ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores how pursuing management careers has become bound up with the aspirations and hopes of a particular generation of individuals. The increasing pervasiveness of management language and ideas throughout all social institutions similarly points to the significance of management in how we think about ourselves. In most cases, however, the stories seemed to point to a more complex reality that went some way to explaining why management careers had proved so attractive. One theme of more critical writing on management and organisations is that management careers and the framework of management qualifications that support them constitute a struggle for the identity of managers themselves. Retaining the narratives in the form of individual stories provided an important safeguard against seeing such managers as a univocal group all responding in similar ways.
