ABSTRACT
I started this book with the question: where do management ideas come from? In the first chapter I have argued that this is a nontrivial question given that many of these ideas have been established in the canon of management while the social practices that have produced these ideas remain largely hidden (see also Shenhav, 1999). In order to address this central question I drew from the literature on commodification because it preludes prior discussions on management idea production and allows shedding more light on its social life or cultural biography, an issue that received scant attention in the literature about the supply-side dynamics of management ideas. This allowed developing a broader, processual conceptualization of commodification in which commodities are not solely considered in economic terms, but as ‘things’ of which their exchangeability is a socially relevant element in the past, present, or future (Appadurai, 1986; 2005), and commodification ‘is best looked upon as a process of becoming rather than as an all-or-none state of being’ (Kopytoff, 1986: 73). This entails that commodified forms of management knowledge are hypothesized as having their own ‘biography’, and studying these knowledge commodities goes beyond solely focusing on the moment or state of an idea's exchange, taking into account their total trajectory from initial conception through development, maturity, and decline. In line with this framework, I sought to empirically trace ‘new’ management ideas and practices back to their fabrication in the context of management consultancies. As Sturdy et al. argued: ‘… further insight in the role of consultancy in the development of new management practices could be achieved by extending research back into early product development’ (2009: 177). In the context of this research, this perspective allowed to develop a better understanding about the way consultants as central knowledge entrepreneurs construct commodified forms of knowledge throughout different stages in their social life.
