Building the Neoliberal World: Managers as Intellectuals in a Peripheral Economy

Abstract

The familiar idea of conflict between intellectuals and the holders of power is called into question in neoliberal global capitalism. A life-history study of a small group of public and private sector managers in Australia documents a labor process that is to a significant extent about data and ideas but is conducted under conditions that make reflective intellectual work unlikely. The tension is resolved in a technologically mediated collective labor process of management. This labor process is onto-formative: in contested and situationally specific ways, the practices of the managers bring a neoliberal order into being. This process is traced in relation to organizational life, privatization, and also globalization, which is partly constructed by practice from the periphery. Summaries of three case histories and extracts from others are given.

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