ABSTRACT
As shown in the previous chapter, the vast majority of management books available in Sweden originate in either Sweden or the US. This could be interpreted as there being two parallel general trends in the international managerial discourse: nationalism and Americanisation. Furthermore, this pattern tends to be more marked the more popular and practically oriented the distribution channel. In this chapter we are going to examine two texts that represent these two general trends. The purpose is to discover whether they represent knowledge or ideology. In the previous chapter a comparison of data from different distribution channels showed one American title (In Search of Excellence) and one Swedish (Service Management) to be particularly significant to the Swedish discourse on management in the 1980s. These books are therefore selected for a detailed study of the production of popular managerial manifestations.2 Two major strategies are used: to examine the texts, and to study the context in which they have been produced. In this chapter we employ the first strategy, while the latter will be employed in the following chapter.3
