Revival of Era of Management Science

Management science has its own history marked by great philosophers like F.W Taylor, Elton Mayo, M.P Follet, Rensis Likert, Gulick, Urwick etc. Soon after the end of the era of Principles of Management in 1937 with the papers of Gulick and Urwick, when the dogmatism in the field of management was at peak, the era of human relations made its way with the study of Elton Mayo.

The Human Relations school made way to the Behavioral schools with the emergence of philosophers like Simon and Bernard. Soon , it was realized that management is not a pure science and even an attempt to make it a pure science would defeat the very purpose of the discipline. Soon, there came an era, post imperialism, which was more behavioral, humanistic in its approach and led to the development of social science of management.

Since the birth of the discipline of modern management, there has been a debate on which part of the discipline of management, science or social science, must be given priority. However, if we talk about the recent developments in the field of management, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, software technology, machine learning, deep learning etc, the discipline of management science is making a move towards the science away from the behavioral aspect of it.

The principles and techniques of business analytics and emergence of statistical tools have made the concept of various scientific tools extremely obvious in the field of business management. The structured decisions are mostly moving to the technology enabled decision support systems. The artificial intelligence and emergence of robotics has made the discipline of management science vast like never before.

As management science has been more of a discipline of confluence of various other disciplines which has components of psychology, statistics, commerce, mathematics etc, the ambit of management as a discipline has become infinite in the modern times. The surprise is not  about the growth of the boundaries of the discipline but the tolerance of the discipline to include the technological part more into its arms. The modern era can be called the era of techno-management, which is full of scientific and technical jargon, which is full of specific answers to a question in various scenarios.

The emergence of the techno-management era has its advantage of higher speed, fast growth, quick decision making and technological revolution in the field of management. But at the same time, it has its own disadvantages. In this era of mechanistic growth, the human factor in an organization is again being left behind. It has taken us back to the era of industrial revolution where efficiency and effectiveness took over the motivation and group dynamics.

However, the change is inevitable. Whatever is happening, that will happen. Agility of any organization or an individual will decide on the survival or the death. It is the game of ‘survival of fittest’ of Darwin, which is going to be the buzz word. It is the ability to change and adopt the newer technologies and processes which will decide the fate of any organization or individual. So the gurumantra remains very basic. The fast adapters or learners will survive. The rigidity will die its death. Also, the leadership will be more at microscope, where employee centric approach will be required, as humans will have to take care of humans because machines will make the management easy but life difficult.