6 Arguments for Management as a Science:
1. Science is based on continued experiments. Management is also revolving around so many experiments ‘trial and error’ means both success and failure.
2. Those who have pioneered the science of management were not theoreticians but practitioners for long. The science of management is not a laboratory finding but the product of long experience.
3. Intuition is something vague, common sense is too common and judgment is one’s own. There is neither logic nor uniformity in them. Elevation of management to a science has given it prestige and recognition.
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4. Principles are supposed to be guides to thought and action. They were not propounded as infallible truths. As Foyal, himself pointed out, how to make use of principles is a difficult art, requiring intelligence, experience, discretion and proportion. The principle is the lighthouse fixing the bearings, but it can only serve those who already know the way into port.
5. Science attempts to explain the events with which it deals. It provides the cues to why a particular result followed from a particular action. So the remedy can be adjusted to the disease. But the art ignores the need for explanation. Something happened to-day, because it happened yesterday or a year back. Art is not concerned with why it happened or why a particular event did not happen.
6. In management the situation, both the content and context, has become very complex in recent times. Business could have been managed as an art in the last centuries, but in today’s world no longer business can do without specialist staff. They all are the products of scientific education.