Peter Drucker has been one of the most articulate and effective missionaries for management as a profession and a discipline. His major works on the subject (1955, 1973, 1985) have given generations of managers a sense of purpose and self-respect, and helped to shape the expectations of the growing legions of young would-be managers in business schools. In his 1973 book on the tasks, responsibilities and practices of management, he set out to expunge the image of the manager that held sway in the prewar ‘Heroic Age of Management’ when it was identified with responsibility for the work of others. Instead of the bowler-hatted boss exercising authority on behalf of hierarchy, Drucker portrays the tasks of management as furthering the mission of organizations, making work productive and fulfilling social responsibilities. He writes: ‘Management is a practice rather than a science. In this, it is comparable to medicine, law, and engineering. It is not knowledge but performance’ (1973, p. 17).

The components of this performance he envisages as ‘planning, organizing, integrating and measuring’ (ibid., p. 393). Within the management literature one can find this approach represented by a proliferation of bestselling practitioner cookbooks for managerial excellence, ranging from the reductio ad absurdum of ‘one-minute’ recipes for success (Blanchard and Johnson, 1982) to considered appreciations of the complexities of the managerial role such as is represented in the work of Rosemary Stewart, depicting the manager's world as bounded on the one side by demands and on the other side by constraints, with ‘choices’ the operating zone of freedom between them (1982).