Management as a System of Knowledge and Authority

It is frequently demonstrated how difficult it may be to generalize about what kind of knowledge managers actually need, how managers’ knowledge backgrounds matter in practice and how managers deal with their knowledge environments. The education and training background of top executives vary considerably across industrial sectors and nation-states. Cross-national explorations into the relationship between management and knowledge, then, may be a way to improve our understanding of these issues. How is it that managers with very different professional backgrounds are still able to deal with similar problems in a relatively efficient way? I suggest that this is because the management activity is embedded in historically shaped institutional and conceptual frameworks. Managerial strategies and organizational forms always emerge within particular knowledge and authority contexts, and these processes of formation have to be taken into account when we want to understand the logics of contemporary systems. In this article I will introduce a knowledge/authority perspective on management. Such a perspective provides concepts that are useful when trying to explain variations in composition of management elites and organization structures. I will develop two ideal-typical models based on the history of management systems in the USA and Germany, and on the basis of these models present some hypotheses about how the structuring of managerial activities relates to knowledge contexts.