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Foster, William M., Hassard, John S., Morris, Jonathan and Wolfram Cox, Julie 2019. The changing
nature of managerial work: The effects of corporate restructuring on management jobs and careers.
Human Relations 72 (3) , pp. 473-504. 10.1177/0018726719828439 file
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1
THE CHANGING NATURE OF MANAGERIAL WORK: THE EFFECTS OF
CORPORATE RESTRUCTURING ON MANAGEMENT JOBS AND CAREERS
William M Foster, University of Alberta, Canada
John S Hassard, Manchester University, UK
Jonathan Morris, Cardiff University, UK
Julie Wolfram Cox, Monash University, Australia
Abstract
This article analyses contemporary issues relevant to understanding the changing nature of
management and managerial work. The argument is developed in four parts: First, to provide
context, we offer an overview of the literature on the organization and control of managerial
work, tracing contributions mainly from the early 1950s onwards. Second we discuss the first
of two related concerns relevant to understanding the contemporary nature of managerial work
– strategies of organizational restructuring: an analysis highlighting the effects of downsizing
and delayering on managers amidst corporate campaigns promoting ‘post-bureaucratic’
systems. Third, we extend this discussion by addressing how corporate restructuring affects
managers in their everyday work – notably in relation to the perceptions and realities of
growing job insecurity and career uncertainty: an analysis which draws regularly upon data we,
as researchers in the field, have collected in a series of investigations since the turn of the
century. The paper concludes by summarising the content of four research articles whose
arguments relate to issues discussed in this analysis of managerial work.
Keywords: corporate restructuring; delayering; downsizing; job insecurity; managerial
careers; managerial work; organizational forms.
Introduction
2
It is nearly 20 years since Barley and Kunda (2001) made their well-known clarion call for
work to be brought ‘back in’ to studies of organization. In our view this remains particularly
apposite for studies of the changing nature of managerial work. Despite a growing body of
empirical work in which managers tend to be a key focus (see Hassard et al., 2009; Sveningsson
and Alvesson, 2016; Tengblad, 2012), grounded research investigations on what managers
actually do in their everyday work remain limited. Moreover despite Barley and Kunda’s plea
for ‘relevance’ in work-related studies, research in this area can often appear abstract (see
Korica et al, 2017) and/or overly driven by the search for theoretical novelty (see Suddaby et
al, 2011). This is despite the centrality of managerial work – and of managerial discourse
generally – to organizing and notably to processes of organizational change and development
(Cunliffe, 2009; Philips and Lawrence, 2012).
In this article therefore we wish to argue a case for research that reflects a more
grounded understanding of the changing nature of management. Starting with an overview of
theory and research since the 1950s, the analysis proceeds to examine two issues central to our
understanding of the nature of modern managerial work. The first is the character of recent
forms of corporate restructuring, with this being analysed primarily in relation to the effects of
recurrent rounds of downsizing and delayering on managerial work amid business strategies
promoting so-called ‘post-bureaucratic’ systems and structures. The second is resolution of a
series of analytical problems at the heart of research into managerial work – these relating
focally to issues managers have faced concerning perceptions of increased job insecurity and
career uncertainty; matters that appear progressively to define their work. In seeking to make
sense of these issues, our discussions frequently draw upon evidence from empirical
investigations we, as researchers in this field, have undertaken since the turn of the century.
The article then concludes by reviewing the four dedicated contributions to this special issue –
contributions that comprise its substantive research content.
3
Theorizing the organization and control of managerial work
In providing a sense of context, not only for this article but for the special issue as a whole, our
starting point is to return to major studies contributing to our understanding of the nature of
managerial work. This is done for two main reasons: (i) to illustrate how early scholars
anticipated many of the themes of importance to contemporary researchers in this field (and
thus the work of the former deserves re-visiting) and (ii) to draw out many of the
methodological virtues and values underpinning qualitative research based on the direct
observation of managers, their work and employment.
A natural starting point here is Sune Carlson’s study of what Swedish senior managers
(essentially chief executives/managing directors) do at work – Executive Behaviour (1951) –
which is one of the earliest empirical studies in business administration. The main conclusion
of Executive Behaviour was that managerial work needed to be examined and understood in its
social context and with a focus on the intentions, goals and attitudes of the manager. To
investigate successfully, Carlson suggested, researchers needed both to enter the ‘black box’
of the manager’s mind and relate managerial behaviour to the wider social and physical
environment. Primarily researching ‘work loads’ and ‘working methods’, his study found
senior managers were extremely pressurised in their everyday actions: individuals who rarely
had enough time to strategize successfully on behalf of their organizations. Ultimately however
Carlson was disappointed by failing to develop clear operational concepts for researching
managerial behaviour and felt his work lacked a genuine theoretical system to make sense of
his empirical observations. Nevertheless Carlson’s work would largely set the agenda for
research into managerial work in the decades to come.
Around the same time, C. Wright Mills’ eminent account of ‘the American middle
classes’ – White Collar (1953) – was set within the broader socio-economic context of the
4
period and assessed its impact upon the working lives of among other groups managers. In
Mills’ analysis of the ‘managerial demiurge’ he argued that while managers were now very
much at the centre of the ‘new bureaucracies’ of corporate and industrial life, their work
remained highly polemical – in a study that is essentially a caricature of managers’ actions and
activities. Managers in Mills’ analysis were thus cast in a somewhat negative light and
portrayed as rather pitiful and unromantic characters, with the nature of their work being
depicted as contradictory and paradoxical. Indeed managers in this analysis were portrayed as
essentially trapped within burgeoning and unyielding corporate structures, and mostly in
ambiguous and circumscribed ways.
Elsewhere another high profile account relating to managerial work and published
around the same time – William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) – appeared even
more unsympathetic to managers, characterising them as acting in largely undemocratic ways
under a powerful, all-embracing, corporate gaze; one that seemingly acted contra to the socio-
economic spirit the US was built on, namely entrepreneurial individualism. Other
contemporaneous accounts extended these forms of sociological analysis, but often in the
context of the ever-growing power of large firms in the post-war period (Galbraith, 1967), with
the main cause of growth in such studies being depicted, metaphorically, as an ‘invisible hand’
driving western market-based economies (see Chandler, 1977).
Additionally around this time two innovative methods were gaining credence for the
collection and analysis of data on managers and their work – diary accounts (Burns, 1954) and
direct observation (Dalton, 1959). While Burns’ (1957) diary-based work noted managers often
dealt with and were largely consumed by activities related indirectly to production, Dalton’s
(1959) observational work noted similarly that managers spent a considerable amount of their
time engaged in informal actions, including seemingly irrational, often self-protecting,
undertakings linked to hidden agendas and incentives.