Managing the Neo-Liberalization of the World: The Case of Development Administration and Management

Bill Cooke

Abstract

This paper is about the relationship between management, a First World discipline, and the Third World. Evidence is that management is assumed to apply in organizations in modern, or post-modern societies. There is however a distinctive form of management, Development Administration and Management (DAM) applied to Third World nation-states that are deemed in the First World to require neo-liberal modernization. This essential difference is concealed by a certain level of crossover with generic management.

This article sets out this institutional and conceptual separation and crossover. It then goes on to demonstrate how DAM, with particular help from participatory ideas associated with the management of organisational change (for example action learning) is complicit in the World Bank's neo-liberalising "poverty reduction" agenda. It concludes by reviewing the implications of DAM / management's status as a direct instrument of neo-liberalism for both management generally and for Critical Management Studies.

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