We inhabit a world, a capitalist one, that shapes what we know and what we think, incompletely, haltingly, in a fragmentary fashion. This means that efforts to accomplish the seemingly technical tasks encapsulated within development and management remain in fact intensely political efforts to understand and clarify what we observe. It remains essential to shed critical light on what otherwise appears to be detached and unchallengeable knowledge, and to cast a critical eye on how organizations claiming to serve a public good function, through the exercise of such knowledge. This chapter concludes this book by summarizing it in terms of three themes. First, I consider how management and development ideas accommodated shifts between three dominant capitalist regimes, namely, colonial, modernist, and financialized capitalism. Initially disparate, these accommodations gradually became connected to each other, and to a nascent and inchoate scholarship on civil society.

Second, I turn to common sense. What theoretical purpose can this Gramscian concept serve? I argue that common sense is an incomplete effort of perception by interest groups, where some of these perceptions gradually become naturalized within knowledge groups as conceptions of the world. When these perceptions are acted upon, and attached to epistemic foundations that gain purchase within networks of powerful actors, they become hegemonic. However, forms of knowledge, and the powers they represent, do change over time, often under pressure from other interest groups, or changing priorities within existing interest groups. Common sense and the allied concepts discussed in this book offer productive ways of considering expert power. They are more supple than terms that convey solely an ideological understanding, such as “managerialism” (see Chapter 7). They show the ideational shifts that happen over time, and the ways interest groups scheme to survive these shifts. Since this Gramscian approach also considers politics and the ways groups constantly maneuver with outside changes, in a dialectic that refines their conceptions and common sense, it can help us understand the prevalence and survival of organized interest groups.

Third, I ponder what the future holds for this rising alliance of conceptions in development studies, management studies, and civil society. Since I have argued that being against NGOs is insufficient from a critical perspective (see Chapter 1) and that it is simplistic to dismiss these organizations as all bad (or extol them as all good), what are other ways we can speak of them in the near future?