Evidence-based management

From the 2000s a group of scholars argued that management should become more like a profession that takes evidence seriously, using medicine as the model, with systematic reviews and controlled trials near the top of a hierarchy of evidence and anecdote, opinion and narrative review near the bottom.

The book reads the movement as a case study in narrative incoherence — and, using Foucault's archaeological approach, asks under what conditions its claims became authoritative at all.

The movement's argument has a fairy-tale structure with unusual clarity: an interdiction violated, a villain in intuition and untested assumption, expert helpers, a magical object in systematic evidence, heroes who adopt it and a prize of better decisions. Moral clarity of that kind is what makes a plot compelling.

Its advocates disparaged narrative while relying on it. The phrase evidence-based is itself an enthymeme, smuggling in two contested premises: that we agree what evidence means in management, and that what counts as evidence in the sciences should count as evidence here. And who, after all, could be against evidence?

The wider point is not about one movement. It is a model of what happens when any narrative achieves dominance: it starts to mistake its own premises for self-evident truths, and treats critique as a temporary detour on a route already decided.

Rhetoric · Method

1. What counts as evidence here, and who decided?
2. What kinds of knowledge have been relegated to intuition or opinion?
3. Which dominant account in your field has stopped noticing that it is an account?
4. Where is critique being acknowledged but bracketed?

Chapter Five: Method — the chapter carries the evidence and the close reading this page only points at.

Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required · no case facts introduced from outside the manuscript