Luther Gulick

July 28th, 2012 Luther Gulick

Luther Halsey Gulick, III (January 17, 1892 in Osaka – January 10, 1993 in New York) was an expert on public administration. He was the son of physician and Camp Fire Girls founder Luther Gulick (1865-1918).

Luther Gulick III graduated from Oberlin College in 1914 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1920. He became a staff member of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research (later the Institute of Public Administration). He taught at Columbia from 1931-1942, and then returned to the Institute of Public Administration as its director from 1942 until his retirement in 1961.

Luther Gulick was among those who expanded on the works of Henri Fayol to build a foundation for management theory. He viewed management functions as universal. His seven-activities acronym, POSDCORB, is a familiar word throughout management practice. POSDCORB stands for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, co-ordinating, reporting and budgeting. He wanted to revise administrative practices by the establishment of general rules.

He agreed with Frederick Taylor in that he believed that certain characteristics of organizations provided administrators with the means to manage effectively. He was in accord with Max Weber in that organizations were hierarchical. Gulick added the concept of span of control, which addressed the factors limiting the number of people a manager could supervise. He also recommended unity of command because he felt that people should know to whom they were responsible. His homogeneity of work centred on the fact that an organization should not combine dissimilar activities in single agencies. This was the basis of Gulick's major contribution in the area of departmentalization.