This introductory chapter asserts that management must be understood as a much wider network of cultural power, negotiated by participants at all levels in institutional hierarchies. Management, in this sense, is a culture of shifting discourses and dispositions that create meaning, generate value, and shape media work throughout each moment of production and consumption. For this understanding, the chapter draws from organizational sociology and critical theory in examining how historically situated ideas about management operate as modes of managerial identity formation. Though management has become an important practice in the contemporary era of branding, IP licensing, and convergence, management as a discursive category has existed for a long time. Its functions, representations, and dispositions have changed in accordance with both industrial and cultural shifts.