The Social Construction of Management

Nancy Harding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415369428
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134202614
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

What is management and how do the people who become managers take on a managerial identity?

How does text inform the manager's identity?
From cultural studies we understand that the relationship between text and reader is not passive but that each one works upon the other, and that text is active in forming the identity of the reader. This books is the first to analyse how many management textbooks construct their readers. It analyses management textbooks published since the 1950s and shows they construct a world in which chaos is kept at bay only by strong management, and in which strong management is based upon the rationality of modernity. This book exposes and analyses such claims-to-truths, and theorizes their arguments using the work of Butler and Foucault, the sociology of scientific knowledge, critical legal studies, art history and queer theory.

By revealing a postmodern turn in management textbooks, The Social Construction of Management is both a critical and empirical study that explores the constitution of managerial identities in the age of mass education in management. An exciting contribution to the growing body of knowledge within critical management studies, this book challenges the way we think about organizations and their management, and about management education as a whole. This is thought provoking reading for anyone studying management, or working in the managerial organization.

1
Introduction
Management and the manager as social constructions

Much of this book is devoted to exploring management textbooks and how they construct management and thus the subject positions into which managers step. I will thus begin in the way that a textbook does, albeit that these first two sentences make explicit the parodic intent of this beginning.

This book argues that (here we must bring on the bullet points):

• Management is a subject position into which the person known as ‘the manager’ steps, to be saturated with the meanings and identities of management; so the discovery of how managers construct their identities requires first that we understand how management is constructed.

It proceeds from the following assumptions:

• The subject position of management requires of managers that they both oppress others (the ‘workers’ whom they ‘manage’) and are themselves oppressed.
• Improvements in the experience of our lives as workers in organizations, including rights to be treated with dignity and respect, require changes in the ways in which management, and thus managers, is constituted.
• If we are to work to bring about these changes, we first need to understand the deep processes of constitution and construction of management and managers, for as the metaphors of construction and constitution imply, the bedrock upon which the current oppressive identities are built serves to uphold them and make them impervious to change. It is only by exploring that bedrock that we can begin to identify ways of bringing about meaningful change.

And now we must bring in the summary.

This book is therefore an analysis of how management as a subject position is constituted and how managers construct their identities as managers. Its title, The Social Construction of Management, conflates this doubled process, of the constitution of management and the social construction of the manager. It focuses in large part upon management textbooks and explores the relationship between the textbook and the reader, arguing that each mutually contaminates the other, that each is mutually implicated and mutually engaged with the other. The reader of the textbook, as Best (1999) argues of readers of novels, desires in this coupling of self and other to be given an identity and to be read by the other. Having explored the textbooks, this book then turns to an analysis of empirical research undertaken into the construction of managerial identities. This intrusion of ‘the real world’ is designed to inform the analysis of how textbooks construct the subject position of management through discovering how persons occupying that subject position construct their managerial identities.

And now we must bring in the objectives of the chapter, including the learning outcomes.

This chapter explains first the perspective of management which informs its arguments, i.e. why I see management/managers as oppressive, and draws upon arguments from the subdiscipline now known as critical management studies (Fournier and Grey, 2000). The larger part of the book explores the constitution of management through the pages of management textbooks, which could lead to the accusation that my arguments are therefore not social constructionist. To allay that charge I will then outline the perspective of social constructionism which informs the pages of this book, i.e. one which argues that the dissolution of the boundaries between the social sciences and humanities allows us to explore the mutually imbricative dynamic between cultural artefacts, in this case textbooks, and the social.

And now I must abandon this parody, or is it pastiche, of a management textbook, lest I fall unthinkingly into ‘management speak’ and the certainties contained within management texts which believe that what is ordained will come to pass, so long as there is good management.

Management as object, rather than subject, of study, or studies of management rather than for management

I was introduced to management as both a subject and object of study in 1980, when I enrolled on one of the few management degrees then available in the British university system. In those early days of studying management at degree level, the curriculum could offer only four management subjects, i.e. half of a degree. For the other half of my degree I studied the topics offered by the staff in the other half of the department, the Industrial Relations side, and so tripped happily from a lecture on how to manage strategically, or one on the niceties of marketing tactics, to one on how Marxist thinking had influenced Harry Braverman, or another on the philosophy of work (in my memory I see Peter Anthony walking into the first lecture, standing with both hands on the lectern, and announcing that this year we would be exploring why we worked. My mind exploded— bloody hell, wow, what a question!). Today, management degrees are the most popular in the British university system, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, and numerous other subdegree courses, short courses, training courses, etc., induct the learner into theories of what management is and what managers do. For the vast majority, the study of management is the study of a subject, i.e. how to do something, rather than the more traditional mode of study of British higher education institutions, of a critical and questioning approach to understanding of the object of their intellectual interest (Anthony, 1986).

I am acutely aware of how the process of studying for a degree and subsequent inculcation into academic life wrought huge changes in my—at the bus stop, over tea or whisky with friends, in the check-out queue at Tesco’s—my story of how I used to be a miner’s wife and identity, and will expand upon it tediously to anyone who will listen factory machinist and typist, but turned into a leftish-inclined, struggling to be feminist but never quite making it as a good feminist so hooray for queer theory, academic. What is still tediously and clumsily called ‘the post-modernist/post-structuralist turn’ (and which not only allows but almost demands, in the spirit of reflexivity, the insertion into this text of this personal, first-person narrative that explains ‘where I’m coming from’) has made the exploration of the constitution of identities into an academic endeavour. The decentring of the subject has replaced humanism and the concept of the universal human being with the individual who is involved perpetually in processes of identity formation, and it is those processes which fascinate and inform much of our current theorizing and research practices.

In this context, I am led to ask: What is the impact upon identities of inducting vast numbers of our most highly educated citizens into theories of how to do management and how to be a manager? I answer myself thus: the formation of identities that are diminished by the removal of possibilities of freedom and pleasure in work, for management as it is presently imagined serves to maintain oppressive systems of control over the workplace, the worker and the manager. Those very managers who have read the textbooks, attended the courses, and have never, ever, been challenged to think critically (Grey and Willmott, 2002) help in the maintenance of their own oppression and that of those whom they ‘manage’.

This, of course, is not a new thesis. I deviate from Thomas and Anthony’s argument (1996) that such teaching results in poor management, for I argue that the very existence of management implies that others need to be corralled, watched over, ferociously ‘motivated’ if they are to work sufficiently hard, and that this very implication brings about the existence of workers who seek every opportunity to work less efficiently. Indeed, I quarrel with the assumption that work should be about maximizing production, for workplaces are to the twenty-first century what villages or communities were to previous eras and so when we imagine ‘work’ as about nothing but production we diminish its importance in our lives and facilitate, in our lack of imagination, a form of post-modern feudalism where managers have taken over the rights of dictating how the many should live lives of debased servitude. Contributors to French and Grey (1996) have provided critiques of management education that have influenced the arguments in this book. However, such critiques have not explored how management as a subject of study serves to construct managerial identities or, in the terms used in this book, the subject position of management into which the manager steps.

Indeed, although the concept of identities has been brought to the forefront of much intellectual endeavour under the influence of postmodernism/post-structuralism, it is only recently that some tentative studies of identity in the workplace have appeared. Paul du Gay (1996), for example, in a very interesting discussion has argued that organizations display a new rationality of government and a novel regime of subjectification which is built on a conception of the individual as an ‘entrepreneur of the self’. The result is a ‘responsibilized, autonomized individual’ who is given a compulsory autonomy which must be ‘exercise[d] …continuously in order to guarantee one’s own reproduction’ (du Gay, 1996, p. 183). Everyone now becomes an entrepreneur of their own lives, and the ‘ethos of the enterprise form’ inscribes all aspects of individual lives, each of which becomes ‘structured as the pursuit of a range of different enterprises’ (ibid., p. 184).

A perspective on workplace identities that may prove most influential, given the status of its authors, is that of Alvesson and Willmott (2002). They argue that managerial interventions are designed to influence employees’ self-constructions so that they become congruent with managerially defined objectives. Identity-construction thus should be seen as a dimension of organizational control. I disagree with their arguments, and also with Paul du Gay’s, on two grounds: first, the presumption that identities can be so easily manipulated, and second, in their reification of ‘the organization’. On the first of these, I suggest that although Alvesson and Willmott argue that members of organizations cannot be reduced to ‘passive consumers of managerially designed and designated identities’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002, p. 621), the model they develop of the relationship between self-identity, identity work and identity regulation betrays their avowal. In their model, ‘regulation is accomplished by selectively, but not necessarily reflectively, adopting practices and discourses that are more or less intentionally targeted at the “insides” of employees, including managers’ (ibid., p. 627). This is a model which can be seen as ahistoric, and which presumes that employees, when they arrive at work, leave other aspects of their identities in the glove compartment. Furthermore, the core metaphor they appear to use is that of the amoeba, absorbing into itself everything that is put in its path by nature or, in this case, the manager. Similar presumptions of an uncomplicated causal relationship between interpellation and becoming can be found in several disciplines, for example in psychotherapy (McLeod, 1997), and some cultural studies theorists who presume that what appears on the pages of a novel or in the flickering images of the film camera reflect, straightforwardly, what is happening in the social world. Within the social sciences such a failure of analysis of the causal processes involved should be avoided. With regard to the reification of ‘the organization’, I worry that continuing to think of this entity ‘organization’ as some monstrous overlord that watches our every move while it remains invisible to us, and that seeks ever-more insidious ways of controlling us, has the opposite effect to that intended, for it provides us with a monster that is too big and too scary to challenge (Ford and Harding, 2002).

However, I follow Alvesson and Willmott closely in many of their other arguments which, along with the contributions to critical management studies of an increasing number of theoretically informed academics and researchers, seek to critically interrogate management, with the aim of eventually transforming management practice (Grey and Willmott, 2002). This is not the place for a summary of thinking within critical management studies, one already more than admirably undertaken by Fournier and Grey (2000): suffice to say that in my reading it comes from a somewhat left-wing academic tradition which feels more or less comfortable with exploring the ‘continuing reproduction of capitalist employment relations’ (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001). Its intellectual antecedents are those where knowledge is pursued for its own sake, and where education’s aims are the provision of conceptual understanding, a breadth and depth of knowledge, a capacity to synthesize within a sustained intellectual framework, where ‘theoretical grounding and the experience of critical dispute encourage the active pursuit of challenge’ (Thomas and Anthony, 1996, p. 31). It is thus concerned with unsettling that ‘pretence of indisputable and unproblematic techniques and skills to enhance managerial effectiveness’ (French and Grey, 1996, p. 10) which dominates the business of business schools. Ultimately, its aims somewhat revolve around achieving different kinds of organizations in which work is carried out without destruction or debasement of individuals, although since the collapse of Marxism’s promise of a utopia that followed upon revolution, the ultimate ends remain somewhat vague (Wray-Bliss and Parker, 1998).

This book is, in its adherence to traditions from critical management studies or, more broadly, from the sociology of organizations, an exploration of how we socially construct mechanisms of power which speak through managers. It is thus a study of management, which seeks explanation of why we have a supposed need for management, rather than a study for management, which attempts to teach people how to manage. Managers, who are the materialized metaphysics, so to speak, of capitalist power, are in this perspective a social construction in that they belong in a social world wherein lies the possibility for thinking, and thus practising, things differently. In order to bring about change we have to understand-the mechanisms by which current pillars of power are maintained. Marxism had too simplistic an assumption about how change could be achieved and, indeed, about how the new utopia could be built. Market managerial utopianism sadly has been more successful in imposing its own vision of utopia (Parker, 2002a). Postmodernism/post-structuralism, while it has not yet helped us dream the design of the utopia we desire and has, indeed, in a peculiar reverse brought pragmatism to the discussion about utopias, helps us discern and understand those mechanisms. As Laclau (1990) has pointed out, it helps us open the possibilities repressed in the taken-for-granted and seemingly ‘objective’ social relations and identities. One of these mechanisms is a language of management which is now so dominant that it crowds out alternative ways of thinking of, speaking about and working in organizations. The language of management is materialized in and through managers. But it is too simple to think of the language of management as nothing more than a language of rationality, autonomy, entrepreneurship, etc. Both Derrida and Foucault have taught us to explore more deeply into any language, to discover the languages which make possible that language, and thus not to presume that the ideology spoken through the language is all that informs and sustains that power/knowledge formulation signified in writing and speech. Judith Butler, in taking forward Foucault’s ideas, reminds us that the languages that inform our thinking, speaking and writing both subjectify and subjectivize. In the opening paragraphs in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), in a lucid style which belies the infamous difficulty of her writing, she brings the reader up short with the power of her discussion about power:

As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what ‘one’ is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependent upon that very power is quite another. We are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order. This is surely a fair description of part of what power does. But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are. The customary model for understanding this process goes as follows: power imposes itself on us, and, weakened by its force, we come to internalize or accept its terms. What such an account fails to note, however, is that the ‘we’ who accept such terms are fundamentally dependent on those terms for ‘our’ existence. Are there not discursive conditions for the articulation of any ‘we’? Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency.

(Butler, 1997, pp. 1–2)

Foucault, she points out, does not elaborate on the specific mechanisms of how the subject is formed in submission; he explores neither the psyche nor the double valence of power as subordinating and producing. That is Butler’s task, and it is an example that is taken up in this boo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Management and the Manager As Social Constructions
• Part I: Construction
• Part II: Deconstruction
• Part III: Reconstruction: The Social Construction of Management
• Notes
• Bibliography