We are delighted to announce that the annual Leo P. Ribuffo Dissertation Prize has been awarded to Erik Baker (Harvard University), for “Entrepreneurial: Management Expertise & the Reinvention of the American Work Ethic.”
The Society for U.S. Intellectual History established the Leo P. Ribuffo Prize for Best Dissertation in U.S. Intellectual History in 2019. Ribuffo, a revered scholar and exemplary mentor, reshaped the field during his long and illustrious career at George Washington University. The award seeks to honor his life and career by recognizing the distinguished work of emerging scholars and to advance the highest levels of research, writing, and scholarship.
We are deeply grateful to this year’s prize committee of Lisa A. Szefel (Chair), Andrew Jewett, and Peter Wirzbicki. Here is the committee’s statement on Erik Baker’s prize-winning work:
“The scope of “Entrepreneurial: Management Expertise & the Reinvention of the American Work Ethic” is truly impressive. It presents a tour de force of U.S. intellectual history via the theme of entrepreneurialism from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the new millennium. Eric Baker sets out, and sustains throughout, the stakes of his work on a topic of great relevance. We found fascinating how he investigated familiar sources with great sophistication while making linkages among various worldviews, treating bestsellers, blue chip firms, business school professors, “callous shock doctrine technocrats,” Christians, consultants, East Coast bureaucrats, ex-countercultural tycoons, financiers, industrial intellectuals, modernizers, organization men, and policy makers. The third chapter, which connects mid-century writings about managers with post-World War II renderings of the authoritarian personality and ideals about American freedom and individualism, was especially powerful.
The sweep and impact of the study are such that Baker not only redefines but at times simply explodes the categories of manager, bureaucrat, and conspicuous consumption, as well as capitalism, consumerism, and neoliberalism. His arguments are many and convincing: about the “workplace as arguably the central stage on which the drama of consent formation has played out”; the role of managers in setting the parameters of workers’ expectations and experiences; and the sources of the expanding inequality that marks and justifies late capitalism. Micro-level critiques of management and marketing discourse are coupled with meta-level assessments of cultural norms, defining teloi, personal virtues, Taylorism adherents, and work ethics.
Meanwhile, juxtapositions of an executive class amidst New Deal reforms, democratic leadership and development, and the imperial/economic geography of the federally enriched postwar Sunbelt and decolonizing Southern hemisphere lead to rich and incisive conclusions. Nimbly summarized concepts, events, and individuals orient the reader in this eloquently written text, where surprising insights abound. In the end, the “moralistic valence of the ideology of entrepreneurial management” triumphs.”
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