WHO STOLE THE CHEESE? OR: HOW POSTMODERNISM CAN GROW YOUR BUSINESS ...

In this paper, I examine some of the key management literature of the neo-liberal 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 the uncanny proximity between neoliberal ideas about disaggregating, outsourcing, networking, etc. and the leading motifs of postmodernist theory. Its guiding hypothesis is that postmdoernism in the academy, despite its own self-misrecognition as "radical", is a further ideological expression of the same neoliberal drive to overcome "Fordist", "authoritarian" ways of organising production and social regulation.