ABSTRACT
Koontz and O’Donnell petitioned for management’s overarching role on the basis of four claims to truth: that management is art, science, heteronormative rationality and founded in legal authority. For this last, until 1976 when the issue started to disappear from their discussions, they claimed that managerial authority is embedded within a ‘right to manage’ given by delegated authority from shareholders and thus the law of property in particular, and the legal system more generally. They devoted a chapter in their textbook to ‘proving’ this assertion. By the sixth edition of the textbook this argument had disappeared. Koontz and O’Donnell were not alone in this nonchalant treatment of their recourse to law, and indeed there is a pattern in many textbooks of the period. It seems management’s right to manage was by the late 1970s so entrenched, so taken for granted, that the case no longer needed arguing. That at least is one reading of the cause of the disappearance of the chapter. However, I have suggested that the changes which took place in the textbook in the 1970s heralded the start of a shift from the modern to the post-modern. In this chapter I will show how the changes in the articulation of claims to legal status were part and parcel of the inauguration of the textbook as producer of the objects of which it speaks-managers and management.
