A Product of 'His' Time? Exploring the Construct of the Ideal Manager in the Cold War Era

Managers are often measured against an ideal that is treated as a tangible object which is stable across generations. It is the contention of this paper that the ideal manager is, in fact, a social construct that is a product of the political and social context within which it exists. Different periods in time create unique typifications of the construct, and the ideal manager is not independent of its environment. The socially constructed nature of the ideal manager will be illustrated through the analysis of the construct at one specific point in time, the internal Cold War in the years following the Second World War and ending in 1960. While widely studied in most disciplines, the Cold War has been largely ignored in the management literature, and therefore provides us with a unique perspective from which to assess the impact of context on the standard to which managers are held.