Administrative Thinkers and Schools of Thought
Map the schools
Organise thinkers into families rather than memorising lists. Classical/scientific management: Taylor (time-motion study, scientific selection, functional foremanship), Fayol (five functions, fourteen principles), Gulick and Urwick (POSDCORB, span of control). Bureaucratic school: Weber (ideal-type legal-rational bureaucracy). Human relations: Mayo (Hawthorne), Follett (conflict as constructive, group principle), McGregor (Theory X and Y), Maslow (hierarchy of needs), Herzberg (motivators vs hygiene). Behavioural/decision: Simon (bounded rationality, satisficing, fact-value distinction), Lindblom (incrementalism, "muddling through"), Etzioni (mixed scanning). Systems and ecological: Riggs (prismatic society, sala model), Fred Riggs' formalism and overlapping, open vs closed systems. Public choice and new public management: public choice applies market logic to bureaucracy; NPM borrows private-sector techniques. Critical/postmodern: critique of neutrality and hierarchy.
Traps
- Attribution swaps. Satisficing is Simon, not Lindblom; Theory X/Y is McGregor, not Maslow; the "prismatic society" is Riggs, not Weber.
- Hawthorne overreach. Mayo showed social factors matter; questions that credit him with formal incentive theory are wrong.
- Weber misread. Weber described an ideal type analytically, not as a recommendation; he also warned of the iron cage.
- Fayol vs Taylor. Fayol is top-down general management; Taylor is shop-floor task efficiency.
Rule of thumb
Anchor each thinker with a keyword: Taylor = task; Fayol = functions; Weber = legal-rational; Mayo = social; Simon = bounded rationality; Lindblom = incremental; Riggs = prismatic. If the keyword appears in the stem, the thinker is usually the answer.