Primary Supervisor: Joël Thomas Ravix
University: GREDEG-CNRS, Nice University
Date of Convocation/Graduation: 21 November 2011
Language: French
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the notion of “management” was principally applied to the care of children, to the running of a farm, to the administration of schools, and to medical treatments. This first managerial rationality takes its meaning within a coherent set of concepts: care, industry, arrangement, conduct, and calculation; the articulation of which draws a new way of thinking about the government of people and things. This imagination of power is directly linked to the family and the home, and the child is its primary object.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, while many US business firms are slowly emancipated from the family realm, the term “management” is applied to human beings, carrying the symbolical universe of the machine and its cardinal principle of efficiency. Here stands scientific management. Far from depicting the administration of things replacing the government of men, the history of modern management thought shows the understanding of the administration of things being applied to the government of men. But that is not the whole of this new understanding of the managerial rationality. The dimension of care disappears to the benefit of the principle of control. Management is a non-disciplinary way of governing: it consists less in watching over and punishing than in standardizing, arranging, handling, and training. Thus, it seems fair to sharply criticize the application to management of Foucault’s theories of power and discipline. The principle of organization also becomes central, according to which power can be capitalized and embodied in plans, systems, arrangements, symbols, signs, and persons. Lastly, the mechanisms for taping, creating, transforming, and embodying knowledge constitute a pivotal dimension of this new way of thinking of management. The main lines structuring the understanding of the notion of “management” in the twentieth century are thus efficiency, control, organization, and knowledge.
This rationality cannot be understood by the yardstick of the military discipline, of the patriarchal authority, of the instrumental rationality proper to the engineers, or of the capitalist rationality proper to the economists, for the reason that it is formulated largely in reaction to these four rationalities. Precisely, the second managerial rationality constitutes a new understanding of the way of governing individuals, which we call a “governmentality,” in a way slightly different from Foucault. This managerial governmentality cannot be fit into a unique organizational frame, but circulates between different institutions, the most prominent being the family, the business corporation, and the State. The study of this new governmentality is the occasion to question the main views of government prevailing on both sides of the Atlantic for a century and a half, and thus to contribute to clarifying the contemporary ways of thinking about power.
The general schemes of thought used in the twentieth century to apprehend power, whether they are inspired by Marx, Weber, the Frankfurt School, or Foucault, focus on certain types of domination, which are mainly State-owned, military, disciplinary, legal, physical, capitalist, and technical. But, on the whole, these intellectual frameworks leave aside the logic of power proper to management. Nowadays, while this managerial governmentality is applied to the bulk of human activities, management is still thought of mainly as a loose and neutral set of technical arrangements, best practices, and universal recipes, the adoption of which is a matter of common sense and a guarantee of efficiency. Most of the histories and theories of management, far from questioning the origins, the evolutions, and the mechanisms of this governmentality, hold a discourse largely hagiographic and instrumental. For instance, rather than explaining how and why the value of efficiency came to gain precedence over yesterday’s socially praised principles of brute force, justice, honesty, loyalty, equality, seniority, and freedom, a majority of theoreticians and historians of management contribute to extend, naturalize, and justify its symbolic prominence. Calling for a change, this research makes a case for theory of managerial governmentality and for a new history of management thought.
