Conflicting Understandings of the Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences: The Founding Figures of British Management History

Abstract

The industrial relations is a seminal event in the emergence of modern systems of management. It is also central to the British tradition of management history. Accordingly, this chapter is concerned not with the ideas about management that emerged in Britain during the nineteenth century, but rather with the emergence of the discipline of management history in Britain. If the very concept of the Industrial Revolution is primarily due to the posthumous publication of the lectures of Arnold Toynbee the elder (1852–1883), shifting understandings about the nature of British management have been built around profound disagreements as to the causes, duration, and effects of the Industrial Revolution. In the opinion of the American historian, John Nef, the importance of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is altogether overstated, Nef arguing that the success of nineteenth-century British managers is attributable to an earlier industrial relation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. For some, such as E.P. Thompson, R.H. Tawney, and both Arnold Toynbee the elder and Arnold Toynbee the younger (1889–1975), the managerial order created by the Industrial Revolution was economically advantageous but socially retrograde. For others, notably John Clapham, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and, above all, Sidney Pollard, the Industrial Revolution was a socially liberating force. Only by understanding these debates can we comprehend the seminal ideas that have informed management history in Britain.