Reading — 2026 Jan–Apr Recall Set 70

When students graduate and first enter the workforce, the most common choice is to find an entry-level position. This can be a job such as an unpaid internship, an assistant, a secretary, or a junior partner position. Traditionally, we start with simpler jobs and work our way up. Young professionals with a plan to become senior partners, associates, or even managers of a workplace. However, these promotions can be few and far between, leaving many young professionals unfamiliar with management experience. An important step is understanding the role and responsibilities of a person in a managing position. Managers are organisational members who are responsible for the work performance of other organisational members. Managers have formal authority to use organisational resources and to make decisions. Managers at different levels of the organization engage in different amounts of time on the four managerial functions of planning, organising, leading, and controlling. However, as many professionals already know, managing styles can be very different depending on where you work. Some managing styles are strictly hierarchical. Other managing styles can be more casual and relaxed, where the manager may act more like a team member rather than a strict boss. Many researchers have created a more scientific approach in studying these different approaches to managing. In the 1960s, researcher Henry Mintzberg created a seminal organisational model using three categories. These categories represent three major functional approaches, which are designated as interpersonal, informational and decisional. Introduced Category 1: INTERPERSONAL ROLES. Interpersonal roles require managers to direct and supervise employees and the organisation. The figurehead is typically a top or middle manager. This manager may communicate future organisational goals or ethical guidelines to employees at company meetings. They also attend ribbon-cutting ceremonies, host receptions, presentations and other activities associated with the figurehead role. A leader acts as an example for other employees to follow, gives commands and directions to subordinates, makes decisions, and mobilises employee support. They are also responsible for the selection and training of employees. Managers must be leaders at all levels of the organisation; often lower-level managers look to top management for this leadership example. In the role of liaison, a manager must coordinate the work of others in different work units, establish alliances between others, and work to share resources. This role is particularly critical for middle managers, who must often compete with other managers for important resources, yet must maintain successful working relationships with them for long time periods. Introduced Category 2: INFORMATIONAL ROLES. Informational roles are those in which managers obtain and transmit information. These roles have changed dramatically as technology has improved. The monitor evaluates the performance of others and takes corrective action to improve that performance. Monitors also watch for changes in the environment and within the company that may affect individual and organisational performance. Monitoring occurs at all levels of management. The role of disseminator requires that managers inform employees of changes that affect them and the organisation. They also communicate the company's vision and purpose. Introduced Category 3: DECISIONAL ROLES. Decisional roles require managers to plan strategy and utilise resources. There are four specific roles that are decisional. The entrepreneur role requires the manager to assign resources to develop innovative goods and services, or to expand a business. The disturbance handler corrects unanticipated problems facing the organisation from the internal or external environment. The third decisional role, that of resource allocator, involves determining which work units will get which resources. Top managers are likely to make large, overall budget decisions, while middle managers may make more specific allocations. Finally, the negotiator works with others, such as suppliers, distributors, or labor unions, to reach agreements regarding products and services. Although Mintzberg's initial research in 1960s helped categorise manager approaches, Mintzberg was still concerned about research involving other roles in the workplace. Mintzberg considered expanding his research to other roles, such as the role of disseminator, figurehead, liaison and spokesperson. Each role would have different special characteristics, and a new categorisation system would have to be made for each role to understand it properly. While Mintzberg's initial research was helpful in starting the conversation, there has since been criticism of his methods from other researchers. Some criticisms of the work were that even though there were multiple categories, the role of manager is still more complex. There are still many manager roles that are not as traditional and are not captured in Mintzberg's original three categories. In addition, sometimes, Mintzberg's research was not always effective. The research, when applied to real-life situations, did not always improve the management process in real-life practice. These two criticisms against Mintzberg's research method raised some questions about whether or not the research was useful to how we understand "managers" in today's world. However, even if the criticisms against Mintzberg's work are true, it does not mean that the original research from the 1960s is completely useless. Those researchers did not say Mintzberg's research is invalid. His research has two positive functions to the further research. The first positive function is Mintzberg provided a useful functional approach to analyse management. And he used this approach to provide a clear concept of the role of manager to the researcher. When researching human behavior, it is important to be concise about the subject of the research. Mintzberg's research has helped other researchers clearly define what a "manager" is, because in real-life situations, the "manager" is not always the same position title. Mintzberg's definitions added clarity and precision to future research on the topic. The second positive function is Mintzberg's research could be regarded as a good beginning to give a new insight to further research on this field in the future. Scientific research is always a gradual process. Just because Mintzberg's initial research had certain flaws, does not mean it is useless to other researchers. Researchers who are interested in studying the workplace in a systematic way have older research to look back on. A researcher doesn't have to start from the very beginning—older research like Mintzberg's have shown what methods work well and what methods are not as appropriate for workplace dynamics. As more young professionals enter the job market, this research will continue to study and change the way we think about the modern workplace.

A Stories and poems aimed at children have an exceedingly long history: lullabies, for example, were sung in Roman times, and a few nursery games and rhymes are almost as ancient. Yet so far as written-down literature is concerned, while there were stories in print before 1700 that children often seized on when they had the chance, such as translations of Aesop’s fables, fairy-stories and popular ballads and romances, these were not aimed at young people in particular. Since the only genuinely child-oriented literature at this time would have been a few instructional works to help with reading and general knowledge, plus the odd Puritanical tract as an aid to morality, the only course for keen child readers was to read adult literature. This still occurs today, especially with adult thrillers or romances that include more exciting, graphic detail than is normally found in the literature for younger readers. B By the middle of the 18th century there were enough eager child readers, and enough parents glad to cater to this interest, for publishers to specialize in children’s books whose first aim was pleasure rather than education or morality. In Britain, a London merchant named Thomas Boreham produced Cajanus, The Swedish Giant in 1742, while the more famous John Newbery published A Little Pretty Pocket Book in 1744. Its contents — rhymes, stories, children’s games plus a free gift (‘A ball and a pincushion’) — in many ways anticipated the similar lucky-dip contents of children’s annuals this century. It is a tribute to Newbery’s flair that he hit upon a winning formula quite so quickly, to be pirated almost immediately in America. C Such pleasing levity was not to last. Influenced by Rousseau, whose Emile (1762) decreed that all books for children save Robinson Crusoe were a dangerous diversion, contemporary critics saw to it that children’s literature should be instructive and uplifting. Prominent among such voices was Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, whose magazine The Guardian of Education (1802) carried the first regular reviews of children’s books. It was she who condemned fairy-tales for their violence and general absurdity; her own stories, Fabulous Histories (1786) described talking animals who were always models of sense and decorum. D So the moral story for children was always threatened from within, given the way children have of drawing out entertainment from the sternest moralist. But the greatest blow to the improving children’s book was to come from an unlikely source indeed: early 19th-century interest in folklore. Both nursery rhymes, selected by James Orchard Halliwell for a folklore society in 1842, and collection of fairy-stories by the scholarly Grimm brothers, swiftly translated into English in 1823, soon rocket to popularity with the young, quickly leading to new editions, each one more child-centered than the last. From now on younger children could expect stories written for their particular interest and with the needs of their own limited experience of life kept well to the fore. E What eventually determined the reading of older children was often not the availability of special children’s literature as such but access to books that contained characters, such as young people or animals, with whom they could more easily empathize, or action, such as exploring or fighting, that made few demands on adult maturity or understanding. F The final apotheosis of literary childhood as something to be protected from unpleasant reality came with the arrival in the late 1930s of child-centered best sellers intent on entertainment at its most escapist. In Britain novelists such as Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton described children who were always free to have the most unlikely adventures, secure in the knowledge that nothing bad could ever happen to them in the end. The fact that war broke out again during her books’ greatest popularity fails to register at all in the self-enclosed world inhabited by Enid Blyton’s young characters. Reaction against such dream-worlds was inevitable after World War II, coinciding with the growth of paperback sales, children’s libraries and a new spirit of moral and social concern. Urged on by committed publishers and progressive librarians, writers slowly began to explore new areas of interest while also shifting the settings of their plots from the middle-class world to which their chiefly adult patrons had always previously belonged. G Critical emphasis, during this development, has been divided. For some the most important task was to rid children’s books of the social prejudice and exclusiveness no longer found acceptable. Others concentrated more on the positive achievements of contemporary children’s literature. That writers of these works are now often recommended to the attentions of adult as well as child readers echoes the 19th-century belief that children’s literature can be shared by the generations, rather than being a defensive barrier between childhood and the necessary growth towards adult understanding.

Ever since its elevation to the status of an academic discipline, history has been very largely concerned with problems of its own making. These may be gaps which the young researcher is advised by supervisors to fill; or established views which he or she is encouraged to challenge. In either case, the need for the researcher to provide new insights in order to gain professional advancement often counts for more than the intrinsic interest of the topic. Social history is quite different. It touches on, and arguably helps to focus, major issues of public debate. It mobilises popular enthusiasm and engages popular passions. It prides itself on being concerned with everyday things rather than sensational events and is directed against the ‘Great Man’ theories that originally characterised history, and the tedious focus on bureaucratic issues that subsequently dominated the 1920s and 30s. This is also reflected in the way it is taught, through the adoption of multi-disciplinary perspectives rather than a narrow historical interpretation. Social history emerged, both as a popular enthusiasm and as a scholarly practice, from the cultural revolution of the 1960s in North America and Europe, and reproduces its leading inspirations. The spirit of social history was pre-eminently a modernising one, as reflected in its choice of subject matter. Whereas traditional history had focused on the 12th to 17th centuries, social history was apt to make its historical homeland in the 19th century. Latterly, it has even begun to extend its inquiry up to contemporary events and movements. The subject matter favoured by the new social history, with its move away from the aristocracy and the establishment, corresponds to other cultural manifestations of the 1960s, such as New Wave British cinema, with its working-class protagonists, or ‘Pop art’, with its use of everyday artefacts. Similarly, the anti-institutional bias of the new social history—the renewed determination to write the history of ‘ordinary’ people as against that of statecraft—could be said to echo a much more widespread collapse of social deference, and a questioning of authority figures of all kinds. Another major 1960s influence on the new social history—very different in its origins and effects—was the ‘nostalgia industry’, which focused on the sale of memorabilia and artefacts from recent history. This emerged as a kind of negative counterpart to the otherwise dominant modernisation of the decade and reflected a disenchantment, no less apparent on the Left of the political spectrum than on the Right, with post-war social change. Industrial archaeology, an invention of the 1960s, elevated disused factories and mills to the status of national monuments. Following in the same track, property restorers turned houses built for 19th-century factory workers—once emblems of poverty, overcrowding, and ill-health—into picturesque residences. In another sphere, one could point to the proliferation of folk clubs and the discovery of industrial folk songs, prefiguring one of the major themes of the new social history—the dignity of labour. So far as historical work was concerned, by the 1970s the sense of disenchantment had crystallised into an idealised view of the past, fostering a nostalgic regard for disappearing communities. The restoration of vanished components of ‘the world we have lost’ became a major impetus in historical writing and research. The dignity of ordinary people could be said to be the unifying theme of this line of historical inquiry and retrieval—a celebration of everyday life, even, perhaps especially, when it involved hardship and suffering. Despite the novelty of its subject matter, social history reproduces many of the characteristic biases of its predecessors. Social historians are good at amassing details on household artefacts, budgets, daily purchases, but at times the evidence is assumed to speak for itself, and the simple reproduction of fact masquerades as explanation. The facts accumulated may leave no conceptual space for the great absences, for the many areas where the documentary record is silent. The indulgence which social historians extend towards their subjects, and the desire to establish ‘empathy’—seeing the past in terms of its own values rather than those of today—can also serve to flatter our self-esteem, making history a field in which, at no great cost to ourselves, we can demonstrate our enlarged sympathies and benevolence. Recognising our kinship to people in the past, and tracing, or discovering, their likeness to ourselves, we are flattered in the belief that underneath we are all lovable; eccentric perhaps and even absurd, but large-hearted, generous and frank. This sense of integration with the past can thus serve as a comfortable alternative to critical awareness and self-questioning, allowing us to dignify the present by illegitimate association with the past. Social history, if it is to fulfil its subversive potential, needs to be a great deal more disturbing. If it is to celebrate a common humanity, and to bring past and present closer together, far more weight needs to be given to the effects of insecurities and emergencies—the fears that shadow the growing up of children, the oppositions we encounter during our lives—experiences which may be hard for an individual to categorise but which nevertheless have a significance which goes beyond that individual. Perhaps too we might recognise that there is a profound condescension in the notion of ‘ordinary people’—that unified totality in which social historians are apt to deal. Implicitly it is a category from which we tend to exclude ourselves, although in fact we are exceptional only by our privilege of hindsight. ‘There are … no masses,’ Raymond Williams wrote, ‘only ways of seeing people as masses.’ It is perhaps time for historians to scrutinise the term ‘ordinary people’ in the same way.