The article seeks to map out a life cycle of management ideas in the twentieth century, in terms of their inclusion in books written in English. The examples used include, amongst others, Scientific Management (SM), Human Relations (HR), Human Resource Management (HRM), as well as General Management (GM). This bibliometric study looks at the statistical frequency of terms used therein, as plotted by the Google Books Ngram Project in a data-base of over five million published books. The study presented here uses the aforementioned Harvard/MIT-originated ‘Ngram analysis’ method to create a novel graphic representation of management ideas, to map the frequency of familiar terms in this field, which should be of interest to academics and practitioners, including general managers.
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