Constructing the Management of Taxation: Re-making the Inland Revenue as a Managerially 'Complete Organisation'

Finance & Accounting

Further details

Postponed due to illness

Forms of management and governmentality have moved closer together in recent decades. If we take both bureaucracy and management as inventions of similar types and chronology (both involving new disciplinarity in work-time, work-space and work-activity, both emergent in the nineteenth century), then this is a significant re-alignment. The apparant triumph of management over bureaucracy in the form of New Public Managment (NPM) leads us to question how this triumph has been effected, and therefore what the significant differences between these similar approaches may be. This paper begins to addres these issues, through a consideration of changes ongoing in the UK Government's taxation arm, the Inland Revenue (IR), that are moving it from a burreaucratic mode of existence towards what has been named (Brunsson & Sahlin-Andersson, 2000) as a managerially 'complete organisation'