Management paradigms in Finnish journals and literature between 1921 and 2006

This article examines when the information on central management paradigms first arrived in Finland, and how they have been discussed in Finnish journals. Our key findings reveal that rational paradigms – scientific management and structural analysis – dominated management discussions in Finnish journals until the 1980s, and that discussion on management paradigms in Finland in the twentieth century appears to have been characterised by a slow transition from rational ideology towards normative ideologies. We also found that Barley and Kunda's thesis (1992) regarding the alternation of rational and normative ideologies is not really applicable to Finland: it would seem that the emergence and adoption of paradigms coincide more with changes in economic and business structure and influences arriving from abroad.