Preface
An observation attributed to Germaine Greer at the end of the twentieth century –
that marketing is the principal cultural form of our time – served as a topic of
exchange in a major British newspaper (
Guardian,
27 March 1999). The choice of
debaters, the managing director of a major public relations firm and the paper’s
chief art critic, was suggestive of the links between publicity and oil painting
examined by John Berger in
Ways of Seeing
(1972). Following Berger’s analysis
in the early 1970s, the encroachment of management theory – not least of all asso-
ciated with notions of consumer sovereignty – into many areas of social activity
has been steady. Fear and greed, particularly on the part of middle managers, helps
to explain ‘Heathrow Organization Theory’, the mischievous term coined by
Gibson Burrell to characterize the ‘philosophical vacuity’ underpinning manage-
ment thinking, which results from ‘the fact that most mid-Atlantic managers think
with their beliefs than about them’ (Burrell 1989: 308, 307).
Yet it is prudent to remember that insider accounts have characterized manage-
ment gurus as fallible propagandists.
Financial Times
columnist Lucy Kellaway
has criticized the management self-help business. By way of illustration, ‘F + M =
P * R’ (where F = Formula, M = Management, P = Pretentious, R = Rubbish) is
how she mocks the crude and simplistic pragmatism encapsulated by flow charts to
gain scientific respectability (Kellaway 2000: 58). In the same vein, ‘bullshit
bingo’ is a game of lining up management clichés: it accentuates the reliance on a
‘piece of verbal wallpaper to cover flaws in argument and gaps in thinking’ (leader
in the London
Times,
6 April 2000). This is consistent with the case against
management theory – incapable of self-criticism, incomprehensible gobbledegook,
rarely rises above basic common sense, and faddish and bedevilled by contradic-
tions – as posited by
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