Mark Learmonth

Autoethnography and academic identity: glimpsing business school doppelgängers

Throughout our adult lives we have both been haunted by a certain sense of doubleness—a feeling of dislocation, of being in the wrong place, of playing a role. Inspired by Stevenson’s novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde we explore this doubleness through evocative, dual, autoethnographic accounts of academic conferences. By analysing our stories in an iterative process of writing, reading, rewriting and rereading, we seek to extend the reach of much recent autoethnographic research. Presenting ourselves as objects of research, we show how, for us, contemporary academic identity is problematic in that it necessarily involves being (at least) ‘both’ Jekyll and Hyde. In providing readings of our stories, we show how autoethnography can make two contributions to the study of identity in organizations. The first is that autoethnographic accounts may provide scholars with new forms of empirical material—case studies in identity work. The second contribution highlights the value of experimenting with unorthodox approaches—such as explicitly using novels and other literary sources to study identity.

Leadership and charisma: A desire that cannot speak its name?:

Leadership has proved impossible to define, despite decades of research and a huge number of publications. This article explores managers’ accounts of leadership, and shows that they find it difficult to talk about the topic, offering brief definitions but very little narrative. That which was said/sayable provides insights into what was unsaid/ unsayable. Queer theory facilitates exploration of that which is difficult to talk about, and applying it to the managers’ talk allows articulation of their lay theory of leadership. This is that leaders evoke a homoerotic desire in followers such that followers are seduced into achieving organizational goals. The leader’s body, however, is absent from the scene of seduction, so organizational heteronormativity remains unchallenged. The article concludes by arguing that queer and critical leadership theorists together could turn leadership into a reverse discourse and towards a politics of pleasure at work.

Some unintended effects of teamwork in healthcare.

Teamwork has been emphasised as a key feature of health service reform, essential for safe, efficient and patient-centred care. Bringing together literatures from the sociology of healthcare and organizational theory, we examine how the teamwork phenomenon plays out in practice. Drawing upon material from two ethnographic studies, conducted in an operating theatre and a medical-records department in separate UK NHS hospitals, we explore some of the discursive teamwork practices of healthcare staff. Our analysis presents a very different picture from the normative, evangelistic promotion of teamwork within much management and health policy writing. We reveal how the ambiguity of teamwork opens up opportunities for a complex, diverse range of responses to the managerial discourse among diverse occupational groups, mobilizing the discourse to enact identity in different ways. We highlight how teamwork discourse can be instrumentally co-opted in the reproduction of the very occupational divisions it is designed to ameliorate, or simply ignored as irrelevant when compared to more attractive forms of collective identity. These responses challenge both those who believe that teamwork is a solution to problems in healthcare, as well as those concerned about the oppressive effects of pervasive managerialism.

Making health services management research critical: a review and a suggestion

This piece reviews the qualitative research literature on NHS management published since 1990. It suggests that much of the established work in this field takes for granted managerial assumptions that are consequently not subjected to sustained critical examination. It is argued therefore that this research has tended to create a version of the world that supports elite interests whilst appearing to be disinterested. A framework for seeing management in a radically different manner is also proposed - Critical Management Studies. Its approaches to analysing management and organisation are offered in the belief that they articulate the kind of challenges to orthodox views that many with an interest in health care are likely to find attractive and perhaps emancipatory.

Can critical management studies ever be ‘practical’? A case study in engaged scholarship

What happens when you try to engage with management practice as a critical management scholar by actually doing management? Although there have been calls for critical scholars to attempt such engagement, little is known about the practical challenges and learning that may be involved. This article therefore provides a case study that details some of the experiences one of us had when working as a manager while trying to remain true to his critical sensibilities. The story suggests that transforming management practice will be a constant struggle, and that the difficulties of achieving even small changes should not be underestimated. However, change is not impossible. Following Foucault, we argue that critical perspectives, when engaged in particular ways, offer resources through which we might challenge the dominance of managerialist thinking on a practical level − at least in the long run.

Critical Essay: Reconsidering critical performativity

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of ‘critical performativity’, a concept designed to debate relationships between theory and practice and encourage practical interventions in organizational life. Notwithstanding its laudable ambition to stimulate discussion about engagement between critical management studies researchers and practitioners, we are concerned that critical performativity theory is flawed as it misreads foundational performativity authors, such as Austin and Butler, in ways that nullify their political potential, and ignores a range of other influential theories of performativity. It also overlooks the materiality of performativity. We review these limitations and then use three illustrations to sketch out a possible alternative conceptualization of performativity. This alternative approach, which builds on Butler’s and Callon’s work on performativity, recognizes that performativity is about the constitution of subjects, is an inherently material and discursive construct, and happens through the political engineering of sociomaterial agencements. We argue that such an approach – a political theory of organizational performativity – is more likely to deliver on both theoretical and practical fronts than the concept of critical performativity.

Ordinary and effective: the Catch-22 in managing the public voice in health care?

Introduction  Joseph Heller’s Catch‐22 is regularly invoked to critique the irrationality inherent in supposedly rational bureaucracy. We explore a Catch‐22 for policy concerning public involvement in English health care: you have to be ordinary to represent the community effectively, but, if you are ordinary, you cannot effectively represent your community.

Managerialism and public attitudes towards UK NHS managers.

Presents the results of empirical work examining public attitudes towards UK NHS managers. The findings indicate a strong lack of sympathy for managers. Discusses possible explanations for these results. The preferred explanation is that NHS managers as a group tend to share an ideology about the nature of the NHS and the role of management within the NHS which is at odds with the beliefs held by most members of the public on these matters. Explores the origins and nature of managerial ideology (managerialism) in the NHS and discusses possible reasons why the ideology might tend to be unpopular with the public. Concludes by suggesting that the traditional core values of the NHS as perceived by the public could be being violated by managerialism. This violation may be the principal cause for the low public esteem in which NHS managers are currently held.

Death and Organization: Heidegger’s Thought on Death and Life in Organizations

Mortality has not been given the attention it deserves within organization studies. Even when it has been considered, it is not usually in terms of its implications for own lives and ethical choices. In particular, Heidegger’s writing on death has been almost entirely ignored both in writing on death and writing on organizational ethics, despite his insights into how our mortality and the ethics of existence are linked. In this paper, we seek to address this omission by arguing that a consideration of death may yield important insights about the ethics of organizational life. Most important of these is that a Heideggerian approach to death brings us up against fundamental ethical questions such as what our lives are for, how they should be lived and how we relate to others. Heideggerarian thought also reconnects ethics and politics, as it is closely concerned with how we can collectively make institutions that support our life projects rather than thwart or diminish them.

‘Girls’ working together without ‘teams’: How to avoid the colonization of management language

Many of us increasingly experience our personal and working lives through a range of categories and classifications that have come to be strongly associated with the formal management of organizations, the effect of which has been explained as a subtle colonization of our minds and imaginations. This article presents insights from an organizational ethnography based in a UK hospital’s medical records library where participants rarely used management discourses, the only managerial terms they used at all being teams and teamwork, and then mostly by way of parody, while strongly preferring an alternative collective identity, the girls. This article therefore illustrates and analyses how these workers shunned, if not entirely avoided, management language’s colonizing incursions.