The Unmaking of Management? Change and Continuity in British Management in the 1990s

Abstract

In the late 1980s, a series of reports-notably, "The Making of Managers" by Charles Handy-outlined a development path for management in the U.K. This was to be based on the development of an education and training base and the model set by leading corporations. A decade later, this paper reviews current trends in managerial work and employment against the expectations of the late 1980s. In doing so, it distinguishes between the objective condition of British management and its institutionalized meaning within wider British society. It argues that recent accounts of changes in managerial work and employment have focused solely on incremental changes in the empirical domain and have neglected important discursive shifts in the way management is understood and enacted within organizations. These shifts have been catalyzed by the emergence of a series of organizational initiatives-first, Total Quality Management (TQM) and, latterly, lean production and Business Process Reengineering (BPR)-which aim to systematically deconstruct management by emphasizing worker empowerment, delayering, downsizing, and the redistribution of managerial functions. In short, initiatives such as these are contributing to the "unmaking of management." Managerial groups are subject to intensification and polarization, while managerial practices are diffused throughout the work process.