Shaking Off Managerial Power

Fellow blogger Dave Pollard’s latest post catches the mood perfectly – 

The US is clearly sliding into fascism. The western media seem to have given up all pretence of serious journalism. Climate and ecological collapse are accelerating and completely out of control. Inflation, threatens to deep-six our utterly debt-dependent economy, when interest rates soar to catch up to it and monthly minimum loan and mortgage payments triple. And then there’s the pandemic…

In times like this, I need an uplift. And I got it from a small book I pulled off the shelf and reread from cover to cover – one of the many advantages of small books! The cognoscenti may look down on this format but I’m a great fan. If writers can’t compress their thoughts into 120 pages or so, then they have no right to inflict their verbiage on the rest of us. After all, if they feel they need more pages, they can always try my idea of the “expandable book”

The uplifting title was “Letting Go – breathing new life into organisations” (2013) from the Postcards from Scotland series which first explores the fundamental question of what motivates us before challenging the entire basis of ‘command and control’ management as well as the “tyranny of modern day ‘performance management”. 

They argue convincingly that effective leaders and managers should ‘let go’ of their ideas on controlling staff and instead nurture intrinsic motivation. The book shows that good managers need to develop management systems which actively support the human spirit, enabling creativity and allowing staff to perform their jobs properly. The ideas in this book could breathe new life into struggling organisations and are a breath of fresh air for thinking about the world of work. 

This was just before Frederic Laloux’s famous “Reinventing Organisations” took us by storm in 2014 (followed in 2016 by an Illustrated Version no less). And also before we were aware of the inspiring model of social care offered by the Buurtzorg social enterprise whose website is here. Almost a decade has passed since the critique of managers contained in “Letting Go” came out and a lot has happened since – we’ve become much more aware of algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and the threat of robots whose cause has been advanced considerably by the pandemic.  

And rereading it has certainly encouraged me to go back to the draft of Change for the Better? A Life in Reform and make sure it deals more effectively with the question of how on earth we gave managers so much power. “The Management Virus” forms chapter 4 of that draft and did ask that question but gave no reply…. 

We take managerialism for granted – even although it didn’t exist in the 1960s. “Managerial” then was only an adjective and, thanks to James Burnham, followed by the word “revolution” (at least in the immediate post-war period) to refer to what he first argued in 1941 was the growing influence of senior managers in America’s larger Corporations vis-à-vis its shareholders.

An argument sustained by the likes of Tony Crosland and Andrew Shonfield who persuaded us that the system had now been tamed - although history has demonstrated that this was a brief truce in the struggle between state, corporate and union power. And, further, that shareholders and the importance of "shareholder value" came back with a vengeance in the 1980s....

In 1956, William W Whyte’s classic Organisation Man may have painted a picture of docile managers but change was in the wind - and was prefigured in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) which analysed vague social forces, not deliberative organisational change. Even Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty didn’t envisage significant social engineering – although the power of the economists and number-crunchers was beginning to be felt in the likes of Robert McNamara 

And yet, however slowly, the 1970s saw in Britain the first signs of a new management ethos in both central and local government which, by the late 80s had become a gale-force wind. To most people at the time, public sector reform was a graveyard for reputations….there seemed no mileage in it.

There is an important story here which has never been told properly….which resolves into three basic questions –

·       Why and how, all of 50 years ago, did the “managerial turn” get underway, contaminating our everyday experiences and discourse?

·       How have we allowed managers to gain such unaccountable power?

·       What we can now do to bring them to heel?