Creating New Knowledge in Management: Appropriating the Fiel...

Business / Organizations and Management Theory

Creating New Knowledge in Management rediscovers lost sources in the work of Mary Parker Follett and Chester Barnard, providing a foundation for management as a unique and coherent discipline.

This book begins by explaining that research universities, and the management field in particular, have splintered into smaller and less related parts. It then recovers a lost tradition of integrating management and the humanities, exploring ways of building on this convention to advance the unique art and science of business. By way of Follett and Barnard's work, author Ellen S. O'Connor demonstrates how the shared values, purposes, and customs of management and the humanities can be used to build an enterprise that will help to meet the challenges of business today.

Igniting approaches to management that build on humanistic traditions is the ultimate goal of this book. Therefore, the text ends with two experiments—one in the classroom and one with a business executive—that take up this call and offer a perspective on where management must go next.

About the author

Ellen S. O'Connor has studied the relationship between management and the humanities and has lectured in business schools in the U.S. and Europe for the past 30 years.

"Creating New Knowledge in Management performs the important task of revisiting seminal management authors (Follett, Barnard) and demonstrating their continuing relevance. In doing this, the book generates a new understanding of the origins of management thought, linking this to current debates about the role of business schools."

—Ken Starkey, Nottingham University Business School and author of The Business School and the Bottom Line

"This thoughtful book highlights the need for business schools to teach current managers and managers-to-be the benefits of appreciating and acting upon this key notion: The expansion of cooperative behavior and the development of the individual are mutually dependent realities, and a balance of these two elements is needed for an organization to maintain vitality."

—Joe Mahoney, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Dr. O'Connor blends careful research and meticulous scholarship with her keen philosophical and postmodern perspective to reinterpret the world and works of Mary Parker Follett and Chester Barnard for our time. Grounding her work deeply in the writings of these two legends in management thought, O'Connor's book brings each of these characters, and their important ideas, forward and revitalizes their work in terms of current management challenges. My sense is that this book will be the definitive work on Barnard for the next generation of scholars."

—Paul Godfrey, Brigham Young University