The Rise of Entrepreneurial Management Theory in the United States

Abstract

This article challenges the historiographical commonplace that twentieth-century American management discourse was dominated by bureaucratic aspirations to objective expertise and rational planning. Proposing the category of “entrepreneurial management” to describe the countervailing tendency, it demonstrates the persistence of intellectual interest in managers who used the personal qualities of leadership to enlist enthusiasm among subordinates for their firm's initiatives. By the mid-twentieth century, these managerial leaders were commonly described as “entrepreneurs.” Through a reading of early twentieth-century writing on “human factor” management and Depression-era “human relations” theory, the article shows that intellectual interest in entrepreneurial leadership thrived during a period typically characterized as the height of scientific management and corporate bureaucracy. Analyzing Peter F. Drucker's postwar management writing in detail, the article concludes by arguing that the “entrepreneurialism” of the late twentieth century did not represent a break with the established managerial project, only the strengthened authority of one existing tendency within a variegated intellectual field.