Mapping the meanings of a “good manager”: Clarifying an ideological confusion

Abstract

This work aims to clarify the meaning of an expression that is often employed in managerial language but that has been insufficiently analyzed. The expression bon manager (good manager) is analyzed using a corpus of 50 French-speaking management publications selected from among the academic journals available on the Cairn website. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the ideological presuppositions of this expression. Six clusters of meanings emerge from our work, according to the cognitive status of the expression and its relative character. Thus, the meaning of the expression changes depending on whether it refers to a reality or a representation, whether “goodness” is absolute or relative, and whether it relates to a situation or to a particular perception we have of it. We argue in this work that managerial ideology has an interest in maintaining the confusion between these meanings, which allows it to demand excellence from managers by making them take a normative fiction for a descriptive reality, as in the image of Stakhanov.