Middle Managers’ Responses to Organisational ‘Re-branding’

Paper presented to Leadership in a Branded World track,

The European Academy of Management 2nd Annual Conference on Innovative Research in Management, Stockholm

Colin Hales, University of Westminster

Professor Colin Hales, Westminster Business School, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

+44 (0)20 7911 5000 extension 3266 email: C.Hales@Westminster.ac.uk

Middle Managers’ Responses to Organisational ‘Re-branding’

Summary

This paper argues that, in contrast to their public claims, organisations do not so much engage in radical reconfiguration as ‘re-branding’ of their structures and middle managers’ roles. Modest changes to reporting relationships and the distribution of power are cloaked in the brand images of ‘decentralisation’ and ‘empowerment’, whilst equally modest changes to managerial responsibilities are branded as ‘leadership’ and ‘entrepreneurship’. This re-branding is less a description of the intrinsic properties of the organisational change ‘product’, more a set of claims, or ‘brand promises’, about beneficial performative effects. However, middle managers re-branded as ‘business managers’, ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘leaders’, without commensurate substantive changes either to their roles or their autonomy, respond to this dissonance not by behaving in ways consistent with the brand promise but by retreating into familiar administrative routines.

Towards the Post-Bureaucratic Organisation and ‘New’ Forms of Managerial

Work

Since the late 1980s, management discourse has been replete with persistent

and insistent claims that, as a result of the ineluctable pressures of hyper-competition

and chronic environmental turbulence, lumbering, sclerotic, centralised bureaucracies

are being transformed into nimble, aerobic, decentralised, post-bureaucratic

organisations (see, for example, Ashkenas et al.1995; Castells, 1996; Charan, 1991;

Drucker, 1988; Galbraith et.al., 1993; Hastings, 1993; Palmer and Dunford, 1997

Powell, 1990; Quinn et.al., 1996; Savage, 1996 Snow et.al., 1992 Volberda, 1998).

The key drivers in this process are decentralisation, as functional departments are

reorganised into business units, regulatory controls are relaxed and unit managers are

given the ‘freedom to manage’ and empowerment, as responsibility for work

operations is transferred from managers to self-managing teams of workers.

The characteristics of the post-bureaucratic organisation are nowhere near as

clearly delineated as those of the bureaucratic model which has loomed over both the

organisational terrain and its representation in organisation theory ever since Weber’s

classic ‘ideal type’ encapsulated the essential character of the then nascent large-scale

state and industrial organisations (Weber, 1964). Broadly, however, it is conceived

as a loose federation of informally constituted, self-managing, often temporary, work

units or teams within which there is a fluid division of labour. These units/teams are

co-ordinated through an internal market, rather than rules, and horizontal negotiation

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and collaboration, rather than hierarchy (Halal, 1994). Instead of a hierarchy of

vertical reporting relationships there is a ‘soft network’ (Hastings, 1993) of informal

lateral communications, information sharing and temporary collaboration based on

reciprocity and trust, which may be facilitated by an invisible ‘hard network’ of

electronically distributed information (Nohria and Berkeley, 1994). With freely-

available information and shared expertise, the ‘organisation’ becomes a collection of

temporary, contingent, self-organising teams, constantly forming and dissolving

according to work demands and trading and collaborating with each other as required.

To these structural features, Hecksher (1994), in one of the few systematic analyses of

the post-bureaucratic or, as he terms it, ‘interactive’ organisation, adds a number of

features that define its modus operandi: institutionalised dialogue, influence through

persuasion, trust based on interdependence, a sense of mission, widely shared

information, principles as guidelines to action, meta-decision-making processes,

problem-driven relationships, peer evaluation, public standards of performance and

flexible time-frames.

What distinguishes the post-bureaucratic organisation from bureaucracy and

its many variants, therefore, is the absence of a rigid division of labour, hierarchy and

rules. Thus, the division of labour is based on market- or product-based multi-

functional teams across which specialist expertise is contingently distributed, rather

than on functional departments and fixed specialist roles in which expertise is

concentrated. Teams have collective responsibility for their performance, rather than

individual managers being held personally responsible for the actions of those under

their ‘command’. Teams are accountable to those with whom they engage in internal

market transactions, hence accountability is collective and lateral, rather than

individual and vertical. Internal organisational relationships are predominantly

market (or quasi-market)-based, centred on outputs where market value is the key

criterion, rather than rule-based and centred on processes where compliance with

regulations is the key criterion. Finally, dialogue and persuasion under conditions of

shared principles and trust replace acquiescence to rules under conditions of clear

power and authority relations.

Predictions about the inexorable rise of post-bureaucratic organisational

forms are often coupled with predictions about fundamental changes in the nature of

managerial work (Dopson and Stewart, 1990; Drucker 1988; Handy, 1990; Hecksher

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and Donnellon, 1994; Kanter, 1989; Mintzberg, 1998; Morgan, 1993; Peters,

1989,1995; White, 1994; Zuboff, 1988). Again, the decisive change is the supposed

dismantling of bureaucratic hierarchies and rules through the twin processes of

decentralisation and empowerment. With ‘decentralisation’, middle managers are

freed from the stifling constraints of regulatory controls and the demands of

hierarchical reporting relationships to manage ‘their’ business units in entrepreneurial

ways, answerable solely for the performance of those units. With ‘empowered’

employees working in self-managed teams free from managerial direction and

control, managers take on the broader roles of co-ordination and leadership.

Thus, the distinct, traditional role of ‘manager’ as someone who is

individually responsible and accountable for the planning, co-ordination and control

of the work of a bounded group of staff under their specific command, within the

constraints set by policy and regulations, is, supposedly, disappearing. ‘Managers’ in

the traditional sense are being replaced by a particular brand of professional

‘knowledge worker’ charged with a more complex, less constrained entrepreneurial or

leadership role. The new ‘leader-orchestrators’ (Drucker, 1988; Mintzberg, 1998)

engage in the fuzzy task of facilitating and co-ordinating the divers efforts of a

variegated network of players. Consequently, they lead, advise, inspire and co-

ordinate teams; collaborate and negotiate integrated effort across boundaries;

promote organisational learning; and conceive, instigate and facilitate change. In

these endeavours, they must seize their new-found freedom from hierarchical scrutiny

and regulatory constraint by exercising judgement, unleashing creativity and taking

risks. In short, they cast off the dowdy feathers of administration for the rich plumage

of leadership.

The implications for the nature of managerial work run broadly as follows.

First, ‘management’ is less distinct and embraces a wider range of tasks and activities

that are more concerned with managing a business unit than a specific function.

Secondly, the emphasis of managerial work shifts away from routine administration -

planning and monitoring the conduct of work, processing routine control information

and handling disturbances to workflow - towards non-routine ‘entrepreneurial’

behaviour - allocating resources and instigating product and process innovation.

‘People management’ shifts from day-to-day management, in the form of the

direction, control and monitoring of work performance, to leadership, in the form of

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consultative co-ordination, support, advice, coaching, development and inspiration.

Finally, the managerial gaze switches from the vertical - managing downwards and

reporting upwards - to the lateral - communicating, liaising, negotiating and

collaborating with a wide range of contacts across both internal and external

organisational boundaries.

This thesis is not without its critics. A number of writers cast doubt, from a

variety of perspectives, on both the extent and true character of post-modern or post-

bureaucratic organisations (Alvesson, 1995; Berg, 1989; Ezzamel et.al., 1994; Hilmer

and Donaldson, 1996; Parker, 1993; Thompson, 1993; Thompson and O’Connell

Davidson, 1995; Warhurst and Thompson, 1998; Whittington and Mayer, 2000).

They argue that demonstrably and radically different organisational forms are

confined to a few recurring and celebrated cases and that claims about the adoption of

such forms are little more than misleading rhetoric on the part of senior managers,

given that many forms of organisational change have entailed an extension or

intensification of, rather than a departure from, bureaucratic control. The impact of

recent organisational developments on managerial work has also been questioned,

either by those asserting that, despite the ‘hype’, the fundamentals of management

have not altered (Eccles and Nohria, 1992; Warhurst and Thompson, 1998) or by

those who argue that the main outcomes of organisational restructuring are

managerial jobs that are broader in scope but more pressurised (Thomas and

Dunkerley, 1999; Vouzas et. al., 1997) or ‘a smaller number of middle managers

[with] greater responsibility for a wider range of duties for which they are now clearly

accountable’ (Dopson and Stewart, 1990) .

Yet, after a more than a decade of assertion and counter-assertion, evidence on

the extent of organisational change and the impact that this has had on managerial

work remains at something of a premium. Since much of the debate has been about

the extent of these changes, survey evidence would be of particular value but is, as

yet, not available (although a research project, funded by the British Economic and

Social Research Council, is currently underway at Westminster Business School

examining the extent and substance of changes to the role of first-line managers).The

case-based evidence presented below cannot resolve the issue of the extent of these

changes. What it does illustrate, however, is the disparity between claims about

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particular changes to organisation structures and managerial roles and the reality - and

the consequences of this disparity for managerial behaviour.

‘Decentralisation’ and Managerial Work in Zimbabwe and Malaysia

The findings of two research studies (Hales and Tamangani, 1996; Hales and

Mustapha, 2000) call into question whether ‘decentralisation’ is always what it is

claimed to be and thus necessarily always gives rise to new forms of managerial

work. The two studies, conducted in the retail and hotel sectors in Zimbabwe and the

electronics and textile manufacturing sectors in Malaysia were concerned to

investigate the impact of different organisational forms on managerial work.

Both studies employed a comparative case study design. In each study, the

role expectations and work activities of middle managers in two centralised and two

decentralised organisations were compared, with data collected on four key variables:

organisation structure, through semi-structured interviews with senior managers and

documentary evidence; the sources, content and strength of role expectations

surrounding unit/departmental managers, through depth interviews, based on the

‘managerial wheel’ technique’ (Hales and Nightingale, 1986) with identified

members of the managers’ role sets; unit/departmental managers’ own role

perceptions, through depth interviews also base on the ‘managerial wheel’; and

unit/departmental managers’ allocation of their time among different work activities,

through structured observation and activity sampling.

In the supposedly ‘decentralised’ organisations, middle managers had been

granted more formal autonomy over unit operations, such as staffing, marketing and

expenditure within budgets, whilst control through centrally-imposed operating

procedures had been replaced by controls over managerial recruitment and selection

and, crucially, over unit/departmental performance. In short, ‘decentralisation’ meant

that middle managers had become accountable not for how their units operated but

how they performed in the market and were accountable not to regional or area

managers but directly to senior managers at head office.

What was striking, however, were the similarities between the roles and

behaviour of managers in the decentralised organisations and those of managers in the

centralised organisations. Middle managers in all the organisations, regardless of

whether they were centralised or decentralised, focused on three key areas:

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• Staff administration - day-to-day maintenance of staffing levels, allocation of

duties, supervision of work, appraisal of work performance and handling minor

conflict, grievances and disciplinary matters.

• General work administration - routine work planning, problem-solving and

monitoring progress to try to ensure the smooth functioning of work operations

• Managing routine information - monitoring and contributing to day-to-day flows of

information, attending meetings, explaining policy, giving advice and

disseminating information about their unit/department

In addition, they spent a significant proportion of their time on non-managerial tasks,

in particular assisting subordinates with their work.

The obverse of these shared pre-occupations was a tendency to neglect

activities directed at change, development or improvement. Although, in the

decentralised organisations, considerable lip-service was paid to managers acting in

‘entrepreneurial’ or business oriented ways, middle managers gave little attention to

staff development, introducing improvements in work processes or improving

unit/departmental performance.

Therefore, despite ‘decentralisation’, middle managers performed their role

primarily in terms of routine administration and day-to-day ‘fire-fighting’ rather than

non-routine leadership and future-oriented development. In part, this was a matter of

both interpretation and ability on the middle managers’ part. Most had learnt ways of

working under earlier, more centralised and procedurally-driven operations and had

not been retrained to respond to the new system. The new emphasis on unit

performance, however, made them, if anything, more cautious, not less, and more

inclined to adhere to tried and trusted ways of working. Another key reason for this,

however, was that the changes to organisational structures were more apparent than

real. The supposedly ‘decentralised’ organisations had retained hierarchies in which

individual managers were responsible for a clearly delineated sub-unit and

accountability was enforced through a vertical reporting relationship to a single

immediate boss. Managerial behaviour remained circumscribed by rules, if not about

the conduct of unit operations then about expected levels of performance, which had

been devised and imposed unilaterally by senior managers. The only changes were in

the height of the chain of command through which and the criteria by which managers

were held accountable.

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In the interviews with senior managers, a number of reasons for this lack of

substantive change emerged. Firstly, in many cases, senior managers saw no

contradiction between creating performance-driven units and retaining hierarchical

controls: the former were grafted on to, rather than replaced, the latter. Secondly,

however, senior managers emphasised that middle managers’ newly acquired

‘freedom to manage’ did not mean freedom to do as they pleased without having to

account for their actions. Few spoke of middle managers as people who could and

should be completely trusted to manage their units/departments appropriately.

‘Empowerment’ and Managerial Work in Two UK Organisations

Additional evidence from two UK public sector organisations - ‘Citycorp’ and

‘Parcelco’ - also suggests that the substance of organisational change may be far less

radical than the claims that are made for it and may occur within, rather than away

from, essentially bureaucratic forms. The two cases are drawn from a comparative

study of five organisations in the UK which had claimed, at a research symposium, to

be implementing ‘empowerment’ programmes. In each case, data were collected by a

combination of: depth, tape-recorded interviews with senior managers, line managers,

supervisors/team leaders and production/service workers; scrutiny of documentary

evidence; and observation conducted over two week-long visits to each site.

Citycorp, the municipal engineering division of a large local authority, had

previously acted as both client for and provider of a wide range of engineering

services and had been divided along functional lines into six departments, each

headed by an Assistant City Engineer (ACE) reporting to the City Engineer. Within

each department there was a clear hierarchy of senior and associate engineers,

technicians and clerical staff. In the mid-90s, it was obliged to put its construction

and property services out to competitive tender and thus to differentiate between those

staff whom it would retain in a ‘client’ role and those who would have to compete

with outside companies, as ‘consultants’. If fully implemented, these changes would

significantly re-shape the work of both the ‘client’ engineers, who would become

concerned with managing a market relationship with consultants, and the ‘consultant’

engineers and technicians, who would have to manage themselves as a competitive

business unit.

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In fact, the changes at Citycorp and the consequent impact on managerial

work were far more modest. All functions other than Engineering were simply re-

named (e.g. ‘Administration’ became ‘Corporate Services’). Within Engineering,

employees were assigned, with some degree of arbitrariness and horse trading, to

‘Client’ and ‘Consultant’ units. Instead of Compulsory Competitive Tendering,

where the Consultant unit would have been required to compete with outside

contractors, there was ‘Voluntary Competitive Tendering’, with outside firms invited

to bid for a 5 year contract as ‘host’ consultants on condition that they employed all

the Citycorp Consultants. Finally, far from the engineers being allowed to run the

Consultancy unit free from direction and regulation by senior management, previous

hierarchical reporting relationships remained but in different guises. The Consultancy

unit continued to be headed by an Assistant City Engineer (ACE), as before. The

‘new’ structure, instigated ostensibly to permit a more ‘dynamic’ relationship with the

‘host’ consultants, amounted to no more than a re-labelling of the previous hierarchy

of positions. Thus, as senior manager, the ACE designated himself as the ‘Finder’,

responsible for strategic issues and generating new business, whilst the engineers

became either ‘Minders’ (Associates) with middle management responsibilities for

liaising with the Client group, or ‘Grinders’ (Team Leaders) with first-line

management responsibility for project operations.

Despite some fairly grand claims by the ACE about ‘fundamental changes’,

the result was, in the view of those affected, ‘business as usual’ resulting from ‘a

token gesture’. The hierarchical structure of managerial responsibilities remained,

with each manager/engineer accountable to an immediate boss. As one Associate put

it: ‘ the work I’m doing hasn’t changed - I’m now further up a shorter totem pole,

that’s all’. Despite the rhetoric of ‘empowerment’, neither Associates nor Team

Leaders had any influence over decisions affecting the unit as a whole. Team Leaders

had little operational autonomy over individual projects, except by default when the

ACE and Associates had no time to become directly involved.

Interviews with senior managers and engineers suggested a number of reasons

why the empowerment programme represented an attempt to re-label and re-orient,

rather than to replace, the existing hierarchical structure. For senior managers, the

programme was, in part, a compromise: attempting to create a more ‘entrepreneurial’

orientation in the face of opposition from engineers who had worked in local

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government for many years and had no wish to move, in effect, to a branch of the

private sector. The outcome, as one admitted was a ‘mish-mash’, resulting from a

‘snakes and ladders exercise’. It was also, however, prompted by a wish to retain

control and to ‘lean on’ the engineers to become more market-oriented. For their part,

engineers and middle managers expressed cynicism that they had been, as one put it,

‘railroaded’ and had no enthusiasm for being ‘enterprising’. Neither were they able to

do so, since the promised training to help them adapt to their new role had failed to

materialise.

Parcelco is the parcel handling division of a national delivery organisation,

run as a semi-autonomous business, that had previously been organised into 10

regions each subdivided functionally into Sales and Operations. In its nine years of

existence, it had yet to turn a profit despite repeated rationalisations and cost-cutting -

in part, because it continued to operate in all sectors of a market in which price

competition, particularly for business traffic, was intense and profit margins were

low. In an attempt to break even, Parcelco undertook a restructuring programme in

which the ‘express’ and ‘standard’ delivery networks were integrated, cutting 600

jobs, and re-organised into eight Business Units, to be run by General Managers

(GMs) who were to be given a high degree of operating autonomy free from head

office interference. Sales and Operations managers within Business Units were to

report to the GM, rather than head office. The GMs themselves would be responsible

for unit operations and staffing and accountable for ‘Key Performance Indicators’

relating to costs, revenues, new business and service quality. An internal market

mechanism was created to apportion overhead and support costs to units and to price

internal transfers in order to give a more accurate picture of unit costs and revenues.

Head office itself was to be slimmed down, with a reduction in staff engaged in

gathering operational data. The stated intention was for this to lead to substantial

changes in managerial behaviour, both at head office, where direct control would give

way to ‘leadership and support’, and among unit-level managers who would become

more ‘business-focused’ and ‘entrepreneurial’.

Despite the language of quality and empowerment (‘Organising for Quality

Leadership’), the principal aim was to rationalise operations and reduce costs and one

year into the programme, there were few changes of substance to reflect the re-drawn

organisation chart or senior managers’ upbeat rhetoric. Much of the old hierarchy

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was still in place. Area and Regional Managers had been retained and had, if

anything, strengthened their control over personnel matters: consequently, unit GMs’

‘autonomy’ over staffing was minimal. Indeed, the GMs’ job responsibilities had

been specified in considerable detail in new procedural manuals, so any freedoms

they enjoyed were highly circumscribed.

Developments at head office confirmed the general view within Parcelco that

only ‘lip service’ was being paid to organisational change. Far from diminishing, the

collection of operating data by head office (or ‘information hoovering’ as it was

dubbed) continued with a vengeance, not least through the oxymoronic ‘Vital Few’

form which required 1,000 separate data entries every month. The view at unit level,

therefore, was that, whatever the rhetoric, head office was still primarily concerned

with ‘fault finding’, blame’ and ‘interference’. Moreover, head office continued to set

budgets without consulting GMs and continued to intervene in day-to-day unit

operations. Direct control, rather than ‘leadership’ or ‘support’, continued to be the

pre-occupation of head office managers.

Similarly, at unit level, GMs continued to be pre-occupied with the day-to-day

administration of staff and work operations. Rather than developing a more

entrepreneurial focus by seeking to develop new business and increase revenues, GMs

retained a managerial focus on cost-cutting under pressure to meet Key Performance

Indicators. Rather than ‘empowering’ delivery and depot employees, GMs felt

compelled by cost pressures to encourage experienced employees to leave and to

replace them with inexperienced staff on short-term contracts whose work they then

deemed in need of close monitoring.

Reasons for the disparity between the rhetoric and reality of empowerment at

Parcelco emerged from the interviews with managers. When senior head office

managers talked about the changes that had been instigated, they emphasised

‘accountability’ for ‘clear performance measures’ as a way, first and foremost, of

improving cost efficiency; conversely, there was no mention of business unit

managers developing business and generating new forms of revenue. For their part,

middle managers at business unit level saw this as the intensification of a ‘blame

culture’ with an emphasis on ‘fault finding’ through, as one put it, ‘a myriad of

measurements to tell us precisely how badly we’ve failed’. Consequently, they felt

that they were not trusted and quite deliberately played safe to ‘make the numbers’

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by, as another put it, ‘getting involved in cost and control issues on the operational

side, the nitty-gritty stuff’.

Organisational Change as ‘Re-Branding’

It was evident, therefore, that in these cases, senior managers’ claims about

‘decentralisation’ and ‘empowerment’ were not descriptions of substantive changes in

the distribution of power and responsibility but attempts to represent structures that

were largely unaltered in new ways , whilst talk of ‘leadership’ and

‘entrepreneurship’ were not descriptions of significantly new managerial roles but

attempts to re-label roles that had changed very little, if at all. In short, senior

managers had re-branded rather than re-formulated their organisations and their

middle managers

Re-branding products or services that largely retain the same physical form is

a common enough phenomenon in marketing. Even when a brand is linked to a

concrete physical product or visible service, it stands over and above and, therefore,

somewhat independent of it. Mainstream marketing theory (see, for example, Doyle,

1991; Kotler, 1997) follows Levitt’s (1983) concept of the marketed ‘offering’ as

comprising both the ‘core’ product or service - the commodity that meets the

consumers basic needs or wants - and the brand that surrounds, adds value to and

differentiates it. The brand, in turn, comprises three components, or layers:

• the ‘basic’ brand, represented by name, logo, design, packaging and

advertising

• the ‘augmented’ brand, represented by additional services, delivery, forms of

payment and guarantees

• the ‘potential’ brand, represented by the intangible brand ‘image’ or

‘personality’ that further differentiate the offering

In essence, therefore, the brand is both sign and symbol - not only a guarantee of

certain physical product attributes but also a promise to deliver various intangible

sensual, emotional and functional outcomes to the consumer. A brand may convey up

to six meanings about a marketed offering: its physical attributes, promised benefits,

associated values, cultural origins, distinctive personality and typical user (Kotler,

1997). Therefore, brands carry connotations that are both functional (what it does for

the consumer) and representational (what it says about the consumer). Because the

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intangible, promissory brand image floats independently of the core product, the re-

launch of an existing brand or the re-branding of an existing product may take place

quite independently of any change in the physical characteristics of the product itself.

The notion that not only products and services but also organisational

structures and middle managers can be both ‘branded’ and ‘re-branded’ is a metaphor

only sustainable in the context of a ‘branded world’ where a ‘marketing

consciousness’ (Kotler, 1997) increasingly pervades not only the relationship between

businesses and consumers, or even organisations and their wider publics, but all

relationships and, therefore, where more or less anything or anyone can become, or

thought of as, a brand. As Klein (2000) shows, the brand has come a long way since

its earliest manifestation as a means of differentiating mass products through

advertising by surrounding their physical core with an image, or set of claimed

attributes that offered a guarantee of quality and associated values that promised

psychological and emotional benefits that would accrue to the consumer from owning

and using the product. The branding of products gave way first, to the branding of

corporations as a whole - the creation of ‘corporate personalities’ - and second, to the

creation and maintenance of brands as bundles of distinctive values, images and

promises that transcend particular products. Thus, there has been the gradual

inversion of the product and the brand: where once the brand was the ephemeral

promise that attached to the existential product, now the brand is a free-floating image

sui generis to which a plethora of different products, services or activities may be

attached. The branding of products has given way to the creation of the brand per se.

Freed from any particular physical form, brands have not only come to encompass

wide portfolios of products and services but also to encroach upon hitherto

unmarketed spheres. One such sphere is the internal workings of corporations

themselves.

The explosion of popular management literature and the self-promoting

activities of both management gurus and their commercial mimesis, the management

consultants, has meant that what were once complex and contended ideas about how

organisations might be most effectively configured, and which were largely matters of

academic debate, have become supposedly uncontentious branded ‘business

solutions’ for organisational problems - real or enacted - to be peddled in the

marketplace. Consistent with the growing inversion of product and brand, the

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emphasis in these packaged solutions is less on ‘product attributes’, more on ‘brand

promise’ - not on what any organisational changes might substantively entail but what

benefits, in terms of organisational ‘flexibility’, ‘customer focus’, ‘innovation’ and

‘effectiveness’, flow from them. The appeal of these brands of organisational change

stems precisely from the deliberately indeterminate, rhetorical character of their

promised effects; their allure comes from their capacity to evoke an emotive image, or

sense, of a transformed future workplace peopled with made-over managers, rather

than from any rational adumbration of the mechanics of change. If consumers buy

‘hope, not soap’, organisations (or, more precisely, their senior managers) buy the

promise of market share, rather than the pain of organisational repair.

The question remains, however, why these organisations and their middle

managers had been re-branded. Since this was not a central concern of the respective

research projects at the time, there is only limited, albeit indicative, direct evidence on

this, derived from some of observations made by senior and middle managers

interviewed in the study. What follows, therefore, is offered primarily as an informed

interpretation or ‘reading’ of the evidence.

My general contention is that organisational ‘re-branding’ is intended for both

external and internal consumption. As far as external consumption is concerned, the

key processes are conformity to an increasingly hegemonic rhetorical climate and the

pressures of institutional isomorphism. To take the first of these, since the 1980s, a

sustained ideological drip-feed by influential ‘free market’ business gurus and

academics, business press opinion-formers and right-of-centre governments has

created a climate of ideas - broadly termed ‘the enterprise culture’, together with its

specific corollaries, ‘the cult of the customer’ (duGay and Salaman, 1992) and ‘anti-

bureaucracy’ (duGay, 2000) - in which certain propositions about the immutable

properties of markets and the inescapable responses on the part of market participants

have become, if not universally taken for granted as received wisdom, then certainly

not seriously challenged. A view prevails that markets are self-evidently more

‘competitive’, as a result of both the entry of new ‘global players’ and the

increasingly sophisticated and discerning demands of sovereign consumers, whilst the

broader business environment is becoming chronically ‘uncertain’ and ‘chaotic’, as a

result of rapid developments in technology and design, sources of supply, legal

frameworks, employee and consumer diversity, demographic change and so on. Thus

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it has become commonplace to assert that the only viable response, by individuals and

organisations alike, is to become: more ‘adaptable’ and ‘flexible’ in order to respond

rapidly to any unforeseen changes in the business environment; ‘leaner’ and ‘fitter’ to

compete on speed and cost; more ‘customer-driven’ to offer what the market wants at

the level of quality that it wants it; and more ‘enterprising’ in order to identify and

seize market opportunities. Finally, the way to achieve a capacity for such a response

is through greater individual ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’. In organisational terms,

this means removing the dead hand of rules and hierarchy through ‘de-regulation’ and

‘delayering’. In short the only survival strategy for chronically turbulent times is to

dismantle the twin pillars of bureaucracy.

The promise of greater ‘freedom’ - from regulatory constraint and hierarchical

supervision - and ‘responsibility’ - for the efficiency and performance of an

organisational unit - is implicit in the two dominant brands of anti-bureaucratic

organisational change: ‘decentralisation’ and ‘empowerment’. In common with all

forms of rhetoric, these terms have no precise, unambiguous, agreed technical

meaning and are used as labels for a wide diversity of change initiatives (Hales, 1999;

2000). However, they are heavy with implication, carrying attractive emotive

connotations that evoke broader value-laden ideas.

What has developed, therefore, is a largely unchallenged depiction of the

current business climate and a model of necessary changes that will equip

organisations to survive and prosper in such a climate. For a number of reasons,

organisations or, more specifically, their senior managers find it increasingly difficult

to resist the implications of this hegemonic business-world view. Firstly, in common

with other successful ideologies, this view to some extent resonates with everyday

experience. What it provides is both a vocabulary to describe and a plausible

explanatory account to make sense of this otherwise disparate and inchoate

experience. In doing so, it articulates both a need for change and a vocabulary of

solutions. These alone may prompt endogenously-generated and managed change.

However, a second, more specific pressure to conform may come from business

consultants who have crystallised this generic account of the contemporary business

climate into a specific diagnostic vocabulary of ‘business problems’ and have

packaged generic change processes into particular marketable ‘solutions’. Tapping

into a general unease about business uncertainty, business consultants may convince

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senior managers that they must undertake, or, at least, be seen to be undertaking, the

kind of unavoidable changes supposedly taking place elsewhere - if not because of

their intrinsic worth, then because these are the changes every other organisation is

making.

This is reinforced by the pressures of institutional isomorphism (di Maggio

and Powell, 1983): where once institutions expected others to be, or at least look like,

bureaucracies as evidence of their probity, now institutions come to expect those with

which they interact to be ‘non-bureaucratic’ as evidence of their operational

efficiency and market credibility. A key institutional sector here is the stockmarket

and financial institutions, judging businesses not simply on current performance but

perceived capacity to perform in the future. Re-structurings and re-organisations

couched in a fashionable vocabulary of anti-bureaucracy send signals to these

financial institutions that an organisation is serious about maintaining or enhancing its

competitive capacity. A second critical institutional field is the web of government

departments, non-governmental agencies, industrial bodies and the like that, through

their diverse activities, collectively articulate and promote a hegemonic view of how

effective organisations should be configured. Finally, other market institutions, such

as competitors, suppliers and distributors, form and express an image of the kind of

organisations with which they expect to deal and how they expect these organisations

to operate. What is crucial here is not so much what organisations are or how they

function in practice but what they appear to be and how they appear to function.

The ‘re-branding’ of organisational structures as ‘decentralised’ and middle

managers as ‘empowered’ is also very much intended for internal consumption. It

represents a form of ‘internal marketing’ in which the management of human

resources has come to be conceived and approached, at least in part, as a marketing

problem, amenable to the application of marketing techniques. In short, it is

recognised that the structural arrangements through which employees are managed

have a symbolic, as well as a substantive character, in that they carry implicit

messages about how employees are regarded by the organisation and what is expected

from them. Thus the way in which changes to such arrangements are ‘spun’ draws

upon the techniques of promotional communication, branding and advertising to, in

the words of one advocate of internal marketing (Berry, 1984), ‘involve, motivate and

educate employees’. Branding change as ‘decentralisation’ or ‘empowerment’ serves

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not so much to inform employees (as ‘consumers’ of the new arrangements) about the

precise technical nature of the change ‘product’ as to persuade them of its necessity,

secure their identification with it and enlist their commitment to it. Crucial to this is

the promise that the new organisational brand carries: less a description of the new

organisational arrangements, more a normative evocation of their ‘benefits’, in the

form of improvements to business performance, and the ‘typical user’, in the form of

the new identity of managers implied by the change. Thus with the ‘decentralisation’

and ‘empowerment’ brands (whatever they might actually entail) comes the promise

of organisations that will be ‘flexible’, ‘adaptable’, ‘responsive’ to the market and

‘close to the customer’ and managers who will be ‘free to manage’, ‘enterprising’,

‘risk-taking’, ‘business minded’ and ‘accountable’.

The re-branding of organisational arrangements is reinforced by the re-

branding of the managerial role. Again, the emphasis is less upon describing the

specific requirements of these new roles as upon evoking the new identity and image

of the managers who will undertake them . Middle managers are re-branded as

‘business unit managers’, ‘profit centre managers’ or ‘team leaders’ with the new

implicit characteristics of ‘business-mindedness’, ‘dynamism’, pro-activity’,

‘creativity’, risk-taking’ ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘leadership’. The intention, again, is

to augment the core of the managerial role with a normative, motivational brand

image that can secure managers’ identification with and commitment to their ‘new’

role, orient their actions and energise their performance.

But, for all the claims about what else they might be doing, re-branded middle

managers have to continue managing - and they have to do so under circumstances of

chronic dissonance between the ‘orchestrator-leader-entrepreneurs’ that they have,

apparently, become, and the managers, individually responsible and accountable for a

unit’s performance, that they continue to be. As I have argued elsewhere (Hales,

1999b) , managerial ‘responsibility’ is, even under stable conditions, highly

problematic: uncertainties surrounding much of the managerial role lead managers to

gravitate towards those aspects that are, recognisably, ‘managerial’; being held

causally responsible for the performance of others compels managers into continuous

‘micro-management’ of ‘their’ staff; and being held morally responsible for their own

and others’ actions drives managers to immerse themselves in the minutiae of

organisational information in order to negotiate moral outcomes in their favour.

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Where this chronic uncertainty surrounding managerial responsibility is compounded

by the contingent uncertainty engendered by having to undertake a role that has been

re-branded but not substantively altered, managers cope by eschewing risk and

adhering closely to familiar managerial routines. As Argyris (1991) argues, in the

face of organisational mixed messages, managers retreat into a ‘defensive routine’ of

articulating an espoused theory of action (i.e. what they say they do - and why) but

following a quite different ‘theory-in-use’. To avoid feelings of vulnerability,

incompetence and embarrassment, they behave in ways that suggest being ‘rational’

and ‘in control’ and minimise the probability of ‘losing’.

In the cases discussed above, middle managers were doing just that. They

were faced with the mixed messages of being told that they were ‘free to manage’, yet

still being subject to rules and hierarchical scrutiny that showed that senior managers

did not trust them to manage. Their response to this uncertainty was to play safe and

do those things that were unambiguously associated with being a manager and that

showed that, if they were not necessarily ‘leading’, then at least they were ‘in charge’.

Whilst they suspected that they should be more ‘entrepreneurial’, they knew that what

they still had to do was to manage: to direct and control, on a day-to-day basis, the

people and processes of ‘their’ unit for which they were responsible. However their

jobs were now branded, they still saw themselves as ‘managers’ with ‘staff’ for whose

actions and performance they would be personally held accountable and therefore,

who they had to manage on a day-to-day basis. These were the ‘fundamentals’ on

which they believed they would be judged and to which they gave priority. This was

amplified by two things. Firstly, they had not been given any training to take on new

dimensions of their role. Secondly, they had a perception that being held accountable

for unit performance created a greater need to avoid being seen to fail. This led them

to become, if anything, less inclined to take risks and more inclined to adhere to

familiar routines that would demonstrate that, even if they were not especially

enterprising, they were ‘managing’. Whilst they may have partially absorbed the

new ‘espoused theory’ of managerial behaviour as entrepreneurship and leadership,

their continued ‘theory-in-use’ (Argyris 1991) was of managerial behaviour as routine

administration and ‘keeping the show on the road’.

Conclusion

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Despite the grandiose claims, changes to organisations and the middle manager role

may amount in practice to little more than re-branding: a slimmed-down bureaucracy

(‘bureaucracy-lite’) is represented as radically ‘decentralised’, whilst middle

managers who are still held responsible and accountable for an organisational sub-

unit within the constraints of vertically-imposed regulations and hierarchical scrutiny

are said to be ‘empowered’, with all the positive images of enhanced business

performance that surround these brands. Whatever the effect this might have on

external institutional expectations, the internal effect on managerial behaviour and

commitment may turn out to be the reverse of what was probably intended. Far from

abandoning their pre-occupation with the quotidian routines of administration in

favour of creative, opportunistic business leadership, managers may respond to the

dissonance between what they are told they have become (i.e. entrepreneurs) and the

concrete evidence of what they still, patently, are (i.e managers) by adhering

defensively to the very routines that they are being encouraged to abandon. They

continue to devote the bulk of their time and energy to the day-to-day micro-

management of people, processes and information because these are the key things for

which they continue to be individually responsible and vertically accountable. A

rose, we are assured, ‘by any other name would smell as sweet’; equally, for middle

managers re-branded as ‘empowered’ ‘leaders’, the thorny scent of management may

linger.

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