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The Theory Of The Administrative Management

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The administrative management viewpoint evolved early in the 1900s and is most closely identified with Henri Fayol (1841-1925), a French industrialist. Fayol’s work, “Administration industrielle et générale (1916)”, later translated into the 1949 “General and industrial administration”, is one of the first and most widely quoted analyses on management. As a result, Fayol influenced many writers, most notably Urwick. Although, there have been many theories supporting Fayol’s ideas, but there have been many writers who have directly opposed Fayol, the most prominent one being Henry Mintzberg, who in his “The Nature of Managerial Work (1973)” regarded Fayol’s ideas as “folklore”. The aim of this essay is to evaluate the works of both Fayol and Mintzberg, discussing the pros and cons of both the theories. Moreover, the essay will depict that how Fayol has been able to withstand “the test of time” and prove that his theory cannot be termed as “folklore”.
Henri Fayol was described by Koontz and O’Donnell (1976) as the “father of modern operational-management theory”. He analysed the activities of industrial undertakings into six groups: technical; commercial; financial; security; accounting; and management (Fayol, 1949; Mullins, 1996; Bakewell, 1993). The managerial activity is divided into five elements of management (Gray, 1984), which are defined as: ‘to forecast and plan, to organise, to command, to coordinate and to control’. Fayol also suggested that a set of

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