Papers on the Science of Administration

This is an edited collection rather than a single argument, assembled by Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick and published in 1937 by the Institute of Public Administration at Columbia University, running to 195 pages. It gathers eleven papers by the people who were then building a general theory of organisation, and the library records list them in full. Gulick opens with his notes on the theory of organization and closes the volume with a paper on science, values and public administration. Urwick contributes a paper treating organisation as a technical problem and another on the function of administration and the work of Henri Fayol, whose own paper on administrative theory in the state also appears. James Mooney writes on the principles of organization, Henry Dennison on the need for what he calls political science engineering, Lawrence Henderson with Thomas North Whitehead and Elton Mayo on the effects of social environment, Mary Parker Follett on the process of control, and John Lee on the pros and cons of functionalization. The paper the vault needs is V. A. Graicunas on relationship in organization, which is the source of the span of control arithmetic that later management writing repeats without the name. The volume was reprinted in 1969.

Written from the worldCat catalogue record and the CiNii Books record, which lists the contents.

What this vault takes from it

Nothing yet. The title appears in the registry because it has been mentioned in passing, and no concept or person note currently draws on it.

Reliability

Not audited here. 0 notes in this vault draw on it.