Miliband's managerialism

My fellow Corpuscle David Miliband betrays his managerialist ideology:

We have to work harder at creating a culture of shared values which can balance the beliefs of each with the good of all....Britain needs to develop a learning culture built around the idea of a personalised curriculum designed to discover individual talent.

This is managerialist in at least three ways.
1. The presumption that governments have the power to create culture, that governments can do anything if only they work hard enough.
2. The failure to describe precise mechanisms. How exactly do you create a shared culture? You can't do so merely by exposing people to the same teachers and friends. If you could, David's culture and mine would be much more similar than they are.
3. The under-valuing of traditional professional skills. If you want to improve education, why not hire good teachers and give them the autonomy to pursue professional standards? Why drone on about culture?
The tragedy here is that David probably doesn't realize just how ideological, how contestable, his rhetoric actually is.

Comments

[Bob B]

On "shared values", please allow me to post this illuminating quotation as an instructive test case in the present context:

"The tax department chief of the Association of Industrialists ... emphasized that it was useless to attempt precise comparisons between the new and old tax regulations because the important issue was 'the new spirit of the reform, the spirit of [enter ideology of choice]. The principle of the common good precedes the good of the individual stands above everything else. In the interests of the whole nation, everyone has to pay the taxes he owes according to the new tax law'."

What might readers suppose was the "ideology of choice" in the quotation as originally reported?

The original quotation:

"The tax department chief of the Association of Industrialists (Reichsgruppe Industrie) emphasized that it was useless to attempt precise comparisons between the new and old tax regulations because the important issue was 'the new spirit of the reform, the spirit of National Socialism. The principle of the common good precedes the good of the individual stands above everything else. In the interests of the whole nation, everyone has to pay the taxes he owes according to the new tax law'."

Source: Avraham Barkai: Nazi Economics (Berg Publisher Ltd (1990)) p. 183. Mr Barkai is a research fellow at the Institute of German History, Tel Aviv.

It is therefore perhaps unsurprising to many of us that Uncle Joe Stalin evidently had no insuperable ideological objections to the Soviet Union signing a Friendship Treaty with Nazi Germany on 28 September 1939 when Britain and France were already at war with Germany - reference: Norman Davies: Europe (OUP 1996) p.1000. In fact, relations were so friendly between the signatories that military liaison officers were exchanged across their new mutual border running through what had previously been Poland's national territory.

Is it entirely surprising that some of us have recurring difficulty in distinguishing between supposedly "leftist" and "rightist" ideologies? I was under the impression that David Milliband was supposed to be well-tutored on the analysis of ideological issues.

[Metatone]

Hi there,

Did you ever write up a definition of what you mean by "managerialism"? Could you link us to it? It's seeming a little fuzzy to me recently.

1) There is a genuine debate about how possible it is to alter the culture of organisations, but there is enough evidence that it is possible in some cases to make your first point require at least some more substance.

2) This is a bit rich coming from an economist, not to mention a blogger who specialises in short pieces. How often do you include "precise mechanisms" when you write here for us?

2 a) It's worth noting also just how similar your culture is with Mr Milliband's. The distinctions you see are actually rather fine ones from the point of view of someone who comes from (for example) a US Ivy League Uni.

3) I come not to bury this point, but to praise it. The entire NuLab/Thatcherite theory leads (if you follow the logic) to a destruction of the power of the professions. Mainly, of course, because they represented an alternative power base, which neither the Thatcherite nor Blairite theorists could tolerate. This is implicit in "managerialism" because that ideology posits that all power should sit with management, but it's worth recognising that it is driven as well by an explicit "societal-political" (as opposed to "organisation-political") imperative to shape the discourse of voting, as much as the discourse of service provision.

[chris]

These two posts help define what I regard as managerialism.
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2005/05/whats_wrong_wit.html
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2006/05/managerialism_v.html
I fear that for every reader who wants more on this subject, 10 will want me to put a sock in it.

[Metatone]

No doubt you'll be offended by this, but you should really measure your own writings, and indeed your own discipline up against these complaints about managerialism. After all, managerialism doesn't come out of nowhere, rather it is a product of using economics to analyse social policy.

[Bob B]

Am we to understand that the economic aspects of social policy are either irrelevant or best overlooked?

My understanding is that the roots of "managerialism" go back to the notion of business administration as a collection of disciplines which are worthy of study and promotion independently of business contexts to which the disciplines can be applied.