The Ideology of Managerialism

“[This book] establishes Thomas Klikauer as today’s authoritative voice on managerialism. [It] explores the important distinction between managerialism as an ideology and as a set of practices. Much of the writing on managerialism fails to recognize how the former infuses the latter. I recommend this book to organizational scholars and others interested in the evolution of the modern corporation.” - Sanford M. Jacoby, UCLA, USA “Thomas Klikauer’s new book is the third one on managerialism – in so far forms a trilogy. The two earlier ones – “Managerialism: A Critique of an Ideology” from 2013 and “The Language of Managerialism: Organizational Communication or an Ideological Tool?” from 2023 – set already the pace, making him the expert on the topic worldwide. He limited himself until now in describing the phenomenon and its dangerous invasion not only into the company but the whole society. Now he confronts himself with the theoretical challenges to understand and analyse managerialism. Nevertheless he remains modest in just providing fragments of a future theory. This endeavour is fully successful as he brings together the main challenges for a sustainable, democratic society with elements to overcome them by a well-known strategy, i.e. intellectual self-defence against the ideology of managerialism on the basis of the Frankfurt School of critical sociology, in one word: Bildung/education. In reading this book for example. Apparently this is not something, which should only be done in business schools, however, within the whole educational system – as managerialism penetrates the whole society. Therefore the book is strongly recommended not only to experts, but to a large public.” - György Széll, Osnabrück University, Germany