MAKING UP MANAGERS - BUREAUCRACY, ENTERPRISE AND THE LIBERAL ART OF SEPARATION

A key feature of recent debates within the sociology of organizations has been the tremendous wealth of criticism levelled at the concept and practice of 'bureaucracy'. Indeed, the critique or 'bureaucratic culture' has emerged as something of a 'nodal point' connecting a number of different strands of organizational analysis - from the overtly populist 'bureaucracy-bashing' prescriptions of contemporary managerial discourse to contemporary feminist analyses of the gendered nature of 'bureaucratic rationality'. This article concentrates upon the critique of bureaucracy deployed within contemporary managerial discourse-especially as this refers to the ethical conduct of management-and suggests that it is in crucial respects misplaced. In particular, it emphasizes the 'constitutive relationship' between forms of bureaucratic administration and modern liberal democratic government. In so doing it indicates how the de-differentiation of departments of existence advocated by proponents of contemporary managerial discourse serves to undermine this relationship in certain important respects and with potentially deleterious results.