Editorial

Abstract

The last century has been significant in terms of the development of the social sciences. Thus for instance, sociology, social psychology, politics, education and management have all taken their own pathways to reach some level of maturity. The relatively new addition to this group is, of course, management and its associated organisational theory that arose with Taylor at the turn of the nineteenth century. He pioneered the scientific movement and argued that management should be based on well-recognised, clearly defined and fixed principles, instead of depending on more or less hazy ideas. However, it seems that a management science has only in recent decades become substantive and rich enough to be able to think in the same terms as other branches of the social sciences. It has been enriched by the other social sciences through a process that I refer to as knowledge migration, a process in which knowledge that applies to one scientific area is migrated across to another in a way that validly transforms it to its new context. Thus, knowledge that takes a particular meaning in one of these sciences may end up with a quite different, though thematically related, meaning in another. Whenever a concept is shifted in a valid way from one paradigm that underpins a particular theory in one area of social science to another, the knowledge is migrated rather than transferred.