sharpe-whostolethecheese-2010.pdf (1.18 MB)
Who stole the cheese? or : How postmodernism can grow your business
journal contribution
posted on 2010-01-01, 00:00 authored by Matthew SharpeIn this paper, I examine some of the key management literature of the neoliberal 1990s to make a series of wider observations about contemporary ideology. Post-structuralist or post-modernist theory is often presented as the arch-enemy of neoliberal capitalism, as the orthodoxy of late capitalism. However, adding to work by Frederic Jameson, Thomas Frank and others, this paper examines uncanny proximity between neoliberal ideas about disaggregating, outsourcing, networking, etc. and the learning motifs of postmodernist theory. Its guiding hypothesis is that postmodernism in the academy, despite its own self-misrecognition as "racial", is a further ideological expression of the samr neoliberal drive to overcome "Fordist", "authoritarian" ways of organising producation and social regulation.