Ideas Matter: ‘What’s wrong with the Professional Managerial Class?’

From the series ‘The elite: old and new’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in November 2021.

The term ‘professional managerial class’ was coined in 1977. Thinkers on both left and right have drawn attention to the rise (and rise) of a seemingly new group in society who neither labour in traditional occupations nor own significant amounts of capital. This group of salaried professionals – in the civil service, education, management, public relations, public health etc. – not only increasingly manage the key institutions of society. They are also said to exert a social and ideological influence, promoting ‘progressive’ campaigns around gender, sexual, racial, and other identity causes. But who are this group? Can it really be said to be a ‘class’, and how do they differ from more familiar elites?

Lecture by Catherine Liu, professor of film and media studies, University of California Irvine, and the author of ‘Virtue Hoarders: the case against the professional managerial class’

THE ACADEMY ONLINE IV: The elite: old and new
To view the full programme and some suggested background reading to the talks, please visit  https://theboi.co.uk/academy-online-iv  

ASSOCIATED READING

For this lecture you may wish to read:-

• READ: Barbara and John Ehrenreich, The Professional Managerial Class in Radical America, Vol 11, No. 2, 1977 (pdf) https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1125403552886481.pdf
• READ: Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: the case against the professional managerial class, 2021 https://amzn.to/3ehMCDS   

 

THE ACADEMY
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.

 

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