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This is a book for those with concerns about the trajectory of development, and about the continuing encroachment of managerialism into social life. Its authors attempts to bridge the current division between development and management studies by constructing a critique of 'development management' - an approach to development that blends seemingly objective and neutral claims of managerialism with notions of modernity and other connected utopian ideas of 'Third World' progress. Contributors are drawn from the growing field of critical management studies and the development world; all use their critical frames of reference to address increasingly managerialized development processes and practices.

This book overturns and reclaims ideas such as participation, community, governance, NGOs and civil society. It is often managerialist ideas and practices that thread these ideas together, yet often they remain buried in development studies' disengagement from the mundane: for instance the languages and artefacts of managerial and organizational life, the report, the logframe, the encounters with the boss. What these contributors have in common, tacitly or explicitly, is an understanding of development and managerialism as problematic, modernizing, interventions.

This is a fresh and provocative critique of the very practices in development that we take for granted and will breathe new life in perennial post-development debates about the status of international development, NGOs and development studies.