Detailed Research Proposal and Case for Exemption from Keele University Research Methods

The manager's tale: an exploration of the narrative construction of managerial identity

Patrick Reedy

PhD

2004

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Professor Martin Parker for his encouragement, support, tolerance, always useful criticism and friendship. I could not have wished for a better supervisor.

Thanks also to Doctor Deborah Kerfoot for her support, assistance, confidence in my ability, and stimulating discussions of this work.

Thank you Kathryn for your unflagging support, belief, encouragement, critique and proofreading, I promise to reciprocate!

Finally thanks to Eleanor and Florence, my two daughters, for bringing me back down to earth on the frequent occasions I have needed it, and reminding me of what is really important.

Abstract

The thesis explores the idea that the construction of managerial identity can usefully be conceptualised as a narrative accomplishment. The research is framed as itself a story that is made up of interrelated autobiographies and biographies. In my introduction I explain how and why I have used stories, including an account of how I collected and organised the material that forms the empirical content of the thesis. In the following two chapters I present both my own life history and those of a number of managers. In Chapters Four, Five and Six, I develop my theoretical position on narrative identity. I start by evaluating how managerial identities are framed within Critical Management Studies (CMS), offering a critique of CMS as a product of an academic identity project that often unreflexively relies upon positioning managers as ‘the Other’. I go on to argue that, as a result, a rather limited bipolar debate between humanistic and poststructuralist conceptions of identity has become characteristic of CMS research. In Chapter Six I argue that the existentialist philosophy of Heidegger, Sartre and Ricoeur might extend thinking about managerial identity through its insistence on the essential narrativity of human existence and its conception of lives as existential quests. I then return to the life histories, thematising them using the theoretical framework developed previously, according to three modes of narrative analysis; those of historical reference, narrative elements, and narrative performance. I conclude that the narrative approach and the use of life histories has much to offer future research into managerial identity and has important ethical and political implications for the CMS ‘project’. These implications include the ethical imperative of representing others empathetically and exploring the links between our own identity projects, our representation of others and the pursuit of social justice.
Contents

Chapter One: Introduction or ‘Once Upon A Time’

Telling Stories

Management and CMS

Methodological Considerations

The Narrators

The Structure of the Thesis

Chapter Two: The Researcher

Chapter Three: The Managers’ Stories

The NHS Manager

The United Nations Security Manager

The Mental Health Charity Manager

The Engineer

The Information Systems Consultant

The Squadron Leader

The Human Resources Manager

The Insurance Account Manager

The Airport Security Training Manager

Chapter Four: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall; The Story of an Academic Identity Project

Introduction

The Story of Critical Management Studies

The CMS Project

Who do We think We are?

Who do We think They Are?

In the Hall of Mirrors

Chapter Five: The Cogito Proclaimed Forfeit

Humanist and Poststructuralist Models of Identity

The Self of Humanism

The Shattered Cogito

Death and Identity

Beyond the Limits

Chapter Six: Narrative Identity and the Existentialist Quest

Heidegger

Jean-Paul Sartre

Ricoeur

Narrative Identity and Identity Narratives

Chapter Seven: Reference and Performance; a Thematic Analysis of Managers’ Narratives

My Generation

Class, Family and Location

Education and Occupation

Expectations and Attitudes

Age and the Stages of Life

Once Upon a Time

The Researcher

The NHS Manager

The United Nations Security Manager

The Mental Health Charity Manager

The Engineer

The Information Systems Consultant

The Squadron Leader

The Human Resources Manager

The Insurance Account Manager

The Airport Security Training Manager

Performing Narrative

Narrative Linkage

Narrative Slippage

Narrative Options and Narrative Editing

Chapter Eight: Conclusions; Who Speaks, Who Listens and Where?

The Story So Far

Who is Speaking?

Who is Listening?

Just Institutions

Epilogue

Bibliography

Chapter One: Introduction or ‘Once Upon A Time’

The mystery of how we come to be who we are, as individuals; as members of families, communities, nations and other groupings, is a subject of endless fascination and speculation to human beings. To paraphrase Heidegger (1926/1962), we are the only being for whom its own existence is an issue for it. The vast historical repository of stories which are woven through our culture and which we draw on to explain ourselves to ourselves reflects this fascination. All of these stories ultimately rest on questions of who we are and what our relationship is to the world we inhabit and the others we share it with. This research arises from these concerns and reflects a desire to understand how we come to be who we are. It does this by exploring the way in which our life stories incorporate a particularly pervasive source of identity in Western industrial society, that of the management career.

My introduction begins the task of exploring whether the idea of narrative and story-telling can contribute something worthwhile to an understanding of our own existence and so provide some answers to the related question of how and why being a manager has become so significant for so many in making a life for themselves. The thesis will, therefore, have stories and story-telling at its heart and indeed I have also applied many of the conventions of story-telling to the writing-up of this research. In this sense, the thesis is itself a story about stories. The rest of this opening chapter will expand on why I believe that stories in general and autobiography/biography in particular have a contribution to make to this area. It will also explain the approach I have taken, point out links to related research and discuss some of the issues that arise from this sort of approach. However, before I engage directly with these matters, it seems appropriate to begin with a story, one that explains to the reader how this thesis came to be as it is and the links between it and my own life story.

I came late to my career as an academic, being forty when I began it, having escaped from ten years as a manager in various further education colleges. The means of escape from a job I found increasingly irksome was an MBA programme where I became aware of the existence of what is now commonly known as critical management studies or CMS. In many ways the two years of my life when I studied my MBA were a fateful event in the Giddensian (1991) sense. It was a turning point which coincided with the mid-point in my life, if one still takes the Bible’s three-score years and ten as a lifetime. I discovered that my discomfort with managerialism and my growing sense of being forced into being someone I wished not to be was shared by many. Finding this discomfort was shared and accounted for in the writing of academics, was in many ways a liberation. To cut a long story short, at least for the time being, I felt that my studies transformed me, or at least gave me the opportunity to transform myself. In CMS I saw something akin to ‘home’, a place or community where I could be myself with similar others, rather than having to keep my head down, a square peg in a round hole.

As I started my new career as a university lecturer I quickly realised that I should have also to be a researcher and that the title ‘Mr’ in front of my name in the university phone book was more of a badge of shame than a polite form of address in the rather elite university in which fortune had somehow deposited me. My transformation was incomplete, I would have to acquire the title of ‘Dr’ by ‘doing a PhD’ but what could I do? I did what I suspect many others would have done in the same circumstances; I started with what was familiar from my own experience. My strong professional identity as an educator and my attraction to CMS gave me a starting point. If I had been changed by my experiences as a student on such a programme then would the same be true for others? Was this perhaps an opportunity for critically minded university teachers to have a direct influence on the reproduction of management thinking and practice in the way suggested by so many of the authors I was reading (French and Grey 1996; Burgoyne and Reynolds 1997; Fournier and Grey 2000)? After all, it is the one point at which academics have an opportunity to introduce alternative ideas and practices to those who will form the next generation of managers or to challenge more senior practitioners. At its most ambitious and utopian, the critical management educational project implies the aims of individual emancipation and, by extension, social transformation (for examples see: Tanton 1992; hooks 1994; Boyce 1996; French and Grey 1996; Jackson 1997; Currie and Knights 1999; Dehler 1999; Reynolds 1999; Holman 2000; and Reynolds 2000). I duly began what I had intended to be an evaluation of the transformative potential of critical pedagogy. In this way my own identity project and the narrative of its pursuit became bound up with the stories of a number of my students.

As I reflected upon the link between my own identity as aspirant CMS academic and that of the managers who formed the focus of my research, I began to see the interaction between these two elements increasingly in narrative terms. Initially this was as a way of theorising the ongoing construction of identity by individuals and also as a fruitful methodological approach. Eventually this interest took over the entire project. My dalliance with the humanist dream of transforming the world through the exercise of reason and the development of a higher consciousness, through the ‘learning community’ proved highly problematic for reasons I have explored elsewhere (Reedy 2003). It also became clear, as my empirical work developed, that the actual content of their studies in any case made little impact on the majority of my students. More significantly, I also began to become intrigued with the actual stories themselves, caught up in the plot, wanting to know what would happen next, fascinated by the different ways in which individuals used the same discursive elements to build narratives that were both similar to each other and unmistakably unique. This interest foreshadowed my discovery of the two categories of identity central to Ricoeur’s (1992) thinking, that of idem (sameness) and ipse (selfhood).

I found also that I could not separate their story from my story. Most of my students were around the same age as me, and all could be said to be members of the post-war baby boomer generation. This collection of stories is thus one portrayal of a shared experience and understanding of what it has meant to grow up in the later decades of the 20th Century in the United Kingdom. It foregrounds the way in which managerialism and managerial work have become such a significant part of our lives, despite none of us starting out with any aspirations to be a manager ‘when we grew up’. I found myself constantly reminded of my own childhood and the political, economic, and societal events that have made us both the same and different. These stories could only have been produced in this social and historical context and my framing and interpretation of them is equally a product of my own experience of them.

To summarise this lengthy preamble, my original intention to critically evaluate the transformative claims of critical pedagogy in the lecture room was substantially modified, both by the growing conviction that these claims were unlikely to have much light shed upon them by what I was doing, but also because I was ambushed by something that seemed much more interesting, an attempt to present and then theorise a number of narratives of identity by managers. I began to explore beyond the confines implied by the phrase ‘managerial identity’ in order to get a sense of a wider life than that which occurs at work. For the problem with asking people only about their experiences as managers is that this is what they will tell you about. For some of my interviewees, this wider perspective revealed that a managerial identity seemed to have a relatively weak hold on their overall conception of themselves.

My interest in the implications of this research for CMS has survived, however. Much of my motivation in wishing to understand the processes of identity formation have to do with assessing the prospects for the ability of individuals to intervene as creative agents in these processes. I will argue in Chapter Four that this has important ethical and practical implications for those who wish to influence such interventions for their own political and identity projects.

Telling Stories

So much for the story of the evolution of the research but what have I actually done as a result of these changing aspirations? The backbone of the thesis is the idea of narrative. I present a number of such narratives in the form of life histories, designed to reflect the experiences of people who are managers at the start of the 21st Century and who have all completed a critically orientated masters in management, and all of whom I have taught. These narratives are intended to be more than merely ‘data’. I wish them to stand as accounts of the lives of managers in their own right, as stories that may interest, inform, amuse, move or provoke their readers. However, in order to adequately theorise such narratives, in a way recognisable as academic research, it is unavoidable that these stories are thematised and generally dissected but I also wished to preserve their integrity as stories, no matter how contrived and edited such accounts must be by my authorship. This wish was stimulated by a feeling of obligation to the people who had taken part, many of whom had become friends during the course of the research. I felt that I had a duty to them to present their stories as accurately as I could, according to my understanding of what they wished to communicate about themselves, to do justice to their struggles, hopes and (usually mild) suffering. It was only as my theoretical work developed that this desire was reinforced by the ethics of historical narrative central to the work of Ricoeur (1985; 1992; Kearney 1996a), who became an important influence on the development of my analysis, confirming me in my intuition of how a certain ethics of representation should guide me.

I would argue that preserving the stories in a way that is faithful to their original narrated form has enabled me to better understand the ways in which identity is worked upon and modified. One can trace how contradictions, tensions, constraints and opportunities can go both unrecognised and recognised, and the efforts individuals make to construct a coherent sense of self from the seeming chaos of ‘ordinary’ lives. As the empirical work progressed it also became clear to me that such an approach underlined the complexity and heterogeneity of individual responses to the shared social context of their lives. Retaining these narratives in the form of individual stories provided an important safeguard against seeing such managers as a univocal group all responding in similar ways. Wishing to treat the stories in this fashion inevitably meant gravitating towards the idea of my interview transcripts being a form of life history.

Life histories are usually more the province of biographers and historians than social scientists. Feminist epistemology has also made a strong case for their use in sociological research as a way of re-discovering marginalised voices and countering the dominance of patriarchal interpretations of the world (Cotterill and Letherby 1993; Griffiths 1995). A similar impulse appears to lie behind the classic ethnographies of working life by writers such as Beynon (1975) in the 1970’s and, more directly, by edited collections of working life histories such as ‘Work’ (Fraser 1969). A relatively forgotten but striking example of the use of life stories, not just to chronicle individual voices but also to paint a rich portrait of a place and time, is Ronald Blythe’s ‘Akenfield’ (1972). Through the stories of a cross-section of villagers, Blythe builds up a vivid picture of social change in a Suffolk village from the beginning of the 20th century to the mid 1960’s. A better known example of this approach in the US is the work of the Chicago School, most notably represented by Studs Terkel (1970), who again attempts to build up a rich picture of working life for those whose voices are rarely directly heard, as opposed to their indirect and abstracted representation by others. There are some problems, from an academic researcher’s standpoint, in simply presenting such stories as if they represent people ‘as they are in their own words’. All of such collections are premised upon the ‘political’ motivation that such voices deserve to be heard and many are avowedly left-wing in seeking to present a version of history with the usual class preferences inverted, the history of the ‘common people’(Harrison 1984). Even if one wished to remove the influence of these motivations there is still the problem that the processes of selection, editing, and framing of these narratives is generally opaque. In addition, such stories tend to be assumed to be straightforwardly referential of an actual life and external reality rather than an account constructed cooperatively between discussants in a particular social context (Stanley 1992). Nevertheless, foregrounding the stories themselves can still make an important contribution to the understanding of identity. In too many accounts supposedly based on storytelling the actual stories are demoted to a fragmented and supporting role, subordinated by the author’s wish to assert their own identity over others. I have placed my narratives at the heart of the thesis and before their analysis in order to avoid this demotion of the stories as stories.