What is Management Engineering? Towards a “Body of Knowledge” for a Systemic Discipline

An unprecedented mix of technological and social transformations is increasing the complexity of challenges faced by individuals and organizations, along with the need to build more performing and sustainable socio-technical systems. In such endeavor, the role of higher education and scientific research is crucial in the effort to advance knowledge and contribute to a better society. As an academic and professional field, management engineering is particularly well-positioned in the described scenario, given its native problem-solving orientation, cross-disciplinary nature, and value-oriented perspective. However, unlike most engineering and technical disciplines, a structured and globally shared definition of management engineering, along with the conceptual “boundaries” of the field, is yet to be introduced in literature and shared among practitioners. The objective of this research is thus to apply a mixed inductive and deductive activity to reconstruct the meaning of management engineering and propose a definition of its founding pillars. A design science approach and a compound artifact development process are used to obtain an Italian scope of the discipline and complement the same with an extensive international and cross-disciplinary benchmark analysis. An intermediate result, including a constellation of 467 concepts or second-level constructs characterizing management engineering, is used to obtain a taxonomy of 7 macro-areas and 35 first-level topics. The study is a first but comprehensive effort to define, on an empirical basis, the constructs characterizing the field of management engineering. It can thus be assumed as a useful conceptual platform upon which to build a system view and a codified body of knowledge as a condition to further develop management engineering as an academic and professional discipline.