Roadblocks to Post-Managerialism

Abstract

Managerialism’s ideology of ‘positive’, uncritical, and self-comforting thinking and its entourage of positivist-empiricist management studies aim to counteract the historical Enlightenment task of critical rationality that is today directed towards post-managerial and environmentally sustainable living. This critical assignment has always included nondisconnected forms of meanings able to challenge pathologies such as those created by Managerialism.⁸⁴⁷ Today, it enters conceptual thought as critical, constitutive, contradiction-highlighting, discomforting, and confronting factors while simultaneously determining its own validity through the value of non-managerial concepts. To the degree to which managerial societies have shown to be irrational, any critical analysis in terms of Enlightenment’s historical-moral rationality introduces these concepts as critical-negative elements in the form of critique, contradictions, and transcendence. These elements can never be assimilated with the positivism and the positivistic tendencies of Managerialism. Instead, they challenge the project of Managerialism in its entirety, in its intent, and in its validity.