Expansion of Management Knowledge: Carriers, Flows, and Sources

Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion of management education and practice. At the same time, the formalization of management practice has allowed for a widespread diffusion of management ideas across sectors and continents. This book provides an up-to-date summary of the development, refinement, and diffusion of managerial ideas, adding detail and explanation to commonly held conceptions about the explosion of management knowledge.

The contributors contend that management ideas do not flow automatically but are actively shaped and transformed by knowledge carriers—business schools, consultancies, and the media. Drawing on data from worldwide empirical studies, the chapters analyze how such carriers are organized, how they act and react, and how they shape and reshape knowledge. The book places the development and diffusion of management knowledge in a wider environmental and historical context and offers stimulating comparisons of European and American management traditions.

The combination of theory and practice will make this book a valuable resource for courses dealing with management, organizational and institutional theory, and globalization.

The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion of management education, consulting, and the formalization of management practice, with a widespread diffusion of management ideas across sectors and continents. This book describes and analyzes this worldwide flow of management ideas and the key carriers of these ideas.

Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson and Lars Engwall are Professors of Management in the Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. Engwall’s most recent book is Regulation and Organizations: International Perspective (co-editor with Glenn Morgan).