Many forms of knowledge may in practice enter management calculations. Many sites exist where they may be encountered: not only university courses but also popular books, training sessions, magazines, web-sites, the popular press, as well as the usual networks of sociability. There are many sites from which practical orientations might develop. The important point is that, in practical terms, university academics enjoy neither an exclusive nor a privileged role: they are not legislators of what is management knowledge but simply among its many interpreters (Bauman, 1987). For all intents and purposes, however, given the institutionalized norms of journal publication, many university academics continue to practise their craft as if they were legislators rather than particular interpreters. For others, the audiences in the lecture theatres and of the more popular journals and books, the craft of organization studies provides a set of popular recipes and tools that can serve as solutions to the problems of managing modern organizations, promoting a series of rules, representations, procedures and technologies of, and for, management thinking, rather than contingent scientific 'proofs'. With these tools, often used retrospectively to constitute those actions that have already been undertaken as being in accord with some rationality, as being, in a word, legitimated, managers are able to create order out of potential chaos, are able to be seen to be managing rather than merely coping. Managing means creating an ordered ensemble of relations between past histories and future actions as strategies that construct the present. Managing means creating nexi of peoples, materials and technologies that can act autonomously in pursuit of these strategies. No longer does managing mean creating limits to freedom, as in Taylor's day, but it means making organization members free, qua organization members, thus enabling people, materials and technologies 3 1
