Is there a stronger stress on management than on technical education in recent years?

In my working environment, over the past few years I have observed an increasing stress on developer management and self-management over technical education.

For example, at work I hear lots of discussions about software development processes, about ways to handle software specifications, e.g. through automatic tests, and so on. I hear less discussions about programming concepts / techniques like data structures, lazy evaluation, memoization, and so on.

To give another example, if I asked a colleague how he would manage the complexity of a certain problem, I would expect that he'd indicate me some solution approach (try to solve a subproblem first, identify subtasks) instead of suggesting a programming abstraction (try using pattern X).

Is it just something specific to my working environment or there is a general trend towards management / work organization and away from the more conceptual aspects of programming?

To make my question specific (and answerable), are there any authors or modern schools of thought that consider organizational aspects more important than educational ones for improving developer productivity?