Managerialism

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

A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in the managerial society as a token of material-commercial progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality under the ‘managerialisation of everything’? Managerialisation — making something managerial — turns every eventuality of human existence into a manageable issue. Simultaneously, it standardises everything while promising individualism and individuality. You no longer have a sex-life but you ‘Manage Your Sex Life’; we do not have real marriages but we manage our marriages, we do no longer have an education but managers who manage education.¹⁰⁴ The resulting managerial society is governed by a painful demand for performance inflicted on everyone. Managerialism engineers the free competition among unequally equipped managerial subjects. Under its ideological banner of globalisation it has curtailed the prerogatives and national sovereignties unleashing global corporations and their ideological resources. That this managerial order involves economic, social, political, cultural, ideological, and intellectual domination may be a regrettable yet also promising development.

The classical Marxian theory envisaged the ‘capitalism→socialism’ transition as a revolution when a proletariat destroys the apparatus of capitalism but retains the organisational apparatus while subjecting it to socialisation. There is continuity in the revolution because certain organisational rationalities, freed from irrational restrictions and destructions, can be sustained in post-managerial societies. This is of fundamental significance for the notion of post-Managerialism as a specific negation of managerial capitalism. Although the present developments in management are subject to the commandments of Managerialism, they do not, like other factors, end with the cessation of these directives. Even in the process of revolution when unsustainable relations of production are overcome, technology remains. Once subordinated to post-managerial thinking, a new post-managerial formation of human and environmental sustainability continues to develop — perhaps with extra momentum. Contrary to an ideological misbelief, technology does not develop through leaps but by a gradual accumulation of elements of a new quality, thereby replacing previous technologies.

There are prospects that Managerialism’s chain of ideological encirclement and repression may be broken. This requires an attempt to project Managerialism’s present development and that of managerial capitalism into the future, assuming that a relatively normal capitalist evolution takes place until — a quite possible — global environmental destruction occurs. This means for theoretical purposes, temporarily neglecting the ‘real and present’ possibility of an immediate end of human civilisation through instant resource depletion and environmental destruction.²⁴⁹ On this factually rather problematic assumption, Managerialism would remain a permanent feature and so would managerial capitalism. At the same time, the latter would continue to be capable of maintaining and even marginally increasing living standards for a slowly but steadily declining part of the global population. This might be possible for a limited time in spite of and through intensified production accompanied by environmental destruction as well as the systematic waste of resources and natural and human faculties. The capability to increase living standards has asserted itself in spite of and through several wars, two world wars, numerous recessions, a relative long period of peace when one discounts the so-called Cold, Korean, Vietnam, Balkan, Afghanistan, and Iraq Wars, the War on Drugs with 60,000 deaths in Mexico alone, an apparently unending War on Terrorism, and numerous other little bombings, engineered civil wars, incursions, and invasions.

Having discussed the system integrative imperatives of Managerialism, an achievement only rendered possible by its own growing ideological forces and a relentless expanding colonisation of human beings and nature, this section turns to Managerialism’s corresponding powers of integration inside an authoritarian mass culture. Managerialism has colonised what was originally termed ‘how things are done around here’ — which is also called ‘corporate culture’ under management studies. Managerialism uses this term even though it is neither related to fine art nor is there a shared set of commonly established values and meanings inside managerial regimes. What management studies call ‘corporate culture’ is a rather one-dimensional affair. It is the domination of culture based on the hegemony of management inside managerial regimes. In these regimes, those who invent corporate culture and foster its existence exist next to those who are forced to accept it in a ‘take-it-or-leave’ or ‘my way or the highway’ option. But there is also a non-managerial societal form of culture that is increasingly exposed to Managerialism’s ideological forces. Managerialism has taken over societal culture while simultaneously corporate management has created a one-dimensional culture inside corporations. On this Lyford P. Edwards noted in 1927 ‘no class will permanently be allowed to exercise power over society without being responsible to society for the way power is exercised’.³³⁰

One of the foremost experts on obedience is Stanley Milgram with his ‘Obedience to Authority’.³⁷⁹ Perhaps his key finding was that situations powerfully override personal disposition as determinants of behaviour. When people face a moral dilemma between what an authority demands of them and what their personal moral standards tell them, the former wins, especially inside authoritarian structures. Under Managerialism and with management as the sole authority, managerial regimes are prime areas of this. Management is even in a position to engineer specific situations and systems that powerfully override personal moral dispositions. In short, inside sociology’s ‘agency-vs.-structure’ model, managerial structures determine (im)moral behaviour. The principle moral agent is no longer the self but has been transferred to management.³⁸⁰ But Milgram’s obedience experiments have also shown that ordinary people are much more likely to obey orders — even immoral ones — when the authority is perceived to be legitimate.³⁸¹ Hence, Managerialism’s strong focus on legitimising managerial rule over society.

With Managerialism, consciousness has been relinquished through reification and the invented managerial necessities of markets, commodities, and things. Necessity, morality and guilt have no place in this ideology. Corporate managers can give a signal that liquidates hundreds of jobs, lives, and — in economic terms — confines people to endless circles of poverty, destitution, depression, and violence on our ‘Planet of Slums’.⁴³³ Yet managers can still declare themselves free from all cramps of conscience and live happily thereafter.⁴³⁴ Renouncing morality and guilt does no longer leave even microscopic traces of an unhappy consciousness, a concept reaching back a very long way.

In traditions of Western thought, the idea of reason remains the core concept guiding formal and managerial logic, research, and teaching in management studies. Inside this, an antagonistic structure of reality and thought were to become reality if managerial ideology was not to eclipse the true state of affairs. The managerial world is a world of direct, immediate, and non-reflected experience in which managerial regimes, Managerialism, semi-academic and quasi-scholarly subjects such as management studies exist. According to the prevailing ideology of Managerialism, the reality of managerial regimes must never be fully comprehended, transformed, or even subverted. The managerial order is to remain the only reality there is. Hence, management studies’ guiding principle is the equation of

Reason = Truth = Reality.

It is value-neutral, objective, and avoids joining the subjective and objective worlds into one antagonistic unity. Managerial reasoning remains un-reflected reasoning deprived of all its original critical content as outlined in Kantian Enlightenment.⁵³⁶ Its emancipatory powers have deliberately been annihilated so that critical reason has no longer any transformative powers. The power of the negative no longer establishes theoretical, practical, and ethical reasoning.

In social reality — despite changing names and ideologies — the domination of individuals by individuals still remains an historical continuum linking pre-managerial to managerial societies. However, current managerial societies have altered the base of domination to some extent.⁶¹⁷ They have done this by gradually changing personal dependence of slaves on masters, serfs on lords, and subsequently workers on management with an additional dependence. This is the new and ideological dependence on Managerialism.⁶¹⁸ It is found in managerial domination with corporate policies, rules, markets, and corporations all glued together by the ideology of Managerialism. The managerial order of things is the result of domination as much as it carries domination forward. Nevertheless, it also remains true that managerial domination has generated a form of higher rationality affecting managerial societies. Together with Managerialism, it sustains its own hierarchical structures while simultaneously exploiting, ever more efficiently, the natural resources of planet earth as well as the mental resources of its knowledge workers within the knowledge and service societies.

A non-managerial redefinition of thought can help coordinate mental operations with those of social reality. Thought is on the level with reality when it is cured from managerial transgression reaching beyond Managerialism’s conceptual framework. This can be done either through purely axiomatic logic and formal mathematics or as an extensive universe of discourse and behaviour accomplished as Habermas’ ‘ideal speech’.⁶⁹² A critical linguistic analysis of Managerialism can cure thought and speech from the confusing ghosts of Managerialism. The emphasis is on the critical and enlightening function of philosophical analysis that exists independent from any correction to the abnormal, domineering, and pathological forms of communication and behaviour engineered through managerial thought and speech. It is able to remove managerial obscurities, illusions, oddities, and ideological belief-systems. If anything, it can expose their ideological content and correct malformed behaviour in managerial regimes which Hegelian philosopher Honneth describes as ‘pathological mis-developments’.⁶⁹³

The commitment of critical theory to deconstruct the pathological reality of Managerialism shows forth strikingly in its treatment of the latter. The problem of Managerialism is inherently historical while it simultaneously exceeds the traditional boundaries of simple management. Far from being only an abstract question of epistemology, managerial language as used by Managerialism and questions on the ideological status of Managerialism have to be at the centre of critical theory. But the treatment of Managerialism also reveals the position of critical theory in the intellectual culture and its historical function. While conventional philosophy and related fields are out to exorcise metaphysical ghosts such as mind, consciousness, will, soul, self, etc., Managerialism, meanwhile, moves relentlessly into position even against universities, academic departments, and entire fields of scholarly endeavour. The result shows, in a strange way, the potentiality of the destruction. While conventional subjects from sociology, history and psychology to philosophy haunt these ghosts, Managerialism haunts these subjects — not because it has to but simply because it can.⁷⁹⁴ The idea of not engaging with Managerialism is the idea of a pre-issued intellectual and departmental death certificate.

Managerialism’s ideology of ‘positive’, uncritical, and self-comforting thinking and its entourage of positivist-empiricist management studies aim to counteract the historical Enlightenment task of critical rationality that is today directed towards post-managerial and environmentally sustainable living. This critical assignment has always included nondisconnected forms of meanings able to challenge pathologies such as those created by Managerialism.⁸⁴⁷ Today, it enters conceptual thought as critical, constitutive, contradiction-highlighting, discomforting, and confronting factors while simultaneously determining its own validity through the value of non-managerial concepts. To the degree to which managerial societies have shown to be irrational, any critical analysis in terms of Enlightenment’s historical-moral rationality introduces these concepts as critical-negative elements in the form of critique, contradictions, and transcendence. These elements can never be assimilated with the positivism and the positivistic tendencies of Managerialism. Instead, they challenge the project of Managerialism in its entirety, in its intent, and in its validity.

Managerialism alters the relationship between the rational and the irrational. Contrasted with the fantastic and insane aspects of managerial rationality (means), the realm of the irrational (ends) becomes the home of those who make us believe that they and the system they represent are utterly rational. But the ideas which Managerialism promotes as ‘the’ way of life become increasingly irrational. Total environmental disintegration may well be the price for the next supercheap deal on a toaster, a car, a fridge, or a flat-screen. Today, following the completion of ‘the structural transformation of the public sphere’⁹⁰⁴ and Managerialism’s colonisation of the lifeworld,⁹⁰⁵ managerial societies manage, shape, define, or at least infiltrate all normal forms of human-to-human interactions. This structure validates even human communication in accordance with Managerialism’s requirements. Values alien to Managerialism no longer have other media of communication.⁹⁰⁶ They are largely excluded from the public sphere and banned into the realm of abnormality, obscurity, utopia, and fiction. But this domain still has space for freedom of expression enabling non- and anti-managerial writers and artists that do not conform to the ideology of Managerialism to call things by their true name.