Identity, Discourse and Organizations: Managism

In the last post I had promised to write a piece to make what I had written there a bit more concrete. Here I am! I want to discuss the implications of a certain type of discourse on managers’ identities. The managism discourse can be defined as:

An everyday discourse at the hearth of which is the belief that there is a distinctive managerial expertise based on a body of objective management knowledge which managers should apply to enable them rationally to design, maintain and drive organisational systems in the same way that expert engineers design, maintain and drive machines. (Watson, 2006)

Think about it: almost all management books, MBAs promotional material and similar stuff tend to advance a similar discourse. Let us analyze the possible implications. Watson calls managism an “operating faith”; he says that one function of it is to comfort people and basically give them the sense of security they need in order to cope with the complexities of the profession. Watson tells us how the rhetoric used by this promotional material works as many stories do: “it builds up anxieties in the reader and then implies that these anxieties will be overcome by the purchase of the product”. The product being the book or the MBA program.

Anyway there is also a potentially dangerous side in the managism Discourse: it creates the idea that managers are very rational, cool, calculating and visionary leaders (better if equipped with an MBA from a top Business School). Managers are presented as heroes. This Discourse can therefore raise the level of expectations to an unattainable level making it very difficult to keep up with them. “And, of course, it demands [managers] that they prove themselves all the time by achieving more demanding ‘results’ ” (Watson, 2006). The results of not being able to cope with these expectations can be tragic (e.g.: stress, depression, suicide).

Sveningsson and Larsson (2006) suggest and interesting and alternative way in which managers may end up coping with the Discourses (of leadership): fantasy. In their article, they describe the interesting case of a middle manager whose actual inability to lead in a transformational way is compensated with a sort of “identity immune system” which makes him think that he is actually a transformational leader, despite what others think and say. Reality is compensated with fantasy. In describing the manager way of seeing himself Sveningsson and Larsson wrote: “self-identity as a transformative and visionary leader has taken on the quality of fantasy, understood as an idea that is disconnected from current reality […]”.

We have therefore briefly discussed the implications of the managism Discourse on managers’ identities. Of course, one should also understand that, luckily, there is space left for choice. In fact, as discussed in the last post, there are many contradicting and competing discourses on which we can draw. People are still active agents and therefore are not completely constrained in their actions. As Watson (2006) writes “there is a mixture of choice and constraint”. Different people make sense differently of such texts, depending on their identities, past experiences, etc… Since there are many different Discourses, there is room for choice, but sometimes the space may not be enough we could say. In fact, I think that it may be very difficult to step away from certain Discourses when living in a certain world (e.g.: business world) where they are so dominating. The managism Discourse is probably the strongest one and, I have to admit, that I also tend to be trapped in it when I think of the implications of undertaking a career in business.

Identity, Discourse & Organizations

Common sense – derived from a strictly modernist understanding of the world - describes the individual as a fixed entity with a certain given and stable personality. In fact, identity has been classically conceptualized as a well defined and stable construct: the idea being that it stabilizes itself and never changes, except in exceptional circumstances, once one reaches adulthood.

A post-modernist approach would instead suggest that the individual is rather, using George Herbert Mead words, a “parliament of selves” or, using another metaphor taken from Karl Weick, an “ongoing puzzle that is undergoing continuous redefinition”. A process of never ending negotiation, of struggle is what therefore characterizes the “identity work” we need to engage in, in order to try to reach the necessary sense of perceived stability.

In fact, we try to make sense of who we are by drawing on various cultural/linguistic resources such as narratives and discourses. The assumption here, as discussed in another post, is that language shapes the ways in which reality is constructed. This last point is easily understood if we consider how "we cannot know, think about or analyse the world without using concepts, language, [categories] and "frames of reference", which come from the social world that we are part of" (Watson, 2006).

For example discourses - understood as the historically contextualized collection of texts, logics and assumptions about something - can a have a more or less strong influence on the way we can plausibly think, or talk about a certain subject, on the way we enact reality and therefore make sense of ourselves. Various competing and contradicting discourses coexist at the same time and, almost certainly, none is going to offer a sufficiently strong grip in order to guarantee to the individual the comfort of a sense of coherence and stability. In fact, as humans we are better understood as strategic and situationally oriented: the specific context, the various ongoing projects, the competing discourses present at a given time and many other factors are going to influence the current sense of self and consequently how we make sense of reality.

From an organizational point of view this is interesting because this continuous struggle to define one’s identity is going to influence and, at the same time, to be influenced by organizational life. For example, people’s work orientation – the meaning and attitudes toward work – are going to change over time together with what an individual is going to be willing to exchange with the organization: the inputs, the physical and mental effort, the responsibilities, willingness to accept risk-taking, acceptance of managerial control and so on and so forth.

Moreover understanding people in this more process-relational way may help us understanding how there is actually a limit to the extent of control that a manager can reach over the people working in the organization: it is in fact impossible to herd the cats, or to control the uncontrollable.

To conclude, I think that the practical implications of this paradigm shift in how we conceptualize individuals are not to be underestimated. In fact, as we know, theories in social sciences tend to have the property of self-fulfilling prophecies: “If men define situations as real they are real in their consequences.”

In the next post on this theme, in order to make what I have explained here a bit more concrete, I am going to analyze the implications of a certain discursive approach to management.

PS: Most of Ideas for this post were taken from: Tony Watson (2006) Organizing and Managing Work. Financial Times/Prentice Hall