How do we understand management?

It can be considered a strange situation that Poland does not yet have a uniform understanding of the concept of management. It is used in very different semantic contexts. Tadeusz Oleksyn said that everything is managed today. Most often, it is the company that is managed, but also the state, the national economy, diversity, conflict, time, own health and own career, uncertainty, environment, future, politics, fear, time, etc. Hence, this word is absolutely ambiguous. Bolesław R. Kuc said that there are as many management concepts as there were authors writing on this subject in 100 years. Łukasz Sułkowski adds the following to this strange situation:“Today, the term management is abused in relation to all social processes, e.g. conflict management or organisational culture management, and even in relation to abstract entities,managed by chaos.” This “allism” of the word management could be somehow tolerated if it only applied to colloquial language. Unfortunately, the ambiguous understanding of the word has been granted the right of citizenship also in science, including management sciences. It suffices to open any book or article in a management journal to find out. This situation applies not only to Poland, as evidenced by, for example, the following statement in a German academic textbook from 1990: “Neither the scope of management science is clearly outlined, nor the concept of management itself has yet been uniformly defined.”

One should definitely strive to develop and widely adopt a proper understanding of all basic management concepts, starting from the very concept of management. People who doubt the sense of specifying concepts and terms can be told that every young science begins its existence by specifying the basic concepts it uses.