Confronting Managerialism

How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Their Lives Out of Balance

Robert Locke, J.-C. Spender

Confronting Managerialism offers a scathing critique of the crippling influence of neoclassical economics and modern finance on business school teaching and management practice. In doing so, Locke and Spender show how business managers who were once well-regarded as custodians of the economic engines vital to our growth and social progress now seem closer to the rapacious ‘robber barons’ of the 1880s. In effect, responsible management has given way to ‘managerialism’, whereby an elite caste of businessmen disconnected from any ethical considerations now call the shots, sending the lives of the rest of us ‘out of balance’.

The book traces the loss of managers’ earlier social concerns, amply encouraged by management education’s transformation since the 1960s, especially in the US. It also questions not only the social ethics of the US management caste but its management efficacy compared to systems of management that are highly employee participative and dependent, such as in Germany and Japan. Today’s attempts to ‘bolt on’ ethics and social responsibility courses, the authors argue, are mere window-dressing, a public relations move that cannot get to the heart of the matter. Only fundamental reforms in civil society and business schools can really make a difference.
 

Contents

• Foreword
• Introduction: Managerialism and Business School Education (1920-1970)
1. The Failure of Management Science and the US Business School Model
2. US Managerialsm and Business Schools Fail to Find Their Moral Compass
3. Managerialism and the Decline of the US Automobile Industry
4. Managerialism, Business Schools, and our Financial Crisis
• Conclusion: Back to Balance
• References

About the Authors

Robert R. Locke is Emeritus Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is one of the leading international authorities on the contentious subject of management, and the author of numerous books and articles on comparative management and management education, including The End of the Practical Man and The Entrepreneurial Shift.

J.-C. Spender was on the faculty at City University (London), UCLA and Rutgers, and published many academic articles and books. His most recent publication being Burton-Jones, A & Spender, JC (Eds.) Oxford Handbook of Human Capital. He is researching and publishing on a new theory of managing that stands on the ancient art of rhetoric.