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Amir Goldberg

Professor Of Organizational Behavior and (by courtesy) Sociology
Stanford Graduate School of Business
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The Managerialization of Everyday Life From 1950 to the Present

Date: Friday, October 24, 2025
Time: 14:00 pm – 15:30 pm

Abstract

The 1980s saw the expansion of a market-oriented culture, extending the logic of competition and commodification to the personal sphere. Various accounts suggest that this neoliberal turn prompted individuals to understand themselves as projects requiring monitoring and optimization, like how a firm manages inventory or productivity. Yet empirical evidence for this cultural shift---what we term the managerialization of everyday life---remains debated and largely anecdotal. To address this gap, we develop computational linguistic methods for tracing the diffusion of explicit and implicit managerialized discourse across multiple cultural domains from 1950 to today, including newspapers, films, novels, congressional speeches, and case law proceedings. We also apply these methods to interviews with a representative sample of contemporary Americans. Our analyses reveal a secular rise in management metaphors applied to the body, subjectivity, and social relationships, since the mid twentieth century. 1980 marks a key turning point, consistent with the ascendance of neoliberal politics in Western societies. We document sociodemographic variation in the uptake of managerialized language, finding that women were among the earliest adopters. By the turn of the twenty-first century, managerial discourse had become institutionalized, with younger, White, affluent, and college-educated individuals at the forefront of its cultural entrenchment. Our findings provide large-scale evidence of how shifts in economic institutions reshape the way people conceptualize themselves and their social ties, and challenge prevailing narratives about the decline of rationality in contemporary life.