Managerialism - Counter Arguments Against Managerialism

Counter Arguments Against Managerialism

Corporate America pays enormous sums to leadership gurus to run training seminars for managers. As with the idea of bottom-up power, there is of course much to the idea of the importance of leadership in business organizations. But a good deal of leadership training is counterproductive. It overemphasizes moral influence and underemphasizes top-down power as management tools.

Managerialism deceives managers into thinking they are leaders more than bosses. The consequences for managers when they try to put such fables into action can be terrible and, for employees, still worse. When employees don’t leap to follow the “leader,” the fortunate managers are those who do not lash out in anger and destroy what moral influence they really do have. Managerialism can also promote corrupt management. Overstating the importance of moral leadership vis-à-vis top-down power is a recipe for immorality. A fair part of the immense amount of CEO arrogance, conceit, and thievery we have witnessed in recent years has been perversely rationalized and supported by Managerialism and its unethical idea that the manager is a moral leader.

Managerialism aims unrealistically to make corporations democratic. It is more likely to make democracy corporate. Our universities now churn out 100,000 MBAs a year or a million a decade. Many more undergraduates major in business disciplines than in American history. Other citizens pick up management ideas from social contacts at work, from company training seminars, and from the how-to-manage pulp sold in airport bookstalls. Our political leaders at all levels, from the White House to local government, will increasingly have been schooled in Managerialism. All the more irony, then, that managerial theorist created their false ideology in an often sincere but always mistaken attempt to make corporate life consistent with democracy. They would have done better both for business and democracy to admit the truth that Americans live two lives. At work we create wealth under top-down power that contradicts the freedoms and rights we cherish in the rest of our lives. The best possible act of corporate “social responsibility” would be to acknowledge the conflict and therefore help maintain the balance between the top down management power that has made us rich and the bottom-up political values that keep us free.

One suspects that the inducements of democratic virtue and the chance to undo Managerialism’s subtle undermining of democratic culture will not alone change the corporate mindset. The job will require the efforts of citizens outside the corporation as well as in it. We all need to better understand the risks and rewards of the new managerial ideology. Management is too important to leave to CEOs.