Introduction: The New Development Management

Bill Cooke and Sadhvi Dar

A Dual Modernization

This book offers critical perspectives on the contemporary and ubiquitous uses of managerialism in international development interventions. Our use of the term critical is not as an alternative to important. Nor are we critical in some sense that management ideas have not been applied properly in development, or that there are development practices that must be improved managerially. We are critical in the sense that we believe there is something intrinsically wrong with the very idea of management and its applications in international development. As editors, we – and, we think, the contributions here – are:

... critical of established management practices and the established social order. Our premise is that structural features of contemporary society, such as the profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality, and ecological irresponsibility, often turn organizations into instruments of domination and exploitation ...

This quotation, with which the main thrust of this book resonates, is from the domain statement of the critical management studies (CMS) interest group of the (American) Academy of Management (2007). In identifying with it we, as editors, align ourselves with what has emerged over the past fifteen years or so as CMS. Nevertheless, we are committed to making this book more than a critical management studies volume about development and development management. It is, equally, a contribution to postdevelopment, or what our (colonizing?) instincts might lead us to term critical development studies.

In bringing CMS and critical/postdevelopment understandings together, we are motivated by the intellectual approaches that these ostensibly separate fields share. This is notwithstanding the diverse range of social theorizing, epistemological framings, and methodologies that are encompassed within each field. An example of this sharing is the self-evident similarity between the landmark (in development studies) Foucauldian deconstruction of development discourses and explanation of their material consequences in James Ferguson's (1990) The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic State Power in Lesotho and the important (in management studies) Foucauldian deconstruction of human resource management discourses, linking them to their material consequences, in Barbara Townley's (1994) Reframing Human Resource Management: Power, Ethics and the Subject at Work. Both these studies question the ethics of managerialization (in Townley) or bureaucratization (in Ferguson) through seemingly mundane and neutral practices. These practices are described as often culminating in a singular and rational project logic that has dehumanizing effects on the lives of those impinged upon (as workers, as beneficiaries, as stakeholders) by such projects. This logic also is instrumental in constructing a regime of truth that makes particular, and often unethical, realities more legitimate than others.

Identifying the similarity in these approaches to the ethics of organizing (broadly, and not unproblematically, defined) indicates how the demarcation between critical work on development and critical work on management might begin to be bridged. But this demarcation in itself must also be an object of critical attention. Not least, this chapter and this book imply, it serves to sustain modernization and the modern as an enduring and dominating (in intent) worldview with implications for a diversity of social institutions and arenas. We do not therefore proclaim this book as marking the invention of a brand-new, novel field. Instead it is committed to exploring the interconnections, engagements and relevances that the critical management and postdevelopment understandings can have for one another.

In singling out Ferguson and Townley, we do not wish to propose that CMS and postdevelopment scholarships are wholly Foucauldian. Both embrace (in often uncomfortable simultaneity) neo-Marxism and Critical Theory; feminist, postmodernist, and/or postcolonialist perspectives; critical environmentalism, and much more. Subsequent chapters exemplify and rehearse much of this range. Further, there are already reviews and collections that describe the two fields. For CMS, key works in this genre are Grey and Fournier (2002), Grey and Willmott's reader (2005) and Adler, Forbes and Willmott's recent review (2007). For postdevelopment, there is particularly Rahnema and Bawtree (1997) and Kothari and Minogue (2001), but also see Sachs (1991) and Crush (1995b).

CMS and postdevelopment work are often also criticized for the same reasons. Postdevelopment has been called impractical, woolly theorizing (Parfitt, 2002) that does nothing to alleviate poverty, leaving no practical options open for tackling what development agencies do (or are trying to do), and so making the situation worse.

CMS is similarly attacked for its lack of instrumental value or relevance (as acknowledged, for example, in Grey and Fournier, 2002; see also The Economist, 2004), on the grounds that while it is very good at presenting critical argument against managerialism, it is not at all inclined to suggest a real alternative (Parker, 2002).

But perhaps the most relevant concern here is a point debated, but yet to really emerge in print, that CMS might itself be some kind of colonizing discourse, First World in its origins, but domineering over different expressions of opposition to managerialism elsewhere. This point of criticism also potentially applies to this book. Our response would be to recognize, first, that we of course believe social phenomena to be complex, complicated and multidimensional. Just as one singular approach to alleviating poverty (as sanctioned by multilateral agencies such as the World Bank or International Monetary Fund [IMF], and even some international nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]) cannot fit all socially embedded geographies, histories and people, nor can there, or should there, be one...