Management After Critique
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
! IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE? management after critique School of Management Leicester 7-10 July 2015 CRITICAL MANAGEMENT STUDIES 9TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE - LEICESTER ABSTRACTS Cover image: Really by Kenny Louie https://www.flickr.com/photos/kwl/ CMS2015 Organizing Committee: Matthew Allen, Jo Brewis, Michaela Driver, William Green, Christopher Land, Ming Lim, Martin Parker, Sarah Robinson, Mel Simms, Jennifer Smith Maguire, Christiana Tsaousi, Eda Ulus, Camelia Vasilescu, Elke Weik Table of Contents Streams* Alternative insights on health and social management: Tackling and solving the wicked problems ....... 1-18 An experiment in critical friendship 3 .................................................................................................... 19-32 Co-operative and community owned enterprises: resisting or reproducing the neoliberal consensus? 33-46 Critical Entrepreneurship Studies .......................................................................................................... 47-71 Critical perspectives on place marketing and branding: beyond elitism – where to? and Managing Space with Culture: Critical Approaches to the Use of Culture in Regional Governance ........... 73-84 Dwelling in the Ruins of Management .................................................................................................. 85-92 Ecological Accounts: Making non-human worlds (in)visible during moments of socio-ecological transformation ................................................................................................................................................................... 93-109 Escaping capitalism’s contradictions: resistance, transition and transformation ............................... 111-116 Exploring Civil Society, Voluntary and Not-for-profit organisations as a crucible for creative alternative, democratic imaginaries ........................................................................................................................... 117-135 Finance and its Alternatives: Probability, Practice and Education ....................................................... 137-145 Food and Drink Markets: The Production and Consumption of Alternative Market Practices and Narratives .................................................................................................................................................. 147-169 Fourth Wave Feminism? Bodies, Practices, Politics and Ethics ............................................................ 171-190 Global elites and the transnational capitalist class ............................................................................... 191-197 History before Critique? There always was an alternative .................................................................... 199-207 Managerial Agency and the Maintenance of Inequalities ..................................................................... 209-217 Managing Space with Culture: Critical Approaches to the Use of Culture in Regional Governance 219-222 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! * Streams are ordered alphabetically, abstracts are arranged in running order. Open Stream ............................................................................................................................................. 223-235 Organisation and Collaborative Practices in the Arts ............................................................................ 237-246 Organising and migration(s): moving borders, enacting transformative spatialities, creating mobile commons ................................................................................................................................................... 247-256 PhD Workshop - Articulating the Alternatives: Writing Development Through Critical Friendship 257-276 Questioning the ‘Fixing’ of Management Education: Opening up the alternatives ............................ 277-286 Taking management research beyond critique: An experiential drama workshop on Cultural Animation .................................................................................................................................................................... 287-289 The Degradation of the Employment Relationship – Back to Work as the Focus of CMS ................. 291-300 The Ethics and Politics of Dissensus: Democracy as Alternative .......................................................... 301-316 The long and winding road of employee ownership: What can we learn from the experiences with Employee Share Ownership and Employee Owned Companies in Central and Eastern Europe before, during, and after transformation? ........................................................................................................... 317-325 The professions in neo-liberalism: Supporting agents, resistant targets, or still an alternative ‘third logic’? .................................................................................................................................................................... 327-334 Towards a Critical Political Economy of Organisation ........................................................................... 335-352 Towards inclusive development? Transformations in the public, private and civic sectors in developing countries .................................................................................................................................................... 353-369 Fringe ......................................................................................................................................................... 365-366 Keynotes .................................................................................................................................................... 367 Author index ............................................................................................................................................. 369 Alternative insights on health and social management: Tackling and solving the wicked problems Managerial identity construction in elderly care: handling wicked problems through humanistic identity Monica Andersson Bäck1 and Charlotta Levay2 Elderly care is riddled with ‘wicked problems’, i.e. multi-level predicaments that escape definitive formulations and solutions (Rittel and Webber, 1973). On the societal level, the growing share of elderly in the population entails both financial pressures and increasing demands for integrated and preventive care (Ferlie et al., 2013). On the local level, it is largely left to low-level managers to confront the ensuing dilemmas, that is, to control costs and at the same time provide high-quality care. Recent studies of elderly care in Sweden and elsewhere indicate that local managers face budget restrictions, heavy administrative workloads, and a multicultural workforce with low pay, low status, and high turnover. In addition, managers need to implement numerous change initiatives designed to monitor and improve quality of care, such as national guidelines, clinical registries, and core values programmes. We seek to understand how local managers deal with the wicked problems of elderly care as those appear in everyday organisational life. Taking a managerial identity approach (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003; Watson, 2008), we believe it is important to pay attention to managers’ efforts to uphold a consistent and affirmative identity – their ideals, self-conceptions, and aspirations – since such identity work no doubt shapes their actions and attitudes related to organisational goals. In this study, we describe and analyse identity constructions among managers in Swedish elderly residential care. We explore managers’ accounts of their management ideals, self-perceptions, and experiences, as well as expectations and views held by subordinates and colleagues. In a recent study, Sveningsson and Alvesson (2015) uncovered two main themes in managers’ identity work: the visionary, strategic change leader, and the humanistic, psychologically insightful, and coaching leader. We contribute by further investigating the second theme, which resonates with a caring rationality and permeates identity constructions among managers in our study. The empirical material consists of semi-structured interviews with managers and employees in six Swedish nursing homes – two municipal, two for-profit, and two not-for-profit. It also includes observations of work meetings and interviews with national and regional administrators. The case studies were conducted with a focus on managers’ role in the implementation of clinical quality registries, which yielded rich information on views and experiences of organisational change, quality management, and everyday work. Interviewed managers saw it as their role to support, guide, and motivate personnel, by listening, understanding, confirming, and being there for them. This was both how they perceived expectations from others and how they described their own ambitions and actions. They also saw it as the only 1 Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. [email protected] 2 Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden. [email protected] | 1 possible approach, given the importance of employee commitment and alignment to work standards. Correspondingly, interviewed employees expressed expectations for managers to be present and helpful, but they also wanted them to solve more practical problems, by securing resources, providing suitable work routines,