The managers’ moment in Dutch politics: A case study of management as politics in the 1980s and 1990s in Western-Europe

This paper investigates the us of management as form of political leadership in the In the 1980s and 1990s via the casestudy of The Netherlands. In those years a successful political leader was a ‘manager’, who communicated a managerial ideology and introduced businesslike methods in government and politics. In this article we first deal with the development of the relation between leadership, manager and management and how these subjects are described in the historiography of management and political history. In addition, we will elaborate on the performative role of leaders since the 1970s and how the change in the discipline of management relates to this. Thereafter the rise of the ‘manager’ in Western politics will be introduced and explained. In the third paragraph the rise of Dutch management in the Netherlands will be analyzed in which we will show how politics became more business focused and how party politics changed. As a case study we show how the effects of these changes in the new Dutch environmental policy which was exported to the rest of Europe. Finally we will describe the heydays of the manager and its decline, which shows how leadership success is a product of its time.