Abstract
William M Foster, University of Alberta, Canada
John Hassard, University of Manchester, UK
Jonathan Morris, Cardiff University, UK
Julie Wolfram Cox, Monash University, Australia
The world of organizations has been transformed over the past twenty years. Firms now face intensified international competition facilitated by developments in information and communications technology (ICT), trade liberalization and interconnectedness through the development of global commodity chains. Against this backcloth, new, more responsive organizational forms have emerged, based on flat, neo-bureaucratic lines, accompanied by delayering, downsizing and concentrating on core activities, as part of a move to neo-bureaucratic organization (Clegg et al., 2011). This has led some commentators to predict that we are now seeing ‘the end of management’ (Murray, 2010).
In this context, we have arguably witnessed significant changes to managerial work and how it is done (Hassard et al., 2009). This transformation has been reported in both economies dominated by a shareholder-value orientation (i.e., US and UK) and in economies with a stakeholder focus (i.e., Germany and Japan) (Morris et al., 2006; 2008). Across these economies we have seen the rise of neo-liberalism and a consequent focus on shareholder value that appears to have led managers to concentrate on financial issues (Tengblad, 2004; 2006; 2011) and for corporations to favour ‘a tyranny of corporate slenderness’ (Hales, 2002; 2005; Tyler and Wilkinson, 2007). As a result, changes to managerial work can be seen in increased spans of control, intensified work regimes, longer working hours, reduced promotion opportunities, less career certainty and greater job insecurity. Yet, in some other contexts, the emergence of neo- bureaucratic organizational forms has been accompanied by vertical disintegration necessitating more diffuse methods of managerial control (Clegg, 2011).
Despite these changes to managerial work we still know relatively little about how these changes affect managers and what they do at work. To address the current void in our conversations about managerial work we invite exemplary contributions to address these issues from one or more of the following themes.
Working time, work intensification and work-life balance
Job security, managerial careers and labour markets
Job identification, organizational identity and work commitment