> I suspect that this recent return to management fads is prompted by
> middle management's realization that they had better find something to
> make them look necessary again. The years of watching the stock ticker
> on the office PC are behind them.
Management has been a pretty steady growth industry from the very beginnings of the global economy, back in the late 1950s -- due to the need for specialized biz services, media, distribution and retailing of all kinds. My point isn't that the 21st century Left is the same as management, but that both are locked into the same socio-economic forcefield -- globalization -- and end up borrowing from each other's toolkits. Nowadays the silicon managers have to deal with polyglot workforces, a global palette of cultures, ceaseless information flow, etc.; it's not about imposing a military hierarchy on people, the way Ford used to run its assembly lines. At their best, management pubs can come amazingly close to diagrams of future worker-controlled factories; the very fact that mgmt lit is ideology, i.e. untrue in practice, makes it an unwitting index of truth amidst the falsity of the total system.
-- Dennis