Overall description

The technology for managing large organisations has become an important feature of modern societies. Although this technology is associated with a considerable degree of uncertainty, a great many management tools and models are used in society at large, as well as in individual organisations, both private and public. 

This management technology is to a large extent the product of scholars and practitioners in the United States, but is used extensively in social contexts that differ in many ways from the North American context. Against this background a research programme was formulated with three objectives: 

1. To judge to what extent education, research, and consulting contribute to the homogenisation of European business practice; 

2. To determine whether this homogenisation is more developed in some parts of Europe than in others; and 

3. To contribute to an improvement in the diffusion and consumption of management knowledge from Europe. 

In order to achieve these objectives the programme poses three principal questions: 

1. What are the structure and role of the significant carriers of management knowledge in Europe? (The Carriers), 

2. What is communicated through these carriers? (The Content), 

3. To what extent do these carriers diffuse management knowledge in various European countries? (The Diffusion). 

From a consideration of these three questions it can be established that the three major carriers of management technology are: graduates, publications, and consultants. In the case of all three of these carriers the task of the programme is first to identify the major players in the participating European countries, namely, institutions for management education, publishing houses, and consulting firms. The impact of these major players on the different countries will be assessed using indicators such as the educational background of top managers, the circulation and impact of publications, and the market share of consultant companies. Identification of the major players will provide an entrée to the messages communicated through curricula, the content of publications, and the products offered by consultants. Particular attention will be paid to the claims of these messages to be "context-neutral". In this way it is hoped to alert people to the problems involved in an uncritical acceptance of a general management technology.

The suggested programme is expected to have several practical implications. First, there will be consequences for the management schools, publishers, and management consultants. Through a more comprehensive understanding of their own dynamics across business systems, these carriers of administrative knowledge will be able to improve both the European emphasis of their activities and, at the same time, take greater cognisance of the different national contexts. This should lead to an improvement in the dynamics of implementing business knowledge and, consequently, of management practices. Second, with the diffusion of the results of this study, European managers should become more conscious consumers of business knowledge. Fads and fashions are all too frequent phenomena in business education. Helping managers to develop an increased awareness of the institutional and competitive dynamics of the carriers of business knowledge should improve the conditions of their consumption of such knowledge and their adaptation to idiosyncratic contexts of that knowledge, that is, of practice. Third, public policy-makers both nationally and on a Europe-wide basis, especially those in charge of programmes aimed at the diffusion of practical knowledge, could profit from the insights of this research on the interplay of these three carriers across the different business systems existing in Europe.