Making history critical: Recasting a history of the “management” of the British National Health Service

The purpose of this paper is to explore a possible discursive history of National Health Service (NHS) “management” (with management, for reasons that will become evident, very much in scare quotes). Such a history is offered as a complement, as well as a counterpoint, to the more traditional approaches that have already been taken to the history of the issue.

Document analysis and interviews with UK NHS trust chief executives.

After explicating the assumptions of the method it suggests, through a range of empirical sources that the NHS has undergone an era of administration, an era of management and an era of leadership.

The paper enables a recasting of the history of the NHS; in particular, the potential for such a discursive history to highlight the interests supported and denied by different representational practices.

Today’s so-called leaders are leaders because of conventional representational practices – not because of some essence about what they really are.

New ideas about the nature of management.

The value of thinking in terms of what language does – rather than what it might represent.