Managerialism

A Critique of an Ideology

T. Klikauer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349462674, 9781137334268
• eBook ISBN: 9781137334275
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Most people know what management is but often people have vague ideas about Manageralism. This book introduces Manageralism and its ideology as a colonising project that has infiltrated nearly every eventuality of human society.

1

Introduction: Managerialism and Society

Today, most of us spend most of our days inside companies, firms, and corporations. These firms are democratic exclusion zones run by managers under the institutional heading of management. Management not only encompasses the actual affairs of business organisations but also other institutions. The first step to successful management is an institution that trains managers: the business/management school.¹ The second is the actual structure set up by management: managerial regimes operating inside firms and companies. The third is not an institution but an ideology.² In the words of Scott & Hart (1991:40), ‘Managerialism, like any ideology, is defined by its ends and by the means used to achieve those ends’. Today, Managerialism has entered the public domain with roughly a million Google hits.³ There are endless numbers of people who call themselves managers, rafts of publications, textbooks, academic and quasi-academic journals, and huge numbers of academics employed by management schools. Yet despite all this, there are very few books on Managerialism⁴ with some notable exceptions.⁵

Today, an initial attempt to define Managerialism comes from Wikipedia.org describing it as ‘the belief that organisations have more similarities than differences, and thus the performance of all organisations can be optimised by the application of generic management skills and theory. To a practitioner of Managerialism, there is little difference in the skills required to run a college, an advertising agency, or an oil rig. Experience and skills pertinent to an organisation’s core business are considered secondary. The term Managerialism can be used disparagingly to describe organisations perceived to have a preponderance or excess of managerial techniques, solutions, rules and personnel, especially if these seem to run counter to the common sense of observers. It is said that the MBA degree is intended to provide generic skills to a new class of managers not wedded to a particular industry or professional sector. The term can also be used pejoratively as in the definition of a management caste.’

American management expert Robert R. Locke defines Managerialism as ‘what occurs when a special group, called management, ensconces itself systemically in an organisation and deprives owners and employees of their decision-making power (including the distribution of emolument), and justifies that takeover on the grounds of the managing group’s education and exclusive possession of the codified bodies of knowledge and know-how necessary to the efficient running of the organisation’.⁶ Today, Locke’s definition can be extended because Managerialism has extended itself from the limitations of business organisations to society.⁷ Hence, a more appropriate approximation to a definition might be:

Managerialism combines management knowledge and ideology to establish itself systemically in organisations and society while depriving owners, employees (organisational-economical) and civil society (social-political) of all decision-making powers. Managerialism justifies the application of managerial techniques to all areas of society on the grounds of superior ideology, expert training, and the exclusive possession of managerial knowledge necessary to efficiently run corporations and societies.

This transition from management to Managerialism has historic origins. After 18^th and 19^th century’s simplicity of running small workshops, firms, and small companies, factory administration, i.e. management, grew larger.⁸ Management installed itself as the sole institution with specialised knowledge – managerial knowledge – to administer factories.⁹ During the early 20^th century factory administration was turned into management. Subsequently management expanded its operations. By adopting legitimising ideologies such as competition, efficiency, free markets, greed is good, etc. management mutated into an ideological operation that today has infected all sections of human society. In historical terms, this occurred at first where ‘Scientific Management’ was invented, i.e. in the USA. Managerialism’s chronological trajectory could only ever be from management to Managerialism. Historically, management and Managerialism were not paralleling movements nor was the latter an ideology that formed the practical expression of management. Management entered the scene before Managerialism appeared.

In terms of an historical chronology, Managerialism is a genuine US-American term because the USA has been at the forefront of management techniques (Taylor, Ford, Drucker, Porter, etc.) with the possible exceptions of French writer Henri Fayol (1916) and partly German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). Consequently, it was in the USA where management first became Managerialism. ‘During Herbert Hoover’s years as Secretary of Commerce and then as president, Managerialism was further honed, until it became the sword’s-point of reform in the Roosevelt era. Managerialism was credited with the prosperity of the Eisenhower 1950s.’¹⁰ In short, management is an early 20^th century term (Taylor, Fayol, and Ford) while the term Managerialism belongs to the late-20^th century. Managerialism merges management with ideology, thereby assisting an expansion of something rather simplistic, trivial, mundane, and to be honest, rather dull: the administration of a company. ‘Management, to put it plainly, is boring’ (Scott & Hart 1991:39). But this boredom quickly expanded to become something that transcended simple factory administration. Subsequently, management mutated into a full-fledged ideology under the following formula:¹¹

Management + Ideology + Expansion = Managerialism

When management mutated into an ‘-ism’, it joined a family of ‘-isms’.¹² Put simply, ‘-isms’ indicate an informal, often derogatory and unspecified doctrine, system, and practice. In other words, ‘-isms’ are belief-systems with a cognitive content that is held up as being true. Hence, an ‘-ism’ is accepted as authoritative by a group or school. In short, ‘-isms’ represent a doctrine consisting of a shared set of common ideological beliefs and practices. To turn management into an ideology, management first needed to come up with a proper ideology.¹³ It has become commonplace to see ideology as a set of ideas that constitute goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things. It provides a worldview phrased as a set of ideas that are proposed by a dominant class or group. Members of such a group or society receive the ideology in order to create a false consciousness. As Jaeggi outlined, ‘ideologies are the means by which the predominant situation is instilled in the hearts and minds of the individual’.¹⁴ Ideologies are used to create socialisation and engineer compliance so that the victims of ideological socialisation do not rebel but support a given ideology. The main purpose behind an ideology is twofold:

1. It adheres to a common set of ideas where conformity already exists. This is done through normative thought processes.
2. It is the task of ideologies to cloak the reality of, for example, a given institution that is based on contradictions.

‘Managerialism is about playing out … a cacophony of aberrations and inconsistencies’.¹⁵ Ideology seeks to masquerade uniformity and an overall goal based on a set of easy to digest principles such as, for example, competition, deregulation, efficiency, free markets, and privatisation.¹⁶ Ideologies are systems of abstract thought applied to public matters, thereby making ideology central to politics and society. Implicitly, a catch-all umbrella-ideology such as Managerialism seeks to redirect thinking away from truth and into a specific direction that is invented by a hegemonic and powerful group.¹⁷

As with most ‘-isms’, Managerialism is, in the majority of cases, used pejoratively rather than favourably. Where Managerialism is dominant, its ideology is made to appear as common sense and requires no further explanation, e.g. competition, the free market, etc. These assumptions are backed up through an ideological legitimacy delivered by universities housing management schools that generate thousands of MBAs and MAs in marketing, finance, operations management, and Human Resource Management. The university association seeks to level management up to the realm of science in an attempt to equalise management with science on par with physics or at least with economics. University generated management ‘science’ as a whole serves primarily as a PR exercise to legitimate management.¹⁸

Where Managerialism needs a name (free enterprise, business community, etc.) the choice is usually one that conceals the profit interests leading to ‘New Public Managerialism’, ‘Neo-Managerialism’, and ‘New Managerial Nonsense’ in the public sector and ‘shareholder value’ in the private sector.¹⁹ ‘Shareholder value’ comes along synonyms for organisational goals, organisational outcomes, organisations objectives, adding value, ‘Triple Bottom Line’ (PPP = people, planet, profit), ‘The Real Bottom Line’, and so on. All of them conceal the profit motive.²⁰ As an ideological cloaking device, shareholder-value is of particular interest in the way it represents managers as mere agents of shareholder principals. The central doctrine of Managerialism is that the differences between, for example, universities and car companies are less important than their similarities and that the performance of all organisations can be optimised by the application of generic management skills and knowledge. It follows that the crucial element of institutional reform and restructuring, to use one of Managerialism’s most favourite buzzwords, is the removal of obstacles to ‘the right to manage’.²¹

Historically, the rise of Managerialism has gone hand in hand with that of reactionary programmes of market-oriented reforms – e.g. Thatcherism – and economic rationalism and Neo-Liberalism elsewhere. Nevertheless, Managerialism and Neo-Liberalism are not the same even though they share certain affinities. Neo-Liberalism has a definite political programme – as outlined by Herrn von Hayek – in the form of privatisation, deregulation, annihilating welfare states, aggressive anti-unionism, restrictive fiscal policy, redirection of public spending, tax reform, interest rates, floating exchange rates, trade liberalisation, liberalisation of capital account of the balance of payments, promoting market provision, legal security of property rights, and the financialisation of capital. In contrast, Managerialism is not primarily concerned with such political issues.²² Its prime concern is the management of capitalism and society in its image. Both – capitalism and society – should mirror the way corporations are managed. For Managerialism, management and managerial techniques applied to corporations are the guiding principles, for Neo-Liberalism it is the free market.²³

Neo-Liberalism is about economics and politics, Managerialism primarily deals with corporations and management and the function of both inside ‘managerial economics’.²⁴ Neo-Liberalism even pretends to serve the common good, Managerialism has no common good. But perhaps the clearest point of difference between both remains democracy.²⁵ Managerialism is not a democratic programme. It does not seek to influence politics to get democratically elected representatives to further its political ambitions. Managerialism is primarily about getting its managerial-reactionary programme carried out at company and societal level.²⁶ For Managerialism politics and democracy are simply a hindrance on the way to efficiency and competitive advantages.²⁷ In sum, Neo-Liberalism is about democracy while for Managerialism the extermination of democracy is no more than an, albeit welcomed, side-effect. Inside the neo-liberalist project, democracy and politics are important. Inside Managerialism, none of them exists. For Managerialism, there are no democratic solutions to problems, only managerial ones. Managerialism is not about Rousseau’s volonté générale (general will) of the people but about engineering-like approaches to societal problems that have been converted into technicalities.²⁸

While Neo-Liberalism’s background is economics, Managerialism is an outgrowth of management. At first glance, Managerialism may even appear inconsistent with traditional free-market thinking that promotes ideals such as competitive marke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Managerialism and Society
• 2 Managerialism as Ideology
• 3 Annihilating Social Change
• 4 Spreading Managerialism
• 5 The Culture of Managerialism
• 6 Managerialism and Authoritarianism
• 7 Managerialism and Positive Thinking
• 8 Shaping Science – Shaping Democracy
• 9 Management Studies
• 10 The Age of Managerialism
• 11 Challenges to Managerial Thinking
• 12 Beyond Managerialism
• 13 Roadblocks to Post-Managerialism
• 14 Conclusion: A Post-Managerial World is Possible
• Notes
• Index