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In most areas of intellectual endeavour, those at a discipline’s cutting edge are disconnected from other mortals. Such individuals live in a bifurcated world wherein they pitch their data and interpretations to an (often vanishingly small) audience of peers. Their medium is principally the serious scholarly literature and their way of communicating is, by everyday standards, turgid, opaque and exclusory. As a result, heroes of technical domains are confined to their disciplinary silos, their proverbial ivory towers. They tend not to attain the status of public intellectuals and typically remain unknown, heroes maybe but only within small circles. Understandably so. After all, the pioneers in say, physics or statistics as well as in more applied areas such as nanotechnology and drug development are, of necessity, dealing with subject matter that, although potentially of widespread benefit, is difficult to understand and esoteric, for practical purposes off-limits to lay audiences. In these kinds of cases, the shadowy experts have specialised formal training, almost always only obtained within universities and research institutions. They are small in number and typically cement themselves in a rigid pecking-order created from the prestige-levels of the journals wherein they publish, their number of citations, the amount of research funding they attract and the image of their institutional affiliations. They mostly reveal nothing of their lives and personal values through their work. Their reticence in this regard expresses an axiom of logical positivism, namely, the fact-value distinction, which, in practice, boils down to the contention that preference and bias are not part of knowledge creation. In other words, claims to truth are to be judged independently of their creator (Joullié and Gould, 2022, 2023a, 2023b).
Thinkers and writers about management, employment and organisational life are in a different category to their peers in most other disciplines. Indeed, theory addressing workplace stewardship, superintendence and relationships more generally is not the exclusive preserve of the academy and conjecture in these areas is engaged in widely wherever there are employers struggling to be successful (Muldoon et al., 2023). In this regard, the consultants, the academics and the practitioners compete in the same space and often with mutual disdain. It is also true that those who formalise ideas about how to do management are more inclined to become celebrities than theorists from other domains. Some write best-selling books, go on the speaking circuit, get lucrative consulting deals and gain popularity through social media. The ones who end-up in the limelight, identified here as the established gurus, tend to be, in various ways, compelling speakers and good self-promoters (Joullié et al., 2021). Such attributes bare little on whether their actual message has substance, a phenomenon which creates a consequential point of difference between the management thinkers and those building bridges or microprocessors. Specifically, the sorting machine for who becomes a management superstar is not the one used for the engineers. Whatever the case, and at least from a historical perspective, the people who have ended up being known as management gurus are not always the ones who have made the most profound theoretical, or even practical, contributions (Muldoon et al., 2023). Herein lies the motivation for the present special issue, Unacknowledged pioneers in management thought.
