Abstract
Although popular depictions of economic change thrive on generalizations about the ‘squeezed middle’, in academic studies of work the middle often remains a gaping hole. This highly engrossing book does an excellent job of filling that hole by providing a highly astute, timely and thorough look at the work of middle managers and at middle management as work. Based on interviews with 251 managers in large corporations across a range of sectors in the USA, Britain and Japan, the authors offer a nuanced account of what corporate restructuring means for the work and indeed the lives of those who bear much of the responsibility for translating the reshuffling and flattening of organizational charts into practice.
Chapter 1 helpfully reviews the treatment of middle managers in different theoretical orientations, variably dismissive, sceptical or optimistic about their role in large corporations. The labour process-inspired interpretation adopted here sees white collar workers ‘just as much subject to top-down labour control as other members of the firm’ (p. 26). Just as the book’s cover photo at once resembles and differs from that of Braverman’s original, the authors want to ‘rehabilitate’ (p. 46) the legacy by incorporating managerial work, deliberately excluded in the original formulation of labour process theory, into its explanatory domain.
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are devoted to the fieldwork findings. The USA, ‘the historical home of the Chandlerian giant firm’ (p. 55) and more recently of a range of corporate restructuring ideas, has indeed witnessed a move to fewer layers of management in large firms. Yet these delayered corporations are by no means flat and the case studies in an array of sectors reveal the widespread, top-to-bottom imposition of ‘generic and off-the-shelf systems’ (p. 122). ‘Cutting and caring’ (p. 69) appears as incongruous a mix to implement as it sounds; and despite nods to fostering ‘love and trust in the matrix’ (p. 85), the most discernible consequence of corporate restructuring for middle managers is their becoming ‘not empowered, just more responsible’ (p. 95). The incessant restructuring does not even appear justifiable on grounds of a continuous quest for ‘rationalization’, since while its deleterious effects on managers are quite clear, its delivery of increased profits is far from so.
Though different from the USA, post-liberalization Britain offers a vivid illustration of how shareholder value and short-term financial demands have come to dominate strategic thinking. In one memorable interview excerpt, a manager in an automotive firm depicts ‘a manic environment, where speed is everything’ (p. 133). High levels of reward are possible for the best skilled, but promotion opportunities increasingly scarce. Dwindling returns on business, as in the case of the insurance firm in the study, lead to cost-cutting and subsequently to the intensification of managerial work, with the obligation to ‘drive more and more effort from those below, while enduring heavy monitoring from those above’ (p. 167). The persistent increase in the demands on managers is only sustainable through their pride in, commitment to and even enjoyment of their jobs. The chapter concludes with the cautionary tale of a former manager in the banking industry, who contributes a vignette where the result for branch managers reaching targets was the raising of future targets by head office.
Japan, as always, proves a telling comparison. Accordingly, while changes in corporate governance and the shift towards shareholder value are relatively contained here, the restructurings of organizational hierarchies at the middle level are significant. Despite a considerably distinct macro-structural backdrop, a convergence story is played out in terms of the experience of managerial work through ‘the combined weight of smaller, more piecemeal changes over time’ (p. 184). Emphasis only on the resilience of societal coordination in Japan runs the risk of missing ‘the human angle’ (p. 185: 1), that managers here have experienced the same general push as their peers in the USA and Britain towards ‘doing more with less’ (p. 202), job enlargement, work intensification, stagnated wages and declining promotion prospects. The interview findings from Japan do a lot to support one central claim of the book, that there is a relative decoupling of corporate governance principles from the realities of managerial work and increasingly the latter ‘are essentially similar, regardless of institutional context’ (p. 225).
Across continents, then, contemporary managerial lives have rather universally become more pressurized and insecure, characterized by overwork, stress and anxiety. The authors raise two obvious (and humane) questions: whether it has to be this way; and whether the intensification of managerial work can continue indefinitely. Their proposal for ‘increased sharing of workload by hiring more mid-level managers’, if simple, is also entirely commonsensical. Resisting the new organizational ideology and restoring the dignity of managerial work are unlikely pursuits for firms that may not see ‘real value’ in them, but government action, union resistance and litigation may yet prove unlikely allies in countering the seemingly fixed formulas that lead to the deterioration of the quality of work and life.
‘Downbeat observations’ (p. 256) are made here on the nature of contemporary managerial work, for sure, but through them also a superbly crafted and powerful call for a careful look at the intensified (managerial) labour process that need not be as ‘normalized’ as it has become. The reflexive, sophisticated and often moving accounts of the managers add much conviction to the arguments, as well as the heart, of the book. One remains wanting to find out more about how those who are so incessantly exposed to the perils and pressures of managerial work are nevertheless so routinely able to generate the kind of commitment and derive the kind of pride that these accounts also vividly capture, as in the tradition of Gideon Kunda’s (1992) Engineering Culture. Some consideration of that puzzle would have been still more rewarding to read, though perhaps not exactly a delight.