Thompson Work Organisations A Critical Introduction (3rd ed)

92 • W O R K O R G A N I S AT I O N S

TA B L E 7 . 1 M a n a g e r i a l f u n c t i o n s

1 Acting as a figurehead and leader of an organisational unit 2 Liason: the formation and maintenance of contacts

3 Monitoring, filtering and disseminating information

4Allocating resources

5Handling disturbances and maintaining workflows

6Negotiating

7Innovating

8Planning

9Controlling and directing subordinates.

Source: Colin P. Hales (1986) 'What Do Managers Do? A Critical Review of the Evidence',

Journal of Management Studies, 23. 1: 95.

observation methods, time-budget studies and self-report questionnaires can capture a greater sense of fluidity and processual factors (Horne and Lupton, 1965; Stewart, 1967, 1976; Mintzberg, 1973; Kotter, 1982; Burns, 1982).

Such studies purport to reveal that the image of the reflective strategist, thinker and planner is a myth. An alternative picture is indicated through the language of realism. Though there are variations between the studies, management practices are said to be opportunistic, habitual, tactical, reactive, frenetic, ad hoc, brief, fragmented and concerned with fixing. This arises primarily because the manager has to adapt to continued uncertainties, limited information and contradictory pressures, not least on time and energy. As a result, routines are shaped by short time spans, the domination of face-to-face interaction and lateral communication in gathering and using information. For Mintzberg, this actually corresponds to managerial preferences for use of informal structures, gossip and speculation.

Nor are such activities necessarily bad for effectiveness and efficiency. Though energy can be dissipated in conflict and power struggles between cliques, Kotter (1982) points out that patterns do emerge based on establishing and maintaining networks vital for co-operation and a flow of information. Finally, though the focus is on the internal world of the organisation, the new realism is not incompatible with an analysis of environmental pressures. Loveridge’s (1982) study of manufacturing companies in the Midlands showed that marketing and financial pressures, plus the need to accommodate to the power of workforce job controls, led in the direction of federal structures and short-term reactive policies and a concern with implementation rather than planning.

The ‘realist’ challenge to the scientific and rational character of management is useful and widely accepted. It has not, however, established unchallenged intellectual domination. Not only do textbooks remain influenced by prescriptions from Fayol, preoccupations with new lists of functions can still be described as variations on a classical theme. Indeed the actual choice of new lists is extensive. Many pop management writers recycle a limited number of activities under new and more exotic titles, including that of jungle fighter and gamesman (Maccoby, 1977). Much more influential has been Peters and Waterman’s (1982) list of eight characteristics associated with ‘excellent’ companies, itself influenced by the classic writings of Barnard. Lists

M A N A G E M E N T • 9 3

of any kind continue to be the outward form of a belief in a universal, transferable and common essence of management, a disposition that has been relatively constant in the development of organisational theory (Huczynski, 1993: 98). Partly in response to the excesses of claims about new forms of organisation and management, influential voices are calling for a return to that ‘essence’, though it may be redefined in different ways, for example as the pursuit of rhetoric, identity and robust action (Eccles and Nohria, 1992).

Watson (1994: 37) suggests that new empirical studies have produced an overreaction to classical perspectives. Drawing on his own research among managers he argues that there is a need to get back to basic principles, while recognising the inherent complexity of practice. Put more analytically, he is suggesting that we can distinguish between the real functions (such as planning and co-ordinating) that management has, and the activities through which effectiveness is sought. Nor is this impetus to return to some of classical themes purely theoretical. The past decade has seen the rise of a competence movement in a number of countries that aims to specify a common currency of occupational standards and develop managers with the aid of behavioural and task measurements (Burgoyne, 1993).

There are also inherent limits to the realist research. It is, as Hales (1988) notes, an internal critique, and at the heart of the problem is the fact that it is at the empirical level only. Realism can show us that management is not what it is made out to be. Instead it portrays the activities of managers ‘as a quite arbitrary set of roles with little suggestion as to why they are as they are’ (P. Armstrong, 1986: 19). The pervasive image of ad-hocery and muddling through seems to deny both purpose and coherence. Hales (1986) rightly observes that by focusing on individual jobs, rather than management as a process, behaviour is unsituated and neglects the institutional context and functions. This is worsened by the tendency of behavioural analysis to concentrate on observable activities in a non-problematical way. For all its limitations, responsibilities and functions were the focus of classical theory and many of the criticisms levelled at have been attacks on a straw man (Berkeley Thomas, 1993: 51). In this sense ‘realism’ marks a retreat from a broader framework of analysis.

Understanding managerial work requires questions to be asked not just about what managers do, but what they have to ensure others do: in other words, an emphasis on the control of particular organisational units in the labour process, albeit as one phase of the management process rather than the whole story (Hales, 1988: 5). As one manager commented to Watson in response to the question, what is the essential difference between a managerial and non-managerial job, ‘Gut feel says to me: in a managerial job you have some aspect of controlling other people – directing things. I don’t like the words I am using here but if I’m actually honest, it’s about directing other people’ (1994: 49).

Analysing management in terms of its control functions on behalf of capital is associated with labour process or neo-Marxist perspectives. These criticise the previously discussed approaches for focusing on individual activities, marginalising the neglect of the broader structural context. Or, as Tsoukas puts it, ‘By reducing the study of managers to the study of individual actors on the stage, the script and the setting which enables actors to perform in the first place are neglected’ (1994a: 294). However, to leap from the individual to structure runs the risk of producing over-generalised, over-deterministic accounts. Indeed, many commentators have objected precisely on these grounds, arguing that the managerial activity of making the organisation work

94 • W O R K O R G A N I S AT I O N S

is multifaceted, and that managers cannot be treated as ‘ciphers’ who simply serve other, higher interests (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992: 7). Managers may pursue their own interests and identities (Watson, 1994); act in a genuinely altruistic way on behalf of the organisation (Grint, 1995); or promote sectional interests, for example engineering, that are distinct from those of capitalists (Shenhav, 1999).

We explore some of the relations between management, strategy and control in more detail in the next chapter. However, as Grint (1995: 51) admits, labour process accounts have become subtler in their explanations of why managers do what they do. In particular, as Tsoukas (1994a: 294) notes, neo-Marxist research has tried to overcome the problem of the leap from individual to structure by introducing more complexity into the picture through a focus on management divisions of labour. The next section considers these contributions.

Bringing the threads together: management as a labour process

What is required is a structural analysis that can account for both the constraints on and complexities of managerial behaviour: a perspective that is neither deterministic nor voluntaristic. One way forward begins from a remark made by Braverman that ‘Management has become administration, which is a labour process conducted for the purpose of control within the corporation, and conducted moreover as a labour process exactly analogous to the process of production’ (1974: 267). An offshoot is that the alienating conditions attached to the purchase and sale of labour become part of the managerial apparatus itself. Though little more than an aside, it has been utilised by a number of writers, notably Teulings (1986), to produce an analysis of management’s role in the administrative apparatus of industrial organisations. The very fact that management is a ‘global agent’ carrying out the delegated functions of capital means that it is part of a collective labour process at corporate level. As we have previously indicated, this delegation in part reflects the transfer of functions such as co-ordination from the market to management and administration.

As that role has evolved, it has also become differentiated. So for example, large administrative divisions are, in the case of accounting, ‘producing nothing but elaborate mechanisms of control associated with the realisation of capital and its enlargement’ (Johnson, 1980: 355). But it is not only a case of the emergence of specialised functions and departments.

Differentiation also takes place in terms of levels. Teulings puts forward a model based on the existence of four distinct management functions: ownership, administration, innovation, and production (see Table 7.2). Two major consequences of the new division of labour follow. First, though the power of the administrative machinery of which management is a part has increased, the power of individual managers tends to diminish due to the rationalisation and routinisation of their activities. With the development of more complex managerial structures, new techniques have been introduced to integrate, monitor and control middle and lower management (Carter, 1985: 98).

Years ago there might be five hundred fellas but you would only have one boss. Now everyone has a chief. . . . You can’t discuss the job with them, everything is ticked in little boxes now.The boss is scared because if they don’t treat everyone

M A N A G E M E N T • 9 5

I n s t i t u t i o n a l i s a t i o n o f d i s t i n c t i v e m a n a g e m e n t f u n c t i o n s TA B L E 7 . 2 a t s e p a r a t e l e v e l s o f m a n a g e m e n t

	Function	Levels
I	the ownership function	institutional management
	– accumulation of capital	– creation and preservation of legitimations
II	the administrative function	strategic management
	– allocation of investments	– development of objectives
III	the innovation function	structuring management
	– product market development	– new combinations of production factors
IV	the production function	operational management
	– control of the direct labour process	– direction and co-ordination of direct labour

Source: W. M. Teulings, 'Managerial Labour Processes in Organised Capitalism', in D. Knights and H. Willmott (eds) (1986) Managing the Labour Process, Aldershot: Gower.

in a standard way they are afraid the other bosses will report them. (Plessey engineer quoted in Thompson and Bannon, 1985: 170)

Hale’s analysis of management divisions of labour qualifies Teulings by showing that some management functions – those that the latter designates as operational – have their origins in the labour process rather than the market, and that there is not an exact correspondence between functions and levels. Those divisions are vertically fractionalised so that ‘there is a differentiation within the performance of management work in terms of the extent to which agents are involved in the decision-making process’ (Hales, 1988: 10, and see 1993, Chapter 8). As Watson (1994) shows in his account of a major UK telecommunications firm, even senior plant level managers will frequently find themselves frustrated by centralised control in companies that takes place at cost to their strategic inputs oriented towards long-term viability. Many will be subordinated to senior management through merely providing information from which decisions are made.

The activity of managers managing other managers takes place in different forms in the modern corporation, whether it be multi-divisional structures, holding companies or conglomerates, where varying forms of decentralisation go hand-in-hand with increased accountability and monitoring. At a micro-level, techniques such as management by objectives are still important, though presented as a form of control and motivation arising from the objective demands of the task (Drucker, 1955), which reproduces an aspect of the relationship workers have with ‘scientific management’. In other cases, managers become more literally victims of their own devices (Storey, 1983: 93), as shown in studies such as Nichols and Beynon (1977) on the chemical industry. The latter additionally note the flattening-out of career structures and exposure to redundancy, characteristic of many managers. We know from other evidence (Newell and Dopson, 1996; Scarborough and Burrell, 1996) that middle managers in particular are becoming prime victims of organisational restructuring. The corporate preference for downsizing and de-layering, though exaggerated, is seriously affecting job security, career paths and work intensity (Littler, Bramble and McDonald, 1994).

96 • W O R K O R G A N I S AT I O N S

This is not wholly new. Even the detailed studies of management functions discussed earlier in the chapter had the purpose of restructuring and rationalisation. Both Mintzberg (1973) and Drucker (1979) favour using techniques to split off routine activities from senior layers, introducing separation of conception and execution within management itself. This can now be further aided by computer technology and information systems.

The second consequence of changes in the managerial labour process is the growth of structural conflicts and imbalances between the different levels and functions. Teulings argues that each level of management tends to follow a rational logic of its own, enhancing the potential for defence of specific group interests, for example between production-oriented operational management and the strata concerned with innovation in product markets. Such tendencies are worsened by the absence of, or limits to, formal mechanisms to resolve or bargain conflicts. Instead they are likely to be dealt with at the operational level, leading to a disproportionate emphasis on changing the practices of shop floor workers.

One effect not discussed by Teulings is the effect on managerial ideologies. The legitimatory content in management thought has traditionally been directed towards two objectives: convincing non-management groups who challenged managerial goals and activities, and sustaining common aspirations (Child, 1969: 228–9). This becomes more problematic with the development of competing claims to fashion management theories and practices. Such competition cannot be wholly understood within the kind of framework that talks of levels. It neglects the role of what Armstrong calls interprofessional competition (1984, 1986, 1987b). It has long been recognised that professional groups pursue market strategies based on claims to exclusivity of knowledge and monopolies over a set of practices (Johnson, 1972; H. Brown, 1980). But the examples and models have mostly come from the older and ‘social’ professions such as law and medicine, with professions active in business seldom figuring as prominently.

One of the reasons for the neglect is that the sociology of the professions has emphasised the traditional ‘role conflict’ between professional autonomy and the bureaucratic principles of work organisation (Child, 1982; Rueschemeyer, 1986). Radical writers interpret these trends in terms of the conflict between acting for capital, whilst increasingly taking on the characteristics of employees. Some refer to the growth of a new professional-managerial class (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 1979), with others preferring to talk of the proletarianisation of the ‘middle layers’ (Braverman: 1974). While some insights can be gained from such perspectives, a primary focus on issues of class location is limited. Armstrong’s model allows us to focus on the specific role of the professions in the managerial labour process.

Armstrong and inter-professional competition

Armstrong is critical of certain aspects of the idea of management as a labour process. He agrees that lower management has been subject to greater controls and its own version of the separation of conception and execution, but is concerned that attention is drawn away from that basic contradiction between labour and capital, thus legitimising the existence of any form of unproductive activity by referring to it as a labour process in its right. But as long as the connections to the dominant capital–labour contradiction are maintained, we see no reason why the concept cannot be usefully

M A N A G E M E N T • 9 7

employed. Armstrong prefers to talk of struggles for control within capital, reflecting the ‘tensions and contradictions within the agency relationship’ (1989: 312). In other words, employers and senior managers are inescapably dependent on other agencies to secure corporate goals and policies.

So in practice, management functions for capital are mediated by competition between occupational groups. Each profession has a core of specialist knowledge and activities that can form the basis of advancement through a ‘collective mobility project’. But the core can only be used effectively if it is sufficiently indeterminate to prevent parts being detached, or routinised. While the general point might apply to all professions, those active in business have to face rival claims over the carrying out of control functions. For example, drawing on the work of Layton (1969), Armstrong (1986: 26) argues that scientific management’s techniques and justification for the control of labour through the ‘planning department’ was an expression of an ideology of engineering. Industrial engineering rests on the design of operating procedures which monitor and control labour costs (Storey, 1983: 275). But the attempt to place engineers at the apex of the firm through the diffusion of such techniques has clearly not been fully achieved, given that engineers do not predominate in the higher levels of management. At the heart of this ‘failure’ lies the difficulty of maintaining a monopoly over control practices that could be carried out by others.

To make matters worse, British development has taken place based on a definition of management hostile to engineering. This is because of a combination of finance and marketing as favoured specialisms, and the tendency to define management as a set of general functions and skills divorced from productive expertise (see earlier in this chapter). One commentator noted that a result has been, ‘a whole generation of MBA students who will not go near a manufacturing strategy. . . . They want to be in at the gin-and-tonic end with the financial strategy’ (quoted in Armstrong, 1987b: 428). Other professions have gained because of the popular belief that the education of engineers does not equip them for dealing with people and money. As a potential agency they therefore experience difficulty in establishing the vital commodity of ‘trust’ with those in positions of power. It is therefore not surprising that many engineers seek a route out of production into senior management through courses such as MBAs. The consequent low status of engineering identified in the Finneston Report and by Child et al. (1983) is, however, as we have seen, a peculiarly Anglo-American phenomenon. In contrast, German management is dominated by professional engineers, due in part to the historical relevance of engineering techniques and technical education to competition with British and other manufacturing goods, and to access to training in financial techniques.

In the case of accounting and other financial specialisms, there has been a dramatic rise from the days of poorly paid clerks and bookkeeping tasks. Some of the factors involved include the development of management accounting as cost control techniques in the industrial restructuring during and after the depression of the mid-1920s. In the United States, the control function of management accounting can be clearly identified in the following definition from the National Association of Accountants:

the process of identification, measurement, accumulation, analysis, preparation, interpretation, and communication of financial information used by management to plan, evaluate and control within an organisation and to

98 • W O R K O R G A N I S AT I O N S

ensure appropriate use and accountability for its resources. (Quoted in Wardell, 1986: 28)

Other factors include once again the need for co-ordination and control over middle managers in multi-divisional companies and the legal requirements for control through auditing. The cohesiveness of an accounting élite in business has been facilitated by the acceptance of an inevitable ‘horizontal fissure’ in the profession. This has allowed a range of routine tasks to be delegated to ‘accounting technicians’ (Johnson, 1980; Glover et al., 1986), thus maintaining indeterminacy and monopoly over core practices. Accountants have also undertaken an aggressive campaign to encroach on the spheres of other professions through such measures as manpower audits and human resource accounting (Armstrong, 1986: 32). Though only a minority are closer to real power, the spread of a ‘financial rationality’ means that British boardrooms are increasingly dominated by those with a background in banking or accountancy, within a ‘managerial culture which is often preoccupied with accounting measures and procedures’ (Armstrong, 1988).

Such developments have begun to threaten the power of the personnel function, a segment of management that had also enjoyed a major long-term growth. From the days of its origins in company welfare workers, the Institute of Personnel Managers now has more than 20 000 members. Throughout that development, personnel professionals have had a continual struggle to convince business power-holders that they could move from welfare to general management functions. They consolidated a hold over administrative functions such as interviewing and record-keeping, as well as expanding into the newer areas of staff development and determination of wage rates and incentives (Carter, 1985: 102). In a partnership of mutual convenience, the behavioural sciences have helped develop a mystique that ‘the personnel manager is probably the only specialist in the organisation whose role can be distinguished by the virtually exclusive concern with the management of human assets’ (Mullins, 1985: 129). But the problematic of ‘dealing with people’ has inherent limits in establishing a monopoly of knowledge or practice, particularly when its ‘behavioural nostrums’ are routinely taught to the full range of business students (Fowler, 1985). It is therefore unsurprising that surveys (Daniel and Millward, 1983) have reported a lack of qualified and trained personnel staff in many companies. Fortunately for the profession other factors have been working in their favour, notably the spate of employee legislation and codes of practice in the 1960s and 1970s, and the recommendations of the Donovan Report (1968) that firms should centralise and formalise their bargaining procedures. Both measures allowed personnel to extend and monopolise spheres of expertise, as well exercise greater authority over lower line managers (Armstrong, 1986: 37).

But deregulation of labour markets, decentralisation of bargaining and scrapping of aspects of employment law have given a further twist to the ratchet of interprofessional competition by eroding or redistributing established personnel functions. This is complicated by the rise of human resource management (HRM). On the surface it seems positive; after all personnel managers have long trumpeted the importance of treating human resources as an organisation’s greatest asset rather than a cost to be minimised. HRM can then be seen as an upmarket version of personnel with a tactical name change (Torrington, 1989). This is perhaps the ‘soft’ version of HRM, with the harder versions stressing the integration of the management of human resources into

M A N A G E M E N T • 9 9

core business strategy and practice (Guest, 1989; Storey, 1989). The significance of the latter is that it enables, perhaps obliges, other managerial groups, particularly line managers, to take HRM ‘on-board’.

Whether it is in fact becoming more strategic or more effective is open to dispute (Guest, 1990), but the perception of greater centrality has sparked off a struggle by managers across a variety of functions to absorb the rhetoric and responsibilities of HRM (Poole and Mansfield, 1992). The efforts of traditional practitioners to defend and carve out new territories was not helped by a widely-reported study from a team at the London School of Economics that produced headlines of ‘Personnel officers are a waste of time says new study’ (Independent on Sunday, 15 May 1994). Perhaps, like other professional groups, personnel is heading for a split: ‘a polarised profession consisting of a mass of “clerks of works”, performing routine administrative work for a newly self-confident line management, whilst a few élite “architects” of strategic human resources policy continue to operate at the corporate headquarters level’ (Armstrong, 1988: 25).

What the work of Armstrong highlights is that managerial groups have constantly to fight to establish their usefulness through the agency relationship. Given successive waves of organisational restructuring driven by the latest managerial fads or new environmental pressures, the territory for that battle is constantly shifting. Many large organisations have undergone major change programmes, often culture-led, in recent years. Companies are increasingly seeking to recruit managers who have experience of such programmes, irrespective of their function of origin. The HR function is in a difficult position, given that senior executives often aim to decentralise responsibilities to line mangers, and may be reluctant to let HR, or indeed any functional group, be seen to ‘own’ the change process. Research from Marks et al. (1997) on the spirits industry suggests that HR personnel can seek influence through their expertise as ‘managers of culture’. Culture is often seen as the glue that holds change initiatives together, and culture is ultimately seen to be ‘about people’. This creates opportunities for HR to influence change agendas and measure the success or otherwise of measures geared towards transforming attitudes and performance.

Change processes may set off sharp inter-professional conflicts. In a valuable study of newly privatised utilities in the UK which explicitly uses Armstrong’s framework, Mulholland (1998) identifies a struggle between ‘public sector survivors’ and ‘movers and shakers’. The former are older managers primarily from engineering and technical backgrounds within the water and electricity industries, while the latter are younger, with a graduate background, and reputations built through efficiency drives in the private sector. Mulholland demonstrates that because they are ‘tainted’ with public sector values, engineers have become non-preferred managers, their competencies marginalised and status diminished. In contrast the private sector experience and entrepreneurial attitudes of the newly-recruited group mean that they have become the trusted and preferred agency of senior management. As one corporate manager put it: ‘Obviously the people who came into the industry aren’t carrying the baggage of forty years of nationalised industry culture. . . . They are knocking aside the tribal custom for us’ (Mulholland, 1998: 191).

The kind of analysis in this section usefully adds to an understanding of the complex levels and functions within the managerial labour process. As Whitley (1984) argues, there is limited standardisation across managerial tasks and this helps to explain the lack of progress in establishing management as such as a profession. The

100 • W O R K O R G A N I S AT I O N S

growth of MBAs and other qualifications suggests attempts to develop certification of skills and knowledges, as well as a career route. But they can best be seen as a form of individual credentialism and filter into higher paid jobs, and not necessarily a convincing one, with some employers showing considerable scepticism (Oliver, 1993). The jibe ‘masters of bugger all’ may be unfair, but it reflects historic tensions between generalism and specialism, as well as a feeling that the content of many courses is pitched above business requirements and the realities of middle management work.

Conclusion

A focus on competing agencies and professions also emphasises the specific historical bases and differences in the development of management theories and practices, particularly between different national traditions, though we have had little space to elaborate on them here. The discussion embodies the general purpose of the chapter: that of developing a structural analysis of management that recognises the contradictory sources of influence over activity. It should be clear that managers need not be treated as over-determined ‘ciphers’ in order to explain their work in a structural way. A conception of agency can be utilised that accepts considerable variation in management practices, as well as enabling us to understand the rise of new groups competing for influence. For example, business consultants, research and development engineers and IT analysts are using their knowledge to challenge the existing expert division of labour (Reed, 1992a). We have also been able to illustrate the competing rationalities of contending groups, without accepting the mainstream notion of a single, neutral rationality underpinning managerial theory and practice. Many of these issues will resurface again in different form in the following chapter.

8 Control: Concepts and Strategies

Asked what the secret of successful automotive management was, a senior General Motors executive replied, ‘Control. Deal control. Product control. Labour control’ (quoted in Huczynski, 1993: 185).

We can see from the discussion in the previous chapter that practically and theoretically management is intertwined with control. Yet why and how is strongly contested between mainstream and radical approaches. This chapter examines contrasting perspectives on understanding control. It is primarily about conceptualisation rather than current evidence of the outcomes of control strategies and techniques. These will be dealt with mainly in Chapters 11 and 12.

Mainstream mis/understandings

The treatment of control in mainstream writing is ambiguous at best, marginal at worst. Frameworks that assume goal consensus can often simply ignore or trivialise the issue. When it is discussed explicitly in standard textbooks, the chapters devoted to it are sometimes of a rather bizarre nature in almost omitting any reference to conflicts between groups. The talk is of technical inputs and outputs in a self-adjusting system, performance standards and feedback mechanisms. It is also seen in a unitary way: ‘controlled performance’ with an assumption of goal-consensus. Control is reduced to a monitoring device, with management’s role to check progress, ensure that actions occur as planned, correct any deviation, or reassure us that what we are doing is appropriate (O’Reilly and Chatman, 1996). Some writers (Lawlor, 1976) put an emphasis on people desiring control, for example getting enjoyment from dependence on higher authority. Resistance is smuggled in occasionally when discussing the behavioural implications as people ‘react’ to control processes, requiring management to adjust strategies accordingly.

This apparent absence of control from the mainstream is, however, somewhat misleading. The issues are there but they are articulated in different language and concepts. As the influential mainstream writer Pfeffer notes, ‘control is at once the essential problem of management and organisation and the implicit focus of much of organisation studies’ (1997: 100). The key term here is implicit. When control is discussed it is often alongside co-ordination. Any complex division of labour requires mechanisms to set goals, allocate responsibilities and evaluate the effectiveness of performance. Co-ordination is a more neutral term than control and more compatible with an assumption that management is a largely neutral set of techniques and competencies.

Even when texts do have chapters with control in the title, they often pass over quickly into other issues such as job design, organisational structure or leadership. In the first instance, debate is focused on designing structures which facilitate levels of