As someone who possesses the rare and unfortunate dual backgrounds of Humanities and Business Economics, I find myself uniquely qualified to dismiss a canard I've tried my best to ignore this semester. It is the claim by Drucker that management (which is de facto an extension of economics) is a liberal art. Now, I can see why he wants management to be a liberal art. He doesn't want it to be quantitative. He wants to dissociate it from its unmistakably horrible past. Scientific management, en vogue during the Gilded Age (which we seem to be quickly returning to), despite its claim to fix "social loafers" in the workplace, was the impetus for the labor movement of this country. Once a manager knew that a good worker could make a gadget every 50 seconds, guess what? You were fired if you took longer than that. Any complaining or organized resistance was met with lock-ins (meaning the management locked their employees in, which resulted in some cases of fires killing numerous workers) or outright violence and murder.
Like I said, it makes sense to try to dissociate management from its ugly past. But this is just apologetics. It dishonors the tradition that organized labor went through in this country, much as we'd like to believe that unions are just barriers to financial solvency. Management still tries to fix the social loafer, albeit with more humane methods. But the legacy of unethical management is still with us. Sweatshops, illegal and under-the-table jobs, or a certain governor (with several others waiting in the wings) trying to show his managerial cred. by busting an entire state's public union. Taylor and the robber barons would be proud.
My point is, own up to your history and let's move on. Don't pretend you're a liberal art, when we know damn well that what Drucker is telling us is not in his mind subjective (he states as fact such things that union movements damaged this country, which one might expect from a person who fled social democracy in Germany), subject to taste, or open to interpretation. Management is a highly specialized subset of economics, and both are social sciences. This means they are not hard sciences, since it involves the complicated and ever variable thing we call society.
