The Rise of Management Culture

Our project aims to chart the historical ascent of neoliberalism by employing text analysis on extensive historical text corpora. We seek to uncover insights on topics such as who “manages” various aspects of life. We propose that discourses on the management of personal affairs (e.g., body, emotion, interpersonal relationships) are manifestations of neoliberal ideology, which sees individuals as managers of their own life projects. We also are interested in understanding who the initial advocates of management ideology were and how they circulates their beliefs in various institutional contexts such as academia, law, and the media.