As a result of the many changes which have taken place in the field of management development since the 1960s, a scenario presenting the probable appearance of the discipline in the year 2000 is presented, with evidence from the past and present to support it.

The central concern of this paper is managers in the middle who are hierarchically suppressed by new systems from above and squeezed by new technologies from below. They represent one of the most disillusioned groups in work organisations. Mid‐career crises, redundancies and exhortations to...

More people are preferring advisory to executive roles, and organisations are beginning to suffer from a lack of candidates for what is increasingly seen as the thankless task of management. This trend is being encouraged by mistaken management development practices and views of the managerial...

There has been a long and wide‐ranging literature on the problems of the individual's adjustment to the demands of work organisations. In the 1950s, Argyris and Merton argued that the needs of mature individuals and the properties of modern bureaucracies were incongruent. In a later work,...

There is a vast literature on managers' values and beliefs. However, there have been very few attemps to identify British managers' values or beliefs and relate them to employee relations practice. Marsh's survey of practice included questions on managerial values but this researcher did not...