Edward Francis Leopold Brech

In 1945, Urwick and Brech made their most lasting contribution to management literature with the publication of his three-volume Making of Scientific Management. It was the first treatise to present a clear and focused discussion of the development and applications of management science. It included a comprehensive number of profiles of leading proponents of management theory, from early pioneers such as Charles Babbage and Frederick Winslow Taylor, to those such as Seebohm Rowntree and Mary Parker Follett who innovated and refined their concepts.

All aimed to bring '"adequate intelligence" to the control of the forces released by a mechanised economy' to bring the logical standards of science to bear on business practice. It also dealt with early contributions to understanding the scientific approach to control in industry. A long background of scientific management practices had previously been largely unknown before publication of these volumes. The study included a view of methods of control at the famous Boulton and Watt Foundry, of Robert Owen's approach to personnel management, and of commercial management training.

The second part of "The making of scientific management," entitled "Management in British Industry" described management in Britain from the Industrial Revolution to the 20th century developments of scientific management and human factors in management. Beside general chapters, there were specific chapters on the work of the Boulton and Watt foundry; on Robert Owen; on J. Slater Lewis, and on F.W. Taylor.[3]

In the preface of "The making of scientific management: Vol 3. The Hawthorne Investigations," Elton Mayo (1947) acknowledged, that:

Aerial view of the Hawthorne Works, 1925.

Lyndall Urwick was the first person to take public notice of the successive studies of human relations in industry undertaken by the Western Electric Company. He was at the time Director of the International Institute of Management at Geneva; and somewhere in the early 1930s he published a monograph on the Hawthorne experiments. At that time the enquiry was still in being and no books dealing officially with the tortuous course of the study had then been published.

This has since been altered ; approximately seven books, including the official Management and the Worker by Roethlisberger and Dickson and The Industrial Worker by North Whitehead, have appeared and have circulated widely in the United States and even beyond the American borders. Unfortunately these books, and other books that comment on them, are not easily obtainable at the moment outside the United States. This is of course due to the 'dollar shortage' and other disturbances of social and economic balance that have followed the latest European war. So that, at a moment when everyone needs to know more of the Western Electric findings, anything that approximates to a careful record is practically unobtainable.

And it is at this moment that Urwick, with the effective aid of his close associate Brech, has again come to the rescue. It is, I feel, timely and appropriate that one who first noticed the interest of the Hawthorne study should again undertake to make available to that section of the British public who desire to be further informed something of its details and probable significance. Such information is necessary ; both the claims made for, and some criticisms of, the Western Electric experiments are often based upon extensive misunderstanding. I hope that the book will be read widely by the many who are, in these days of difficulty, vitally interested in the human problems of modern industry.[4]

In his "British Management Writings Before the First World War" Brech (2003) summarised the raise of British approaches to management as follows:

In the two decades prior to World War I, a number of British writers and consultants had begun to address the problems of management in the modern world. Although they were aware of similar developments in America, where scientific management was becoming the latest business fashion, these writers sought to develop distinctly British approaches to management. Writers such as the engineers Joseph Slater Lewis, A.J. Liversedge and F.G. Burton, the consultants Edward Elbourne and J.W. Stannard, and the accountant Lawrence Dicksee laid stress on the need for a methodical approach to business management, the need to be inclusive and to motivate workers to see the company's goals as their own, and above all the need for more and better training for would-be managers... [Their work shows] the directions in which British management thinking might have gone had not World War I and the subsequent "Americanization" of British industry intervened. Today, they remain an important example of an alternative way of thinking about and practising management, and demonstrate the plurality and diversity of management thought...[5]