Michael Roper

Between Manliness and Masculinity: The “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950

T First World War continues to loom large in the historiography of twentieth-century masculinity, providing a further example of how gender studies have tended to work within, rather than to recast, established topics and chronologies. Debate has focused on trench warfare in particular, and how far it contributed to a reassessment of Edwardian concepts of manliness. The question of whether or not heroic ideals were buried in the mud of Flanders figures in histories of public schools and youth organizations; in literary studies of interwar imaginative writing; as well as in research directly inspired by gender history, on topics as diverse as men’s bodies, sexuality, and domesticity. Shell shock, and its effect on medical and military ideas of manliness, has been at the forefront of the discussion. Despite this relatively developed historiography, there is little agreement. During the 1980s, building on the work of authors such as Paul Fussell, who had argued that the chivalric language of the prewar was found hopelessly wanting in the trenches, scholars pointed to the impact of the war in the reassessment of heroic ideals. In a still-influential essay published in 1987, Elaine Showalter argued that shell shock was nothing less than “the body language of masculine complaint, a disguised male protest not only against the war but against the concept of ‘manliness’ itself.” Young subaltern officers, socialized through their public school education

Masculinity and the Biographical Meanings of Management Theory: Lyndall Urwick and the Making of Scientific Management in Inter-war Britain

This article explores the biographical shaping of management theory. Using the British management theorist Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) as a case study, it argues that existing understandings of the history of management studies are limited by their lack of attention to the emotional a priori of theory production. For men such as Frederick Taylor or Urwick, the work of composing management theory for a public audience was intimately connected to events and experiences in the private life. Theorizing addressed emotional dilemmas even while it strove to construct a separation between the personal and the organizational. Management theories are not only historically, socially or discursively constructed, but can be read in terms of the evidence they provide about individual subjectivity. Psychoanalytic concepts can help illuminate such relations. Theorizing can be seen as a form of play: as something which, in D.W. Winnicotts terms, takes place in the space between the psychic reality of the ‘me’ and the external world of the ‘not me’. The ‘classical’ administrative theory represented by Taylor, Fayol and Urwick sought to create organizational structures which could stand apart from, and allow the management of, individual personalities. It simultaneously insisted on the status of theory as the ‘not me’; that is, as a product which was not shaped by personal experience, but which constituted objective knowledge. The illusion of theory as a largely external, social product persists in much management and organization studies today. This article challenges that social determinism, first, by showing how Urwicks theories addressed issues of separation and intimacy, and second, by placing Urwicks work in the context of his relations with women.

The Unconscious Work of History

ABSTRACT This article is concerned with the emotional processes that animate historical work. Starting with a critical discussion of recent work in the history of emotions, it investigates the emotional aspects of the historians relationship to the past, and demonstrates how psychoanalytic ideas – particularly the concept of the unconscious – can illuminate that relationship. Part one describes the emotional hold of the past and how historians and psychoanalysts have perceived it. Part two examines the unconscious resonances of personal sources such as letters, memoirs and oral testimony. Even in the most private personal account, such as a diary, the writer imagines a reader, and emotions are evoked through the communication between the writer or speaker and the audience, real or imagined. The historian, in viewing such communication, tries to be receptive to the states of mind being conveyed. In that way she or he is drawn into the unconscious dramas of the historical actor. Part three is concerned with the unconscious pressures in the present to which the historian responds. This is as much a matter of collective psychology as it is of the individual historians subjectivity, relating to the types of unconscious work that society demands of history. Historical scholarship, I hope to show, not only reflects the particular intellectual, political and economic milieu in which it is produced, but involves the historian in a process of navigation between her or his own unconscious, the past traces of unconscious emotion in historical artefacts, and the present psychological needs that history serves.

Killing off the father: Social science and the memory of Frederick Taylor in management studies, 1950–75

This article focuses on the politics surrounding the memory of Frederick Taylor in order to explore the post‐war development of management studies in Britain and the USA. It argues that the shift in the discipline from practitioner‐based to social science knowledge was a paradigmatic one, in which the theme of generational revolt was central. The article outlines the rise of the new management studies in Britain and the framing of the debates between social scientists and practitioner‐theorists as a struggle between fathers and sons. This theme is explored in relation to the contest over the memory of Taylor, and then the reaction of the British management intellectual Lyndall Urwick to the conflict. By analysing both the institutional and personal dimensions of the paradigm shift, and focusing on its generational meanings, the article seeks to illustrate how management history can be enriched by cultural approaches.

Subjectivities in the Aftermath: Children of Disabled Soldiers in Britain After the Great War

One of the most underrepresented groups in trauma studies is children. Children had to cope with the psychological and physical disabilities of their fathers and the socio-economic dislocation caused by war. In this chapter, Michael Roper has found a vein into the subjective experiences of second generation war victims through interviews with British men and women, many of them working-class, who grew up in the households of disabled Great War veterans. Children became “containers” for their parents’ traumas, and they suffered their own psychological damage when their mothers and fathers projected their pain and frustration on to their children. Further, children witnessed the upending of gender roles as they saw their fathers become dependent on their mothers, and even their sons and daughters, for not only economic security, but also the most basic daily needs.