Abstract
I was on a plane recently, reading this book. That’s the sort of jet setting life I lead. The man in the next seat asked me about the book. I said it was written by someone who was very critical of management. He turned about to be a management consultant, and thought that management could certainly be improved. There was a lot wrong with the way that management was practised, he said, and people like him tried their best (he looked tired) to help managers make things better. I didn’t have the heart, the courage, the time, to tell him that this provocatively titled book wasn’t just another way of diagnosing how managers might be helped, but getting rid of them altogether. Of course, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of management.
Gerard Hanlon wants to make a strong claim, that ‘management’ adds up to a concerted attack on the organizing capacities of the working class, in order to turn them into dependent subjects of capitalism. In 19th century Ireland, to ‘take the soup’ was a phrase which meant something like betraying your beliefs, your independence. Faced with starvation during the famine, Catholics agreed to sit through Protestant bible instruction in return for soup. Concentrating primarily on the United States for his historical examples, Hanlon shows how the last two centuries can be written as an attempt to force workers (like the migrant Irish who left from the famine onwards) to become ‘soupers’. ‘Management’ claims that workers are less rational than managers, that ordinary people can’t organize themselves, that corporations are more efficient than independent craft workers, that leisure time is for consumption and so on. The secret history of management is one of ‘severe governance’ (p. 20), using troops to break heads and psychologists to brain-wash employees into unitarist beliefs and financial dependence. This book presents management as the ‘neo-liberal science’, a combination of strike breaking and pseudo-rationalism which entrenches the assumption that all organizations must always be managed.
In theoretical terms, Hanlon relies on a broadly autonomist Marxist conception of class struggle, essentially suggesting that capitalism is always responding to the resistant agency of those it wishes to co-opt. As with much of this literature, there is a focus on post-industrial conditions, with an emphasis placed on the way in which contemporary ‘cognitive capitalism’ needs to harvest the free gifts of the general intellect in order to create value. The two positions are not necessarily connected (because iPhones have to be made in factories too), but they do allow for a distinction between the ‘physical violence’ of Taylor, and the ‘mental violence’ of Mayo. As Hanlon puts it, ‘if you cannot confiscate the soul by seduction, you can try to force the body to submit to your control and will’ (p. 7). The core of the book involves readings of many names who will be familiar enough, but whose texts are often neglected. Taylor, Mayo, Michels, Hayek and others are read and convincingly shown to be engaged in a quite conscious class war. Weber and Durkheim come off little better, being condemned as liberals who didn’t like what was going on, but did little to actually produce ideas that would allow the struggle to be seen with the clarity that Marxists have managed to achieve.
This is a great book because it is so clearly uncompromising in its diagnosis. Over two centuries, it shows how management moves from being ‘mere superintendence’ (quoting Stanley Pollard, 194) to claiming its place as the most productive and heroic activity in the organization. There is no hesitancy in the way that Hanlon goes after his target, and he makes a compelling case for reading Mayo et al., rather than reading about them in the OB101 textbook. Of course this strategy does leave hostages to fortune because both ‘capital’ and ‘management’ end up being treated as entities or forces with agency and intentions. So when Hanlon claims that ‘management believes’, or ‘capital intends’, it is unclear whether these words point to particular people, or to impersonal social forces, or to some form of knowledge/power which justifies and animates action. But in a sense, this doesn’t matter because his is a structural argument. Criticizing Hanlon for neglecting agency, meaning, subjectivity or whatever is a bit like complaining that the soup you ordered is too wet and comes in a bowl. Or that it was pho, consommé or stew, not soup. My complaint is a different one, and it concerns the possibilities of finding a way out of the soup that we are in.
There are plenty of hints about what was prior to capital in Hanlon’s account of the imperial rise of management in the United States, and hence perhaps also what might succeed it. He claims that the ‘artisan republic’ (p. 69) which preceded management was characterized by ‘a cooperative and shared sociality’ which was ‘the foundation stone of craft work’ (p. 58). It was destroyed by capital, but even within capitalism, his autonomism allows him to claim that there is always space for difference. ‘Resistance and struggle deliver tomorrow. If management’s victory were total, capitalism would petrify because on its own it cannot invent tomorrow. That comes from labour, the class struggle and class recomposition’ (p. 51). Theoretically, the ‘social or ethical individual’, created co-operatively as exterior, collective and public (p. 11) is prior to capital. This is a problem for management because ‘an unmanaged outside, indeed a proper individuality, would lead to unpredictability’ (p. 15).
Sadly, for this reader, Hanlon does nothing with these theoretical resources to show us how ‘management’ and ‘capital’ might be escaped. He shows us how to see capitalism, and how to understand management as neo-liberal science, but is silent on what alternatives there might be. Indeed, some rather convincing alternatives are actually closed off, since he tells us that ‘radical critiques of this transition must reject the notion of a return to some form of craft experience or a return to concrete goods for use value in small scale communities’ (p. 89). In part, I think that the difficulty he faces comes from the way that he collapses ‘management’ and ‘organization’, as if they were the same things. It seems to me that we cannot escape ‘organization’, and neither should we want to, assuming that the word means something like patterning, planning, co-ordinating and so on. ‘Management’ though, as Hanlon convincingly shows, is a particular form of organization, and there are many reasons to be suspicious of the idea that we cannot organize ourselves, and hence that we need others to do it for us.
Indeed, we might wonder what sort of alternatives Hanlon would actually sponsor. He is clear that management attempts to collapse ‘any liberal distinction between the economy and the polity, life and work, market and non-market, public and private’ (pp. 20, 186). He seems to think that there should be a gap between economy and polity (pp. 190, 197). Yet, when it comes to craft workers, he claims that the ‘distinction that emerges later between work and life did not exist for these workers’ (p. 58). Setting aside a certain contradiction here, if ‘craft experience or a return to concrete goods for use value in small scale communities’ is not an answer, then what is? To my mind, there are many alternatives that directly address the question of management—co-operatives, mutuals, complementary currencies, worker self-management, prefigurative organizing, horizontality, degrowth and so on. But instead of gesturing towards what that we might be for, he leaves us on the dark side, showing us only what we should be against. To my mind, it’s a shame that this splendidly provocative book didn’t offer us some ways out of the soup, rather than leaving us stuck in it, like flies.