Nancy Harding

Invoking Satan or the Ethics of the Employment Contract

ABSTRACT Studies of mergers of organizations focus upon the financial and economic outcomes, with little attention paid to the effect on the people working in the merging organizations. This paper reports the findings of a study of the impact on managers of an organizational merger. Rather than the cool calculations of accountants and economists and the rational application of a managerial logic, we found the impact on these managers was upon their emotions, which seemed sometimes too buffeted to allow them to continue in their work. A narrative analysis of the stories told by these managers suggested they experienced their involvement with the merging organizations as akin to a Faustian contract, whereby they had sold their souls to the organizational devil and were now reaping the costs. When we came to write this paper we found that using the usual rubrics of academic writing suppressed the sheer emotionality of their experiences. We have therefore followed the imperative of our conclusions, and written our analysis in the form of a play, based upon Christopher Marlowes Dr Faustus, which allows us to use our interviewees’ own words to illustrate the impact of the merger. The play is, of course, in the format of a tragedy: it has four main characters – the narrator, the manager, Faustus and Mephistopheles – and five acts. We use the Prologue to insert our own words, where we argue for a turn away from the ‘hard’ school of human resource management towards one that is ethically informed. Programme notes contain the technical details which justify our research methods. We remain totally unapologetic for intruding emotions into the rational world of academia.

The inception of the National Health Service: a daily managerial accomplishment.

PURPOSEnIt is commonplace to talk of the UKs National Health Service (NHS) as having its inception in 1948 in an Act of Parliament which brought together many hundreds of widely dispersed organisations into one, new organisation, the NHS. This paper aims to challenge the concept of a National Health Service and to argue that the (seeming) accomplishment of this organisation is the daily task of health managers.nnnDESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACHnThe paper develops a theoretically-based analysis of how an organisation is accomplished through ongoing processes of construction. First, critiques of the ontological status of this thing called organisation are considered. Then Laclau and Mouffes discourse theory of political action, inspired by Derrida and Gramsci is used, to try to understand this apparent thing and the work of those charged with its management.nnnFINDINGSnThere has been little application of this theoretical perspective to understanding management in general and health management in particular but, given the highly politicised nature of health management, their theoretical perspective seems more than apposite. Application of Laclau and Mouffes theory to the NHS leads to the conclusion that there is no such thing as the NHS. There is, rather, a presumption of the thingness of the NHS and one of the major tasks of managers working within this organisation is to achieve this sense of thingness.nnnRESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONSnThis is work in progress--these ideas continue to evolve, but feedback from readers is necessary.nnnORIGINALITY/VALUEnThis is the first time that Laclau and Mouffes work has been used to analyse health organizations. The value of the paper is mostly for people working to develop critically-informed understandings of how organizations work.

The Psyche and Leadership

In Chapter 5 we drew on a study of leadership development to show that ‘Great Man’ and charismatic theories of leadership still inform organisational practices. We concluded that leadership therefore presents a norm which is so difficult to achieve that it can only have negative consequences for leaders, while it simultaneously creates categories of people who are ‘abnormal’ and who are thus second class, inferior and denigrated. In Chapter 6 we demonstrated that the people we call ‘leaders’ or ‘managers’ must simultaneously be both leaders and managers. As this calls on them to behave both in masculine and feminine ways, they do not know which way to turn and the result is anxiety. The theoretical perspectives we used in those chapters, queer theory and post-structuralist gender theories, draw on psychoanalytical theory to assist the development of understanding of what it is to be a person living in the West in the twenty-first century. In this chapter we turn explicitly to psychoanalytical theory itself and apply some of its insights to leadership.

The Doctor/Manager Relationship as a Psychosocial Encounter: A Scene of Fantasy and Domination?

During a study of the merger of two hospital trusts we observed doctors who felt defeated and oppressed by management, but their grief seemed disproportionate to the changes they were actually experiencing. We were struck by the strength of their grief at a loss of nothing more (it seemed) than membership of committees and participation in certain decision-making forums. To all intents and purposes, these doctors were free to continue working much as they always had. What, therefore, were they mourning? From where did this deep grief emerge? This chapter pursues answers to these questions in order to help understand how a particular affect or grief appears common during processes of organizational change (Ford and Harding, 2003).

Queer(y)ing Leadership

Turning now to a more critical analysis of leadership, in the first two chapters in this section we will focus on theories arising from gender studies to articulate our concerns. Chapter 6 will explore leadership using perspectives from feminism and men and masculinities. In that chapter we will explore how leaders have to take on feminine characteristics, while management requires that they take on masculine characteristics. We will suggest that leadership creates huge anxieties for managers as it puts them in the contradictory position of having to be both masculine and feminine at one and the same time, so whatever they do is unacceptable. In this chapter we will establish the setting for that argument by using queer theory to show that leadership is normative in that it provides a vision of ‘the normal’, which leaders have to attain. We will show that attaining the norm of leadership is impossible.

Leadership as Performative: Or How the Words ‘Leader’ and ‘Leadership’ Do Things

This chapter’s focus is upon how the words Teader’ and ‘leadership’ are performative, that is, how those two words construct, or make both leaders and leadership thinkable. We are examining chief executives in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) in this chapter, because the history of management and leadership in the NHS lends itself particularly well to this type of study.

Conclusions: Towards Emancipatory Leadership?

The concerns about leadership that led us to write this book were the following: n n1. n nThere is a huge body of literature on leadership and yet the vast proportion of it is located within one narrow theoretical perspective designed to improve profitability, efficiency and effectiveness in organisations. n n n n n2. n nResearch into leadership is often fragmented, poorly conducted, at times trivial and frequently based on management/guru academics and practitioners, who have a vested interest as they are keen to promulgate their latest solutions to the ‘dilemmas of leadership’ (Collinson and Grint, 2005, 5). n n n n n3. n nThere is no consensus on how to define leadership so it would be easy to dismiss it out of hand, but it has become such an authoritative discourse in both academic and organisational settings that it is too important to ignore (Collinson and Grint, 2005; Ford, 2007; Sinclair, 2005). n n n n n4. n nLeadership theory constructs a model of ‘the leader’ that is impossible to achieve. It represents the leader as a singular subject, a ‘monad’, who is objective, rational and secure unto himself/herself. Managers and leaders are, however, people (not robots) and so they have complex identities.

The Leader as Hero

One of the principal aims of this book is to unsettle the dominant identity of organisational leaders as disinterested, rational figures who lead others for the good of their organisations. That is an identity that, we argue, is not only unachievable but also highly controlling of those charged with the task of leadership. We showed in Chapter 2 how the very words ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ construct the very people and tasks that we are discussing, and we showed how the words may have numerous meanings and are open to contestation over how they are defined. The result of reading that chapter should be that readers now realise that they have a theory and definition of leadership that may be at odds with those we are using as we write these pages. Indeed, no two readers should share precisely the same definitions—every time someone offers one it is open to debate, discussion and rewriting.

Learning to be a Leader—Training Courses

In Chapters 2 and 3 we discussed how the terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ have a performative impact, in that they serve to construct the very things they describe. In this chapter we turn to an arena more overtly concerned with the production of leaders and leadership: training courses.