Not just a snapshot: Bain’s Management Tools & Trends Survey as a classificatory infrastructure for recent management history
Dag Øivind Madsen, Richard W. PuytPurpose
This paper aims to examine Bain & Company’s Management Tools & Trends survey as a historical source and asks how its design formats recent managerial change for later interpretation. Rather than treating the survey as a neutral record, or claiming to demonstrate its downstream influence, the paper conceptualizes it as a classificatory infrastructure that conditions what becomes visible, comparable and narratable as management history. This approach builds on wider debates about source construction, historiography and the selective character of historical evidence in management and organizational history.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper develops a historically oriented source critique of the Bain survey corpus from 1993 to 2023, including related survey publications and interpretive texts by Bain authors. The analysis considers the source’s provenance, intended executive audience, publication formats, category construction, changing tool rosters, respondent positioning and usage and satisfaction metrics. Drawing on an integrated fashion-institutional perspective, it examines the historical affordances created by these features rather than treating the survey primarily as a conventional research instrument.
Findings
The analysis shows that the survey provides valuable longitudinal evidence of elite managerial attention and consultant-mediated problem definitions. At the same time, it makes heterogeneous management ideas commensurable, stages change through roster entries and exits and authorizes executive perceptions through standardized rankings and metrics. These features create historical affordances for narratives of rise, decline, continuity and replacement, but do not by themselves demonstrate that later academic or practitioner accounts adopted those narratives.
Originality/value
This paper conceptualizes recurring consultant-generated surveys as historiographical infrastructures: devices that convert the managerial present into portable evidence for later historical interpretation. It identifies classification and commensuration, temporalization and authorization and portability as three mechanisms of historiographical mediation. In doing so, it extends work on the role of consultants and other intermediaries in producing and circulating management knowledge and offers guidance for using such sources without conflating visibility with practice or potential influence with demonstrated uptake.