Abstract
This paper attempts to make sense of the apparent paradox of the successful representation of management as a technical practice coexisting with a lack of success in management sustaining a project of professionalization. The success of the former has, for many occupations, been the key to the latter, especially when allied with university licensing. The main issues and debates relating to management as a technical practice, management as a profession, and the role of the management academy are outlined. This leads to an alternative interpretation of their relation, in which the representation of management as a technical practice is envisaged not as a failed professionalization of management but rather as a successful responsibilization of managers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abbott, A. (1988).The System of Professions An Essay on the Division of Expert Labour, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Alvesson, M. (1987).Organization Theory and Technocratic Consciousness: Rationality, Ideology and the Quality of Work, de Gruyter, Berlin.
Alvesson, M., and Willmott, H. (eds.) (1992).Critical Management Studies, Sage, London.
Barley, S., and Kunda, G. (1992). Design and devotion: Surges of rational and normative ideologies of control in managerial discourse.Admin. Sci. Q. 37, 363–399.
Bendix, R. (1956).Work and Authority in Industry. Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization, John Wiley, New York.
Bernstein, R. (1976).The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, Blackwell, Oxford.
Bledstein, B. (1976).The Culture of Professionalism. The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Norton, New York.
Boje, D., and Dennehy, R. (1993).Managing in the Postmodern World. America's Revolution Against Exploitation, Kendall Hunt, Dubuque, IA.
Bowles, S., and Gintis, H. (1976).Schooling in Capitalist America, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Brandeis, L. D. (1914).Business—A Profession, Small, Maynard, Boston.
Burnham, J. (1945).The Managerial Revolution, Penguin, London.
Carey, A. (1967) The Hawthorne studies: A radical criticism.Am. Sociol. Rev. 32, 403–416.
Carlson, S. (1951).Executive Behaviour, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, (1991 reprint).
Casson, H. (1915).The Axioms of Business, Efficiency Exchange, London.
Chandler, A. (1965).The Railroads: The Nation's First Big Business, Sources and Readings, Harcourt Brace, New York.
Chia, R., and Morgan, S. (1996). Educating the Philosopher-manager: De-signing the times.Manage. Learn,27, 37–64.
Child, J. (1969).British Management Thought. A Critical Analysis, Allen & Unwin, London.
Child, J., Fores, M., Glover, I., and Lawrence, P. (1983). A price to pay? Professionalism and work organization in Britain and West Germany.Sociology 17, 63–78.
Clark, T. (1995).Managing Consultants. Consultancy as the Management of Impressions, Open University Press, Milton Keynes.
Clegg, S., Boreham, P., and Dow, G. (1986).Class, Politics and the Economy, Routledge Kegan Paul, London.
Collin, A. (1996). The MBA: The potential for students to find their voice in Babel. In French, R., and Grey, C. (eds.),Rethinking Management Education, Sage, London, pp. 132–151.
Deetz, S. (1992).Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization, SUNY Press, New York.
du Gay, P. (1995).Consumption and Identity at Work, Sage, London.
Engwall, L. (1992).Mercury Meets Minerva. Business Administration in Academia: The Swedish Case, Pergamon Press, Oxford.
Enteman, W. (1993).Managerialism. The Emergence of a New Ideology, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Foucault, M. (1970).The Order of Things, Tavistock, London.
Foucault, M. (1979).Discipline and Punish, Penquin, London.
French, R., and Grey, C. (eds.) (1996).Rethinking Management Education, Sage, London.
Furusten, S. (1995).The Managerial Discourse—A Study of the Creation and Diffusion of Popular Management Knowledge, Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
Game, A. (1990).Undoing Sociology, Routledge, London.
Garsten, C., and Grey, C. (1997). How to become oneself: Discourses of subjectivity in postbureaucratic organizations.Organization 4, 211–228.
Giddens, A. (1974).Positivism and Sociology, Heinemann, London.
Grey, C. (1994). Career as project of the self and labour process discipline.Sociology 28, 427–472.
Grey, C. (1996a). Critique and renewal in management education.Manage. Learn. 27, 7–20.
Grey, C. (1996b). Towards a critique of managerialism. The contribution of Simone Weil.J. Manage. Stud. 33, 591–611.
Grey, C., and French, R. (1996). Rethinking management education: An introduction. In French, R., and Grey, C. (eds.),Rethinking Management Education, Sage, London, pp. 1–22.
Grey, C., and Mitev, N. (1995). Management education: A polemic.Manage. Learn. 26, 73–90.
Grey, C., Knights, D., and Willmott, H. (1996). Is a critical pedagogy of management possible? In French, R., and Grey, C. (eds.),Rethinking Management Education, Sage, London, pp. 94–110.
Habermas, J. (1971).Towards a Rational Society, Heinemann, London.
Habermas, J. (1987).The Theory of Communicative Action (Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason), Vol. 2, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Heckscher, C. (1995).White Collar Blues, Basic Books, New York.
Heckscher, C., and Donnellon, A. (eds.) (1994).The Post-Bureaucratic Organization. New Perspectives on Organizational Change, Sage, London.
Hines, R. (1988). Financial Accounting: In communicating reality, we construct reality.Account. Organiz. Soc. 13, 251–261.
Jackson, N. and Carter, P. (1995). The “fact” of management.Scand. J. Manage. 11, 197–208.
Jacoby, H. (1973).The Bureaucratization of the World, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Jacques, R. (1996).Manufacturing the Employee. Management Knowledge from the 19th to 21 st Centuries, Sage, London.
Kanter, R.M. (1977).Men and Women of the Corporation, Basic Books, New York.
Kay, J. (1994). Plenary address, British Academy of Management Conference, Lancaster University, Sept.
Kimball, B. (1992).The ‘True Professional Ideal’ in America. A History, Blackwell, Cambridge, MA.
Knights, D. (1992). Changing spaces: The disruptive impact of a new epistemological location for the study of management.Acad. Manage. Rev. 17, 514–536.
Kotter, J. P. (1982). What effective general managers really do.Harvard Bus. Rev. 60, 156–167.
Kramer, R., and Tyler, T. (eds.) (1996).Trust in Organizations, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Kuhn, T. (1962).The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Chicago University Press, Chicago.
Larson, M. (1977).The Rise of Professionalism. A Sociological Analysis, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Leavitt, H. (1991). Socializing our MBAs: Total immersion? Managed cultures? Brainwashing?Calif. Manage. Rev. 33, 127–143.
Littler, C., (1982).The Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies, Heinemann, London.
Locke, R. (1984).The End of Practical Man, JAI Press, London.
Locke, R. (1989).Management and Higher Education Since 1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
MacIntyre, A. (1981).After Virtue, Duckworth, London.
Mant, A. (1977).The Rise and Fall of the British Manager, Macmillan London.
Marcuse, H. (1964).One Dimensional Man, Routledge Kegan Paul, London (1986 reprint).
Mintzberg, H. (1973).The Nature of Managerial Work, Harper & Row, London.
Mitroff, I., and Churchmann, C. (1992). Debate,Harvard Bus. Rev. 70, 134–136.
Nyland, C. (1988). Scientific management and planning.Capital Class 33, 55–83.
Pollard, S. (1968).The Genesis of Modern Management, Penguin, London.
Raelin, J., and Schermerhorn, J. (1994). A new paradigm for advanced management education—How knowlege merges with experience.Manage. Learn. 25, 195–200.
Reed, M. (1989).The Sociology of Management, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead.
Reed, M., and Anthony, P. (1992). Professionalizing management and managing professionalization: British management in the 1980s.J. Manage. Stud. 29, 591–613.
Ritzer, G. (1993).The McDonaldization of Society, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Rizzi, B. (1939).La Bureaucratization du Monde, Champ Libre, Paris.
Rose, N. (1989).Governing the Soul, Routledge, London.
Rueschemeyer, D. (1986).Power and the Division of Labour, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Sarfatti Larson, M. (1984), The Production of Expertise and the Constitution of Expert Power. In Haskell, T. L. (ed.),The Authority of Experts, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, pp. 28–80.
Senge, P. (1990).The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday, New York.
Sikka, P., and Willmott, H. (1995). The Power of “Independence”: Defending and Extending the Jurisdiction of Accounting in the United Kingdom.Accounting, Organizations and Society 20, 547–581.
Sinclair, A. (1995). Sex and the MBA.Organization 2, 295–317.
Smith, A. (1904).The Wealth of Nations. Methuen, London (Original 1776).
Stewart, R. (1967).Managers and their Jobs. Macmillan, London.
Thompson, J., and McGivern, J. (1996). Parody, Process and Practice: Perspectives for Management Education.Management Learning,27, 21–35.
Townley, B. (1994).Reframing Human Resource Management. Sage, London.
Veblen, T. (1918).The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. Huebsch, New York.
Watson, T. (1994).In Search Of Management. Routledge, London.
Watson, T. (1995). Management Fads: Their Role in Managers' Lives.International Journal of Human Resource Management,5, 889–905.
Watson, T. (1996). Motivation. That's Maslow isn't it?Management Learning 27, 447–464.
Weber, M. (1968).Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretative Sociology. Bedminster Press, New York (Original 1922).
Weil S. (1988) Oppression and Liberty. Routledge Kegan Paul, London (Original 1933).
Whitley, R. (1984a)The Intellectual and Social Organisation of the Sciences. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Whitley, R. (1984b). The Fragmented State of Management Studies: Reasons and Consequences.Journal of Management Studies 21, 331–348.
Whitley, R. (1995). Academic Knowledge and Work Jurisdiction in Management.Organization Studies 16, 81–105.
Whitley, R., Thomas, A. and Marceau, J. (1981).Masters of Business. The Making of a New Elite? Tavistock, London.
Whyte, W. H. (1956).The Organization Man, Doubleday, New York.
Wilensky, H. (1964). The professionalization of everyone?.Am. J. Sociol. 70, 137–158.
Willmott, H. (1984) Images and ideals of managerial work: A critical examination of conceptual and empirical accounts.J. Manage. Stud. 21, 349–365.
Winch, P. (1958).The Idea of a Social Science, Routledge, London.
Wren, D. (1994).The Evolution of Management Thought John Wiley, New York.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Grey, C. Management as a technical practice: Professionalization or responsibilization?. Systems Practice 10, 703–725 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02557921
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02557921