Management and Organisation Community Seminar – Professor Leo McCann

Title: The system has, in my view, become counterproductive” – Robert McNamara, the World Bank, and management as a profession

Date: 24 April 2024

Time: 14:30-16:00

Location: NUBS.2.05

If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:

“The system has, in my view, become counterproductive” – Robert McNamara, the World Bank, and management as a profession

Speaker: Professor Leo McCann, Professor of Management, University of York

Abstract:

The notion that management is a profession that can confront ‘global grand challenges’ or be a ‘force for public good’ is currently very prominent. But this idea is far from new. This paper explores the management history of the World Bank, one of the world’s most important organizations with a social mission. Based on historical documentary research it explores the years 1968-1981 when the Bank underwent substantial organizational change and mission expansion under its President Robert S. McNamara – a hugely controversial figure but also person strongly connected to the professionalization and institutionalization of management. Sources illuminate how the World Bank both changed its remit to what might now be called ‘bottom of the pyramid’, poverty-reduction strategies, while also massively increasing its borrowing and lending activity. These changes were not all successful. Bank staff expressed concern about the purpose and effectiveness of development lending, a rapid escalation of workload, a growth in restrictive controls over work processes and open discussion, and a concomitant decline in staff morale. Located theoretically in literatures on the audit society (Power, 1999; Strathern, 1996) and critical data studies (Beer, 2016; Boyd and Crawford, 2012; Iliadis and Russo, 2016), the paper argues that two of the central aims and functions of management – to measure and to control – lie at the heart of management’s image problem. It is often difficult to argue that measurement and control serve the public good; instead, these functions exist largely to further management’s own sectional interests. Notions of a public good were central to internal and external World Bank discourses, but documentary sources show continual frustration with an inability to convince sceptical audiences about the Bank’s value, effectiveness and ethical probity. Making an historical contribution to management studies and critical data studies, the paper shows how the task of ‘repurposing’ management for the public good is not only a contemporary challenge, but also a problem with a long and difficult history.