Blackwell Reference Online

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From the beginning of the nineteenth century until today, the industrialized world has witnessed unparalleled socioeconomic development. At the same time, the phenomenon of historical capitalism has been the object of numerous publications. Writers as diverse as classical and neoclassical economists, Marx, and foundational thinkers in sociology were all obsessed by the socioeconomic dynamic related to this movement. In sociology an attempt to explain the emergence of capitalism was the central core of Weber's intellectual work. If, according to Weber, capitalism is singularized by private firms in a market economy, another important characteristic is the appearance of management thinking and of a new social agent: the manager. As shown by historians of business such as Alfred Chandler, the social figure of the manager emerged at the end of the nineteenth century when business firms grew inexorably in size in the US. Since then, management thinking has undergone great development. Management is a social field in Bourdieu's sense, in which different actors play a role in its construction and transformation. Theories of management are both the products of society (mainly people and social forces in a historical context) and its producers. The sociology of management has to take into account this theoretical elaboration in order to understand the principal discourses which contribute ... log in or subscribe to read full text