Historical discourses of public management in Denmark: Past emergence and present challenge

Abstract

The management phenomenon does not simply arise out of nothing. It has emerged against the background of a protracted process that has gradually created the conditions for that which we now refer to as ‘management’.This article investigates the construction of the concept of management in the Danish public sector in the 20th century, revealing a transformation of the concept characterized by four different discourses that have rendered management a question of bureaucratic control, efficient rationalization, sectoral planning and, finally, professional management. The article accounts for the particular time-dependent conceptions that inform our knowledge of the past and contribute to our understanding of contemporary semantic possibilities for management. By this means, the article sheds new light on the emergence of public management from the past and the challenges it faces in the present.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.