Well, friends, so far 2026 has been all about headcolds and procrastination. I'm supposed to be working on the manuscript for Bloomsbury, and although I still have 2,5 months to delivery⊠Let's just say I've been quite productive in other writing! Which is OK too, it all counts. Anyway, today's little item is a fragment for a project on "folk management" I'm working on. Let's see where it'll lead me⊠Oh, and remember that new book that y'all got first through this newsletter? Well, I released it more generally now, so if you missed it the first time around, here's one more chance. And to those of you who get this email because you downloaded the book recently, welcome! Here's the book:
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So, until next time, stay classy! Alf
The Curious Case of Elitism and Management
The issue of elitism and/in management is yet another of the many complex dynamics that exist in the realm of business that makes the notion of folk management befuddling to consider. Superficially, this might seem to be one of the less complex issues, as we quite often assume that management is elitist at heart. Management studies, as a field of study and perchance even a science, certainly is. It is taught at universities, often in prestige parts thereof, not seldom in ways where expensive executive education is part and parcel of the offering. Professors in management studies tend to be among the better paid at a university (if not quite there with professors of engineering), and universities do quite a lot to at least insinuate that studying management will be an efficient way of becoming part of the elite. In a similar way, there is often an assumption in organizations that management positions are kept for the elite (regardless of whether this is defined through meritocracy or good, ol'-fashioned nepotism), and that becoming one of "them" means you start counting yourself as being part of the elite, no matter how ill-defined. In fact, both in business schools and in businesses, there are institutional forces at play to enhance this appearance of elitism. In businesses, labor organizers (be they unionists or more anarchist in form) often utilize the notion of an us-vs-them, a working class being oppressed by an elite, even if the classical socio-economic classes have become quite hybridized and management are likely to be scions of the middle class (if that) rather than an actual elite. In business schools, a somewhat nebulous field called critical management studies (CMS) has arisen, emphasizing the many ways in which management studies as a field is elitist and prone to align itself with management rather than workers, capital rather than the plebeians, and upholding the status quo rather than enacting meaningful change. The fact that this is often taught by management professors who have gotten where they are thanks to the success of the ideology of management has been noted, both within CMS and outside of it.
What is almost always forgotten in these debates is the rather pedestrian fact that management in the age of late capitalism can be quite far removed from the elite narratives often ascribed to it. To pick just a single example from my own life, part of my daily routine as I am writing this has to do with waking up an 18-year-old for his shifts in a grocery store. This is no random task, nor a random man â he is the son of my partner, and while his mother doesn't work from home, I often do, so this task has fallen upon me. It is made more complex by the fact that his hours are quite fluid, and he may not get word from management about his shifts until a day or a few days beforehand. To many, this smacks of oppression, and the heartless elitism of management. In reality, however, the management in question consists of a somewhat hapless 20-year-old man, who somehow tries to keep the ever-changing roster of workers happy with their hours. Observing this from a slight distance, I recognize little of the elitism that we tend to assume is associated. Here, management have little to no educational advantage over those they (or, in this case, he) manages, and in fact often has an age disadvantage. The management position is paid slightly better, but it is doubtful whether this is just recompense for having to juggle all that is needed to ensure staff are on hand. To claim that the situation could be read as an ideological microcosm is not in and of itself untrue â I am trained in the art of making such reading of nigh-on any human interaction in society (and can extend this into the socio-technical or other-than-human realms with ease) â but this would ignore that such a reading would have an air of the ludicrous about it. Yes, management has an ideological side, and this is connected to ideological structures that permeate society, but at the same time we are talking about a 20-year-old trying to get an 18-year-old to wake up in the morning (if aided and abetted by a professor in this task).
Now, some might make the claim that this home-spun anecdote is weak sauce as a more general argument, as hapless foremen by no means are a new phenomenon. People have found themselves in over their heads since primordial times, and whether this is called a management position or not seems incidental rather than fundamental. If we assume that management is just that, a position, then this might indeed be the case. I will however argue that this is a flawed assumption. Yes, part of the managerialism of late capitalism is the tendency to create âpositions of managementâ, assumed loci for where management happens. This, however, assumes that management is absent outside of these, and further that the people occupying such positions have an understanding of the way their acts are part of a greater whole. This is not what management hath wrought. Thought in an abstract manner, management seems to build edifices of elitism, increasing the amount of ways in which oppression can be brought upon people and adding to the layers through which man can look down upon man. In practice, however, managerialism as an ideological praxis is almost democratic, insofar as it captures close to all of those who are touched by it. An organization, such as the local branch of a large grocery chain, will have a few people with little to no management tasks assigned to them. These people, to whom my partnerâs son just about belongs, are however an exceptionally small minority in the organization as a whole. Whereas the green grocer of yore might have been an operation run by one singular manager, overseeing the work of many a clerk, today my 18-year-old exemplar is spending a few cheerful months being just the subject of management. If he does well, and thus far this seems to have been the case, he has been told that a more permanent job, with attendant extra responsibilities, might be his in the near future. And what are these extra responsibilities? In almost all cases, cases of management.
Some might in this see a specific mechanism of ideology, a praxis through which hierarchies are established and layered so that the promiseof becoming part of an elite is always there, even if very few reach this assumed promised land. That said, this aspect does not exclude the fact that very few â an almost invisible sliver, in fact â of those who today become part of the management machine in any meaningful sense become part of an elite through this. Granted, there are those within this group who may in the fullness of time achieve a high level of take-home pay, and through this may seem like an elite to those of lesser fiscal fortune, this extends the notion far beyond analytical usage. Today, you can be a manager and despite this represent an elite â some very wealthy people remain active in the management of their corporations or conglomerates â but at the same time being a manager is more likely to indicate that you are middle- to working class. Whilst we keep alive the notion that management is about exerting control over others, most if not all who are part of the management matrix are just folks, doing a job and hoping that their manager doesnât challenge them in an undue manner. Yes, the promise might be there, as it is in a lottery, but just like in a lottery very few managers end up with much more than a wage packet and something in the way of a pension. Nothing to sneeze at, but at the same time far from the gilded life of the elite, made even less attractive by the resentment that being part of âmanagementâ receives.
Now, I am not arguing that managers through this represent some new, twisted kind of the Lumpenproletariat so vividly evoked by Marx. Nor am I claiming that management today is a strictly proletarian activity, although it should be noted that more and more proletarians do actually engage with management â and not just as the shop stewards beloved by industrial sociologists. Rather I would argue that whereas managerialism has been seen as part of the working of the bourgeoisie, the contemporary version of this class have little to no interest in affairs so pedestrian as everyday management. Instead, management is at heart an activity connected to the petite bourgeoisie, and what we have seen socially and organizationally over the last 100 years has been less the extension and growth of the proletariat but more the rise of this lesser, petty bourgeoisie. While the proletariat became fragmented, generating among other things a precariat, it also started merging with this group it has always had a complicated relationship with. It should be remembered that Marx himself saw that the differences between the two classes tended to be cultural and social rather than material, and that there was a revolutionary potential in the petite bourgeoisie that wasnât present in e.g. the Lumpenproletariat.
So, what does this all point to? Increasingly to a perspective where management need to be understood as something elites use, rather than something that is characteristic for the same. In fact, it might point in two directions at one. One, that we need a theory of class consciousness (Ă la LukĂĄcs) among managers and in management. We need to become better at understanding how contemporary class identities mix with the management role, so as to free us from simple binaries. Two, that we need better theories of how management becomes what Althusser called an ideological state apparatus. How does management, and our relation to it, produce us as subjects? What kind of person has my wife's son's manager, at a scant 20 years, become due to being placed in "a management role"? I raise this not to claim any great originality here â CMS has, in its ways, looked at this for quite some time (if with less than structured results) â but because this might be able to help us understand the category of "folk management" as something more than a reductive reading of management theory, and potentially as a kind of resistance.