Management, Managerialism and Managers

Cunliffe-3864-Ch-01:Cunliffe-Ch-01 3/4/2009 4:55 PM Page 8 1 Management, Managerialism and Managers When I was asked to write this book, there was some debate about the title: should it be about management, managers or managing people? Why was this an issue? We often use the terms interchange - ably without necessarily thinking about the implications or conse - quences. But I believe language is important. This is not just a semantic or an intellectual issue, it’s also a practical one, because whether we are aware of it or not, words do things – they influence and play out in our actions and relationships. Consider how a person’s actions and ways of speaking and relating to other organizational members change in overt and subtle ways when she or he becomes a ‘manager’ and part of a management team. So it’s worth spending some time exploring these differences and examining their potential practical consequences. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the often taken-for-granted and generally narrow ways in which we think about management, and to offer some alternative ways of thinking about what managers do and who managers are. We’ll touch on the relationship between management and language in this chapter, but go on to explore this in more depth in Chapter 2. To begin with some brief definitions: management is a collective noun used to refer to a group of people engaged in organizing and con - trolling a business or, as Tony Watson and Pauline Harris (1999) say, management is a requirement and outcome of any work organization. We also talk about Management Studies as a body of knowledge, skills and competencies associated with managing organizations. Managers are people who engage in these activities, and managing relates to the activity of doing something to and/or with others. In the first Very Cunliffe-3864-Ch-01:Cunliffe-Ch-01 3/4/2009 4:55 PM Page 9 Management, Managerialism and Managers 9 Short… book, Chris Grey (2009: 55–63) talks about the origins and interpretations of management: from the mundane meaning of man - aging to do something (I managed to get out of bed today), to the elitist view of management as a dominant social institution and an instru - ment of control. He outlines what it is that managers do when they manage: they solve problems, they control and discipline workers, they make things efficient, they might even make things more humane. They do so by representing and intervening: making activities and actions knowable by producing signs and texts (organization charts, job descriptions, product specifications, operational procedures, etc.), and then acting to make sure people and things do what they are suppose to be doing. Much of the literature on management, both traditional and con - temporary, focuses on answering the questions ‘What is manage - ment?’ and ‘What do/should managers do ?’ Even critical perspectives (CMS) address these questions, although their answers might be very different from the norm. These questions are seen as vital to the devel - opment of ‘professional’ managers because management education and training programmes are based on theories, models and ideas about the types of activities carried out by effective managers. If edu - cation can equip managers with the knowledge, techniques and skills necessary for them to function more effectively, then an improvement should be seen in organizational and ultimately economic perfor - mance. However, there’s a performative element to management that often remains unconsidered. Performativity draws on the notion that words are not just words, they do things. John L. Austin (1962) argued that we create action when we utter particular kinds of words. For example, ‘You are fired’ or ‘You are now promoted to Human Resource Director’, has an influence on how a person behaves – in the latter example on ways we expect HR Directors to behave and talk. Feminist philosopher Judith Butler has done much to develop the notion of performativity, particularly in relation to gender-identity. Let’s look at some of her ideas because they pave the way for looking at performativity in a management context. In Gender Trouble , first published in 1990, Butler draws on Austin’s notion that words do things to argue controversially that gender is performative . Gender and identity do not exist per se , but are ongoing and open, created, Cunliffe-3864-Ch-01:Cunliffe-Ch-01 3/4/2009 4:55 PM Page 10 10 Studying Management maintained and refashioned in our desires, words, gestures, acts and social discourse. We might have the illusion of a given and stable gender- identity, but it is an effect, a ‘repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (1990: 43–4). So for Butler, gender and identity are performed and come into being through language, are neither fixed nor free- floating but ‘performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (p. 33). If we relate this to managerial identity, then the very words ‘man - agers’, ‘management’, and ‘managing’ and all that they convey (as we will see in the discussion to follow), construct the very behaviours and actions they supposedly describe. There is an extensive body of schol - arship relating to management that carries the assumption that the - ory informs practice, and that good managers need to be able to talk the talk and walk the talk. This work includes articles, books, man - agement degree programmes and training activities, which have cre ated and maintained management as we know and enact it today. Embedded in this work are ways of talking about and framing man - agement that are authoritative forms of speech, bringing ways of acting and forms of managerial identity into being. For example, the term ‘management by walking about’ (MbWA) was popularized by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in their 1982 book In Search of Excellence , and is now an accepted part of management discourse and practice. So words both author managerial action and identity, and give that action and identity authority and power over others – an example of performativity. There is little doubt that management theory has played an influen - tial role in management education by providing both the language and the organizing themes for curriculum design, guidelines for course content and topics for teaching. Yet despite this, the relationship between management theory and practice is seen to be problematic. The assumption that theory informs practice came under scrutiny over twenty years ago with criticisms that theory is divorced from practice and doesn’t take into account the complexities and uncertainties man agers face. 1 The debate still continues today. A number of authors have attempted to bridge the gap. Tony Watson’s ethnography of Cunliffe-3864-Ch-01:Cunliffe-Ch-01 3/4/2009 4:55 PM Page 11 Management, Managerialism and Managers 11 how managers work in a UK company, documented in In Search of Management (1994, revised 2001) is one such example. Another quite different attempt is Thinking About Management (2000), where Ian Palmer and Cynthia Hardy aim to link academic management debates to practical management issues by organizing the debates around management activities such as: managing structure, managing people and managing power. While Watson’s account is an inductive one, based on insights drawn from his conversations with managers during a year spent in a company, Palmer and Hardy’s book is deductive, still essentially theoretical with practical management-related exercises. In the main, management theory is still ‘theoretical’. Just as Judith Butler argues that we need to challenge ways of thinking about gender and identity to reveal their political nature and ontological possibilities, so have there been calls to critically interro - gate taken-for-granted approaches to management, managing, and management education. 2 We’ll take up the challenge in this and the following chapters. In this chapter, we’ll look at the various – and often unproblematic – ways in which management and managers have been constructed, both in the literature and in practice. We’ll do so as a way of establishing the groundwork for one of the major premises of this book, that: Management is not just something one does , but is more crucially, who one is and how we relate to others. In order to examine this statement more carefully, we’ll move on to explore different ways of thinking about management and managing. Our ‘realities’, identities, and even knowledge itself, are culturally, his - torically and linguistically situated, so we’ll begin with an overview of how Management Studies has developed over the last century. When reading this, you might notice that the history of management is western (based mainly in the USA and Europe), and it’s a history mainly by men, about men, and for men. This may seem to be a controversial statement, but when I started teaching in a UK Business School over 25 years ago, there were only two female management faculty mem - bers and we often taught management courses with no female students. Before the 1970s, there were few female management or Cunliffe-3864-Ch-01:Cunliffe-Ch-01 3/4/2009 4:55 PM Page 12 12 Studying Management organization theory authors (Mary Parker Follett, Rosabeth Kanter and Rosemary Stewart being exceptions). So management was, and as we will see in Chapter 3, largely still is man agement, not just in terms of the number of male versus female managers, but also in relation to the gendered nature of organizational practice. I also want to suggest that despite the debate about whether man - agement theory has any relevance to management practice, there are connections.

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