Matthew J. Brannan

Between a rock and a hard place: Exploring women's experience of participation and progress in managerial careers

Purpose – The growth of women in management has been argued to offer a route to reduce organizational and social inequality. The purpose of this paper is to explore the careers and experiences of female managers from a variety of organizations operating in the West Midlands region of the UK. Design/methodology/approach – This study is based on 56 interviews conducted with women managers within various sectors. The interviewees also completed pictorial careers maps, which along with interview recordings were analyzed. Findings – The key themes to emerge from this research centre upon the factors that draw women into management (which we term seductive elements) as well as some of the hindering practices that prevent women from progressing. Significantly, we find that managerial careers are associated with gendered assumptions and practices (e.g. facilitating and developing people) which contribute to construct management (done by women) as bounded-up characteristically with “feminized” behaviours. Research limitations/implications – The research is based upon a relatively small sample that is multi-sectorial. Wider studies that increase population size, together with deeper studies that hold sectorial variables constant would further add weight to the findings presented here. Practical implications – The paper draws attention to the “lived reality” of doing management, which, we argue often, for women in particular involves the reconciliation of contradictions and conflicting pressures. We draw attention to the lack of “alternative models” of organization and highlight the potential for gender-focus mentoring and management education. Originality/value – The paper is of value in giving voice to a selection of women managers by allowing them to reflect upon and explore their experience of management. The paper also documents the day-to-day reality of womens managerial careers that require the re-enactment and reproduction of stereotypical gender norms.

Brands at Work: The Search for Meaning in Mundane Work

Brand scholarship traditionally resides within the marketing literature and focuses on organizations’ external relationships with customers. However, increasing critical attention in organization studies has focused on the brand in order to understand its impact on the internal dynamics of employment relations in contemporary organizations. Drawing on an ethnography of frontline service work in an IT consultancy call centre, we explore the brand as an internal organizational resource sustaining the process of employee meaning-making activities. Documenting the ‘work of the brand’, we outline what the brand offers both employees and employers and, in doing so, we theorize the brand at work as a connecting mechanism between processes of identity formation/re-formation and regulation. While employees are encouraged to internalize particular brand meanings (in this case prestige, success and quality), we found that they often willingly buy into these intended brand meanings as a palliative to ‘cope’ with mundane work. In this way brand meanings are central to producing a self-disciplining form of employee subjectivity.

Ethnographies of work and the work of ethnography

The articles comprising this special issue of Ethnography have been selected from papers presented at the Current Developments in Ethnographic Research in the Social and Management Sciences event held at the University of Liverpool Management School in September 2006. The symposium jointly organized by the host institution and Keele University Institute for Public Policy and Management is the first UK management school-based event (that we know of) to focus exclusively on ethnographic research and was specifically conceived of as a ‘space’ to bring together established and emerging scholars to explore current trends in qualitative research in the social and management sciences. We utilize this special issue to present work that seeks, in various ways, to explore the changing contours and character of the nature of work and the impact this has upon employers and employees. As the breadth and quality of the empirical and theoretical content of the papers presented at the Liverpool Symposium demonstrate, ethnography is a key focus in research for a growing number of organization and management theorists. Ethnography captures what Hodson calls ‘the emergent subtle life of organizations’ (2001: 52) in domains that can be captured by survey research only as shallow de-contextualized surface images. Our aim in selecting these articles has been to contribute to the reanimation of images of work. In this respect our authors respond directly graphy

Editorial for the Journal of Organizational Ethnography

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the new journal, its history, scope and ambitions.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews the current growth in interest in ethnographic research in organizational and management studies, reflected not least in the success of the Liverpool‐Keele Ethnography Symposium.Findings – Surveying the state of the field, this paper has identified a need for a natural home for organizational ethnographers. The continuing growth and development of the Symposium is also a reflection of the shared experience among would‐be ethnographers who find that, when presenting ethnographic work at other conferences, their choice of methodology is more often subject to contrarian rather than constructive discussion. It is only by debating the merits of the empirical and theoretical themes and perspectives that inform the subject in a constructive way with others, who are genuinely appreciative of the tradition, that it will develop.Originality/value – Th...

London calling: selection as pre‐emptive strategy for cultural control

Purpose – This article seeks to explore forms of selection practice, focusing on role‐play techniques, which have been introduced in many organizations in an attempt to “objectivize” the selection process by offering a means of assessing task‐specific aptitudes.Design/methodology/approach – This article draws upon an ethnographic study of a call centre in which the researcher underwent the recruitment and selection process to secure work as a precursor to conducting fieldwork within the organization. Whilst there is little precedent for the employment of ethnographic techniques in researching recruitment and selection, we argue such techniques are appropriate to explore the social processes involved in practices such as role‐play. The discussion draws upon fieldwork which was conducted at “CallCentreCo”, who continuously recruit customer service representatives (CSRs) to work in their call centre. CallCentreCo uses role‐playing exercises extensively in the selection of all grades of staff and are argued b...

Critical Essay: Meta-Analysis: A Critical Realist Critique and Alternative

Meta-analysis has proved increasingly popular in management and organization studies as a way of combining existing empirical quantitative research to generate a statistical estimate of how strongly variables are associated. Whilst a number of studies identify technical, procedural and practical limitations of meta-analyses, none have yet tackled the meta-theoretical flaws in this approach. We deploy critical realist meta-theory to argue that the individual quantitative studies, upon which meta-analysis relies, lack explanatory power because they are rooted in quasi-empiricist meta-theory. This problem, we argue, is carried over in meta-analyses. We then propose a ‘critical realist synthesis’ as a potential alternative to the use of meta-analysis in organization studies and social science more widely.

Power, corruption and lies: Mis-selling and the production of culture in financial services

The extent of recent misconduct in retail financial services questions assumptions that mis-selling is perpetrated by rogue traders dealing in sub-prime markets. Yet we know little about the organizational dimensions of mis-selling and specifically how new employees are introduced to and subsequently enact mis-selling behaviour when not explicitly encouraged to do so. This article seeks to understand the mechanics of mis-selling through an ethnographic account of the opening of a new retail financial services call centre, and analysis of the ritual nature of the sales interaction. The study documents the training, induction and initial work of direct sales agents to better understand the complexity, social relations and organization of mis-selling, together with the way in which regulation and management regimes shape sales practice and consequent employee behaviour. The critical analysis of sales rituals allows us to explain how mis-selling becomes embedded in organizational practice and contributes to our understanding of the everydayness of mis-selling in contrast to approaches that focus either on individual decision-making or on cultural explanations.

Exploring the Role of HR Practitioners in Pursuit of Organizational Effectiveness in Higher Education Institutions

Abstract This paper focuses on how human resource (HR) professionals view their role in contributing to organizational effectiveness (OE) in the higher education (HE) sector. Drawing on interview and documentary data, we trace how rival definitions of OE relate to two emergent conceptions of rationality. First we identify instrumental forms of rationality based on assessments of how well (or efficiently) organizations achieve preordained objectives. Second, we identify stakeholder satisfaction models of OE, which concern the extent to which competing needs of stakeholders are satisfied and, thus, presuppose a more dialogic view of rationality. The empirical findings suggest that HR professionals do support attempts to reorientate their institutions towards a top-down form of organization, which would privilege high-level objectives and efficiency. This implies a move away from a more traditional view of universities as discursive and participatory organizations, where effectiveness is regarded as meeting the varied needs of stakeholders, such as academics, students and the wider society, in a balanced way. This may also complement a move to a ‘business partner’ model of human resource management (HRM). However, whilst the HRM professionals largely favour such a shift, they acknowledge limitations to the extent that is practical or even entirely desirable.

‘You're Not Going Anywhere’: Employee Retention, Symbolic Violence and the Structuring of Subordination in a UK-Based Call Centre:

This article explores practices that produce and reproduce domination in and through organizational hierarchies and shows how high levels of employee turnover were managed within a UK-based call centre through the use of culturally bound employment practices. Using ethnographic methods the paper explores the experience of managerial retention strategies from the perspective of employees and draws upon some of the theoretical resources employed by Pierre Bourdieu, specifically in relation to his concern with structures of subordination, and with the ways that processes of symbolic violence appear legitimate. The paper therefore makes three contributions to our understanding of the sociology of work generally and the management of labour turnover in service industries specifically; first, it extends understanding of the cultural basis of retention strategies. Second, it explores the ‘lived experience’ of these strategies. Finally, it considers the relevance of Bourdieus analysis for making sense of these practices in action.

A gendered perspective on Learning to Labour

This paper presents an auto-ethnographic study of the personal experience of learning to labour. Heather Hopfl reflects on the prospects and opportunities presented to her as part of her life and experiences of learning to labour during the same period as Williss study: which, of course, is specific to young men. Consequently, the paper reflects on the implications of class location and life chances, on the social engineering experimentation of the 1950s and 60s, on the options presented by a grammar school education and on the impossibility of return occasioned by such opportunities. It discusses the escape routes open to some but closed to many.