Historical discourses of public management in Denmark

The management phenomenon does not simply arise out of nothing. It has emerged against the background of a protracted process that has gradually created the conditions for that which we now refer to as `management'.This ar ticle investigates the construction of the concept of management in the Danish public sector in the 20th century, revealing a transformation of the concept characterized by four different discourses that have rendered management a question of bureaucratic control, efficient rationalization, sectoral planning and, finally, professional management. The article accounts for the par ticular time-dependent conceptions that inform our knowledge of the past and contribute to our understanding of contemporar y semantic possibilities for management. By this means, the ar ticle sheds new light on the emergence of public management from the past and the challenges it faces in the present.