What Is Management; What Do Managers Do?

The development of the modern capitalist world is set within the framework of Four Industrial Revolutions. As organisations evolved to take advantage of increasingly global opportunities, so did the role of managers and management as contributors to their prosperity. In its current form, management has become a constellation of concepts. Its many definitions span the boundaries of leadership and strategy on the one hand and business administration on the other; from people management to P&L accounts. Managers deal with operational processes and with human emotions; with intangibles—such as brands or goodwill, and tangibles—such as machinery on a production line or IT systems in a bank. Managers are concerned with both change and stability; sometimes simultaneously. They can operate within Weberian rational, hierarchically structured organisations—‘functional frames of reference’, organic wholes in which individuals act—or in network or swarm structures, because in our ‘digitally mediated world’ the hierarchical governance typical of the classic bureaucracy is less prevalent. There are few business concepts that have attracted as much interest as the management of organisations.