The practice of management goes back to 3000 b.c., to the first government organizations developed by the Sumerians and Egyptians, but a formal study of management is relatively recent. The early study of management as we know it began with what is now called the classical perspective.

The classical perspective on management emerged during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The factory system that began to appear in the 1800s posed challenges that earlier organizations had not encountered. Problems arose in tooling the plants, organizing managerial structure, training employees (many of them non-English-speaking immigrants), scheduling complex manufacturing operations, and dealing with increased labor dissatisfaction and resulting strikes. Between 1880 and 1920, the number of professional managers in the United States grew from 161,000 to over 1 million.

These professional managers began developing and testing solutions to the mounting challenges of organizing, coordinating, and controlling large numbers of people and increasing worker productivity. Thus began the evolution of modern management from the classical perspective.