“Management is evil”: management control, technoscience and saudade in pharmaceutical research

In a discourse on theology, “evil” is for certain scholars denoting the “absence of good.” When management, as being the totality of practices, technique, routines and standard operating procedures is perceived to do more harm than good, is it evil. Presents a narrative study of pharmaceutical research. According to a strategic management agenda, laboratory pre‐clinical research is seen as a core competence that delivers new chemical entities that become candidate drugs. Pharmaceutical researchers in discovery and development phases reject managerial practices because they in various ways limit scientific activities and impose control mechanisms. At the same time, pharmaceutical researchers emphasize the importance of leadership. The absence of genuine leadership and the emergence of managerial practices entailed a feeling of melancholia and loss of a successful past that will never be seen again, among the pharmaceutical researchers.