The landing of CEOs in the Argentine State and the diffusion of management as a social practice: a proposal of approach from Sociology

DIEGO SZLECHTER; FLORENCIA LUCI; MARCELA ZANGARO

Liverpool

Congreso; Stream ?The decolonizing management studies agenda: advances, challenges and prospects?, 10th International Critical Management Studies Conference ?Time for another revolution??; 2017

Critical management studies

Historically management emerged as a body of knowledge and a set of techniques aimed to plan and organize capitalist labour. Perhaps for this reason, reflections on this practice have often had an instrumental approach: they focused to look for techniques that would achieve the interests of the private firm. However, not all the perspectives who dealt with the analysis of management-related phenomena arose from functionalism approaches basically oriented to corporate interests. Nevertheless Sociology of Work has been one of the disciplines that critically approached what the Management Sciences and partly the Sociology of Organizations studied with a focus of attention on the search of order and balance in the firm. However, both managerialist perspectives and their critical variants had elements in common: an endogamic, "productivist" look, centered on what happened exclusively inside the company.The study of management from Sociology perspective proposes to recover discussions about actors, practices and speeches that have been present for more than 100 years in the first business schools in the USA, but granting them a new dimension, broader than the prevailing one during the taylorist - fordist period. We propose to do this nourishing the analysis from conceptual elements coming from, on the one hand, Management and Administrative Sciences, and on the other hand, Sociology of Work and Sociology of Organizations.The pertinence of the sociological view of management makes sense in the new scenario that emerged by the end of 2015 in Argentina. The landing of CEOs of large firms in the management of various public agencies since the assumption of the new government is one of the most novel facts of national politics, while it prefigures a new way of addressing the issue of management as an object of study, given the differences presented by the incorporation of private-business vision into the public-state sphere with respect to what happened during previous decades in terms of the administration of public affairs.In the current Argentine context, it is pertinent to tackle the task of thinking critically about how articulates the logic of the public in local state with that of the private-business oriented, fostered by agents whose professional trajectories came from corporate environment, and excluding in this analysis the idea that this reflection should be restricted to management tools that move from one sphere to the other. Therefore, we think it is necessary to extend the critical view towards the ethos and social practice of those who, until recently, integrated the corporate leadership of our country and who now hold key positions in the Argentinean state.Given the relevance and wide diffusion that management has today -as a way of thinking the world- from the particularity of the Argentine case and considering that, for us, the classic academic avenues mentioned above do not seem sufficient to address the complexity of this practice, It is our intention to describe what are the characteristics that should have a disciplinary approach that captures it in all its richness.Our sociological perspective proposes an approach that transcends dichotomous or functionalist views and rather, thinks of management as a social practice. A practice that has emerged in a singular historical context - that of the beginnings of industrialization ? and has followed a path that places it today in a position of much greater influence which demands to analyze the way certain practices and discourses of the corporate world expand in broader social contexts (such as politics, the sphere of reproduction, public management, etc.).In sum, studying management from a sociological perspective leads us to overflow the boundaries of the firm without this implying a deviation from the sphere of work: the firm remains our anchor point given that it is the social space where not only this practice is created and recreated but it is also the locus that gives its validity and social legitimacy. In other words, it is possible to argue that if managerial practice has been encompassing other spheres of life beyond the company, this has been to a large extent, due to its capacity to interweave in the construction of well-established social imaginary and success models, such as meritocracy, the cult of efficacy, the appeal to entrepreneurship and individual performance, etc.