Most ICC commentators are enthusiastic about the promise of management as a way to optimise the court’s performance. Yet few are as eager to historicise the practices they advocate. Chapter 2 seeks to read the court’s managerial present through its past deployments, journeys, and consequences for other institutional projects long predating the contemporary Rome Statute system. The chapter begins by tracing the uses of management in such institutions as the plantation, war, and the nineteenth-century factory before following them as they entered the practice of early international institutions. Beyond these spaces, a major part of management’s pre-history lies in its invocation at the United Nations after decolonisation. The chapter demonstrates that two of management’s key assumptions – regarding its lack of history and its claim to political neutrality – are only the ‘truth effects’ of protracted expert and political struggle within various institutional spaces. The most important of these for the ICC has been the United Nations, where management formed part of a counter-strategy against the democratisation efforts of newly decolonised states. Whilst purportedly neutral today, the management practices taken up at the ICC continue to bear the scars of these earlier political wins and losses.

Until the early twentieth century there has been little basis for thinking about meaningful work in Management Research beyond the perfect match between the supply and demand of labour and technical methods to get as much work as possible out of this breathing factor of production. Then, however, the interplay of political, economic and cultural dynamics forces management theory to reconsider. This is the point in time in which this chapter sets off and illustrates who spread the seeds of meaningful work ideas on the contested soil of economic rationality ideas and with what result. The chapter captures the development that has led to complementary, but also competing thoughts of meaningful work in the domain of classical and contemporary Management and Organisational Behaviour literature. We claim that management interest in meaningful wage labour for employees is based on the idea that such work leads to the kind of work orientations that enhances efficiency and productivity. From this perspective, meaningful work is not a gift from the employer, but the latter’s strategic choice.

Scholars have often considered salary-earning professionals as workers, since they did not own the means of production and, from the 1920s onwards, were subject to increasingly ‘scientific’ management. Professionals were not always salary earners, however. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, professionals tended to own small businesses. Over the twentieth century, professionals moved into ever-larger enterprises, typically becoming salaried employees. Early professional businesses included individual medical and accountancy practices, small legal partnerships, independent local newspapers, and engineering consultancies. Women, too, owned small schools and nursing homes or home-based private hospitals where they cared for the sick, or they worked on their own account. The transformation of the professional class from small, bourgeois business owners to a large salaried workforce has been poorly documented and theorized. This chapter shows the trajectory of professional work towards ever-larger, even industrializing, institutions. I argue that, even when salaried, the professional class retained the model of moral capitalization they had built into their original bourgeois businesses. They supported the expansion of the enterprises in which they worked, even their industrialization, because it expanded their influence, extending virtue across the Anglo world.

This chapter traces the development of education in America from the end of Reconstruction to World War II. The industrialization that characterized this period gave rise to a system of “scientific” management which prized efficiency and competition above all other factors. This in turn influenced the philosophy of behaviorism, which remains a pillar of American education. The chapter exposes the faulty premises of behaviorism and its unfortunate effects when applied in schools. In addition, the chapter examines sources as varied as the Founders’ writings and the latest neuroscientific research to critique behaviorism and endorse social constructivist pedagogy. The chapter also features a brief discussion of the outer limits imposed by the Supreme Court on the government’s ability to regulate education. The discussion includes an examination of three seminal cases: Pierce, Meyer, and Yoder.