Fayol's General and Industrial Management - Part 2

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

Fayol's Work

"At what point of my life I became convinced that the social phenomenon as the physics phenomenon, are subject to the natural laws independent of our own will? I couldn't tell. I think I never doubted it."
Henri Fayol

Is at this point that we must have in mind the context that surrounded Henry Fayol in his times and especially the predominant Taylor’s model.
Since 1908 Taylor's work becomes published in France -based on the translation made by H. Le Chatelier- achieving the acceptance of many businessmen (in several cases the business application of the model was previous to such publication). However Fayol continued, just as his method was, with his in depth studies and analysis of the reality of management; studying, analyzing and preparing his conclusions and his work, in a personal and independent way and with the scientific severity so closely related to the French spirit.
Once again, just as in the case of his excellent and classic works about the problems of the mines, the brilliant engineer and the successful manager, would take their time to create a new classic success... this time about a new blossoming science: The General Management.
According to Stoner and Wankel (about the United States) "very slowly, the recognition of his work arrived, in part because his writings weren't translated to English until several years after his death. Few managers in the United States knew his work during the last years of the 1930's. However, Fayol was the first to state many of the concepts of management which nowadays we take for granted." Henri Fayol managed to systematize an important part of the complexity inherent to the organizations. He reached this goal, starting from a defiant reality that tended to elevate the entropy within them. He resorted to the use and creation of new "tools" in accordance to the new science. He used the rationality of the engineer, but had the intellectual greatness of adapting such rationality to the new phenomenon he had to face: the management of organizations. The reading of his work, turns, this way, into a source of knowledge, mostly valid and applicable in the current times. And, which is not less important, from
such reading comes up a humanistic point of view which deepens into the nature of the human being and which is present in the crucial moment of establishing its conclusions and principles.