Mary Parker Follett

From CEOpedia
Mary Parker Follett
See also


Mary Parker Follett (3 September 1868 – 18 December 1933) - was an American political scientist, social worker and management thinker from Massachusetts, best remembered for treating conflict, power and authority as processes that can be redesigned rather than as fixed facts of organizational life[1].

She never ran a company. She never held a university chair either. Yet her lectures to American and British executives in the 1920s anticipated a good part of what later travelled under the labels of participative management, empowerment and win-win negotiation. For several decades after her death she was barely cited in the United States, and the revival of interest only gathered pace in the 1990s.

Life and education

Follett was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life in and around Boston. At the Thayer Academy one of her teachers, as Lyndall Urwick and Henry Metcalf later recorded, impressed on her the value of scientific method and woke an interest in philosophy that never left her[2].

She went on to the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, the so-called "Harvard Annex" that became Radcliffe College. Her studies there stretched over six years, interrupted by the academic year 1890–1891 at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read history, law and political science. England stayed with her. Many of her closest friendships, and much of her later audience, would be English. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1898, summa cum laude, after a course in economics, government and philosophy, and then did graduate study in Paris (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, pp.10-11).

From 1900 she turned to practical civic work in Roxbury, a poor district of Boston where young people went early into factories and shops. She started the Roxbury Debating Club at the Roxbury Neighbourhood House; it grew into the Highland Union and the Roxbury League. Her bigger idea was simple: school buildings stood empty every evening, so why not open them to the neighbourhood? By 1909 she chaired the School House Sub-Committee of the Women's Municipal League of Boston. In 1911 the committee won the experimental use of one school for a winter, and by the following winter legislation provided for four. These Boston School Centres (first called Evening Centres) were widely copied in other American cities[2].

Work on a vocational Placement Bureau, set up with the Boston school authorities in 1912, brought her into regular contact with employers and working conditions. Her interest moved from politics and neighbourhood life toward industrial relations. In the 1920s she became a regular lecturer at the conferences of the Bureau of Personnel Administration in New York, and in 1926 and 1928 she spoke at the Rowntree lecture conferences in Oxford. From 1929 she lived mostly in England. In January and February 1933 she gave a series of lectures at the London School of Economics. She returned to America that autumn and died in Boston on 18 December 1933 (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, pp.16-20).

Asked in England why a political philosopher would study business, she answered that some business men were doing the liveliest thinking she knew, adding: "I like to do my thinking where it is most alive" (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, p.17). For some thirty years she shared a home in Boston with Isobel L. Briggs; after Briggs' death she lived in London with Dame Katharine Furse.

Major works

Follett published three books in her lifetime. Her lectures were collected after her death.

  • The Speaker of the House of Representatives (1896) - a detailed historical study of how the Speakership had grown into one of the strongest offices in American government. It grew out of work prepared at Radcliffe and a paper read to the Newnham historical society, and appeared with an introduction by Albert Bushnell Hart[3].
  • The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government (1918) - an argument that democracy has to be built from small, face-to-face groups, starting with the neighbourhood, rather than from crowds of voters. "Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals," she wrote[4].
  • Creative Experience (1924) - her most philosophical book, drawing on psychology, law and philosophy. It contains her first full statement of circular response and integration[5].
  • Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett - edited by Henry C. Metcalf and Lyndall Urwick (introduction dated December 1940). It gathers fourteen papers, among them "Constructive Conflict", "The Giving of Orders", "Power" and "Individualism in a Planned Society"[2].
  • Freedom and Co-ordination - her 1933 London School of Economics lectures, edited by Urwick and published in 1949.

Main ideas

Constructive conflict and integration

Follett refused to treat conflict as something bad in itself. Conflict, for her, simply meant difference: of opinions, of interests. And difference was not going away. So she proposed to put it to work, the way an engineer uses friction to drive a belt over a pulley. "There are three main ways of dealing with conflict: domination, compromise and integration," she told a New York conference in 1925[6].

Domination is victory of one side. Quick, but rarely durable. Compromise is what most people regard as fair: each party gives something up so that work can go on. Follett's objection was blunt. Nobody really wants to compromise, because compromise means losing part of what you want, and the issue tends to resurface later. Integration is different: a solution is found in which both desires have a place, and neither side has to sacrifice anything.

Integration, she admitted, is hard. It needs intelligence, keen perception and, above all, inventiveness. Some people simply enjoy domination; an integrated settlement can feel flat because nobody gets to celebrate a victory. And managers and workers alike are trained to win debates, not to think together (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, pp.45-48). These ideas sit close to what later writers on styles of handling conflict and negotiation call collaborating, as opposed to forcing or compromising.

Circular response

Her theory of integration rested on a psychological claim. Behaviour, she argued, is never a one-way chain of stimulus and response. It's circular. Her favourite image was tennis: the way B returns the ball depends on A's serve, and A's next shot depends on both the serve and the return (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, p.44). In a quarrel you are never fighting only the other person: "I can never fight you, I am always fighting you plus me" (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, p.45). Employees respond not just to an employer but to the relationship between themselves and that employer. Change the relationship and the response changes.

Power-with versus power-over

Most people, Follett observed, understand power as power-over, the power of one person or group over another. She proposed a second idea, power-with: "a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power"[7]. Management should not hold power over the workers, nor the workers over management. A test for any scheme of employee representation was whether it developed joint power.

Her wording in Creative Experience was sharper: "Coercive power is the curse of the universe; coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul" (Follett 1924, p.xiii). Power, in her view, could not be handed around like a fixed stock. It had to be grown. Compare the classic definitions in power and authority.

The giving of orders and the law of the situation

How do you give orders without bossiness on one side or a collapse of authority on the other? Her answer: "My solution is to depersonalize the giving of orders, to unite all concerned in a study of the situation, to discover the law of the situation and obey that"[8]. She put it even more directly a page later: "One person should not give orders to another person, but both should agree to take their orders from the situation" (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, p.59).

The head of sales does not command the head of production. Both study the market, and the market decides. Follett thought the same logic could run all the way down to the foreman and the shop floor. She credited scientific management with a step in this direction, since under it managers were as much under orders as workers. And she warned that "depersonalizing" was really a matter of repersonalizing, of seeing relations between people within the whole situation that gives them meaning.

Co-ordination

Toward the end of her life she reduced her view of organization to four principles, all of them about process rather than structure (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, p.23):

  • co-ordination by direct contact of the responsible people concerned,
  • co-ordination in the early stages,
  • co-ordination as a reciprocal relating of all the features in a situation,
  • co-ordination as a continuing process.

Direct horizontal contact between heads of departments, not only communication up and down the chain of command, was central to her thinking. Later readers saw in it an early case for cross-functional teams and the matrix organization. See also functions of coordinating.

Leadership

Follett had little patience with the picture of the leader as a dominant personality. The leader's job was to make a common purpose articulate. "The best leader has not followers, but men and women working with him"[9]. Authority should follow knowledge and function, so that leadership could shift to whoever understood the situation best. In another lecture she wrote: "The best leader knows how to make his followers actually feel power themselves, not merely acknowledge his power" (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, p.290). Ideas of this kind reappear in modern writing on transformational leadership and empowerment at work.

The library window: a worked example of integration

Follett's best-known illustration is almost comically small. She told it in Creative Experience (pp.184-185) and again in "Constructive Conflict":

"In the Harvard Library one day, in one of the smaller rooms, someone wanted the window open, I wanted it shut. We opened the window in the next room, where no one was sitting. This was not a compromise because there was no curtailing of desire; we both got what we really wanted" (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, p.32).

Why does it work? Follett explains that she did not want a closed room. She just didn't want the north wind blowing straight on her. The other reader didn't care about that particular window; he wanted more air. Once each stated demand was broken into the underlying want, a third option appeared that neither had proposed.

The same steps can be laid out as a method:

  1. State the demands. Window open versus window shut. Framed like this, only domination (one wins) or compromise (window half-open, both a little unhappy) is possible.
  2. Uncover the interests behind them. Reader A wants fresh air. Reader B wants to avoid a direct draught.
  3. Widen the set of options. Other windows, other rooms, moving the desk.
  4. Choose the option that satisfies both interests in full. Open the window in the empty room next door.

Her second example from the same lecture had real money at stake. A dairymen's co-operative nearly broke up over who should unload cans first at a creamery platform: farmers coming down the hill or those coming up. Each side could only see two answers. The fix was to change the position of the platform so that both groups could unload at once (Metcalf & Urwick 1940, pp.32-33). Interest-based negotiation later made the same move its central technique.

Influence and rediscovery

Follett's business lectures drew attention while she lived, but her standing faded fast. Urwick did most to keep her name alive: he co-edited Dynamic Administration and edited the LSE lectures, at a time when the field's attention was on engineers such as Henry Gantt and Frank Gilbreth and on the techniques of scientific management. Her stress on authority accepted from below and on co-ordination is often compared with Chester Barnard's The Functions of the Executive (1938).

In the United States she largely dropped out of the management canon after the Second World War. Peter Drucker, writing in the 1995 collection Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management, edited by Pauline Graham with a preface by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, observed that in the management field she "became a nonperson"[10]. Drucker and Kanter both suggested that a philosophy of cooperation and consensus fitted poorly with decades dominated by war and recovery from war. Kanter also pointed to the men's-club character of early management science, and noted that Follett's ideas were taken up in Japan, where her gender mattered less. The reviewer Barbara Presley Noble added a third reason: Follett never had the institutional base, a school or a corporation, that secured other reputations[10].

Graham's book, together with Joan Tonn's long biography (2003), turned the rediscovery into a steady stream of scholarship in management, public administration and political theory[1].

Relevance to modern management

A lot of present-day practice reads like an application of her lectures, even when nobody cites her:

  • Interest-based negotiation - separating stated positions from underlying interests, as in the library window.
  • Collaborative conflict management - the "collaborating" style in the familiar five-style models of conflict handling is close to her integration.
  • Participation and empowerment - participative management, democracy in the workplace and self-managed teams share her idea of power-with.
  • Leadership as a function - shared and situational models of leadership echo her claim that authority should follow knowledge.
  • Horizontal co-ordination - cross-functional teams, project structures and matrix designs put her first principle (direct contact of the responsible people) into the organization chart.
  • Human relations - her focus on the psychology of control and consent prefigured themes of the behavioral school and the people-centred assumptions of Theory Y.

Criticism and limitations

Admirers and critics agree on one thing: Follett was stronger on principles than on procedures.

  • Idealism. Integration assumes that, dig deep enough, interests can be made compatible. Some conflicts, over a fixed budget, a closed plant or a wage cut, may be genuinely zero-sum. Follett named obstacles to integration but offered no rule for telling when it is impossible.
  • Power differences. Critics argue that "taking orders from the situation" can hide who defines the situation. When management controls information, the law of the situation may look a lot like management's preference.
  • Little empirical testing. Her evidence came from conversations with managers, committee work and personal observation, not systematic research. Small anecdotes such as the window carry much of the argument.
  • Abstract style. Creative Experience in particular is dense and philosophical, which limited its readership among practitioners.
  • Use and misuse. Her language of partnership can be borrowed to dress up management decisions as consensus.

Fair enough, some of these points apply to most management theory of the period. And she rarely claimed integration was always available, only that it was tried far too seldom.

Legacy

Follett gave management several ideas it still uses: constructive conflict, integration as an alternative to compromise, power-with, the law of the situation, circular response and the four principles of co-ordination. She came to business from political science and social work, which may explain why she saw organizations as networks of relationships rather than machines. That view, out of fashion for half a century, now sits near the centre of mainstream management theory and organizational behavior.

Mary Parker Follett — recommended articles
Management theories — Styles of handling conflict — Power and authority — Participative management — Chester Barnard — Integrative thinking — Transformational leadership — Functions of coordinating

References

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Tonn J.C., Mary P. Follett: Creating Democracy, Transforming Management, Yale University Press, 2003
  2. ↑ Metcalf H.C., Urwick L. (eds.), Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, Harper & Brothers, 1940, Introduction, pp.10-12
  3. ↑ Follett M.P., The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896, Preface
  4. ↑ Follett M.P., The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government, Longmans, Green and Co., 1918, p.5
  5. ↑ Follett M.P., Creative Experience, Longmans, Green and Co., 1924, Chapter III "Circular Response", pp.53 ff.
  6. ↑ Follett M.P., Constructive Conflict, in: Metcalf H.C., Urwick L. (eds.), Dynamic Administration, Harper & Brothers, 1940, p.31
  7. ↑ Follett M.P., Power, in: Metcalf H.C., Urwick L. (eds.), Dynamic Administration, Harper & Brothers, 1940, p.101
  8. ↑ Follett M.P., The Giving of Orders, in: Metcalf H.C., Urwick L. (eds.), Dynamic Administration, Harper & Brothers, 1940, p.58
  9. ↑ Follett M.P., Leader and Expert, in: Metcalf H.C., Urwick L. (eds.), Dynamic Administration, Harper & Brothers, 1940, p.262
  10. ↑ Noble B.P., Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management (review), strategy+business, Issue 2, 1996
Retrieved from CEOpedia