Wow! eBook
Return to Judgement: The Case for Post-Infantilized Management
Author(s): Mats Alvesson (Author), Dennis Nørmark (Author)
- Publisher: Bristol University Press
- Publication Date: June 16, 2026
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 304 pages
- ISBN-10: 1529244439
- ISBN-13: 9781529244434
Book Description
Today’s organizations are increasingly complex with many structures, practices and rules to follow. While the organizational head – an administrative knowing better class – becomes larger, the space for people doing the core job of the organization to think outside the box and take personal responsibility shrinks.
How can we tackle this and give workers more space to use their judgement?
Drawing on cases from universities, healthcare and other industries, this book reveals how the growth of management, policies and expertise are often counterproductive. The authors provide solutions for rethinking work and organization and to encourage what they call post-infantilized management.
Highlighting key debates around organizations and bureaucracy, this book presents an alternative vision for the future of work and management.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘On a scientific basis, the authors challenge many of the obvious assumptions that characterize today’s leadership training. They question simplified models, trendy management concepts and overly positive rhetoric – and instead point to the need for judgment, maturity and critical thinking. Otherwise, there is a risk that organizations will be characterized by empty rhetoric, excessive administration and symbolic politics.
For those who work with leadership, governance or organizational development, this book offers an intellectually sharp and thought-provoking critique. Read and reflect.’ Pär Boman, Chairman of Volvo and Handelsbanken
‘The book addresses and analyses an important and timely issue: the growing bureaucracy and the increasing legal requirements faced by both public and private organizations. This results in a rising overhead burden that the core operations are forced to carry unless effective countermeasures are implemented. The analysis presented here is therefore highly insightful, and the proposals put forward are both valuable and well chosen – for example, making leadership less all-encompassing and more focused on specific needs.’ Per Eriksson, former Vice-Chancellor, Lund University
‘At work, do you feel encompassed by rules, regulations, by digital disciplining that seems pointless, by being advised to conform to standards, procedures, policies, rubrics and much else that seem to be systematic traps for ensnaring your time and diminishing your autonomy as a person? You’re not alone. Alvesson and Nørmark have written a book that demonstrates this clearly. The existential state they describe is one in which there is an excess of “post-infantilized management” treating knowledgeable and capable adults as if dim-witted children. Kant prefigured enlightenment as liberation from the deadweight of pointless traditions and rituals; today careers are generated in creating increasingly more “modern” rituals of unfreedom from which only our minds, ourselves, can liberate us, by thinking thoughtfully, cultivating maturity and taking responsibility in organizations designed to encourage rather than diminish these features of being a competent person.’ Stewart Clegg, University of Sydney
About the Author
Mats Alvesson is Professor at the University of Bath, Lund University and City University of London.
Dennis Nørmark is an anthropologist, author and speaker.
