Organization men and women: making managers at Bell Canada from the 1940s to the 1960s

The development of management as an occupation in post-World War II Canada is a topic that has received some attention from historians, but it is still an aspect of work and labor history that merits closer attention. This article seeks to reveal something about the nature of management work in Canada in the postwar decades by looking at how managers at Bell Canada were trained from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. This includes examining management theories that were prevalent at that time, the international aspects of them, and how they were used in Bell's corporate training programs. This analysis shows that, in the case of one of Canada's largest companies, management training was as much a process of adapting people to the methods and beliefs of the organization as it was about educating them to perform management functions.