Who is ‘the middle manager’? Harding, Nancy; Lee, Hugh; Ford, Jackie
Human relations (New York),
10/2014, Volume:
67, Issue:
10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Middle managers occupy a central position in organizational hierarchies, where they are responsible for implementing senior management plans by ensuring junior staff fulfil their roles. However, ...explorations of the identity of the middle manager offer contradictory insights. This article develops a theory of the identity of the middle manager using a theoretical framework offered by the philosopher Judith Butler and empirical material from focus groups of middle managers discussing their work. We use personal pronoun analysis to analyse the identity work they undertake while talking between themselves. We suggest that middle managers move between contradictory subject positions that both conform with and resist normative managerial identities, and we also illuminate how those moves are invoked. The theory we offer is that middle managers are both controlled and controllers, and resisted and resisters. We conclude that rather than being slotted into organizational hierarchies, middle managers constitute those hierarchies.
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There remains a conviction that the torrent of publications and the financial outlay on leadership development will create managers with the skills and characters of perfect leaders, capable of ...guiding healthcare organisations through the challenges and crises of the 21st century. The focus of much attention continues to be the search for the (illusory) core set of heroic qualities, abilities or competencies that will enable the development of leaders to achieve levels of supreme leadership and organisational performance. This brief commentary adds support to McDonald's (1) call for recognition of the complexity of the undertaking.
This article introduces a critical approach to follower/ship studies through exploring the unarticulated but highly influential implicit academic theory of follower/ship that informs dominant ...paradigms of leadership. Research into follower/ship is developing apace but the field lacks a critical account. Such an absence of critical voice renders researchers unaware of the performative effect of their studies, that is, how their studies actively constitute that of which they speak. So, do studies of followers (and leaders, it follows) constitute that very actuality they are studying? Analysis of seminal papers in three major categories of leadership, leader-centric, multiple leadership and leader-centred, shows that leadership theory is underpinned by the desire for power and control over the potentially dangerous masses, now labelled ‘followers’. The etiolated perspective of the people called ‘followers’ undermines leadership theory, and we recommend the wisdom of leaving follower/ship unexplored.
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The post-Cartesian ‘material turn’ in management and organization studies understands that bodies are far more than vehicles that enable work to be undertaken, but are agentive actors in the ...constitution of work and working selves. This leads to the need for more empirically derived understanding of the agency of flesh in the performative corporealization of working, embodied selves. We met this challenge through adapting feminist, posthuman research methods for a study of the materialities and materialization of working bodies. The study takes forward Judith Butler’s and Karen Barad’s theories of performativity by reading them through each other, and introducing flesh as an agentive actor in each moment-to-moment move. In paying close attention to the speech of supposedly ‘dumb flesh’ we show how flesh resists its negation and itself imposes control on the worker. We coin the term ‘body/flesh’ and illuminate how bodies are active and agentive, constituting corporeal/izing working selves in somewhat unexpected ways.
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This article develops a performative theory of resistance. It uses Judith Butler’s and Karen Barad’s theories of performativity to explore how resistance (to organizational strategies and policies) ...and resistants (those who resist such strategies and policies) co-emerge, within and through complex intra-actions of entangled discourses, materialities, affect and space/time. The article uses empirical materials from a case study of the implementation of a talent management strategy. We analyse interviews with the senior managers charged with implementing the strategy, the influence of material, non-sentient actors, and the experiences of the researchers when carrying out the interviews. This leads to a theory that resistance and resistants emerge in moment-to-moment co-constitutive moves that may be invoked when identity or self is put in jeopardy. Resistance, we suggest, is the power (residing with resistants) to say ‘no’ to organizational requirements that would otherwise threaten to render the self abject.
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This article explores gender and entrepreneurial leadership, notably the meanings female entrepreneurs ascribe to notions of entrepreneurial leadership. Drawing from interviews with female business ...owners, the article questions the dominant hegemonic masculine entrepreneurial leadership model as well as that reportedly associated with women. Research findings illuminate the fluidity and variability of the entrepreneurial leadership construct. Our feminist poststructural lens and critical leadership stance adds new insight into the multiple subjectivities of entrepreneurs and surfaces contradiction and tension that shape the very sense of their entrepreneurial selves. By questioning accepted knowledge, this research offers new perspectives on the multiple realities of entrepreneurial leadership, which should be heeded by policy makers, academics and practitioners alike.
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This article explores a new approach to researching leadership in organizations through drawing on psychosocial accounts of the lives of managers as leaders. This study of managers’ lives through a ...critical, psychosocial analysis presents a different account of leadership identities and how these are constructed and how they function in oppressive ways. The analysis concludes that managers are not transcendental and are not homogeneous. Managers construct multiple, competing and ambiguous narratives of the selves. Key to this more critical approach is the contextual location and partiality of accounts of leadership, and the recognition that our sense of selves are not only entwined within the context and the situations in which they are performed, but also within the hegemonic discourses and culturally shaped narrative conventions.
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This article explores leadership as a discursive phenomenon. It examines
contemporary discourses of leadership and their complex inter-relations with
gender and identity in the UK public sector. In ...particular, it focuses on
various ways in which managers’ identities are constructed within
discourse, produced in specific historical and institutional sites within
specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies
(Hall, 1996). Drawing from interviews with senior managers employed in a large
UK local authority, this article researches the dominant discourses of
modernization and the primacy afforded to discourses of leadership in the
council. It explores first how these discourses become part of managerial
workplace identities, and second, what other discourses help to shape
managers’ identities. Contradiction, discursive production, plurality
and ambiguity feature heavily in the analysis of these managers. Accordingly,
the article questions dominant hegemonic and stereotypical notions of
subjectivity that assume a simple, unitary identity and perpetuate androcentric
depictions of organizational life.
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Since the 19th century, much academic effort has been expended researching leadership. Bodies of theory have risen to dominance, proved unsatisfactory and been replaced by another generation of ...ultimately disappointing leadership thought. This repetitive pattern continues, so we ask what motivates this continuing, seemingly fruitless search? Focusing on researchers and not leadership per se, our analysis is inspired by two surprisingly complementary sources: psychoanalytical theory and Lewis Carroll’s epic nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits. Together they lead to a theory that re/search is motivated by unconscious desires to experience the transformational object—an ultimately unachievable search but one that unconsciously sustains the ever-growing field of leadership research. In contributing a new psychoanalytical theory of unconscious motivations that inspire our research, we also demonstrate the inspiration poetry may offer organizational researchers. We conclude by offering a ninth fit, which leaps into the void of future thought and finds that the leadership Snark was, in fact, a Boojum.
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This critical review of the literature on female entrepreneurship problematizes the metanarrative of economic growth and the mechanisms through which it both operates and is maintained. Central to ...this is the axiomatic ‘underperformance hypothesis’, which states that ‘all else being equal, female entrepreneurs tend to be less successful than their male counterparts in terms of conventional economic performance measures’ (Du Rietz and Henrekson (2000, p. 1). As an axiom, the truth of the ‘underperformance hypothesis’ is taken for granted, and thus it invisibly serves as a starting point, delimiter and interpretive lens for analysis in this field. While it remains invisible, the hypothesis will continue to reproduce the differences between male and female entrepreneurs, and thus the subordination of women to men in the realm of entrepreneurship. The review illustrates how, by associating females with underperformance, the persistent influence of the metanarrative of economic growth has been masked and the image of the female entrepreneur as problematic and inferior to her male counterpart has been reinforced. The authors argue that a postmodern feminist epistemology will destabilize both the metanarrative of economic growth, and the axiomatic ‘underperformance hypothesis’ it supports, thus opening up space for a heterogeneous understanding of (female) entrepreneurship. By questioning accepted knowledge about female entrepreneurs, the review sets the platform for the exploration of new research questions and a broad agenda for future research. Such an agenda is crucial in order to move future research beyond the pervasive influence of the metanarrative of economic growth and its attendant underperformance hypothesis.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
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