Changing Management Practices in Financial Services [1]

The empirical material presented is derived from an ongoing research project, funded by The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), investigating changes in UK management practice, and by the Financial Services Research Centre (FSRC) at the School of Management, UMIST.

A questionnaire based survey of changing management practices was carried out by the authors in 1992 (Ezzamel, Lilley and Willmott, ‘How Has Management Changed? Perceptions of Organizational Transformations in UK Companies’, forthcoming). Questionnaires were sent to the Chief Executives of our survey companies. In the main, they were completed by either the Chief Executive or Finance Director. Thus, it is important to note that our questionnaire material only offers insights into senior managers' perceptions of change. In addition to this major survey, interviews were subsequently conducted with a number of senior and middle managers in a sample of 27 companies selected from respondents to the survey. Quotations in this paper are drawn from these interviews.