ABSTRACT
The premise of the Finniston report was that all industrial management, in whatever function, and at whatever level, has an ‘engineering dimension’. An intelligent observer from Mars might approach the problem of defining management by observing what managers actually do. If Finniston was correct, surely an ‘engineering dimension’ to management should have been revealed in those well-known empirical studies which have set out to challenge traditional prescriptive formulas. The production and dissemination of management knowledge, and the managerial careers based upon the particular conception of management which underlies it, constitute a massive bandwagon. Finally, it is evident that the problem of the missing ‘engineering dimension’ in British management is as much a problem of management education as of the professional ‘formation’ of engineers. The response from the management education movement has been silence: the Fores/Glover/Mant/Sorg school of thought has never been engaged in public debate.
