The Managerial Lineages of Neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

Managerialism is often depicted as a key practice of neoliberalism yet relatively little has been written by scholars of neoliberalism about the actual relationship between managerialism and neoliberalism. Usually subsumed under a functional reading of neoliberalism, managerialism has too often been understood simply as a means for neoliberal ends (i.e. to promote market rule or competition). This paper challenges this perspective on the grounds that it conflates practices that stem from two different historical lineages. As we show, managerial governance not only has a very different history than neoliberal theory, but it also rests on different principles. Its development can be traced back to the US defence sector in the 1950s and the pivotal role of the RAND Corporation. On the basis of this historical perspective, we argue for the need to analyse managerialism on its own terms and make the case for considering the rise of managerial science as a paradigmatic shift in governance. In doing so, we show how managerial governance represented a radical rupture from previous management practices and show how it profoundly reshaped how we have come to understand governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• New Public Management
• governmentality
• governance
• RAND Corporation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank, Hanna Mareike Beck, Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, Julian Germann, Paul Gilbert, Matthew Hughes, Ian Lovering, Lena Rethel, Jan Selby, Lauren Tooker as well as two anonymous reviewers for their comments and helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Samuel Knafo is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Making of Modern Finance: Liberal Governance and the Gold Standard (Routledge, 2013).

Sahil Jai Dutta is teaching Fellow in International Political Economy at the Department of Politics and International Studies Politics, University of Warwick. His research focuses on British political economy, financialisation, sovereign debt management and public sector reform.

Richard Lane is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University.

Steffan Wyn-Jones is a research fellow at the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. He has written about the political economy of the Cold War and Post War American Foreign Policy.

Notes

1. In focusing on writings about neoliberalism, we do not deny the existence of a rich literature on various aspects of this managerial governance, notably a wide range of publication on ‘New Public Management’ (Hood 1995, Lynn 2006). However, these developments have rarely been articulated from a historical perspective and register only tangentially in debates on neoliberalism.

2. Even elaborate accounts of management theory, such as Will Davies fascinating The Limits of Neoliberalism, conflates both by casting managerialism as part of a new regime of violence organised around the norms and imperatives of competitiveness. Managerialism is read here as a technocracy that is unaccountable; a new regime of violence that values leadership and where decisions are no longer in need of proper justification because of the imperative of competition (Davies 2014: 145).

3. Managerialism is also at times associated with the separation of ownership and management, which became particularly marked in the 1920s. This is a different development which has more to do with the question of control over the corporation, rather than the techniques of governance (Berle and Means 1967).

4. In a similar way, the rise of modern bureaucracies since the late nineteenth century was predicated on the need to separate bureaucracy from policy as a means to ensure the efficiency of the former. This very separation explains the strong synergies between scientific management and these modern bureaucracies that Max Weber wrote about (Hibou 2012, Hanlon 2015).

5. It is noteworthy that those who did champion a broader vision of scientific managerialism usually hoped that the growth of knowledge would eliminate uncertainty thus making it possible to apply more ‘mechanical’ ways of thinking (Stivers 2003: 218).

6. OR was initially developed in Britain but the enthusiasm for it in this country dissipated with the end of the war, as academics returned to their universities and discussions around ‘scientific planning’ came to be associated with socialism (Kirby 2003).

7. Leading the way on this path was von Neumann himself who immediately went beyond game theory after the publication of Theory of Games and Economics Behavior co-written with Oskar Morgenstern. In the 1950s, his work gravitated towards a theory of automata which lent great emphasis to a broader reflection on the role of information and the processes of its communication (Mirowski 2002).