'We Are All Managers Now'; 'We Always Were': On the Development and Demise of Management

The existence of an identifiable group of people who are labelled 'managers' has been one of the most significant aspects of the organization of work and society for well over a century. This separation of managers from others has been questioned for some years by critical writers, not least because it ignores the many managerial activities performed by non-managers both in and outside the workplace. This argument suggests that the development of the 'special' status of managers is a construction which requires explanation. Accepting this, three broad types of explanation are reviewed in the paper: technical, elite and political approaches. Notwithstanding these explanations, in recent years the logic – although not necessarily the actuality – of organizational change programmes, and especially of the concept of empowerment, has been suggestive of the 'demise' of management, most especially middle management. This demise has implied an erosion of the distinction between managers and managed. Now, organizational members are told that 'we are all managers', and the three approaches have various ways of explaining this, which are reviewed. Critics may reply that 'we always were', thus welcoming a more democratic notion of management, but this paper argues that such a reply reflects an inadequate, and potentially oppressive, understanding of management     

The Consultant–Client Relationship: Critical Perspectives on the Management of Organizational Change

The management consultancy industry is attracting more and more attention. The critical literature in particular has questioned how a non-codified body of knowledge like 'consultancy' could become so apparently influential. The answering emphasis has been on the symbolic nature of consultant strategies and consultancy as a powerful system of persuasion. However, an emerging structural perspective has developed a rather different view, focusing on the limits of the industry discourse, and the constraints of a consultancy role defined largely by external forces. While it is useful to contrast the two perspectives – strategic and structural – they can also be viewed as complementary, and indeed a number of writers have been well aware both of the importance of consultant strategies and the context of consultancy work. In particular, they have explored the interaction between consultant and client, and called attention to factors like the countervailing power of client organizations and the uncertainty of the management task. The paper aims to contribute to this debate and draws on case studies of consultants' role in the management of organizational change – one of clients with considerable market power, and another of interdependency between consultant and client. The point stressed is that the consultancy process contains no 'necessary' structures (which may be implied by pairings such as the dependent client and indispensable consultant, or alternatively the resistant client and vulnerable consultant). Instead the consultant–client relationship is best regarded as part of an overarching managerial structure and a contingent exchange that assumes a variety of forms.     

Introduction: Organizations, Risk and Regulation

abstract    Risk, regulation and practices of organizing are interrelated in a myriad of ways. Natural disasters, technical failures, and also processes of organizing are sources of risk to which organizations must respond and for which new managerial and regulatory practices are demanded. In this introduction we highlight three salient features of risk management: the (un)intended production of risk by organizations; the complex interrelationship between risk management and regulation; and the evolving and often contested nature of risk management knowledge. Each of these three themes is evident in the different contributions to this themed section.     

ENACTMENT IN MANAGERIAL JOBS: A ROLE ANALYSIS*

Research into managerial jobs and behaviour has been appropriately criticized for being acontextual and atheoretical. Hales (1986) suggested that role theory could provide one suitable theoretical framework. This article assesses the merit of that suggestion and then develops it by proposing a theoretical model of the antecedents of a manager's impact on the expectations held by others that partially define the job. the analysis integrates research from the fields of managerial behaviour, leadership dyads, symbolic interactionism, and idiosyncratic jobs to produce a more comprehensive model of the determinants of ‘expectation enactment’in managerial jobs. It brings an enactment or ‘emergence’perspective to the field of managerial jobs and behaviour that is consistent with recent developments in other parts of the organizations and management studies literature. Implications for future research are discussed.     

MANAGEMENT CONTROL AS A BRIDGING CONCEPT

Despite their often overlapping subject areas, management science and social science reveal only occasional promise of a fruitful interlink. However, recent developments in the study of managerial control suggest that this problematic could well be used as a suitable bridge.     

The service sector: Challenges and imperatives for research in operations management

The United States has undergone a transformation from an industrial society to the first postindustrial society. Consequently, the service sector has outstripped manufacturing in its contribution to the GNP and in employment. This paper discusses the challenges and imperatives for research in service operations management (SOM). Service operations have unique characteristics that must be considered in developing research strategies. Recent attempts at evolving a general theory of service organizations are reviewed, and it is suggested that these conceptual models provide a unifying framework for the study of SOM. Research in SOM requires a broad perspective that includes the customer and the interactions with other functional areas. It requires an integration of conventional production concepts with behavioral and marketing considerations.     

Differences in leadership behaviour and influence between public and private organizations in Greece

This paper aims at comparing certain managerial aspects which seem to affect and account for the differences in organizational performance between public and private organizations in Greece.

By presenting empirical evidence concerning leadership behaviour and influence in both types of organizations, it becomes apparent that leadership quality is not necessarily the problem in public organizations. A number of leadership substitutes and neutralizers such as bureaucratic controls, external political influence and the limited positive reward power which leaders seem to possess have to be removed in order to enhance the role of leadership in public sector organizations.     

企业生产组织形式的演化及管理职能的社会化

20世纪以来,企业生产组织形式经历了福特制到精益生产模式再到大规模定制模式的转换,每一次转换都在不同程度上改变了企业内部生产管理的权力结构及其与外部协作企业之间联系,并催生了大量的独立化的生产服务机构和社会协调组织,使得生产管理职能的社会化程度不断提高。     

PUTTING GIDDENS INTO ACTION: SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND MANAGERIAL AGENCY

This article examines the influence of Anthony Giddens on recent work in management studies, especially the contribution of his structurationist perspective to understanding managerial agency. A citation analysis and discussion of prominent exponents such as Ranson et al. (1980), Andrew Pettigrew and Hugh Willmot, concludes that Giddens’influence is substantial but lopsided. Giddens’concern for the intersection and tension between different social systems has been particularly neglected. Drawing on the insights of current ‘institutionalist’studies of societal influences on organizations, the article builds a structurationist account of managerial agency that is founded on the contradictions within and between different social systems. The article ends by considering the implications of this structurationist account for current concerns with managerial leadership, organizational symbolism and strategic choice.     

Human Resourcing in Practice: Managing Employment Issues in the University

Participant observation in two universities is used to throw light on processes of sensemaking engaged in by managers concerned with human resourcing issues. Analysis of managerial sensemaking in the case study organizations is carried out using concepts from earlier sociological theorizing about human resource or personnel management, treating these theoretical ideas as resources for use in the researchers' own sensemaking. It is shown that theoretical 'sense' can be made of the managerial or 'lay' sensemaking in the universities in terms of a need to handle various tensions which are inherent in all employment management work in industrial capitalist societies. And it is argued that there is clear continuity between what is currently occurring and has occurred in the past. This interpretation is shown to differ from that of an alternative approach in social science sensemaking, that which uses the notion of a new paradigm of 'HRM'.     

In Defense of Bureaucracy

Abstract

Managerial capacity, meant as available potential for managerial resources to be deployed when needed, can be considered ‘slack’ in a public organization during normal times, but recent developments in the research literature of public administration suggest that such capacity can sometimes contribute to public program performance. Does managerial capacity help to dampen or eliminate the effects of sizeable and negative budget shocks on the outcomes of public organizations? This question is investigated in a set of 1,000 organizations over an eight-year period. For the most part, and largely due to managerial adjustments, budgetary shocks of 10 percent or more have only limited or no negative impacts on performance in the short term. They do, however, cause a drop in performance for certain outcome measures, both immediately and in the following year. Sufficient managerial capacity, however, mitigates these negative performance effects. The findings point toward a key question with which public managers must wrestle: how to balance the costs of slack against the benefits that capacity-as-slack can generate when environmental shocks threaten to disrupt the operation of public programs.     

The relationship of managerial values and assumptions with performance management in Turkey: understanding within culture variability

The present study examined the relationship of managerial values and assumptions with performance management (PM) practices with the aim of understanding the within culture variability in the managerial implementation of PM in the context of a developing country – Turkey. The model of culture fit served as the theoretical basis of this study. Data were gathered from 214 business organizations in Turkey. Participating managers completed a self-administered questionnaire, which assessed managerial values, employee-related managerial assumptions, and PM practices. The proposed model and the hypothesized relationships were examined through structural equation modelling. Results revealed that managerial values and assumptions were significantly related to their PM practices, above and beyond the established organizational PM systems. Managers were more likely to implement practices the way it was congruent with their values and assumptions.     

Kaizen, Ethics, and Care of the Operations: Management After Empowerment

The notion of empowerment has been increasingly used within management discourses during the 1990s. Empowerment is depicted by its proponents as the common denominator for recent managerial techniques and activities that acknowledge the individual employee as an intelligent, accountable, creative being, and therefore a productive resource for the company. Rather than thinking of management techniques as being, or not being, used to empower employees, this paper suggests that the notion of ethics , and more specifically what Foucault calls technologies of the self , provides possibilities for analysing how employees constitute themselves as ethical, productive, and legitimate members of society through the use of management techniques. This paper presents a study of how the management technique of kaizen , continuous improvements, is used in three Swedish companies. Thinking of work as ethically embedded rather than determined by the degree of distribution of the empowering resources in organizations paves the way for opportunities to conduct more sensitive analyses of how managerial techniques operate in practice.     

Re-Engineering the Sense of Self: the Manager and the Management Guru*

Conventional explanations of the enormous popularity of management gurus have centred on the need for managers to find relatively quick and simple solutions to their organizations' complex problems and the gurus' adeptness with marketing technology to promote these solutions. A few writers have also recognized the role that management gurus play in responding to managers' needs to make sense of themselves. Management gurus appeal to the manager's social or externally directed esteem needs by legitimating and celebrating the manager's role in society. the spiritual and charismatic quality of the gurus' work resonates with the manager's personal or internally driven needs by providing a sense of hope and purpose. The relationship between the management guru and manager is further explored with an analysis of the rhetorical techniques employed by the two leaders of the re-engineering movement, Michael Hammer and James Champy. Adopting a dramatistic or dramaturgical perspective, I describe how these writers skilfully manipulate the managers'sense of themselves to provide a compelling rationale for launching or supporting a re-engineering initiative within their organizations. the inherent dramatic appeal of the re-engineering process is an important reason for the movement's phenomenal popularity and, paradoxically, its lack of universal success.     

Innovation-Oriented Culture in the Public Sector: Do managerial autonomy and result control lead to innovation?

This article examines the effect of specific new public management (NPM)-related characteristics to explain innovation-oriented culture within public sector organizations. According to NPM doctrines, an enhanced managerial autonomy combined with result control will stimulate a more innovation-oriented culture in such organizations. Using multi-country survey data of over 200 public sector agencies, we test for the influence of organizational autonomy, result control and their interactions, on innovation-oriented culture. High levels of managerial autonomy and result control have independent and positive effects. However, the interaction between high personnel management autonomy and high result control has a negative effect.     

Exercised Voice as Management Failure: Implications of Willing Compliance Theories of Management and Individualism for De Facto Employee Voice

The advantages of employee voice for organizations and individuals are well known, but in practice those who exercise voice sometimes face serious sanctions. Tensions surrounding voice are rooted in tacit presumptions of willing compliance embedded in influential theories of management, particularly the works of Chester Barnard and Herbert Simon and those who follow their traditions. Employees who exercise voice demonstrate that management has failed to secure willing compliance, action which managers may take as personal affront. The individualism prevalent in the U.S. may exacerbate managerial tendencies to respond negatively and emotionally to those who exercise voice. Reprisals lead to self-censorship, limit de facto voice and restrict crucial organizational feedback. In addition to being valued as a right and a source of important organizational feedback, employee voice needs to be considered as an ongoing struggle within organizations.     

Applying the reduce,reuse, and recycle principle in the hospitality sector: Its antecedents and performance implications

Although the literature on eco-friendly strategies followed by firms is abundant, the focus on the reduce, reuse, and recycle (3Rs) policies as the cornerstone of environmental sustainability is scarce. This study examines the 3Rs environmental strategy among 143 large organizations in the hospitality industry. We use the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm theory to test the strategy's determinants and its impact on business performance on a suggested conceptualization level. As hypothesized, green corporate governance and environmental management systems, along with slack financial resources, were found to positively influence the adoption of a 3Rs environmental strategy. In turn, the implementation of the latter leads to superior business performance, measured in terms of operating profits and Tobin's Q. The study has several implications on a theoretical, managerial, and public policy level where intriguing directions for future research are provided.     

At the critical moment: The rhizomatic organization and “Democracy to Come”

In the field of Organization Studies (OS), there has been strong interest in the use of the metaphor of rhizomes as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The merit of the rhizome metaphor is that it offers strong explanatory power in capturing the chaotic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable nature of organizations, which problematizes a managerial reading of organizational process that is often preoccupied with the managerial goals of performance, efficiency, and effectiveness. In the past two decades, with the development of the internet and social media, the concept of rhizome has been concretized as an organizational ontology but, ironically, we have witnessed that the features of rhizome may selectively be employed and developed into a military tactic, to serve a totalitarian interest of control. For instance, the idea of rhizome manoeuvre has widely been adopted by (terrorist) organizations that seek to justify the act of violence. This paper seeks to defend the rhizome and its emancipatory potential but suggests that the use of rhizome must have its provisional boundary. To substantiate this argument, the author conducted an ethnographical study in a social movement organization. The idea of a provisional boundary is in line with Deleuze and Guattari's view of provisional dualism. In this regard, the author suggests that rhizomatic organizations and their actions should be grounded in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical framework of "democracy-to-come", embedded in Bergson's open society. With the help of the empirical data, this paper identifies some tentative principles to inform the actions of rhizomatic organizations.