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.

A movement that disparaged narrative while telling an unusually clean one: an interdiction violated, a villain in intuition and untested assumption, a magical object in systematic evidence, and a prize of better decisions. The chapter also reads it archaeologically, asking under what conditions its claims became authoritative at all. And who, after all, could be against evidence?

The book works from published research. This is the paper the case rests on, in its own words.

Morrell, K. (2008). ‘The narrative of “evidence based” management: A polemic’, Journal of Management Studies, 45(3), 613–635.

This paper critically examines the implications of this account from the perspective of Formalism: a narratological approach to critique that focuses on how narratives are made compelling, and hence powerful. Compelling narratives deploy devices that establish (i) credibility and (ii) defamiliarization.

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: the passage from the underlying paper above is quoted verbatim and checked against the source · surrounding context is site-written · author review required · no case facts introduced from outside the manuscript