The Emergence

The Emergence

The people of Western Europe were reduced to filling the basic need of self-preservation after the fall of the Roman Empire. The main objective of  an individual was protection against murder, robbery and violence. For that protection, one frequently sought the protection of a person more powerful than himself, and in return for the protection he paid the price of subservience, including the loss of individual freedom and the rise of a feudal relationship.

Because of these economic and environmental conditions the growth of the institutions of feudalism was both natural and inevitable. The feudal system itself of course was actually nothing more than an extension of practices that appeared in the final days of the Roman Empire. Thus, some conditions of feudalism came in existence in Roman times.

Feudal Organization

The organization of feudalism was basically a scalar one with descending grades of delegated authority. At the top of the great feudal pyramid stood the emperor or the king and all the land in his dominions belonged to him. He kept large areas for his personal use and invested the highest nobles with the reminder. The great vassals of the crown held these fiefs on condition of rendering certain specified services, mainly military and financial. In like manner, these vassals in turn exacted services similar in kind from their sub-vassals. This system of subinfeudation resulted in successive graduations down to the smallest feudal unit, the knight’s fee.

The process of decentralization represented by this pyramid was further emphasized by the growth of the institution of immunity. Under this system the vassal won the right to govern his own territory as he wished. The feudal unit, the manor, became in some respects a governmental unit with its one-man court. Feudalism, therefore, represented another large-scale venture in decentralization and involved the same conditions and problems as those faced by contemporary governmental and business organizations.

The primary problem then as now was to determine how to preserve the proper balance between centralized authority and local autonomy. Decentralized operation was necessary to provide the immediate attention and flexible needed to adjust policies to local conditions. Centralized authority was equally important to insure that all the advantages arising out of the total interaction of all the parts on the whole, or the whole on all parts, would be realized.

According to Mooney and Reiley, this balance is not merely a question of management; it also involves the form of organization through which management can best operate and become effective.

It showed that with a common interest this type of organization would work, but, they found, the common interest concept must exist. The one major defect of feudalism was the inaccurate assumption that this common interest did exist. The same assumption was also made by the organizers of the Roman, Egyptian and Greek Empires.

Finally, feudalistic organization taught management that delegation of authority is not an abdication – that the delegate always has the authority to take back what he delegated and that the delegation was a conferring and not a transferring of authority. The inappropriate delegation of authority by transfer showed clearly that if a manger wished to organize a function on a decentralized basis, the organization must be accomplished on a base of conferred authority, otherwise the sought-after decentralization would turn into disintegration.