Glenn Morgan

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...

THE CONCEPT OF STRATEGY IN SOCIOLOGY: A NOTE OF DISSENT

This paper takes up the debate on strategy initiated by Crow (Sociology 23). It argues that the concept of strategy has been uncritically appropriated by sociology. It has been treated as though it were an unproblematic concept, whereas in fact it is embedded within specific discourses and has particular social effects. In particular, Crow fails to consider the explicit use of the concept of strategy in two key areas of social life - the military and business organisation. Had he considered these areas, he would have noted that the concept of strategy needs understanding in terms of its role in reproducing specific sets of hierarchically organised social relations. We argue that utilising the concept of strategy in other areas of social life has similar power effects. In our view, strategy must be treated as a topic of sociological analysis, not as a resource for explaining social life.

Gendering Jobs: Corporate Strategy, Managerial Control and the Dynamics of Job Segregation:

The paper argues that the understanding of gender relations at work necessitates an explicit consideration of corporate strategy and managerial practices. Through the detailed examination of relations within a financial services company, we show how certain important issues of corporate strategy revolve around the gendered nature of particular jobs. The struggle within senior management to develop a corporate strategy was reflected in the lower levels of the organization in a struggle between particular groups over the maintenance of gendered identities and the control of particular work settings. The struggle between different groups of men, as well as between men and women, was conducted in terms of who was best able to contribute to the success of the companys corporate strategy. The paper argues that an important dimension of the gendered order in work settings is to be located in the dynamics of corporate strategy formation and development in organizations. Analyses of gender at work, it is argued, need to take into account some of the issues of management control and corporate strategy.

Barriers to transformation: Beyond bureaucracy and the market conditions for collaboration in health and social care

The post‐1990 health reforms in health and social care have resulted in quasi‐markets, centralized funding and an acceptance of top‐down managerialism.The analysis of contracting within the public sector has focused on the extent to which the market has affected equity, access and choice for users ‐ but it has also had a tremendous impact on staff, staff morale and their relationships. Whilst policy makers demand joint practice in order to deliver continuous care, the market culture has resulted in competitive or depressed behaviour amongst professional managers and support staff. The bureaucratic public administrations were criticized for reinforcing rigid departmentalization and a stagnant culture ‐ the contracting environment and reductionist performance management (NPM and managerialism) appear to be having a similar blocking effect on those staff developing new relationships and working beyond establishment boundaries. This paper outlines what are perceived to be the barriers to social transformation in health and social care services, as relayed by those actively engaged in building bridges across professions and agencies. The research input is based on a mid‐stream ESRC Management Innovation Project.

Leadership and corporate strategy: Toward a critical analysis

Abstract The paper examines the increased interest among leadership writers in the issue of corporate strategy and corporate culture. Academic, consultant, and practitioner literature has increasingly focused on the way in which leadership constitutes effective organizations through shaping values and culture. This has led leadership studies away from the examination of the micro-processes of group formation with its concomitant problems of measurement and analysis and towards the consideration of the role of senior management in leadership. However, the paper rgues, that there has not yet been sufficient critical analysis of the role of leadership in these circumstances. It is argued that corporate leadership of this sort needs to be understood as a specific set of discourses and practices which has particular conditions of possibility. These are located in the changing nature of industry and management in the current era. It is argued that in order to advance, leadership studies need to problematize the discourse of ‘leaders” themselves, rather than accepting them as adequate accounts of how organizations work.

Constructing Consumers and Consumer Protection: the Case of the Life Insurance Industry in the United Kingdom

Consumer protection is now a central feature of political discourse in western society. The re-emergence of the widespread belief that the free market is the best means for ensuring the public good is coupled with a recognition that an unregulated market can under certain circumstances become monopolistic and disadvantageous to the consumer. Accordingly, some sort of consumer protection is necessary to ensure that this does not occur. In this respect, politicians have been influenced by the emergence in the UK of a powerful ‘consumer’ lobby, associated with specialist organisations such as the Consumers Association and the National Consumer Council, as well as with certain sections of the press, radio and television.

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