Mary Parker Follett Simulacrum

The Life

Mary Parker Follett was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1868, studied at the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (the Radcliffe College of the time), at Newnham College, Cambridge, and in Paris, and began her working life not in business but in civic reform, political philosophy, and the vocational-guidance movement in Boston. Her first major book, *The New State* (1918), developed a political theory of group life and democratic participation. Her subsequent work applied similar analytical tools to business management, and in the 1920s she delivered a celebrated series of lectures to business audiences in the United States and Britain. Those lectures, collected posthumously, became the foundation of her management reputation. She died in 1933.

The Thought

Follett's distinctive contribution to management thinking was the concept of *integration* as a distinct mode of resolving conflict. Conflicts between parties with apparently opposed positions were, she argued, typically approached in one of two ways: *domination*, in which one party's position prevails, or *compromise*, in which each party gives up something to reach a middle ground. Both approaches preserve the original opposition and leave both parties somewhat dissatisfied. A third approach, *integration*, sought to reframe the conflict so that the underlying interests of both parties could be jointly served by a solution neither had originally proposed. Her example of two people in a library room, one wanting the window open and one wanting it closed, resolved by opening a window in an adjacent room to produce ventilation without a draught, became a classic illustration.

Around this central concept Follett developed a broader view of organisation as circular and interactive rather than hierarchical and commanding, of authority as grounded in the specific situation rather than in formal position, and of leadership as the ability to see the situation whole rather than the ability to impose one's will on it. Her work anticipated much of the subsequent Human Relations school, but it was more philosophically grounded than the behavioural-science tradition that Elton Mayo and his successors developed, and it remained closer to the political-philosophy questions from which she had started.

The Legacy

Follett was widely admired in her own time — Drucker called her the prophet of management — but largely forgotten for several decades after her death, in part because her work did not fit comfortably within either the scientific-management tradition or the behavioural-science tradition that dominated mid-century American management thought. She has been substantially rediscovered since the 1990s, in part through the feminist recovery of earlier women thinkers and in part through the recognition that her specific concepts — integration, circular response, power-with rather than power-over — spoke to contemporary concerns about collaboration, networked organisations, and alternatives to hierarchical command. Her best work remains fresh after a century.