MANAGEMENT OF IMAGE AND MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING

volve considerable degradation as compared with the self-images of the staff functions concerned.<BR>The likely consequences in both cases flow from management’s capacity, as agents of capital, to concretize its own versions of reality. Both product design<BR>and the staff functions subjected to ABCM can be forced to conform to the social constructions demanded by management technique. These social constructions then act as self-fulfilling prophecies in which the degraded image becomes a degraded actuality.<BR>Management: Generalized and Abstract<BR>Acknowledged as the founders of management thought, both Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henri Fayol would have been astonished at some of the inclusions and omissions in today’s teaching and research on management. Begin with the omissions. Importantly Taylor’s “revolution in management”, was also a “revolt of the engineer” (Layton, 1971), a revolt against “ordinary management” which, in Taylor’s view, had forfeited its claim to authority because it lacked expertise in the productive process. As with the motive, so with the practice. The re-design of production processes which lay at the heart of Taylor’s Scientific Management depended heavily on the expertise of the mechanical engineer, a profession of which Taylor was himself a distinguished member. For Taylor, then, the competent management of a process was inconceivable without expertise in that process. So it was with Fayol. Although the work translated by Lyndal Urwick as “General and Industrial Management” (Fayol, 1949) aimed to set out the general principles of<BR>Management, image and management accounting 283 efficient administration, it was also an expression of Fayol’s experience as a mining engineer. And although his principles were subsequently appropriated by Urwick as the knowledge base of a decontextualized managerial knowledge, Fayol himself took it for granted that they would be applied in the light of a thorough knowledge of production processes.<BR>Very early in this history of management education, it became clear that the pressure of educational markets would prise apart this primordial unity of management and process knowledge. Harvard University’s first venture into management education was a 1908 course on Railroad Management. This included<BR>such industry-specific topics as Railroad Operation, Railroad Accounting and Railroad Organization and Finance. The pattern of electives chosen by students,<BR>however, quickly revealed a demand for topics of more general application, such as Industrial Organization, and Factory Management (Copeland, 1958, 21 ff). By 1912,the trend towards generality in management courses was decisively under way, driven by factors which remain operative today. Courses which promise a generality of application appeal to a broader market than those which are sector specific.<BR>They also promise a wider range of career options since the end-qualification is portrayed as portable. The underlying assumption—largely tacit at this stage—was that management is always and everywhere the same.<BR>Driven by the logic of competition and predation, meanwhile, capitalism itself was changing. Messily but inexorably, the era of family capitalism was giving<BR>way to that of entrepreneurialism, and this, in turn was giving way to managerial capitalism (Chandler, 1977). In consequences, the range of managerial practice was extending into functions previously reserved for ownership, such as finance, marketing strategy and company policy itself. As early as 1911, Harvard had responded by introducing a course in business policy, “to develop an approach to business problems from the top management point of view” (Copeland, 1958, 42).<BR>By the early 1920s, Harvard’s courses had re-focused on “certain broad functions of the business enterprise”: business policy, business law, statistics, marketing, acc