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Managing BritanniaCulture and management in modern BritainRobert Protherough and John Pick
January 2003, 220 pages |
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.
CONTENTS
1. The Cultures of Management
2. How Managers Behave
3. The Language of Modern Management
4. Management as an Academic Subject
5. Managing the Arts
6. Managing the Schools
7. Managing the Deity
8. Rebranding Britain
9. The Real World: Management in Literature
10. Bursting the Managerial Bubble
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 steel-works 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 desireable 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 organizations 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 Skills ...