Introduction

The Danish Journal of Economics and Business Administration is one of the oldest scientific journals in Europe within the field of business administration, management science and behavioral science related to the firm and to public administration.

The journal celebrates its sO'th anniversary in launching this issue on
trends and megatrends in the theory of management.

The journal is published by the Association of Candidates from the Danish Graduate Schools of Economics and Business Administration. In 1979, the association celebrated its 25th's anniversary. In this connection we published a special issue written by Danish researchers, the headline being the development of business administration as a scientific discipline and its impact on our society.

The "Festschrift" had five points of view:

- The development of business administration as a discipline and the
strategic function of that discipline,

- the development of the partial functions in the firm (the economics of
partial functions) and their impact upon the management process of
the firm,

- developments in theory of the firm and the theories of business and
public administration,

- the management function, and

- the role in the firm and in the society of the graduates from the
graduate schools of business administration.

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*) Editor of The Danish Journal ot Economics and Business Administration, professor, ekon., dr., di. h.c, Management Research Institute, The Copenhagen School of Economics and Business Administration.

Seventeen important contributions showed that our discipline has become
very differentiated and that its main field of interest now is
managerial behavior in private firms and public administrations.
It became clear that what concerns researchers is primarily the total
management process in the firm and in the public administrative system.
This means, that we in the past few years have witnessed
a shift in paradigm. From economizing within the firm and the organization
towards managing the development of the firm and the organization.

The counterpart of this development is the actual jobs of the graduates in practice. They are more and more concerned with making the management process of the whole organization and its environment more and more efficient.

We have as a consequence asked eleven distinguished researchers in
the field to give us their personal wiew of

Trends and Megatrends in the Theory of Management.

It seems as our local development and the development in our neighbour countries to a lage extent is shared by developments in the USA. A natural consequence of being aware of these developments is to use "natural forces" in active development of your own management milieu. And that researchers take the consequence and integrate their activities in the mutual development of the actual management process in the specific organization and our general knowledge, our theory of management.