Academic Knowledge and Work Jurisdiction in Management

Abstract

Relations between formal, academic knowledge, training in high-level expert ise and practical problem-solving activities vary considerably across fields of practice, as well as across societies. Four major kinds of skills development, certification and extent of jurisdictional control over tasks and jobs can be distinguished: craft professional, academic professional, contested academic and research based. Most academically credentialed managerial skills are sim ilar to contested academic skills. These variations in types of skill formation and jurisdiction result from differences in dominant institutions and char acteristics of fields of practice. Of particular importance are: the extent of professional élite power, state licensing, the prestige of modern science and of universities, the level of student demand, the nature of the employment system and labour-market organization and the contextual dependence of prob lems and issues. Academics in some managerial fields have extended their jurisdictional control in some countries by developing technical skills for dealing with complex, yet well-bounded and general, kinds of problems invol ving quantitative information.