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3. Speech by Derek Pugh at the Celebration of Frank Heller's Life and Work on 9 May 2008 1. Speech by Derek Pugh at the Open University Graduation on 28 June 2000 on the occasion of the conferment of Emeritus Professor REPLY TO CONFERMENT Vice-Chancellor, members of the Open University and guests: Thank you very much, Roland, for those kind words. It is rather chastening to hear your career set out like that - inevitably being a bit economical with the truth, but so what - to-day of all days, we graduands are entitled to feel rather expansive. For me it has been a great privilege to work in higher education. Since my research field is the analysis of organizations and how they function, I am keenly aware of the large amount of intellectual and behavioural autonomy which academics are allowed compared with those who work in businesses, government agencies, and other enterprises. Apart from my first apprentice projects, I have always done the research that I have wanted to do, choosing the work that I felt worth doing and where I could hope to make an impact. I am most appreciative of this degree of freedom. Of course it may not seem so attractive to Vice-Chancellors who have to try and manage a band of self-opinionated and fractious professors. But that's why they are so good at ducking and weaving. I said I have 'worked' in universities. But if, as in economics, work is defined as 'activity undertaken for financial reward' I have hardly worked at all. I have done what I wanted to do and, goodness, at the end of the month they paid me a salary for doing it! I came from a regular university to Milton Keynes - which I can best describe as the OU's course writing factory. It was very strange to me as a central academic not to meet and interact with students except once a year at summer schools. I thought it obvious that I should tutor courses as well, so that I could discover at first hand how educationally effective they were. And then I found out that for me to do that they had had to appoint me to a second job in the OU as an Associate Lecturer - and they paid me an extra salary! I am very proud that in my time in the University, I tutored every course which I had helped write as a member of the Course Team, and I think of myself not only as an Emeritus Professor but as an Emeritus Associate Lecturer too. Now my contact is with doctoral students, helping to launch them on research careers. I am very pleased that one of my research students graduated PhD this morning and you will have seen me express my delight. It has been a special privilege for me to be in such an innovative institution as the Open University that has pioneered the educational methods that will characterise the 21st century. So may I finish by congratulating to-day's graduates (and myself) on participating so successfully in the education of the future. Thank you.
2. Speech by Derek Pugh at the University College,
Northampton Graduation on 16 July 2001 on the occasion of the conferment of an
Honorary Fellowship ACCEPTANCE SPEECH Thank you very much, Simon, for those kind words. It is rather chastening to hear your career set out like that - inevitably being a bit economical with the truth, but so what - to-day of all days, we graduands are entitled to feel rather expansive. It is indeed an honour to be elected as an Honorary Fellow and I am most grateful to the Senate and Council of University College Northampton. It is also a great pleasure for me because I am returning to my youthful haunts and I am awash with nostalgia. Sixty- one years ago, as a schoolboy, I was sent away from the London blitz to Northampton. We were evacuees - a newly invented word. I came with my cousin Basil Cohen, who I'm delighted has joined us here to-day. Nowadays people commute daily between Northampton and London as a matter of course. But in those days to a young boy it seemed a long way away, and I did not quite know what to expect. We were billeted on the good people of the town and they had to endure us as part of their contribution to the war effort. There were the inevitable tensions, but after a bit we got to appreciate the place. Well, to the extent that I clearly remember thinking: Northampton would be a really nice place to live - if you weren't an evacuee! Now that I am no longer an evacuee, I really feel very benign about the town. By the time I got to the Fourth Form all the London School's science masters had been called up to the Forces and we were sent to the College of Technology by the Racecourse for our Physics and Chemistry classes. I remember that I was impressed by the laboratories, and I am sure that they are still top notch today. As Simon has said, I was most taken by the plaque showing that the first Principal of the College was both a Master of Arts and a Master of Science. I thought what a clever man he must have been to be an expert in such a wide range of subjects. Now, many years later, when I too have an MA and an MSc, I realise that it is basically a matter of determination and persistence. After all, even 'Genius', as Edison pointed out, is only 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. The golden rule is 'Keep going' and then, in due course, you find yourself, at the graduation ceremony - sometimes with a certain amount of surprise as some of us have to admit. At the College we had Mr Siddall to teach us. One day he went off to London and came back as Dr Siddall. It was all very mysterious then, and it had to be explained to us that it did not mean that he was now a medical doctor who could issue us with pills. I think I understand what happened a little better now, having spent a large chunk of my working life supervising and examining PhD students like Dr Simon Denny, of all of whom I am very proud. It is a mark of the very considerable change that this institution has undergone and a tribute to its high standards, that there is now no need to go off to London as University College Northampton awards its own Doctoral degrees under the auspices of the University of Leicester. Of course, change has been the most characteristic feature of most aspects of life since the Second World War. In my time in higher education there have been many changes, and I have always tried to find ways using them to satisfy my taste for innovation. I have worked in several new academic fields as Simon has noted. I have worked in new institutions. In the 'fifties I went to the Birmingham College of Technology, which quickly became the College of Advanced Technology which, in turn, became the University of Aston. In the 'sixties I came to the London Business School soon after it was set up as one of the first postgraduate business schools in the country. In the 'eighties I joined the most innovative experiment in higher education of the 20th century - the Open University. Change in every sphere is inevitable, and careers do not always follow orderly progressions in today's world. So if have one message for to-day's graduands it is: work hard at understanding the changes in your environment and analyse carefully how to benefit from them to enable you to seize all the opportunities for self-development that come your way in your working lives. But some things don't change. For the past forty years I have been working with my colleague, co-author and friend Professor David Hickson of the University of Bradford. We started as colleagues in the Aston University Industrial Administration Research Unit, but even when we moved on separately from there to different places, we continued to collaborate in writing books. The first book we wrote together is dedicated to our parents; the latest to our grandchildren, which gives you some idea of how long we have been at it! So I am very pleased to welcome David here to-day. It also allows me to take the opportunity to remind him that the publisher's deadline for our next book is only 41/2 short months away. That means more work, of course. I am now an Emeritus Professor, officially retired, although Natalie, my wife, regularly looks at me and says: "Well, I can't see any difference!" But for me it has been a great privilege to work in higher education because of the large amount of intellectual autonomy which academics are allowed in research and teaching. Apart from my first apprentice projects, I have always done the research that I have wanted to do, choosing the work that I felt worth doing and where I could hope to make an impact. I have always lectured on my understanding of the fields in which I have taught creating new courses in the process. I am most appreciative of this degree of academic freedom. But it does mean that it is very hard to retire if you feel that you still have something to contribute. The way I put it when asked is that I am not retired but I am 'working at retiring' and that will hopefully keep me going for a bit. I have always been most impressed with the way that musicians, no matter how eminent as performers, always give lessons, feeling that the education of the following generations is a task to which they should contribute. That is my view too, and in my teaching now I concentrate on encouraging beginning Management researchers who are studying for a PhD by giving master classes on research. I think this is a particularly appropriate task for a senior citizen who has become an Honorary Fellow, which is why I gratefully accept the honour that the College has conferred on me. Thank you.
3. Speech by Derek Pugh at the Celebration of Frank Heller's Life and Work on 9 May 2008 I was very pleased when Florence asked me to contribute to this memorial
meeting to Frank Heller. Frank and I have known each other, and each other's
work, for a long time. I feel that he made an important and distinctive
contribution to applied social science in management in his programme of studies
in industrial and organizational democracy. Since my Inaugural Lecture at the
Open University was, rather unusually, a television programme on organizational
systems, in it I interviewed Frank on his research. I first met FH 50 years ago in1958. I had been detailed by my boss at Birmingham Tech to contact all the management education and training departments in Britain to see whether we could form a contact group and, perhaps later, an association. Frank was distinctive because he was a social scientist (like me), but (unlike me - I was just a beginner in management education) he was the head of one of the largest departments in the country at the Regent Street Polytechnic - the first social scientist to head such a department. In those days, Management as a subject was far too new for universities to have anything to do with it. Management departments were in Technical Colleges (run by production engineers who taught primarily production scheduling and work study) or in Colleges of Commerce (run by cost accountants who focused on cost accounting). The high status management education institution in the country was the independent Administrative Staff College at Henley. This was for those going to be top managers (and who therefore did not need to bother with work study or cost accounting) and their courses were based on Carlyle's dictum "The history of the world is the biography of great men". So they read and discussed how-I-did-it stories of great men. The few social scientists around, like Frank, were distinctive for two reasons. First, because we knew about the Hawthorne Studies, thought they were relevant and important and wanted to teach about them - thus in due course ushering in the concept of 'Human Relations' into British management education. Second, because we believed in research - even into management. Frank, never just a talker, always wanting to do something about important issues, actually carried it out, producing some of the earliest management research from a technical college. In 1952 he published an article in the journal Occupational Psychology on "Measuring Motivation in Industry", for example. But most people in management and management education did not see the point of research, since based on their experience, they knew how to do it anyway. Then we had the impact of a major piece of British research: Joan Woodward's study relating management structure and processes to the technology of manufacture. This was important because it directly contradicted the Management Principles of Fayol, so assiduously propagated by Urwick. It introduced what became known as the 'contingency approach' to management structures and behaviour. By the sixties, this approach had burgeoned; Lawrence and Lorsch in Harvard, Burns and Stalker in Edinburgh, myself and colleagues at Aston. Social scientists in management, like Frank, championed this approach because it gave us evidence to confront the unquestioned assumptions of the men of experience (and they were men, although Mary Parker Follett was often given the status of an honorary man). In 1958, we did form a preliminary group; then in 1960 this developed into the full-blown Association of Teachers of Management. Frank always the do-er, played a big part in forming the ATM and became its first Secretary. Frank was a pioneer social scientist in this field in Britain, and was at the beginning of the surge of social scientists into management education, which, by the 'seventies, had taken it over. But, of course, by then Frank was established on an important research career outside management teaching in Britain about which we are now going to hear. Derek Pugh.
4. HOW MANAGEMENT RESEARCH CAME TO ASTON: Speech by
Derek Pugh at Aston Business School, 60th Anniversary Celebrations Open Day
"Then and Now" on 17th June 2008 The first of these outstanding men was Joe Hunt. He was the Managing Director of a very successful high-tech automation company, Hymatic Engineering in Redditch. He was a governor of the College and became Sir Joseph Hunt for services to industry and education. When David Bramley, the founding Head of the Department, left to return to industry, the post was advertised and we in the department were all agog to see who would be appointed. It could be a production manager like David Bramley - that was what nowadays would be called the default option. But maybe it would be somebody from Personnel Management or Industrial Relations: that would be different. Then we heard that a management consultant had applied for the job - interesting. When the selection committee, chaired by Joe Hunt, announced that it had appointed as Head of Department Dr Tom Lupton, an academic researcher in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester, the members of the department were completely non-plussed and in shock. In that announcement the words Dr, academic, researcher, Social Anthropology, University, were all terms that provoked bewilderment and some trepidation. But Joe Hunt carried through the appointment because he realised that, not only had the College to change to become more academic, accepting research as a normal part of its activities, but it had to be demonstrated that this was actually going to happen. We'd had various name changes: from Birmingham Technical College to College of Technology, to designation as College of Advanced Technology. And the general feeling was that these changes were, to use a term of contempt from the motor industry, 'badge engineering', and that the real workers on the ground would carry on doing what they had always done. Shrewd manager that he was, Joe Hunt ensured that through this innovative appointment we all understood that things were going to change. This was the first foundation pillar for Aston management research. The second outstanding man was Tom Lupton. He was a rather special sort of social anthropologist. Social anthropologists each have their own particular tribe, whom they have lived among and whom they have studied in detail. But Tom Lupton's tribe was not in Western Melanesia or Matabeleland. His tribe were factory shop floor workers in Lancashire, England. He lived among them, he studied their social interactions, status systems, mores, rituals, rites of passage, and wrote them up - just like any other social anthropologist. So you can understand why he was interested in this job in a heavily industrial area like Birmingham. Tom Lupton had obtained a Government grant to study factors affecting shop floor behaviour - quite a considerable one. He brought the grant with him; but none of his Manchester research associates transferred with him to take a post in Birmingham. So he had a large grant and no one to work on the research. He accepted me on internal transfer to join the group, and he recruited David Hickson. David and I recruited Bob Hinings and Graham Harding. This group of 4 then hammered out what we wanted to study, and, inevitably, this deviated quite a lot from the original proposal. As we were in a management department, it naturally focused on management of the organization. As Tom Lupton was the grant-holder we needed his approval and we presented our ideas to him at a seminar and waited with bated breath. After a pause, he said 'yes'. (What he actually said was: "If that's what you buggers wanna do, you'd better get on with it!") This remains the most munificent act of academic generosity that I've ever encountered. So there we were: a group of full-time researchers actually being paid to do research and nothing else. That caused some waves. There were many who thought that research into management was some sort of elaborate scam and that one day we would be rumbled - and didn't hesitate to tell us so. But Tom Lupton had ensured that management research was regarded as an essential part of the job that had to be done in our developing department. This was the second foundation pillar for Aston management research. The third outstanding man was Dr Venables, the formidable Principal of the College, who was a leading national player in the re-organization of higher technological education, and became Sir Peter Venables and the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Aston. Tom Lupton's Government grant came from the DSIR (one of the earlier incarnations of the ESRC). It was the policy of the DSIR to fund the starting-up of new research activities - seed corn money. It was not intended that once the grant had come to an end the research would stop, but that it should take root and be supported by the receiving institution. So the contract that Dr Venables signed on behalf of the College on receiving the grant contained a sentence to the effect that if, at the end of the grant period, the research was considered "important and timely" the institution would continue to support it. In the early part of the final year of the DSIR grant, we put up a proposal for further development of the research. As you know, the mills of bureaucracy grind exceeding slow when faced with a possibly innovative decision, and so it was not until 2 weeks before the date of expiry of the external grant, that we heard the answer. But it was 'yes' and the college took over the support of the research posts. This was Sir Peter Venables honouring his commitment. Because he understood that research had to be a permanent part of the work of the soon-to-be university, he negotiated with our then paymasters, the City of Birmingham Education Department, to include research posts in the establishment of the Industrial Administration Department. So now we had research accepted as an ongoing activity supported financially by the institution. This was the third foundation pillar for Aston management research. Through the framework created in turn by Joe Hunt, Tom Lupton and Peter Venables, management research came to Aston - and stayed. They were great men and I salute them.
5. Speech by Derek Pugh at the Aston University Graduation on the occasion of the award of the degree of Doctor of Letters (DLitt) honoris causa Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Members of the University, Ladies and Gentlemen. But it did, and I was fortunate to participate in, and benefit from, the many changes that followed from that transformation. The university-to-be encouraged research and devoted resources to it, which allowed my colleagues and me to develop the Aston Studies programme of which Patrick has spoken. I am delighted that several of the contributors are here today. I am sure that David Hickson, John Child, Diana Pheysey, Roy Payne and Pat Clark understand that the honorary degree is a joint recognition of the contributions of our whole team. From Aston I went on to a new institution, the London Business School, and a new subject, Organizational Behaviour. Later, I joined the Open University, the most innovative experiment in higher education of the 20th century. So change has been a key part of my career experience. I have always regarded the phrase 'May you live in interesting times', not as curse but as a blessing, which is why I have just published with my OU colleague David Mayle a 4-volume compendium of academic articles on Change Management. (I should say that I wrote and published my first books while at Aston, and it was also at Aston that I learned never to miss an opportunity to plug them!) So if I have one message for to-day's other graduands it is that change is the only constant in the world of business and management. Don't just let changes happen to you unawares; work hard at understanding the inevitable changes in your environment and how to benefit from them by seizing all the opportunities for self-development that come your way in your working lives. I have always been most impressed with the way that musicians, no matter how eminent as performers, always give lessons, feeling that the education of the following generations is a task to which they should contribute. That is my view too, and in my teaching now I concentrate on encouraging beginning Management researchers who are studying for a PhD by giving master classes on research, and updating my book which I hope will continue to be as useful to future doctoral students as Patrick found it. I think this is a particularly appropriate task for a senior citizen who has become an Honorary Graduate, which is why I gratefully accept the honour. Thank you. |