Plato's Republic, Homer's Iliad and Machiavelli's The Prince - these literary classics may seem to have little to do with contemporary management strategies but, according to US specialist Ricky W. Griffin, managers often cite their relevance to today's business problems.

Griffin says the historical context of management is extremely important in order to avoid past mistakes and learn from the successes.

Some say management is an exact science like chemistry, biology or physics. Others believe it is much more of an art or a craft because the outcome of its strategies cannot be accurately predicted.

An early example of management practice resulted in the Egyptian pyramids. Such complicated structures required carefully co-ordinated planning and superb management when being built.

The ancient Romans used management to facilitate communication and control throughout their territories.

Today, management is not just the preserve of factories or large corporations but can be found in the home, in schools - wherever there are tasks to be completed.

Its evolution has always been shaped by social, economic and political developments but it was only from the late 1800s that it began to take on recognisable structures.

According to Mr Michael McDonnell of the Institute of Personnel Development, modern management emerged from the need to enable mass production in factories.

Key to this development was Frederick Taylor who worked at a steel factory in Philadelphia: "He studied the various jobs done by the worker and broke them down into a very rigid job description detailing how long each task should take," said Mr McDonnell.

This method became "scientific management" and aimed to increase the productivity of the factory workers.

Many plants adopted Taylor's methods but he did come in for some criticism - workers believed scientific management was a device to squeeze more from employees so that the workforce could be reduced.

Other research suggested there were more worker-friendly ways to increase productivity. In the 1920s and 1930s Elton Mayo conducted the so-called Hawthorne experiments in a factory near Chicago. He found that by acknowledging a worker's individual traits rather than treating him or her as robots, productivity was also increased.

More recent developments in the business environment have caused major shifts in management style. With the invention of the microprocessor, advances in telecommunications and the removal of trade barriers corporations needed to change the way they were run.

With this in mind about 10 years ago Rosabeth Moss-Canter wrote a book entitled Teaching Elephants to Dance. It targeted large traditionally structured companies such as IBM and General Motors which she believed needed more agility to respond to changes in the market.

Her theory was based on the four Fs: modern companies should be "Fast, Focused, Fun and Flexible". In management terms, said Mr McDonnell, this meant the removal of layers of middle management and the theory of employee empowerment being widely introduced.

A spokeswoman for telecommunications company Eircell says that as the company has grown "the management side has developed with it". "The team ethos is very strong," she says. "There is no hierarchy. People are empowered and encouraged to develop an entereprenurial style within the company."

In the McDonalds group of fast-food restaurants the diversity of the management role is immediately apparent.

According to Annette Kelly, its extensive training courses are designed to apprise management staff of the required technical skills but also to "give them the tools to communicate effectively with customers and staff".

Part of the management and staff structure is a performance appraisal system which allows for effective discipline and motivation of all workers.

Mr Mell Clifford, human resources director with Tesco Ireland, outlines what Tesco wants in management: "The key thing for us is that they have the right attitude and the potential to develop. They must be energetic, interested in people and enthusiastic about retailing."

The retailing sector is full of people who began by stacking supermarket shelves and rose through the aisles to take up top positions. There are 800 staff at management level across all departments in Tesco Ireland.

But while management and personnel strategies appear to operate a million miles away from Taylor's rigid rules, Michael McDonnell of IPD believes the spirit is still alive in the State's growing number of callcentres: "At these organisations workers are given a strict script to follow when they take calls from customers and they can only spend a certain time on the phone. It is ironic because these jobs are best done by creative problem solvers but the role in its current form is very limiting."

According to McDonnell, there is already a phrase for it in some business quarters - they call it neo-Taylorism.