Abstract
Business and management education (BME) links the themes of these books, in contexts of wealthy societies with strong youth cultures and irresponsible attitudes towards the Earth’s future.
Locke and Spender suggest that BME develops an immature, selfish, vain, international ruling caste, selected by equally venal seniors, to help sideline and repress able(r), but non-careerist, non-managerialist, rivals.
The new caste is predisposed towards ageism, Fineman’s main concern, and should be opposed by proponents of corporate social responsibility (CSR) like Crouch and Maclean.
The underlying issue is the eternal battle between freedom and serfdom in an increasingly productive, yet apparently over-populating, increasingly under-resourced, planet.
Confronting Managerialism addresses economic, political and social problems generated since the 1970s, mainly through the self-serving neoliberalism of the Anglo-American business elite and business schools. Developing previous work of senior author Locke, it offers the following argument.
Management is useful, as the expert and responsible eyes, ears and brain, guiding hand and the outstretched arm of business and other organizations. This is a valid, if understated, and slightly idealized and American, view in the hands of Locke and Spender.
However, managerialism is a new, powerful, international caste system and its ideology. Some managers usurp power from subordinates and owners alike, using it selfishly, justifying themselves by self-defined expertise, based on presumed depth, relevance and prestige of their business school qualifications. Among the most favoured beneficiaries of industrialization and abundance, unprecedentedly wealthy, powerful, electronically and physically mobile, they seek to form a cohesive, partly self-reproducing and caste-like latter-day international counterpart of feudal and other pre-industrial ruling classes.
The growth of managerialism is linked to the worldwide influence of elite US business schools, emphasizing neoclassical economics, financial instruments and metrics, and to 20th century American economic dramas. The authors decry business schools’ neglect of liberal and technical education and disinterested professional and public service. Influenced by business leaders’ greed, business school students have a ‘sense of entitlement, limitless hubris, and general disregard for social norms that might stand in the way of their personal success’ (p. xix). Such anti-democratic characteristics are also explored by Oborne (2007) on Britain’s political (and media) class(es) and by Jackall (1988) on amoral careerism in corporate USA.
This argument is supported by histories of US management and the growing worldwide influence and moral atrophy of elite US business schools, and by comparisons with developing Islamic and Confucian alternatives. The US car industry’s responses to Japanese challenges since the 1970s are compared with Germany’s, and criticized for distantiation between vital technical concerns and managerialist self-interest.
There follows an account of the economic crisis, first foreseen in the 1960s, of 2007-8. Developments in IT, politics, business services and business school postgraduate degrees in financial engineering facilitated major changes in financial services, which increasingly abused wealth-creation. Financial institutions, business school education and management became selfishly detached from industrial and business realities. Increasingly fragile derivatives markets burgeoned, along with amoral financial products, pseudo-scientific business education and self-serving business and employment practice. Managerialism and trust of business schools corrupted the financial system, hollowing out economies, edging them towards implosion. Other harmful effects included ones on education, housing and pensions. Around the year 2000, political and business leaders in Germany, Japan and other more sober-minded countries re-emphasized serious resistance to the menace of Anglo-American neoliberal practices.
The great error of financial institutions and business schools and their quantitative analysis was moral. They sold insurance, pensions, savings and investments that were high-risk derivatives, presenting them as no-risk savings. This was legal, but ‘if not fraudulent, at least highly immoral […] and […] on a massive scale’ (p. 173). Regarding science and ethics as separate phenomena, legitimized and reinforced by amoral financial analysis and business school ‘education’, with tacit help from institutional investors, financial sector managers confused and overpowered ineffectual government regulators, mesmerized politicians and individual shareholders. The speed, volume and spread of trading of goods and services grew; managerial self-interest became increasingly divorced from pursuit of the common good.
Locke and Spender’s ‘Conclusion’ offers three prescriptions for restoring economic ‘balance’. Conventional institutional reforms could not suffice: managerialism and business schools, expanding internationally, were too self-referentially ‘successful’. Societies themselves must change, following valid foreign examples, to develop different structures and processes.
The first prescription is to strengthen non-financial company managements against outside predators like banks and hedge funds. Second, representatives of all kinds of company stakeholder should select CEOs and boards of directors. Organizations might once again ‘belong’ to stakeholders. Integrity, perseverance and adaptation might again count for more than quarterly balance sheets, share price movements and managerial empire-building. Third, business schools should become more truly educational, serving wider interests than those of finance, to lead the never-ending fight against managerialism.
Finally, the authors claim that ‘the choice is […] between […] unregulated US neoliberal market capitalism… and an internationally regulated form of dynamic capitalism in which firms are more efficient because of participative management, and […] markets function better because of a more equitable distribution of wealth in society’ (p. 192).
Caste, the word chosen for managerialists, is excellent, because of its worrying hint of near-permanent mass alienation of pre-industrial serfdom. The authors might have focused more on related phenomena like: ageism; environmental concerns; political activity; assumptions, details and implications of contemporary business and BME; and the most fundamental alternative to managerialism, Technik. However, a broader approach might have diminished Confronting Managerialism’s force.
The thesis, often inspirational, sometimes profound, is a historically informed stiletto thrust into the arrogant greed of a potentially world dominating managerial-political caste. Its wisdom, wit and contemporary relevance, coming from Locke, now in his 80s, suggest how misguided ageist contempt for mature experience can be.
Organizing Age addresses age as the ‘silent shaper’ of work and employment. All societies have their own ‘age maps’ for handling time’s passage: age defines appropriate attitudes and behaviour. Economic development affects life courses, increasing age and time consciousness, diversifying experiences.
Fineman explains how, as lives lengthen and societies develop, age-related meanings, rituals and symbols grow in number and kind. He discusses economic development and the cult of youth, self-presentation of age and spiritual growth versus physical decline. He doubts the ideal of a mutually-supportive multi-generational workforce. Fineman compares the last four generations, arguing that the idea of a generation with certain peculiarities is arbitrary, sometimes malign, although influential on media-fuelled expectations and choices.
Ageism, meaning age-focused stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination, is more often directed at elders, partly because of the cult of youth and universal fear of ageing and death. Employer subversion, growing international labour mobility and fear of population ‘ageing’ have partly thwarted legislation against age discrimination begun in the 1960s. Greater longevity suggests a slow reversal of ageist trends. Elders probably would become more powerful, yet age remains ‘a primitive […] emotive category’, continually renewing prejudices. Ageism also holds young people back, reinforcing dubious age hierarchies.
Fineman explores three examples of institutional ageism in affluent democracies, which more open, flexible, intergenerational relations might reduce: young offenders’ institutions, child labour and dementia care. Retirement, interwoven with economic strains and conflicts, increasingly fragmented and problematic, is no longer part of a straightforward citizen-state contract: more focus on its variety is needed.
Current economic confusion, especially about employment and ‘baby boomer’ incomes, exacerbates ageism. States and employers use chronological age to regulate activities, often sustaining prejudice and denial. Ageism is more flexible in market contexts than in public ones. Growing income disparities and longevity exacerbate class distinctions and stress among carers.
In richer societies, ageing and death need demystifying. This implies age-inclusive policies, including ones for families, housing, transport, work and employment. Mutual intergenerational understanding and support can strike a good balance between intergenerational conflict and potentially stifling ‘age solidarity’. Age-based pigeonholes and boundaries, mapping growing diversity and flexibility of life courses, reflect ‘the politics and passions of the times’. Some are liberated, others marooned. Policy-makers and researchers should understand this.
Fineman mixes popular and social scientific thinking, often insightfully and thoughtfully. There is little overt theorizing, Durkheimian undertones notwithstanding. He describes the current economic and social dispensation using contested terms like ‘postmodern’ and ‘great recession era’, without explanation. Changes in ageism against younger, middle-aged and older people go largely unexplained. International comparisons are few. Nonetheless, he demonstrates well ageism’s pervasiveness, influence and neglect by social science.
The Responsible Corporation in a Global Economy explores the potential of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the roles of governments, individuals and organizations. Its 12 chapters come from a mixture of academics and practitioners.
The ‘Introduction’ considers CSR in business, management research and political science. Businesses threaten governments’ claims to ethical leadership, abusing CSR to encroach on state-run regulatory and non-market activities. Market imperfections and negative externalities hamper CSR. This situation often raises paradoxical questions, e.g. neoliberal deregulation policies often eventuate in reregulation. CSR is needed partly because transnational corporations (TNCs), penetrating and sidestepping governments, outweigh and shape markets, harm the environment and retard fair trade.
The editors explain how CSR and neoliberalism are uneasily matched, although constructive technical change, political responsibility, co-operation and care of the Earth demand it. Business is politically stronger than religious and cognate ethical institutions, so governments and civil society need to give leadership. Since the early 1990s the main foci of CSR campaigns have shifted from states to firms, especially to TNCs in developing countries. The responsible business case for CSR can trump economic criticisms: self-renewing firms ultimately make higher profits. Civil society, the main forum for debates about values, generally opposes profit maximization as the overriding goal of business.
Maclean and Crouch posit a four-stage continuum of corporate stances towards CSR: negative, passive, active and proactive. Negative attitudes suit neoliberalism. Proactive ones influence public and consumer values, attitudes and tastes in directions favourable to CSR. Four themes recur: variation and change in the purposes and roles of corporations; attributes of responsible ones; practical limits to CSR; and its ethical dimensions. Anglophone BM academics have played down the achievements of individuals, especially ‘non-managers’. Yet CSR is often driven by individuals and small groups, whose contributions should be praised, without vague organizational influences set above them to simplify analysis.
The following chapters address varied aspects and theories of CSR, like differences between neoliberal and stakeholder theories, business-government relations as influences on CSR, and the development of strongly ethical CSR cultures. Three chapters advocate more ethical supply chain practices than those associated with predatory Anglophone capitalism: CSR should not be an efficiency-seeking prerogative of large resource-rich developed country corporations. Prospects for sensitive ‘developmental’ CSR, involving the UN, the IMF and the World Bank, are also discussed. This sort of CSR might generate a better balance between humane and sustainable management and more hegemonic kinds.
Chapters 10 and 11 address corporate citizenship from CSR-relevant standpoints. Corporate involvement with governments could transform political arenas, enlarging citizenship and nurturing emergent forms of global governance. Yet corporate rights have generally been greater than corporate responsibilities. Businesses’ contributions to host and home communities need to improve.
The 12th, concluding, chapter regards purely market-based CSR as giving companies too much power. Therefore, efforts from civil society, governments, international institutions and businesses are recommended. Suggestions include new, different, modes of value and wealth creation and reforms of corporate governance. Growing use of universal technical and management standards is praised for encouraging more constructive business-society relationships.
This informative and thoughtful book is a very useful complement to Confronting Managerialism.
Thematic connections and the future
Locke and Spender, in attacking the defects of an emergent international political-managerial caste, are overly reluctant to question ethically two-edged Anglophone notions of management as an enabling generality, but rightly warn against dangers of regarding morality as irrelevant to business. Their tour de force effectively asks mature people to recapture some reins of power from spoilt children and grandchildren of affluence and abundance.
This age-related point supports Fineman’s about the underestimated influence of age on employment and society, including its use in managerial control. Fineman succeeds at consciousness-raising, despite his uneven argument and neglect of historical and comparative considerations.
Crouch and Maclean’s volume offers thoughtful and detailed accounts of contexts, problems and prospects of CSR. Policy-oriented, it lacks stimulating historical examples. Yet it is full of implicitly anti-managerialist information and ideas, although its practical emphasis currently inhibits pursuit of a potentially very ‘deep cleaning’ approach to CSR that questions, for example, the societal fit and very existence of specific organizations and sectors.
Locke and Spender might have been more thorough in contextualizing Anglophone BME. Business and management degrees, examined more generally than by them, tend to be based on weak, apolitical analyses of economies and societies, and to be of dubious utility. Such degrees exaggerate the extent and importance of quantifiable efficiency, globalisation, the pace of change, organic organization, academic knowledge and the economic value of services, while playing down humanitarian concerns, the sector-specific and organization-specific, the underlying force of industrialization, the general importance of persistence and of the long run, bureaucratic organization, the cumulative nature and power of technical knowledge and the economic and other forms of dependence of services on industry and production. Strategic management theories are generally culture-bound and inimical to effectiveness. BME has relied on the assumption that practitioners are ‘appliers’ of social science, borrowing prestige from the false, powerfully institutionalized, Anglophone belief that engineering is applied science. BME also plays to its market by incompetently patronizing the professional, technical and skilled employee expertise of more experienced ‘knowledge workers’, by associating expertise inaccurately with young graduates and professionals. It usually ignores high-level Machiavellian organizational behaviour, usually a major influence on divisions of labour and effectiveness. Locke and Spender could usefully have explored such phenomena in some detail, with some focus on power structures and processes used to obtain, deploy and employ material resources, expert and legitimate power, in and across relevant organizational boundaries.
Theorizing about age should be more historical and comparative. Modernization means different processes in different places, but normally includes changes in the use of age in educational, employment and related decisions.
In recent years arguments favouring and opposing very high managerial incomes have increasingly been spelt out. Both sides, especially the former, tend to forget the unprecedented nature of the contemporary situation: coexisting global-minded and often aggressively exploitative elites; instantaneous worldwide communication; and large-scale high affluence that supports ‘outrageously’ high incomes.
Such conditions favour worldwide coalescence and dominance of the managerialist caste. To oppose this, certain phenomena could be curbed or discouraged, and others encouraged. The first include careerism, corruption, lengthy or indefinite periods of tenure in senior posts, narcissism, nepotism and profiteering. The second mainly comprise higher value being accorded to socially beneficial work, less to power and material and intellectual display. Such changes would require the development and use of international law and/or individual and institutional preferences and behaviour playing greater parts. They could help ward off socio-political conflicts and resource depletion engendered by over-population and over-consumption.
However, without persistent, committed, humane, mature, principled and appropriately subtle individuals imbued with values of professional and public service, the recommendations of the Crouch and Maclean and the Locke and Spender volumes could merely be pious hopes. Societies with large, principled and robust middle classes are generally more fertile breeding grounds of such individuals than are other societies.
This essay assumes that globalization is more ephemeral than the ongoing industrialization process that began in early modern times, which develops the technical core of human sustenance, development and possible self-destruction. Therefore, to take the issues raised by these books forward, attention might usefully turn to some fundamental questions asked by social science, especially questions associated with industrialization and modernity.
Future debates about managerialism, corporate responsibility and age relations in employment need to incorporate the Continental notion of Technik, discussed briefly by Locke and Spender, which has incalculable relevance to most social science. In Anglophone countries, two ‘cultures’, the arts and sciences, are recognized, but in Continental countries there are three: Kunst (like the arts), Wissenschaft (similar to science) and Technik (the many engineering and other making and doing subjects, representing practical knowledge). Technik tends to mean ingenuity and technique, not the application of codified public knowledge; management in rather than of specialised activities; valuing production more than consumption; unselfish individualism and the common good (except in the very long term); more positive aspects of the roles of government in economic life; endogenous more than exogenous economic change and development; the local rather than the global in national political psyches; and older and more stable rather than newer and more turbulent geographical and historical contexts. Technik has strong links to Marx’s notions of alienation and species being, Veblen’s instinct of workmanship and Durkheim’s comparisons of technical and social divisions of labour. Technik’s focus on useful tasks is the best antidote to managerialism. CSR is weakened if not based strongly on Technik’s sector-specific integrity. Finally, expertise tends to grow with experience, so that Technik is unhappy with ageism, including the kind exerted against youth.
These contrasts between Germanic and Continental European Technik and the more arm’s-length Anglophone notion of management can be overdrawn. The seeds of each can be found within the other in specific societies and institutions. Thus business education in the USA continues to retain and develop some productive and other technical elements. There have also been, recently, significant non-mainstream developments in MBA curricula there, like social entrepreneurship and ‘base of the pyramid’ courses, which broaden concerns and universities’ and employers’ recruitment sources. In Germany and the Far East, as elsewhere in the world, there has been considerable growth of MBA and similar courses, suggesting Americanization of influential segments of education and industry, but since around 2000 caution and adaptation to ‘local’ needs have been increasingly apparent.
It is possible that ageist and socially irresponsible BME and managerialism will be weakened, if not unravelled, by the very scale of their expansion. WS Gilbert’s point (in the Grand Inquisitor’s song in The Gondoliers) that ‘When everybody is somebody, then no-one’s anybody’ is pertinent. If far more people are qualified as managers and professionals than there are ‘suitable’ jobs for them, the chance of a tightly-knit unified caste evolving to dominate may be reduced. Also, the fact that BME students increasingly need to self-fund means that ever higher proportions will experience ‘non-managerial’ employment and work and thus learn to empathize with people from a widening range of backgrounds. They themselves will come from increasingly diverse – including increasingly age-diverse and occupationally diverse – backgrounds, and may tend to reject most kinds of social exclusion.
