Framing an Art of Management

David M. Atkinson

Chapter 1 in Thinking the Art of Management, 2007, pp 15-36 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract In the academic world of universities and their business schools, a concern of some scholars is that the output of research appears little adopted by the world of practice.1 Conversely, railway station and airport bookshops reveal volumes of management secrets marketed to this alter-world; they offer its population of managers the seven, ten, 20 or so key steps to take to solve this or that management issue. These books present a populist management science; a symptom of a culture of practice. Here, in a May 2006 search of the online bookshop Amazon.com, a significant number of business-related titles (over 2,900) connected with the search words “Art of”, including: The Art of Managing People; The Art of Being an Executive; The Art of Using Science in Marketing; and The Art of Strategy. Such books tell stories of successful individuals and of their excellent companies; they are packaged for managerial consumption, with the promise of a share in their narratives of success. But from within the world of academia, Henry Mintzberg (2004:10) has followed others in suggesting that, rather than being a science, management appears more like an “artform”, with characteristics of “insight”, “vision” and “intuition”. The word Art, in a management context, has become legitimized with a certain relevance to management studies.

Keywords: Organizational Practice; Aesthetic Judgement; Online Bookshop; Cultural Turn; Rationalist Paradigm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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DOI: 10.1057/9780230589988_2

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