of 
both unspoken and explicit exclusions is sought here in a review of three texts 
proposed as exemplars on management by Grey (1999), after Reed (1989), namely 
Burnham (1942), Braverman (1974) and Chandler (1977).

      Grey follows Reed in distinguishing between technical, elite and 
political accounts of the emergence of management. In the technical account, 
exemplified by Chandler, the 'growth in scale and complexity of capitalist 
enterprises required the development of a new group of specialists to manage' 
(Grey, 1999, p. 566); hence the requirement to coordinate through the visible 
hand of these managers rather than the invisible hand of the market. In the 
elite account, exemplified by Burnham, management is seen as a body of theory 
and practice which sustains an advantageous status for a particular, 
managerial, elite, which is able to attain that position in the first place 
because of the separation of ownership from control. In the political account, 
exemplified by Braverman, management emerged from the drive to subject workers 
to the discipline required by capitalist accumulation. According to Grey, 'it 
may be noted that while this political approach to management is opposed to the 
functionalism of technical accounts of management, it has its own 
functionalism: workplace discipline is seen as functional of the drive for 
capital accumulation, and is at least in indirect form, functional to capital 
accumulation' (1999, p. 568).

      All three exemplars locate slavery outside the development of modern 
management. Burnham presents a quasi-Marxist epochal history of economic 
development, which concludes not in socialism but managerialist corporatism, 
and does therefore cover the era of ante-bellum slavery. But for Burnham wage 
labour is a defining characteristic of the capitalist epoch, implicitly 
precluding any consideration of slavery, which consequently is only mentioned 
briefly in relation to feudalism. For Braverman, the production process is 
framed by the 'antagonism between those who carry on the process and those for 
whom it is carried out, those who manage and those who execute . . .' (1974, p. 
68). But again, any recognition of this antagonism on ante-bellum plantations 
is precluded by wage labour as a defining feature of capitalism, and slavery is 
only mentioned in relation to ancient Egypt.

      Chandler pays most attention to slavery, over three pages; but these are 
three of 500, and their title ('The plantation - an ancient form of large scale 
production' (1977, p. 64)) makes his pre-modern situating of slavery clear. 
Chandler clearly recognizes some managerial complexity in the plantation 
economy. It is accepted that there was some division of labour, and managerial 
record keeping suggested a certain level of sophistication. Chandler also 
states that as the first salaried manager in the USA, 'the plantation overseer 
was an important person in American economic history. The size of this group 
(in 1850 overseers numbered 18,859) indicates that many planters did feel that 
they needed full time assistance to carry out their managerial tasks' (1977, p. 
64). Despite this it is asserted that the Southern plantation 'had little 
impact on the evolution of the modern business enterprise' (1977, p. 66), for 
three reasons. First, notwithstanding the nearly 19,000 overseers, Chandler 
claims there was no meaningful separation of ownership and control. 'The 
majority of southern planters directly managed the property they owned' (1977, 
p. 64) which, we should remind ourselves, included people, and cites Fogel and 
Engerman's (1974) claim that many owners of large plantations did not employ 
resident salaried overseers.

      Second, he argues that plantations were limited in scale. Thus the 
'plantation workforce was small by modern standards. Indeed it was smaller than 
in contemporary New England cotton mills . . . [in] 1850 only 1479 plantations 
had more than 100 slaves' (Chandler, 1977, p. 64). The scope for managerialism 
to develop was by implication constrained; hence Chandler's third argument, 
that there was a lack of managerial sophistication on the plantations. The 
managerial task was 'almost wholly the supervision of workers' (1977, p. 65), 
which by implication was straightforward, and indeed a little more than a 
seasonal requirement ('only at those critical periods of planting and 
harvesting . . . did the work of the planter the overseer and the drivers 
become more than routine' (1977, p. 65)). Division of labour was limited, the 
accounting there was simple, and in any case book keeping was more likely to be 
undertaken by the plantation owner.
     
      A Logic of Denial 

      What the exemplars Burnham, Braverman and Chandler have in common is the 
construction of a grand narrative, in which the emergence of management as an 
activity and of managers as a group or class is a consequence of the growth and 
increasing industrial sophistication of a globalizing capitalist economy. In 
addition, for Grey, for their real theoretical differences the three 
perspectives 'collectively constitute the fabric of the knowledge through which 
the commonsense and taken-for-granted reality of management is woven'. This 
knowledge is that '. . . management is what managers do' (1999, p. 569); that 
is, a conflation of a certain set of distinctive managerial activities ('what 
managers do') with an occupational category possessing a distinct managerial 
identity (i.e. 'managers'). Taken together these shared features produce three 
inter-related tests for inclusion in modern management, which whatever it was 
that facilitated profitable production on the backs of 4 million enslaved 
people apparently fails. First, for management to be modern, it has to take 
place within the capitalist system. Slavery is excluded from capitalism 
explicitly by Chandler with his assertion of ancientness, and his claims for a 
lack of separation of ownership and control in particular, and tacitly by 
Burnham and Braverman with their specification of wage labour as a defining 
feature. Second, for management to be management, the activities carried out in 
its name have to be of a certain level of sophistication - for Chandler, beyond 
the apparently simple harnessing of enslaved people's seasonally varying 
labour, for Burnham and Braverman in order to achieve wage labourers' 
submission to capitalist relations and processes of production. Third there has 
to be a group of people carrying out these management activities who have a 
distinctive identity as managers.

      The following three sections will show that the ante-bellum plantation 
economy actually passes rather than fails these tests. I will begin by 
exploring the case not just for locating the plantation economy within the 
development of capitalism, but for seeing it as a site of the emergence of 
industrial discipline, as attempts were made to overcome the resistance of 
enslaved people in the production process. Next, I will show that managerial 
practice in the face of this resistance was sophisticated to the extent that it 
closely resembled what we now see as scientific management and as classical 
management theory. Third, I will show there was a substantial (greater even 
than Chandler allows) cadre of managers, labelled as such, with a managerial 
identity sustained by white supremacist racism. Although much that follows in 
these sections explicitly rebuts Chandler, it only does so because his is the 
only history of management which gives slavery serious mention. To restate, 
this article is about the exclusion of slavery throughout management studies, 
not just in Chandler.

      CONTINUES......
     
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