Purpose
This study aims to analyse how managerial decision-making has been conceptualised in the literature across successive technological developments between 1980 and 2025. Although technology’s influence on management is widely recognised, existing research remains fragmented across disciplinary and technological streams, with limited attention to the longer-term historical reconfiguration of managerial rationality across bounded, data-driven, algorithmic configurations and more recent agentic ones.

Design/methodology/approach
The paper adopts a focused bibliometric-conceptual design that integrates quantitative science mapping with qualitative historical interpretation. A dataset of 263 Scopus-indexed journal articles published between 1980 and 2025 was analysed using Bibliometrix and VOSviewer for performance analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis, thematic mapping and thematic evolution analysis. The bibliometric evidence was then interpreted through a historical lens to examine how technological change has progressively reconfigured managerial rationality in the literature. Accordingly, the study does not treat the identified configurations as predefined categories to be tested, but as interpretive outcomes of the conceptual synthesis developed from the bibliometric patterns.

Findings
The findings indicate that the literature on managerial decision-making has evolved through several overlapping and unevenly developed technological streams. Rather than replacing one another linearly, these streams accumulate and coexist, producing increasingly hybrid and distributed understandings of managerial rationality. This trajectory also reveals a shift in scholarly attention from cognitive limits and data quality to concerns with algorithmic bias, explainability and the governance of increasingly autonomous decision systems. The paper interprets these streams as historically evolving and partially overlapping configurations of managerial rationality, shaped by the interaction between bibliometric patterns and broader conceptual debates.

Originality/value
This study contributes to management history by offering an integrated historical-conceptual interpretation of how successive technological developments have reshaped the literature on managerial decision-making. It situates recent developments in agentic AI within a broader historical trajectory and highlights how technological change has progressively reconfigured managerial rationality, cognition, authority and autonomy.