began with the publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s third book, The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. Winslow Taylor advocated that men of commerce should pool their traditional business knowledge, reduce it to laws and formulae, and produce a “science of management”. (Location 65)
It will be a recurrent theme of this book that management is now applied to realms far removed from production industry, and to realms where it has, by any sensible reckoning, no business. (Location 93)
Indeed the government feels so confident of its ability to “manage” the national culture that it produced, in March 2001, a Green Paper prescribing the national culture for the following decade. Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years showed that the government had a much greater faith in its ability to manage the output of “creativity” than in its ability to manage more tangible concerns such as the London Underground, car production or the care of livestock on the farms. But then, modern management, like modern government, is increasingly concerned with fashioning attitudes, and less and less concerned with tangible goods and services. (Location 103)
After seven years of Lord Birt’s recent restructuring of the BBC, managers had doubled in number, by then comprising some 26% of the 24,000 staff, so that when in 2000 his Lordship left the BBC, basking in the warm congratulations of the Prime Minister, an independent auditor (July, 2000) found that the BBC management was overstaffed by some 1,100 people and was needlessly wasting £130 million a year of licence payers’ money. (Location 173)
