/pas0/*How can we understand the proliferation of management guru schemes over the last 20 years?/par0/par0/*What do recent management fads and fashions share in common?/par0/par0/*What are the implications and limitations of the prescriptions on offer for people's working lives?/par0/par0/Managerial fads and fashions, guru panaceas and organisational innovations have proliferated over the last 20 years. Drawing on case studies from both the UK manufacturing and financial service sectors, we argue that the emergence and popularity of a new range of management innovations reflects and facilitates the reproduction of a neo-liberal economics that has dominated Western politics for over almost a quarter of a century. In the guise of such interventions, it is argued that current management thinking around 'new' forms of work organisation is immersed in a contemporary version of the American Dream. It is posited that they involve an attempt to exercise power so as to reconstitute our everyday life and sense of self (identity) by extolling a unitary ideology, individualism, the success ethic and self-interest that reproduces prevailing asymmetries of power and wealth. By reference to our empirical research, we identify numerous difficulties confronting the implementation of this discourse, including both collective and individual forms of resistance, unintended consequences and contradictory tensions around the notions of autonomy versus control, individualism versus collectivism, insecurity versus commitment, and quality versus quantity. The book concludes that the contemporary American Dream offers only 'one' dream of a better tomorrow and it is argued that we should seek other dreams that question rather than simply legitimise current inequalities.