As intellectual historian Crane Brinton pointed out in his book Ideas and Men: The Story of Western Thought, fields of study such as philosophy, religion, and politics generate “noncumulative” knowledge as opposed to the scientific domain, where knowledge is “cumulative” and progress is genuine. The real problem with arts or noncumulative fields of study is that, unlike the sciences, they never prune their trees of knowledge. They add but they do not subtract. Artifacts come in and out of fashion, but they never disappear completely and they can be revived at any time.
Management seems to fall into Dr. Brinton’s noncumulative category. Students of the subject are presented with a dense jungle of often conflicting theories, principles, and practices, most of which are backed up by either folklore or anecdotal evidence rather than by scientific data. Different approaches appear, are adopted enthusiastically, and then disappear, only to be reincarnated later under new names.
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