Edited and updated from:
'A Taste for Innovation' in A.G. Bedeian (ed.) Management Laureates: A
Collection of Autobiographical Essays, volume 4, 1996, New York: JAI
Press.
EARLY YEARS
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| Derek as a pageboy, 1939 |
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| Derek as a prefect, 1948 |
EDINBURGH PSYCHOLOGY
I was fortunate
to be able to study at the University of Edinburgh, with a grant from the
London County Council. Traditional Scottish universities are different from
English ones. With a four-year degree framework and a modular structure, they
are much closer to the American pattern. At the time I was a student
(1949-1953), the Edinburgh Psychology Department was offering by far the most
thorough education in all aspects of psychology in Britain. In addition to the
wide range of lecture courses offered, the opportunities for practical
experience were immense. I ran animal experiments (pigeons, I'm glad to say;
our learning theory man was a Skinnerian), gave intelligence tests to
schoolchildren and to paraplegics (Terman-Merrill and Koh's Blocks
respectively, if I remember rightly) and administered and interpreted
projective techniques (Rorshach, TAT, Szondi).
Edinburgh was
then a major centre for printing and publishing. The selection of boys as
printers' apprentices (no girls of course, which shows how long ago this was)
was undertaken by the Psychology Department. Honours students were involved in
administering the tests, conducting the interviews, writing evaluations and
participating in selection decisions. This really caught my interest;
psychologists doing a real job in a practical situation that I could relate to.
I found psychiatric hospitals too depressing, and I am afraid that I got a bit
bored with the fact that theories of behaviour were supposed to be furthered
through the study of white rats. That schools and firms could make use of
applied psychologists was much more interesting.
Conceptually
the range of studies was wide. In addition to psychology I took courses in
mathematics, social anthropology and political economy (as economics was called
in my time). The University regarded the fledgling science of psychology as
having so recently moved out from under the wing of philosophy that we were all
required to take several courses in logic and metaphysics. I took
to philosophy immediately. Thus I had a good grounding in epistemology, and, as
is appropriate for one studying on the same benches as David Hume, had my
period as a solipsist.
In due course,
I came to the conclusion that, whatever view I took on the philosophical issues
as such, if I was going to pursue any substantive topic I would have to assume
a realist, determinist approach to analysis. Otherwise I would be condemned to
spend my time on the metaphysics without getting round to the physics, or, in
my case to the social psychology. This is still my view, which is why I refer
to myself as an 'unreconstructed positivist'.
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| Derek and Natatie at their wedding 18 April 1954 |
During my
career I have learnt from many people. My wife has been a fellow professional
and a constant source of ideas over the years, and I have learnt much from many
colleagues. But at the early stages in my career I worked with four senior
colleagues whom I came to regard as my 'professional father figures.' The
relationship with some of them was not always easy (there is, after all, a
strong Oedipal element in all Western parent-children relationships), but they
played a major part in my intellectual formation. The first of these was Boris
Semeonoff of the Edinburgh Psychology Department. What I took from Boris was
breadth of vision. He was both the leading statistical expert in the
department and the leading exponent of the subtle individual, and
often psychoanalytical, analysis involved in projective techniques. In a highly
fractionated discipline and department, this was distinctive.
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| Derek at his graduation in 1953 |
SOCIAL SCIENCES RESEARCH CENTRE, EDINBURGH
But by then I
was working with my second professional father figure and was growing up very
quickly both intellectually and organizationally. After I graduated I was
invited by Roderick M. McKenzie ('Mac' to everybody) to be his research
assistant on a newly funded project. After the Second World War, the poor
financial state of Europe benefited from the US Government's Marshall Aid
programme. In the early 'fifties there was a follow-up programme in which aid
in dollars (i.e. hard currency) was given by America on condition that an
equivalent amount of money in the country's own currency was spent on improving
its industrial productivity. This 'Counterpart Aid' allowed a number of
industrial social science research projects to be set up in Britain and, for my
generation, provided a large increase in the number of research job
opportunities.
Although Mac
and I were members of the psychology department, we were seconded to the Social
Sciences Research Centre. The reason why there was no sociology taught at that
time in the normal undergraduate programme at Edinburgh (it was only taught in
the Social Studies department as part of the professional training of social
workers) was that the government grant had been used instead to found this
interdisciplinary Centre. All the academic members had been seconded from
social science departments with the idea of developing a more integrated
research approach which it was hoped would get us further in understanding
social phenomena. Those seconded were very impressive: they included Tom Burns
(the sociologist from the department of Social Studies, who was soon to be
joined on another Counterpart Aid project by the psychologist, George Stalker),
Michael Banton (from Social Anthropology, later a leading sociologist of
contemporary Britain) and Hilde Behrend (from Commerce, a leading academic in
industrial relations). Erving Goffman had been a visiting scholar (and my tutor
in social anthropology), and the first edition of The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life was published as a Centre monograph.
As a beginning
academic, I bought entirely the innovative message that interdisciplinary
integration was the way forward. Looking back now, I see the Centre as a
heroic, yet doomed, enterprise. There was no Director - the idea appeared to be
that it would function as a sort of intellectual kibbutz. Tom Burns was
already the biggest name, and was later to become much bigger with the Management
of Innovation book. He was sometimes regarded by outsiders as the leader,
but he did not wish to play that role internally. And certainly several others
would have resisted that.
The Centre is
long gone; Edinburgh has a fine Sociology department of which Tom Burns became
the first Professor and Head. But I retain something very important from my
experience there. It is a great scepticism about academic disciplines; in
particular about the arbitrariness of their boundaries. I can easily be
provoked into maintaining that they are merely the restrictive work practices
of academics. What matters is that the subject of study should be illuminated
in as many different ways, and with as many conceptual research schemes, as
possible. And while collaboration across disciplines is good and should be encouraged,
real inter-disciplinary integration takes place in the researcher's head. The
clearest way in which this view has stayed with me is that in my academic
career I have eschewed traditional disciplines. In the succeeding four decades
I held posts in Social Medicine, Human Relations, Industrial Administration,
Organizational Behaviour, Systems and International Management.
The project
that Mac and I carried out at the Centre concerned the problems of inspection
in British industry. Although we did look at some problems of selection and
training in the traditional industrial psychology mode, the focus of the study
was a post-Hawthorne social interaction approach. On my part, this entailed a
reading of the early Human Relations literature (B.B.Gardner, I remember,
appeared very wise and, when we were feeling depressed, seemed to have said it
all). I also tackled the management literature and found, as you would expect,
that F.W.Taylor had some forceful and shrewd things to say about inspection.
During this
project I learned many things. From Mac I learned about being sensitive to an
individual's motivation, the key importance of status and how it is
manipulated, and how interpersonal control works. For myself I had already
begun to take seriously the notion of organizational structure. Tom Burns
talked about Weber and, after I discovered that this was not the psychologist
who linked the intensity of the stimulus to intensity of the sensation (i.e.,
the Weber-Fechner Law), nor the musician who wrote "Invitation to the
Dance" the only Webers I knew, I found out a bit more about Max Weber. (I
feel the need for a Wagnerian leitmotiv at this point!) The aspect of the study
that I wrote up for my MSc dissertation was concerned with the impact on the
inspection-production relationship of the differences in their positions in the
organizational structures of the Chief Inspectors of three subsidiaries of one
firm.
This aspect of
the project was eventually published in a paper in the Journal of
Management Studies about ten years later. This brings me to another thing
I learned from Mac, in the 'how not to do it' vein. Research is not carried out
unless the results are published. Mac had a problem with publication, which is
why he is not nearly as well known as he should have been. He was the classic
perfectionist: always putting off publication in order to improve the work. But
he was also always finding ways in which teaching - and he was a fine teacher
whose students regularly considered him the best they had experienced - would
take priority over writing. Since he was the designer and leader of the
inspection project, when I left I felt it right to allow him to publish overall
from it. But after ten years when little had appeared relative to what we had
investigated, I decided to publish anyway and my later articles appeared in
1966.
There is a
sequel. In his sixty-fifth year on the eve of his retirement, Mac died after a
painful cancer, bravely borne. During his illness he talked with friends about
an unpublished manuscript on which he had worked after I had left. It was clear
that the work meant a lot to him. After his death, Hilde Behrend arranged for
it to be considered for publication and asked me to edit it. I found the
manuscript fascinating; full of penetrating insights based on the psychological
understanding, concentrated detailed analysis, and sheer practical common-sense
that characterised Mac's approach. The volume was published in 1989 - but that
was too late.
During this
period I also gently began my teaching career. Since, like the rest of us, I
have suffered from so much inadequate teaching in my time, striving to be an
effective teacher has always been important for me. So are innovative teaching
methods, and I have tried to contribute to their development. Indeed my first
teaching task in the mid-fifties was innovative in that I had heard of no other
institution where it occurred. Because no entry knowledge of statistics was
required for the first-year psychology course, many students found the weekly
statistics lecture difficult to follow on merely one hearing. A second weekly
lecture in which the same topics were covered was therefore set up, and about
half the class attended it. Giving this 'echo lecture' was my first teaching
job. I had to put on an academic gown (borrowed), enter the main lecture
theatre, and discourse to the assembled multitude (well, about a hundred).
Being a ham, I loved it of course, and was sorry that I was allowed to do it
for only one year.
EDINBURGH SOCIAL MEDICINE
My next job was
in the Department of Public Health and Social Medicine, where I worked on a
project concerned with sickness absence as a social phenomenon. The project was
led by Cecil Gordon, a social biologist who during the Second World War played
a leading part in the development of Operational Research in the Royal Air
Force, and later in the foundation of the British Operational Research Society.
It had been designed with Roy Emerson, whom I succeeded. I came in at the data
analysis stage, my first involvement in a large-scale statistical survey. As I
am fond of pointing out, I can't programme a computer - by the time they came
in I could loftily require others to do that for me - but I used to be able to
plug up a Hollerith board! When I came to know him, Cecil Gordon had suffered a
number of debilitating physical and mental illnesses. Although he was a general
benign presence presiding over the research activity, he could not, in fact,
make an intellectual contribution. Although I was the junior member of the
team, I had to become responsible for organizing and writing up the material
for academic publication. Intellectually I recognised this after about two
weeks; but emotionally it took me nearly three months to accept that nothing
was going to happen unless I did it. I then buckled down to the analysis and
writing up, which meant that my name was on three articles from about one
year's work.
At this time,
as an applied psychologist, I was asked by the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
to evaluate the adequacy of the selection procedures into the Medical School.
The cynics had long said that the sons of doctors, particularly if their
fathers were Edinburgh graduates, were admitted on poorer school (i.e. high school)
leaving attainment than others. The orthodox view held that this was not so. I
found that it was so. Then an interesting thing happened: the establishment's
denial changed to justification. The sons understood better what was involved
in the job, and indeed the life, of a medical practitioner; they would be more
committed to last the long and gruelling course; their fathers were in a better
position to help them to become effective more quickly; and so on. Nothing
changed.
BIRMINGHAM COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY
It was Natalie
who brought to my attention in 1957 the advertisement for a Lecturer in Human
Relations at the Birmingham College of Technology, and urged me to apply. This
was probably the most important single decision of my professional life.
The
College had been founded as a technical college concentrating on part-time
sub-degree education, but it had recently been designated to be developed into
a College of Advanced Technology. This meant that it would be able to present
'degree equivalent' courses and, most importantly, would be expected to develop
its research activities. As an earnest of this intention a number of 'Reader'
posts were established. In the British system, these are senior posts with the
emphasis on research activity - not being universities they could not establish
professorships. In the 'Birmingham Tech' Department of Industrial
Administration where the management education took place (in Britain in those
days, 'business schools' meant secretarial colleges) an internal promotion to
the newly established Readership meant that a lectureship became available, and
I was appointed.
When I decided
to go to this strange low status institution, the reactions from my Edinburgh
colleagues were very mixed. While some were intrigued that applied social
science was wanted there, several warned me that I would never get back into a
university if I went. The fact that it was a permanent post, with an increased
salary was a plus, of course. But the move from Edinburgh to Birmingham was a
minus, which would take me a considerable time to adjust to. But the more I
found out about the proposed developments, the more interested I became in the
potential for change and innovation.
On arrival, I
was immediately thrown in at the deep end into a teaching schedule which
required me to teach for up to 20 hours a week, including two evenings and
Saturday mornings, for which I had one weekday off. But of course, with Sod's
Law in full operation, that was a day on which I had to teach in the evening.
That was the bad news. The good news was that all the students were in jobs.
They came to the college in the evenings, or on day release arranged through
their employers. This meant that courses were repeated in parallel. For
example, you could do the Certificate in Workshop Supervision on Tuesday
afternoons and Friday evenings, or on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings.
Staff were all required to repeat their classes several times in one week. This
is an excellent way for new lecturers to learn their trade - if they
get help in preparation, and feedback on their performance.
I was extremely
fortunate in receiving this from my third professional father-figure, John
Munro Fraser. Munro, as he was known, was very different from Mac. They knew of
each other but I don't think they ever met. Had they done so I am sure they
would soon have cordially disliked each other - they did have in common that
they were both good haters. Mac was subtle, wanting to build on intuition,
wondering about the reasons behind the reasons; Munro was direct, go-getting,
wanting an analysis which would give a formula to wrap the matter up. They were
both Scotsmen, but Mac fitted my stereotype of an Italian, Munro of an
American. Mac found it hard to get academic material to the stage of
publication; Munro published a steady stream of books. Mac had developed a
system of classification of jobs for use in vocational counselling which was
ten years ahead of its time. He published a couple of papers on it, but never managed
to complete for publication the definitive handbook that the system required to
become properly established. Munro published several workbooks on his
'Five-fold Grading' selection system, which was a well-known rival to Alec
Rodger's 'Seven Point Plan'.
Munro had
designed the courses in Human Relations that we in the section taught. He
specified the contents of each lecture. The subsequent discussion topics were
designed to enable the participants, who had good practical industrial
experience as supervisors, technical specialists, junior managers, or shop
stewards, to explore the ideas and test them against their experience. Having
to conduct the same class four times in one week, certainly polished my
presentation skills. The hardest task, I found, was to be able to remember
whether the joke I was about to tell had been used yesterday, (in which case
this was a different class and I could use it again), or last week (in which
case it was the same class and had to be avoided). This assembly line approach
did not apply to certain specialist courses. I developed and presented my own
course on staff selection, including Munro's methods, of course, but going
wider. This was a very welcome increase in autonomy. I don't suppose this
experience would suit everyone, but I must say it gave me a good grasp of the
skills of classroom teaching.
In addition to
my Human Relations teaching, I had to contribute to the course on Management
Principles and Practice. This was the final course of the Diploma in Industrial
Administration and was intended to be the jewel in our crown. It consisted of a
series of case studies which attempted to pull together all the previous
teaching. Each course was taught on a visiting basis by a senior business
manager from the Birmingham area, with any required academic input given by a
member of staff. In my first year, I was allocated to work with a very unusual
man who is my fourth professional father figure. Joe Hunt (later Sir Joseph
Hunt) was the managing director of a very successful hi-tech automation company
"Hymatic Engineering". He ran his firm in what Tom Burns had called
an 'organic' way. This is impressive enough, but Joe was a successful top
manager who was also a natural born teacher. He just knew, without as far as I
know having had any teacher training, that in this field, the important task of
a teacher is not to give the right answer, but to ask the right question. He
was naturally skilled in doing this, and his students and myself, as his junior
colleague, learned a great deal from him of the subtleties of management. He
was open in thought too, again unusual in a successful senior manager, and
learned from us. I regard it as a considerable accolade that he asked for me to
be his co-tutor on this course in the two subsequent years that I was
available.
In my second
year, Norman R.F. Maier came for a month as a visiting teacher. He introduced
his role-playing exercises, and this was a big eye-opener. It is still the only
teaching methodology that I know which actually benefits from larger class
sizes through comparisons between the smaller sub-groups. I began to use some
of his role-plays, and developed a couple of my own. I used Norman's exercise,
"The Change of Work Procedure", regularly for the next twenty years.
It is an excellent introduction to interpersonal leadership skills.
During this
year too, I began working on an innovative project with two colleagues not in
the Human Relations section. As can be imagined, this was an unusual thing to
do in a mechanistic set-up such as ours, but it grew out of my commitment to
integration in teaching. Bill Williams (an economist) and John Fairhead (from
the business communications section) and I started work to develop our version
of a non-computer business game based on G.R. Andlinger's 1954 paper in
the Harvard Business Review. Over the succeeding years we developed,
with other colleagues, many business exercises which we later collected and
published as Exercises in Business Decisions in 1965.
Also at this
time I began my first experience of distance teaching (another leitmotiv here).
Tom Wylie, a former trade union official who headed our Industrial Relations
section, suggested me as the correspondence tutor in social psychology for
Ruskin College, Oxford. Ruskin was the college that prepared trade unionists
with no qualifications for entry into the university proper. But it also ran
correspondence courses for shop stewards and other workplace representatives.
They had to read material sent to them, and send me essays that I commented
upon. No marking of course; this was true education for development. I enjoyed
it, and did a six-year stint, until the system changed.
After three
years of concentration on teaching at this intensity, I felt that I had had
enough and was more than ready for a change when the opportunity came.
THE INDUSTRIAL ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH UNIT
The change came
in 1960 with the appointment of a new head of the Department of Industrial
Administration. The previous head, David Bramley, had left when it became clear
that the designation as a College of Advanced Technology was going to lead the
institution to establish Bachelor's and even Master's degrees. He felt this was
an academic diversion from what the College should be doing, and so returned to
an industrial post. The new person appointed was a surprise: Tom Lupton, a
social anthropologist from the department at Manchester. The choice of a businessman
or an engineer was expected, and Tom's appointment heralded that the Board of
Governors of the College was taking very seriously the intended development in
the academic standing of the organization.
Tom Lupton had brought with him a large Government grant for the study of shop floor behaviour in British factories. But since he had been appointed as the head of the largest management studies department in the country, he found, inevitably, that he had no time to launch the research. Nor did any of his research colleagues in Manchester transfer with him to Birmingham. This was my opportunity. I offered to be seconded from my lectureship to work on the research, and Tom agreed enthusiastically. There was also a College Research Fellowship available and David Hickson was appointed to it.
I don't
remember when I first met David - though it was as momentous for me as Oliver
Hardy first clapping eyes on Stan Laurel. But I still do remember very clearly
the look on his face when I told him that I was going to leave my lectureship
to do research full time, and that we were going to set up a research unit and
intended to appoint other researchers. He had not been told. He had
thought that he was going to be a lone researcher working under the general
supervision of Tom Lupton, but he readily agreed to join the group. Forty-five
years later we still regularly work on collaborative projects. The first book
on which we collaborated was dedicated to our parents (and our professional
father-figures); the latest to our grandchildren.
The Industrial
Administration (I.A.) Research Unit was set up on 1st January 1961, with a
Senior Research Fellow (myself) and a Research Fellow (David). We appointed two
Research Assistants: Bob Hinings, a sociologist, and Graham Harding, a
psychologist. Bob thus started his long association with the work, and his
subsequent major contributions to the field of organizational analysis.
So the group
got started. We retired to our researchers' ivory tower to review the field and
plan our programme. The 'ivory tower' was, in fact, the basement of a nearby
slum. But conceptually it was an ivory tower, because we had the great
privilege of being allowed to get on with our research. No one else in the
Industrial Administration Department was particularly interested in what we
were doing, since this was solely a teaching department. Tom Lupton was the
exception, of course, and he provided the crucial protection of authority, and
much encouragement. We spent a year surveying previous work and hammering out
our conceptual framework of context, organization, group, and individual levels
of study and their relationships. Everyone participated in all aspects of
designing the programme of work and carrying out pilot interviews, and this had
a great integrating effect.
After Graham
Harding went to other work, Bob Hinings moved to a teaching post in the
neighbouring University of Birmingham, but continued his contribution from his
new base. This allowed the recruitment of the 'second generation' of
researchers. It was rather different for them. Since the conceptual framework
and research strategy had been worked out, their contribution was to the
operationalization of the concepts at the context and organizational levels,
and data collection and analysis. Important as this is, it brings with it the
inevitable feeling of working on 'somebody's else's research' and they did not
develop a long term commitment to this academic field. Chris Turner works in
the field of social services provision, Theo Nichols is a powerful Marxist
analyst of modern industry, and Keith Macdonald publishes on the sociology of
professions.
I realised that
we would need some methodological help, even though I was by now a Fellow of
the Royal Statistical Society and held their certificate. I also realised that
we did not need a professional statistician (who would only tell us what we
could not do) but a methodologically sophisticated social scientist. We were
extremely fortunate in interesting a psychologist, Phil Levy of the University
of Birmingham, in working with us. He made a major contribution to structuring
our analyses, which were way ahead of anything else being done in the field at
that time. I have always felt that my highest methodological accolade was not
my Fellowship, but the fact that Phil said to me "I enjoy explaining these
ideas to you. You get their implications."
THE UNIVERSITY OF ASTON IN BIRMINGHAM
 |
| Aston at 40, 2006 |
One change I
had not bargained for, since it went against my predictions: a difficulty about
being a positivist is that the data can bite back! I had always predicted that
academics who become heads of departments, with the increased salary, status
and power involved, would not give them up just because they preferred to do
research. Well, Tom Lupton proved me wrong. He gave up his Aston post to go to
a Research Chair at Leeds. It is true that he went from there to the Manchester
Business School and, in due course, became its Director (which is half a vote
for my hypothesis), but he did demonstrate a commitment to personal research
work that is rare among British heads of schools.
By 1965 the
external grant was coming to an end. In those days one of the conditions laid
down by the Government on providing support such as this, was that the
institution would continue to fund the work from its own resources if, at the
end of the original grant, the research was still found to be important and
timely. With the inevitable bureaucratic complexities involved in such a
decision, it was literally within two weeks of the official date of the grant
ending that the decision was announced. By this time those on short-term
contracts had left; in an expanding social science market they had obtained
permanent teaching appointments elsewhere. Only David Hickson, who had obtained
a Research Lectureship, and I remained.
But, glory be,
the answer was 'Yes'; the University agreed to continue funding the work. This
sort of major support was infrequent even in the 'sixties and, for me, it
underlines how appropriate it is that the research has become internationally
known as 'the Aston studies'. The decision opened the way for the third
generation of Aston researchers. Kerr Inkson, Roy Payne and Diana Pheysey
were paid for by the university. John Child was funded from an additional
Government grant that I obtained.
We now entered
a new phase of the work: new projects were designed (e.g the wider national
organizational study), the previous conceptual frameworks were extended (e.g.
to group level work), new concepts were developed and operationalized, new data
were collected and analysed. All the members of this generation were thus
involved in all stages of the research, and it is interesting that they all
continue to do leading work in the field of organizational studies: Kerr Inkson
in Auckland on corporate excellence, Roy Payne in Sheffield on stress, and John
Child in Cambridge on management in China. Diana Pheysey worked on corporate
change at Aston until her retirement, and I am most touched and grateful that
her innovative book on Organizational Cultures: Types and Transformations (Routledge,
1993) was dedicated to me.
The Unit was
always very fortunate in the high level of contributions it received from its
support staff - only one bad selection decision there, over which we will
hastily draw a veil. Our information, data and interviewing assistants did us
extremely proud. I like to think that we contributed to their development too,
in that Cindy Fazey, Rita Austin and Will McQuillan - all of whom started with
us as non-graduates - in due course became academics in their own right with
lectureships at universities. Patricia Clark has stayed at Aston for three
decades in research information. Our secretary, Ruth Goodkin, was a phenomenon
in coping so unflappably with a whole bunch of demanding academics.
THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF MANAGEMENT, WRITERS WRITERS
ON ORGANIZATIONS, AND PENGUIN BOOKS
The history of
the Aston studies has been written up several times now, and is beginning to
take on a myth-like quality even for those of us who experienced it. I like to
be as realistic as possible in describing the tensions and failures as well as
the commitment and the successes. Roy Payne once paid me the compliment of
introducing me as the most participative manager that he knew. But, as I
pointed out, I had no choice: that's how it had to be. For example, in the
early years I was the leader of the group, the most experienced researcher, the
only member in a permanent post, and, at the time of the second generation, the
only psychologist. It does not need a great deal of psychoanalytical insight to
see that I would, on occasions, become the focus of the hostility of junior
members when the frustrations became too great. There was an inevitable tension
between the impact of their short-term contracts and my long term view of the
objectives of the programme. This result just had to be lived with, but it made
me grateful for the fact that I was involved in The Association of Teachers of
Management (ATM).
The ATM was
distinctive to Britain in that it contained professionals from a wide range of
institutions concerned with management education. In particular, it was a forum
in which academics from colleges and management development officers from
industry could meet together to discuss professional issues. It started in
1960: Tom Lupton became the first Chairman, Frank Heller the first Secretary. I
was a founder member and accepted the post of editor of the Newsletter.
This was a mimeographed sheet produced in the Department: my first issue was,
in fact, typed up by Bob Hinings. During the next six years I built it up into
a larger, professionally producedATM Bulletin, which reflected the growth of
activity in the field. This task took some of my time, and that of our
information assistant Cindy Fazey, to occasional rumblings from the populace
about lost research time. But the activity was very important to me psychologically,
in that it engaged me in a professional activity away from the group. I needed
the bolt-hole. I was also hammering out my view of the nature of our subject
and published an article in the Psychological Bulletin in 1966 on
'Modern Organization Theory', which generated the largest number of requests
for offprints, and appeared in the greatest number of anthologies of any of my
papers.
It was through
the ATM that I came to know Morris Brodie of the Administrative Staff College
at Henley. The College had produced a booklet to hand out to its students
introducing them to some of the management writings. Morris asked me to prepare
a new edition of it. I recruited David Hickson and Bob Hinings and when we had
worked out what we wanted to do, it was no longer a booklet, but a book. Thus
began Writers on Organizations: a set of summaries of the work of leading
writers in the field. The first edition in 1964 was a hardback, but the second
and subsequent editions have been published in paperback by Penguin in Britain,
Sage in the US. It has proved to be one of the most durable books in
organizational studies, with sales over the years of more than a quarter of a
million copies. It has been translated into Japanese, Russian, Hungarian,
Bulgarian, Romanian and Slovakian. I am told that there is also a
pirated version in Chinese, but I have not seen it. Bob dropped out as an
author after the third edition, owing to pressure of other work. David and I
produced the fourth edition in 1989 after I had spent a happy Christmas
vacation unsexing the language: 'professional father figures' becoming
'professional forebears' etc. A fifth edition appeared in 1996 and a sixth in
2007. The book ensures that we keep up with the literature, and involves the
interesting decision, which we make after a small survey of our colleagues, of
which writers to add and who to drop for each new edition. I used to feel a bit
guilty about those dropped, but now we have produced a hardback omnibus
version, Great Writers on Organizations, (3rd Omnibus edition, 2007) which
includes all those writers who have ever appeared.
I do feel
that Writers is a real contribution to management education in
Britain. I continually meet managers who tell me that reading it had started
them thinking seriously about organizational issues. Communication with
managers has always been an important value for me. I am proud of how many
professional and popular articles we have written about our
researches, in addition to the academic ones. And I have taken every
opportunity to work with practising managers in research, teaching and
consulting.
It was in the
mid-sixties that I was asked by Charles Clark of Penguin Books to be the
General Editor of a series of entitled Penguin Modern Management Readings. Readers
were very popular then in all subjects as the writing of textbooks could not
keep pace with the expansion in higher education. I like this sort of editorial
role and was pleased to accept. My task was to design the set of titles in the
series and then to ask a leading scholar to edit a volume. Of course, getting a
'name' to edit a reader is much easier than getting them to write a book, which
is why the series went with a swing and my network grew rapidly. So, for
example, Igor Ansoff did a reader on business strategy, Vic Vroom and Ed Deci
did one on motivation, Warren Bennis and John Thomas on change, Andrew
Ehrenberg on consumer behaviour, Fred Emery on systems thinking, Dalton
McFarland on personnel management, and so on. My own contribution on organization
theory is still going strong, with a fifth edition out in 2007.
THE FINAL PHASE OF THE I.A. RESEARCH UNIT
The final phase
of the I.A. Research Unit took place from 1968 onwards with its splitting up. I
am often asked why this happened, with the implication that a successful work
group should go on forever. But it is not like that. I am inclined to think
that research groups have a life cycle in which they are productive, and the
Aston unit was longer lived than most. But people's horizons, opportunities and
aspirations change even when they are doing good work, and these form the pull
factors. Even in 'success' there are many stresses and frustrations which can
provide the pushes.
In my case
there were two pull factors. First, the attraction of going to a recently
established business school in London that was an independent institution
wholly devoted to developing research and teaching in the subject. I have a
taste for educational innovation and saw that this was a big opportunity.
Secondly, I was head-hunted; only the second occasion in my career (so far?)
that this has happened to me. Head hunting was unusual in the British academic
world, and I took it as a welcome example of the degree of independence which
the London Business School (LBS) had obtained from the federal University of
London, compared with the workings of the unitary University of Aston (see next
paragraph).
The push factor
came from the fact that I had unsuccessfully applied for a chair at the
University of Aston. It was not that I did not get the job (nobody was
appointed), but that the University had adopted a policy which meant that, in
principle, I could not be appointed. They were advised by an external
assessor (in British universities, chair appointing committees always contain
professors from other universities) to look to appoint an industrial
sociologist who would both build up the organizational work in the management
school, and develop a sociology department in the new Faculty of Behavioural
Science. Apart from the fact that I did not qualify, I fundamentally disagreed
with this policy. My view was (and is) that business schools are adequately
developed only by academics who are willing to commit themselves in career
terms to the new venture. They do not have to cease being sociologists or
economists, but their organizational identification must be fully as
sociologists in business schools. There was also a second problem: Was it
possible to find a leading industrial sociologist who would be prepared to join
the management school at Aston? In my view, it was not.
As someone who
has spent a large chunk of his life studying the workings of bureaucracies, I
have always believed in putting my knowledge to use. I predicted that, having
accepted what sounded to those who did not know the field like a viable policy
in regard to the chair, it would take the powers-that-be of the University of
Aston five years to discover that they could not carry it out. They would then
accept the sensible policy of an organizational behaviour chair in the
management school, and a separate chair to head the sociology department. I
left Aston, with considerable regret, because I was sufficiently ambitious not
to be prepared to wait those five years. This was one of my predictions which was
supported by the data. Precisely five years later John Child was appointed to
the chair of organizational behaviour in the management school, and in the
following year a professor was appointed to head up the sociology department. I
acted as an external assessor for both posts.
 |
| Derek in Alberta, Canada |
So, in 1968, I
went with John Child and Will McQuillan to the London Business School, Roy
Payne following a year later. For quite unrelated reasons, David Hickson and
Bob Hinings accepted a two year secondment at the University of Alberta,
Edmonton. There David led a group in studies of power, and on his return to
Britain, inaugurated the Bradford decision-making programme. Bob returned from
Canada to the Institute of Local Government Studies at Birmingham, later going
back to Alberta to continue his studies of strategic change. At the time, all
these departures led to a winding down of the programme at Aston, and the
fourth generation of Aston researchers operated from other institutions,
primarily the London Business School and the University of Alberta. The unit at
Aston continued as an administrative entity until 1973, when with a general
re-organization of the department the title lapsed. Research at Aston continued
in other directions.
THE ASTON RESEARCH PROGRAMME
The results of
the programme have been described in the various books and papers, by us and
about us, and need not be repeated here. They have made an impact on the field
as is shown by the fact that no less than three papers have been designated
'citation classics' by the Institute of Scientific Information on the basis of
citation counts. I was awarded a University of Aston DSc (a higher doctorate in
the British system) on the basis of my contribution, with Paul Lawrence on the
examining board. I regard it as a considerable academic accolade that leading
scholars, such as Howard Aldrich, Jerald Hage, Marc Maurice, Bernard Reimann
and Bill Starbuck, are prepared to write and publish detailed critiques of the
work. I don't agree with all they say, but I don't mind being criticised - I
find it more difficult to be ignored.
But the studies
have not been ignored - far from it. John Freeman's 1986 'editorial essay' on
assuming the editorship of the Administrative Science Quarterly, actually
mentioned the Hawthorne studies, the American Soldier studies and the Aston
studies in the same breath - and managed to take my breath away!
Interest in the work stems primarily from the fact that the concepts studied
are important to the field. But, in my view, there are two other contributory
factors. One is the group basis of the research, which allowed extensions and
replications to be undertaken by original members of the group and their
'fourth generation' collaborators. The second is the publication of extremely
explicit descriptions of the methods of the research. This makes it easier for
others to utilise the instruments developed. Many studies around the world have
been carried out based entirely on the published methodology. I am most
appreciative of the two original editors of the Administrative Science
Quarterly, Tom Lodahl and Bill Starbuck, who agreed to publish such a degree of
detail. John Child and Patricia Clark made a key contribution when they
prepared the various data sets using the Aston methodology for deposit in the
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) data archive for the social
sciences at the University of Essex. I have also archived some of the original
interview schedules of the Aston and LBS studies in the Open University.
I want to react
to two comments on our type of work which never cease to irritate me. One is
the suggestion that because we take a functionalist approach, we then use only
quantitative data. This is completely wrong, and can be dangerously misleading
to the unwary. Some people seem to think that the Aston variables, scales and
items jumped straight into our laps, and all we had to do was to start
counting! That was not the case; they were the result of a considerable degree
of qualitative investigation to understand the relationships involved. How
often have I heard PhD students say "I'm going to send out a
questionnaire, and then do a detailed study on a small number of cases".
This is the wrong way round. Good quantitative work is necessarily based on
good qualitative work. As an unreconstructed positivist, I regularly carry out
qualitative study, moving on to quantitative designs only if a clear framework
of relationships between variables is established which can convincingly be
encapsulated in numerical analysis. Oh, and by the way, the Aston structural
level studies were based on structured interviews, not on questionnaires. These
were used only for the group-level studies.
My second
irritation is the way the term 'radical' has been appropriated by
phenomenologists, neo-Marxists, post-modernists, etc., who characterise a
positivist, functionalist approach as anti-change. I think that is just not so.
If I wanted to change an organization, I would go to someone who understands
its structure and functioning, and the levers of change. I would not go to
someone who considers that an organization is a domain of discourse or a
class-based conspiracy, because it would not give much help in actually
changing. So 'critical'? Yes, criticism from all is necessary. But 'radical'? No
way.
THE LONDON BUSINESS SCHOOL
I came to the
London Business School when it had been in existence for a couple of years and
was still in temporary accommodation. My first post was as Reader and Director
of Research of the School, but after a year, on 1st January 1970 to herald the
new decade, I was appointed Professor of Organizational Behaviour (OB).
Although there had been visiting American professors at LBS with this title,
including Vic Vroom and Dean Berry (who recruited me) I was the first native
Brit in the country to be appointed to a chair in this subject. Tom Lupton had
been appointed to the Manchester Business School before me, of course, but his
first title was Industrial Sociology. He changed to Organizational Behaviour
only after I had been appointed. I had been writing quite a lot about the need
to forge an interdisciplinary approach to behavioural aspects of management
under the title of 'organizational behaviour', and so was very pleased to have
been the first appointment.
My work changed
considerably in London, since I had to take on a full teaching and
administrative load in addition to research. Natalie too, took up full time
teaching with a lectureship (then a senior lectureship) in industrial sociology
in the Business Studies Department of the Polytechnic of North
London. She was very important in helping me to understand and keep in touch
with the polytechnic sector, which then had a large majority of the students in
business studies, when, in 1970, I was elected as Chairman of the Association
of Teachers of Management. In my three year term as Chairman I had to undertake
a more public role: presiding over conferences and committees, developing
workshops and training courses for management teachers on professional updating
and research, leading delegations to the House of Commons to lobby for the
development of management education as a whole, writing to the Education
Secretary (Mrs Thatcher) questioning Government policy on 'regional
management centres', and so on. I also had to learn to make after dinner
speeches, which is more difficult than it seems - though I always found the
story about how Androcles persuaded the Lion not to have him for dinner got me
off to a good start. And my experience of management meant that I was recruited
to undertake other non-academic jobs as chairman or consultant in a number of
voluntary organizations.
An early job
that I had to do at LBS played an important role in my professional thinking.
As part of the first review of the master's programme, I worked with William
Egan in evaluating the validity of the selection test used for the intake.
Along with all other leading schools we used the Admissions Test for Graduate
Schools of Business of the Educational Testing Service at Princeton (ETS). Since
we had only been going three years, only the first year graduates were in jobs.
We therefore used the course marks as the criterion measures. We found very
high predictive validities from the test scores to the first year marks - in
one of the years an overall correlation of over 0.6, and this was before any
correction for restriction of range. This was very gratifying to the testers,
and our results were used for some years by ETS in their advertising
literature. But it worried me. What was the intervening educational process
which allowed a selection psychologist to predict so well how somebody would
perform more than two years later? How would it be characterised by an
educational psychologist? It seemed to me that it had to be a very straightforward
process - a 'sponge theory' in which education was the one-way transfer of
knowledge from the professor to the students, who soaked it up, and then spewed
it out in the examinations. I decided that I would throw in my lot with
improving the educational process, making it more flexible, more exploratory,
more of a two-way exercise, even though this inevitably meant that the
predictive validity would fall. I decided that I would rather be an educator
than a selector, and since then I have never used a test. I am glad to say that
when we reorganized the programme, the validities duly went down.
Our
Organizational Behaviour section at LBS had some interesting teachers. When I
first knew Denis Pym he was a mainstream Birkbeck College occupational
psychologist. Then he went back home to Australia for a few years. When he
returned to London and joined LBS, he had become the most free-wheeling
iconoclast that I knew. He seemed to attack everything: organizations,
leadership, professionalism, 'the domination of the eye over the ear.' He was a
forceful and effective lecturer and his students liked him. In as far as I
could understand him, I regarded his approach as a form of anarchism - which is
very liberating, I suppose, for budding executives presumably preparing
themselves to oppose anarchy in order to manage successfully.
Andrew
Pettigrew was already making a name for himself as a detailed and careful
researcher into organizational power and politics, and beginning his
magisterial studies of change at ICI, the British industrial conglomerate. He
went, in due course, to a chair at Warwick Business School and has built up the
Centre for Corporate Strategy and Change there as a leading research group.
Charles Handy was the most effective lecturer that we had. Clear, forceful,
relevant and inspirational. It is no surprise to me that he has gone on to
become a leading British management guru - the British version of
Peter Drucker. He regularly broadcasts and his books are very popular in
challenging received wisdom with visions of the future. Stuart Timperley stayed
at LBS, where his street-wise organizational wisdom is much appreciated by the
experienced executives. And there can't be many academics who have achieved
Stuart's distinction of becoming the chairman of a professional football club,
viz: Watford Town.
We were later
joined by Tommy Wilson (A.T.M. Wilson), one of the most experienced
professionals in the field of industrial social science. He had been the first
Chairman of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, but came to us after
having spent a long period as Adviser to the Board on Social Sciences at
Unilever. This was probably the most prestigious social science job in British
industry, involving continual treading of the corridors of power. He was
very shrewd in his understanding of the political processes of organizations,
and very powerful in his analysis of policy options. But, maybe because of his
long experience as a consultant, I found it very difficult to mobilise his
support. For a time we were the only two OB professors in the School. I was the
head of department and needed to fight my corner. Tommy always produced clear
analyses of the issues, but then usually abstained rather than voted as I felt
was required.
At LBS we
benefited from a steady stream of outstanding visiting scholars of such
enormously varied interests and skills as Chris Argyris, Bob Dubin, Martin
Evans, David Kolb, Ed Lawler, Charles Perrow and Bill Starbuck. I always found
it fascinating to watch them in action and to come to terms with their
thinking. I like to think I took something from all of them.
I feel
particularly proud of two innovations in teaching which I introduced at LBS.
Will McQuillan and I developed an Interpersonal Management Skills course as an
option in the Master's degree. It became so popular, many students rating it as
the best course they had taken in the programme, that it was made compulsory,
despite my protestations that the act of choice was an essential part of the
commitment which made it work. Later Jill Jones and I collaborated, and, after
my time there, LBS hired John Harter as a specialist trainer just to carry to
this training in a specially designed laboratory.
The second
innovation was a course for the OB Doctoral programme on the skills of doing
research. This course developed from my gradual realisation that the education
normally given to doctoral students flies in the face of all we know about
adult human learning. Typically in Britain, we give doctoral students lectures,
tell them to read a lot, and then send them out into the field to "make a
contribution to knowledge". Some of them make it, of course, but on the
whole it is a recipe for disaster. Effective learning takes place under
controlled conditions in which the learner gets plenty of early feedback. I
developed a series of graded research exercises, including designing a research
study on a specified topic, constructing a questionnaire and testing it out,
replicating a published paper, etc. to allow the skills of the research craft
to be practised before candidates started on their doctoral projects.
Of the series of doctoral students whom I supervised at LBS, I still keep in
close touch with three: Peter E. Smith who runs the MBA programme at the Berlin
Fachhochshule, Moshe Banai of Baruch College, New York, and Ana Shetach of
Emek-Yezreel College, Israel.
During this
time my international professional network expanded considerably. Rex Adams of
Ashorne Hill College, who succeeded me as Chairman of the ATM, asked me to join
with him in bidding for a contract to design and run a six-month course in
Italy for Italian managers who wished to prepare themselves to become
management teachers. We got the contract and this led, over the years, to a
considerable amount of management development work in Italy. In due course I
was elected a Fellow of the Italian Academy of Business Management. Teddy
Weinshall of Tel Aviv University came regularly to LBS and became a friend -
particularly after his daughter did her PhD under my supervision. Teddy helped
me to develop my contacts in Israel, and I regularly gave seminars to managers
there, many of them jointly with him. I have also been a visiting professor at
the Haifa Technion and the Tel Aviv Business School, where Yoram Zeira has been
a constant contact. S.R. Ganesh was a doctoral student of mine, and after his
return to India he arranged for me to undertake a lecture tour there. I had the
honour of being the keynote speaker at the first all-India conference of
organizational behaviour teachers in Hyderabad in 1979. Other tours there have
followed. I also paid a regular series of visits to Hong Kong working with
Gordon Redding, giving seminars to managers and collaborating in a joint
research project. Regular contact as a teacher and a consultant with practising
managers in both the UK and abroad is important to me as stimulant to my
thinking and as a challenge to my teaching.
I had become a
member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Institute for
Advanced Studies in Management based in Brussels. This enabled me to make
contact with many colleagues on the continent. I contributed to a conference,
organized by Geert Hofstede and Sami Kassem, on European Contributions to
Organization Theory and met a range of new colleagues from different countries
there. All of these experiences were sensitising me to the need to understand
cultural differences in organizational functioning. Until then it was David Hickson
who had taken the lead in the consideration of cultural differences in the
Aston work and its derivatives. The problem, I found, was that 'culture' as a
explanatory term was a residual category: a rag bag into which it was too easy
to throw things which would otherwise be left unexplained. Geert Hofstede's
contribution in establishing a framework of four dimensions of societal culture
was a major step forward in analysing the differences. And I find it
significant that two of the dimensions map on to Aston dimensions. I have
become more and more interested in cultural differences in management, as I
feel that we can go beyond description and take a more analytical approach to
them.
THE ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR RESEARCH GROUP
From my arrival
at LBS in 1968, Dean Berry and I began building up the Organizational Behaviour
Research Group with support from the School. After he left to fulfil his
nominal potential by becoming Dean Dean Berry of INSEAD (the multi-lingual
business school in Fontainbleau, France), the Group obtained a Social Science
Research Council programme grant entitled "Organizational Behaviour in its
Context". This had a number of components. It began with John Child and
Will McQuillan working on the 'national' Aston project. Roy Payne joined to
develop group-level studies on the performance of managerial work groups.
Malcolm Warner and Lex Donaldson became 'fourth generation' Aston researchers,
working on extensions to the programme to trades unions and occupational
interest associations, in collaboration with Ray Loveridge. Roger Mansfield
came to work primarily on managerial careers, but also become a member of the
fourth generation making important conceptual contributions both at the
structure and group levels. Alan Dale joined to study organizational change and
development and Leslie Metcalf (now of the European Institute in Maastricht) to
research QUANGOS (quasi non-governmental organizations, such as the economic
development committees then set up for particular industries). Brenda Macmillan
worked on managerial mobility. Kay Schraer was an excellent secretary. Our size
meant that, as is traditional for me anyway, we were housed in a nearby slum -
the fine new premises of the business school in Regent's Park being already too
small to accommodate researchers.
Good research
projects were carried out, as reported, for example, in the second and third
volumes of the Aston books and elsewhere. But we were never able to get
anything like the degree of group cohesion that we had experienced at Aston.
Chris Argyris was a regular visitor to LBS, and on occasion we benefited from
his consummate skills as a process consultant when relationships in the research
group needed help. After a few years John Child went back to Aston as a
professor (i.e., full professor in American terms) and Malcolm Warner went to
be professor at the Administrative Staff College, Henley - both meteoric rises:
from Senior Research Officer to Professor in one step. Both later went on to
develop their many contributions to the field, finally returning to their alma
mater, Cambridge University in the Judge Institute of Management Studies; John
as the first Guinness Professor of Management Studies. Roger Mansfield, also a
LBS Senior Research Officer, paused slightly at Imperial College on the way to
becoming Professor and Director of the Cardiff Business School. Ray Loveridge
went to a chair at Aston from an LBS lectureship.
In addition to
presiding over the whole research programme, I was continuing my writing aimed
at developing the field of organizational behaviour. I had an interesting
experience in crossing swords in print with Lyndall F. Urwick. He was the
leading British exponent of traditional management theory, and wrote a paper in
the then newly established management journal Omega attacking social
science for confusing what was previously straightforward by misuse of the word
'organization'. Sam Eilon, the editor of the journal invited me to comment, and
I published a short defence of social scientists' contribution to the
understanding of management activity. Urwick's reply was a poem called
"Lines on D.S.Pugh's Theory of Organization" which begins:
"I have no
animus
Against the
Pughsillanimous,
Nor any
intention
To handicap
invention.
But D.S. Pugh's
semantics
Play such
curious antics,
That its hard
for a simple mind
Not to be left
behind."
It then went on
to say that what I had written was nonsense. Since I had gone to some trouble
to point out that I did not consider Urwick's views nonsense, only incomplete,
I was a bit put out at the time. But still, I suppose it must be some sort of
distinction to have a poem about you published in an academic journal.
My specific
research interests, in collaboration with Lex Donaldson and Penny Silver,
focused on attempting to understand and analyse organizational processes. In
the early 'seventies we held a conference on 'organizational process' to try
and get a better understanding of how to analyse the phenomenon. We invited
Karl Weick, whose book The Social Psychology of Organizing had
recently made a big impact. I remember being very impressed that, when I told
him that I did not understand the second half of his book, Karl replied that he
did not understand it very well either. I thought this must be real innovation,
not just a taste for it. The longitudinal study that Lex, Penny and I carried
out also reflected my growing interest in organizational change. I was
impressed with the ideas that Alan Dale, our most experienced organizational
development practitioner, was demonstrating. The excessive emphasis in American
OD on interpersonal relationships, always seemed to me to be inadequate. Not
surprisingly, I was clear that you had to take the authority structure
seriously and look for ways of getting structural change.
That Lex
Donaldson left for Australia was a failure on my part. Not for Lex, of course,
he has gone on to develop a powerful world-class career as an organization
theorist based in Sydney. But I could not persuade the Principal of the London
Business School that someone would actually leave the School while there was
still some chance that he would get an extension to his contract in London. He
was therefore not prepared to advance in time the decision on Lex's extension.
I felt that
this was typical of LBS at this time. It was at the top of the tree: the
leading business school in Britain, the only non-American school consistently
listed in the world top ten. It was in a beautiful location in a park in
central London, and was a very comfortable place to be. Our Principal was the
economist Jim Ball (later Sir James Ball); an excellent leader who had done a
magnificent job in revitalizing the School in the 'seventies. But by the
'eighties, he had stayed too long. (Pugh's rule-of-thumb for successful chief executives
has a Macawber-like ring. Aim to stay for ten years. Go after nine: result,
sighs of nostalgia. Go after eleven: result, sighs of relief!) I felt that the
School was in a rut and, after fourteen years, I was in a rut too. So when the
opportunity came in 1983, I was able to exercise a taste for innovation.
OPEN UNIVERSITY, TECHNOLOGY FACULTY, SYSTEMS
DISCIPLINE
The United
Kingdom Open University (OU) is the leading distance learning institution in
the world. It led the way in developing the most important innovation in higher
education in modern times: the facility for students working part-time and at
home to conduct rigorous university level studies to the same degree standards
as at established universities. For the central academic staff it requires a
completely different way of working. Teaching does not mean taking a class at
nine o'clock on Tuesday morning - there are no students on the campus to teach
(except PhD students, of whom more anon). Teaching means participating in a
course team which writes course units (as the specially designed workbooks are
called), makes audio-visual presentations in collaboration with the BBC
(originally as radio and television programmes but more commonly now as audio
and video tapes), designs the short residential schools, and sets up and
participates in computer conferences. In addition to central staff in the
'course writing factory' at Milton Keynes, there are also regional academic
staff across the country who tutor the students through the courses prepared at
the centre. It is a completely different way of working from my previous
teaching experiences. I was ready for a change and entered into all these
activities with a swing.
The reaction in
the profession to my move from LBS to the OU, was one of bewilderment - if
anything more incredulous than the reaction to my move twenty-five years
earlier from Edinburgh University to Birmingham Tech. I was the first full
professor of the London Business School to move from there to another
university. I was moving from the top status institution in my field to a
new-fangled set-up which was viewed with much suspicion. For many university
teachers, it appears demeaning that the OU requires no previous qualifications
at all for entry to its foundation courses. It aims to take people who left
school thirty years ago with no qualifications, but who have the ability and
the commitment, to obtain a degree. The view is that it is not the input level
but the educational process and the output standards which matter. For several
years people would come up to me at conferences and say how surprised they were
at my leaving LBS. I think many were bemused when I said it was because I have
a taste for educational innovation.
I was also
changing in another way, too. I was widening my academic interests by joining
the Faculty of Technology and accepting the chair of Systems and headship of
the Systems discipline. This brought me into contact with a subject that I had
previously only been aware of in a general way, but now had to tackle
seriously. I should say that the University had defined the post in the widest
possible terms, and, indeed, the advertisement for the job had specifically
stated that experience in organizational development was an appropriate basis
for applying. I underlined at my interview that there was no point in
appointing me unless the OU was intending to develop management studies in a
major way, and the Vice-Chancellor confirmed that this was so.
My Inaugural
Lecture linked both interests, being on "The Management of Complex
Systems". In British universities a new professor on appointment gives a
lecture which is open to the whole university and, indeed, to the public. But I
had given public lectures before and did not come to the OU to repeat myself.
My Inaugural Lecture was a fifty minute television programme: a first even for
the OU. It is a lecture but, since I had the resources of the BBC behind me, I
was able to illustrate it with footage from programmes as disparate as Henry
Ford's Model T assembly line, the 'Yes, Minister' sitcom, and specially filmed
interviews about their research with Frank Heller and David Hickson. I was
talking direct to camera for less than half of the time. The programme was
shown several times on television, and after some years was even revived as a
'golden oldie.'
The fields of
application of the systems discipline were very wide ranging. There was
research on bio-systems, catastrophic systems failures, manufacturing systems,
energy systems, and the functioning of worker co-operatives. The group, using
the ideas of Sir Geoffrey Vickers, Stafford Beer, Peter Checkland, took what I
would regard as a cybernetic engineering approach to systems. It always
surprised me that my colleagues did not draw on the biological systems thinking
of von Bertalanffy, and Emery and Trist. Even the bio-systems unit seemed to me
to be concerned with an engineering approach to biological change. And, with
few exceptions, the discipline's interest in management was confined to systems
design. As head of department my involvement in these activities was limited to
encouragement and criticism. My own writing at this time was focused on reviews
and re-evaluations of past work, such as that for the fascinating conference
on Beyond Method, which Gareth Morgan organized at York University,
Toronto.
The only
students on campus are those studying for PhDs: at this level the OU becomes
like an ordinary university with personal supervision. I found, as is so often
the case in Britain, that these students were not well inducted into the nature
of a PhD. They did not know how the process works, and what was expected of
them. Their supervisors seemed to think that 'they will pick this up as they go
along' and left it at that. At the London Business School, in addition to my
skills course for the OB doctoral students, I had inaugurated during my term of
office as Chairman of the Doctoral programme, a course for all students on
"The processes of PhD-getting". It dealt with such usually neglected
topics as the meaning of a doctorate, the form of the PhD thesis, and perils to
avoid. When I came to the OU, I began to offer this course to the Technology
Faculty and then to the whole university.
While I was
still at LBS, I was asked to be the external examiner for a PhD thesis on
concept development in doctoral students by Estelle Phillips. When I came to
the OU, I found that Estelle had carried out an evaluation study of the
University's doctoral supervision system. Clearly we had complementary
interests in this process and I suggested that we collaborate on a book that
would help students to understand and manage their way successfully through
their doctoral studies. She agreed, and in due course Phillips and Pugh: How
to Get a PhD came into being. Now in its fourth edition, it has been a
very successful book both in Britain and abroad. It is distinctive in that it
concentrates on the processes involved, and, being applicable to all subjects,
is as avidly read by scientists and engineers as by economists and historians. 'How not to
get a PhD - seven tried and tested ways' and 'How to manage your supervisor'
are popular chapters, as is the one on 'How to supervise', which is addressed
to the supervisor, the other key partner in the enterprise. Since it appeared,
Estelle and I have been running a sort of unofficial counselling service.
Students, supervisors, even Deans, call us up for advice on difficult problems.
Some of the ways in which research students are treated are truly hair-raising,
and I often think of us as the pathologists of the doctoral process. Later
editions of the book contain a detailed chapter on 'Institutional
Responsibilities' which we hope will contribute to improving the standards of
provision.
I was also much
involved at this time in the battles to establish a business school in the Open
University on what I would consider to be a proper basis. The teaching of
management had begun in the Continuing Education programme of the University
under the direction of Brian Lund. I acted as a tutor in the London Region for
the introductory course entitled "The Effective Manager" for which
Brian had been responsible, with contributions from, among others, Charles
Handy. This excellent course was very popular, and further courses were
introduced. But there were inevitable disagreements about the nature of the
qualifications, the need for an MBA degree, the necessity to establish a school
as a full faculty in the University able to appoint professors, and so on.
These were duly hammered out, and in 1988 the business school was established
as the Faculty of Management of the Open University.
Having
established a school, the University's first task was to appoint a Dean. With
many misgivings on Natalie's part, she is always much more realistic than I am,
I applied for the post. In what I now regard as a providential escape, I was
not appointed. Looking back I realise that I was too influenced by the
independent situation of the London Business School: I conceived of the
Deanship as something like the Principal's role there. In fact, for most deans
of British university business schools, the main job appears to be fighting
your own university - and I would have got very frustrated with that.
The OU
appointed Andrew Thomson of the University of Glasgow as Dean. Andrew and I
were already working together on an Economic and Social Research Council
working party for the establishment of large-scale databases in management
studies. He immediately asked me to join him in the business school. I was
lobbied by Geoff Peters, the Dean of the Technology Faculty, to stay there. But
there was no doubt where my heart lay - and anyway I have a taste for new
expanding enterprises, rather than mature ones.
THE OPEN UNIVERSITY BUSINESS SCHOOL
So here we are
again in temporary accommodation in Stony Stratford while our campus building
in Milton Keynes is being erected. The Open University Business School (OUBS)
was not in a slum this time but in a suite of offices in a faceless modern
block. In 1988 it was a hive of activity: new structures, new subjects, new
courses, exponentially expanding numbers of students. In four years it became,
in terms of student numbers, the largest business school in Europe, probably in
the world. That's the nature of successful distance learning. And then we began
expanding into Western Europe, followed, with the help of the 'know-how fund'
by expansion into ex-communist Eastern Europe, and then into the Pacific Rim.
The whole exercise had an attractive 'sixties feel about it, and we were able
to do it in the late 'eighties because the developments were funded from fee
income with only minor government financial support.
In this welter
of teaching activity, I was appointed as Director of Research with a brief to
introduce elements of a research climate, establish research activity, and
inaugurate a doctoral programme. Some financial resources were available, but
as anyone who has been in this situation knows, it is not money that is the
academics' scarce resource, but time. Over the years we have established a
number of University recognised research groups built around committed
researchers: they include voluntary sector management, small business
management, strategic management, information management, human resource
management and, my particular concerns, international management and management
history.
I also
inaugurated the OUBS doctoral programme, but it has, as yet, a small number of
students because we cannot go beyond the capacity of our faculty to supervise,
and their research experience is still being steadily built up. Then the ESRC
established a national Management Teaching Fellows programme to give
encouragement to beginning academics to enter the field of management studies.
The programme gave opportunities for the participants to have a reduced
teaching load, while they obtained training in teaching and research. During
the years of the scheme's operation, the OUBS obtained over a dozen such
fellowships, one of the largest allocations of any business school. I was
responsible for designing and managing the programme of activities for them; in
later years in collaboration with Jacky Holloway, one of the first graduates of
the scheme.
While Andrew
Thomson was still at Glasgow, he had agreed to edit the Newsletter of
the newly formed British Academy of Management (BAM). Andrew edited the first
issue at the OUBS, but then, because of pressure of work, he asked me to take
it over. With my previous experience of the ATM Newsletter, I can't say
that I didn't know what I was letting myself in for. But I enjoy this sort of
editing. It is proactive. It requires the editor to go out to colleagues,
asking, and then nagging, them to write informative or provocative articles. I
was able to make full use of my network to establish a regular publication
which BAM members told me they positively looked forward to reading. I
established a number of regular features: 'BAM Soapbox' to stir things up by
'banging the drum at the top of your voice about a bee in your bonnet'; 'BAM
Impact' for introducing your colleagues to an important book in your field;
'BAM Focus' for publicising the research being carried out in your school.
Perhaps the most popular feature was the gossip column written by 'Stony
Stratford'. This managed to comment on the passing scene to such good effect
that even some of my American colleagues told me they read it to discover what
was happening in British academic management. After three years and ten issues,
I felt that I had done my stint and handed the Newsletter on.
THE INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT RESEARCH GROUP
By the time I
moved into the Open University Business School in 1988, cross-cultural
comparisons in management had become a main focus of my research interests and
I decided to take the title of Professor of International Management - the
third chair that I have occupied. David Hickson had put us in touch with Enzo
Perrone of Bocconi University, Milan - the leading business school in Italy.
They had been conducting comparative longitudinal studies of the structure and
functioning of Italian organizations. They were setting up a European network
to carry out cross-cultural studies and were seeking a British participant for
the group. I agreed to join, and set up the OUBS International Management Research
Group which became the British member of the 'International Organization
Observatory'. The other members of the IOO were from France (Gilles van Wijk,
Paris) Spain (Josep Baruel, Barcelona) the Netherlands (Arndt Sorge and
Mariëlle Heijltjes, Maastricht) and Germany (Christian Scholz, Saarbrucken).
Geoff Mallory, Timothy Clark and I worked on this project at the British end. I
feel it appropriate that papers from this work have appeared in German, and in
the Festschrift for my friend and neighbour Frank Heller of the
Tavistock Institute which was published in Holland. A further result of the IOO
collaboration is a book on 'European Perspectives on Human Resource
Management', edited by Timothy Clark, which explores the interestingly
different ways in which this subject is conceptualised and practised in the
various European countries.
With my
colleague Dagmar Ebster-Grosz, I also conducted a more specific project on
Anglo-German business collaboration. This was designed as joint venture with
the University of the Saarland and involved interviews with the chief
executives of German subsidiaries in the UK and British subsidiaries in
Germany. The two research teams made their data available to each other, but,
because of a major divergence of opinion, made their analyses separately. In
our view, the German analysis is overly quantitative in a way which is
unjustified by the nature of the data. The British results are based on content
analysis of the interviews and illustrative quotations. This harks back to a
point I made earlier about the need for a strong qualitative understanding
before undertaking quantitative analysis. Our results were published in 1996 in
a book entitled "Anglo-German Business Collaboration: Pitfalls and
Potentials".
MANAGEMENT HISTORY RESEARCH GROUP
A major recent
interest of mine, as befits a geriatric professor, is in management history.
This was stimulated when I met a phenomenon: E.F.L. Brech. Edward Brech has
been writing about management for the last fifty years. He collaborated with
L.F.Urwick on the classic British three volume work which appeared in the
'forties on The Making of Scientific Management. He wrote The Principles
and Practice of Management and other books, and is in the Pugh and
Hickson Great Writers on Organizations omnibus. And all this while
working as a manager and a management consultant; he has never held an academic
post. In the years since his retirement he had been writing a history of the
development of management and the management professional institutes in
Britain. He was looking for an academic link and, strangely, had found it
difficult to find one.
 |
| Dr Edward Brech (left) with Derek at the OU Graduation Ceremony, 2006 |
I consulted
with Andrew Thomson and we agreed to set up a Management History Research Group
in the Business School to develop this work. When Andrew finished his stint as
Dean, he became the head of the group. Edward became a Visiting Research
Fellow, and, under my supervision, developed his work on "The concept and
gestation of a professional institute of management in Britain, 1902 -
1949" into a thesis. In 1994, at the age of 85, he was awarded a PhD for
this study, and promptly went into the Guinness Book of Records as the then
oldest British doctoral graduate. In the next decade, he continued his work on
the history of British management institutions and was awarded a higher
doctorate (DLitt) in 2006. He was considering further work when he sadly died
at the age of 97. He was a phenomenon and will be much missed.
My own
interests are in the history and development of management ideas. My
contribution has been as the series editor for Dartmouth Publishing's The
History of Management Thought. Many new universities cannot make available
a historical framework for management studies because they do not have back
runs of important journals, and are not in a position to obtain them. A set of
readers, in which a leading scholar chooses key articles in the field to
demonstrate its historical development, seemed a useful contribution to make.
This is what the series sets out to do. So we have John Miner's choice on
Administrative and Management Theory, Lyman Porter's and Greg Bigley's on Human
Relations, Sam Eilon's on Management Science, Lex Donaldson's on Contingency
Theory, etc. The series ranges from Early Management Thought (Dan Wren) to
Post-modern Management Theory (Linda Smircich and Marta Callas).
OFFICIAL RETIREMENT
 |
| Natalie and Derek Pugh on the occasion of their Golden Wedding, 2004 |
Also at that
time those who have been my research colleagues over the years presented me
with a Festschrift, Advancement in Organizational Behaviour: Essays in
Honour of Derek S. Pugh edited by Timothy Clark, which gratified me very
much.
And I was delighted that my teaching colleagues were kind enough to have
established the annual Derek Pugh Prize, to be awarded to the best student
among the two thousand or so managers who take the OUBS beginning courses every
year.
 |
| Timothy Clark and Derek Pugh, British Academy of Management Conference, 2014 |
I continue to
give seminars to managers and management students. I have also developed a
series of seminars for doctoral students and supervisors of all faculties based
on the topics covered in the 'How to Get a PhD' book. Then there are the
new editions of the books to write, and new ideas for books to
develop. I have to say that I have enjoyed myself at work - even in the battles,
and I have had my fair share of those. So there is a natural attraction to
carry on. And anyway, my view has always been that while we may have made some
progress with the various research programmes, we are still trying - "and
the best is yet to be".
(Revised
November 2006)
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