Managerialism

Defining managerialism is a somewhat illusive task. While as a term it is frequently bandied around, its widespread currency defies a precise definition. In this entry, we will illustrate the rise of managerialism as well as elaborate on some of the key contours of the phenomenon. The term has its provenance in British industrial relations discourse of the 1960s, when a managerial analysis was seen as one that posed a unitary view of the organization defined in management's terms, rather than those of rank-and-file employees. In 1966, a Committee on Industrial Relations was formed to give evidence to the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations (the Donovan Commission), and the influence of an appendix written by Oxford industrial relations specialist Allan Fox—a pluralist view, in which organizations were seen in terms of a plurality rather than singularity of interests—became significant. In this perspective, it was normal to expect organizations to be contested terrains, arenas in which different interests struggled against each other to define agendas and outcomes. Hence, a managerialist perspective stressed a unitary set of interests binding employers, managers, and workers together rather than stressing the plural, differentiating, and countervailing interests that cleaved them—and organizations—apart.

While these are the early U.K. origins of the discussion of managerialism, it is widely accepted that for the Anglo-American economies, the late 1970s and early 1980s marked a watershed. The ascendancy of Thatcher and Reagan marked a radical departure in terms of government policies and orientations from that which had gone before. Key motifs of the discourse of the new right included the championing of markets, entrepreneurs, consumers, and managers.

In 1982, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence, a book that, among other things, articulated these ideas and translated them into a management manifesto. Many management academics were keen to point out the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of the book and were unable to disguise their schadenfreude when many of the companies Peters and Waterman touted as excellent appeared to fail. Yet [Page 868]Peters and Waterman were in touch with the zeitgeist, and in many ways their book, as it sold in millions, came to define it. They promoted flexibility, the reduction of bureaucracy, and most important, the importance of corporate culture in achieving organization success. In this entry, we argue that Peters and Waterman's book marked an epochal moment—one that was to mark the ushering in of the age of managerialism. Managerialism first had its impact in the private sector during the spate of corporate restructuring during the 1980s, but its influence was soon to be felt in the domain of the public and nongovernmental sectors under the label of New Public Management. The following sections explore managerialism in more detail.