Mary Parker Follett

Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) was an American political philosopher and management thinker whose ideas about authority, conflict, and organisation anticipated much of the later twentieth century's humanistic approach to management. She was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, to a family of modest means. Her father, a Civil War veteran, died when she was young; her mother became an invalid, and Follett took on significant family responsibilities while still a student. She studied at the Annex — which later became Radcliffe College — at Cambridge University, and in Paris, focusing on history, political economy, and philosophy. Her first major book, The Speaker of the House of Representatives, appeared in 1896 and remains a standard work on the history of that institution. She worked for decades in community organising, founding evening recreation centres and other services in Boston's poorer neighbourhoods and serving on various committees on industrial and social questions. Her experience in community work brought her into contact with real problems of coordinating people with different interests toward common ends, and she drew on this experience to develop her later writings on management and organisation. The New State (1918) and Creative Experience (1924) argued for a democracy based on the integrating of differences rather than on majority rule. In the late 1920s she was invited to lecture to business audiences in the United States and England, and these lectures — posthumously collected as Dynamic Administration — made her reputation as a management thinker. She died in Boston in 1933. Her work was largely forgotten during the mid-twentieth century but has been rediscovered since the 1970s as the fields she influenced caught up with her.

Origin

United States

Lifespan

1868-1933

Era

Early 20th century

Subjects

Management Political Philosophy Conflict Resolution Democratic Theory Organisational Behaviour

Skills

Critical Thinking Ethical Thinking Cultural Heritage And Identity Creative Expression Problem Solving

Why They Matter

Follett matters because she proposed, a generation before anyone else took it seriously, that management should be understood as a human and collaborative practice rather than as the exercise of authority over subordinates. The dominant management thinking of her time — associated with Frederick Taylor's scientific management — treated workers as inputs to a process designed by managers, with efficiency the main goal. Follett rejected this approach. She argued that authority should come from the situation and the facts it presents, not from a person's position in a hierarchy; that conflict between workers and managers could be addressed productively by integrating their underlying interests rather than by domination or compromise; and that organisations functioned best when the people in them exercised genuine agency and shared in decisions. These arguments, made in the 1910s and 1920s, anticipated nearly all of the human-relations, participative management, and organisational democracy movements that developed after the Second World War. Peter Drucker called her a prophet of management; Chester Barnard, himself an influential management thinker, drew heavily on her work. Her account of constructive conflict — the idea that conflict should be used to reveal underlying interests that can be integrated, rather than suppressed or resolved by the victory of one party — remains influential in conflict resolution, negotiation theory, and organisational design. Her rediscovery since the 1970s has placed her alongside Drucker, Deming, and others as one of the founding figures of twentieth-century management thought, and has begun to correct the gender-biased histories of the field that long omitted her.

Key Ideas

Power with, not power over

Follett distinguished between two conceptions of power. Power over is the ability to make someone do something they would not have chosen to do; it is the power of domination. Power with is the capacity that a group develops by working together toward shared ends; it is the power of cooperation. Follett argued that most managers think in terms of power over — how to get workers to do what management wants — when they should be thinking in terms of power with — how to build the capacity of the whole organisation through genuine cooperation. The distinction is not merely moral. Power over, Follett argued, produces resistance, resentment, and poor results. Power with produces coordination, creativity, and better outcomes. The framework remains useful wherever people are tempted to coerce rather than collaborate.

The law of the situation

Follett argued that authority in an organisation should come from the demands of the situation, not from the position of the person giving orders. A manager who tells a worker what to do because I am the manager produces resistance; a manager who says this is what the situation requires invites collaboration. Follett used an example: instead of a manager ordering a worker to change a procedure, both should examine the situation together and together conclude what it demands. The order then comes from the facts, not from the hierarchy. This shifts the emotional and practical dynamic from authority-imposition to shared problem-solving. The idea has been rediscovered many times since, under various names, and is a founding principle of several modern management approaches.

Constructive conflict

Most organisations try to avoid conflict or suppress it when it appears. Follett argued this was a mistake. Conflict, she said, is not necessarily destructive; it is the expression of genuine differences in perspective or interest that, if worked with rather than suppressed, can produce better outcomes than any party could have reached alone. She identified three ways people respond to conflict: domination (one party wins), compromise (both parties give something up), and integration (a new solution that meets the underlying interests of both). Integration is the most creative and the most difficult. It requires looking past the stated positions to the underlying desires that produced them. Much of modern negotiation theory — particularly the interest-based approach of Fisher and Ury — descends from this framework.

Key Quotations

"Power is with, not power over."

— Creative Experience, 1924

Follett is drawing her core distinction between two conceptions of power. Power over is the familiar sense: the capacity to make someone else do what you want. Power with is less familiar: the capacity that a group generates by working together. The distinction is not just linguistic. The two kinds of power produce different outcomes. Power over produces resistance, resentment, and superficial compliance. Power with produces creativity, cooperation, and better decisions. The sentence is a compact statement of a view that shaped her entire approach to management and politics, and that remains worth holding against the still-dominant assumption that power is fundamentally about getting one's way.

"One person should not give orders to another person, but both should agree to take their orders from the situation."

— Dynamic Administration, 1940 (posthumous)

Follett is stating her law of the situation. The manager who says do this because I say so invites resistance; the manager who says the situation requires that we do this invites shared problem-solving. Both people — manager and worker — examine what the circumstances require and follow that rather than one dictating to the other. The shift sounds small but is large in practice. It moves authority from personalities to facts, and it treats both parties as thinking adults. Follett was not denying that managers have responsibility for decisions; she was arguing that the way orders are framed changes whether they produce cooperation or resistance, and that the productive framing is available.

Using This Thinker in the Classroom

Ethical Thinking When introducing two conceptions of power

How to introduce

Ask students: what does power mean to you? Most will describe something like the ability to make others do what you want. Introduce Follett's distinction between power over and power with. Power over is what they described — the power of domination. Power with is the capacity a group develops by working together. Discuss examples: a sports team whose players individually are unremarkable but together achieve things none of them could alone; a classroom where students help each other learn more than any of them could alone. Connect to everyday situations where collaboration produces more than command, and ask students where they have seen each in action.

Problem Solving When examining different ways of handling disagreements

How to introduce

Introduce Follett's three ways of handling conflict: domination (one side wins), compromise (both sides give something up), and integration (a new solution that meets the underlying interests of both). Ask students to think of a recent disagreement they witnessed or participated in. Which of the three was used? What alternatives were available? Discuss why integration is the hardest — it requires understanding what each side really wants underneath their stated positions and being willing to look for creative new solutions. Give examples of integration: shared spaces designed for different uses at different times, agreements that meet multiple needs through clever design rather than tradeoff.

For a short introduction

Pauline Graham's edited volume Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management (1995, Harvard Business School Press) collects her major essays with contemporary commentaries and is the most accessible starting point. The posthumous Dynamic Administration (1940) remains readable today.

Joan Tonn's Mary P

Follett

Creating Democracy, Transforming Management (2003, Yale University Press) is the standard biography.

Key Ideas

Integration as creative activity

Follett's idea of integration deserves longer treatment. When two parties are in conflict, their stated positions usually reflect underlying interests that they have translated into specific demands. The demands may be incompatible while the underlying interests can be met in some new way neither party had thought of. Follett gave many examples from her community work: a library dispute over reading-room hours where one side wanted longer opening times (to read) and the other shorter times (to have a quiet space); the integration was discovered by creating different spaces for different purposes. Finding integrations is creative work. It requires genuine understanding of what the other party wants, willingness to question one's own assumptions, and attention to the possibility of solutions neither party had proposed. Integration is more than compromise, in which both parties give something up; it produces genuinely new outcomes.

The group process

Follett rejected the view that groups are simply collections of individuals whose opinions can be averaged or voted. She argued that groups have their own life — they can produce ideas, understandings, and decisions that no individual member could have produced alone, if the group process is conducted well. This required genuine engagement: members listening to each other rather than waiting to speak, building on each other's ideas rather than competing, exploring disagreements rather than suppressing them. A well-run meeting or discussion group, on this view, is a form of collective thinking that is qualitatively different from individual thinking. Much subsequent work on teams, facilitation, and collaborative intelligence has drawn on or rediscovered Follett's analysis.

The limits of majority rule

In The New State (1918) Follett argued that majority rule was a crude way of handling political difference. When a majority outvotes a minority, the minority's legitimate interests are simply overridden; the resulting policy is not necessarily good, and the minority retains the grievances that produced the conflict. Follett proposed that genuine democracy requires mechanisms for integrating differences rather than just counting them. The group should work together to produce a solution that reflects the full range of views, not merely select one view over others. This is demanding. It requires time, patience, and good-faith engagement. Follett did not think it could replace voting entirely, but she thought modern democracies relied too much on voting and too little on integrative deliberation. The critique remains relevant wherever democracies find themselves unable to make wise decisions on difficult matters.

Key Quotations

"Conflict is the difference that enters into the very fibre of life itself."

— Dynamic Administration, 1940

Follett is arguing that conflict is not an unfortunate deviation from harmony but a fundamental feature of life. Whenever people have different perspectives, needs, or interests, conflict will arise. Trying to eliminate conflict altogether means either suppressing difference, which is unjust, or refusing to acknowledge it, which produces worse conflict later. The productive attitude is to accept that conflict will come and to develop the skill of working with it well. Much of her thinking follows from this basic stance. Integration, group process, constructive engagement — all of these are techniques for handling conflict productively rather than for eliminating it. The sentence is worth pausing on because so much management and political thought still assumes that a well-functioning organisation should have no conflict.

"We can often settle our differences better if we understand what they really are."

— Dynamic Administration, 1940

Follett is making a practical point that goes deeper than it first appears. People in conflict often state positions that do not reflect their underlying interests. A worker who demands higher pay may really want to feel appreciated. A manager who demands faster output may really want control over a process they do not understand. If the parties engage only with the stated positions, they will fight over the wrong thing. Understanding what the difference really is — the underlying interests behind the stated positions — is often what makes integration possible. The practical skill Follett recommends is asking: what do they actually want, and what do I actually want, behind what we are saying? Most difficult conflicts become tractable when this question is asked seriously.

Using This Thinker in the Classroom

Critical Thinking When examining how authority works

How to introduce

Present Follett's law of the situation: authority should come from the facts of a situation, not from the position of the person giving orders. Ask students: when someone tells you to do something, do you respond differently depending on how it is framed? Most will recognise that they do. Orders with no explanation produce resistance; explanations that make the situation visible produce cooperation. Discuss the implications for teaching, parenting, and managing. Is it always possible to frame orders this way? What happens when the situation does not support the order but someone in authority wants it anyway? Connect to broader discussions of when authority is legitimate and when it is not.

Cultural Heritage and Identity When examining why some thinkers are forgotten and others remembered

How to introduce

Tell students that Follett was widely respected in her lifetime, that Peter Drucker called her a prophet of management, and that her work was then largely forgotten for forty years before being rediscovered in the 1970s. Ask: why might this have happened? Discuss the factors: gender (she was one of very few women in a field dominated by men); style (her work crossed political philosophy and management, not fitting neatly into either); historical timing (her ideas suited a later moment better than her own). Connect to the broader pattern of women thinkers whose work was forgotten and recovered. What does her rediscovery teach us about how intellectual history gets written?

Problem Solving When examining how to work with conflict rather than suppress it

How to introduce

Introduce Follett's view that conflict is a fundamental feature of human life, not a deviation to be eliminated. Discuss the implications. If conflict is normal, then the skill to develop is not avoiding conflict but working with it well. Ask students: what does working with conflict well look like? Discuss the practical steps Follett recommended — understand what each party really wants, look for creative solutions neither had thought of, treat the conflict as a source of useful information rather than as a failure. Connect to skills students need in group projects, family disagreements, and public controversies. The ability to engage conflict productively is one of the most transferable skills there is.

Further Reading

Follett's own books Creative Experience (1924) and The New State (1918) are the major primary sources. Ellen Fletcher's Disappearing Acts (2001) examines her and other early women management thinkers. Peter Drucker's essays on Follett, collected in various places, provide useful contemporary responses from a subsequent major figure. The Harvard Business School library holds substantial Follett manuscript materials.

Key Ideas

Depersonalising authority

One of Follett's most distinctive arguments was that authority should be depersonalised — removed from individual personalities and located in the shared understanding of the situation. When a worker resists taking orders, the resistance is often not against the order itself but against the implied superiority of the person giving it. If the order is understood as coming from the situation — this is what the job requires, not what I as your superior demand — the resistance often disappears. The argument applies not only in workplaces but in families, classrooms, and public life. Depersonalised authority is not no authority; it is authority that the people subject to it can see the grounds for. This approach takes more skill than personal command and achieves more lasting cooperation.

The organic view of organisations

Follett rejected the dominant mechanical metaphor for organisations — the factory as machine, with workers as parts that can be replaced. She proposed an organic view: an organisation is a living whole whose parts affect each other and cannot be fully understood in isolation. Change one part and the others adjust. Optimise one department and the others may suffer. The organic view implies that managers cannot treat organisations like machines to be tuned; they must understand interdependencies, feedback, and emergence. The view anticipated much of the later systems-thinking tradition in management and was ahead of its time. It also has clear resonances with ecological thinking and with the organic metaphors that would appear in other fields later in the twentieth century.

Community as the foundation of politics

Follett's political writings argued that democratic government depended on living communities of citizens who deliberated together about shared problems, not on isolated individuals casting votes. Without the prior experience of working together in neighbourhoods, workplaces, and civic organisations, people would not have developed the skills of integrative thinking that democracy at the large scale required. Her community work in Boston was not charity; it was the cultivation of the practices and relationships on which genuine democracy rested. This view of democracy as requiring a supporting structure of active communities has been developed by many later thinkers and has become a standard theme in debates about civic engagement, participation, and the health of democracies. Follett's contribution was to see it clearly when others were taking the formal mechanisms of democracy for granted.

Key Quotations

"Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led."

— Dynamic Administration, 1940

Follett is redefining leadership against the dominant view of her time (and ours). The powerful leader is not the one who dominates followers but the one who develops their capacity. A leader whose team becomes more capable, more confident, and more able to act independently has done more than a leader whose team simply does what they are told. The measure of leadership, on this view, is what the followers can do — not what the leader can command. This inverts the usual hierarchical assumption that good followers reflect good leadership. It may be closer to the truth that good followers are evidence that the leader has helped them become capable. The view has been influential in later thinking about servant leadership, empowerment, and coaching.

"The test of the real integrity of a group is whether or not the individual members dare to disagree."

— Creative Experience, 1924

Follett is describing a specific property of healthy groups. A group in which everyone agrees may look cohesive but is often dysfunctional — members are suppressing dissent, withholding information, or pretending agreement they do not feel. A group whose members can openly disagree, and disagree without punishment, has the integrity to surface difficult issues and work them through. The word integrity is precise: the group holds together through honest engagement, not through enforced agreement. Follett's insight anticipates later work on psychological safety in teams, on groupthink, and on the conditions of good collective decision-making. It also applies beyond work groups to families, classrooms, and political communities.

Using This Thinker in the Classroom

Ethical Thinking When examining the limits of majority rule

How to introduce

Present Follett's critique of majority rule as a crude way of handling political difference. When a majority outvotes a minority, the minority's interests are simply overridden; the policy is not necessarily good; the grievance remains. Follett proposed that democracy should aim for integration of differences, not just vote counting. Ask students: is this realistic at the scale of modern democracies? Discuss what conditions integration requires — time, patience, good-faith engagement, small groups, shared commitment to outcomes. Consider what institutions might support integration: deliberative assemblies, participatory planning, restorative justice processes. What is lost if democracy is reduced to voting, and what is gained if it is expanded beyond it?

Cultural Heritage and Identity When examining the relationship between community and democracy

How to introduce

Introduce Follett's view that democratic government depends on living communities where people deliberate together about shared problems. Without these communities, people lack the skills and experience that democracy at the large scale requires. Ask students: does this hold up? Discuss what is happening to community in contemporary societies — the decline of civic organisations, the rise of digital communication, the weakening of local institutions. If Follett was right, these trends would weaken democracy itself. What does it take to build the communities Follett thought democracy needed? Connect to current discussions of civic engagement, social capital, and democratic decline.

Common Misconceptions

Common misconception

Follett was a management consultant who wrote about business techniques.

→

What to teach instead

Follett was primarily a political philosopher and community organiser whose work on management emerged from her broader thinking about democracy, community, and human nature. Her major books are political philosophy, not business manuals. She came to business audiences late in her career and was invited because her political and social philosophy offered something the rapidly-growing field of management lacked — a framework for thinking about organisations as human communities. Reading her as a proto-business-writer misses the depth and seriousness of her intellectual project. She was one of the most significant American political thinkers of the early twentieth century whose insights happened to apply to business as well.

Common misconception

Integration of conflict means everyone gets what they want.

→

What to teach instead

Integration, in Follett's sense, does not mean that every party gets their stated demand satisfied. It means finding a solution that meets the underlying interests of the parties, which may look quite different from what they initially asked for. Sometimes integration is not possible — the underlying interests are genuinely incompatible, and compromise or domination becomes necessary. Follett did not pretend that integration always works or that there is no such thing as genuine zero-sum conflict. Her argument was that many conflicts treated as zero-sum are not actually zero-sum, and that the skills of finding integrations can resolve more conflicts productively than domination-and-compromise ever will.

Common misconception

Follett opposed all forms of authority.

→

What to teach instead

Follett did not oppose authority as such; she argued for a different kind of authority. Her law of the situation was that authority should come from the demands of circumstances understood in common, rather than from the personal will of superiors. She recognised that organisations need direction and that someone needs to take responsibility for decisions. What she objected to was the personal, hierarchical, arbitrary exercise of authority that treats subordinates as objects rather than partners. The alternative is not no authority but authority grounded differently — in shared understanding of what the situation requires. Reading her as anti-authority rather than as advocating a better form of authority misses her positive proposal.

Common misconception

Follett's ideas are historically interesting but dated for modern organisations.

→

What to teach instead

Most of Follett's central ideas remain live in contemporary management thought, often rediscovered under new names. Interest-based negotiation, participative management, servant leadership, psychological safety, democratic deliberation, restorative practices — all have deep affinities with her work. Her rediscovery from the 1970s onwards reflects this continued relevance. The framing has changed, the specific examples have dated, but the underlying arguments about power, conflict, and organisation continue to be useful. Dismissing her as historical risks missing how recent management thinking is often catching up to positions she articulated a century ago rather than superseding them.

Intellectual Connections

Influenced

Peter Drucker

Drucker acknowledged Follett as one of the founders of his field and called her a prophet of management. Many of Drucker's themes — the rejection of command-and-control management, the importance of worker participation, the framing of management as a human practice — can be traced back to her work. Drucker was not alone; Chester Barnard and other mid-century management thinkers also drew on her. Reading them together shows a continuous line of thought that runs from Follett's 1920s lectures through mid-century management to the present, often with the intermediate figures acknowledging their debt to her while later readers forgot she had been the original source.

Anticipates

Elinor Ostrom

Ostrom's work on how communities self-organise to manage shared resources has strong resonances with Follett's earlier work on community self-governance. Both argued that people can and do govern themselves effectively through negotiated rules, patient deliberation, and shared commitment — not only through top-down authority. Both produced detailed empirical accounts of how this works in practice. Reading them together shows a continuous tradition of thought about self-governance that runs from Follett's community work in Boston to Ostrom's field studies around the world, with the intervening years often underserved by attention to these themes.

Complements

W. Edwards Deming

Follett and Deming, though working in different fields, reached convergent conclusions. Both rejected command-and-control management; both saw workers as capable adults whose participation improved outcomes; both understood organisations as systems rather than hierarchies. Deming's statistical work made the practical case for these views in the specific context of manufacturing quality; Follett's philosophical work made the conceptual case that applies across all organisations. Reading them together shows how the same basic insights about humane and effective management have been reached from different starting points, reinforcing each other.

In Dialogue With

John Dewey

Dewey and Follett were American contemporaries working on the theory and practice of democracy from closely related angles. Dewey's pragmatist philosophy emphasised democracy as a way of life requiring continuous public deliberation; Follett's community organising and political philosophy emphasised integration of differences through working together. The two thinkers knew each other and drew on common sources in pragmatism and progressive reform. Reading them together fills out a specifically American tradition of democratic theory that emphasised participation and deliberation over formal mechanisms of voting and representation.

Anticipates

bell hooks

hooks's work on teaching as an engaged practice that treats students as active participants rather than passive recipients has affinities with Follett's views on management. Both argued against top-down models of their respective practices — teaching and managing — and both insisted on the agency and dignity of the people who had traditionally been treated as subordinates. Both saw the work of their field as fundamentally relational rather than technical. Reading them together across the decades that separate them shows a continuing line of thought about how to work with people rather than on them, and how doing so produces better outcomes for everyone involved.

Complements

Hannah Arendt

Arendt, writing a generation later, also distinguished power from violence and argued that genuine power arises from human beings acting together rather than from one person's capacity to make others comply. The parallel with Follett is substantial. Both argued against the reduction of power to domination; both saw collective action as the source of real political capacity; both worried about modern tendencies to treat politics as the enforcement of policy rather than the shaping of common life. Reading them together shows how twentieth-century thinkers from different fields converged on shared insights about power, politics, and the possibilities of human cooperation.