The Cult of Managerialism and Small Steps Back to Sanity

In the mid-1980s, a quiet revolution took place in the corridors of power, boardrooms, and public institutions alike. Spurred on by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, a new way of thinking—neoliberalism—swept across both sides of the Atlantic. Its central tenet? That market efficiency, competition, and technocratic management were the keys to unlocking prosperity. But while it might be unsurprising that private businesses, driven by profit motives, would embrace this philosophy, what is deeply disheartening is the extent to which public sector institutions—designed to serve the common good—have fallen into the same technocratic trap.

From hospitals to universities, public services that once stood as pillars of community, care, and civic purpose have increasingly adopted the sterile, number-driven philosophy of managerialism. In the process, they have become hollowed-out versions of their former selves, more concerned with targets, metrics, and performance reviews than with the people they were meant to serve.

Public Institutions as Business: The Education Sector

In the UK and the US, the education sector has been almost entirely overtaken by managerialist practices. Schools and universities, once bastions of learning and intellectual development, are now dominated by managers who treat them as if they were businesses operating in competitive markets. Instead of focusing on student development and fostering a love for learning, administrators obsess over exam results, graduation rates, and student ‘outcomes’—all of which are easily quantifiable but fail to capture the true purpose of education.

Take Ofsted, the UK’s school inspection body. What was once intended as a support for educational quality has become an instrument of fear and compliance. Schools now spend more time preparing for Ofsted inspections—aligning teaching to tick the right boxes—than they do fostering creativity and intellectual curiosity. Teachers are evaluated not by the depth of the relationships they build with students or the long-term impact they have on young minds, but by exam performance and attendance statistics.

This relentless focus on numbers distorts everything. Instead of learning for the sake of learning, students are taught to pass exams. Instead of becoming centers of intellectual exploration, schools become exam-preparation factories, churning out standardized results in the same way a manufacturing line might produce identical widgets. The great irony, of course, is that this system doesn’t produce better students—it produces more stressed, disillusioned students who have learned to 'play the game' but who often leave school with little passion for learning or the world around them.

In the US, the No Child Left Behind Act exemplified this technocratic shift. A policy ostensibly designed to raise educational standards across the board, it instead shackled teachers to rigid metrics that punished schools for not hitting arbitrary targets. The effects were catastrophic: schools in low-income areas—already struggling—were disproportionately penalized, and the rich-poor educational divide only grew wider.

The NHS and the Managerialist Nightmare

If the tragedy of managerialism in education is disheartening, its spread through the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is downright tragic. The NHS, one of the great public institutions of the 20th century, was founded on the principle of universal healthcare—delivered free at the point of use, and with an emphasis on care, not profit. But over the past few decades, managerialism has slowly eroded the soul of the NHS.

Hospitals and healthcare systems, much like schools, are now run as businesses. Targets—such as ‘bed turnover rates’ and ‘patient discharge times’—have become the ultimate measure of success. It doesn’t matter whether patients leave the hospital feeling better, or whether nurses and doctors have the time and emotional bandwidth to care for them properly. What matters is that the numbers look good.

Take the ‘4-hour wait time’ target in A&E (Accident and Emergency). Introduced with the aim of ensuring patients are seen quickly, this metric has in practice become a perverse incentive. Emergency departments rush to move patients out of A&E within the four-hour window—often by transferring them to inappropriate wards—just to avoid a penalty for failing to meet the target. The deeper human element—the needs of patients, the skill of the doctors, the pressures on staff—gets lost in the bureaucratic shuffle.

Doctors and nurses, under pressure to meet these technocratic demands, find themselves overworked, under-supported, and increasingly disconnected from the very reason they entered the profession: to care for people. The NHS, once a beacon of compassion-driven healthcare, is becoming a labyrinth of managerialism, where spreadsheets dictate what happens at the bedside.

Neoliberalism’s Trojan Horse

What’s most distressing is that these public institutions didn’t have to go down this road. Unlike businesses in a capitalist system, where profitability and efficiency are key, public institutions have always had a different mandate: to serve the common good. But the rise of neoliberal thinking has blurred this line, embedding the belief that public services must be run like businesses to be 'efficient.' Thatcher famously declared, 'There is no alternative,' and over the decades, this dogma has taken root so deeply that it’s now the default approach in most public institutions.

Even left-of-center governments, which traditionally would have protected these public institutions from such pressures, embraced managerialism. Tony Blair’s Labour government, like Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration in the US, accepted the neoliberal consensus. They introduced systems of 'choice' and 'competition' in public services, believing that market forces would raise standards across the board. But in reality, all they did was force public services into a straitjacket of targets, competition, and technocratic control.

The tragedy is that this managerialism isn’t just unnecessary—it’s actively harmful. Complexity theory, for instance, has given the lie to the idea that human organizations can be managed like machines. Schools, hospitals, and governments are not simple, linear systems that can be controlled with a set of levers and dials. They are complex, adaptive systems, where relationships, human emotions, and creativity play a vital role. Trying to manage them with rigid performance metrics leads not to greater efficiency, but to dysfunction and a pervasive sense of meaninglessness.

Barry Schwartz and the Return to Practical Wisdom

While managerialism continues to tighten its grip on both private and public institutions, there is an alternative. In his book Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, psychologist Barry Schwartz offers a compelling vision for re-enchanting our institutions and returning sense to decision-making. His solution? The cultivation of practical wisdom— the ability to make decisions that are appropriate to the conxtext.

At its core, practical wisdom is about cultivating judgment, the ability to do the right thing in the right way, for the right reasons at the right time. It’s a type of wisdom that cannot be captured by rules, algorithms, or metrics; it requires experience, moral discernment, and the ability to navigate complex situations with nuance and empathy. Schwartz argues that practical wisdom is exactly what is missing in our technocratic, managerialist world, where decisions are often reduced to binary choices based on data points and KPIs.

This idea resonates with many people because it aligns with what we intuitively understand about human work. Good teaching isn’t just about hitting exam targets—it’s about knowing how to inspire students. Good healthcare isn’t just about bed turnover rates—it’s about caring for the whole patient, emotionally and physically. But practical wisdom is hard to quantify, and in an age dominated by metrics and efficiency, it doesn’t fit neatly into spreadsheets. And that’s precisely why it has been eroded - and derided.

Schwartz’s call to cultivate practical wisdom might feel out of sync with modern capitalism, where scalability and predictability are prized. But its basic correctness—the fact that it speaks to the complexities of human life and work—cannot be denied. The problem, however, is that practical wisdom is difficult to scale. It requires human judgment, not a one-size-fits-all solution, and it takes time to develop through experience.

This explains why politicians, both on the left and right, have been seduced by the managerialist mindset. Simplistic targets and performance metrics are easier to communicate, easier to measure, and—most importantly—easier to sell as political successes. If you can show that waiting times in A&E have dropped or that exam scores have risen, you can claim victory, regardless of the deeper consequences. Simple lies, after all, sell better than complex truths.

But, the fact that something is easier to sell doesn’t mean we should accept it. Institutions based on practical wisdom, collaboration, and trust might be harder to build, but they are far more likely to foster environments that employees trust and respect. The deep irony is that, in the long run, institutions built on practical wisdom are not only more humane but also more effective.

Managerialism and the Crisis of Meaning

One of the most profound consequences of managerialism’s rise has been its contribution to the sense of meaninglessness that pervades modern life. When work is reduced to a set of KPIs, when schools are judged by exam results alone, and when hospitals are run like factories, it’s no wonder that people feel disconnected from their work. The purpose of work, in its deepest sense, is about more than just getting things done—it’s about contributing to something larger than oneself. It’s about creativity, purpose, and human connection.

But in the world of managerialism, these things have no place. The only thing that matters is whether you’ve hit your targets. This shift has eroded trust within organizations, creating environments where employees struggle to respect the system they’re part of. Managers rely on incentives and punishments to coerce people into meeting goals, rather than fostering a culture of collaboration, empowerment, and shared purpose. The result is workplaces where people do the bare minimum to tick boxes, but feel no connection to their work or to their colleagues.