The near death of management scholarship

ONE MIGHT CLAIM THAT management is not a profession but a social science. That could be a fair point. However, unlike nanagement scholarship, some social science disciplines - e.g. psychology, economics, political science, and geography - have practical applications and keep close to practice. Psychologists have gone a step further to professionalise the discipline. Economists inform policies and act as advisors. They are well sought after.

My guess is that management, especially in Europe, has allowed itself to be overburdened, and in some way hijacked, by sociology and anthropology - the two social sciences that are far removed from practice. Although they claim to study practice, they do so not necessarily to improve practice, as one might expect, but to wallow in some intellectual gymnastics for narcissistic entertainment.

Hence, in the pursuit of an illusive vain glory, management scholarship dressed in the borrowed garb of exotic organisational theory, sees itself as a superior elite game removed from the mundane practicalities of everyday management. The latter is seen as less intellectual than the former. In that regard, managers do the low and dirty job, while management scholars engage in some pristine and intellectual job.

This self-imposed hubris and dichotomy undermine management scholarship and will eventually kill and bury it forever. Unfortunately, many management scholars, pontificating as the masters of the universe and the best intellectuals to ever exist, do not see the near death of management.

Unsurprisingly, their vacuousness will soon be revealed in the “show your impact” era of scholarship in the United Kingdom, for instance.

Hopefully, these grand management scholars will smell the coffee, as they say, and adjust their ways. Perhaps, they will not theorise it away as a form of managerial uprising with managerialistic tools to clumber to death the harbingers of the secret truths of quality life and living.

However we see it, I see the end, though. It will never be the same again!