Empirical methods Prescriptive and policy Managerialism is the idea that professional managers should run organizations in line with organizational routines which produce controllable and measurable results.
[1][2] It applies the procedures of running a for-profit business to any organization, with an emphasis on control,[3] accountability,[4] measurement, strategic planning and the micromanagement of staff.
[6][7] However, critics of the idea argue that managerialism is in fact a worldview similar to neoliberalism where each human is assumed to be an economically motivated homo economicus.
Managerialism (with the -ism suffix) is usually used disapprovingly in contexts where the worldviews behind management structures are critiqued from a left-wing, welfarist, anti-corporate, or libertarian perspective.
[3] Albert A. Anderson summarized managerialism as the ideological principle that sees societies as equivalent to the sum of the decisions and transactions made by the managements of organizations.
[19] Compare what the historian James Hoopes wrote (2003): "[...] the main genesis of managerialism lay in the human relations movement that took root at the Harvard Business School in the 1920s and 1930s under the guiding hand of Professor Elton Mayo.
He looked to corporate managers to restore the social harmony that he believed the uprooting experiences of immigration and industrialization had destroyed and that democracy was incapable of repairing.
[21][need quotation to verify] Instead, managerialism sees the core building-block of contemporary society as the modern business company or corporation.
How managerialism functions as such an ideology has been expressed by one of managerialism's main ideological flagships – the Harvard Business Review – when former editor Joan Magretta made the following revelation: Business executives are society's leading champions of free markets and competition, words that, for them, evoke a world view and value system that rewards good ideas and hard work, and that fosters innovation and meritocracy.
All that is needed is a rational assessment of the problem and this involves gathering and collating information, listing the options, calculating costs of each, evaluating consequences and choosing the best course of action.
Robert R. Locke defines it accordingly as: "What occurs when a special group, called management, ensconces itself systemically in an organization and deprives owners and employees of their decision-making power (including the distribution of emolument), and justifies that takeover on the grounds of the managing group's education and exclusive possession of the codified bodies of knowledge and know-how necessary to the efficient running of the organization.
Managerialism is conceptualized in that it seeks firstly to explain the socioeconomic and political reasons behind why particular organizations have been developed and, secondly, to describe the ways in which public services are currently being delivered.
The idea of Managerialism came to fruition when new organizational forms originated from a view that professional bureaucratic modes of organization were inefficient and could not cope with the challenges rising from increasing globalization.
There have been movements away from purely market based systems that were in place strictly for efficiency, to contractual mechanisms and performance measurement through audit and review.
A former professor of Industrial Management at the Harvard Business School, Mayo heavily researched the behavior of workers at Western Electric; a manufacturing facet of AT&T.
Today he is considered a major contributor to the intellectual thought process and ideas of business management, as well as critical theories of industrial and organizational psychology.
His book, The Human Problems of an Industrialized Civilization articulates his collective thoughts taken from the famous Hawthorne research study conducted while at Harvard University.
Sociologically Marx has identified core interrelations between groups of people classified by class structures, and how those claimed relations may lead to the success or failures of a collective society.
"He was especially interested, therefore, in a probing analysis and evaluation of the fundamental cultural values of Western philosophy, religion, and morality, which he characterized as expressions of the ascetic ideal.