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Why Is Management A Cliché?, Stefano Harney

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article introduces the term demotics of management by asking why so much management literature reads like a cliché. Typically this question has been approached by seeing the cliché as strategic. This article instead views the cliché as symptomatic. It marks a growing problem—how can management track labor out of the workplace and into the realm of social reproduction, a realm that is increasingly, with the tendency of immaterial labor, directly productive. This problem has produced not only the explosion of popular management literature, particularly in the United States, in the last 20 years, but also what might be called …