Managing Britannia

Robert Protherough

Description

For more than thirty years the solution to all Britain's problems has been better management. As a result management schools dominate higher education and managers are at work everywhere developing 'strategies' and 'systems' and quantifying 'outcomes'. There are now more managers on the rail network than train drivers, yet the benefits of modern management of railways, schools, hospitals and universities are elusive.This is because 'management' does not exist-the academic study of 'management science' and the assumption that there are universal management skills are bogus. This book shows how modern management practices have all but destroyed politics, education, culture and religion-modern management is the cause of our national malaise.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• British Isles

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 06 juillet 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845404796
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title page
Managing Britannia
Culture and Management in Modern Britain
Robert Protherough and John Pick



Publisher information
2016 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Paperback published in 2003 by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200
Exeter EX5 5YX
UK
Copyright © 2002 The Brynmill Press Ltd
First published in 2002 by The Brynmill Press Ltd
The right of John Pick and Robert Protherough to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.



Quotations
If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism , 1891
Management, like the emperor’s clothes, does not exist; the prime myth of management is that it does.
Robert Heller, The Naked Manager for the Nineties , 1995



Acknowledgements
In the course of this book’s preparation, we have benefited from many helpful discussions with colleagues and students, both in and out of formal classes. Our thanks are also given to Paul Bissen and Adrian Seville, who suggested material and sources, and to Ben and Jane Roberts for their critique of the book’s main argument. We owe a special debt to Judith Atkinson and Caroline Gardiner, who read chapters in draft and made many helpful comments, and to Ian Robinson, for the detailed interest he has taken in every stage of the book’s production. However, we alone are responsible for the opinions expressed in the text and for any factual errors which it may contain.
Robert Protherough, John Pick 2001



Preface
In the ’eighties we began to be seriously alarmed by a number of things that were happening in British education, amongst them the fact that “management” was being taught and promoted as a skill which could readily be detached from the people and processes that it was managing. At that time each of us was separately writing about the swelling tides of bureaucracy which seemed to be engulfing the universities, churches, schools and the administration of the arts. Everywhere there seemed to be a concern with presentation rather than substance, and in the way things were being managed there was an increasing emphasis on numerical targets and less and less attention given to the ways management affected people.
A decade later things were getting decidedly worse, for it seemed that all of our previous worries were now dangerously merging into one. A sinister new orthodoxy, to which we later attached the term “modern managerialism”, seemed to be spreading into every part of Britain. No British institution - cathedral, college, hospital or arts centre - was safe from it. Soon it was being openly asserted that “in the modern world” every aspect of life - hospitality, friendship, eating out or caring for one’s family - had to be managed, with managerial “targets” set for each part of its operation, and with league tables tabulating successes and failures.
Yet this was not management as we had once understood it. The new managerialism was wholly based on quantifiable data, and dealt largely in symbols and abstractions. British culture was itself turned into an “industry” and rendered down to columns of statistics. The public services were now given “targets” to achieve, like steelworks in the former Soviet Union. Everything, including so-called assessments of quality, was now commodified and judged quantitatively. And those blessed with managerial qualifications became the most desirable commodities of all. As managers hopped from one kind of business to another, they gained the sort of golden handshakes and salaries that put them in the same financial league as professional footballers.
It seemed to us that all this was both foolish and harmful. It was foolish to have so many intelligent people squandering their talents on such trivialities, and harmful because the machinations of modern managerialism were steadily undermining and destroying art, scholarship, religion and much else that had made life in Britain worth living. We decided that a warning was needed, and that was the spur to write this book.
It could have been twice as long. Material showing the ravages wrought by this new managerialism has crowded in upon us, and of necessity we have had to leave out a number of the bizarre happenings that might have further illustrated our argument. For the same reason we have not expanded upon the significance of the way in which organisations concerned with the arts, education, religion and the social services are now regularly retitled and reorganised - not for reasons of principle, but because it suits the managerial bureaucracy. Instead we have simply called public services and commercial enterprises by the title they had at the time of writing, and left our readers to draw their own conclusions about the curious fact that the Department of Education and Science, for example, having for a brief spell been the Department for Education and Employment, is now the Department for Education and S kills ...



1. The Cultures of Management
It is generally agreed that the development of management, as a discrete business practice and as an academic subject, began with the publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s third book, The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. Winslow Taylor advocated that men of commerce should pool their traditional business knowledge, reduce it to laws and formulae, and produce a “science of management”. Scientifically-trained managers could then take over the organisational skills which were being wastefully dissipated throughout the workforce, and the production and marketing of goods would become more efficient as a result. Winslow Taylor’s work thus marks the beginning of a transition from a time when fewer than 1% of those involved in business bore the title of managers, to the modern world in which no business is thought to be properly run unless at least 15% of its workforce is, one way and another, managerial. It also records the first stirrings of that modern cult, which was to grow apace during the last decades of the twentieth century, which accords managers a venerated, near-divine status. For the success of an enterprise no longer depends upon the quality of the goods and services it may offer, but upon the value which the jobs market puts upon its management team. Managers are now held to be the one indispensable element in any business or service. If a firm’s productivity falls, or its products fail to sell, its shop floor workers will be unceremoniously laid off. By contrast its managers will rarely be dismissed, and when they are, they will be appeased by handsome gifts. [1] More probably their numbers will be enlarged, for failing businesses are now commonly conceived to be in need of more rather than better management, and in need of ever more wordy advice from the managers’ expensive allies, the ubiquitous management consultants .
It was in America that management first took root. As Robert R. Locke observes in his recent study of American management, it was the Americans who “invented management and with it the American way of doing business”. [2] The academic study of management became established in the USA when the first MBA course was offered in 1916 at Columbia University, but it was the 1920s which saw the first substantial growth in the study of the new “science” - with Wharton, Harvard and then the Michigan School of Administration offering MBAs. Now there are more than 700 MBA programmes in the USA, where study at a business school offers a near-guarantee of a lucrative managerial career. It is for example estimated that a typical graduate of Harvard’s 1974 MBA programme will now be contemplating early retirement, having amassed a fortune of more than $8 million. [3]
Not until the 1960s did the study of management spread to these shores. American-style MBA programmes were then established in the universities of London and Manchester, in defiance of those who warned that far from underpinning the growth of the national economy and thus shaping the national culture, the supposed new “science” of management was itself a cultural manifestation. For, as Locke remarks: “Management is an American term and an American creation. Although American management has always hankered for universality, it is nothing more than a cultural peculiarity.” [4] Since then the study of management in Britain has spread steadily, until it is just about the only subject area which its universities have in common. There are currently around 12,000 students studying on Britain’s 120 MBA programmes, and in many modern universities the Business School is the fastest-growing and best-resourced faculty.
It will be a recurrent theme of this book that management is now applied to realms far removed from production industry, and to realms where it has, by any sensible reckoning, no business. There is scarcely any part of our domestic and social experience which is not now described by our politicians as an industry , so that its problems can be presented as mere problems of production, marketing and sales, and therefore capable of solution only by managers . Our cathedrals and our countryside are seen as resources to