Writing

Writing seems to be even more a tool of power than it was in 1947 when George Orwell wrote his Politics and the English Language. University specialisms have multiplied; professions have developed and expanded their empires; management has developed its own language. Obfuscation in the pursuit of an unchallenged life is the name of the game.

I’ve spent a significant part of my life writing papers – but only recently recognised this. This blog tries to explore the reasons why I have spent so much time struggling in front of a keyboard. I started by writing quasi-academic papers simply because I was looking for ways to improve the way local government in my country worked.
I had become a local councillor and was horrified at the way the municipality (staff and councillors) treated the (low-income) citizens who had elected me. Instead of responding positively to their efforts at self-help, they ridiculed and undermined them. And this seemed to be systemic – something to do with the assumptions which came with the bureaucratic structures we used.

 This was the early 1970s and these structures were under fire (from writers as varied as Bennis, Fergusson, Toffler and most memorably by Donald Schon whose 1970 Reith lectures (published as Beyond the Stable State) had me riveted in front of my father’s radio. I was summarising the more interesting books and papers – trying to apply their open, participative processes to my situation – and describing what happened in Occasional Papers in a Local Government Unit I established. No “peer review” – so perhaps I fell into some bad habits! I was writing for myself – trying to make some sort of sense of the confusion I felt. On the other hand, it gave me the freedom to develop my own “voice” – and adjust my style in the light of direct feedback from readers as distinct from academic custodians of good writing norms!

At the time I was a lecturer – but being a politician forced me to simplify my language to make myself understood by colleagues and the electorate! That was a great training! I had to “unlearn” a lot of big words and complicated phrases which university life had given me; and to learn to call a spade a spade!

Then I wrote a short book to try to explain in simple terms why some major changes being experienced by local government were necessary and also trying to demystify the way the system worked. That made me realise how few books were in fact written for this purpose! Most books are written to make a profit or an academic reputation. The first requires you to take a few simple and generally well-known ideas but parcel them in a new way – the second to choose a very tiny area of experience and write about it in a very complicated way.

After that experience, I realised how true is the saying that “If you want to understand a subject, write a book about it”!! Failing that, at least an article – it’s amazing how what was a clear understanding in your mind is mercilessly exposed as deficient when you put it on paper! Gaps in your knowledge are exposed – and you begin to have the specific questions which then make sure you get the most out of your reading.

My first real publications were chapters in other people’s books and national journals – which described the experiences in community development and more open policy-making processes some of us had introduced into Europe’s largest municipality. I was “sunk”, however, when one journal then asked me to write one page every 4 weeks. I just couldn’t compress my thoughts that way. Although I was reading a lot, I couldn’t write in abstract terms – only about my own experiences, trying to relate them to the more general ideas.

Since I became a consultant in Central Europe and Central Asia and have written less passionately and more analytically for very targeted (and narrow) audiences. Basically what I have been trying to do in the last 10 years is to summarise our experiences in Europe of changing systems of government (eg decentralisation) and indicate what it might mean for the countries in which I was working. It has always been the HOW – rather the WHAT – of change which has fascinated me. One of the things which has disturbed me in the last decade or so is the way complex processes have been reduced to simplistic formulae in subjects such as the management of change and government accountability – their ethical dimension being sucked out in the process. British Governments have become impatient and have imposed one (centralised) fashion after another – in the process making us cynical about both change and the specific nostrum of the moment.

At one stage I wrote a short paper about the writing process – and presented it to some students. I was intrigued to learn that many of the ideas reflected a paper I had never heard of written by C Wright Mills - On Intellectual Craftsmanship

The painting is an Ivanov - I think Savi

Morning surf

I gave a link yesterday to an interesting site – Musings of an Amateur Trader – which consistently gives detailed and self-confident assessments of the political and economic health of countries. Wow, I said to myself, this guy really gets around. Now I think I know why – it’s hardly a blog (it contains no profile or statement of purpose) rather the presentations from a risk agency called STRATFOR headed by a financier called George Friedman. Today’s entry is a detailed forecast of political and financial events in 2011 – with the text occasionally indicating STRATFOR’s methods or assessments (when the penny dropped). So this is the real stuff we are getting – for free!
While I was searching for info on them, I came across (a) a long and fascinating post from another forecasting blog on Stratfor reliability and also what looks to be a thoughtful blog by management consultant (!!) John Hagel.

I’m remiss in not having looked at the great Eurotribune website in the last few months – and did some catching up this morning of its diaries. It draws on a group of writers from various parts of Europe and America and does great interviews with people working at the cutting edge of social and economic development - particularly those working on food and farming issues (eg farming sovereignty) and in various African countries (a good series is the 1,000 word intros to those countries and the various garssroot initiatives they have). Good posts on Neo-feudalism and neo-nihilism; a pamphlet on the broken British economic model; and a discussion about trends in financial capitalism.

Clearly I shall have to update the list of favourite links I have on the right hand column of this site!
Now to return to the editing I have been doing of the two papers on China I have recently added to my website. The title I had originally given to my explanation for my resignation from the project there had been Mission Impossible and, when I changed it to Lost in Beijing,I had not realised there had been a steamy film with that title! I had actually been thinking of Bill Murray's Lost in Translation with the sad hotel scenes looking down on a megapolis. Right now I'm working on the other paper - a briefing note on Chinese Administrative Reform. One might ask why - since my website does not get many hits. But I am surprised by the frequency with which I can find a post of mine from this blog on a google search - so I hope that, with a suitable title, the paper (and website) might get a higher profile. Even although I say it myself, its library of papers and references seem to be unique!

Cultural differences

I have quite few websites about the EU on my favourites bar – but don’t often access them since they are either too technical or too predictable. I’ve just looked at the two which are in my “links” on this site and have to wonder why I put them there! Neither gives any real sense of what’s going on in the EU. But I’ve just hit (through the Social Europe site) a blog which seems genuinely informative about a range of EU activities; gives links for further reading; and which resists the temptation of self-indulgent raving to which too many blogs succumb (“yours truly” excepted, of course!)
I mentioned recently “The geography of thought” – the book which reports on the experiments which take the writing of people like de Hofstede and Trompenaars about differences in cultural behaviour a stage further – to suggest that Europeans and Asians literally see the world differently and think differently. By coincidence I read in parallel Lucy Wadham’s The Secret Life of France – which is a delightful dissection of the mental and behavioural DNA of the Parisian bourgeois. She uses the country’s interesting mix of Catholicism and Revolutionary principles to offer an explanation of why the English (I use the term for obvious reasons!) and the French find it so difficult to understand one another – whether in matters relating to infidelity or diversity. Have a look at some of the 77 reviews on the Amazon site to get a sense of her argument.
The differences between Bulgaria and Romania is a fascinating issue for me. The Danube does not just act as a geographical but as a cultural and even physiognomic (?) boundary. Witness the way the voice timbre of women drops and their “sini” (glands) grow in the 2 minutes it takes to cross the great bridge which connects Giurgiu from Russe! Another difference I noticed the other day is that all the plastic Bulgarian pepper pots seem to be recyclable (the tops unscrew to allow you to top up) – whereas the Romanian ones are not! Very significant! I was also interested to read that the Romanians share with the Serbians a feature which I find most annoying – a search for blame and an almost sadistic delight in pointing out apparent contradictions in their interlocuteur’s conversation. A classic example was this week when I told my partner about the crack which had developed in the mountain house toilet. “No”, I replied, “I remember very clearly flushing the toilet after I had turned off the water in January; and not only did I put salt in the toilet water remaining but I remember squeezing the water in the toilet basin with a cloth!” “But”, Came the suspicious query, “Why did you need to add salt if you had squeezed the water out?”! I rest my case!
And let's not talk about the various ways people conduct arguments - with the tentative explorative style fitting very ill with the aggressive debate which seems to characterise what we might call Latin nations???

Plus Ca Change....???

About 25 years ago I first doodled a little table which tried to identify the key subjects which had divided opinion in each of the decades since the 1930s

At the time I didn’t understand why I was doing this - but it was clearly an important idea for me because I would keep returning to it…I became fascinated by the failure of those who became disillusioned with ideas which had initially enthused them to ask the obvious question about the lessons they drew from both the seduction and disillusionment

It was, of course, Keynes who first drew our attention to the power of ideas. The quote is on my blog’s masthead –

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"

But most of us seem to imagine that we are so hard-headed as to be resistant to anything but appeals to our self-interest.

As a result we fail to ask good questions about the rise and fall of ideas –

If only we would take time to explore the reasons for both the seductiveness and disappointments, we might learn to develop the art of scepticism…

The focus of my table (called “The Ebb and Flow of Ideas”) on fashionable ideas is, of course, rather idiosyncratic. The more normal way to handle social trends is that of social historians such as David Kynaston who emphasise the influence of technological change. But documentarist Adam Curtis shows us yet another way – choosing the theme of social control to demonstrate how the theories of a few individuals - from Freud to “game theorists” and characters such as RD Laing, JD Buchanan, Bob McNamara – were used by big business and politicians alike in the post-war period. And how an utterly negative assumption about human nature underpinned the basic model of social interaction they all used…

His series called The Trap is typical and its various parts can be viewed here, here – and here.

I knew that the author of the famous satirical series “Yes, Minister” (Anthony Jay - whose essay I reproduce in the final part of my own 5-part series) based it on the work of the “public choice” economists – (35 mins into part 1) but I had not, until viewing “The Trap” realised the role RD Laing had played in destroying the US psychology establishment and bringing in a new self-referential one…

Curtis’s work has attracted some good profiles – eg this one in 2007 and this one in 2012

His most recent documentary is Hypernormalisation which I am right now viewing and on which I may comment shortly…..

No less a journal than The Economist has just published a long interview with him – in which he makes the important point that - 

What no one saw coming was the effect of individualism on politics. It’s our fault. We all want to be individuals and we don’t want to see ourselves as parts of trade unions, political parties or religious groups. We want to be individuals who express ourselves and are in control of our own destiny. With the rise of that hyper-individualism in society, politics got screwed. That sense of being part of a movement that could challenge power and change the world began to die away and was replaced by a technocratic management system.That’s the thing that I’m really fascinated by. I think the old mass democracies sort of died in the early 90s and have been replaced by a system that manages us as individuals

My recent post on "controlling the Masses" led to another important series of posts about contemporary politics which included reading lists about the location of power….As I was rereading them, I was struck with exactly the same reaction as Curtis when he makes this comment about investigative journalism - 

“The problem I have with a lot of investigative journalism, is that they always say: “There should be more investigative journalism” and I think, “When you tell me that a lot of rich people aren't paying tax, I’m shocked but I’m not surprised because I know that. I don’t want to read another article that tells me that”. What I want is an article that tells me why, when I’m told that, nothing happens and nothing changes. And no one has ever explained that to me.

Curtis uses the opportunity of The Economist interview to emphasise the point that people are searching for a new politics which will give them a vision worth striving for....and that we all seem overcome with a dreadful fatalism....I very much agree with his opinion that our times need a new more positive and more social vision and that the central question indeed is how we learn to trust again…..
This gives me a chance to remind my readers of the great reading list I included recently for protestors

Explaining the blog's title

The blog was ten years old last autumn – making it one of the longest-running (english-speaking) blogs of its kind.  It first saw the light of day as "Carpathian Musings" because the blogging started in my mountain house in that area but, after a few winters spent in Sofia, I realized that the title was no longer a precise description of its source.

The blog was therefore, for 5 years or so, called “Balkan and Carpathian Musings”.

But neither the word "Balkan" nor "Carpathian" are keywords people use when they are googling on the topics the blog deals with - such as "the global financial crisis", "organisational reform", "social change", "capitalism" - let alone "Romanian culture", "Bulgarian painting", "transitology"etc.... 
So clearly the blog needed a name which better expresses its content and objectives. I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…

Let’s be clear, I’m not interested in raising the profile as an end in itself…..I have no illusions about my significance. But I am confident that my blog (and website) is an almost unique “resource” or, if you prefer, “library”…..Not perhaps so much of my writing – but of the insights of others whose books and papers I’ve taken the time and trouble to seek out and whose significance I’ve both recognized and wanted to pass on……Two crucial but not necessarily connected factors!!

So, let me try to explain why, for the past few months, I’ve been running with the title “Exploring No-Man’s Land”. The images of battlefields this summons up are quite deliberately chosen.

First, an accident of birth had me straddling the borderland of the West and East ends of a shipbuilding town in the West of Scotland – with class, religious and political tensions simmering in those places. 

Then political and academic choices in my late 20s brought me slap into the middle of the no-man’s land between politicians and different sorts of professional and academic disciplines.

Then, when I was almost 50, I became a nomadic consultant, working for the next 25 years in ten different countries

Previous posts have tried to give a sense of how that experience has made me who I am….

I was the son of a Presbyterian Minister (or “son of the manse” as we were known) and received my education in a state school which still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic Tradition……now, sadly, much traduced.

It would have been easier for my parents to send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from our house but, as home was a manse (owned by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End”, that school was fee-paying. And my parents (although no radicals) would never have contemplated taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with modest houses and apartments in the centre and east of the town.

Thus began my familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..And trying to straddle such borders – let alone explore them – can be an uncomfortable experience.

When I became a young councillor in 1968 (for the Catholic-dominated Labour party), I found myself similarly torn I developed loyalties to the local community activists but found myself in conflict with my (older) political colleagues and officials.

And I felt this particularly strongly when I was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and wife-beating……..

The collusion between the police and my legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt” and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was rarely disturbed to sign search warrants!

And, on being elevated a few years later to one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized Departments with massive budgets and manpower.

It was at that stage that I developed a diagram for my students to make sense of the “conflict of loyalties” to what I saw as 4 very different pressures (audiences) to which politicians are subjected – 

- local voters (if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);

- the party (both local and national)

- the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;

- their conscience.

Politicians, I argued, differ according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished – “populist”; “ideologue”, “statesman”,  “maverick”.

The effective politician, however, is the one who resists the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its own important truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership.

And I would make the same point about the different professional and academic disciplines.

Each generates its own way of looking at the world – as you will see from the table below which looks only at seven academic disciplines

The core assumptions of academic subjects

Discipline	Core assumption	Most Famous exponents (not necessarily typical!)
Sociology	Struggle for power	Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, C Wright Mills,Robert Merton,  Herbert Simon, A Etzioni, Ralf Dahrendorf
Economics	Rational choice	Adam Smith, Schumpeter, Keynes, P Samuelson, M Friedmann, J Stiglitz, P Krugman
Political science	Rational choice (at least since the 1970s)	Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, David Easton, S Wolin, Peter Hall, James Q Wilson, Bo Rothstein, Francis Fukuyama
Geography	??	Mackinder, David Harvey, Nigel Thrift, Danny Dorling
Public management	mixed for traditional bodies - rational choice for New PM	Woodrow Wilson, Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt, Guy Peters, G Bouckaert,
anthropology	shared meaning	B Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Shore, David Graeber
Political economy	draws upon economics, political science, law, history, sociology et al to explain how political factors determine economic outcomes.	JK Galbraith, Susan Strange, Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Geoffrey Hodgson, Yanis Varoufakis,

And, of course, each of these seven fields has a variety of sub-fields each of which has its own specific “take” even before you get to the eccentricities of individual practitioners – let me remind you of this table about 10 sub-fields in Economics which I used in a recent post

Pluralism in Economics

Name of “school”	Humans….	Humans act within…	The economy is…..
Old “neo-classical”	optimise narrow self-interest	A vacuum	Stable
New “neo-classical”	can optimise a variety of goals	A market context	Stable in the absence of friction
Post-Keynes	use rules of thumb	A macro-economic context	Naturally volatile
Classical	act in their self-interest	Their class interests	Generally stable
Marxist	do not have predetermined patterns	Their class and historical interests	Volatile and exploitative
Austrian	have subjective knowledge and preferences	A market context	Volatile – but this is generally sign of health
Institutional	have changeable behaviour	Instit envt that sets rules and social norms	Dependent on legal and social structures
Evolutionary	act “sensibly” but not optimally	An evolving, complex system	Both stable and volatile
Feminist	exhibit engendered behaviour	A social context	Ambiguous
Ecological	act ambiguously	Social context	Embedded in the environment

This is an excerpt only – the full table is from Ho-Joon Chang’s “Economics – a User’s Guide” but can be viewed at diagram at p61 of The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017)

Please understand, I’m not trying to confuse – rather the opposite….I’m trying to liberate!

Once we become aware of the very different worlds in which people live, our world suddenly becomes a very richer place – in which we have choices about the particular lens we use to make sense of it all…

I remember the first time I really became aware of this – when I did the Belbin team test. And The Art of Thinking by Bramsall and Harrison (1984) very usefully sets out different types of strategic thinking..

Here’s another example - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/01/framing-capitalism.html

Draft Guide for the Perplexed

Some 12-13 years ago I drafted a paper with the rather odd title “Living for Posterity” which was -

"one man’s attempt to explore how he might “make a difference”; or at least feel that what he is doing is improving the human condition rather than compounding its problems. For I was at the enviable point in my life where I didn’t need to work full-time and could choose what I did with my time and life.
The first half of the paper still has the form and content it had when it was originally written (in Tashkent) in 2001 some 10 years after I had left political life in Scotland and started the nomadic life of a consultant in countries which were assumed to be in some sort of transition from a form of communism to capitalism".

How – was my question – should I use my energies and resources (time, skills, knowledge and money) in the future to best public (rather than private) advantage?

My 2001 note was structured around 5 questions -

• why I was pessimistic about the future and so unhappy with the activities of the programmes and organisations with whom I dealt – and with what the French have called La Pensee Unique, the post 1989 “Washington consensus”

• who were the organisations and people I admired

• what they were achieving - and what not

• how these gaps could be reduced

• how with my resources I could help that process

One friend responded and I returned to the questions 10 years later and tried to update my thoughts.

On Sunday I had a stimulating chat – over a white wine - with a new acquaintance about the issues and have been encouraged to do a minor update which you can find on my website with the title - Draft Guide for the Perplexed

I’ve been very lucky in my life – having a position of considerable political influence in the West of Scotland for 22 years from the age of 28 – and then having responsibility for a variety of capacity-building projects in central European and Central Asian governments for another 20 odd years.

From these very different vantage points (and my constant reading) I have developed some views about what we might call social/political interventions…..Unfortunately I find that my attempt to communicate these gets perverted by language – not just my own imperfections but, I suspect, the verbal infrastructure itself. Hence the pleasure I got from drafting a “Devil’s Dictionary” to warn people about language – entitled Just Words

I readily confess to being one of these annoying people who “takes stock” every few years of what has been going on in a place for which I felt some affinity and offers some uninvited (and generally unpalatable) comment. I started the habit in the mid- 1970s and was allowed to indulge the habit by my various positions. I might say that it made few friends!

Although I continue to write a blog I now use it mainly to pass on what I consider to be useful perspectives of others who are better skilled than  -, whether by virtue of their more felicitous language, their experience, reading or understanding. 

The Managerial Creed

Anything which smacks of the managerial is suspect these days – but have we really pinned down what it is we find so objectionable – apart from the proliferation of the breed and their counter-productivity? And, given the way Artificial Intelligence and robots threaten to make managers redundant, should we not just treat what James Burnham called (in 1941) the “managerial revolution” as an embarrassing hiccup?  

It’s difficult for younger people to realise there was once a time when managers hardly existed. I well remember when the concept of management first became fashionable in the UK – in the early 1970s, when professionals ruled the roost as accountants, engineers, educationalists, lawyers or medics. I have to confess to being part of the first generation which became enthusiasts for the promise of management. 

It was actually a priest in South America who most effectively set the cat amongst the pigeons of UK professionalism with his anarchistic critiques of the grip which educational and medical castes had on our minds - namely Ivan Illich of Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1974) fame. I used to tour the various professional associations in Scotland in those years – using both the Illich critique and the insights I had gained as a Chair of one of the new Social Work Committees to challenge the conventional wisdoms of these professions.

And it was for this reason that, under the influence of John Stewart of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), I became an early convert to the idea of corporate planning and management which was then fashionable - although its time soon passed, with complaints about “silo management” being, if anything stronger  in recent years (see Gillian Tett’s 2015 book below). Getting agreement about priorities is, of course, the easy part – making those priorities stick when it comes to implementation is the rather more difficult part– particularly for political organisations.

I’ve had a curious relationship with management over the past half century – the first half of my adult life, from age 25, was spent as a reforming politician where the Directors of professional services were amongst my closest colleagues (my paid job in academia was a bit of a sideline). That changed in the second half of my life - when I entered the project management world of consultancy where I was generally Team Leader of small groups of professionals trying to develop the capacity of organisations in ex-communist countries. That was, quite frankly, very much a question of the blind leading the blind since we “westerners” were only subject specialists (usually of only one country’s system) and had little experience of change management – let alone understanding of the context in which we were working. So I made a point of doing my homework on what the literature of “change management” (which had started in the mid 1980s and was a decade later the most popular field) had to say. Out of historical interest, I’ve reproduced the Annotated Bibliography for change agents I did in those days. 

The blog has several times suggested that there are religious overtones to economics and management – culminating with this post last year which listed the relevant books, including The Faith of the Managers by Stephen Pattison (1998) 

By seeing much of modern management as in some ways a profoundly religious and ethical activity that looks different to those who are managed rather than managing, I hope to place it in a new light. Management is deified by some and demonized by others. Subjecting it to a partial critique that emphasizes religious and ethical features should help both protagonists and detractors to see management for what it is - a human activity with strengths, weaknesses, possibilities and pitfalls.

Management is an important and necessary function in the modern world. No organization that is in any sense organized can do without some kind of management function, and it is unhelpful and unrealistic to hope that management will go away or can be dispensed with.

Rather, management needs to be improved and made more effective.

This might be expedited in part by helping both managers and the managed to become more self-consciously aware and articulate about the nature of this activity and the assumptions upon which it rests.

Readers will be familiar with my view that we need shorter books – authors really do need to compress their thoughts more clearly and in a shorter format. There’s far too much padding. That’s why I favour those articles which try to give an overview of the literature on a subject. I see that I noticed this in what I think was the last post on managerialism  almost three years ago. The subject is, correctly in my view, now beginning to attract more attention. 

For the moment I aim to skim the books I’ve listed below – and then perhaps come back to you with my thoughts. I should emphasise that these are not management textbooks – or the pop-management stuff you buy in airports. They are rather the critical reflections on that body of crap.

The two best articles in the immediate list below are the Doran one and the last one 

Key Articles

NPM – the dark side of managerial enlightenment; Thomas Diefenbach (2000) Focused on the issues raised by the market-based new public management.

Managerialism – an ideology and its evolution; Christine Doran (2016) A very clear and useful overview of the literature

Managerialism and the continuing project of state reform Janet Newman and John Clarke (2016) A rather more academic treatment of aspects of public sector reform

A Zizekian Ideological critique of managerialism Keith Abbott (2018) A typically compressed and far too clever academic argument of a sort which gives academia a bad name

The Political Economy of Managerialism; Eagelton_Pearce and Kanfo (2020) which explores why this discipline seems to have ignored this issue

The Managerialist Credo; Glover, McGowan and Tracey (2021) A quite excellent overview of the topic

Books

Managerialism – the emergence of a new ideology by Willard Enteman (1993) rather pedantic treatment by a US academic focusing more on socialism, capitalism and democracy than on managerialism

Managing Britannia – culture and management in modern Britain; Robert Protherough and John Pick (2003) 

Against Management – organisation in the age of managerialism; Martin Parker (2004) I didn’t find this book all that interesting when I first skimmed it quite a few years ago – but that probably says more about my impatience with a lot of sociologists  

The Making of Modern Management – British management in historical perspective Wilson and Thomson (2006) Very thorough treatment by 2 British economic historians    

The Age of Heretics – a history of the radical thinkers who reinvented corporate management Art Kleiner (2008) a US journalist examines the past half century for key moments in a racey read.

Management and the Dominance of Managers – an inquiry into why and how managers rule our organisations; Thomas Diefenbach (2009) suggests that the question of how managers have gained their excessive power has not been sufficiently explored…..This article of his is in “academese” but you can still sense his concerns

Rethinking Management – radical insights from the complexity sciences; Chris Mowles (2011)

A delightful and very thoughtful book from an experienced consultant trying to rethink his profession from first principles….

Confronting Managerialism - How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender (2011) Locke is an American Prof who has been very critical of managerialism

Managerialism – a critique of an ideology   Thomas Klikauer (2013) written by a German who started as an engineer and trade unionist and now teaches Australian MBA students, this is a superb and comprehensive attack on the pretensions of manageriaism.l

The Silo Effect – the peril of expertise Gillian Tett (2015) Tett is a financial journalist and anthropologist and this is a very practical attack on groupthink

Strategic management and organisational dynamics Ralph Stacey and Chris Mowles (2016) a very thorough and critical assessment which contrasts “realist” and “postmodern” approaches and suggests a better, more reflective way

The Triumph of Managerialism? New Technologies of Government and their implications for value edited by Anna Yeatman, Bogdan Costea (2018) Have only google excerpts

Anarchism, organisation and management Martin Parker (2020) This is an update to his 2004 book – he’s also published an interesting dictionary of alternative organisations