Based on a comprehensive review of literature, the paper examines how ‘managerial work’ as a fluid analytical category has been approached methodologically, theoretically, and empirically over the last 60+ years. In particular, we highlight the existence of competing scholarly understandings regarding its nature, performance, meaning, and politics. We suggest that subsequent empirical investigations have too often worked, methodologically and theoretically, to slot in, and thus effectively reduce, the term to a particular pre-existing box, rather than exploring open-endedly what and how, but also why of ‘managerial work’ as a distinct mode of situated ordering. Having represented the concept’s past and present by identifying four distinct research approaches reflected in representative publications, we suggest more attention should be devoted to a mode of analytical departure that promises to directly address suggested shortcomings in the literature. Specifically, we argue that much could be gained if contemporary notions of practice are brought into the study of managerial work. To this end, we outline the contours of a practice-based approach as a sensitizing framework for understanding managerial work, by highlighting the situated, relational, sociomaterial, meaning-making, and consequence-oriented analytical foci the approach suggests, and suggesting a number of conjoint research questions, as well as acknowledging subsequent limitations
