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Fayol's “Principles” in a University Library

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In reading through Management Basics for Information Professionals by Evans and Ward, one of the theories of management that stood out to me was the “administrative approach” (2007). Henry Fayol was one of the main proponents of this approach, though there were many others as well. Fayol “divided organizational activities into five major groups” and also identified 14 principles of management and believed that “management is a skill one can learn, rather than a talent received at birth” (Evans & Ward, 2007). In the context of my personal experience I found that it might be interesting to compare my experiences as a student employee in the UC Berkeley library to some of the more applicable aspects of Fayol's principles of management. I …show more content…

Another of Fayol's principles had to do with authority and responsibility. In the department of the main stacks, there was a staff librarian who acted as our manager, as well as a group of students that performed supervisory tasks. In my last year or so in the library I joined this group, and was given the task of doing some of the day-to-day tasks that kept our department running. These included opening and closing procedures, keeping statistics of the work done by students, assigning hourly jobs, training, and so on. The important idea in this principle is that “giving orders and being responsible must go together” (Evans & Ward, 2007). I would argue that in our department, while we were responsible for making sure the work was done as well as assigning jobs, if there was a difficult situation the supervisors were able to refer to the staff librarian for support. For example, if one student was chronically underperforming or late, we would notify the librarian. If one considered the group of supervisors plus the librarian who managed us to make up the “management” of the department, then in whole authority and responsibility did go together. I would also say that instead of thinking of student supervisors as not being as responsible as they could be, it would be more plausible to say that the hourly assignment of jobs and other such tasks were ones that were delegated to them by the librarian, because while he was more responsible, there was no way that he could

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