Educating Managers for Post-bureaucracy

The dominant conception of the manager is of a morally neutral technician engaged in a world of purely rational problem solving. This is the conception advanced by business schools, by management consultants and, in large measure, by managers themselves. It is also that of the critical sociology of management, in which managers are cast as morally disabled technical problem solvers not because they choose to be so but because, in the bureaucratic business corporation, they have no choice. In both its mainstream and its critical forms, this conception of management is closely tied to the rationalizing characteristics of bureaucratic organization, but what of management in post-bureaucracy? This article explores the role of the business manager in the flexible network organizations that are characteristic of early 21st-century business, and their implications for management education.