“The meaning that I have given to the word administration and which has been generally adopted, broadens considerably the field of administrative science. It embraces not only the public service but enterprises of every size and description, of every form and every purpose. All undertakings require planning, organization, command, co-ordination and control, and in order to function properly, all must observe the same general principles. We are no longer confronted with several administrative sciences but with one alone, which can be applied equally well to public and to private affairs and whose principal elements are today summarized in what we term the Administrative Theory.”

— Henri Fayol

Source: The administrative theory in the state, 1923, p. 116

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Henri Fayol 27

Developer of Fayolism 1841–1925

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“An examination of the characteristics required by the employees and heads of undertakings of every kind leads to the same conclusions as the foregoing study, which was confined largely to industrial concerns. In the home and in affairs of State, the need for administrative ability is proportional to the importance of the undertaking. Like every other undertaking, the home requires administration, that is to say planning, organization, command, coordination and control. Nothing but a theory of administration, which can be taught and then discussed by everybody, can put an end to the general uncertainty as to proper methods, which exists in the isolation of our households. There is therefore a universal need for a knowledge of administration.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Industrial and General Administration, 1916, p. 80; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 7

“Every employee in an undertaking — workman, foreman, shop manager, head of division, head of department, manager, and if it is a state enterprise the series extends to the minister or head of a state department — takes a larger or smaller share in the work of administration, and has, therefore, to use and display his administrative faculties. By administrative knowledge we mean planning, organization, command, coordination, and control: it can be elementary for the workman, but must be very wide in the case of employees of high rank, especially managers of big concerns. Everyone has some need of administrative knowledge.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Industrial and General Administration, 1916, p. 10; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 4-5

“It is in the development of further administrative coordination that we must come to political scientists for aid. We ask that you apply to the field of economic administration the technique of analysis and principles of organization which you have developed in the study of administrative organization in the form of the state.”

Gardiner C. Means (1896–1988) American economist

Source: "The Distribution of Control and Responsibility in a Modern Economy", 1935, p. 64

“Administration is generic. It is a social science concept which applies to all organized group activity. Administration arises whenever organization occurs. There are common problems and processes in the household, the school, the church, the business corporation, and the vast modern state. After deciding upon objectives, means must be devised for carrying out the program. This latter process is administration. Anyone who is responsible for directing the work of others thereby becomes an administrator”

Marshall E. Dimock (1903–1991) American writer

Source: "The Study of Administration." 1937, p. 29

“THE subject I have been given for these lectures is The Psychological Foundations of Business Administration, but as it is obvious that we cannot in four papers consider all the contributions which contemporary psychology is making to business administration — to the methods of hiring, promoting and discharging, to the consideration of incentives, the relation of output to motive, to group organization, etc.”

Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) American academic

I have chosen certain subjects which seem to me to go to the heart of personnel relations in industry. I wish to consider in this paper the most fruitful way of dealing with conflict. At the outset I should like to ask you to agree for the moment to think of conflict as neither good nor bad; to consider it without ethical prejudgment; to think of it not as warfare, but as the appearance of difference, difference of opinions, of interests. For that is what conflict means — difference. We shall not consider merely the differences between employer and employee, but those between managers, between the directors at the Board meetings, or wherever difference appears.
Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. 1. Lead paragraph

“Administration has to do with getting things done; with the accomplishment of defined objectives. The science of administration is thus the system of knowledge whereby men may understand relationships, predict results, and influence outcomes in any situation where men are organized at work together for a common purpose. Public administration is that part of the science of administration which has to do with government, and thus concerns itself primarily with the executive branch, where the work of government is done, though there are obviously administrative problems also in connection with the legislative and the judicial branches. Public administration is thus a division of political science, and one of the social sciences.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Source: 1930s, "Science, Value and Public Administration", 1937, p. 189

“Every bureaucracy, therefore, in accord with the peculiar emphasis on its own position, tends to generalize its own experience and to overlook the fact that the realm of administration and of smoothly functioning order represents only a part of the total political reality.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)
Context: Every bureaucracy, therefore, in accord with the peculiar emphasis on its own position, tends to generalize its own experience and to overlook the fact that the realm of administration and of smoothly functioning order represents only a part of the total political reality. Bureaucratic thought does not deny the possibility of the science of politics, but regards it as identical with the science of administration. Thus irrational factors are overlooked, and when these nevertheless force themselves to the fore, they are treated as "routine matters of state."

“Before we can establish any immutable 'principles' of administration, we must be able to describe, in words, exactly how an administrative organization looks and exactly how it works.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. xiv.

“Public administration is that part of the science of administration which has to do with government, and thus concerns itself primarily with the executive branch, where the work of government is done, though there are obviously administrative problems also in connection with the legislative and the judicial branches. Public administration is thus a division of political science, and one of the social sciences.”

Luther H. Gulick (1892–1993) American academic

Source: "Science, values and public administration," 1937, p. 189

“The control of an undertaking consists of seeing that everything is being carried out in accordance with the plan which has been adopted, the orders which have been given, and the principles which have been laid down. Its object is to point out mistakes in order that they may be rectified and prevented from recurring.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Henri Fayol (1916) cited in: Ralph Currier Davis (1951) The fundamentals of top management. p. 157. This quote was already cited in multiple sources in 1938.

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