Management

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\"Management\" (from Old French ménagement \"the directing\", from Latin manu agere \"to lead by the hand\") characterises the process of leading and directing all or part of an organisation, often a business, through the deployment and manipulation of resources (human, financial, material, intellectual or intangible). Early twentieth-century management writer Mary Parker Follett defined management as \"the art of getting things done through people.\"

One can also think of management functionally, as the action of measuring a quantity on a regular basis and of adjusting some initial plan, and as the actions taken to reach one's intended goal. This applies even in situations where planning does not take place. From this perspective, there are five management functions: planning, organizing, leading, co-ordinating and controlling. For others though, this definition, while useful, is far too narrow. The phrase \"management is what managers do\" is also prevalent, conveying the difficulty with which management is defined, the shifting nature of definitions, and the connection of managerial practices with the existence of a managerial cadre or class.

Management is known by some as \"business administration\", although this then excludes management in places outside business, eg charities and the public sector. University departments that teach management are nonetheless usually called \"business schools\". The term \"management\" may also be used as a collective word, describe the managers of an organization, for example of a corporation.

From the most general systemic perspective , management is a high level mental and communication activity (by tasks emission), of the indirect goal-oriented control of the domain of interest using autonomous execution and information entities/agents/units. The main management generic missions are: confrontation of objectives with the possibilities, planning, and leading of autonomous human units to the goal achieving. In every such situation, a continuous decision-making is required.

Historical development

There are difficulties in tracing the history of management. Some see it as a by definition late modern (in the sense of late modernity) conceptualization. On those terms it cannot have a pre-modern history. Others, however, see management-like activities in the pre-modern past. Some writers trace the development of management thought back to Sumerian traders and ancient Egyptian pyramid builders. Slave-owners through the centuries faced the problems of exploiting/motivating a dependent but sometimes recalcitrant workforce, but many pre-industrial enterprises, given their small scale, did not feel compelled to face the issues of management systematically. But innovations such as the spread of Arabic numerals (5th to 15th centuries) and the codification of double-entry book-keeping (1494) provided tools for management assessment, planning and control.

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