Mary Parker Follett: Biography Of This Organizational Psychologist
Mary Parker Follet (1868-1933) was a psychologist who pioneered theories of leadership, negotiation, power and conflict. She also carried out several works on democracy and she is known as the mother of “management” or modern management.
In this article we will see a brief biography of Mary Parker Follet whose life allows us to establish a double rupture: on the one hand, breaking the myth that psychology has been done without the participation of women, and on the other, that of industrial relations and political management also done only by men.
Biography of Mary Parker Follet: pioneer in organizational psychology
Mary Parket Follet was born in 1868 into a Protestant family in Massachusetts, United States. At the age of 12, she began academic training at the Thayer Academy, a space that had just opened to women but had been built with the objective of promoting education primarily for the male sex.
Influenced by her teacher and friend Anna Bouton Thompson, Parker Follet developed a special interest in the study and application of scientific methods in research. At the same time, she was building its own philosophy on the principles that companies should follow in the social situation of the moment.
Through these principles, special attention was paid to issues such as ensuring the well-being of workers, valuing both individual and collective efforts, and promoting teamwork.
Today the latter seems almost obvious, although not always taken into consideration. But, around the rise of Taylorism (the division of tasks in the production process, which results in the isolation of workers), together with the Fordist chain assemblies applied in organizations (prioritizing the specialization of workers and chains assembly that would allow more production in less time), Mary Parker’s theories and her reformulation of Taylorism itself They were very innovative.
Mary Parker Follet was trained in the “Annex” of Harvard University (later Radcliffe College), which was a space created by the same university and intended for women students, who they were not seen as capable of receiving official academic recognition What they did receive, however, were classes with the same teachers who educated the men. In this context, Mary Parker met, among other intellectuals, William James, a psychologist and philosopher of great influence on pragmatism and applied psychology.
The latter sought for psychology to have a practical application for life and problem solving which was especially well received in the business area and in the management of industries, and served as a great influence on Mary Parker’s theories.
Community intervention and interdisciplinarity
Many women, despite having trained as researchers and scientists, found more and better opportunities for professional development in applied psychology. This was because the spaces where experimental psychology was carried out were reserved for men, which meant they were also hostile environments for women. This segregation process had among its consequences the gradually associate applied psychology with feminine values later discredited by other disciplines associated with masculine values and considered “more scientific.”
Starting in 1900, and for 25 years, Mary Parker Follet carried out community work in social centers in Boston, among other places she participated in the Roxbury Debate Club, a place where political training was provided to young people around a context of significant marginalization for the immigrant population
Mary Parker Follet’s thought had a fundamentally interdisciplinary character, through which she managed to integrate and dialogue with different currents, both in psychology, sociology and philosophy. From this she was able to develop many groundbreaking work not only as an organizational psychologist, but also in theories on democracy The latter allowed her to serve as an important advisor to both social centers and economists, politicians and businessmen. However, and given the narrowness of the most positivist psychology, this interdisciplinarity also creates different difficulties in being considered or recognized as a “psychologist.”
The theories developed by Mary Parker Follet have been fundamental to establish several of the principles of modern management Among other things, his theories differentiated between power “with” and power “over”; participation and influence in groups; and the integrative approach to negotiation, all of them later taken up by a good part of organizational theory.
In very broad terms we will develop a small part of the works of Mary Parker Follet.
1. Power and influence in politics
In the same context of Radcliffe College, Mary Parker Follett trained in history and political science together with Albert Bushnell Hart, from whom she took great knowledge for the development of scientific research. She graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe and completed a thesis that was even praised by the former president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, for considering the analytical works of Mary Parker Foller valuable. on the rhetorical strategies of the US Congress
In these works he carried out a meticulous study of the legislative processes and the effective forms of power and influence, through having made records of the sessions, as well as a compilation of documents and personal interviews with the presidents of the United States House of Representatives.. The fruit of this work is the book titled The Speaker of the House of Representatives (translated as The Speaker of the Congress).
2. The integrative process
In another of his books, The New State: Group Organization, which was the fruit of his experience and community work, Parker Follet defended the creation of an “integrative process” that was capable of sustaining democratic government outside of bureaucratic dynamics.
He also defended that the separation between the individual and society is nothing more than a fiction, so we must start studying the “groups” and not the “masses”, as well as seeking the integration of the difference. He held this way a conception of “the political” that also involves the personal so it can be considered one of the precursors of the most contemporary feminist political philosophies (Domínguez & García, 2005).
Creative Experience, from 1924, is another of its main others. In this he understands the “creative experience” as the form of participation that puts effort into creation, where the meeting and confrontation of different interests is also fundamental. Among other things, Follett explains that behavior is not a relationship of a “subject” acting on an “object” or vice versa (an idea that he in fact considers necessary to abandon), but rather it is about a set of activities that meet and interrelate
From there, he analyzed the processes of social influence, and criticized the sharp separation between “thinking” and “doing” applied to hypothesis verification processes. Process that is frequently ignored given the consideration that the very formulation of the hypothesis already generates an influence on its verification. He also questioned the linear problem-solving processes proposed by the school of pragmatism.
4. Conflict resolution
Domínguez and García (2005) identify two key elements that articulate Follet’s discourse on conflict resolution and that represented a new pattern for the world of organizations: on the one hand, an interactionist concept of conflict, and on the other, a proposal for conflict management through integration
This is how the integration processes proposed by Parker Follet, along with the distinction he establishes between “power-with” and “power-over”, are two of the most relevant antecedents in different theories applied to the contemporary organizational world, for For example, the “win-win” perspective of conflict resolution or the importance of recognizing and valuing diversity.
