ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the institutional aspects of Labour's concern with management in the late 1940s and reflects on the content of that ‘managerialism’, before finally considering the wider ideological significance of Labour's evolving conception of management. One of the functions of the BIM was to bring together the wide range of previously existing management bodies and to provide an agency for education in management. But whilst the BIM focused on the education of the practising manager, there was also the question of management qualifications for those at the beginning of their career. In practice the management systems which emerged in those industries tended to reflect arguments about collective bargaining and capital finance as much as any notion of internal organisational efficiency. The idea of a training in management as preparation for advancement up the industrial career hierarchy was clearly popular in ASSET, and this obviously tended to produce a rather different perspective on the legitimacy of existing industrial organisation.
