The rotten core of In Search of Excellence: Reflections on the tainted legacy of the excellence project

Abstract

This article offers critical reflections on In Search of Excellence. Located within a discussion of ‘the historical turn’ and offered as a ‘counterhistory’, the article argues that the excellence project has had a profound and enduring impact on management education and on the manner in which we understand and elaborate the problems and processes of management. The article suggests however that the excellence project persists as a form of knowledge and prevails as a set of idealized practice because critics and educators have failed to engage meaningfully with the managerial practices of those organizations vaunted as ‘excellent’. Building upon newspaper archives and longer forms of journalism to provide a novel, critical analysis of the practices of those organizations vaunted as ‘exemplars of excellence’, the article offers tools for a critical pedagogy of business excellence.