The Manager's Tale

Stories of Managerial Identity

Patrick Reedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781032837819
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317024514
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

What does being a manager mean to those who do managerial work and why has becoming a manager become so attractive for so many people? How does pursuing a managerial career fit with the wider project of constructing a life and a sense of self? This illuminating and thoughtful book answers these questions by considering the extended life histories of ten managers, allowing their own voices to be heard. The Manager's Tale uses the ideas of Heidegger, Sartre and Ricoeur to show that who a person is can be seen as a narrative accomplishment, a result of the stories we tell ourselves and others. Within this framework the manager's stories are revealed, highlighting the complex ways in which dominant expectations of what it means to be a successful individual in the modern world influences what sort of person we strive to be.

Chapter 1 Once Upon A Time

DOI: 10.4324/9781315555737-1

The mystery of how we come to be who we are, as individuals; as members of families, communities, nations and other groupings, is a subject of endless fascination and speculation to human beings. To paraphrase Heidegger (1926/1962), we are the only being for whom its own existence is an issue for it. The vast historical repository of stories from which human societies are constituted, and which we draw on to explain ourselves to ourselves, reflects this fascination. All of these stories ultimately address questions such as who we are and what our relationship is to the world we inhabit, as well as to the others we share it with.

This book was written from just such a desire to understand how I came to be who I am and how this was related to how others understand themselves. The primary method by which I have tried to accomplish this has been to listen to the accounts others have given of their lives as well as reflecting on my own life story. This book, however, also deals with a more specific phenomenon, that of the rise of the managerial career, a subject that is intimately linked to my purpose because such careers have become an increasingly important aspect of how many of us define ourselves and seek to achieve their life projects. The global constituency of business school postgraduate courses preparing students for just such careers indicates that they are now a far from parochial concern of developed Western societies. The increasing pervasiveness of management language and ideas throughout all social institutions similarly points to the significance of management in how we think about ourselves. Thus the stories considered in this book are all stories of how becoming a manager, of pursuing a career as a manager, has been central to the way in which the individuals involved have sought to construct a life worth living. The implications and nature of the pervasiveness of the managerial career are then a key theme of this book.

In this introductory chapter, therefore, my task is to explain why the use of narrative in the form of life stories can contribute something worthwhile to an understanding of our own existence and so provide some answers to the related question of how and why being a manager has become so significant for so many in making a life for themselves. Rather than just theorising about stories, however, I wish the stories themselves to be at the heart of the book so that ‘the authors of the utterance are put on stage’ as Ricoeur (1992, 48) puts it. In other words, that the book stands as a testimony to their experiences, their strivings, hopes, suffering, disappointments or triumphs; in other words of how they made a life for themselves.

It might seem an obvious point that lives should be understood through stories, through biographical/autobiographical narratives, after all what it is to be a human being and live a life is almost always represented through different sorts of stories. The books, films, plays, television programmes, and songs with which we fill a good deal of our lives consist of just such stories (Czarniawska 1998; Boje 2001). On meeting new people, even in relatively casual ways, we almost always feel that some account of ourselves and backgrounds is required. Throughout human history (itself rendered as a story) people have told stories, have through them founded the cultures, religions, movements, empires and myths by which the world and their place in it were formulated. Science itself is seemingly not free of this dependence on stories from grand narratives such as evolution – the ascent of humankind from the primeval soup, to the numerous accounts of discovery and progress, and the accompanying triumphs and, sometimes, tragedies.

Despite the centrality of stories to an understanding of how human beings understand themselves, accounts by managers of their own lives are strangely lacking in the vast body of books and papers that deal with what it is to be a manager. The idea that identity is primarily a narrative achievement, an enacted story, is well known but even in those books that take story-telling and narrative in organisations as their main subject matter there is a tendency to present the accounts of managers as quotes or vignettes, snippets to illustrate the author’s arguments.

Why should longer, more complete accounts have a particular value though? The rest of this opening chapter will attempt to answer this question, expanding on why I believe that stories in general and autobiography/biography in particular can contribute to understanding how a managerial identity has become central to many life projects. In the next few pages therefore I will explain the approach I have taken, trace the use of stories in related sociological enquiries and discuss some of the issues that have arisen in the course of my research. Before I engage directly with these matters, it seems appropriate to begin with a story, one that explains to the reader how this book came to be written, enabling them to better understand from my own story what my intentions are for this book and how my background and purposes have shaped the accounts of others given in subsequent chapters.

I work as an academic in a large business school which is part of an English red brick university. I came late to my career as an academic, being forty when I began it, having escaped from ten increasingly difficult years as a manager and teacher in a number of further education colleges, the equivalent of the community colleges in the United States. The means of escape from a job I found so irksome was paradoxically a part-time Master of Business Administration (MBA) course, paradoxical because most students pursue such qualifications as a route to a managerial career not as a means of exiting one. In the case of the course I followed many of my teachers were highly sceptical of the claims made by mainstream management theory about what being a manager was meant to entail. I thus became aware of the existence of a whole body of writing that supported such scepticism. This discovery was something of a watershed for me as it accorded closely with my own unhappy experiences as a head of department at the college I worked at during a period when the axioms of managerialism became the official ideology within the sector. My enjoyment and success as a mature student encouraged me to think that I might find myself a home in academia, a place or community where I could be myself with similar others rather than continuing to work in a job where I found myself increasingly unhappy. After a dispiriting period of unsuccessful job applications to universities, I finally found myself an opening that seemed to make just such a new identity and career a possibility.

As I started my new life as a university lecturer I quickly realised that transforming myself was going to be a more difficult endeavour than I had anticipated. I soon realised that the title Mr in front of my name in the university phone book was more of a badge of shame than a polite form of address in the rather elite university in which fortune had somehow deposited me. My transformation was incomplete, I would have to acquire the title of Dr by ‘doing a PhD’ but what could I do? I did what I suspect many others would have done in the same circumstances; I started with what was familiar from my own experience. Many years as a teacher and my attraction to critical writing about management gave me a starting point. If my Masters degree had been a turning point in my life then would the same be true for others? I duly began what I had intended as an evaluation of the transformative potential of such educational projects. In this way my own identity project as putative academic and the narrative of its pursuit became bound up with the stories of a number of my students.

This interconnection became more and more apparent to me as I began to have conversations with my students about why they had come on the course and what they were hoping to achieve. Thus my understanding of how our lives were connected was framed by stories and so the idea of storytelling as in itself a significant aspect of my research began to take shape. Initially this was as a way of theorising the ongoing construction of identity by individuals and also as a fruitful methodological approach. Eventually this interest took over the entire project. I quickly realised that critical approaches to teaching managers had only a very limited effect on them. They had their own reasons for coming on the course and these overrode any aims I had to persuade them of my way of thinking about management, I have given an account of this dawning realisation elsewhere (Reedy 2003). Instead I began to become increasingly intrigued with the life projects that brought my students on the course. I became caught up in the plot of their lives, wanting to know what would happen next, fascinated by the different ways in which individuals used the same discursive elements to build narratives that were both similar to each other and unmistakably unique.

As I began to collect their stories I found that I could not separate them from my own. Most of my students were around the same age as me, and all could be said to be members of the post-war baby boomer generation. This collection of stories is thus one portrayal of a shared experience and understanding of what it has meant to grow up in the later decades of the twentieth century in the United Kingdom. It foregrounds the way in which managerialism and managerial work have become a significant part of our lives, despite none of us starting out with any aspirations to be a manager ‘when we grew up’. I found myself constantly reminded of my own childhood and the political, economic, and societal events that have made us both the same and different from each other.

To summarise this preamble, my original intention to critically evaluate the transformative claims of critical pedagogy in the lecture room was substantially modified, both by the growing conviction that these claims were unlikely to have much light shed upon them by what I was doing, but also because I was ambushed by something that seemed much more interesting, an attempt to present and then theorise the identity narratives of managers. I began to explore beyond the confines implied by the phrase ‘managerial identity’ in order to get a sense of a wider life than that which occurs at work. For the problem with asking people only about their experiences as managers is that this is what they will tell you about. For some of my interviewees, this wider perspective revealed that a managerial identity seemed to have a weaker hold on their overall conception of themselves than some other work in this area might suggest. Rather, becoming a manager had entailed fairly conscious trade-offs between the demands of their career and the ability to pursue what, for them, were more important aspirations. This is not to say that they entirely rejected the idea that being a manager could in itself be a desirable aspect of themselves and I explore later both the allure of the management career and its discontents.

Telling Stories

So much for the story of the evolution of the research but what have I actually done as a result of these changing aspirations? I hope that it is already clear that the backbone of the book is the idea of narrative, particularly life history. I thus present a number of life histories designed to reflect the experiences of people who are managers at the start of the twenty-first century and who have all completed a critically orientated masters in management, and all of whom I have taught. These narratives are intended to be more than merely ‘data’. Although not as adverse to some who work with autobiographical narratives to their theoretical analysis (see Bochner 2001, for example) I also wished them to stand as accounts of the lives of managers in their own right, as stories that might interest, inform, amuse, move or provoke their readers. Despite this wish I also wanted to adequately theorise such narratives, in a way recognisable as academic research. It is to a large extent unavoidable that these stories are thematised and generally dissected as a result. I have attempted though to preserve their integrity as stories, no matter how contrived and edited such accounts must be by my authorship. This wish was stimulated by a feeling of obligation to the people who had taken part, many of whom had become friends during the course of the research. I felt that I had a duty to them to present their stories as accurately as I could, according to my understanding of what they wished to communicate about themselves, to do justice to their struggles, hopes and suffering. It was only as my theoretical work developed that this desire was reinforced by the work of Ricoeur (1985; 1992), who became an important influence on the development of my analysis, confirming me in my intuition of how a certain ethics of representation should guide me.

I would argue that preserving the stories in a way that is faithful to their original narrated form has enabled me to better understand how identity is worked upon and modified. One can trace in these extended accounts how contradictions, tensions, constraints and opportunities emerge and are sometimes resolved through the process of making sense of one’s life in the accounts one gives of it. Thus individuals construct a coherent sense of self from the seeming chaos of ‘ordinary’ lives. As the empirical work progressed, it also became clear to me that such an approach underlined the complexity and heterogeneity of individual responses to the shared social context of their lives. Retaining these narratives in the form of individual stories provided an important safeguard against seeing such managers as a univocal group all responding in similar ways. Wishing to treat the stories in this fashion inevitably meant gravitating towards the idea of my interview transcripts being a form of life history.

Life histories are usually more the province of biographers and historians than social scientists but there is a strong tradition of their use in sociology also. Radical intellectual movements have seen life histories as a way of unearthing marginalised voices. For example feminist epistemology has made a strong case for their use in sociological research as a way of re-discovering the silenced voices of women and countering the dominance of patriarchal interpretations of the world (Cotterill and Letherby 1993; Griffiths 1995). A similar impulse appears to lie behind the classic ethnographies of working life by writers such as Beynon (1975) in the 1970s and, more directly, by edited collections of working life histories such as Work 2 (Fraser 1969). A relatively forgotten but striking example of the use of life stories, not just to chronicle individual voices but also to paint a rich portrait of a place and time, is Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield (1972). Through the stories of a cross-section of villagers, Blythe builds up a vivid picture of social change in a Suffolk village from the beginning of the twentieth century to the mid-1960s.

Perhaps better known is the work of the Chicago School, most notably represented by Studs Terkel (1970), who again attempts to build up a rich picture of working life for those whose voices are rarely directly heard, as opposed to their indirect and abstracted representation by others. According to Denzin and Lincoln, the Chicago School:

with its emphasis on the life story and the ‘slice-of-life’ approach to ethnographic materials, sought to develop an interpretative methodology that maintained the centrality of the narrated history approach … This led to the production of texts that gave the researcher-as-author the power to represent the subject’s story. Written under the mantle of straightforward sentiment-free social realism, these texts used the language of ordinary people (2000, 13).

Such life history research is much rarer as a way of studying manager’s lives within contemporary organisation studies, though there is a rich stream of narrative studies which shares some of the same impulse to understand the experiences of individuals as recounted by themselves (Czarniawska 1998). Such work, however, tends not to look at accounts of whole lives, rather it takes ‘story-telling’ as its basic unit of analysis. Typically this literature looks at the stories that organisational members give of particular events or of organisational episodes (see Watson 1994; Czarniawska 1997; Czarniawska 1998; Knights and Willmott 1999; Gabriel 2000; Boje 2001; Wajcman and Martin 2002; Cunliffe; Luhman and Boje 2004; Humphreys 2004, for some noteworthy examples). What I think is lost from these approaches is the literary and empathetic quality that goes with an extended account of a whole life as it has been lived and that is a characteristic of the best sort of biography. Such writing can place the singularity of an individual life within a wider historical context, both shedding light upon the other. On the other hand the story-telling literature shows a much greater awareness than the ‘naturalistic’ Chicago School material of the ethical and philosophical problems associated with an author-crafted account being presented as someone’s life in their ‘own words’.

An alternative approach, mostly to be found in the US, although operating on a broader level of social science research than just organisational studies is what is sometimes known as ‘autoethnography’ much of which can be found in the journal Qualitative Inquiry (see Bochner 2001; Spry 2001; Ellis 2007, for examples). Although the emphasis here is firmly back on the stories themselves for reasons I have some sympathy...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Once Upon A Time
• 2 The Managers' Tales
• 3 Understanding Identity
• 4 Narrative Identity and the Existentialist Quest
• 5 My Generation: Life-Stories as Historical Narratives
• 6 Telling Tales
• 7 And They All Lived Happily Ever After?
• Bibliography
• Index