Managerialism

A good way to think about managerialism is as a particular way of communicating about organizing that talks about organizations as a means for achieving goals of those who are external to organization. Those external people are often quite distant from the real world organization. These interests are focused on what can be extracted quickly and at at distant. Nowdays the concern with profits or capital gains through share ownership, but managerialism as discourse developed along the corporation and its origins in colonalism (Erikson, 2021, Ohlmeyer, 2018).

Central to managerialism is the belief that a generic management expertise, separable from the particularities of what the organization, is the best judge of what the organization should do: “Reduced to an elementary sense, managerialism presents itself as a belief that the world should and can be managed, involving ideologies informed by instrumental rationality, and techniques directed towards the control of organisations and other social outcomes.” (Eagleton-Pierce & Knafo, 2020: p. 768) Italics in original

Capital wants to create exchangeable value as quickly as possible an so encourages metrics of value.These metrics are of course gameable. Arguably these profit related metrics are tied by the market to real value.
Managerialism then becomes the discourse of professional management, a discourse that travels into non-profit organizations where there is no such ‘reality’ test.

Sources

Eagleton-Pierce, M., & Knafo, S. (2020). Introduction: The political economy of managerialism. Review of International Political Economy, 27(4), 763–779. [https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1735478]

Erikson, E. (2021). Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought. Columbia University Press.

Ohlmeyer, J. (2018). Eastward Enterprises: Colonial Ireland, Colonial India. Past and Present, 240(1), 83–118. https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/240/1/83/5060745