The Foundations of Knowledge and Management: An Introduction

Abstract

As a discipline, management history has suffered from the fact that it has typically paid insufficient heed to economics, just as economics has suffered from paying insufficient heed to management and the mechanics of production. In recent years, management history has also divided over matters related to epistemology, the intellectual principles that guide our inquiries and understandings of the world. Accordingly, this Part of the Handbook has two aims. First, it explores the core theoretical principles that have informed economics through a study of classical economics, neo-classical economics, and Marxism. Second, it considers the origins of contemporary debates relating to positivism and postmodernism in the intellectual ferment of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period that witnessed both epistemological understandings that supported the emergence of capitalism and modern management as well as philosophies deeply opposed to the advance of science, rationality, and industrialization.