On the menu: Academic managerialism and critical theory

This paper is concerned with managerialism in universities. It focuses on the way compliance with widely criticised aspects of managerialism—above all, auditing as the dominant form of accountability—is compelled by what Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose call ‘psychotherapeutic authority.’ We offer a reading of two deployments of ‘psychotherapeutic authority.’ The first is the recently published Impossible Bosses: Secret Strategies to Deal with Eight Archetypal Managers, a Jungian self-help book written by a university deputy vice chancellor, a corporate executive, and a management consultant. We read the book in the context of a managerialism losing legitimacy, especially but not only in universities. We place Impossible Bosses alongside Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, which similarly deploys ‘psychotherapeutic authority’ but with very different aims in the context of a mid-twentieth century Anglo-European world attempting to ward off lingering and latent fascist tendencies. While Impossible Bosses aims for the conversion of unhappy workers into capable, self-actualising neoliberal managers, Minima Moralia seeks from its readers an acknowledgment that ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly.’ To get at why and how Adorno's ‘melancholy science’ holds greater hope for universities today than the buoyant optimism of Impossible Bosses, we contrast the different concepts of the unconscious with which they work. Because Adorno's concept of the unconscious is one comprised of ‘social forces’ rather than ‘primordial images,’ it is one on which work becomes possible, even if that work will inevitably be commoditised, will end up on the managerial menu for consumption.