The Evolution of Decision-Making in the British Labour Party : From Grassroots to Netroots ?

Abstract

International audience ; When it comes to branding, marketing, and election victories, the revamped British Labour Party, also known as 'New' Labour, undoubtedly stood, until very recently, as a success story which other political parties wished to emulate. However, it is also now a largely discredited organization, which was defeated at the polls in May 2010 and whose members have been leaving in their droves, a disaffection which the 6 per cent post-election surge is unlikely to significantly counter.1 It is the contention of this chapter that while the business-inspired reforms account to a large extent for the success of the New Labour brand by raising the organization's responsiveness to a range of stakeholders, such as voters and supporters, who had not previously been prioritized, the modernizers' attachment to a technical, managerial conception of people management contained, from the very start, the seeds of future decay. The lessons drawn from the rise and fall of New Labour therefore provide a unique insight into the potentially disastrous effects of some of the most popular tenets of change management in organizations in general, notably the deleterious impact of the Party's growing disregard for the role of members and activists in achieving the organization's main goals.