Management Knowledge: A Process View

This chapter provides a theoretical conceptualization and a detailed empirical study of management knowledge from a process perspective. It describes the development of management knowledge after an unprecedented event—the unexpected leave of the founder-owner-CEO of an entrepreneurial software engineering company. In particular, the chapter studies how management knowledge is enacted by the new executive management, the board of directors, and other senior managers within multiple situations, interactions, and engagements; how it is justified and routinized in the face of uncertainty; and how it is shifting and changing over time, through multiple situated enactments. Drawing from convention theory, management knowledge is conceptualized as “engagement regimes”—a conceptualization that permits a description of the processual dynamic of management knowledge and managerial knowing in a single, coherent, theoretical framework.