Summary: Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices

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• What is meant with Keynes' 'intellectual slavery of the practical men'?

  Practical men often believe themselves to be free of any intellectual influence, but they are slave to the business school academics that are accepted as the truth (e.g. agency theory)

• What are the main concerns of the scholars about the recent state of management research and pedagogy?

  1. Lack of impact of management research on management practice 
  2. Lack of effectiveness of management education for business performance of students

• What is the main concern Ghoshal raises?

  By propagating ideologically inspired amoral theories, business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral responsibility

• What is the pretence of knowledge model?

  A model that states that demands that theorising is based on partialisation of analysis, the exclusion of human intentionality and choice, and the use of sharp assumptions and deductive reasoning.

• What is the problem of the scientific model and ethics?

  As ethics are inseparable from human intentionality, this needs to be denied in order to make business studies a science.

• How does the combination of gloomy vision and pretence of knowledge lead to negative consequences for management practice?

  Double hermeneutic link between theory and practice in social domains. A theory, if gaining enough credibility, can be self-fulfilling and make people act in accordance with it. Managers are both subjects and consumers of the theory, and can adapt their behaviours to conform with the doctrine.

• What is the difference between natural and social sciences according to Elster?

  It lies in the mode of explanation and theorising that is appropriate for each.

• What is the appropriate mode of theorising for organic matter?

  Functional mode. In order to describe that a feautre or behaviour enhances its reproductive fitness.

• How does the causal mode of theorising manifest in social sciences?

  In large phenomena with interplay of a lot of different actors, where intentions of individual actors can be ignored (e.g. capital market)

• What is Berlin's 'false consciousness'?

  By trying to reduce the influence that behaviour of individuals has on shaping events and putting the emphasis on impersonal social forces, people are lulled into a false sense of freedom from moral responsibility.