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