Andrew Sturdy

The Consultancy Process - An Insecure Business?

This paper examines the practices and perceptions of management consultants and their clients. The existing literature, which emphasizes managerial anxiety in accounting for the persistent use of consultants and, relatedly, the transience of management ideas is critically developed. It is argued that such accounts tend to be abstracted from the power relations of organizations and capitalism and to portray management as passive victims of confident consultants. An alternative interactive model is proposed, which is based on reciprocal and self‐defeating concerns of clients and consultants to secure a sense of identity and control. This is explored empirically, highlighting the hitherto neglected active role of managers in resisting consultancy and the pressures and anxieties experienced by consultants. The account selectively draws on secondary sources as well as interview, documentary and survey research of IT strategy consultants and clients in the UK financial services sector.

The Emotions of Control: A Qualitative Exploration of Environmental Regulation:

Processes of control remain central to managerial and critical theories of organization, but their inherently emotional form has been largely neglected. The experience and expression of emotions are more than simply objects and outcomes of control, they also shape its context, processes, and consequences. Drawing upon observations of interpersonal encounters between environmental regulatory inspectors and industrial managers in the U.K., an emotional framing of the dynamics of control is developed. This presents emotion as a condition and consequence of interacting socioeconomic roles and power structures such as those associated with occupations, gender, and capitalism. It also provides a way of analyzing control that is sensitive to its emotional characteristics and may be applied to other, more conventional control contexts.

Customer service : empowerment and entrapment

Customer service is at the centre of many recent changes in work and organisations and is often celebrated as being of benefit to all. This book explores the real nature of customer service from different critical perspectives drawing on a wide range of sectors internationally. n nA provocative and insightful work aimed at students of organisations and management as well as thoughtful practitioners.

The Consumer Rules

Marketing has traditionally deployed the rhetoric of consumer sovereignty and the efficiency of market relations to legitimize its role as an academic discipline and as a management practice. Draws on theoretical reflections and empirical field work in financial services to question elements of this rhetoric. It is only in recent years that, as a result of dramatic changes in the regulation and structuring of the industry, financial services has begun to subscribe to marketing as a basis for distribution and sales. Even then there is some question as to how prevalent the use of marketing concepts is in financial services. In deconstructing the rhetoric of marketing, also provides a fresh and sceptical view about its potential to deliver the benefits it claims, except perhaps in a limited sphere of the financial services. Many of the limitations of marketing, it is argued, revolve around the problematic nature of its assumptions about the consumer and the contradictory tension between claims to satisfy con...

Marketing the Soul: from the Ideology of Consumption to Consumer Subjectivity

It comes as no surprise to recognise that just as the physical sciences facilitated the control over and exploitation of nature for human purposes, so the social sciences have been massively implicated in the exercise of power in the management of populations and individual subjects. Foucault (1973, p. 345) drew our attention to the transition in nineteenth-century Western culture whereupon human beings transformed themselves from being merely the agents of knowledge to also being its object. However, the development of the human sciences was not just about adding another object to the scientific enterprise; the human subjects of its concern were already producing representations of the life, production and language by which their existence was governed. In short, the human sciences have as their object of knowledge beings who themselves have a prior claim to produce such knowledge for themselves in their everyday lives. Theories about human life are, then, second-order constructs or theories relating to everyday first-order theoretical representations (Giddens, 1979a, p. 12, 1984, p. 284; see also Mouzelis, 1993, p. 688).

National Management Styles: A Comparative Study of the Strategy of Bancassurance in Britain and France

During the 1980s, many banking and financial institutions across Europe took up the strategy of bancassurance or Allfinanz. In broad terms, the strategy referred to the goal of selling both insurance and banking products through an integrated distribution system in which existing bank branch networks were crucial. There have been a number of studies by major consultancies evaluating the extent to which national financial systems have adjusted to this model. Most of these studies take the notion of a bancassurance strategy for granted. They assume that within the confines of different regulatory systems, the goal of bancassurance is the same and therefore managerial practices and knowledge of the strategy itself and its implementation process can be transferred across national boundaries.

Introducing Strategic Discourse

This chapter marks a shift in our analysis of change towards the dynamics of organizations operating within and simultaneously shaping the contexts which we have described earlier. At a broad level, our approach is to examine how organizations and fields link together through the development of particular discourses and practices. As we described in Chapter 1, discourses constitute ways of understanding situations and thereby relate to modes of acting upon and controlling contexts. As discourses emerge from a set of material and social conditions, they give the social world a new form and meaning and may become embedded in distinctive managerial practices. Thus, the discourse establishes the ‘truth’ of its presuppositions through constructing a world in its own image. This ‘truth’ defines and works upon the subjectivity of actors as well as the material practices in which the actors are embedded. Such a process does not necessarily imply acceptance and internalization on the part of the actors. These latter states are only one of a range of, often fragile, responses to managerial discourses – others may include rejection, resistance, adaptation or ambivalence. Furthermore, there are multiple, competing and sometimes contradictory discourses which exist in modern societies, and therefore it is crucial to identify which discourses become particularly dominant and influential in particular contexts, why and what their consequences are. This defines our interest in discourses within financial services. Our previous analysis of growing uncertainties within the sector has led us to the view that in response to these changes, discourses began to emerge to reestablish a sense of stability and control. These discourses were elaborated and carried into the financial services sector by many different actors. In what follows we seek to describe this process and how it impacted on the various actors analysed in the previous chapters.

The Social Approach to Organizational Change

Over the last two decades, the issue of organizational change has assumed central importance within the study of business and management. Indeed, sometimes one might imagine that radical change is a new experience or observation in the history of work and employment. Particular attention has been given to broad changes – the pace of technological ‘development’, the internationalization of markets and the emergence of new competitors – as well as the ways in which organizations are (re-)building their structures, strategies and cultures in order to adapt to and shape the new circumstances. How such organizational changes are achieved and the conditions of their emergence and, for many, ‘success’ have become central questions for organization and management theory. In this introduction, we present a critical examination of some of the main approaches to these issues. We then go on to outline a largely separate literature which has informed our own approach and introduce how it has been developed in the analysis of change in the UK financial services sector.

Strategy Discourse and Financial Services: Enter the Management Consultants and IT

Our general argument about strategy can now be linked to the previous chapters. We have seen how, during the 1960s and 1970s, the organizational field which characterized the financial services in the UK began to break up. Actors within firms, aided and pushed by key outside interests such as shareholders, the government and management consultancies, began to search for ways of understanding what was happening and, in the process, of exerting some control over their futures. In this process, the ‘need for strategy’ began to loom as a central part of their transformation process. They began to articulate this new language and to work out its effects. In the process, old practices and languages began to fall by the wayside or to be reconstructed from the point of view of strategy. These processes were by no means painless. They involved the ejection of certain organizations and individuals from the industry, the repositioning of firms (which had implications for the status, rewards and careers of individuals within them) and the reconstruction of relations between the firms, the state and consumers (which had effects on the financial well-being of millions of people). These processes of change were neither smooth nor unidirectional

Changing Work Experiences and Practices: From Black Coats to Service Smiles

In this chapter, we explore the ways in which companies have sought to reshape and control employees in accordance with strategic and consumer discourses. Some observers have linked these changes to certain dimensions of the discourse of ‘strategic HRM (human resource management)’ (e.g. Storey, 1995; Cressey and Scott, 1992). Indeed, Personnel practitioners in the industry have, like those in IT and marketing discussed earlier, sought to transform themselves into ‘strategic’ (HRM) actors. However, this is not our main focus here (see Boxall, 1996; Purcell, 1995; Watson, 1995). Rather, we wish to draw out in more detail the organizational changes discussed in the previous two chapters and what they mean for the nature and experience of employment in financial service companies. In doing so, we consider the ways in which subjects respond to new and emerging discourses. In particular, we explore what is probably the main aspect of change and, given some variation across organizations and sectors in the field (Egan and Shipley, 1995; Storey et al., 1997), one that appears to be more or less common – the shift to the employee as market/consumer-oriented and associated changes in forms of management control.