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A biography of James Oscar McKinsey, author and management theorist, is presented. McKinsey was born in poverty near Mexico, Missouri. According to the author, he received a Bachelor's degree of Pedagogy and later a Bachelor of Law degree. The author notes McKinsey's major works, including "The Organization and Methods of the Walworth Manufacturing Company."

Kurt Lewin has had a significant impact upon modern management. His concepts are widely used and his students are among the dominant contributors to human relations, personnel and industrial psychology. Yet many students of management are completely unaware of Lewin and his contributions. His name is seldom mentioned in texts dealing with management or personnel relations. The failure to recognize Lewin's role in the evolving field of management is a serious neglect, for his philosophy of science, research methodology and approach provide a potential for advancing the discipline of management. Kurt Lewin was an innovative researcher whose ingenuity in experimental design provides a scientific basis for many of our current concepts. It is this writer's express purpose in this paper to draw attention to Lewin and his work so that serious students of management will be stimulated to study them. Lewin's contribution to management thought are intimately related to his other work. He was a "practical theorist." His interest was the world of reality and applying the science of his psychology to real problems of society. It was his concern for the realities of men's daily lives that caused him to investigate subjects having direct bearing on management. For example, he made contributions to our understanding of leadership, training factory workers, decision making, managing change, group dynamics, dealing with conflict, employment of minority groups, counteracting prejudice and dealing with bigotry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this paper is the relationship of the Academy of Management to the profession of management. Its purpose is to explain some of the reasons for our reorganization within the Academy and to suggest directions for the future. First, let us review what has been happening in the Academy. The last year witnessed a significant reorganization. Underlying these changes was the philosophy that as an Academy we must provide professional services for our members! These members, traditionally, are professors of management. Although we have increased the number of executive members significantly, we still have 90 percent academics as members. Due to the nature of the training for academic life, many of the younger men have been weak or lacking in direct contact with the world of work. Because of this their teaching is apt to be sterile. Personally, I am convinced that the gestaltists such as Wertheimer and Lewin were correct. Namely, much of the learning of the skills of management involves subtle processes which can best be achieved by direct experience and involvement. Most of us are perceptually rather than conceptually oriented. We have to experience things first before we can understand them. Thus, we have seen as an important function of the Academy of Management the provision of avenues for bringing professors into direct contact with the world of "reality". Namely, we have organized to help provide dialogue between practitioners and academics. The profession of management is crowded with moral hazards. If we are to truly be a profession, we must face these directly and develop our own code of ethics and moral guidelines. This is a tremendously difficult task and ultimately it is the kind of a thing that each of us has to do for himself However, if management is truly to be a profession. it must have the ethical guidelines which are so essential for professional behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide perspective for those involved in administration. At the outset it should be understood that in the context of this paper, organization behavior is envisioned as intimately related to managerial action. That is, management is viewed as the catalytic agent which directs, organizes, and controls resources so as to influence organization behavior. That is not to say that management can determine exactly what happens. Rather, what I wish to emphasize is that the point of view taken here is that of management (or administration) and what follows is being presented in the framework of "what those who are professionals in the field of management (or administration) should understand about the prediction of organization behavior." Moreover, as discussed here, organization behavior is viewed as the behavior of "a system of consciously coordinate activities of two or more persons".[1]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purposes of this paper is to synthesize the contribution of three "scholar-practioners:" Messrs. Alden, Brodsky and Weitzel. Furthermore, the purpose is to synthesize what these men have presented within the general theme of the 25th annual meeting of the Academy of Management. In short the task undertaken in this paper is to discuss, in the framework of comparative administration, the presentations of (a) the President of a University, (b) a manager in the Department of Defense and (c) the Acting Attorney General of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the organizational construct approach, which looks at a functioning organization as a whole and at the interaction of the organization's various parts as the determining and determined forces that drive the whole organization. The focus is on the nature of organizational constructs in the manufacturing industry, problems in studying constructs, an example of studying an organizational construct, and the implications of the organizational construct approach for management research and teaching business administration. The development of a general theory in management is mentioned.

The article focuses on the use of organizational constructs to understand the functioning of formal organizations. It describes organizational constructs as a system of causality that helps determine the organization's character. It comments on some difficulties involved in studying organizational constructs as each part and that part's function is but an aspect of a complex structure, and that the use of statistical methods has limited applicability in the process of gaining an understanding of organizational constructs. It comments on what implications that the organizational construct model brings to researching and teaching of business administration.