Abstract
Management is the product of American culture and an American product. By management I do not refer to specific individuals or groups in charge of supervision or administration, nor to the act of coping with or handling a situation or task. I refer to management as a separate field of specialized knowledge, an academic discipline, as a profession and a discourse. Management is the product of America in the sense that it emerged within the cultural and institutional context of the United States. It is an American product in that it has become an expensive and highly sought-after academic degree as well as service and knowledge products, especially management consulting. Business schools and their MBA-degrees as well as management consulting firms, now global in scale and scope, emerged in the United States. Consequently, there are underlying assumptions and characteristics in management that are distinctly American. Management carries with it certain aspects of American reality. In legitimating management as a specialized field of knowledge, management educators and consultants have shifted their rhetorical strategy from a discourse of professionalization towards a discourse of marketization. In the process, management has changed from aspirations of becoming a professional community to having become a knowledge commodity. This is indicative of a substantive institutional and cultural shift from a twentieth century culture of professionalism to twenty-first century information-driven economies of knowledge.