Conceptions of Process Management: An Analysis of the Discourse in the Management Literature

Paper i proceeding, 2006

Process management has been described as perhaps the most important management idea of the last 20 years. There is still a considerable debate about what process management means, however, and how organizations shall interpret the idea behind the concept. The purpose of this paper is to study how one of the most important suppliers of management knowledge, namely management journals, describe and use the concept process management. It is suggested that process management is best understood as a discourse of its own that sails under many flags. The study captures a technically oriented discourse that has been driven mainly by practitioners starting in 1983 and that has had fairly constant popularity since then.