Fictions of management

James Dorson, Jasper J. Verlinden

From the organization of private businesses and public services to the optimization of everyday life, management is a ubiquitous term today. Denoting efficiency and control, management has become a catchall term for successful living in neoliberal times. The term is so ubiquitous that it often avoids scrutiny outside of business schools and organizational theory. As the essays collected in Fictions of Management show, however, management has a history closely bound up with cultural practices. While the meaning of management has been critically negotiated in literature since the industrial revolution, management theory in turn draws on cultural resources for animating technical rationality with engaging stories and corporate visions. Tracing the relationship between management and fiction in the United States, where the mutual influence between the two has been the greatest and shaped...