Purpose: To offer a coherent critique of the concept of managerial frameworks of competence through the exploration of the problems of generalizability and abstraction and the "scientific" assumptions of management. Design/methodology/approach: Employs the ecological metaphor of intellectual landscape and extends it to examining the development of the field of management, its early contours which traversed a diversity of conceptualisations such as management as an art, or an expression of personality, or as a vocation, the search for coordinates and a scientific image, and finally, a comparison of agri-business and market gardening. The argument is illustrated by reference to particular management development programmes. Findings: The argument is made that frameworks of competence impose conceptual limitations--"monocultures of the mind"--that are destructive. Justifying coordinates in an activity that is always particular, contextual and socially constructed faces the problem of finding stable evidence in a turbulent ecology and "frameworks of competence" are beset with problems of definition. However, with an understanding of power and discourse, and the application of the landscape metaphor such frameworks can be productively illuminated. What seems to be required is a wholesale shift in values and a re-evaluation of the meaning and purpose of work. Practical implications: Useful to curriculum designers and programme developers to analyse their work. Originality/value: Provides a detailed coherent account of the emergence of the concept of competency, and subjects the concept to wide-ranging critical review. (Contains 1 note.)