Managementwhose

Managementwhose is a concept in organizational theory describing a governance approach that centers accountability and decision rights on the identified owners or stakeholders affected by managerial actions. The term is a neologism formed by combining "management" with "whose," used to foreground the question of ownership and legitimacy in management actions.

Key ideas include mapping decision rights to stakeholders (owners, employees, customers, communities), promoting co-management, ensuring transparency, and aligning incentives with the long-term interests of those who bear outcomes. The concept emphasizes clarity about who holds authority, who is affected by decisions, and how responsibility is shared or delegated across organizational boundaries.

A practical framework involves identifying principal actors, clarifying accountability mechanisms (reporting lines, performance metrics), conducting impact assessments, and embedding ethical review in strategy formulation. It also encourages processes for ongoing dialogue among stakeholders, access to information, and mechanisms to adjust decisions in response to feedback and changing conditions.

Applications across sectors include corporate boards, public sector reform, nonprofit governance, and supply chains, where clarifying "whose" benefits or burdens the outcomes can influence legitimacy and performance. The approach supports governance designs that integrate stakeholder concerns into strategy and risk management, rather than treating ownership as a purely legal category.

Criticism: can be ambiguous, difficult to operationalize, risks diluting accountability if multiple "whose" share power; requires cultures of trust and robust governance processes. In practice, the term remains theoretical with limited empirical consensus. See also stakeholder theory, governance, co-management, distributed leadership.