Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices

Abstract

This article argues that academic research related to the conduct of business and management has had some very significant and negative influences on the practice of management. These influences have been less at the level of adoption of a particular theory and more at the incorporation, within the worldview of managers, of a set of ideas and assumptions that have come to dominate much of management research. More specifically, this article suggests that by propagating ideologically inspired amoral theories, business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral responsibility. As has been extensively documented in the literature over the last 50 years business school research has increasingly adopted the scientific model--an approach that Friedrich A. Von Hayek described as the pretense of knowledge. This pretense has demanded theorizing based on partialization of analysis, the exclusion of any role for human intentionality or choice, and the use of sharp assumptions and deductive reasoning. Since morality, or ethics, is inseparable from human intentionality, a precondition for making business studies a science has been the denial of any moral or ethical considerations in our theories and, therefore, in our prescriptions for management practice.