Managerial power in the German model: the case of Bertelsmann and the antecedents of neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

Our article extends research on authoritarian neoliberalism to Germany, through a history of the Bertelsmann media corporation – sponsor and namesake of Germany’s most influential neoliberal think-tank. Our article makes three moves. Firstly, we argue that conceptualizing German neoliberalism in terms of an ‘ordoliberal paradigm’ is of limited use in explaining the rise and fall of Germany’s distinctive socio-economic model (Modell Deutschland). Instead, we locate the origins of authoritarian tendencies in the corporate power exercised by managers rather than in the power of state-backed markets imagined by ordoliberals. Secondly, we focus on the managerial innovations of Bertelsmann as a key actor enmeshed with Modell Deutschland. We show that the adaptation of business management practices of an endogenous ‘Cologne School’ empowered Bertelsmann’s postwar managers to overcome existential crises and financial constraints despite being excluded from Germany’s corporate support network. Thirdly, we argue that their further development in the 1970s also enabled Bertelsmann to curtail and circumvent the forms of labour representation associated with Modell Deutschland. Inspired by cybernetic management theories that it used to limit and control rather than revive market competition among its workforce, Bertelsmann began to act and think outside the postwar settlement between capital and labour before the settlement’s hotly-debated demise since the 1990s.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian neoliberalism
• Bertelsmann
• managerialism
• ordoliberalism
• Modell Deutschland

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ian Bruff and Cemal Burak Tansel for organizing and facilitating this special issue, as well as two anonymous reviewers for helping to improve our argument. Ian Bruff, Sam Knafo and Ian Lovering provided useful comments on earlier versions of our paper, for which we are very grateful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mareike Beck

Notes on contributors

Mareike Beck is a doctoral researcher in International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK. Her thesis analyzes the international history of German banking and speculation since the 1960s. Her broader research interests include the political economy of debt and financial development, microfinance and German political economy.

Julian Germann

Julian Germann is Lecturer in International Relations and Director for the Centre for Global Political Economy (CGPE) at the University of Sussex, UK. His current areas of research include the historical sociology of global governance and contestation, the political economy of capitalist crisis management, and US and German foreign economic policy. His articles have appeared in European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, New Political Economy, and International Studies Review (with Hannes Lacher).