Administration Schools

We explain what the schools of administration are and the characteristics of the empirical, scientific, classical and more.

What are administrative schools?

Administration schools or administrative schools are the different empirical and theoretical approaches that exist around administration. Each one has a specific way of conceiving and applying administrative sciences to the real world, generally the result of the reflections of its founders, who tend to be psychologists, engineers, economists and, of course, administrators.

In fact, There is no strict consensus regarding the nature of administration or its ideal methods so the different schools have followers and detractors, with points for and against. Despite this, all schools pursue exactly the same thing: finding the ideal formulation of the administrative fact, which allows it to be perfected and made increasingly more efficient.

The main known administrative schools are detailed below.

See also: History of administration

The empirical school

This school gets its name from the philosophical doctrine of empiricism, which maintains that experience is the best way – if not the only valid way – to obtain knowledge and thus make the best decisions.

Consequently, the best administrators are those who are trained by reviewing past experiences, with the purpose of finding general patterns, decisive factors and, in general, valid indications for undertaking current administrative projects.

Therefore, the empirical school places little value on administrative principles, since prefers that its conclusions come from the analysis of the experience that occurred and not that they are formulated a priori.

Its critics, in this sense, maintain that no two administrative experiences will ever be so similar as to repeat all its elements and be able to apply identical solutions. For this reason, the existence of theories and theoretical approaches is essential, not only merely practical analysis.

One of the great empirical theorists of administration was the German-American Ernest Dale (1917-1996), one of the thinkers who contributed the most to administration and management in the 20th century.

The scientific school

The scientific school of administration was born at the end of the 19th century, when engineers and industrialists began to be interested in administrative models that would allow them to improve production.

Heir to the positivist spirit of the early 20th century, this school aspired to study administration from a verifiable, objective, scientific point of view, which would find its universal rules just as happens with the exact sciences. More often than not, it involved finding formulas to maximize production and improve worker efficiency.

The founder of this movement was the American Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915), whose written work revolved around the scientific organization of work, in books such as Shop management from 1903 or Scientific Management Principles 1911. In these works, Taylor revolutionized the traditional concept of management, assigning managers a greater share of responsibility in production.

On the other hand, Taylor shared certain social prejudices regarding the working class, which he considered inherently lazy. For this reason, he aspired to measure and control details such as the number of movements that a worker had to make to maintain maximum production, as if they were robots.

Critics of the scientific school rightly point out the rigidity of its postulates and its aspiration, typical of the time, to understand the production process as a mere matter of gears to control, without taking into consideration the subjective or psychological factors of the work.

The dynamics that this school proposed ended up alienating the worker from the monotonous and repetitive task he was doing, which brings with it significant amounts of frustration and discomfort.

The classical school

Also known as the “operational” or “administrative process” school, this current considers that in all administrative events, no matter how different they may be, more or less the same functions can be identified and therefore certain universal principles apply.

Therefore, the administrator's task must be to identify these functions and their adaptation to certain ideal patterns, for which he classifies the functions as follows:

• Technical functions which have to do with the dynamics of production of goods;
• Business functions which have to do with exchange operations (purchase, sale and exchange) of products;
• Financial functions which have to do with obtaining and applying financial resources;
• Accounting functions which have to do with inventories, balances and operating statistics of the production system;
• Security features which have to do with the protection of goods and people to preserve their usefulness in the production process;
• Administrative functions understood as a mixture of foreseeing, organizing, coordinating and controlling, all in the hands of administrators.

The founder of this school was the Frenchman Henry Fayol (1841-1925), which is why it is often known as Fayolism. In your Industrial and general administration 1916, Fayol explains that administration is as old as humanity itself, but that modern developments force us to think about it from a more technical and specialized point of view.

So, Fayol created the first administrative process model, which served as the basis for many others born later in which the number of functions contemplated varied and changed names, but always agreed that the ultimate administrative function is to control.

The human-relational school

The human-relationalist school breaks with the views until now, since focuses on the human element of administrative processes emphasizing that dealing with people is not the same as dealing with automatic processes.

This school was born from the studies of Australian psychologist Elton Mayo (1880-1949) in the United States, who sought to understand absenteeism, desertion and low productivity in many companies. Thus, he demonstrated that It is impossible to expect commitment and collaboration from workers if they are alienated of the production process itself, especially if they are not heard or taken into account.

Mayo conducted four different studies:

• The first was between 1923 and 1924 in a textile factory in Philadelphia, where the monotonous and tiring work caused continuous desertions among the workers. Mayo proposed increasing rest periods, and convinced management to allow workers to arrange their rest periods themselves. Although they reluctantly agreed, the surprise was the rapid decrease in attrition and the immediate increase in productivity.
• The second was in 1927 at the Western Electric Company in Chicago, a company that needed to increase the productivity of its workers, who were extremely unmotivated. The experiment, initially, consisted of modifying their physical working conditions, for which a control group and an experimental group were created: but although the second was much more successful than the first, the reasons ended up not depending on the physical change of the environment, but from the change in the treatment given to the workers by the scientists in the study: by feeling useful and taken into account, the workers were much more motivated in the tests than in their regular jobs. Thus the traditional consideration that the only thing that motivates the worker is the promise of salary money was refuted.
• The third and fourth studies were carried out during World War II, and had to do with absenteeism in industrial companies. But they were much more easily solved thanks to the two previous experiences that the Mayo team had had, thus verifying the effects of previous conclusions in new work environments.

The structuralist school

Also known as the “social system school,” it proposes a sociological approach to administration, inherited in particular from the books of the German sociologist Max Weber.

The structuralist approach sees administration as a dynamic integrated into the social system that is, to all types of external organizations and social media from which it receives significant influence. Therefore, it is proposed first to understand the historical evolution of societies and their main types of organizations, to understand the impact that the arrival of the Industrial Revolution had on society.

An impact that could be traced not only in productive organizations, but also in commercial, political, social, educational, etc., and that leads to the identification of certain “structures” in all forms of human organization, such as:

• Functional structure which refers to the division of work into specific positions and delimitations, that is, each position or step in the structure corresponds to an expected behavior.
• Authority structure which refers to the chain of command, that is, the division between those who command and those who obey, or those who supervise and those who act. This authority can be given by custom, by charisma, by honorific distinction, etc.
• Communications structure which refers to the instances of information control, which can flow horizontally (between peers) or vertically (according to the authority structure). In addition, communication can occur in written, oral or graphic form.

The study of these and other structures allows the formalization or bureaucratization of the administrative organization, that is, the application of rules and control measures that allow the repetition of certain processes in more or less identical terms.

Therefore, The role of administration lies in understanding these structures and managing bureaucracy to allow feedback in the production process.

The human-behavioral school

Also called the “school of human behavior” or “neo-human-relationalist”, it brought with it a new approach to the study of administration from a human perspective, although approaching it from a broader perspective than previous schools.

In fact, this school claims the experiences of Elton Mayo, although in reality its main exponents were the German Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) and the American Douglas McGregor (1906-1964).

Lewin was one of the pioneers of experimental social psychology, organizational psychology and applied psychology, considered one of the “Big Four” of German Gestalt psychology. His contribution to the school was foundational, through the dynamic study of small groups, in which highlighted the virtues of the integration and participation of workers in the production process.

For his part, McGregor published his book in 1960 The human aspect of companiesin which he proposed two different approaches to managing personnel for productive purposes:

• “Theory X” the most traditional and least effective approach, which understands the employee as an individual denied work whose only work motivation is to receive salary money.
• “Theory Y” the approach that took into account the findings of modern psychology regarding motivation and therefore proposed a change in the way managers act.

This change has to do with authority: McGregor proposes that this is just one of the forms of influence between the manager and the employee, the most coercive and the one that encounters the most resistance, and therefore it should be used only when confrontation is inevitable. or when you are willing to let go of the employee.

Instead, McGregor proposes that managers should seek to motivate their employees taking into account the different steps of satisfaction of Abraham Maslow's famous Pyramid.

Thus, the mere satisfaction of the basic rungs of the pyramid will imply an equally basic commitment on the part of the employee, while higher rates of personal satisfaction and self-actualization will bring with them significantly greater motivation on the part of the worker. To this end, McGregor proposes:

• The integration of the company's objectives and the individual aspirations and needs of the workers;
• Increasing the participation of workers in decision-making and setting objectives;
• The development of self-control and self-management of employees in achieving their goals;
• Promote camaraderie and sensitivity among the group of workers.

The mathematical school

Also called “quantum school” or “decisional theory”, this current focuses its interest on the study of decision-making within a social organization, paying less attention to the rest of the aspects.

This school was proposed by mathematics and economics specialists such as the American economist and political scientist Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001) or his compatriot James Gary March (1928-2018), an expert in organizational theories.

According to this school, The important thing about management is its full understanding of the dynamics of decision making which essentially involves three points:

• The definition of the problem which consists of the identification of the problems to be resolved and the existing needs, as well as their respective constituent elements.
• The analysis of alternatives which consists of searching for paths of action to solve the problem, trying to anticipate the possible drawbacks of each one.
• Choosing the best solution which consists of operations research, that is, the implementation of a method to choose the best of the alternatives through the scientific method. The latter is precisely what these authors call “management science.”

The study of decision making and decision problems gave rise to a theory (Decisional Theory) that is not only applied to the field of administration, but to many other areas of human endeavor.

systems theory

Perhaps the most contemporary of the administrative schools is the one that proposes understanding the administrative fact as a system, that is, a region of the universe that can be isolated and studied in its elements and internal functioning, abstracting from the rest.

Although this theory came from biology, it is not only applied to this field of knowledge, but to practically any other: from the human body to thermodynamic systems in physics and even cultural study.

When we think about systems, we are starting from four fundamental principles:

• Every system contains elements (subsystems) that operate in an interrelated manner and which in turn can be understood as systems in themselves. Therefore, the initial system in turn is a subsystem of another larger and broader system. To study a system, then, we must choose its hierarchical limits.
• Every system moves towards a specific goal for which their respective parties contribute. Without this goal, the system would lose meaning and therefore also its respective parts. And if any of them did not fulfill any function in this sense, it could be perfectly dispensed with without affecting the others.
• Every system is complex in the sense that introducing a change in just one of its components will lead to a larger change in the entire system and in the other elements that accompany it as well.
• The behavior of any system depends on the respective behavior of each of its parts but also the correct interrelation between them.

The impact of this theory in the administrative world was immense, and resulted in the formulation of new mathematical management models and new data management models, which not only took advantage of modern computers, but also allowed us to build an administrative perspective that fits each case in question.

References

• “Administrative schools” at the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo (Mexico).
• “Administrative schools” at the University of Latin America (Mexico).
• “Theories and schools of administration” by Gisel Marconi at the Universidad Abierta Interamericana (Argentina).