being designed and controlled by the expert ‘human engineer’ managers who are
appointed to fulWll the organization’s ‘goals’ (Watson 2006 ). Such a conception
inevitably has a powerful attraction for people trying both to explain and give
legitimacy to the personnel management or HR ‘function’ in an organization: its
role is portrayed as one of dealing with the human ‘input’ to the organizational
system, not just recruiting the labor that the system needs but also administering
and developing it so that it most eVectively plays its role in producing the system’s
outputs. Personnel matters played a central part in the work of the engineering
‘systematizers’ who were, in eVect, the proto-organization theorists who did so
much to shape both organization theory and management practices in the twen-
tieth century. These people, Shenhav tells us, applied mechanical engineering
methods, not just to the administrative restructuring ofWrms and their accounting
procedures but also to the determination of wages and the selection criteria in
employment ( 2003 : 187 ). Among the magazines that helped disseminate this
systems ideology was the periodicalPersonneland, as Shenhav notes, ‘many of
the subsequent scholars of organizations were readers and writers for these maga-
zines’ and the articles, often collected in book form, provided ‘the seedbed from
which discourse on rational organizations grew’ ( 2003 : 191 ).
The discourse on rational organization and personnel management that
emerged and is most clearly made manifest in the textbooks used across the
English-speaking world was not just rooted in a systems view of organizations, it
was also normative and prescriptive, as Legge’s ( 1978 ) analysis of those texts shows.
In reaction to this tendency, Legge took a signiWcant step forward by arguing for a
non-prescriptive organization theory approach to personnel management. The
prescriptive approach, she argued, led to confusions about organizational goals
and personnel objectives which, in turn, led to further confusions ‘about the nature
of the personnel function itself ’ ( 1978 : 16 ). Also, the ‘prescriptive intention of these
books’ succumbed to ‘stilted generalizations that neglect both the complexities and
dynamism of real organizations’ ( 1978 : 16 ). This move is signiWcant because it
marks the point—alongside the present author’s sociological study of the person-
nel occupation (Watson 1977 and below, p. 117 )—where personnel/HR matters
began to be studied in a social scientiWc style where the priority is given to analysis,
explanation, and understanding of employment management phenomena as
opposed to seeking ‘best practices’ that managers might adopt. Legge’s research
focused on the tensions and ambiguities with which personnel managers have to
deal and she pointed to contingency theory as a resource which personnel man-
agers, acting as applied social scientists within their own organizations, might use
to overcome some of these tensions and conXicts. The contingency theory version
of systems thinking (Donaldson 2001 ) is concerned with how the contingent
circumstances of organizations (their size, technology, business environment,
and so on) ‘inXuence the organization’s internal structures and processes’ (Legge
1978 : 97 ). The ‘contingency insight,’ as we might call it, has been brought forward
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