This chapter advances two interrelated propositions that challenge managerialist research: that workers are as rational as managers, and that democracy is intrinsically desirable in working life. Drawing on historical and contemporary critiques of managerialism, the chapter shows how managerial research systematically displaces worker agency – pathologising resistance, depoliticising conflict, and naturalising hierarchical authority – across traditions from Scientific Management to algorithmic managerialism. Using procrastination research as an exemplar, the authors propose a methodological shift toward critical realism, labour process theory, and mechanism-based explanation to reframe delayed task completion as organisational misbehaviour rather than individual pathology. The chapter concludes that acknowledging worker rationality and valuing workplace democracy reorients organisational theory: it exposes managerialist biases, foregrounds political and ethical dimensions of work, and opens conceptual space for more egalitarian and analytically rigorous accounts of organising.