Making Managers in Canada, 1945–1995 by labor and management historian Jason Russell is a comprehensive and thorough analysis of the topic by an author who is in command of the material at hand. The book is empirical, not theoretical, and uses a historically materialist methodological approach. The book asks two fundamental questions: What were people taught about management? Did they learn to manage based on what they were taught?
The author seeks answers to these questions in the corporate world, the community college world (CEGEP in Quebec), and at the undergrad and graduate levels of universities. Russell takes care to cover both English- and French-speaking Canada, as well as the far west of British Columbia, thousands of kilometers/miles to the west of Ontario and Quebec. The book is structured around each of the sectors examined (e.g., corporate), and within each Russell analyzes three different institutions.
Within the corporate chapter he looks at Montreal-based Bell Canada, the Toronto-based department store chain Eaton's, and the London, Ontario–based brewery Labatt's. The three community colleges Russell analyzes are Vancouver Community College on the Canadian west coast, Niagara College on the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario, and College Ahuntsic in Quebec. He sticks with the same institutions when examining undergraduate and graduate programs—the University of British Columbia, the University of Western Ontario, and École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Montréal.
The author thinks that management is fundamentally about dealing with people. Therefore, he is concerned about the shift away from liberal arts, which was part of the orientation in the early post–World War II years, to a curriculum that focuses—excessively, according to Russell—on numbers. He is remarkably thorough, with nearly eight hundred endnotes and a 10-page bibliography for only 229 pages of narrative.
Russell's answer to his own two questions are that people did not learn about management because they were not taught about management because management includes people. As a consultant to management, then a manager of consultants, and finally a professor of management, I agree with the author. After all, isn't self-knowledge the most important characteristic of a good manager?
Are there errors of omission in the book? Yes, of course there are, most specifically the absence of reference to Gerald G. Fisch's Organization for Profit: Management for the Age of Technology, from 1964. Fisch's book followed Alfred D. Chandler's Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (1962). Fisch divided structure into three elements: structure per se, people, and the spirit of the enterprise, or what is now called culture. Organization for Profit was a nonalliterative prelude to the 7-S framework found in In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. (1982) and an important and often overlooked contribution to management literature.
Somewhat surprising is that there is no mention of University of Western Ontario's (rebranded Western University in 2012) publication Business Quarterly—the Canadian equivalent of the Harvard Business Review—which began publication in 1933 and has influenced generations of Canadian managers.
But having said all that, this is an important contribution to the field of Canadian management education. While the author decries the undue emphasis on numbers in management education, he does make use of numbers of his own in the last chapter. Table 1 shows a sixfold increase in managerial employment in Canada over a period when the population only doubled but GDP per capita increased 2.4 times in constant dollars, showing that management matters. But are those new “managers” qualified to manage? Another table shows a sixfold increase in undergraduate education and a ninefold increase in graduation between 1965 and 1985, a period when the population increased by only 30 percent. An interesting fact, not pursued, is that while in Canada it is common to the point of universality that Commerce is taught in undergrad institutions, it is unusual for top-ranked liberal arts institutions in the United States to offer Commerce—Washington and Lee University being a notable exception.
Those who read Making Managers in Canada can be sure that it is a well-researched book by a highly respected author. It is by far the most comprehensive work published to date on the importance of including people in any educational program dealing with management.
