The professionalization of management
There has been a widespread and continual debate about whether or not business management is making a bid for professional status, on a par with law, medicine, the college professoriate, and other well-established professional groups (see Clegg & Palmer, 1996; Skaggs & Leicht, 2005; Locke & Spender, 2011). Professional work and professionalism is at once a cultural label, a label for work viewed as socially and culturally important, and a career aspiration for many looking for stability in labor markets that lack it (see Leicht, 2016). In most treatments by researchers and the public, professional work encompasses those whose work (a) is defined by the application of theoretical and scientific knowledge to tasks tied to core societal values (health, justice, financial status, etc.), (b) commands considerable autonomy and freedom from oversight, except by peers in the same profession, and (c) claims to have exclusive or nearly exclusive control over a task domain linked to the application of the knowledge imparted to professionals as part of their training (Leicht & Fennell, 2001, pp. 25–30).
The questions surrounding the professionalization of management are occurring in a context where there is widespread upheaval over the status of professional work. This upheaval is well represented in the current literature (see Evetts, 2006, 2011, 2013; Suddaby et al., 2007; Suddaby & Viale, 2011). The professions represent the quintessential triumph of Durkheimian occupational communities over and above the mass-society-based anonymity of impersonal markets and the grinding rigidity of bureaucracies. Over the past 30 years, there has been a serious and very thoughtful attempt to evaluate the overall state of professional work, the role that professional work plays in a globalized post-industrial society, and its likely future. Many scholars now focus on autonomy and control over task domains as the major markers of professionalism (cf. Abbott, 1988). And many scholars look with some skepticism on the claims to exclusivity that would-be professions make, in particular focusing on the economic and social benefits to professionals that result from social closure (see Larsen, 1977; Collins, 1990; for management, see Khurama, 2007; Locke & Spender, 2011).
This chapter briefly examines business management as a professional project in light of this widespread reassessment of professional work. The argument in this chapter is that managerial history and contemporary management behavior point to a drive toward professional status and that recent developments in the financialization of the economies of the developed world has only increased the professional claims of the managerial class (see Skaggs & Leicht, 2005; Leicht & Lyman, 2006).
Professional autonomy and professional projects
A professional project is a set of activities that attempt to define and defend an occupation’s task domain from competing occupational groups and the actions of immediate workplace stakeholders (see Abbott, 1988). A profession (for our purposes) is an occupational group whose knowledge base is linked to theories and complex intellectual ideas and whose status and prestige is based on the relationship between occupational tasks and key societal values (see Leicht & Fennell, 2001, 2008). The profession defines the occupational group whose incumbents are deemed worthy of societal rewards for performing important and complex tasks. Professional projects describe how professional incumbents (and their professional associations) defend the profession’s task domain from encroachment by would-be competitors.
According to Freidson (1986) and Abbott (1988), most professional projects attempt to (1) enhance the autonomy and freedom of action for occupational members under a set of well-defined professional prerogatives (Freidson, 1986); and, (2) defend a specific task domain from encroachment by competing occupational groups and stakeholders (Abbott, 1988). Managerial occupations have been and continue to be deeply involved in professional projects that defend task domains against interference by competing stakeholders (stockholders, employees, governments, etc.) while attempting to increase their freedom of action. Ironically, some of these activities harm the professional projects of long-standing professions and would-be professional groups alike.
My argument here is that historical and contemporary management practice is oriented toward increasing practitioner autonomy in response to environmental shocks and the scrutiny of external stakeholders (see also Skaggs & Leicht, 2005). The shifts from sole proprietor to scientific management, human relations management, and human resources management occurred at the same time as the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations sought to place management education front and center in attempts to professionalize management (see Khurama, 2007). This produced big changes in how managers were trained and created a semi-closed, credential-driven labor market for managers. But the growing dominance of economics and the economic crisis of the late 1970s led to the questioning of all forms of professional expertise. It is at this point that managers reinterpreted their professional role as ‘interpreters of markets’. While this reinvention has been rocked by crises associated with financial scandals and the 2008 global recession, this is where the management professional project stands now as of 2014. The conclusion discusses a few of the implications of this new professional claim by managerial elites. But the roots of this professional project started much earlier.
Sole proprietorships and entrepreneurialism, 1860–1910
Around the mid nineteenth century, sole proprietorships were the dominant form of firm ownership in the United States. Corporate organizational forms existed but their use was limited to public works ventures (Hurst, 1970). Most businesses were owned and managed by the same person, who supplied much, if not all, of the investment capital (Berle & Means, 1932).
The dominant form of employee organization was the inside contract (see Stone, 1974). Entrepreneurs would contract with individual craft workers to perform different operations associated with the production process. The craft worker would then hire assistants to actually perform the operations outlined in the contract. In sharp contrast to the entrepreneur, who was invested heavily in a single firm where ownership and management were lodged in the same individual, craft workers possessed vital human capital skills that were portable (see Marglin, 1974; Stone, 1974; Montgomery, 1979; Form, 1987).
Toward the end of the century, the capital demands of rapid industrialization required larger investments than individual entrepreneurs could manage. As a result, the corporate form was beginning to emerge as the preferred arrangement in for-profit enterprises (Berle & Means, 1932). The corporate form of capital structure divided property rights, separating the suppliers of capital from those who acted on their behalf. This split produced the professional domain that came to be occupied by managers (Berle & Means, 1932; Abbott, 1988; Fligstein, 1990).
On the shop floor, entrepreneurs possessed little or no knowledge of how jobs were performed. The skills required to perform necessary tasks were largely controlled by craft guilds or learned through apprenticeship from other craft workers (Wren, 1994). Due to the almost proprietary nature of craft knowledge, employees possessed a great deal of freedom and mobility (Stone, 1974). Craft workers were independent entrepreneurial contractors.
From entrepreneurialism to scientific management, 1910–1940
As firms grew and investors were less involved in the day-to-day operations of specific firms, managers became a vital intermediary representing the interests of owners in the production process. Managers wanted to defend their task domain while investors sought to tie compensation schemes for managers to returns on their investments so that the interests of managers and investors would coincide (see Edwards, 1979). Both groups lacked a mechanism for increasing control and productivity in organizations. Scientific management was one such mechanism.
Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, believed production inefficiencies were due to variations in work methods. Taylor (1903, 1911) felt that these inefficiencies could be reduced by studying the work process itself. Systematic study would yield insights into the most efficient production methods. Managers would record these procedures for the purposes of training their present and future employees. With all of the workers following standardized procedures based on the conservation of time and motion, worker productivity would increase.
Although the rapid growth of Taylor’s ideas can be attributed to the productivity concerns of investors, another reason for the quick acceptance of this method was that scientific management reduced managers’ reliance on skilled employees and increased their professional autonomy. Scientific management broke the knowledge monopoly of skilled contractors. This allowed managers to make greater productivity, hours, and wage demands which served to stabilize the production process (see Braverman, 1974; Edwards, 1979; Gordon et al., 1982).
From scientific management to human relations, 1930s–late 1960s
Beginning around 1910 and continuing throughout the 1930s, scientific management became a major guide to managerial thought and practice in the United States (Wren, 1994). The Great Depression of the 1930s would alter the relationship between managers and workers in fundamental ways.
In the early 1930s, the unemployment rate in the USA rose to approximately 25 percent. Congress expressed concern for the plight of workers by passing the Norris-La Guardia Act in 1932. This Act strictly limited the use of injunctions against unions and outlawed the use of ‘yellow-dog’ contracts (contracts stating that the worker could not join a labor union as a condition for employment). In exchange, management enjoyed widespread protections from strikes and boycotts. The loopholes in the Act and the economic climate of the Depression meant that they could merely dismiss striking workers and replace them with others at a lower wage (Cihon & Castagnera, 1988).
Meanwhile, investors continued to reduce their risk by pursuing the corporate organizational form. The corporate organizational form also increased employee dependence on large corporations. In 1909, there was one small manufacturing firm for every 250 people in the United States; by 1929, there was only one for every 900 people. The increase in the ratio of people to firms was (partially) the result of the growth in the corporate form (from the speech of Senator Wagner, Congressional Record 1935) as well as immigration and the movement of labor from farms to the cities (see Bogue, 1959). And in 1937, when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, also known as the Wagner Act), it signified the first time that both the judicial and legislative branches were in agreement regarding employees’ increased dependence on large corporations.
The liabilities of scientific management in a new institutional environment
With the Supreme Court’s 1937 decision to uphold the constitutionality of the NLRA, the employment relationship changed dramatically, affecting the professional autonomy of managers. Unionization and collective bargaining became options available to workers. Government restrictions on managers’ ability to bargain and terminate employees had the effect of increasing the degree of uncertainty associated with investment in a firm, as volatility in earnings was now more likely. Both developments represented substantial intrusions on managerial autonomy. The human relations approach was one managerial response to this shifting landscape.
Enter human relations management
Although it is often identified with the Hawthorne studies in 1929, the human relations approach would not find its way into the management mainstream until the mid 1940s (Sherman & Bohlander, 1992; Wren, 1994). Unlike scientific management’s focus on production efficiency, the human relations approach focused on aspects of human behavior as these affected the firm. One area of attention focused on managers’ ability to be sensitive to the needs and feelings of their employees and to recognize the individual differences among them. This approach also emphasized the need for increased worker participation and employee-centered supervision (Sherman & Bohlander, 1992; Wren, 1994).
The human relations approach was radically different from its predecessor that stressed the use of time–motion studies to achieve uniformity and maximum efficiency. This extreme shift in emphasis was an attempt on the part of managers to regain professional autonomy and control over their work environment. Given the prevailing legal environment of the late 1930s, the use of scientific management would only exacerbate existing tensions between managers and employees. It would increase the uncertainty of continued, stable profits and heighten investor scrutiny of managerial decision-making. What managers needed, given labor’s increased power in organizational matters, was a method that would appease workers in order to prevent them from exercising their newly created rights.
This attempt at appeasement was embodied in the human relations approach to management. By focusing on such areas as the needs and feelings of workers, managers could hopefully avoid any costly confrontations (Bendix, 1956; Braverman, 1974) and stabilize firm output (Gillespie, 1991). This would have the effect of reducing labors’ power, decreasing investors’ scrutiny of managerial actions, and restoring managerial autonomy.
From human relations to human resource management, late 1960s–2000
From the passage of the NLRA to the late 1950s, unionization in the United States increased rapidly. In 1935, 13.2 percent of the non-agricultural work force was unionized; by 1960, this figure had grown to over 30 percent (Hamermesh & Rees, 1988). After 1960, these percentages began falling (Freeman & Medoff, 1984; Hamermesh & Rees, 1988). Researchers have provided numerous explanations for this decline, from continued government intervention and the institutionalization of union efforts to successful ‘union-busting’ on behalf of corporations (Cihon & Castagnera, 1988; Hamermesh & Rees, 1988). As union membership began decreasing after 1960, the bargaining power of employees started to decline as well.
The development of internal labor markets
The internal labor market (ILM) consists of well-defined job ladders, with movement up these ladders dependent upon the acquisition of firm-specific skills (see Pfeffer & Cohen, 1984). The development of ILMs was the result of complex institutional and environmental interactions between government intervention in manpower activities, industrial unions, and growing personnel departments (Baron et al., 1986). Industrial unions were ambivalent about some aspects of ILMs – many of the provisions that increased management’s control over the work process protected workers from layoffs and arbitrary treatment (see Gordon et al., 1982; Baron et al., 1986).
ILMs altered the relationship between firms and employees in a dramatic fashion. An employee would join the organization at a particular point of entry and move up the organization by way of a highly defined job ladder. As workers progressed through the organization, they acquired skills that tended to be highly firm-specific (Pfeffer & Cohen, 1984). Workers were tied to their current organization because movement to new organizations would result in decreased wages because the skills accrued at the old firm would not be transferable to the new one (cf. Lincoln & Kalleberg, 1982; Burawoy, 1985). The development of ILMs during the 1960s caused the welfare of many employees to become highly dependent on the success of their current workplace. But ILMs do not keep investors from moving their financial capital to other locations and ILMs give managers a stable labor pool to draw from.
The rise of portfolio investment strategies
Concurrent with the growth of ILMs, other technical developments were unfolding that would dramatically affect investors’ exposure to firm-specific uncertainties. Post-depression regulations made the stock market much more efficient in terms of access to information, reducing the risk associated with stock ownership. The expansion in the number of stocks traded and the number of companies available for purchase further reduced the firm-specific dependence of investors by increasing capital mobility.
An important event in decreasing the dependence of investors came in 1952, when Harry Markowitz published his work on portfolio selection. Markowitz (1952) hypothesized that by focusing on the standard deviations of stocks, as well as the covariance between them and the market, investors could diversify away nearly all the firm-specific risk inherent in any one stock, exposing themselves only to the risk of the overall market. With portfolio investment tools, investors could now exercise control over a number of firms without being exposed to the risk of any one.
Shifts in the backgrounds of top corporate executives
By the 1970s, managerial autonomy was increasing as workers became immersed in firm-specific ILMs and investors were shedding firm-specific uncertainties by diversifying their portfolios. These changes were accompanied by a shift in the backgrounds of top executives. Prior to the 1970s, the ranks of top management were filled with individuals whose training and corporate background involved marketing, sales, and engineering. Beginning in the 1970s, a growing number of top executives with finance backgrounds were being selected for key positions in organizations (Fligstein, 1990). As this cadre of managers grew, portfolio investment theory began to emerge as the organizing mechanism for large firms (see Fligstein, 1990).
This change in organizing principles and backgrounds of top executives produced a major split within the managerial ranks. Human relations management was built from a different set of principles that were not isomorphic with the new financial tools of top management. The human relations paradigm was designed to pacify employees in response to newly created union power. But decreasing union ranks and ILMs were making this pacification unnecessary. These occurrences, along with the conflict in ideology between top executives and mid-level personnel managers, led to the rise of human resource management. But the environmental change that greatly increased the role and prestige of financial management was the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s and the prevailing rise of neoliberal market ideologies in their wake.
Enter the human resource management paradigm
Human resource management reflects the underlying tenets of portfolio theory as practiced by top managers. The decision by top managers to diversify was based on the notion that the whole was more important than the individual parts of the organization. Top managers would add and discard firms based on their financial contribution to the overall corporation, while the welfare of the individual firms under the corporate umbrella was of secondary importance. Human resource management viewed employees in a similar fashion. Workers were no longer seen as important in and of themselves (as in the human relations approach). Rather, the employees were viewed in the context of their contribution to the specific firm, with decisions to add or discard employees reflecting this heuristic (Sherman & Bohlander, 1992; Wren, 1994).
Though this is a far cry from the previous perspective where worker satisfaction was of paramount concern, this shift from human relations to human resource management was a reaction to environmental changes affecting the professional autonomy of managers. Managers, whose future was increasingly tied to the performance of the individual firms they managed (see Donaldson, 1963), sought to reduce their dependence on specific employees and make the employment relationship more predictable (Monsen & Downs, 1965). They further sought to align their managerial paradigm with the dominant paradigm of portfolio investment theory as articulated by the new cadre of top managers. The increase in the use of ILMs and the decrease in the strength of unions made this possible. Most of the changes involved in the shift from human relations to human resource management were invisible to non-supervisory employees on a day-to-day basis. What did change slowly was the implied contract between managers and employees regarding their place within the larger corporation (Rubin, 1999).
When viewed in historical context, the paradigmatic shift from human relations to human resource management was an attempt by firm-level managers to enhance their professional autonomy. As top managers in conglomerate corporations continued to manage using the ‘corporation-as-portfolio’ model, the productivity of the workforce at the firm level became of paramount importance to firm-level managers. If the productivity of a particular firm within the conglomerate began to decline, the inclination on the part of top-level managers would be either divestiture or liquidation. In order to remain in the conglomerate, firm-level managers needed a continually productive workforce; this constraint affected the autonomy of firm-level managers. Human resource management supplied the analytical tool necessary for firm-level managers to obviate much of this impact and regain their autonomy.
Parallel developments: the Keynesian crisis and the rising salience of markets and ideologies
In the last 30 years, the rise of neoliberal political and economic ideologies has threatened the expert claims of professional groups and the logic of professional organization as an alternative to and protector of client and public welfare. The 1970s and early 1980s brought inherent crises to prevailing post-war economic arrangements and a questioning of the role of professional expertise in wide areas of social and economic life. This historic change was triggered by the crisis of Keynesian economics in the mid 1970s and the implications this crisis presented for a post-industrial future dominated by technical and administrative expertise (see Bell, 1976; Leicht & Lyman, 2006; Leicht & Fennell, 2008). This change is reflected in the Western European context by the rise of new public management ideas in professional civil service bureaucracies (Bourgeault et al., 2009; Leicht et al., 2009; Kuhlmann et al., 2009).
The contemporary situation of management and the professions can be contrasted with the early- to mid-1960s predictions regarding the spread of professional expertise and reliance on liberal-technocratic professionals in the new post-industrial developed world (see, for example, Bell, 1976; Frank et al., 1995; Frank, 1997). In this world of the future, professions and knowledge-based work roles develop in response to the demands of post-industrial capitalism. The process of filling these jobs and the larger societal adjustments that come with the demand for highly educated workers (educational expansion, credentialing, longer stretches of time in school, and mass higher education) create a professional elite that applies their specialized knowledge to a broad range of problems. Managers, and especially the professionalized manager envisioned by the Carnegie Commission and the post-war Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, were an integral part of a post-war economy actively managed for the public good.
This view of a post-industrial world where knowledge experts would manage the economy in the name of full employment, low inflation, and general prosperity was challenged by two developments: (1) the crisis in Keynesian economics that resulted from the stagflation and economic stagnation of the 1970s; and (2) the subsequent inability of skill-based models to explain rising income and earnings inequality among professionals and between professionals and non-professional groups. These developments led to a broad-based questioning of the relationship between technological expertise and general social welfare while also leading to serious questioning of the ability and desirability of attempting to manage the economy (cf. Stein, 1995).
The new neoliberal consensus (see Reich, 2012; Stiglitz, 2013) takes free markets and moves them from their place as part of the technical environment of organizations to an all-encompassing role in the institutional environment of organizations. The traditionally defined professions have always walked a tightrope between the institutional logic of professional practice centered on professional–client relationships, autonomy, collegiality, and professional ethics on the one hand, and a technical environment stressing market efficiency, technological change, and organizational innovation on the other (see Malhotra et al., 2006; Leicht & Lyman, 2006; Cummings, 2011). Management was no exception to this trend.
The present challenge of neoliberalism as an economic and political ideology has profound implications for the professions as coherent occupational entities. Many of these challenges are clarified if we take the colloquialisms of the new neoliberal consensus and contrast those with traditional conceptions of professional practice and the concept of expert labor (see Leicht & Fennell, 2008):
1.Consumers know best. Any attempt to interfere with, regulate, or affect consumer choice costs consumers money. This means that any interference with service provision (such as licensing procedures, legally defined monopolies over task domains, competency tests, and other devices for restricting professional service provision) extracts costs that are rarely if ever justified. Consumers of services will eventually reward competent, scrupulous providers and punish incompetent, unscrupulous ones. All that is necessary is to let the market do its work with the dollars of the consuming public voting for best practices.
2.Markets will determine what is right. The market becomes the locus of human perfection (see Giddens, 1994). No expert can make, guide or direct choices in the ways that markets will. No authority can make the wise choices that markets can make. Let markets do their job and stay out of it.
3.No credentialing or licensing. These are simply attempts to collect monopoly rents. Consumers will naturally be led to choices that are best for them, and credentialing and licensing are just an attempt to extract windfall profits at the expense of consumers.
4.No codes of ethics. Markets will naturally reward those who behave in the best interests of those who purchase professional services. Information about ethical and unethical practices can be sorted out in the wash and those practitioners who do what clients want them to do and who act in their best interests will win out in the end.
5.Competition will lower fees and salaries. Service delivery from a variety of professional groups, in a variety of settings, with a wide range of organizational arrangements will keep fees and salaries low and service delivery of the best quality.
In European contexts, the 1970s and 1980s and the accompanying economic recessions and deindustrialization led to a widespread questioning of the salience of European models of capitalism (cf. Esping-Anderson, 1989; Ironside & Seifert, 2003; Rifkin, 2004; Fourcade, 2006; Bourgeault et al., 2009; Leicht et al., 2009). Because professional practice (and especially the delivery of health care and education) have much more extensive ties to the public sector in most European countries, the main response to this general crisis in confidence (for professional groups) was the rise of new public management (NPM). While NPM is a label applied to a diverse set of reforms, ideas, and ideologies (cf. Savoie, 1995; Manning, 2001), the general thrust of NPM initiatives is to subject the provision of public service by professionals to market forces through disaggregation, competition, and incentivization (see Dunleavy et al., 2005; Leicht et al., 2009):
Disaggregation – splitting up large public sector bureaucracies into much smaller units, flattening organizational hierarchies and constructing management information systems that facilitate non-bureaucratic forms of control;
Competition – to separate purchasers and providers so that more activities can be subjected to competitive bidding and provision through multiple providers, both public and private. These competitive pressures are designed to replace hierarchical decision-making as the arbiter of appropriate action in the name of efficiency;
Incentivization – a general movement away from rewarding service providers in terms of diffuse public service or professional norms and toward specific performance incentives that are pecuniary and directly measurable. This impact has been especially serious for professional groups (see Kirkpatrick et al., 2011; Dunleavy et al., 2005).
The specific manifestations of NPM vary from place to place and affect a wide array of professional groups. Attempts to implement NPM concepts in the UK National Health Service (NHS) in particular have been controversial (see Ironside & Seifert, 2003). As with attempts to bring market incentives to professional practice in the USA (see Scott et al., 2000), there are very few examples of successful implementation of NPM concepts in European professional health services (see especially Bottery, 1996; Thompson & Reschenthaler, 1996; Kaboolian, 1998; Lynn, 1998; Christensen & Laegreid, 1999; Scott et al., 2000; Dulneavey et al., 2005). The criticisms of NPM in these contexts revolve around the disarticulation between public service and revenue maximization, and the inability to ‘get prices right’ in the provision of services and intermediate goods that are government-supported natural monopolies.
The crisis of Keynesian economics discussed earlier, and the economic reasoning that followed, was an expression of skepticism about the role that professional expertise plays and the championing of a new market-based, spontaneous order as a source of revived prosperity and growth for economies, communities, and individuals (cf. Stein, 1995). Politically (especially in the United States) libertarian neoliberals were able to unite with the cultural right in a conservative alliance that defeated both left and right corporatism (Antonio, 2000).
Management as a professional project in a globalized, neoliberal world
The post-1970s growth and spread of neoliberal ideology has placed contemporary management practice in an ironic position. On one side, managers have played a central role in attacking the professional prerogatives of other professions and would-be professional groups (see Khurana, 2007). On the other side, managers have not been spared the axe as globalized financialization and deregulation created a ‘market for corporate control’ that ties managers’ well-being to short-term investment returns.
In spite of the direct attacks on the job security of some segments of management, the spread of a globalized, neoliberal institutional environment represents a definitive step in the direction of permanently professionalizing management. The rapid development of business consulting and fee-for-service compensation that is the hallmark of the subcontracting process represents the definitive step in the direction of further professionalization for management (see also Leicht & Lyman, 2006). Indeed, one can see this development placing professionalized managers on a par with physicians and lawyers in their ability to establish and maintain independent, fee-for-service practice delivery to corporate clients. In this sense, management may be headed in the same direction as auditing services in accounting.
Undoubtedly, one continuing avenue of contestation will focus on attempts by professional groups to engage in social closure through controls on recruitment and task domains (Abbott, 1988, 1991; Khurana, 2007). This is a long-standing theme in scholarship on the professions, and the rewards accruing to managers are no exception to this rule. In the current climate, market claims represent the legitimation of rewards already received regardless of their relationship to actual competition. This is most obvious in the case of CEO compensation in the USA and UK. This is far from a new mechanism for the continual existence of professional work (Hughes, 1958; Larsen, 1977). The fact that a decentralized, market-based environment exists doesn’t seem to limit the rewards accruing to the successful, but it changes the narrative account used to define and describe success.
The most likely avenues now for the professionalization of management are associated with interpreting markets, making or creating markets, and providing financial services. Managers service the needs of corporations and investors seeking to maximize unearned income in political environments where unearned income receives special favors. Not only do the earnings of these financial service occupations derive from the new dominance of profits, dividends, and other capital rents but the compensation systems provide these would-be professionals with direct benefits from the unearned income they generate for others (see, for example, Leicht & Lyman, 2006).
Unfortunately for others’ claims over task domains, training, and earnings from a job, the new management occupations generate short-term profits for their clients by marketizing and disarticulating others’ work, outsourcing and downsizing back-office activities, and otherwise attacking protected sources of earned income. The current political and economic climate directly rewards them for doing so (Khurana, 2007). In this ironic sense, business schools now teach their students how to undermine the workplace claims of the middle classes, the very group the rest of the developed world’s universities train (Leicht & Fitzgerald, 2014). The managerial prerogatives asserted under the neoliberal dynamic reward professionalized managers for attacking others’ claims to a stake in the economic system and this dynamic shows no signs of changing soon.
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