Issues of management identity: attitudes to management within the Australian Institute of Management, 1940-73

While a number of studies have considered the evolution of Australian business and management, less attention has been paid to the discourse used by Australian managers to conceptualise their identity as managers. This study of management discourse within the Australian Institute of Management (AIM) from 1940 up to 1973 does not, however, reveal a progressive evolution towards a hegemonic conception of management. Rather the discourse of practising managers within the AIM reveals a continual unresolved wrestling with rival conceptions of possible managerial identities as administrators, leaders, professionals and even workers, and how the AIM was continually frustrated in articulating its own institutional identity as a 'society of managers'.