The Age of Eclecticism: Current Organizational Trends and the Evolution of Managerial Models

Many academics and practicing managers believe that there are principles for organizing and managing firms that can form a general theory of organization. The quest for the organizational “holy grail” has a long and tortuous history punctuated by bold promises and great disappointments. As in the Wagnerian operatic dramas, stories and theories about how organizations work or ought to work are repeated and revisited endlessly, with different characters telling different stories. In this article, I suggest that the history of organizational thought and practice can be summarized according to three basic models: scientific management, human relations, and structural analysis. We can then better understand and assess such current managerial trends as lean production or total quality management if we see them as outgrowths of the three basic models of organization, that is, as eclectic models. At different times, managers and firms in different countries and industries have used the three models to tackle various combinations of problems. The adoption of models, however, has rarely occurred automatically but is shaped by institutional circumstances. Therefore, rather than trying to determine the best organizational model, the “best practice,” or the soundest organizational principles, we should try to understand how the managers and workers who find themselves in particular institutional circumstances at the country, industry, and firm levels prefer certain ways of organizing.

Models of organizational management tend to be complex because they need to address two difficult issues at the same time: (1) the technical task of organization; and (2) establishing, maintaining, and justifying a system of authority. While the leaders who rule the business firm no longer own it, they arrange working conditions for their employees (who must obey), as well as decide how to distribute the income from producing and selling goods and services. Broadly stated, the problem of organization entails implementing both an ideology to support the system of authority in the firm and the techniques that enable the organization to meet its goals. The ideology and the techniques tend to reinforce each other. In practice, organizational models need to address the problems of complexity, bureaucratization, diversification, labor unrest, and competition, both domestic and international.1

Models are useful to managers because they interpret the problem and provide practical guidelines for action. The way in which managers perceive, assess, and interpret problems is partially shaped by some ideology, i.e., a set of assumptions and beliefs about how the world works and how it ought to work. Managerial ideologies, then, are cognitive tools. Ideologies are also part of the practical guidelines for action because all true models of management create and justify a system of hierarchical authority. Managers develop new models of management or use those already available to simplify their analysis of reality, evaluate alternative paths of action, and arrange the organizational means at their disposal. Obviously, managers will select among alternative models depending on their training, mentality, experiences, institutional constraints, and so on.

Next I briefly describe the three basic models of organizational management and, subsequently, how they can be used to evaluate the nature of current managerial trends.

Three Models of Organizational Management

According to management history, attempts at organization building during the past century have proceeded along three separate lines: technical, social (sometimes referred to as “natural”), and structural models of management, or, as they are more widely known, scientific management, human relations, and structural analysis.2 Table 1 summarizes the features of the three models.

Scientific management is an organizational ideology and a set of techniques conceived to deal with such problems as soldiering by workers, resource waste, and disorder, as well as management’s arbitrariness, greed, and lack of control. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in an effort to improve efficiency, the early pioneers of the technical approach studied individuals and tasks using the analytical tools of engineering, industrial psychology, ergonomics, and physiology. As an ideology, scientific management assumes that all actors are rational and that industrial conflict can be avoided because an increased surplus will benefit everyone involved in the industrial enterprise. Accordingly, labor unions will become superfluous. Management’s role is to specify every single detail of each worker’s task. Experimental job analysis techniques (e.g., time-and-motion study) will lead to the “one best way” of managing workers and organizing tasks. By separating task conception from task execution, and by dividing and specializing tasks, the firm becomes more efficient. Managerial authority is centralized, following the principle of unity of command, and supervisory autonomy is curtailed. The process of work is simplified, mechanized, and, whenever feasible, arranged in assembly-line fashion. Workers are assumed to be motivated solely by money, and the preferred form of incentive is piecework wages, except for workers on the powered assembly line.

The human relations model, first formulated in the 1930s and early 1940s, deals with a different set of problems, including monotony of work, absenteeism, turnover, conflict, unrest, wrong attitudes, and low morale, which, arguably, lead to restricted productivity. During the 1950s and 1960s, subsequent waves of theorizing refined and enriched this model. Initially based on Paretian and Durkheimian sociology as well as on social psychology and social anthropology, the human relations model suggests that the problems are rooted in the excessive mechanization and industrial rationalization achieved by scientific management. Workers are seen not as selfish individuals but as people with group identifications and emotional dependencies, driven by psychosocial norms and needs. Managers are not essentially different from workers, but their superior ability and skill in dealing with human relationships allows them to exercise self-control. The manager’s role is to create conditions that foster cooperation in the factory by balancing its social system, harmonizing relationships, and leading and integrating the workforce. As with scientific management, the human relations model undermines the need for labor unions.

Human relations experts promulgate the use of a variety of diagnosis and intervention techniques to explore the social situation in the workplace and to improve relationships — interviews, surveys, T-groups, discussion groups, sensitivity training, clinical counseling, psychodrama, role playing, and so on. Worker selection is no longer based on physical aptitudes or dexterity, but on social characteristics, personality, attitudes, and potential for integration and adaptation. Job enlargement, enrichment, and rotation are solutions to the alienating excesses of scientific task engineering. Small-group activities and teamwork substitute for assembly-line work, and hierarchy is downplayed in favor of leadership, participation, and communication. Human relations proponents argue that workers seek not only money but also security, stability, satisfaction, and recognition at work. They advocate economic incentives based only on the performance of work groups.

The third model — structural analysis — emerged in the 1960s with the proliferation of large, bureaucratized firms engaged in producing and distributing a variety of products and services, frequently across country borders. The structural thinkers argue that the analysis of technology and the firm’s competitive environment ought to guide the design of the organizational structure.

This model rests on Weberian and structural-functional sociology as well as on modern behavioral science. All organizational actors are rationally bounded. Professional, salaried managers are assigned the responsibility for planning, setting goals, defining problems, seeking alternatives, and making decisions, based on their superior technical knowledge. Workers are adaptable to their structural situation, and decentralization promotes their initiative, responsibility, and professional growth. Unobtrusive control devices such as job specifications, internal career ladders, operating programs, procedures, guidelines, classifications, and routines monitor the performance of both workers and managers. The methodological keystone is the “contingency approach,” i.e., the principle that firms should be organized differently by kind of product, production process, and external environment. Typologies of organizations are designed to determine the optimal degrees of differentiation and integration of functions (e.g., production, sales, R&D), of decentralized decision making, and of centralized control. The contingency analysis also enables the manager to decide whether to create product divisions, matrix structures, and profit centers.

The Relevance of Institutional Differences

The adoption of the three models of management has varied greatly by country in both the degree and the process of adoption. I argue that the scientific credibility of the three models is loosely related to their actual impact in organizations. Although nowadays many organizations use the ideology and the techniques of the models, I focus on the institutional circumstances prevalent during the historical periods when the models were first considered for adoption.3

The Scientific Management Model

The adoption of the scientific management model was prompted by two situations. First, structural changes in firms (growing size, complexity, and bureaucratization) coupled with high rates of labor unrest were characteristic of countries like the United States and Great Britain during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet, before World War II, scientific management was widely adopted in the United States but not in Great Britain. American employers wanting to implement the techniques had to overcome union resistance at the plant level, and the then emerging engineering profession facilitated the adoption. In Britain, by contrast, engineering was an underdeveloped profession, and a pervasive antitechnocratic mentality among the country’s business elite delayed the implementation of scientific management until after World War II, when state productivity agencies played a significant role in research, information diffusion, training, and implementation.

The second situation had to do with a combination of structural changes inside the firm and international competition, which affected firms in Germany, Japan, and Spain. In Germany and Japan, the period between World War I and the mid-1930s was characterized by the growth of large firms, a mounting problem of international competitive pressures, and the absence of labor unrest. German and Japanese firms adopted scientific management techniques to overcome those problems. The institutional factors that facilitated adoption in Germany were the technocratic mentality of the managerial elite, the influence of the engineering profession, and the collaboration of state agencies and the unions. In Japan, state agencies and the engineering profession played a key role in the reception, adaptation, and propagation of scientific management. During the 1940s and early 1950s, firms in Spain adopted scientific management to overcome the problems of changing organizational structures and international isolation by the Western powers. Army, navy, and civil engineers, in collaboration with state agencies and the official vertical unions organized by the authoritarian regime, facilitated the adoption despite the antitechnocratic stand of the business elite. The situation in Spain in the 1940s is comparable to that in Brazil during the 1930s and 1940s, while a contrasting failure to adopt scientific management occurred in Argentina under General Perón.4

The Soviet Union’s experience between the world wars is strikingly similar to the German one. The Soviet model of scientific management was replicated in China during the 1950s and in Cuba during the 1970s. The state also played a prominent role in Italy and France, but not in the Netherlands or Switzerland.

The Human Relations Model

The adoption of the human relations model can also be contrasted cross-nationally. As a model of management, human relations was supposed to facilitate the adaptation of the worker and employee to complex bureaucratized organizations and, in general, to reduce conflict and unrest in the enterprise. Human relations ideology appealed to employers and managers in the United States, Spain, and Britain because of persistently high rates of industrial unrest and episodic, widespread strikes, and also because influential academics and consultants in the social sciences presented it as a solution to industrial conflict. U.S. and British firms implemented human relations techniques because they had the organizational resources to do it, unlike their Spanish counterparts. French managers saw the human relations model as useful for two different reasons: (1) it could solve the ubiquitous problem of labor unrest; and (2) in combination with “economic humanism” and social Catholicism, it could help create a new managerial elite untainted by Vichy collaborationism. Several South Korean chaebol, faced with mounting labor unrest and uncontrolled growth and eager to appear more democratic, are currently experimenting with human relations programs for the first time, aided by U.S. consulting firms.

The human relations model has not always been relevant or successful. In Germany, for example, industrial peace achieved through mandatory “codetermination” schemes and works councils made the human relations approach redundant during the 1950s and 1960s. The situation in postwar Japan was similar in that Western ideas about human relations at work were adopted only as part of new experiments like quality circles. Soviet management intellectuals railed against the human relations model for its manipulative potential under the conditions of “monopoly capitalism.” Given the underdevelopment of the social sciences under communism and the fact that labor posed no threat to the command structure of power, they had little reason to even consider this model.

· The Role of Religion.

Historically, religion has played an important role as an institutional variable. The dominant religious mentality or ethic among the business elite has often directly affected the adoption of scientific management and human relations in many countries. Research suggests that management intellectuals influenced by Confucianism or Buddhism tend to think that there are intrinsic satisfactions in work, while Christian management intellectuals emphasize the extrinsic rewards. Both Confucianism and Buddhism help to define the business firm as a community. By contrast, Christianity has generally emphasized individual effort.5 These comparisons suggest that the Christian ethic is more consistent with scientific management than with the human relations model.

My own research, however, has demonstrated that Catholicism and Protestantism have affected how ideas about management and organization are received and adopted in strikingly different ways. Catholicism has generally underscored the community, idealism, paternalism, and organicism. By contrast, Protestantism has highlighted the individual, instrumentalism, self-dependence, and contractualism. In Germany, for example, the dominant Protestant management intellectuals generally supported the scientific management model, while Catholic intellectuals sided with the human relations school. The dominant Catholic background in Spain, among other institutional factors, paved the way for the reception, adoption, and adaptation to local conditions of American ideas about human relations. In Britain, Christian-humanist ideals somewhat similar to those proposed by the Roman Catholic Church prompted management intellectuals to accept the human relations postulates.6

The Structural Analysis Model

The adoption of structural analysis techniques followed a similar pattern in the United States, Germany, and Britain during the 1960s. Continued structural changes in firms, product diversification, international expansion, and the relative stabilization of industrial relations allowed a growing cadre of academics and consultants to promote new organizational structures and forms. The only significant difference setting Britain apart from the United States and Germany was the role of British state agencies. As a result, the practical application of structural analysis extended to the large sector of public enterprises. In Italy and Japan, however, we find a counterpoint to the widespread adoption of structural analysis in the United States, Germany, and Britain. Even though Italian manufacturing firms were comparable to their British counterparts in size, bureaucratization, and diversification, structural reorganizations were not as popular. The Japanese pattern of intermarket groups centered around banking, insurance, and trading companies partly eliminated the need for structural designs such as the multidivisional and matrix forms of organization.7 Other less developed countries, e.g., Spain, sharply contrast with the more developed ones because of the low incidence of product diversification and internationalization, which made structural analysis less attractive.

The adoption of managerial models is a complex process. In many instances, the managerial elite’s general assessment of a model is fundamentally shaped by the prevailing modes of thought in each society. These modes or mentalities result from patterns of professionalization, worldly experience, and, in some cases, religious belief. Scientific management and, to a lesser extent, structural analysis have historically developed in conjunction with the “modernist-technocratic” mode of thought. This mentality identifies human progress with material and technical advance, is individualistic, emphasizes self-interest, and believes in planning to improve life. Consistent with it are intellectual trends as diverse and mutually incompatible as the Protestant ethic, classic liberalism, continental European socialism, and communism. In contrast, the human relations model has historically appeared in conjunction with a “traditional humanist” mode of thought. This mentality advances a reactionary view of modernity and material progress, praises joint effort, glorifies the community, and reifies emotions and feelings. Historically, the traditional humanist mentality shares many aspects with the Catholic, Confucian, and Buddhist ethics, liberal humanism, Fabian and reform socialism, and, in certain ways, with fascism and right-wing authoritarianism.8

Do Managerial Models Oscillate from Rational to Natural or Are They Eclectic?

My argument that the evolution of managerial approaches can be viewed in light of the three basic models of management and the institutional circumstances surrounding their adoption suggests that it should be possible to understand current managerial trends by referring to the features of scientific management, human relations, and structural analysis. If true, two scenarios would be possible: First, the evolution of managerial models moves in recurrent cycles from one pure approach to another. Second, new models are eclectic in the sense that they combine characteristics from the three basic models.

Several keen observers have suggested that managerial practices exhibit a cyclical pattern over time.9 There seems to be an unresolved tension between rational and natural approaches, mechanistic and organic solidarity, or individualism and communalism that has haunted employers and managers in their attempt to organize efficient production activities, enlist the collaboration of workers and employees, and establish and maintain authority and control in the workplace. This tension seems to explain the evolution in the United States: over time, there has first been a shift from scientific management (a rational model) to human relations (a natural model) and then a shift back to the rationalism of structural analysis. The next shift, to the naturalist corporate culture approach during the 1980s, confirms the oscillating pattern in the United States.10

However, even if the corporate culture model is seen as a “natural” approach, the cyclical pattern does not universally account for the evolution of managerial models. First, the sequence was not the same in other countries. In Germany, the human relations and corporate culture models were never embraced as such, so there has been no oscillation between rational and natural approaches. In Britain, by contrast, scientific management was belatedly adopted after World War II while human relations was also being introduced.

Second and even more fundamental is that, although structural analysis is a model based to some extent on rationality assumptions, it cannot be put in the same basket as scientific management. Structural analysis is distinct from both scientific management and human relations because it shifts the level of analysis, makes “limited” rationality assumptions, and subsumes the findings of the two previous models as special cases of organization.

The third, and strongest, argument against the cyclical pattern relates to the nature of current trends in managerial thinking and practice. While corporate culture represents a revival of human relations, the two great managerial trends of the late 1980s and early 1990s —lean production and total quality management — are, arguably, eclectic models that disrupt the neat cyclical oscillation between rational and natural approaches.

Lean Production As an Eclectic Model

We are currently witnessing the rise of lean production and total quality management (TQM) as paradigms of “best practice.” Both movements originated in a country that developed late, Japan, a situation that, far from being incidental, appears to relate to the very eclectic nature of the two models. Japanese organizations have always combined imitation and innovation; that is, they have learned about a variety of foreign models, selectively adapted them to local needs, and developed unique innovations.11 Are these new managerial approaches post-Fordist, hyper-Fordist, eclectic, or postmodern? This question is crucial because the nature of lean and TQM ideas will have an impact on their transfer to the country that pioneered Fordist mass production, the United States.

The Japanese lean production model emerged in the midst of a series of management-labor struggles during the late 1940s and early 1950s, which resulted in the demise of cross-industry unions and the reinforcement of managerial authority.12 In principle, lean production rejects both Fordist mass production and Alfred Sloan’s structural analysis, which are adaptive variants of mass production and scientific management. The post-Fordist advocates argue that lean production departs from the mass production system pioneered by Ford in the 1910s and modified by Sloan in the 1920s. In their view, lean production represents a qualitatively different evolutionary trajectory from Fordist mass production. The system of “innovation-mediated production” is more efficient and generates more job satisfaction because it uses the intellectual capacities of workers. It is based on continuous improvement (kaizen) and learning-by-doing approaches, enhances quality awareness, and intimately integrates R&D and downstream activities with production.13

In stark contrast, in the hyper-Fordists’ (or neo-Fordists’) view of lean production, Japanese production management techniques are merely a refinement of mass production in the sense that efficiency is obtained by a more relentless, intensive, and effective implementation of the basic Fordist principles of simplified tasks, accelerated work pace, and reduced waste. Managing the ideal lean firm entails endemic understaffing, draconian efforts to cut superfluous time, and the unceremonious elimination of buffer stocks.14 In this model, managers can flexibly allocate workers, through the creation of teams, to different tasks as the need arises, indirect labor is reduced to a bare minimum as job contents become broader, and worker dependence on the firm is maximized through the development of firm-specific skills and paternalistic corporate welfare programs.15 As both German and Swedish research teams have concluded, lean production “is simply the practice of the organizational principles of Fordism under conditions in which management prerogatives are largely unlimited” and represents “an extension of the sphere of influence of scientific management.”16

The truth about lean production lies somewhere in between the extreme post-Fordist and hyper-Fordist views. I suggest that it is useful to think of lean production as an eclectic organizational approach combining insights from the three basic models. One important implication of my view is that lean production is post-Fordist in the sense that it incorporates selective aspects of the human relations and structural analysis models, but it is not post-modern because it still subscribes to the master principles of division of labor and of functional differentiation and integration, both of which are surely rejected by most postmodern advocates in favor of nonhierarchical, networked, and polycentralized organizations. However, defining lean production as eclectic does not imply that its different elements can be easily combined or transferred. In fact, it took the pioneering Japanese firms several decades to refine the lean production approach.

Production is the central part of lean manufacturing, although supplier logistics, R&D, and distribution also play important roles. Multiple, small-lot production is favored over long, high-volume runs. Scientific management contributes to lean production time-and-motion study and improved accounting methods, which are used to reduce waste, eliminate unnecessary worker movements, and slash changeover times.17 The goal is clearly Fordist and Taylorite: to arrive at the “one best way” of organizing manufacturing so that production costs are minimized, inventories and cycle times drastically reduced, and labor productivity boosted. Another aim is to raise quality standards, a minor concern in the Fordist system. A major departure from scientific management is the substitution of the “pull” system of assembly-line feeding for the inefficient “push” system characteristic of Fordist mass production. In other words, just-in-time feeding supplants just-in-case supply.

Lean production also relies on several of the classic human relations insights and techniques. Teamwork is as important a principle in the organization of production as scientific task engineering. More than two-thirds of the workforce in many of the model lean firms are organized into teams to facilitate communication and cooperation. For some workers, job security and training in a wide variety of skills are the central motivation mechanisms. Frequent job rotation, a reduced number of job classifications, low specialization, and informal cooperation among workers in different teams or units are also used to motivate workers. A system that solicits suggestions guarantees constant feedback to and from R&D, suppliers, and distributors as well as to and from different areas of production.18 As in the typical human relations analyses of the 1940s, higher quality and lower cost are expected to result from lower absenteeism and turnover and increased job satisfaction. The firm is explicitly conceived as a community, with employees being trained in firm-specific but broad skills. Worker happiness is derived from the challenges, demands for improvement, and intrinsic job satisfaction. Japanese autoworkers’ attitudes toward their jobs are revealing: during the 1980s, the average assembly line worker at Toyota, Nissan, or Mazda was absent from work just one day a year and used only 25 percent to 35 percent of his paid vacation days.19

In addition to aspects of scientific management and human relations, the lean production model incorporates certain structural analysis concerns. The organization’s environment is examined in order to make changes in product R&D, organizational structure, and the employment system. The problems of decentralization, control, horizontal communication, division of labor between headquarters and subsidiaries, and adaptation to environmental change figure prominently. Issues of multinational organization structure and coordination of global activities achieve a level of prominence not seen since the heyday of structural analysis in the 1960s.20

Like the concepts of scientific management and human relations, lean production incorporates what fundamentally amounts to a visionary ideology. A better world is promised for all parties in the lean production system. Proponents of the model believe that “lean production will supplant both mass production and the remaining outposts of craft production in all areas of industrial endeavor to become the standard global production system of the twenty-first century.”21 They present lean production as a modern, not postmodern, organizational paradigm for two reasons: the claim of universal applicability and the assumption of boundless possibilities for progress.

Should firms around the world adopt lean production? Dohse, Jürgens, and Malsch have argued that:

The contemporary Japanese management works within a system of industrial relations that limits the articulation of collective interests by employees. The Japanese organization of the labor process is, therefore, not easily transferable; it is at best possible to adopt some of its elements.22

The problem they point out is by no means minor; when ideas travel from one country to another, they get transformed during both codification and implementation, as occurred when Western auto manufacturing methods were transferred to Japan after World War II,23 and as will probably happen with the transfer of Japanese lean production to the United States and Europe. There are many other factors, aside from the nature of industrial relations, that may shape the transfer process, such as shopfloor cultures, local institutions, community structures, and previous managerial practices. With lean production purported to be the best practice for most areas of manufacturing and even for the service sector, its transferability to other parts of the world has become the subject of a lively debate. Swedish researchers have pointed out the difficulty of adopting managerial practices that assume a nonunionized setting and a concept of participation centered on worker consent, unimpeded managerial prerogatives, and increased shopfloor supervision.24 German researchers, auto executives, and engineers have also suggested the need to consider whether the institutional circumstances that make lean production possible in Japan exist in Western Europe.25 Even some of the model Japanese lean firms reportedly are relaxing and reengineering their managerial practices because of the staggering problems created by just-intime deliveries (urban congestion), product diversity and shortened product cycles (financial strain and pressures on suppliers), and flexibility and limited automation (shortage of skilled blue-collar workers).26

Kenney and Florida have studied the transfer of Japanese “innovation-mediated” methods to the auto, steel, rubber, and electronics industries in the United States via “transplants.” They use the rise of “market-seeking” Japanese foreign direct investment in North America and Europe to examine the cross-national transfer of management models. In the case of Japanese auto transplants, the authors paint an appalling picture of work intensification, speedups, waste, absenteeism, deteriorating safety standards, and gender and racial discrimination.27 Transplant managers use aspects of lean production to bust union drives and to justify watching and intimidating workers. Kenney and Florida argue that these are neither characteristic nor unavoidable features of the model, but rather that they have resulted from the clash between “superior” Japanese management techniques and the American legacy of Fordism. Thus, they conclude that there has been “managerial failure” and “pollution” from American practices. Confirming the eclectic nature of Japanese management methods, the authors describe how transplant managers are using job rotation, intense socialization programs, suggestion systems, attitude surveys, renewed communication efforts, uniforms, and worker selection based on adaptability to ameliorate the situation. Ultimately, the question remains whether the problems encountered by the transplants are entirely the result of American institutional characteristics or were already present at the source, i.e., in Japan. Although there is no conclusive answer to this cardinal question in the literature, there is some solid evidence that alienation and problematic labor relations are also present in the model Japanese lean firms.28

TQM As an Eclectic Model

Total quality management (TQM), also an eclectic approach, further illustrates the rise of organizational eclecticism during the late 1980s and 1990s. The quality control circle (QCC) movement in Japan emerged partly as a result of American influence after World War II. Extensive training-within-industry programs and group-dynamics experiments were introduced in the early postwar period. Matsushita pioneered QCCs in the early 1960s, adding a strong production management component. Many other Japanese companies used QCCs to boost morale. They achieved a major departure from the American model by gradually shifting from an inspection-oriented approach to quality control to one emphasizing prevention and employee involvement. The early Japanese movement was influenced by human relations scholars in the United States.29 W. Edwards Deming collaborated extensively with Japanese companies during the 1950s and 1960s, and, in the 1980s, he became famous for helping Ford implement its successful quality control system. Deming endorsed the classic human relations ideas and was heavily influenced by the work of Frederick Herzberg, Abraham Maslow, and his MIT colleague Douglas McGregor, all leading exponents of the human relations movement.30

Aside from the classic human relations techniques, TQM incorporates many scientific management ideas and a few structural analysis ideas. Companies now using TQM have targeted low productivity, low or changing product quality, high employee absenteeism and turnover, fear and morale problems, and bureaucratic paralysis as their primary problems. The proposed solution is typically eclectic because it combines improved process management, human relations techniques, and structural reorganization. Employees and managers are trained in statistical control, production management, and detailed job analysis techniques to help them understand the basics of efficiency and quality in product design, manufacturing, distribution, and sales. In TQM, participatory schemes, attitude surveys, teamwork, and transformational leadership techniques are implemented to make employees and managers more motivated, cooperative, innovative, and responsive. Flatter structures, federations of companies, and divisional autonomy eradicate perverse bureaucratic habits and structures. The eclecticism of TQM is apparent in the criteria for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and in its most ardent academic and managerial supporters’ descriptions of the model.31

TQM is eclectic as a technique, but, as an ideology, it follows the classic human relations approach. Its rhetoric of “total customer satisfaction” gives the firm a moral mission by assigning managers a leading role and adding the old proposal of upgrading employees from mere subordinates to team members. Managers, unlike workers, know what participation really means because “employees are typically unclear about the nature of participative activities as they relate to the work process, and they lack a systematic work improvement methodology.”32 In addition, TQM underscores cherished values such as personal improvement, growth, and perfection.

As with lean production, the transfer of TQM to the United States and Europe seems to be encountering a myriad of obstacles. Productivity and quality improvements have not been as miraculous as initially promised, even though many firms, particularly those facing international competition and using high-skill technology, have tried to implement TQM practices.33

Toward a Comparative Understanding of Management Models

A careful analysis of interests, technology, and economics is unlikely to yield a general theory that will predict when and where different models of management will be embraced. As paradigms of ideas, management models are widely adopted in practice only when institutional circumstances conspire with them. The nature of problems confronting managers and firms, the impact of professional groups, the mentalities of the managers, the response of workers, and the state’s regulatory role are relevant factors. A truly comparative framework for organizational analysis should balance techno-economic variables and institutional factors in order to study the adoption of the three basic models and the eclectic trends of the late twentieth century. Only by understanding managerial models in historical and reciprocal relief can we analyze their relevance and impact.