The Emergent Manager

Tony Watson, Pauline Harris

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780761958420, 9780761958413
• eBook ISBN: 9781446237922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

The Emergent Manager examines the process of becoming a manager within organizations and considers how people relate the ways in which they ?manage? their lives to their development as managers in the workplace.

At the heart of the book is the idea of the individual engaged in a continual process of ?becoming?. Focusing on the reported experiences of managers, the book is richly illustrated throughout with examples drawn from a variety of workplaces, including the civil service, academia, the retail industry, construction and engineering, banking and the prison service.

Tony Watson and Pauline Harris together provide a new understanding of the nature of the management role and the ways in which people make sense of their lives as managers.

Accessible and innovative, this book will be of interest to students and academics in management and organization studies as well as practising managers.

CHAPTER I

MAKING SENSE OF MANAGING

What is it all about?

I think that I am only now really beginning to see what it is all about – actually thinking about what my management philosophy is. For years I was probably doing things without really thinking out what I was doing. I was learning without really being conscious of learning. I was managing things but I don’t think I had … I … I don’t think I thought about being a MANAGER, you know, in big letters. It’s only looking back that I can see how I was changing.

Kevin Berry is a manager in a private coal mining company. He was originally a mining engineer in the nationalised coal industry and is finding it difficult to say at what point he moved into a managerial role. When pressed on whether he could possibly identify the point at which he actually ‘became’ a manager, he went on,

I didn’t. Daft in’t it? But I am now: Mr management man. Look at me – the suit, the mobile phone. But the accent and the [potting his middle] shape don’t change. The rough bit’s there, but meetings, targets, paperwork, budgets, it’s meat and ale to me.

So you’ve changed, yet you haven’t changed?
That’s it. I can put my finger on one thing – I think. You see I as I rose up through the ranks so to speak I wasn’t called ‘the manager’ – it weren’t written on my door, like. There was only one manager and he was the Colliery Manager. I was an engineer. I still am – I still get the wellies and gear on you know. But anyway, I was going to say about this day when I – like it was all of a sudden, well sort of – when I actually noticed that people, some of the lads, younger ones that is – were calling me Mr Berry. I thought to me’sen ‘Ay up, how long’s this been going on?’ That was it. Actually, most people these days, the lads and all that, still call me Kev. But this made me think.

This was a transitional point, then. You saw yourself as different because others were speaking to you differently?
Yes.

And did you think of this in terms of now being a manager?
No. You see I think of managing as involving yourself more than others in getting things done – you know, organising the blokes around you. I’ve always tended to do that. I sort of used to say, when I was with others of the same level – and even higher level, ‘Come on, lads, let’s move this along’.

So you were ‘managing’ even when there was no question of your having the formal status of a manager?
Or of a senior bloke in any sense.

So what was the significance of noticing people calling you mister?
I got them to stop that

But you impled it made you think that…
Yeah. Something was going on. Perhaps I saw myself as becoming management [coughs and sits up as if about to salute], you know, part of the management. It couldn’t be that I was starting to manage people. I’d been doing that – I even did it at school. I was going over some line somewhere. I didn’t like it

And where are you now with regard to that line?
No problem at all. My approach to people hasn’t changed. But with privatisation and the complete culture changes that this entails, I really am part of that. I’m still an engineer but it’s the business side of it that … I’ve read the books, been on the courses. I am a, ahem, a manager of change. No problem …

No problem?
Well, you know. I do ask whether I can keep up with the terrifying pace of what’s going on. But I just say, ‘Use the old head, Kev, like you always did. And deal fairly with folks.’ There’s nowt new.

You’re the same but different
Different but the same.

This conversation with Kevin Berry touches on a number of the key themes with which we are concerned. It can be read as a joint exploration of issues of identity, biography and the nature of managerial work. The interviewer is looking for insights into the process whereby people ‘become’ managers and the interviewee is not only helping the researcher with their project but is also making sense for himself of who and what he is. A key notion that we ourselves are using to make sense of these processes is that of the emergent manager. We think that this is a useful way of thinking about all people who are engaged in managerial work but Kevin, in an especially clear manner, talks along lines very close to our own. He articulates, in his own way and with reference to his own unique biography, a notion of the individual never fully being a particular thing – a manager in this case – but in some process of continually becoming. There is not a point when one actually and unambiguously becomes something. There is never a point when one has actually emerged. Instead there is an ongoing process of becoming; one is forever emergent.

This way of looking at humans as emergent beings is something we will shortly explain more fully. It is central to our conceptual position. Our story will interweave our own conceptual work as social scientists with the story-telling work of the people we have been in dialogue with, and, in that spirit, we will turn back, for the moment, to the relatively specific case of Kevin and the account he gave us.

Let us contrast the account Kevin gives us with the one that we might expect if we were thinking about someone entering an occupation as if this were the relatively uncomplicated and straightforward process we often and conventionally take it to be. Following this, we would tend to think of someone growing up and eventually settling on – choosing – an occupation they wished to enter. They would then pursue the appropriate educational programmes and, once in a post, would systematically train themselves and develop specific skills. They would be able to say to others, ‘I am a pharmacist’ or ‘I am a firefighter’. But this is not what happened to Kevin, he suggests. His formal occupational identity was that of a mining engineer. He calls himself a manager nowadays, and indeed relishes the idea of it. Yet he was doing such work long before either he or others used the title. He was even doing it, he suggests, when he was at school. Not only this, he talks of learning without being conscious of learning and his awareness of changes in himself and in his work, he says, came after the event: ‘It’s only looking back that I can see how I was changing.’

Being a manager appears to have several different aspects to it, for Kevin. There is a social dimension, in which he becomes part of what he calls ‘the management’ – a process which at an early stage led certain young employees to address him as Mr Berry. This demands an adjustment at a personal level. He has, in some way, to come to terms with seeing himself as a manager. And there is also the task dimension. There appears to be something potentially frightening about this (the reference to the ‘terrifying pace of what’s going on’) and there is a process of engaging with the special knowledge to be found in books and courses. On the one hand, the activity sounds rather grand and as if it involves a lot of expertise: Kevin is a ‘manager of change’. But, on the other hand, he is doing ‘nowt new’. To ‘manage’ one has to ‘use the old head’ and ‘deal fairly with folks’. One is different and the same at the same time!

This messiness in the process of becoming a manager and the ambiguities surrounding the nature of managerial work make the notion of emergence especially appropriate for studying processes of entry into managerial work and the development of managerial roles and careers. Such a concept is valuable for looking at many other aspects of human life. It is not the case, for example, that the process of becoming a firefighter or pharmacist is anything like as straightforward as the conventional assumptions referred to earlier would imply. All careers and lives can be looked at as processes of continuous emergence in which people are continuously making sense of what they are doing and where they are going in the light of how they make sense of where they have been. But it is especially valuable to look at management and managing in this way. If Kevin Berry’s case has any typicality at all, managing is something which one can do in one’s work, and indeed in one’s non-work life, long before one takes on an occupational identity or a job title of ‘manager’. A great of deal of the research which precedes and has inspired the present study took as its starting point a fascination with the way the different meanings of the words management and managing ‘bounce off each other’:

When we talk of management or managing in the context of business and other work organisations we think of the work of initiating and organising tasks so that goods and services get produced. But there is an echo of another sense of managing: that of managing as coping, as ‘getting by’ (Watson 1994c).

Kevin Berry was implying that he engaged in ‘managing’ at school, as he did when he was simply doing his basic occupational work alongside peers. This fits with Collinson’s observation that ‘managing’ in the workplace is not a prerogative of an ‘elite and highly privileged minority’ (Collinson 1992). Kevin alludes here to ‘organising the blokes’ and ‘getting things done’. But everyone also organises themselves and others in their non-work lives. We manage events and families. We manage our identities, our relationships and our biographies. But is this to build too much on the fact that we use a similar word for managing in a formal authoritative organisational position and for the process of coping with the shaping by life’s exigencies of our personal biographies? It is not. Following the analysis in In Search of Management (Watson 1994a), it is argued that formal managerial activities entail skills and practices which are essentially no different from those which human beings use in all sorts of contexts when they are trying to get things done – at home, at school or wherever. Managerial work can usefully be made sense of in this way. In the present study we are interested in the extent to which managers themselves who are relatively new to formal managerial roles make sense of their work and lives in a similar way and we are concerned with how they see their experiences from other areas of their lives translating to their changed situation at work. As ‘managers’, they are using these skills and performing managerial activities in very particular social relationships where they are separated out and labelled in a way which implies that they possess a special form of expertise.

A key research question, we might say, was that of how people coming to terms with a work role which has central importance for society and economy see the relationship between their formal managerial work and the rest of their lives. How they make sense of such matters is highly relevant to how they perform. As we shall argue later, there is a close relationship between how people act, think and talk. But, at this stage, we switch our focus for a while away from the individual manager making sense of their work and lives to the sorts of expectations of ‘the manager’ which appear to exist in contemporary culture.

What is expected? The discursive context of managing

It was suggested by one recently appointed manager that to understand the size of what she saw as ‘the gap between how things are portrayed and how they really are’ we might compare the jobs that people do with the description of those jobs provided when they were advertised:

I got this job from reading an advertisement. It sounded really intimidating. But it sort of invited one to rise to a challenge. It has certainly been that. But what is really striking is how much more bloody and messy the reality is compared to the picture they hook you with. I was recruited, if I remember properly, to ‘lead a team of dedicated professionals’ and something like ‘taking the service forward into the next century’. But in practice – phew.

It is interesting though, that you remember these words.
Yes, I suppose … uhm.

Why do you then? If it is simply a …
I think those words stick in my mind because in some sense I think I feel that this is how it should be. I suppose, yes, I think that these are the aims I’m meant to have. Perhaps this is where the challenge lies – turning the bunch of people I manage into a ‘dedicated team’. Yeah.

And the next century?
Well, it’s just hype in one way. But I do think it’s to do with me looking at the section strategically. I ought to be doing more on the strategic side – looking at where we are going. Yes, this is what they recruited me for.

What Jenny Holly is suggesting here is that there is a language which is used in advertisements for managerial jobs and which cannot too easily be dismissed as simple hyperbole, as empty rhetoric. Even though one takes with a ‘pinch of salt’ the high-flown terminology, there are expectations being set for people taking such jobs. And such expectations ‘stick in the mind’, Jenny says. The cumulative effect of reading the language used in management advertisements, we would argue, gives a strong impression of there having developed a particular discourse about managerial activity. This frames – but does not determine – the predispositions which recruits to management are likely to take into that activity. Management advertisements are just one small contributor to the discursive framing which plays a part in the emergence of the contemporary manager.

Discursive framing is a process whereby human beings draw on sets of linguistic resources, categories, and concepts made available in their culture to make sense of a particular aspect of their lives and are thereby influenced in the way they conduct themselves in that part of their life. When we are unsure of how to conduct ourselves on entering a new area of activity we turn to the cultural cues which are available to us. These are inevitably mediated through language and act as what has been called a ‘linguistic repertoire’ (Potter and Wetherell 1987) or a set of ‘discursive resources’ which play a part in the way we mentally and ‘dialogically’ argue with ourselves and relevant cultural others about what should be (Bahktin 1981; Billig 1995; Watson 1994a; Watson 1996). Our actions are not determined by the cues and categories which are culturally available to us: we are continually ‘arguing with ourselves’ as we ‘weigh up’ the different ‘messages’ culturally available to us. The cues and categories play a key part, however, in how we shape our ‘selves’ and our actions.

What is available to us, and what is not available, by way of discursive or cultural resources is enormously significant. Imagine, for example, that in every article that we read about management, every job advertisement that we saw, every film, play or novel in which we encountered managers and in every conversation with and about managers, the talk was predominantly of ‘caring’, ‘persuading’, ‘cooperating’, ‘facilitating’, ‘listening’ and that the stories told were framed in, and were consistent with, these terms. If this were the case, we would approach any managerial situation we might come across with a frame of reference or a mind-set which would predispose us to act in certain ways. The cues to action to which we would look would shape certain predispositions. These predispositions would be quite different from the ones we might have, however, if the key discursive resources and the narratives we drew on in making sense of managerial activity were along the lines of ‘commanding’, ‘utilising’, ‘competing’, ‘winning’ and so on.

If we treat all the talk and writing about management which we come across as a broad text then we can regard it in a similar way to which media scholars have treated the texts they study. These, says Hay (1996), ‘effectively construct an empty story board which recruits readers as dramatis personae upon an expansive stage created within the text itself’. This storyboard comprises ‘a basic set of characters, plot relationships, minimal relevant aspects of context and a variety of interdiscursive cues, intended associations and connotations’. It invites us as readers or ‘active decoders’ to identify with a particular ‘preferred’ subject position. In our case, this might b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Making sense of managing
• 2 Approaching and entering managerial work
• 3 Managing to manage
• 4 Learning to manage and managing to learn
• 5 Managing the self and fitting the part
• 6 Managing the self and playing the part
• 7 Managing relationships and doing the right thing
• 8 Managing a life at work and away from work: boundaries, balances and priorities
• 9 Managing management: emergent managers in a changing world
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index