Works
- Administration industrielle et générale, Bulletin de la Société de l'Industrie Minérale, 3e livraison de 1916; also issued as a book by H. Dunod et E. Pinat, Paris, 1917, 1916
- General and Industrial Management, Translated by Constance Storrs, with a foreword by L. Urwick. Pitman, London, 1949
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The functions and principles of administration
Ideas
Unity of command and the scalar chain. Each employee should receive orders from one superior only, and authority should run in an unbroken chain from top to bottom. Caveat: Experience-based principles, not tested propositions; Simon (1946) criticized such principles as contradictory proverbs. Read in a reprint of the 1949 translation.
The general staff. Senior managers should have a staff of specialists to extend their capacity without dividing command. Caveat: Read in a reprint of the 1949 translation: the staff takes orders only from the general manager and has no executive part in subordinate departments.
Principles and functions of administration. Fayol set out the functions of management (planning, organizing, command, coordination, and control) and general principles such as unity of command and the scalar chain, drawn from his experience running a mining company. Caveat: Offered as experience-based principles, not tested propositions; the 1949 English translation is the edition most cited in English.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.