Management in Three Movements: Theorizing Middle Managers’ Subjectivities

The exploratory inductive research conducted in this study, the themes of which have been highlighted in Chapter 2, demonstrated that further research into how middle managers construct and reconstruct their identities in contemporary restructured, and restructuring, organizations was required. Existing research in the management, and especially the middle management, field was critiqued for its epistemological and methodological orientations which take a largely functionalist, role and task-focused orientation to the subject. The exceptions to this fall into two categories: a) Gowler and Legge’s (1983) work on rhetoric in “The Meaning of Management and the Management of Meaning” (reprinted in Linstead et al 1996). Gowler and Legge’s conceptual analysis is one of the earliest discussions of management — rather than managers — that investigates the socially constructed and hence fluid nature of management. Other work on rhetoric since then has not concentrated on the identity of management as such, but has examined the use of rhetoric in specific contexts (see for example Linstead 1995; Watson 1995a; Hamilton 1997; Alvesson 2001; Cunliffe 2001). b) The growing body of work on discourse, both organizational and managerial, and its analysis (see Keenoy et al 1997; Grant et al 1998; Grant et al 2004; Hardy et al 2005). Some of this work has related the concept to the formation of subjectivities, but again this work has been empirically based and has considered subject formation in particular organizational contexts (Knights and Willmott 1992; Kerfoot and Knights 1993; Watson 1994).