ABSTRACT
One of the four dominant claims to truth in the management textbook is that of the truth of management being a science. Tracing this claim through the various chapters of the more recent editions reveals a somewhat confusing anomaly: the claim is accompanied by both an abjuring and denigration of science, in favour of anecdote, homily, personal experience, hypothetical examples and unreferenced quotes from ‘real’ managers. With the authors’ acceptance that management now has scientific status there therefore comes a rejection of the tenets by which that status is upheld. Importantly, this occurs at the same time as the ‘dumbing down’ of the texts. Where the semblance of academic credibility appears, the publications referred to are those of the famous names in management writing-for example, Argyris, McGregor, Drucker-that are untested in practice, and these too are often referred to in the format of an extended anecdote. Weber, for example, is known in management texts only as a management consultant who recommended the value of bureaucracies and got it wrong, an error the textbooks forgive on the grounds that he was writing so long ago, before management knowledge had really developed (see especially Daft, 1997, for a highly illustrative example). It would be too easy to argue that this is another example of the classical Freudian oedipal conflict, whereby the son first desires the love of the father but then overthrows the father and takes his place, but that argument would lack explanatory power, unless we were to argue further about the increasing managerial domination over academia, and thus over the physical and social sciences, and that is an analysis that belongs elsewhere. Rather, my search for understanding of this contradictory relationship of the management textbook to science will draw upon early work within the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), intertwined with Foucauldian perspectives. This allows me to show that management textbooks mimic the scientific world in that they first, like science, make a claim to being scientific, second, use a rhetoric similar to that of scientists to propound their claims, and third, where the ‘soft’ school of SSK shows science constructs socially the physical world of which it speaks, management textbooks can be seen to be constructing a managerial identity that is compliant, pliant and no threat to the capitalist enterprise.
