ABSTRACT
For a number of decades after World War Two ‘managerial capitalism’ became in the US, and to a signicant but lesser extent in the UK, a term of approbation for a new social order understood to combine a social landscape of giant corporations dominated by professional management with economic eciency, social responsibility and general auence. This explicitly ‘linked American plenty with American management’ (Locke, 1996, p. 4). It was a positive variant of a longer established, often dystopian, view of bureaucratically-run modern mass society and as long as the general auence persisted the US managerial model remained exemplary. Google N-grams show that the term ‘managerial capitalism’ became a meme in the 1950s, peaked in the early 1990s and then declined. This prole represents the rising then declining sustainability of both the concept and US management’s reputation as competition, particularly Japanese competition, and a resurgent domestic nancial capitalism brought widespread economic uncertainty and the collapse of the American management mystique (Locke, 1996).
