In the dedicated pursuit of dedicated capital: restoring an indigenous investment ethic to British capitalism

Tony Blair’s landslide electoral victory on May 1 (New Labour Day?) presents the party in power with a rare, perhaps even unprecedented, opportunity to revitalise and modernise Britain’s ailing and antiquated manufacturing economy.* If it is to do so, it must remain true to its long-standing (indeed, historic) commitment to restore an indigenous investment ethic to British capitalism. In this paper we argue that this in turn requires that the party reject the very neo-liberal orthodoxies which it offered to the electorate as evidence of its competence, moderation and ‘modernisation’, which is has internalised, and which it apparently now views as circumscribing the parameters of the politically and economically possible

Re-imagining management education in post-WWII Britain: Views from government and business

This paper explores the role of government and business in establishing two business schools in Britain in the 1960s. Partly in response to the Robbins Report of 1963, business leaders and politicians re-imagined management education and formed a new type of management education institution to operate alongside and ultimately compete a variety of other methods of management preparation. These two groups collaborated to create the London Graduate School of Business and Manchester Business School as national centers of excellence for management education. Using both archival and published sources, the paper’s contribution is to analyze perspectives expressed by businesspeople and political advocates involved with the business school project. It concludes that these advocates sought to create a body of educated, productive, yet socially-minded managers to lead Britain forward into the next phase of its economic development

Liberal conservatism, ‘boardization’ and the government of civil servants

Drawing inspiration from the loosely coupled genre of studies of governmentality, this article explores the emergence in Britain during the early years of the millennium of a distinctive liberal conservative scheme for the government of civil servants. The term ‘boardization’ has been used to characterize the trend to reproduce the technology of the board of directors in central government. Conservatives currently assign a distinctive role to the work of departmental ‘boards’ in the effective management of the Civil Service. Intimating the costs and risks of the Conservatives’ programme, we explore the role of diverse governmental forces in the emergence of the boards of the Civil Service as an object for action and intervention during the early years of the new millennium. We explore a mutation in the application of practices and techniques drawn from the domain of the business enterprise to the organization of the Civil Service. </jats:p

British policies on productivity 1951-64 A preliminary study

Period of Award - 1 Apr 1994 to 14 Oct 1994SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:3739.0605F(ESRC-R--000/22/1183)fiche / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo