The Expansion of Management Knowledge: Carriers, Flows, and Sources

Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion of management education and practice. At the same time, the formalization of management practice has allowed for a widespread diffusion of management ideas across sectors and continents. This text provides an up-to-date summary of the development, refinement and diffusion of managerial ideas, adding detail and explanation to commonly held conceptions about the explosion of management knowledge. The contributors contend that management ideas do not flow automatically but are actively shaped and transformed by knowledge carriers - business schools, consultancies and the media. Drawing on data from worldwide empirical studies, the chapters analyze how such carriers are organized, how they act and react, and how they shape and reshape knowledge.