Institutional roots of Turkish management: from Ottoman legacy to contemporary business practices

Purpose This study aims to examine the institutional roots of Turkish management style, tracing management formations from the pre-Islamic Göktürk period through the Ottoman Empire to contemporary Turkish enterprises. It asks how the informal constraints that New Institutional Economics treats as given are historically produced and reproduced and why some of them outlast the conditions that once made them efficient. Design/methodology/approach A multi-method historical design combines content analysis of five primary historical sources (the Orhun Abideleri, Kutadgu Bilig, Siyasetname, Koçi Bey Risaleleri and Defterdar Sari Mehmet Pasha’s Devlet Adamlarina Ögütler), life-history analysis of founder memoirs (Koç, 1983, 1984; Sabancı, 1985; Eczacıbaşı, 1999) and semi-structured interviews with 31 senior managers (19 professional managers and 12 owner-managers) of manufacturing and industrial enterprises in four Turkish cities, conducted in 2024 and coded by four coders through a consensus procedure. The analysis is organised around three mechanisms of institutional reproduction, with five management dimensions treated as evidence categories. The evidentiary status of each source type, and the strength of each historical claim, are stated explicitly. Findings Three mechanisms (layering, conversion and normative displacement without behavioural transformation) account for the reproduction of a formal–informal hierarchical duality, trust-through-familiarity selection, delegation reluctance under asymmetric accountability, a fear-based motivational practice beneath an endorsed reward discourse, owner control retained beneath formal professionalisation and state-dependent diversification. Continuity is asymmetric: strongest in selection, organisational structure and ownership, qualified in leadership and motivation, where disconfirming cases are reported and most tentative in strategy. Verification-cost economics explains the origin of particularistic trust; a cultural-historical substrate of Islamic governance norms, patrimonial statecraft, brotherhood hierarchies and a volatile, state-centred political economy explains its persistence. Contemporary reliance on personal impression in hiring is read as a historical resonance of Ottoman physiognomic selection (sima ilmi), not as evidence of direct transmission. Research limitations/implications The historical evidence base is stronger at the macro-governance level than at the micro-enterprise level, particularly for the pre-Ottoman periods. The interview sample, accessed through snowball sampling, is concentrated in manufacturing and industrial sectors in four cities, and the memoir corpus is small and retrospective. The comparison with the Korean chaebol and the non-market-strategy proposition are offered as hypotheses for future testing rather than as established findings. Practical implications A diagnostic heuristic identifies, for each management dimension, the inherited logic, its cognitive depth and the reasons commonly imported interventions fail, and translates institutionally aligned alternatives into concrete redesigns of accountability, verification, promotion and employee-voice systems. Originality/value The study treats the siyasetname tradition and founder memoirs as sources of institutional theory rather than as background. Its central contribution is a historically specified account of how North’s informal constraints are produced and transmitted in one civilisational case, identifying the carriers and mechanisms through which a cultural-historical substrate sustains informal institutions after their efficiency rationale has weakened and proposing a content-specific cognitive-depth hypothesis of reform resistance.