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Nicholas Twigg wrote:

" Is this statement true? Are so many "good" managers from a
technical and scientific background rather than from the arts?"

This is an interesting question, so forgive me if I am somewhat late
in commenting. Management in/of Arts has recieved some interest
these last years here in Sweden and there is at least one project I
know of that is dedicated to what managers can learn from arts and
what arts managers can learn from business. And recently the
CEO of a rather technical Swedish company, I think it was in the
Tetra Laval group, announced his intention to hire managers with a
background in "soft" disciplines, rather than engineering and
business administration.

I don't think there is enough evidence to answer the question, since
the prevailing idea of what a manager should be and know leans
heavily towards engineering or business administration.So this
affects both who get hired and who applies. For my part, I think
that a good manager needs something of both.

I seem to remember that British managers at least used to be
reqruited differently than (e.g.) Swedish managers, with less
emphasis on science/business. This has probably changed by
now; is there someone who knows about this and whether this has
had any effects on the quality of British management?

cheers/bengt
****************************************************
Bengt Kjellén benkj@hgo.se
Utbildningsansvarig Tel 0498-29 99 54
IT/Ekonomiutbildningen Fax 0498-29 99 52
Högskolan på Gotland
Cramérg 3
621 57 Visby
***************************************************

Nicholas Twigg wrote (in part):

"I seem to remember that British managers at least used to be
reqruited differently than (e.g.) Swedish managers, with less
emphasis on science/business. This has probably changed by
now; is there someone who knows about this and whether this has
had any effects on the quality of British management?"

There is a body of literature on difference in management of different
countries. The basic distinction is between emphasis on generalist or
specialist education and knowledge. British management is considered to be
get legitimacy more for its "social" than technical skills, for "knowing
who knows" in case particular problems arise from their employees. To the
contrary in countries (like Germany or Italy) where management has been
institutionalized more as a technical profession bound to the particular
technical and sectoral problems managers find legitimacy for "knowing more"
or being able to evoke this impression. This has different effects on
organization structures. For istance studies using the Societal Effect
Approach in the 1970s and early 1980s discovered that the organizational
configurations of German firms were less laterally and hierarchically
differentiated than those in other advanced industrialized countries, such
as France and Great Britain. In Germany, higher professional continuity
existed across layers, together with a smaller gap between technical and
managerial competence; consequently, the lines of differentiation
(works-staff, production-maintenance, technical-managerial and line-expert)
were less pronounced than in the other countries. This was related to the
roles of: (1) the education system, which emphasized the acquisition of
practical knowledge at the beginning of a career and strongly supported its
integration with theoretical knowledge; and (2) the trade unions, which
pushed for the preservation of integrative organization structures within
the framework of a formally institutionalized system of industrial
relations based on co-determination, the latter allowing the preservation
of a non-Tayloristic organization of labour. Moreover the societal backing
enjoyed by technical professions has given them more influence in operating
units of greater complexity. The pervasive association of craft principles
and industrial rationality within these professions allowed the larger
plants to be particularly flexible (Sorge 1991).

See following literature:
Stewart, R./Barsoux, J.-L./Kieser, A./Ganter, H.-D./Walgenbach, P. (1994):
Managing in Britain and Germany; New York, St.Martin's Press.
Sorge, A. (1991): Strategic Fit and the Societal Effect: Interpreting
Cross-National Comparisons of Technology, Organization and Human
Resources; in: Organization Studies; 12/2: 161-190.
Maurice, M./Sorge, A./Warner, M. (1980): Social differences in organizing
manufacturing units. A comparison of France, West Germany and Great
Britain; in: Organization Studies, 1/1: 59-86.
Delmestri, G. (1997): Convergent Organizational Responses to Globalization
in the Italian and German Machine-Building Industries. In: International
Studies of Management & Organization, 27/3: 86-108.
Delmestri, G. (1998): Do All Roads Lead to Rome... or Berlin? The Evolution
of Intra- and Inter-organizational Routines in the Machine-building
Industry. In: Organization Studies, 19/4 : 639-665.


Giuseppe Delmestri, Università Bocconi, Milano (Italy)