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F.W Taylor first defined management as a true science in 1911 with the purpose of
convincing people that all processes can be made more productive by removing related
resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation. (Taylor, 1911, p.6)
Taylor is definitely correct to certain extent but could management science be really confined to
such rigid boundaries in 1911, when management had not even started evolving? Surely not.
Managements definitive boundaries needed to be flexible and not rigid, because along with its
evolution, it was bound to grow sub-categories and then further sub-categories, etc. An example
of this will be business ethics, which suddenly became a highly relevant sub-category of business
management during the 1970s and 1980s, from a low-profile presence. ( This sudden popularity
can be attributed to the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster in India and the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear
disaster in the then Soviet Union). Again, some very important management concepts such as
creativity, innovation, etc. cannot be described easily using popular science. Therefore, though
management satisfies most criteria to be called a science, some of its characteristics do not make
Is management an art? Art is a process by which human beings, employ their skills of
imagination and creative thought to produce entities (this can be an idea, a painting, a pattern,
etc.) leading to emotional satisfaction and contentment. Art, unlike science, needs no logical
connections to proceed from one point to another; it can simply jump over gaps. There are plenty
of management concepts which are not straight forward and logical. For example, management
considers Intuitive leadership to be a highly effective leadership model but intuition is not a
proper scientific process. But the majority of concepts in management are logical, having rigid
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scientific bases. Thus, we cannot simply declare that management is an art on the basis of a few
concepts.
What is management then? In my personal opinion, the best thing to do here is not to try
and fit management into any pre-finalized shape. Instead, considering management to be a
hybrid mixture of science and art serves our purpose well. Here, we need to take a leaf out of
physics book which considers light energy to be both wave nature and particle, whichever suits
the existing scenario best. Therefore, in conclusion, let us consider management to be a hybrid
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Reference
Taylor, F.W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management, p.7. Retrieved from
https://archive.org/details/principlesofscie1911tayl
Note: Please note that no particular writing style has been followed here. Only a reference has