If Barley and Kunda (1992) are right in hypothesizing that management theory cycles between rational and normative poles according to broad economic trends, with better times for American business corresponding to the ascendance of rational theory, it would have been reasonable to expect a turn away from the cultural theory of the 1980s to a renascent rational theory in the 1990s and 2000s, given the generally though not unrelievedly good times for the American version of capitalism from the fall of the Nikkei and the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the financial crisis of 2008. As a prediction, that looks reasonably good, especially if we give Barley and Kunda credit for calling the turning of the American economic wheel from the nervous 1970s and 1980s of malaise and Japan as #1 that preceded their article. Even if we do not credit them with being economic seers and focus solely on management theory of the last two decades with the economy as an exogenous factor, their hypothesis is quite defensible. The rise of agency theory as not simply a finance model but as a major stream within the management academy itself; the reinvention of OR and OM in the rising field of supply chain management; the increasing financialization of management consulting theory and practice, at the same time that consulting replaced medicine and law as the most desired destination for Ivy League graduates; the popular success of Moneyball, Freakonomics and other books selling rationality and incentives rather than culture and teamwork: These phenomena can all be cited as support for the case that the recent, apparently ended good times did indeed go along with a wave of rational theory.
If Eastman and Bailey (1998) are right in hypothesizing that management theory has entered into a long-term period of value partisanship associated with the breakdown of earlier formalist and consensualist approaches to mediating the fact-value dichotomy, it would have been reasonable to expect that the 1990s and 2000s would have been a period of intensified surfacing of value disputation in management, along the lines already prevalent in law. Some evidence can be cited in support of that proposition: Compared to twenty years before, the division structure of the Academy of Management in 2009 shows an increased number and proportion of divisions—Critical Management, Organizations and the Natural Environment, Management and Spirituality—whose missions reflect a clear value-orientation; the rise of the Moneyball/Freakonomics genre has gone along with the rise of a counter-genre, epitomized by Irrational Exuberance and Predictably Irrational, that emphasizes how human beings deviate from rational choice; and the rise of agency theory has gone along with a vigorous counter-movement arguing that agency theory itself is a major problem for American business and American society. On the other side of the ledger, though, one can cite a diminution of the culture-oriented academic and popular 1980s literature related to flattening hierarchy and liberatory management, as well as a less self-critical tone in 1990s and 2000s theoretical and practitioner literature compared to that of the more anxiety-ridden, less self-confident preceding period, with its concerns about managerial myopia and American decline.
It is interesting to note that law, which Eastman and Bailey rely upon as offering a kind of leading indicator for management, has been characterized over the last twenty years not so much by the rise of value disputes—much as divisions between liberals and conservatives remain central to academic law as well as to the practitioner literature produced by Supreme Court justices--but by the consolidation of law and economics as an ideologically mixed utilitarian alternative to the "rules and principles" mainstream in the legal academy. The result has been a legal academy divided more along the calculation-culture lines that have long prevailed in business schools with their division between more normatively-oriented and more rationally-oriented disciplines. That calculation-culture value split in both its management and legal incarnations lacks the moral intensity of the left-right split, which raises a question about whether the Eastman and Bailey hypothesis of heightened value partisanship holds true in law, and also about whether they were right in seeing law as a leading indicator of trends in management. Perhaps it is management education with its longstanding calculation-culture split that has shown the way for legal education, rather than the reverse.
