Under new management

Another thing that puzzles me, is how big contemporary organizations sometimes bring in outsiders to run them, people who get paid enormous fees, and who will immediately start talking about what a great brand this is, how "we" in the organization need to uphold its traditions, and so on, even though they have no previous ties to the organization or even (in many cases) to the country in which it is based. It's as if there is a separate universe of CEOs and executive managers, who rotate among companies and countries, while the people beneath them stay put, professionally and geographically.

It reminds me of the almost universal modern demand for an "independent central bank", because it seems to be a consequence of a ubiquitous belief system, rather than a symptom of rule by a particular clique. Of course, there are people who will tell you that today's central banks are all run by a single clique, namely whoever it is that is behind the Bank of Independent Settlements in Switzerland. And I dare say that the phenomenon of the outsider executive who immediately assumes local color has plenty of historical precedents.

Still, I think there's something to my intuitions here. The phenomena of cosmopolitan executive churn, and politically disinterested banker-technocrats, look specific to the age of neoliberal economic globalization. A new age of mercantilist civilization-states and politicized local economies, will do a lot of things differently.