managing britannia
I recently finished an excellent book called Managing Britannia, by Robert Protherough and John Pick.
It's about the way that the idea of management has come to take over swathes of British life, bringing its own ethos, rules and vocabulary, imposing them on organisations which worked well beforehand, and wrecking them.
The book is quite polemical, but it mainly deals with areas where the effects of modern
management has been particularly corrosive. The chapters where idiocy is most plain are those on schools and universities, and the NHS. In education, it is plain that the assault on the professional independence of teachers and the proliferation of central targets and tests and reforms has had appalling consequences. The
chapters that criticise government attempts to understand the arts as an 'industry' are entertaining (particular disdain is piled upon Chris Smith in his time as Culture Secretary) but not always convincing. The authors are inclined to see the creation of DCMS and its forebears as a Stalinist project.
I like the way that they book points out how all this began in earnest under Thatcher in the 1980s.
Despite their neoliberal rhetoric about 'little government' it was the Tories who oversaw the initial proliferation of
central government management over every sphere of
human life and endeavour.
Blair and the control freaks of New Labour emerge as the natural heirs of Thatcherite Conservativism in their
relentless multiplication of management
bureaucracies and their ambitious attempts to
bring all of British life under the tedious reductionism of evidence-based policy.
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