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This paper traces the genesis of the systems paradigm in the study of organizations in the United States back to nineteenth-century engineering practices. The empirical analyses for the period 1874-1932 are based on primary data collected from three journals in which the study of organizations was first codified and crystallized: the Engineering Magazine, the American Machinist, and the ASME Transactions. The evolution of the systems paradigm was found to be a product of at least three forces that form one interacting gestalt: (1) the efforts of mechanical engineers who sought industrial legitimation and whose professional paradigm spilled over into the organizational field; (2) the Progressive period (1900-1917) and its rhetoric on professionalism, equality, order, and progress; and (3) labor unrest, which was perceived as a threat to stable economic and social order. The paper provides a cultural and political reading, rather than a functional and economic one, to the emergence of managerial thought and the evolution of organization theory.*
Several academic disciplines have devoted considerable attention to the study of organizations, most notably management, economics, sociology, political science, and psychology. Despite this massive attempt to produce scientific knowledge about organizations, researchers have done little to understand the historical origin of organization studies and its cultural and political context (for the few exceptions, see Waring, 1991; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Guillen, 1994). This paper traces the initial efforts to produce theories of organizations as "systems" during the period 1879-1932 in the United States. The study has two objectives: first, to demonstrate that the systems perspective has an intellectual history that predates general systems theory and, second, to show that the rise and evolution of this perspective should be understood as a product of professional, cultural, and political forces, not necessarily of functional and economic needs. The main argument is that the systems perspective in the management of organizations was crystallized within mechanical engineering during the last decades of the nineteenth century and was institutionalized as a legitimate canonical discourse during the Progressive period (1900-1917). Three factors were instrumental in facilitating this process: (1) The professionalization of mechanical engineering; (2) the political culture of Progressivism; and (3) the politics of labor unrest.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
The ascendance of industrial capitalism in the U.S. after the Civil War was...