MANAGEMENT

DEFINITION OF MANAGEMENT
Management can be defined as a field of study as a team or class of people, and as a process. Management as a field of study about management principles, techniques, functions, and problems. This approach, however, fails to give the correct nature of management. Management as a team includes individuals who perform the managerial activities in the organisation, and the actions performed by them come under managerial activities. However who are the managers and what are these activities that should be treated as managerial activities are hard to identify unless some yard sticks are prescribe.. This becomes more difficult specially when those performing managerial roles bear different titles in the organisations. Much of those problems can be solved if management is defined as process. That is why most of the authors take management process while defining it.
There are two ways of identifying managerial activities- inductive and deductive.
MANAGEMENT PROCESS
It is easier to understand something a complex as management when it is described as a series of seperate, parts or functions, that make up a whole process.. Descriptions of this kind, known as models, have been used by students and practitioners world used to convey complex relationships in easy- to-understand terms. In fact, we used a model without identifying it as such-when we said earlier that the major management activated were Planning, Organising, Staffing, Leading and Controlling.
MANAGEMENT LEVELS
The Management functions are universal which suggests that the manager at all levels have to perform all the functions of Planning, Organising, Staffing, Directing and Controlling. This is, in a broad sense, true, but the emphasis varies on a particular functions with the change of management level. For example, a top level manager is involved more in policy formulation rather than the control functions and supervisors may put more emphasis on control. These difference in the emphasis of various functions at different levels require different characteristics and qualities in managers.
TOP MANAGEMENT
Top Management in an organisation consists of shareholders, board directors, and the chief executive. The chief executive may be called by various names- Managing Director, Director-General, President, Chief Executive, Officer, etc. Top Management is responsible for overall management of the organisation and performs all such functions necessary for this. These functions may be classified into three parts. They are Overall Management, Overall Operations and Overall Relationship.
MIDDLE MANAGEMENT
This groups comes between Top Management and supervisory Management. According to Niles, Middle Managers have pressures from three corners: (i) Top Management forces them to act i.e., accordance with its policies, direction, and guidance. (ii) Lower Management puts pressure over them for accepting and accommodating its ideas and vies. (iii) Middle Managers themselves are interrelated and they expect greater co-operation and working facilities. These managers have to function in these pressures. Three is little uniformity in middle managers because of their own levels in various organisations. Thus, a small organisation may not have middle management group, but a large one has several levels of middle managers. This suggests that as an organisations grows, most new levels are added among middle management. However, a generalisation can be achieved in various functions of this group.
SUPERVISORY MANAGEMENT
Supervision is often limped conventiontly in with all other levels in managerial hierarchy and discussed as part of leadership. In fact, the term supervisions traditionally used to refer to the activity dealing with instructing, guiding, and inspiring human begins toward greater levels of performance. From this term here to denote the specific level of management in an organisation. This level is referred to as supervisors, the first level managers in the organisation. The term supervisor includes types of foreman and junior executives below middle management level.
PRODUCTION ANALYSIS
Production function may be defined as the functional relationship between physical input(i.e., factors of production) and physical outputs(i.e., Quantity of goods produced). As stigler puts it the production function is the name given to the relationship between the rates of input of productive services and the rate of output of product. it is the economists summary of technological knowledge.
The production function can also be expressed in the form of a mathematical equation in which output is the dependent variable and inputs are independent variables. In general terms, this relationship can be also stated as:
P=f(a,b,c..............n)Where P is the rate of output of a given commercially and a.b.c...n are the various factor used per unit.
PROFITABILITY
The term 'Profit' is being used is several sense. According to Prof. Knight, "Perhaps no term or concept in economic discussion is used with a more bewildering variety of well established meaning than profit".In ordinary language profit is the surplus of income over expenses of production accuring to a businessman. It is the amount left with him after he has made payments for all factors services used by him in the process of production.
THEORIES OF PROFIT
Theories of profit explain why profit is paid and how profits get determined. There are some important theories of profit. They are:
1. The Rent Theory of Profit
2. The wages Theory of Profit
3. The Managerial Productivity Theory of Profit
4. The Innovation Theory of Profit
5. The Dynamic Theory of Profit
6. The Risk Theory of Profit
7. The Uncertainly-Bearing Theory of Profit