The politics of management science: an inaugural lecture

One of the key ideas born in the twentieth century and now inherited from it is the doctrine of managerial essentialism. Management is thought of as a generic practice abstracted from particular situations, processes and objectives, and yet, in virtue of that very abstraction, applicable to all of them. It is the taken-for-granted assumption running through a vast body of knowledge now locked in place by powerful institutional interests, in education, consultancy, quasi-academic punditry and existing managerial cultures. Management abstracted in this fashion can only engage with the practices to be managed through a process of imaging. Because expertise in these practices is excluded from management, they must be modelled so as to appear comprehensible to its conceptual apparatus and amenable to its technologies of control. Inevitably this process of imaging involves simplification and distortion. Because the power to control resources and policy is now largely wielded through the medium of abstracted management, its modelling of practices tends to function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. By managing practices as if they were their simplified, distorted models, they tend over time to approximate to these models. The practical consequences are an empirical question in each case, but they are unlikely to be benign. In this inaugural lecture, delivered at the University of Keele, I develop these rather abstract ideas through three examples. The first is an attempt to develop a means of managing product aesthetics using the techniques of market research. The second is the use of activity-based cost management to manage staff departments. The third is the current attempt to kick-start the development of science-based industries through the stimulation of "entrepreneurship".