ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to find ground rules for understanding the process of the managerial revolution in Britain. The work of Michel Foucault appears to set the terms for an important research agenda for the managerial revolution in the UK. A. D. Chandler’s well-known account of the managerial revolution in American business proposes a more nuanced process. The Visible Hand is the history of the development of administrative structures of a particular type which allowed unprecedentedly large US corporations to mobilise and maximise their economic power by overcoming the dysfunctionalities of scale. In the wider world too there was no shortage of visible handles which a visible hand could have turned, had it existed. Foucault’s account of institutional change only deals with success – in the sense that something is formed which is the consequence of some critical mass of discrete contingent developments.
