Mapping the Management Journey: Practice, Theory, and Context

The last five decades have seen a sea-change in business and in management studies. The world of business has been transformed by powerful forces: globalization, IT, outsourcing and all manner of organizational reshaping and flattening. At the same time Management Studies has seen a massive expansion in courses, students and teachers, driven in part by a quest for new and broader models. The ground covered by Management Studies, and the way Management Studies maps this, have changed.

This book, written by specialist experts, analyses these developments in Management Studies, giving a concise guide to specific areas. Working from the broader global and technological context, it explores a range of sectors - private, public and professional - and conclude by examining specific functions involved in management, such as Corporate Strategy, Information Technology, Operations Management, and Marketing.

The authors are all associated with Templeton College at the University of Oxford, a school known for its close work with managers, companies, and other types of organizations, through its executive education programs and high-impact business research. This experience, and its specialist knowledge, leaves it uniquely positioned to chronicle and comment on the development of the discipline of management studies and point the way ahead.

Sue Dopson teaches on the University of Oxford's degree programme in management and also on a wide range of executive development programmes for public sector organisations and commercial companies. Her interests include the nature of managerial work; the changing role of the middle manager; career issues for managers; management in the public sector; and managing with professionals. Before pursuing an academic career, Sue Dopson worked as a personnel manager in the NHS, and her most recent work has been on how developments in genetic science will influence clinical practice and health care policy. Michael Earl works at the intersection of business strategy and IT and has published widely in this area in journals such as the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, MIS Quarterly and other scholarly journals. He has also published several books, including Management Strategies for Information Technology (Prentice Hall, 1989), which was a best-seller. A member of the UK government's task force on e-commerce and consultant to several multinationals, Michael Earl was previously Professor of Information Management at London Business School, during which time he held the roles of Deputy and Acting Dean.