Mark Gatenby

Employee voice and engagement: connections and consequences

This paper considers the relationship between employee voice and employee engagement. Employee perceptions of voice behaviour aimed at improving the functioning of the work group are found to have both a direct impact and an indirect impact on levels of employee engagement. Analysis of data from two organisations confirms that the direct connection between perceptions of voice behaviour and engagement is mediated by both employee trust in senior management and the employee–line manager relationship. Key concepts are outlined, and the implications of the findings for future research and for the management of engagement are discussed.

Managing Change, or Changing Managers? The role of middle managers in UK public service reform

Abstract Drawing upon interview data from three case study organizations, we examine the role of middle managers in UK public service reform. Using theory fragments from organizational ecology and role theory, we develop three role archetypes that middle managers might be enacting. We find that rather than wholesale enactment of a ‘change agent’ role, middle managers are balancing three predominant, but often conflicting, change-related roles: as ‘government agent’, ‘diplomat administrator’ and, less convincingly, ‘entrepreneurial leader’. Central government targets are becoming the main preoccupation for middle managers across many public services and they represent a dominant constraint on allowing ‘managers to manage’.

Managerial perspectives on employee engagement

Background Senior management and leadership are believed to be responsible for the employment of such initiatives and their own level of engagement appears to have a strong impact on the levels of employees’ engagement, theory suggests. This qualitative research explores the perceived levels, drivers and benefits, as well as the levels of managerial engagement at Organisation A, a leading support services company in the UK. This working paper means to contribute to previous studies of engagement conducted by the Kingston Business School Employee Engagement Consortium.

Book Review: Daniel Defoe and the Bank of England: The Dark Arts of Projectors

At a time when organizational scholarship has become ‘boxed-in’ (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2014) by narrow over-specialization, conformity and risk-aversion this book is a ‘box-breaker’. This is not an accident but the conscious attempt by the authors to defy classification – ‘[t]his is an interdisciplinary book, in the sense that it lies between categories that are normally assumed to be discrete, comprehensible and solid. We want to show that they are actually rather dubious, puny boundaries that we have made, not things that are there in the world’ (p. 2). The work is a scholarly debut for Valerie Hamilton, previously a teacher, English literature lecturer, and HR consultant. The text is based on her PhD thesis (Hamilton, 2013) which was supervised by critical organizational theorist and second author of the book, Martin Parker. Since Against management (2002), Parker has been productively building up an ‘alternative’ catalogue of anti-managerialist polemic, including Utopia and organization (2003), The dictionary of alternatives (2007), Alternative business: Outlaws, crime and culture (2011), and most recently the Routledge companion to reinventing management education (Steyaert, Beyes, & Parker, 2016). This book flows out, or is perhaps ‘thrown out’, from the vitality of this unruly scholarly project. The 200 pages of text are organized into six chapters. Chapter one – ‘Novels, and Banks, and Disciplines’ – is the closest we are given to a thesis-framing chapter. Setting the scene in the ‘age of projects’ at the turn of the 18th century we are introduced to the central protagonist, Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) – inventor, businessman, writer, politician, and secret agent. The narrative is based on his pioneering life and publishing career, both as one the first English authors to write about business and economics (the non-fiction work The complete English tradesman (2015 [1726]) being described as the first management textbook) and, more importantly, being identified as the founder of the novel with Robinson Crusoe (2008 [1719]) and Moll Flanders (1993 [1722]) becoming the classic examples of the genre. Moll Flanders is chosen as the more formative and suggestive of Defoe’s work, and is used throughout the book as a comparative case study. We should note here that Defoe is barely acknowledged in the management and organization literature. A search suggests there is only a single reference to his work in the archive of Organization Studies, so it is worthwhile introducing him as an organizational scholar with much to offer. A supporting role in the book is given to William Paterson (1658–1719), the founder of the Bank of England and a contemporary of Defoe. We are informed that the project to create the Bank can be considered similar, both in its speculative ‘projecting’ emergence and in its form, to writing a 663456OSS0010.1177/0170840616663456Organization StudiesBook Review research-article2016