Summary Text The Layering' of Management in Postwar Britain: The Case of The Office Management Association

SUMMARY TEXT
THE ‘LAYERING’ OF MANAGEMENT IN POSTWAR BRITAIN: THE

CASE OF THE OFFICE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION
That is, we can look for the creation of middle management jobs and the
development of taller, more complex organisational hierarchies as individuals and
management associations worked to define places for themselves in hierarchies. Many
authors have charted the development of managers as an occupational group. Child saw
management as a technical function, a source of social status and an authority system
(Child, 1969, p. Reed similarly saw the genesis of modern management as having been
explained in terms of technical efficiency, elite power and political control (Reed, 1989,
pp. These rationales all explain where managers fit in the economy, society and power
structures in which they operated, and all managerial positions came to be for some or
all of these reasons. But the structure of the occupational group itself lacked the
commonality in managers’ work and organisational authority that ideas like the rise of
management might imply. As much as authors discuss the ‘rise’ of management as if it
were a unified occupational group or even ‘profession’, others have stressed the
diversity of the occupation so that it is difficult to see managers as any kind of ‘cohesive
body’.
Managerial functions and managerial jobs increased greatly in twentieth century

Britain. The public sector and the private sector were affected. Peacetime economic
growth and wartime economic demands both produced new needs for organising,
planning, coordinating, commanding and controlling – the classic management
functions described by Fayol in 1918 (Fayol, 1949). However, many of the individuals
who filled these new managerial functions would not have recognised an overarching,
general discipline of management as what they did. They focussed on specialised
managerial functions in specific contexts and asserted that these were distinct
occupational groups, or professions, as they liked to say.
The Office Management Association was one of these groups. Their goals were
to define a body of knowledge that was the jurisdiction of office managers and made
them distinct from other managers. They also took great pains to make sure the
membership of the OMA defined office managers as being part of a top hierarchical
level in any organisation. Many of the OMA’s decision makers and founders were
people who were already successful in their own organisations and these sorts of people
were always encouraged to join the OMA and take an active role in the association’s
activities.
The OMA’s efforts at defining standards and principles of office management

were about creating something like a ‘discipline’ of office management and cohorts of
disciples or heirs. Control of a body of subordinates bolstered the power and prestige of
office managers and validated their positions near the top of organisational hierarchies.
This validation took the place of being members of societal elites or owning families.
Below them, the subordinates followed the prescripts of the OMA – took the courses,
gained the credentials, joined the association – as a way to enhance their positions in
organisational hierarchies in relation to the rest of the office workers. This jockeying for
social and organisational positions created the layers of management in expanding
organisational hierarchies.
In the short term the strategy of managerial specialisation and the large variety
of ‘professional’ management associations may have helped some individual careers.
But in the larger picture the OMA and the other ‘professional’ associations fragmented
the occupational group of all managers, who never quite became recognised as
professionals, because they had never created a basic ‘corpus of principles’ that defined
what a manager was or created a sufficient jurisdiction to be widely recognised. The
varied professional associations defined themselves by their purported technical skill or
other expert knowledge. But these technical skills or expertise changed and evolved
over time as technology and organisations changed. In the end these ‘skills’ and
‘expertise’ represented little more than interest groups that fragmented the occupational
group of ‘manager’. There was no body of knowledge or ‘jurisdiction’ that identified or
could be defended by all managers in common. And when the time came for
reorganisation, ‘modernising’ or delayering, the narrowly specialised fragments were
easily picked off and discarded from hierarchies.

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SUMMARY TEXT

THE ‘LAYERING’ OF MANAGEMENT IN POSTWAR BRITAIN: THE

Managerial functions and managerial jobs increased greatly in twentieth century

The OMA’s efforts at defining standards and principles of office management

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