Leo McCann

Normalized Intensity: The New Labour Process of Middle Management

Based on qualitative interviews (n e 64) within five UK organizations that have embarked on large-scale restructuring (including delayering, downsizing, culture change, role redesign, lean production) we argue that middle managers are currently experiencing significant and progressive work and personal pressures. Performance is monitored more closely, hours and intensity of work are increasing, roles and tasks are changing frequently, and prospects for promotion are downscaled within flattened hierarchies. Whereas middle managers report increased levels of autonomy and skill, are often well remunerated, and frequently appear motivated (at least in the private sector), we suggest their burgeoning grievances over working hours, role pressures and promotion prospects have worrying implications for the future performance of UK industry. We argue further that the motivation for corporations to embark on such large-scale restructuring is best understood with reference to the incessant demands of international capitalism. We conclude that such restructuring, and the personal managerial experiences that result from it, is in keeping with many, but crucially not all, of the trends predicted by Bravermanian labour process theory. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2008.

New Organizational Forms, Human Resource Management and Structural Convergence? A Study of Japanese Organizations

The prolonged, 10-year, economic downturn in Japan has had far-reaching implications for structure and human resource management (HRM) practices in Japanese organizations. In particular, the demise of hierarchical and group structures has been predicted, together with the end of distinctive HRM features such as lifetime employment and seniority-based pay. Using interview-based empirical data with a variety of Japanese organizations, this paper argues that such organizations are indeed moving towards flatter, less hierarchical structures. Moreover, there are marked shifts in HRM practices. In particular, the seniority-based pay system has been subject to reform. However, other practices have proved considerably more robust than the popular literature would suggest. For example, the lifetime employment system, although under significant pressure, remains largely intact. Indeed, we will argue that certain other key practices are being sacrificed to maintain job security.

Middle Managers, the New Organizational Ideology and Corporate Restructuring: Comparing Japanese and Anglo-American Management Systems

Middle managers are facing major workplace pressures in an era of widespread corporate and public sector restructuring in Japan, USA and UK. This paper, based on interviews with senior/HR managers and middle managers in 30 large organizations, suggests that middle managers today face heavy workloads and limited promotion prospects. More significantly, the central task of middle management is changing from managing subordinates in hierarchies towards managing projects in flattened organizations. These changes are in accordance with a new organizational ideology that continues to influence change in public and private organizations in co-ordinated or free market economies. While this ideology has spread rapidly, it has not managed to achieve hegemony. Organizations can be difficult to change and bureaucratic elements will persist despite the changes. The Japanese co-ordinated model and the US and UK free market model are both subject to similar pressures, but the actual organizational changes work themselves out in different ways because of differing institutional arrangements.

Casting the lean spell: The promotion, dilution and erosion of lean management in the NHS:

Lean thinking has recently re-emerged as a fashionable management philosophy, especially in public services. A prescriptive or mainstream literature suggests that lean is rapidly diffusing into public sector environments, providing a much-needed rethink of traditional ways of working and stimulating performance improvements. Our study of the introduction of lean in a large UK public sector hospital challenges this argument. Based on a three-year ethnographic study of how employees make sense of lean ‘adoption’, we describe a process in which lean ideas were initially championed, later diluted and ultimately eroded. While initially functioning as a ‘mechanism of hope’ (Brunsson, 2006) around which legitimacy could be generated for tackling longstanding work problems, over time both ‘sellers’ and ‘buyers’ of the concept mobilized lean in ambiguous ways, to the extent that the notion was rendered somewhat meaningless. Ultimately, our analysis rejects current prescriptive or managerialist discourses on lean while offering support for prior positions that would explain such management fashions in terms of the ‘life cycle of a fad’.

Terms and conditions apply: management restructuring and the global integration of post-socialist societies

The ‘transition’ from state socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and the substantial economic reforms in China, are two of the most significant economic and social processes in recent history. However, despite a growing literature dealing with management in post-socialist societies, there have been few attempts to establish a paradigmatic overview of the underlying causes and drivers of the transformation processes. In this paper we lay out a framework for understanding the emerging dynamics of management and organization in post-socialist societies. In doing so, we employ three related levels of analysis relating to: 1) the broader political economy in which nations and companies are located within the global hierarchy; 2) the different national level institutions that give form to the nature of management restructuring; and 3) the social relations of production at the level of the workplace, which determine the forms of labour management. Central to our argument is the view that the emerging forms of management, while differing according to the distinct terms and conditions under which they are integrated into the world economy and the institutional means by which they meet the challenges and opportunities offered by the world market, are tending towards the subordination of the work systems to the neoliberal form of world capitalism. In particular, this entails the establishment of the most benign environment possible for the expansion of capital, entailing the augmentation of managerial prerogative and ‘low-road’ employment practices.

Restructuring Managerial Labour in the USA, the UK and Japan: Challenging the Salience of ‘Varieties of Capitalism’

This article provides a cross-national, qualitative investigation into the experiences of middle managers in large organizations in the USA, the UK and Japan, following organizational restructuring. Despite well-documented national differences in administrative heritage, institutional regimes or ‘varieties of capitalism’, our data point towards considerable similitude across the three countries in terms of a general expression of the need for change, and the concrete impacts of organizational reforms on managerial work. Specifically we analyse the changing nature of work roles, career paths, working hours and spans of control of mid-level managers in five large firms in each of the three countries. The data demonstrate that middle managers in all three countries face fundamental changes to key areas of their work experience. In Japan, although changes do not amount to a genuine shift towards ‘Anglo-Saxon’ institutions or business practices, the robust use of organizational reforms with very similar aims and underpinning assumptions to those used in the USA and the UK entails similar impacts in terms of work processes of middle managers across the three nations. This shared experience involved the augmentation of middle management skill levels, responsibilities and span of control, but alongside the downgrading of career expectations, and increased workload and work intensity. We argue that these changes are in keeping with some, but not all, of the features explained and predicted in Bravermanian labour process theory.

Extreme Work / Normal Work: Intensification, storytelling and hypermediation in the (re)construction of ‘the new normal’

The label ‘extreme’ has traditionally been used to describe out-of-the-ordinary and quasi-deviant leisure subcultures which aim at an escape from commercialized and over-rationalized modernity or for occupations involving high risk, exposure to ‘dirty work’ and a threat to life (such as military, healthcare or policing). In recent years, however, the notion of ‘extreme’ is starting to define more ‘normal’ and mainstream realms of work and organization. Even in occupations not known for intense, dirty or risky work tasks, there is a growing sense in which ‘normal’ workplaces are becoming ‘extreme’, especially in relation to work intensity, long-hours cultures and the normalizing of extreme work behaviours and cultures. This article explores extreme work via a broader discussion of related notions of ‘edgework’ and ‘extreme jobs’ and suggests two main reasons why extremity is moving into everyday organizational domains; the first relates to the acceleration and intensification of work conditions and the second to the hypermediation of, and increased appetite for, extreme storytelling. Definitions of extreme and normal remain socially constructed and widely contested, but as social and organizational realities take on ever more extreme features, we argue that theoretical and scholarly engagement with the extreme is both relevant and timely.

Men Under Pressure: Representations of the 'Salaryman' and His Organization in Japanese Manga

In this paper we analyse representations of the Japanese salaryman and Japanese organization in Japanese manga, or graphic novels, during the turbulent decades from the mid-1980s to the present day. We argue that manga presents salarymen protagonists in a sympathetic yet not uncritical light, and that it displays support for and criticism of both the Japanese and American organizational models. In addition, we describe how these manga offer important critical challenges from the world of popular culture to the direction of change in Japanese business organizations since the 1980s. Moreover, we suggest that the manga may also provide salarymen with opportunities for critically re-evaluating their own working situations and for developing methods for surviving and thriving under the pressures of working within contemporary Japanese business organizations.

The lost health service tribe: In search of middle managers

This chapter suggests potential consequences for the NHS of widespread denigration of middle management. It is based on ethnographic research in the UK NHS. In 1994 Tony Watson published In search of management, continuing an academic preoccupation with elaborating the lived experience of being a manager. This chapter derives from the opening phases of a study in this tradition. He argued that managers, in shaping their own identities, also shaped organisational work activities and we extend this argument to demonstrate that negative associations to middle managerial identity have the potential to allow for strategic gaps in co-ordination at the middle reaches of NHS organisations as managers have to handle increasingly complex, fluid and heavy workloads, while facing daily challenges from other NHS stakeholders.

Employment relations and managerial work: an international perspective

the subprime financial crisis that erupted in 2007 has once again stimulated widespread concern about the structure, behaviour and ethics of large corporations (especially american corporations). most discussion has focused at the summit of the organization, on corporate governance, new financial instruments and executive reward systems (bogle, 2008; kaplan, 2008; Walsh, 2008). several analysts have argued that the american ‘model’ of business has lost much of its appeal following the subprime disaster (capelli, 2009; Whitley, 2009). While not wishing to dismiss these concerns, this chapter suggests that there are also some other major problems taking place on a daily basis in organizational life, further down the corporate hierarchy, that are equally as important as the debates about ‘topend’ corporate governance. in light of recent events in the corporate landscape, which have involved increasingly tough international competition alongside financial crises, scandals and corporate failures, the issue of just how wellrun large companies are is of major concern. amidst this discussion, there is concern in the academic (Green, 2006) as well as the more popular (bunting, 2004; Fraser, 2001) literature about a distinct decline in the quality of working life for millions of employees in advanced oecd nations. this has long been an issue for bluecollar work but in recent decades it has also become increasingly relevant to whitecollar, middle class occupations such as professionals and managers (cameron et al., 1991; hochschild, 2003). new organizational forms have involved flatter hierarchies, which squeeze out middle management positions. but has restructuring actually had the desired effects for corporations? Given the frantic work pace that middle managers are often exposed to, organizational errors, inefficiencies and failures may also have become more widespread. ours is an era which seems to privilege speed and change over structure and stability. but for what purpose? in short, what have these changes in the organizational