CFP: Making Managers

Management & Organizational History

Special Issue: Making Managers Guest Editors

Rolv Petter Amdam, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway (rolv.p.amdam@bi.no)

Matthias Kipping, Schulich School of Business, Toronto, Canada (mkipping@schulich.york.ca)

Jacqueline McGlade, College of Economics and Political Science, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman (jmcglade@squ.edu.om)

Call for papers

This special issue explores the dynamics, processes, and actors involved in making managers over time in a variety of contexts. The issue intends to fill an important gap in the current literature on the history of management education, which has largely been centered on organizational development narratives, i.e. the rise of business schools, the global spread of the American model, business-based academic disciplines, etc. (see, for examples, the Selected References below).

We therefore invite papers that to chronicle the actual preparation of managers in all types, venues and forms; address questions and perspectives that have not been addressed; and cover geographical areas or industries and activities that are not in focus in the extant literature. We seek contributions that consider a variety of dimensions and aspects involved with making managers, both in imagined and real terms. We welcome in particular contributions that address one or several of the following broad domains: (i) organizational settings, such as universities, companies, business associations, governments, public administrations and the military etc.; (ii) programs and their scope, including undergraduate and graduate degrees, executive education, managerial leadership programs, corporate training, online and self-help courses etc.; (iii) cultural and social processes, contributing, among others, to organizational integration, habitus building and elite formation; (iv) global differences, with a particular focus on non-Western contexts.

Possible (though not exclusive) topics

• The role of management education and training in imparting and inculcating shared terminology and language, norms and behavior;

The shifting weights of various academic disciplines in the preparation of managers as well as the changing importance of experiential learning;
The development of non-traditional manager preparation programs, including alternative contents and new ways of delivery;
The efforts by other actors to complement or substitute for extant university- based management degree programs;
The attempts by the various management education or training providers to bridge perceived gaps between business knowledge mastery, i.e. “know about” and impactful managerial leadership, i.e. “know-how.”
The influence of different national, cultural and institutional contexts on the formal or informal making of managers;
The emergence of a cadre of global managers, tied (or not) to multinational enterprises and related phenomena, including offshoring;
The homogenizing effects due to dominant models, accreditation or rankings, and how these have been resisted, subverted or adapted;
The ways in which education and training contributed (or not) to the expansion and professionalization of management.
Selected References

Amdam, R.P. (2008). “Business Education,” in G. Jones and J. Zeitlin, eds., The Oxford Handbook in Business History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Engwall, L., M. Kipping, and B. Üsdiken (2016). Defining Management: Business Schools, Consultants, Media. New York: Routledge.

Gourvish, T. R. and Tiratsoo, N., eds. (1998). Missionaries and Managers: American Influences on European Management Education, 1945-60. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

McGlade, J. (1998). “The big push: the export of American business education to Western Europe after World War II,” in V. Zamagni and L. Engwall, eds., Management education in a historical perspective. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Mintzberg, H. (2004). Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Submission Process and Deadline

Authors wanting to discuss their ideas or draft papers are encouraged to contact the special issue editors. When writing the manuscript, please make sure to follow the journal’s style guidelines: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rmor20&page =instructions#.U2-Oqi_6Tp0. Completed manuscripts should be submitted online at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/moh, mentioning the special issue. The deadline for submissions is 31 March 2018.

Each submission will initially be reviewed by the guest editors to determine its suitability for the special issue. We might hold a paper development workshop for authors whose manuscripts pass this original screening. Before final acceptance papers will also be double-blind reviewed. Publication of the special issue is planned for the second half of 2019.

About the Editors

Rolv Petter Amdam is Professor of Business History at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway. He has published widely on the international development of management education, and edited Management Education and Competitiveness: Europe, the US and Japan (1996), and co-edited with R. Kvålshaugen and E. Larsen, Inside the Business School: The Content of European Business Education (2003)

Matthias Kipping is Professor of Policy and Richard E. Waugh Chair in Business History at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. He has published extensively on the international dissemination of management knowledge, and in particular the role of consultants and business schools. He has co-edited, with T. Clark, the Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting (2012) and co-authored, with L. Engwall and B. Üsdiken, Defining Management (2016).

Jacqueline McGlade is Associate Professor at the College of Economics and Political Science, Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman. She has pioneered some of the early research on the US efforts to spread their models of management education globally – a topic she is continuing to explore, and is currently working on issues of international political economy and trade development, including, most recently, research on the role of SMEs in the Gulf region.