Master in Business Administration

Module: Management Theory Razan Ahmad

Management as Negotiation at the Interface: Moving Beyond the

Critical-Practice Impasse

Author : Sabin Hotho & David Pollard Journal: Organization Articles Year: 2007 Vol: 14 No: 3 Pages: 583-603

Academic Management Change Critical Management Rationality Universities

Key Words

Methodology & design The study relied on case study exploring middle management

practice in the Higher Education.

It followed the logic of Gergen’s critique of pure critique, (i.e.It proposed alternative reading –counter reading-which

positioned against managerial & critical perspectives).

The data used in the case study are based on: nine semi-structured two long hour interviews with heads of school in an old research oriented university.

Important to Know Critical Management Studies (CMS) project is the aim to

engage with management practice so as to foster & facilitate substantive organizational change towards more human & less oppressive or marginalizing form of organization, organizing & management.

CMS is still suspended between: - The aim to critique dominant management practice & discourse. - The expectation to facilitate transformative management action.

The Aims This paper had to achieve some objectives: To reassert local organizing activity as purposive &

constructive. To facilitate communication across managerial & critical

discourses & their proponents. To facilitate engagement between CMS & management

practice. To shift conceptually from predominantly

problem-solving/engineering model, to amore flexible multiple enlightenment /reflexive model.

Findings

This paper is organized around the notion of critical management research as a three process of producing: insight, critique, transformative redefinitions.

I. Critique: Prichard refers to two conflicting perspectives as the normal (i.e. managerial) & the contra (i.e. critical perspectives). Normal approach:• It offers managerial guidance on sector management & comment

on sector responses.• It considers the concept of change as a quasi-natural force which is

replete with polarized antinomies.• Instrumental rationality & managerial intervention are privileged.• Academics appears as hapless victims of change as–disillusioned &

ill equipped to deal with contemporary demands, & they prefers compromising rather than change (Don’t want to rock the boat).

• Managerial literature speaks of gains to be achieved through change.

The End

Findings

Contra approach:• It is concerned with the impact of change on managing &

managed academics.• Academics located on the continuum between accommodation

& resistance, between self-subjugation & innovative and meaningful coping mechanisms to keep hope alive and demonstrate spirit and dignity.

• It emphasizes loss as the sector shifts from trust-based relations & autonomy to accountability audits, from confidentiality & professionalism to transactional relationships.

• Academics reasserts themselves as at least semi-autonomous decision makers or individuals deliberate choices.

Findings

II. Insight: Interviewees held complex broad & multiple views:• Participants expressed a weary view of sector change, of change ”for

the sake of change”, of loss where change outcomes affected the quality of teaching & research. however, Self-understanding of the interviewees challenge interpretative fixation.

• When asked to describe their own practice: interviewees were sharply critical of prevailing trends, increasing

bureaucracy, economic pressures and they foresaw that academic careers might become less attractive, so they expressed for need for change with relation to both local & broader contexts.

Interviewees straddled the boundaries of local & wider contexts, so they expressed that all had to achieve the balance between individual & corporate interests, both operational & strategic, and saw this as central to the role of the academic middle managers, (i.e. they are as situated at interface, requiring up-ward looking & down-ward communication, an element of being split in between).

Findings • When asked to describe their approach:

They used tools & tactics of soft management, but also being strong where it needs to be strong.

Light-touch management, but not laissez-faire. Distributive management, involving all stakeholders. What allowed them to carry out their jobs was abroad level of

collegial trust, which they saw it as a prerequisite to do the job effectively.

Findings

III. Transformative Redefinition: Bolan arrives at the concept of an expanded, socially grounded

model of rationality which is crucially linked to the notions of adaptation and mediation, termed “adaptive rationality” .

• Adaptive rationality is a means to mediate between instrumental rationality & substantive rationality, to understand management processes, & as a basis to formulate a new concept of management.

• It stresses the coexistence of rationalities, within an individual ’s rationalization process and at organizational level.

• It stresses the coexistence of rather than hierarchical relationships between rationalities in the management of large scale social arrangements.

Findings

• This process cannot be without tensions, so it needs to focus on the organizational interfaces where the differing processes of rationalizing meet and generate friction and tension.

Finally, transformative redefinition of the effect of management as fundamentally dialectical which provides a fuller picture of organizational reality rather than reductivisit perspectives of managerialism would concede.

Conclusions

The task of the organizational analyst, of either managerial or critical persuasion, would be to uncover & critique the interactions between these multiple rationalities.

This paper is the proposal that we drive towards an understanding of management as a dialectical process of mediation rather than a unilinear process of implementation & control that is obeyed or resisted.