Making Sense of Management

A Critical Introduction

Mats Alvesson, Hugh Willmott

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781446292129
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

The first edition of Making Sense of Management set out to provide a fresh perspective on management that was both broad and critical, exploring how the disruptive and constructive potential of critical theory can be realized in organizations. Along the way, it has proven to be a landmark contribution to critical management studies. As well as setting the agenda for current research, this revised edition has been written to appeal to a broader readership and open up critical theory for the general management student.

New sections on HRM, brands, identity, ethics and leadership have been fully developed alongside the rest of the text to reflect the current state of play in critical management studies.

The second edition of Making Sense of Management will be of interest to students and researchers in critical management studies and students on general management courses with a critical perspective.

PART I

INTRODUCING CRITICAL THEORY TO MANAGEMENT

	1
	Management in Critical Perspective

In all societies, people are involved in the complex process of organizing their everyday lives. Sometimes our routines run smoothly and we can forget how intricate they are, and how we are continually engaged, in ‘managing’ their operation. When our routines are disrupted – by others’ unpredictability, our indiscretions or ill-health, for example – we are reminded of the fragility of what we take for granted. Each one of us engages in a daily struggle to accomplish ordinary tasks, maintain normal routines and deal with the unexpected. In the context of modern societies, however, responsibility for many organizing activities has been delegated to, or appropriated by, experts. Amongst them are managers hired to shape and regulate so many aspects of our lives – as employees but also in other spheres, such as areas of leisure and the provision of personal services (Hancock and Tyler, 2009).

Forms of corporate and public management exert a pervasive influence over diverse aspects of modern life that previously were organized within communities and by households. Education, health, consumption and the arts as well as work have become objects of management knowledge and control. The application of ostensibly rational, impartial forms of calculation and control, including control exercised by managers, is pervasive (Grey, 1999). In sum, experts in managing have assumed the role of ‘improvers’ of established ways of doing things and ways of life.

At the same time, modern societies have become increasingly risk and crisis-prone – to, for example, financial meltdown, terrorist threats, nuclear annihilation, ecological degradation, global warming. In addition, there are many less dramatic but nevertheless problematic aspects of modern society, including a widely felt loss of a sense of meaning and purpose in working life (Sennett, 1998, 2006). In affluent or even ‘post-affluent’ societies, there is a slavish preoccupation with materialism and the acquisition of property – something that is manifest in the emphasis placed upon the production, and especially the marketing, of goods and services. Often, consumption has more to do with boosting status and self-esteem – by keeping up, or ahead of, one’s immediate or global neighbours – than with human well-being or flourishing. Economic activity and need satisfaction exist in what has become an increasingly ambiguous, if not perverse, relationship. In contemporary capitalism, greed, superficiality and hedonism dominate; and in these circumstances many people find it difficult to develop a sense of well-being or fulfilment. We are bombarded by images and messages which declare that our lives will be bettered (only) by acquiring more things, finer titles, more impressive careers. We then find ourselves caught up in a ‘rat race’ where insecurity, anxiety and suffering are temporarily suspended but unaddressed and so effectively reinforced (Alvesson, 2012b). Since management is deeply complicit in the organization and development of modern societies, making sense of management, as a key locus of expert control, is critical. It is critical not only for our self-understanding but, more grandiosely, for the future of modern societies and their sustainability.

Seductions of Capitalism and the Limits of ‘Progress’

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When contemplating the achievements of the modern era, it is reassuring to believe that advances in science, and the expertise attributed to its enlightening powers, has swept away much dogma and prejudice. In the Western world dogmas of religion and superstition have indeed been widely challenged and debunked, at least by the more educated of their populations. But they have been superseded by modern, secular myths – such as the belief that science and related forms of knowledge guarantees progress, that markets ensure freedom and efficiency, that affluent consumption is the route to happiness, and that experts know best. In this process, values and practices other than those that contribute directly to economic growth and consumption, and so increase private wealth, have become marginalized and neutralized. Nonetheless, and mainly at the fringes of society, there have been repeated eruptions of disenchantment and recurrent efforts to fashion new values and practices which, as the pressures placed upon resources by globalizing capitalism increase, are set to intensify.

The modern world is shaped by varieties of capitalism in which scientific and technical knowledge has been applied to extract profits from the production and marketing of every conceivable product and service. As a distinctive politico-economic system in which wage labour is hired to make commodities that can be sold for a profit, the reach of capitalism has extended around the globe to incorporate former state socialist societies (e.g. the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China). Capitalism has gained legitimacy by absorbing and then promoting pressures to support the public supply, and subsequent privatization (Grimshaw, Vincent and Willmott, 2001), of a basic level of public goods, in the form of housing, health care and education. The provision of these goods has facilitated an important measure of political stability and, with it, mass consumption as an engine of economic growth. Conversely, any withdrawal of these goods, or slowing of economic growth, threatens this legitimacy.

With technological progress and wealth creation has come a creeping commercialization and commodification of everyday life. Most recently, its advance has developed the ‘new’ markets of entertainment, leisure and, increasingly, the premium pricing of ecological correctness (e.g. organic and other green or low carbon produce). As the meaning of life has been progressively identified with the pleasures of consuming commodities produced and delivered by capitalist corporations, the governance of modern economic and political institutions has become geared to capitalist expansion. Politics has become preoccupied with the technical task of preserving the status quo as democratic debate about ends is displaced by a technocratic focus upon the refinement of means.

Consider the issue of how ‘consumer needs’ are defined. Marketing techniques play a central role in the formation of these ‘needs’ – for example, by associating products with enviable lifestyles or cultural heroes. Leading marketing textbooks are largely silent on the issue of how consumer demand is constituted – how anxieties are generated and then exploited or aspirations are fuelled and responded to. There is scant discussion of the relationship between increased consumption and ecological destruction. In the world of marketing, as in other management specialisms, ‘the environment’ is referred to as if it were something ‘out there’ rather than an integral part of our lives (Naess and Rothenberg, 1991): it becomes yet another sphere or object of management knowledge and control – equivalent to the markets for entertainment, health and leisure – ripe for penetration and colonization. Growing environmental anxiety among consumers is not addressed directly but, rather, is seized upon as an opportunity for product differentiation and gaining a competitive advantage (e.g. through the so-called greening of products or the building of ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘sociably responsible’ corporate images). From a critical perspective the discourses and practices of marketing, for example, are seen to be propagators and seducers of consumer desire as much as they are articulations of, or responses to, human need (Klein, 2000; Morgan, 2003).

As a counter-image to a dominant view of economic actors being engaged in value creation, one could suggest that many businesses are involved in forms of value destruction: cities and landscapes are transformed in environmentally and aesthetically negative ways for commercial purposes; as new images and accompanying aspirations are developed, existing products become out-dated and lose their attractiveness; people are led to believe that what is not novel or fashionable is inferior. It is seldom wanton destruction or even built-in obsolescence. But often the balance between creation and destruction is not self-evident, as attention is given only to the immediate positive aspects of innovation with minimal consideration being given to adverse unintended or long-term consequences. Consider, for example, the notion of ‘financial innovation’, in the form of securitization, that was at the heart of the financial meltdown of 2008 (Willmott, 2010; 2011a). As Engelen et al. (2011) note, ‘the coupling of financializaton and innovation established a normative bias in its favour with the growth of securitization interpreted as engineering which facilitated the efficient marketization of risk.’ What it promised was the spread of risk; but what it delivered was its mystification and, paradoxically, its concentration resulting in the drying up of credit and the use of public funds to preserve banks that had evaded the discipline of ‘moral hazard’ by becoming ‘too big to fail’.

The strength of attachment to capitalist values (e.g. individualism expressed in the form of maximization of self-interest, as exemplified by the financial sector) and priorities (e.g. private accumulation and mass consumption) means that responsibility for social division (e.g. foreclosures, unemployment) and ecological destruction (e.g. Deepwater Horizon ‘accident’) is more likely to be attributed to industrialization, science, weak regulation, irresponsible companies or some combination of such factors. By focusing upon such elements, there is a tendency to disregard their shared development within a politico-economic system founded upon domination and exploitation where costs are routinely ‘externalized’ or treated as ‘acceptable business risks’ to be covered by insurance. Exploitation is systematically built into capitalism. The creative capacity of human beings, hired as employees, is harnessed to produce wealth that is appropriated privately by the owners of capital, which takes the form of factories, service firms, intellectual property (e.g. patents), etc. Domination is an integral feature of capitalism in the form of institutions (e.g. education) and ideologies (e.g. liberalism) that naturalize its features and/or represent them as congruent with ‘human nature’ or most consistent with the preservation of ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘democracy’, and so on. In such ways, divisiveness and destructiveness are downplayed as capitalism is commended as the means of overcoming such problems.¹

Despite their eager professing of green credentials, politicians and industrialists struggle to provide leadership as they remain preoccupied with ‘managing’ the survival and growth of their (capitalist) economies and businesses. Their priorities have been dramatically demonstrated during the ‘Euro Crisis’ of 2011 which is unfolding as we complete this book. Remarkably, the problems (e.g. of Greece and Italy) have been widely diagnosed in terms of national profligacy and ‘sovereign debt’, and the ‘bailing out’ of these nations. Yet, arguably, it is the banks that have been content to lend to these nations that are, once again, being ‘baled out’ by ordinary taxpayers – of Germany or through the European Central Bank. We, it seems, have become the captives of (financialized) capitalism, unwilling or unable to debate and renew the meaning of modern ideas of freedom, community and democracy, and reluctant to face up to the question of how an espoused commitment to these ideas can be translated into substantive action and appropriate forms of governance and planetary husbandry. Of course, politicians and companies are also to a degree captives of voters and lobbyists. They are pressured by demands for a continuing flow of inexpensive and accessible goods and services, and resist making the material sacrifices necessary to reduce gross inequalities and secure sustainability. Such demands are fuelled by huge investments of firms in promoting the appetite for material goods, and the promises of politicians to maintain economic growth and thereby ‘improve’ the material standard of living.

Failure or refusal to recognize the interconnectedness of social and ecological problems spawns remedial action that is limited to interventions where quick wins can be made. The excesses and gross inequalities of capitalist development, nationally and globally, go largely unchallenged, and, at best, state provision addresses only the most shocking, de-legitimating manifestations of destructiveness, deprivation and neglect. Billions have been found almost instantly to bail out the banks but, in the years following the financial crisis, many countries are experiencing great difficulties in sustaining core welfare programmes. These have been assessed to be too expensive and/or the services have been contracted to the private sector where labour conditions are generally inferior with regards to employment security, trade union representation, pensions, etc., and so costs are lower. While bankers continued to pay themselves billions of dollars in bonuses, the withdrawal of the services and benefits (in order to reduce the deficit produced by the financial crisis and its impact upon growth) has been justified on the grounds that such benefits breed a culture of fecklessness and dependency. Experts operating in the financial markets completely failed to make prudent assessments of the risks inherent in the use sophisticated financial instruments (e.g. CDOs, CDSs). Yet, following the crisis, it is the experts in financial markets to whom states are beholden, since a collapse of their currency and/or a crippling rise in interest charges on loans to service the debts in part incurred in bailing out the banks is threatened if they continue to borrow for social purposes (Tett, 2010).

What Then of the Managers?

Managers form a heterogeneous group whose members work across a variety of sectors – e.g. public, private, voluntary – and in diverse organizations where they undertake a wide variety of tasks. They occupy different specialisms (e.g. marketing) and work at different levels in organizational hierarchies. They manage in uncertain conditions and are in possession of imperfect information; and they are under pressure to be responsive to a plurality of demands. This diversity and dynamism makes it far from easy to generalize about what management is and what managers do. Our ambition is to cover management and managerial work fairly broadly, but we concentrate primarily on management of business (and so have comparatively little to say about public sector and third sector forms of management) because it is ‘business’ rather than public management or social enterprise that most strongly shapes and influences the theory and practice of management. Our focus is also limited principally to managers with significant influence, i.e. above the level of supervisory or junior levels of management.

We justify this selectivity on the grounds that, in our assessment, practices of corporate management developed in the private sector have conditioned its application across other sectors. The form of management developed within larger capitalist enterprises has been taken up in other contexts as a model to be emulated, albeit in modified form. Whilst its relevance and appropriateness for other, not-for-profit contexts is very debatable, its ‘market-orientated’ logic, in particular, has been widely diffused – most notably, in the development of ‘new public management’ which is distinguished by the incorporation of private sector disciplines and performance measures.

Amid confusions and uncertainties about managers, and their collective activity as ‘management’, there is a tendency to privilege one single, technical meaning: management as a universal process comprising a number of functions, such as planning, coordinating, and so on. Ignored in this conception is the embeddedness of the managers performing these functions, individually and collectively, within relations of power and domination. These social relations are crucial as it is through them that the functions ascribed to management are defined, allocated and undertaken. Management is inescapably a social practice (Reed, 1984) as it is embedded in social values, politics, interests and relations of class, gender, ethnicity, etc. As such, the meaning and activity of management are most ‘intimately bound up with the social situation of the managing group’ (Child, 1969: 16). The nature and significance of management depend upon the historical and societal context(s) in which it emerges and takes shape (Wilson and Thomson, 2006). The decision making of (senior) managers increasingly shapes these contexts (Scarborough, 1998).

The ‘social situation’ in which modern management has developed is one of specifically capitalist economic relations and the rise of the modern state within diverse societal contexts. This is important because, when the historical and cultural embeddedness of management is appreciated, it is no longer plausibly represented as a set of universal functions. Instead, it is more compellingly understood as ‘a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Summary of Contents
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I INTRODUCING CRITICAL THEORY TO MANAGEMENT
• PART II MANAGEMENT SPECIALISMS IN A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
• PART III RECASTING CRITICAL THEORY AND MANAGEMENT
• Appendix: Brief History of the Frankfurt School
• References
• Index