The changing nature of managerial work: The effects of corporate restructuring on management jobs and careers

Introduction

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, 2003; Tengblad, 2012), grounded research investigations on what managers actually do in their everyday work remain limited. Moreover, despite Barley and Kunda’s (2001) 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.

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 (Carlson, 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 pressurized 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 socioeconomic context of the period, and assessed its impact upon the working lives of many groups including managers. In Mills’ analysis of the ‘managerial demiurge’, he argued that although 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, characterizing them as acting in largely undemocratic ways under a powerful, all-embracing, corporate gaze – one that seemingly acted contra to the socioeconomic spirit the USA 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’ (1954) diary-based work noted that 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.

The 1960s saw qualitative approaches often joined by quantitative research techniques in the study and analysis of managerial work (see Hales, 1986, on this point), in what became a general widening of the research focus. Research accounted not only for interactions between different levels of managerial work (Stewart, 1967) but also for management-related commerce between the organization and its environment (Burns and Stalker, 1961). The central message of what were frequently contingency-related arguments was that the range of (formal and informal) tasks the manager dealt with – or which potentially or actually impacted upon the work the manager did – was far greater than traditionally appreciated in ‘classical’ prescriptions of the tasks, roles and functions carried out by managers and administrators (see Barnard, 1938; Fayol, 1930; Parker Follett, 1942). Particularly influential during this period was Rosemary Stewart’s (1963; also 1972, 1982) work on the day-to-day challenges ‘real managers’ face in the ‘real world’, in which she suggested management effectiveness arose from dealing well with a wide variety of demands and constraints, and as a result hopefully making ‘good choices’. Stewart’s various books on the ‘reality’ of management became popular in that they were neither heavyweight academic tomes nor lightweight populist handbooks, but directed at the interested or ‘thinking’ manager who wanted ideas and concepts to help them be more effective in the workplace.

The 1970s saw the emergence of new lenses and perspectives on research into management and managerial work. Notable here was Henry Mintzberg’s (1973) structured observation approach, and also the more politically driven accounts associated with the industrial sociology of Harry Braverman (1974). Mintzberg’s observational approach – developed primarily in his book The Nature of Managerial Work (1973) – sought to connect, in a very direct way, management theory with managerial practice. His research on the work of CEOs, for example, although seen as innovative methodologically, largely confirmed the findings of earlier qualitative and ethnographic studies. The image was again of a huge volume of fragmented work being accomplished by executives/senior managers at relentless pace – work that was highly interactive, often conducted in meetings, and largely completed by verbal means. By contrast, Braverman’s ‘labour process’ approach – developed in his book Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) – inspired research linking the actions of various hierarchical levels of the organization to the (sub-structural/super-structural) context of socioeconomic power and conflict (Littler, 1982; Nichols and Beynon, 1977). Extending Marx’s writings on the impact of capitalist industrial growth in the 19th century into studies of labour in the 20th, Braverman developed the argument that ‘control’ of work, on behalf of capital, was the raison d’etre of management. Indeed, for Braverman this is the only reason management functions as a separate hierarchical category of authority – it represents the ‘global function’ of capital, otherwise it would just be another category of labour to be hired or fired (Armstrong, 1989). This period also saw Kanter’s (1977) thoughtful account of the experiences of managers at Indisco – in Men and Women of the Corporation – with this work arguing for a less exclusionary approach to managing and the need to devolve power, in what was a generally sympathetic account of managers’ work. This, however, is perhaps a perspective rather lost in many of her later but higher-profile and arguably more ‘managerialist’ (Parker, 2002) contributions to corporate analysis (see Kanter, 1983, 1989).

The 1980s and 1990s were often characterized by focus on a more technocratic view of management, with research on managerial work frequently drawing on quantitative methods. This period often saw emphasis placed on the role of strategic planning by decision-making elites and ‘top management teams’ (Eisenhardt et al., 1997; Hambrick, 1994; Hambrick and Mason, 1984), and on management being evaluated in the context of achieving ever-greater corporate ‘performance’ (Kanter, 1983; Kotter, 1982; Pettigrew, 1992). Other research analysed managerial work beyond Anglo-American domains, and as historically distinct in analyses adopting an increasingly comparative and cultural perspective (Hofstede, 1980; Kanter, 1989; Ouchi, 1981; Pascale and Athos, 1981). Meanwhile, enquiries developed in the labour process tradition (Willmott, 1984), and also those emerging within an incipient ‘critical management’ perspective (Willmott, 1987; see also Adler et al., 2008) – often marrying forms of ‘critical theory’ and ‘post-structural’ analysis (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992) – continued to emphasize conflictual relations between labour and capital.

Other critically oriented contributions published during these decades, however, reflected the re-emergence of research in the ethnographic tradition. Among them, three works stood out as making significant and high-profile contributions to the field: Robert Jackall’s (1988) Moral Mazes, Tony Watson’s (1994) In Search of Management and Charles Heckscher’s (1996) White Collar Blues. In the research for Moral Mazes, Jackall (1988) interviewed and observed managers from various organizational levels, over a number of years, in a range of large and medium-sized companies. Adopting a social constructionist perspective, his analysis conveyed extremely negative images of the lives and work of managers employed by US companies. Jackall argued that by engaging managers in regular, rational and socially approved actions, in the context of close and enduring subordination to authority, modern firms serve to routinize not only individuals’ experiences at work but also their life experiences in general. In so doing, corporations shape moral consciousness, with the hierarchic authority structure of organizations being the ‘lynchpin’ of bureaucratic dominance. In the process, managers progressively adopt ‘upward-looking’ stances that have decisive social and psychological consequences. This is most notable in terms of managers’ own pragmatism and rationality, with the ways in which they interpret personal relationships largely reflecting their position in the organization. Over time, Jackall suggests the successful manager is one who becomes a dexterous symbolic manipulator – someone able to sublimate their own emotional and psychological needs to the demands of others. Within the social structure of bureaucracy, this sees moral questions translated into ‘alliances, fealty relationships, networks, coteries, or cliques, as circles of affiliations’ (Jackall, 1988: 39). Ultimately, the ambiguity of managerial work and its assessment leads managers to conclude cynically that instead of ‘ability, talent, and dedicated service to an organization, politics, adroit talk, luck, connections, and self-promotion are the real sorters of people into sheep and goats’ (Jackall, 1988: 3).

In the UK, research by Tony Watson for his book In Search of Management (1994) reflected a more dedicated ethnographic approach, with the author (a former human resources manager) being seconded for a year from his academic post to work full time in management development for a large telecommunications company. Interviewing 60 managers during the period of his participant observation fieldwork, Watson asked questions such as: ‘What does it mean to you to be a manager?’ and ‘What do you see as the essential difference between managerial and non-managerial work?’ The subtitle of a book that is basically a discursive diary – Culture, Chaos and Control in Managerial Work – somewhat mirrors the findings. Here, ‘culture’ reflects the concern at the time for understanding the importance of symbolic factors in management and organization, which had been a key concern of Peters and Watermans’ (1982) best-seller, In Search of Excellence, the title of which Watson’s book purposefully echoes. Subsequently, ‘chaos’ represents a view of the corporate world as disordered, muddled and confused, and where managers can never be absolutely sure of the outcomes of their actions, which adds to the difficulties pervading managerial work. And ‘control’ refers not only to managers’ desire to be in control of their professional actions, but also the influence of corporate control on what managers can realistically achieve in the context of bureaucratic complex functioning. Overall, Watson reveals the pains and rewards managers experience as they cope with both traditional business pressures and changing organizational cultures. The image of managerial work is that although it appears simple in principle it is difficult in practice, because managers constantly have to ‘feel their way’ in carrying out tasks and roles. This reflects processes of iterative strategic action and exchange within cultures largely shaped by the demands of securing corporate survival amid intense sectoral competition. Watson thus sees managerial work as an inherently ‘emergent’ phenomenon, and presents us with a group of people who – located between large-scale organizational change and what happens practically on the ground – find themselves constantly in the process of making sense of their own biographies, of their importance in the business world, and what they are personally achieving as professionals.

In White-collar Blues (1996), Charles Heckscher explored the nature of managerial work in the context of the onset of large-scale corporate restructuring in the US during the late 20th century. Interviewing over 250 middle managers from corporations including AT&T, Dow Chemical, Du Pont, General Motors and Honeywell, Heckscher surprisingly found that managers often remained loyal to their firms even in the wake of extensive downsizing and rationalization. Nevertheless, he argued that loyalty frequently aided neither managers, who often felt disconcerted by organizational reforms they perceived as making little sense, nor corporations, which in attempting to retain employee fidelity often found they were trying to protect their personnel from what were even tougher realities. Heckscher argues that during much of the 20th century, large firms engaged in an implicit contract with managers, one that saw the provision of long-term employment security in return for employee subordination to the corporate will – an essentially paternalistic convention that delivered employment assurance to managers and operational stability to organizations. However, with the onset of widespread corporate restructuring in the late 20th century, Heckscher suggests that for the first time, managers became treated as a ‘variable cost’ rather than as part of the ‘fixed base’, a change accompanied by plunging levels of management morale. In this context, Heckscher explains how some of the more effective firms in his sample attempted to remedy this by moving beyond the traditional transaction ethic of paternalism. He describes, for example, the policies of four corporations that successfully converted the erstwhile loyalty ethic into one of a ‘professional ethic’, signalling a different type of ‘community of purpose’ constructed around new forms of corporate mission and resolve. In the process, Heckscher rejects conventional rationales for restructuring – such as the pressures associated with global competition – and argues instead that America’s corporate rebirth will be triggered by the emergence of ‘professional’ managers who ply their trade amidst a decline in bureaucratic procedures and the rise of entrepreneurial cultures – a climate in which he suggests corporate loyalty in the US can continue to flourish.

To return to an earlier work discussed, Mills (1953) had also described classical, bureaucratic, white-collar work as reflecting organizational rigidity and narrowness of scope, albeit with a degree of career certainty and job security for the manager. This position essentially presaged another major theoretical and practical reaction in the 1980s and 1990s, notably in the form of the considerable interest shown in Japanese-style management and managerial work (Morris et al., 1993; Pascale and Athos, 1981). Although ‘Japanization’ (Oliver and Wilkinson, 1991) purportedly increased empowerment and the devolvement of decision-making activities, critical accounts reported expansion of tasks, roles and responsibilities in its wake, and thus – when allied with headcount reduction – the onset of significant work intensification for managers. Moreover, whereas modern organizational restructuring has seen a shift from the types of collective endeavour associated with classical bureaucracy to new forms of corporate ‘individualization’ (Dawson, 2012) – reflecting, for example, personal productivity targets, performance-related pay and individual bonuses – researchers have since argued that rather than such phenomena reflecting managers operating under ‘post-bureaucracy’, large organizations inevitably need bureaucracy in one form or another to coordinate activities (du Gay, 2000; Hales, 2002; Jaques, 1990). Thus, what has emerged in recent corporate practice is the condition that Hales (2002: 51) calls ‘bureaucracy-lite’, where corporations adopt stratified structures, but underpinned by an ideology that sees managers increasingly accept wider spans of control, increased levels of responsibility and consequentially much enlarged workloads.

This is not therefore use of the concept of decentralization in the traditionally understood sense of Alfred Chandler writing about the history of strategy and structure at General Motors or DuPont (see Chandler, 1977; McCraw and Tedlow, 1998). Instead, the types of decentralization evident include devolvement of authority partly, or largely, as a consequence of cuts in employment – which have tended to see more, not less, centralization of authority, and as a consequence the reassertion of senior management prerogative (Iida and Morris, 2008; McCann et al., 2008, 2010). In this regard, the way in which the core corporate message is communicated is somewhat reminiscent of Mills’ (1953) description. Indeed, the devolvement of authority in this way largely involves expanding work for managers, in a situation where there is a constant search to increase managerial productivity via cost-cutting and retrenchment (Hassard and Morris, 2017) – with persistent cuts in expenditure over recent decades resulting in a similar scenario for public sector organizations (Farrell and Morris, 2003, 2007). However, whilst managerial work under modern corporate restructuring has possibly become more varied, it had also arguably become more intensive and demanding (see later).

In the post-2000 period, therefore, much research in this area has concentrated on whether the nature of managerial work has qualitatively changed, given purported shifts in corporate governance and organizational forms (Child and Rodrigues, 2003), with analysis often focusing on the changing identity of the manager, and especially the middle manager (Hales, 2005; Tengblad, 2006). During this period, research has often adopted a broader perspective for assessing the nature of managerial work, as in research that continues to describe internationally comparative trends (see Hassard et al., 2009). In such comparative studies, researchers have often offered a more sympathetic view when describing managerial work in corporations of ‘coordinated-market’ (Hall and Soskice, 2001) economies, such as Germany, Japan and Sweden. Authors commentating on business strategy and management style outside of the Anglo-American tradition have often pointed to ‘alternative’ ways of directing corporate affairs and economic matters more generally. In particular, they have highlighted alternatives to the enduring dependence on capital markets, for example in the form of ‘patient’ capital in economies such as Japan and Germany (Amable, 2003; Dore, 2000).

In contrast, the tone of accounts of corporate behaviour and managerial experience in ‘liberal-market’ economies, especially the USA and UK, has often been rather negative, notably when linked to the effects of large-scale organizational change on human resources, especially middle managers. Exceptions to this are accounts claiming managers have some leverage over the ‘strategy process’ (Balogun, 2003), or research arguing a case for retaining traditional managerial roles within modern organizational forms. Work on the latter has included the against-the-grain thesis of du Gay (2000, 2005) on the advantages of modern bureaucracy, and Huy’s (2001) plea in the Harvard Business Review for commentators to argue ‘in praise of middle managers’ in media reports, rather than denigrate their activities, which had become somewhat normative during the 1980s and 1990s, and notably so in the wake of Hammer and Champy (1993). Presaging such arguments, Pfeffer (1998) was highly critical of corporate America’s natural reaction to economic downturn being seemingly a knee-jerk one of ‘restructuring’ – variously cutting costs, posts and entitlements, with such measures directed at middle management in particular.

Indeed, by the 2000s the issue of corporate restructuring dominated many accounts of the nature of management and managerial work. In accounting for the everyday reality of corporate life, influential research took recourse again to ethnographic methods – such as in Barley and Kunda’s (2004) high-profile work on IT specialists in California, and Graham’s (2005) in-depth study of insurance staff in Japan. Many writers offered a picture of large corporations recurrently launching major structural change programmes in the face of intensified global competition. This offered a marked contrast with, for example, Mills’ (1953) analysis of half a century earlier – which, although far from offering an uplifting portrayal of managerial work, suggested extant philosophies of paternalism working to maintain a sense of job security for managers not readily evident in accounts from 2000 onwards. In fact, as we discuss shortly, accounts of corporate behaviour in advanced economies have pointed to a much harsher business environment globally in recent decades, and noted in particular the rise of progressively individualized and targets-based cultures characterized by incentivized pay systems for managers.

Finally, reflecting broadly on the research literature, we argue for a return to grounding accounts of managerial work in theories of social structure and political economy. This is advanced not only to tease out subjective and intersubjective interpretations of changing corporate environments, but also to understand better the economic, political and strategic drivers behind such changes – in other words, how the changing structures of contemporary capitalism impact upon managerial work, as relayed potentially in accounts possessing a ‘touch of realism’ (Beynon et al., 2002) or those assisted by ‘retroductive’ analysis (Reed, 2005). The internationalization of capital has accelerated and been transformed since the 1970s, including significant developments in the role and influence of multinationals, greater international merger and acquisition activity, and capital and labour being drawn from across the world into global commodity chains (ILO, 2015; OECD, 2017; UNCTAD, 2013). In this context, managerial labour has been subject to the vagaries of an ever more competitive business environment – one accompanied by considerable deregulation of product markets and associated with a predominantly neo-liberal economic agenda (Levin, 2016). International corporate expansion was a notable feature of late 20th century economic development (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 2002), as similarly was the growth of financial markets, which governments have often struggled to control (Glyn, 2006). These changes have reflected an era in which, for example, shareholder value logic, the leveraged buy-out, and (the 2008 financial crisis notwithstanding) global investment banking have come to dominate the economic stage, all in the spirit of advancing neo-liberal market-based operations (Davis, 2016). These are some of the reasons why we feel future accounts of managerial work should show greater sensitivity to questions of political economy in particular.

Corporate restructuring and managerial work

As we have argued, issues related to recurrent rounds of corporate restructuring have increasingly influenced the nature of managerial work. Recent decades have seen large publicly-listed corporations depicted as recurrently in the midst of major strategic and/or structural crises of one form or another. Often portrayed by business analysts or change consultants as problematic and sluggish ‘leviathans’, ‘dinosaurs’ or ‘giants’ (see Chandler and Malzlish, 2005; Crow, 2010; Kanter, 1989, respectively), such corporations are commonly characterized as weighed-down dysfunctionally by excessive levels of bureaucracy, and possessing systems no longer appropriate for an environment of hyper-competition in liberalized global markets (Hammer and Champy, 1993; Peters, 2012).

In turn, the hegemony of shareholder value logic (Lazonick and O’Sullivan, 2000; Mizruchi and Kirneldorf, 2005) is held to have pushed firms to become ‘post-bureaucratic’. This has involved changes based on outsourcing, delayering and downsizing in order for corporations to become leaner, flatter and more responsive (Heckscher and Donnellon, 1994), with waves of restructuring, often involving large-scale job losses, being reported in the media. The consequences for managers arising from such developments are multifaceted, but rarely portrayed in a positive light (Alvesson and Thompson, 2006; Hopfl, 2006; Johnson et al., 2009).

Although corporate restructuring is not a novel phenomenon, increasingly media and research reports have discussed the effects on managerial jobs and notably growing problems of managerial job insecurity. It has even been argued that an environment of uncertainly for managers can be promoted purposefully by corporations as a means of securing increases in managerial productivity (Hassard and Morris, 2017). In the UK in 2018, there were widespread announcements of job cuts among major corporations, partly reflecting industry-specific structural adjustments, but also wider corporate pressures, with significant announcements – for example, at British Telecom, Barclays Bank and Marks & Spencer. Indeed, on the day this article was completed, 23 November 2018, Vauxhall Motors, UK, announced significant job losses at its Ellesmere Port plant as part of a ‘restructuring’ exercise to make the plant more ‘competitive’ (Independent, The, online, 2018), while on the same day parent company General Motors announced they were closing plants in Canada and the US as a way to save $6 billion (Daily Mail, online, 2018). However, large-scale job losses have not been confined to ‘liberal-market’ economies, such as the US and the UK, but have also been felt across stakeholder-orientated ‘coordinated-market’ economies, such as Japan and Germany.

Moreover, this sustained squeeze on managerial jobs is not confined to manufacturing, as often highlighted in the media, but is now spread across a range of sectors, such as telecoms, retailing and financial services. As Hassard and Morris (2018a, b) noted, recent research in the London offices of a multinational consultancy revealed a key performance indicator for managers to be how much project work they could outsource to contracted consultants in India, given significantly lower compensation rates; similarly, Bowkett and Morris (2018) noted the transfer of managerial aspects of high-technology value chains from the UK to the Indian sub-continent, for similar reasons. In these instances, western managers could almost be seen as being the knowing architects of their own demise. In contrast, one group to emerge as relative ‘winners’ in this process has been elite senior managers benefiting from escalating salaries, bonuses and pensions, often received at the same time their corporations were experiencing major job losses (see Erturk et al., 2004; OECD, 2018).

Despite regular reports of structural change in large corporations, such organizational transformation is not always radical. Indeed, writers on business and management have often pointed to significant national differences in the extent to which corporate change is experienced as ‘sweeping’ or ‘drastic’, with firms in coordinated-market economies often perceived as more ‘stable’ employers in this regard (Matanle, 2003). Additionally, the organizational outcomes of corporate restructuring are not always so ‘post-bureaucratic’ as the more popular literature on strategic change would have us believe, certainly not in the literal sense of the term (Farrell and Morris, 2007; Hassard and Morris, 2018c; Hassard et al., 2009). In some senses there is a great deal of continuity in the nature of managerial work, even amid large-scale transformations. Despite ample rhetoric about the demise of managers (and middle managers in particular) under downsizing, delayering and other forms of ‘reengineering’ (Hammer and Champy, 1993), what remains in the middle layers of corporations are employees continuing to play pivotal roles in administrative operations. Furthermore, despite much corporate grandiloquence about the strategic and structural benefits of delayering, devolvement, outsourcing and network forms, plain top-down control remains the favoured means of organizing in most corporations.

This is not to deny, however, that there have been significant changes to (and greater pressures exerted on) managerial work in large corporations, irrespective of the national context in which such work is exercised (Greenhalgh and Rosenblatt, 2010). To make a historical point, the classic work of Berle and Means (1932) on the nature of corporations suggested that the more the modern corporation grew, the more powerful and anti-democratic it became. This is a prescient argument in the 21st century, given the concentration of power in large multinationals and their role, for example, in the 2008 global financial crisis. Indeed, in the midst of a seemingly habitual tendency in management studies to search for the ‘new’ (e.g. Suddaby et al., 2011), we would argue historical analyses of managerial work are useful in demonstrating both continuity and change in large corporations (see Drucker, 1947, 1974; Mills, 1953; Whyte, 1960). For this special issue, such analyses are particularly expedient as benchmarks against which to judge, for example, how issues of collegiality, loyalty and mutual gain may have been eroded. There is much contemporary empirical evidence, for instance, of disruption to traditional career paths as a consequence of delayering and attempts to reduce labour costs. Such studies have demonstrated how these trends can have significant and ostensibly negative consequences for managerial motivation, which senior managers are often struggling to address despite vaunted measures to increase employee ‘involvement’ and ‘empowerment’ (Barley and Kunda, 2004; Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Randolph, 1995) and irrespective of whether the corporation in question is German, Japanese, UK or US owned (Morris et al., 2008). Furthermore, it has been argued that such disruption is often accompanied by greater performance pressures, increased levels of work stress, yet reduced levels of job and career security (Hassard and Morris, 2018a; Hassard et al., 2009). Although arguably less severe in coordinated-market economies, nevertheless, managers in such economies have also witnessed the flattening of hierarchies, attenuation of loyalty to employing organizations, and work intensification as a consequence of recent corporate restructuring (Jackson, 2009; Jacoby, 2005; Morris et al., 2018b).

Thus, corporations have frequently made cuts to their managerial workforces as a consequence of large-scale restructuring, but particularly since the 1990s (Burke and Nelson, 1997; Worrall et al., 2016). What is perhaps counterintuitive, however, is that management headcount figures for big firms have also grown, for example, through merger and acquisition activity, businesses moving into new markets or (as often evidenced in Japanese and US corporations) employees simply being relabelled as ‘managers’, sometimes in lieu of a pay raise (a process analogous to ‘title creep’, which for many decades was exemplified by middle managers in US banks being relabelled ‘Vice Presidents’: see Sackett, 2012). This all forms part of what Littler and Innes (2004) notably termed the ‘paradox of managerial downsizing’.

Elsewhere, despite almost calamitous accounts of managers being stressed by increasing job insecurity (Burgard et al., 2009; Ferrie et al., 2002), quantitative reports have suggested numbers of jobs in large firms, notably in the US and UK, have remained relatively stable over recent decades (Froud et al., 2006), as have long-term tenure rates (Doogan, 2009), with this situation being mirrored in reports on Japan (Kambayashi and Kato, 2017). This, of course, points to a degree of stability and security in managerial employment (Fevre, 2007) – one that runs counter to the arguments of high-profile commentators such as Giddens (2000) and Sennett (1998), who reported sometimes alarmingly on the adverse impacts of ‘flexibility’ in employment systems. Indeed, White et al. (2004) provide what is seemingly a positive view on the issue, although they do express concerns about the effects of managers ‘overworking’.

Researchers from a ‘critical’ perspective, however, are often highly pessimistic about levels of managerial security and well-being in modern corporations, pointing regularly to examples of job loss, anxiety and heavy workloads (see Beynon et al., 2002; Green, 2006; Hodson, 2001). Thus, given the seemingly paradoxical nature of much of the literature, arguably analysts of organizational change and its managerial consequences should address what exactly the levels of change being proposed are, and what the impacts on managers are likely to be, before resorting to what can appear rather under-researched and polemical accounts of trends in corporate management. Arguably, Sennett’s (1998) work on The Corrosion of Character can be cited in this regard, in that it extrapolates grandly from what is arguably a rather slight empirical base.

Perhaps reflecting a degree of evidential uncertainty in the field, the international study of restructuring and its implications for managerial work by Hassard et al. (2009) came both to optimistic and pessimistic conclusions. Although managers welcomed more open and less authoritarian management styles, they were often, understandably, negative about features such as work intensification and the progressive dismantling of the work–home boundary. The latter was seen largely as a consequence of the amount of ‘stretch’ in contemporary management work, with this brought about largely by developments in information and communications technology, notably the BlackBerry from 1999, which brought with it the facility for managers to be contacted about work ‘anytime, anywhere’. This was a major feature highlighted in further research by the same team in the mid to late 2010s, which explored ‘work addiction’ amidst the ‘the new organizational ideology’ (see Hassard and Morris, 2018b; also McCann et al., 2008), here noting how new digital systems, such as the messaging platform WhatsApp, offered even greater potential for facilitating corporate surveillance over managers’ activities. Taken together, however, these studies offered little evidence of ‘post-bureaucracy’ in modern corporations, but rather a tendency for hybrid organizational forms to emerge – structures that may be better characterized as ‘neo-bureaucratic’.

In such studies, the reported pace of managerial work remained characteristically fraught, with managers typically undertaking long working days and dealing with a myriad of tasks. Whereas for younger managers such phenomena were often just part and parcel of the ‘new’ organizational ideology – with relatively long days, intensive work and insecure employment accepted as ‘the way things are’ – conversely, for experienced managers this could signal reduced loyalty to the company, brought on by lowered expectations of durable employment and linked to more circumscribed prospects for promotion. This was noted in the three countries studied by Hassard et al. (2009) – the US, UK and Japan – but noticeably so in Japan, where purported ‘lifetime’ employment and habitual loyalty to the corporation seemed increasingly moot phenomena (see also Morris et al., 2018a, b).

Given the often negative consequences linked to corporate restructuring and the fact that a large percentage of restructuring exercises fail (see Griffith, 2001), the question remains of why corporations so readily and recurrently undertake them. Cascio’s (1993, 1998) work in the US indicated downsizing is risky and often counterproductive, potentially leading to diminished morale and lower productivity. Furthermore, while Garrow and Stirling (2007) and Gifford et al. (2009) pointed to increases in unpaid working hours and stress among managers, Green (2006) notes that although wages and levels of affluence across OECD economies have increased, the quality of jobs has declined, in part because of increased managerial control and work intensification. So, again, the question arises as to why firms engage in such restructuring, notably given the often seemingly negative outcomes for managerial workforces?

In part, the answer lies in the increasing dependence of large corporations on financial markets, and particularly institutional investors’ cognizance of benefits from corporate cost-cutting (Golding, 2003), with managers and employees often being squeezed as a result (Froud et al., 2006). However, we should beware of becoming too obsessed with shareholder value arguments when considering corporate behaviour (Lazonick and O’Sullivan, 2000) and thus underestimating the importance of structural or historical factors, such as path dependency (Bebchuk and Roe, 1999; Schmidt and Spindler, 2003). Indeed, restructuring has been practised in economies (such as Japan and Germany) that are far less reliant on capital markets than liberal-market ones, suggesting that other institutional factors are at play (see Ahmadjian and Robbins, 2005; Doellgast, 2012). Furthermore, firms have frequently engaged in ‘false signalling’ and overestimated the extent of restructuring, particularly on headcount announcements (Baumol et al., 2003; Froud et al., 2006; Littler, 2006). Equally, however, equity financing and the role of institutional investors have increasingly influenced corporate strategy and thus firm management, for despite often disappointing results associated with restructuring, such exercises have significantly reduced labour and management costs (Cascio, 2002; Osterman et al., 2001). Thus, although various studies point to the deleterious impact of restructuring exercises on managers, notably below senior executive levels (Hales, 1986, 1999, 2002), recent studies point to restructuring continuing to be practised, albeit arguably in a more incremental fashion (Hassard and Morris, 2018a, b). The work of managers in future investigations therefore needs to be located in wider debates referencing the logic of shareholder value (Froud et al., 2006), the productivity and capacity of corporations and nations (Porter et al., 2005) and even firms’ human resource and other stakeholder capabilities (Hillman and Keim, 2001). Certainly, when researching corporate change in coordinated-market economies, such as Germany and Japan, there is a need to go beyond traditional research loci, and notably studies of manufacturing, which have tended to dominate empirical investigations (Doellgast, 2012; Morris et al., 2018a, b).

Problems, dilemmas and conundrums: Towards a research agenda

From the above analysis, a number of problems, dilemmas and even conundrums associated with the nature of contemporary managerial work become apparent. These variously reflect trends in the literature, suggesting, for example: rising managerial job insecurity (amid perceptions of an increasingly competitive global environment for corporations); stalled managerial careers (in a context of widespread corporate delayering and downsizing); inexorable curbs on management labour costs (involving related issues of managerial motivation and corporate loyalty); unresolved questions of managerial work identity (such as why and when managers are working in intensified regimes do they still appear attached to their jobs?); and finally, various connections between working time, work intensification and work–life balance (including the impact of new and increasingly mobile information and communications technologies on managerial work patterns). We would argue that these and possibly many other issues comprise a suitable agenda for further research into managerial work – an agenda that we now unpack.

Articles comprising this special issue

Having analysed historical and contemporary issues relevant to understanding the nature of managerial work, we now turn to the articles that comprise the substantive research content of this special issue. These articles report on investigations into a number of the analytical themes addressed and empirical gaps identified in this introduction. The four articles can be summarized in this respect as follows.

Carola Wolf’s article on managerial identity discusses whether managers can keep control of their careers based on private ideals and aspirations, or whether these have to be yielded in the face of the vagaries of modern day corporate life. Wolf’s article resonates with many of the themes discussed above, in suggesting that this question often represents a central concern for managers whose careers have been considerably affected by shifting business environments, the design of new organizational forms and related changes to work organization and human resource management. In developing this analysis, Wolf argues that managers can no longer put their faith conclusively in historically normative ‘linear’ models of the managerial career, for the modern corporate environment stresses the need for managers to be more elastic, and essentially to become adept at managing their own careers, a situation she feels is well expressed in recent notions like the ‘protean’ career. As the argument develops, Wolf takes recourse to narrative identity theory to examine how managers can build a protean identity, and in particular discusses how narrative practices can serve to bolster the shaping, realizing and protecting of this identity. Ultimately, from a life histories analysis of managers experiencing substantial career fluctuations, Wolf identifies a set of narrative ‘building blocks’ at the core of protean identity building, with these including ‘discovery of conflicting expectations’, ‘exploration of one’s own values and capabilities’, ‘commitment to one’s own path’ and ‘defending that path’. Importantly, this approach links changes in the macro-economic environment to how managers perceive these changes in terms of career implications. Ultimately, the article calls for a more holistic perspective on managerial careers, one that considers the influence of the social context of work, thus pushing the debate beyond the narrow boundary confines of the workplace.

Ricardo Azambuja and Gazi Islam’s (2019) article discusses kindred experiential issues, albeit through a different analytical lens and using a different research methodology. The article examines the experience of middle management employment through the concept of ‘boundary work’, characterized as that of negotiation between the multiple roles managers play in the ‘gaps’ between organizational groups. An ethnography of a Brazilian accounting firm, the study highlights the ambivalence of middle managerial work, with on the one hand managers having awareness of their roles as ‘proactive and reflexive agents’, but on the other as ‘lacking autonomy and hence a sense of belonging’. This tension expresses itself as a contrast between the forces of emancipation and alienation, which is reflective of the tensions that reverberate through the lives of middle managers. Azambuja and Islam highlight that these tensions are particularly acute for middle managers, and that their roles vacillate between emancipation (as expressed through a sense of ‘mastery, empowerment and reflexivity’) and alienation (expressed by ‘fatigue, lack of self-determination and detachment from their profession and co-workers’). Ultimately, Azambuja and Islam debate these factors and their consequences for the nature of managerial work in the light of results suggesting managers habitually swing between being ‘boundary subjects’ (‘agential and reflexive mediators’) and ‘boundary objects’ (‘interfacing and coordination devices’), with this analysis highlighting how middle management work is often negotiated between the strategic and operational levels of the organization.

A similar tension is also noted by Isabelle Bouty and Carole Drucker-Godard’s article, which focuses upon the work of managers as ‘coordinators’. While acknowledging that coordination has long been accepted as a key managerial function, they argue that the literature on how managers coordinate is under-theorized and lacking in grounded empirical depth, especially regarding temporal aspects of the manager’s role. Using a practice-based theoretical approach, they contrast this with previous work on the nature of managerial work that, they argue, has been dominated by formal and normative approaches to capturing its essence. While acknowledging how many influential studies (notably by Henry Mintzberg) have highlighted the messy and complex nature of day-to day management activities, Bouty and Drucker-Godard suggest a need to theoretically and methodologically integrate elements of ‘action and structure’ through better understanding of the minutiae of the manager’s purposeful behaviours and actions in relation to broader socio-organizational concerns (see Korica et al., 2017; Tengblad, 2012) – in other words through seeking to ‘praxeologize’ coordinating phenomena. Empirically, the study examines the case of the skipper and crew of a racing sailboat to illustrate how managerial work is pivotal, in situ, to acts of coordination as they occur. This is explained principally through analysing how processes of ‘circulation’ are maintained in terms of managing various combinations of coordination mechanisms. In this respect, the study contributes innovatively to the literature on managerial work and notably by placing rhythmicity and the temporal engagement of the manager at the heart of our understanding of the enduring flow of managerial activities.

Lastly, Amanda Peticca-Harris’s article represents a case study of emotions in managerial work. Contributing to the recent literature on ‘compassionate organization’, the article concerns focally the sudden death of a restaurant employee and the need to cope with grief while at the same time managing emotional labour to maintain the organization’s commercial operations. The article basically asks two questions: ‘how do you manage a team following the death of an employee?’ and ‘can managerial responses to suffering … be compassionate within a decentralized structure?’ In what is basically analysis of the failure of managerial work, narrative-based findings describe material conditions that can ‘impede, disavow and inhibit’ the compassion process, with this explained from the viewpoint of managers and their essentially ineffective attempts to assuage the anguish of the grieving team. Through this detailed case analysis, Peticca-Harris goes against the grain of much research in the field by illuminating the dynamics of managerial failure rather than success. In the process, she extends significantly our understanding of the management and mismanagement of grief at work.

Conclusions

In this article, therefore, we have analysed a range of issues relevant to understanding the changing nature of managerial work. Having provided context for this investigation through a modern historical review of the literature on managerial work, we discussed the effects of organizational restructuring on management arising from corporate campaigns promoting ‘post-bureaucratic’ systems. Extending this discussion to how restructuring affects managers in their everyday work, we focused subsequently on the perceptions and realities of mounting job insecurity and career uncertainty, an analysis that drew frequently upon our own empirical investigations in this field. The article concluded by outlining the main arguments and contributions of four articles on managerial work related variously to our discussions of workplace perceptions and organizational change.