[Truncated abstract] This thesis is an analysis of a technology that is radically changing the location, process and position of manager learning, leveraging organisational learning agendas, and creating networks re-ordering institutional frameworks. The thesis examines the discourses, performances and productions associated with the Frontline Management Initiative (FMI) and provides a model of workplace-based management development. Academically, it provides new knowledge about the discourses constituting, enacting and producing manager development. Practically, it provides an understanding of the relations between workplace learning and outcomes that can inform practice. The FMI is a critical technology in terms of leveraging enterprise growth, due to its extensive national profile within the politically dominant societal structures of organisations, the critical interpreting role of frontline managers, and the innovative workplace-based, learner-centred framework. As the solitary Karpin (1995) report beacon, the FMI is positioned in highly contested terrain. Managing practice confronts the complexity of ordering knowledge work, where meaning and knowledge are more fluid and transient. Management development practice is more workplace located where knowing is more situated, distributed and relationally negotiated, but framed by politically endorsed competency-based frameworks. This study takes the unique opportunity to examine a learning technology that is being shaped by powerful mediating discourses. It examines how these multiple discourses construct FMI practice, what meanings of managing they develop and what effect these relational experiences have on subsequent managing practice.