Biographical Dictionary of Management

The "Biographical Dictionary of Management" is a major reference work covering the growth and development of management as a discipline over the last four thousand years, from the merchant princes of Assyria and Tyre to the on-line entrepreneurs of the late 20th century. Over 600 entries provide coverage not only of important figures - Henry Ford, Adam Smith, Frederick Winslow Taylor etc. - but also many who contributed on a smaller scale, like Mitsui Takatoshi, the founder of Mitsui; ida Minerva Telfer, a pioneering writer on the role of women in business; Decius Alpinus, the Roman businessman who developed an M-form business nearly two millennia before Alfred Chandler first conceptualized it, or Arie de Geus, whose early work on knowledge as a corporate asset is now at the heart of most thinking on knowledge management. European, American, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Latin American and African thinkers, writer and practitioners are included. Far more than just another exercise in business history, the "Biographical Dictionary of Management" is in part an attempt to describe a philosophy of management. To that end, the authors of this work include not only business academics but also professional business people and business journalists, historians and futurists, economist and speciialists in many fields.