It is frequently argued that, as a consequence of radical organizational change, the role of first-line manager (FLM) has shifted from supervision to team leadership/co-ordination or business unit management. After reviewing the nature of these claims and the debate about the relationship between first-line management and supervision, evidence is presented from a survey of 135 organizations in London and the South East on how the role of FLM is presently defined and how it has changed. The findings paint a picture of a stable, consistent FLM role where a common performance-oriented supervisory core is surrounded by a penumbra of additional managerial responsibilities relating to stewardship, translating strategy into operations, unit management and, exceptionally, business management. The FLM role remains part of a hierarchical system of individual managerial responsibility and vertical accountability, with narrow spans of control, vertical and internal contacts and authority, participation in decisions and accountability confined largely to operating routines. Changes to the FLM role have been as much towards a strengthening of the supervisory core as a broadening into business management responsibilities. It is argued that the persistence and prevalence of the supervisory core stems from the continued location of FLMs within systems of external, hierarchical supervision. Far from being weakened, the supervisory core of the FLM role has often been strengthened by the adoption of more stringent controls over work practice in order to cope with a growth in business activity or comply with a greater range of external regulations. In some cases, however, a re-division of managerial labour has led to formerly middle management responsibilities and accountability being added to the supervisory core to produce an extended FLM role. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005.

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If the question 'what do managers do?' (Hales, 1986) has -or, at least, had -an air of naivety, insolence, even redundancy, about it, then the question 'why do managers do what they do?' seems positively querulous. For, whilst an answer to the former question -albeit a somewhat incomplete and ambiguous one (Grint, 1995;Hales, 1986;Martinko and Gardner, 1985;Stewart, 1989) -has gradually crystallized over nearly 50 years of research, there have been surprisingly few attempts to answer the latter. In particular, the question of why managerial work exhibits a number of consistent common characteristics, as well as manifold variations, is one which has attracted surprisingly little attention. A central reason for this is that it lies in the gulf which has continued to separate, on the one hand, research on managers and, on the other hand, management theory.As the first part of this article seeks to show, research studies of managers and management theory have been, and remain, poles apart. On the one hand, research studies were slow to move away from the purely descriptive, and have invariably focused attention on the divers variations in managerial work, rather than the commonalities. Therefore, where studies attempted to move beyond the demonstration of correlation to offering an explanatory account, it is variation which they have sought to explain, rather than similarities -implying that these similarities are somehow self-evident -and explanations have tended to take the form of reductionist or localized accounts. On the other hand, management theory has tended to be more concerned with the characteristics and dynamics of the management process as a whole, and has carried the implication that specific managerial practices may be inferred logically from these, without addressing This article seeks to show that there has been surprisingly little interest in developing a causal explanation of the consistently documented common characteristics of managerial work and attempts to sketch out such an explanation. It is argued that researchers in the field have either contented themselves with description and correlation or have given priority to explaining variations, whilst theories of management have tended to suggest that managerial behaviour can be inferred, unproblematically, from the character of the broader management process rather than engaging with the evidence on these behaviours. Even recent and explicit attempts to conceptualize managerial work have not satisfactorily woven theory with evidence. The outline of an explanatory account which is offered attempts to link the common characteristics of managerial work to the ambiguous and problematic nature of managerial 'responsibility' and the way in which all managers both draw upon and, by their actions, reproduce resources, cognitive rules and moral rules, from within the social systems in which they are located, which define and facilitate that responsibility. Well-documented generic managerial activities, substantive areas of work and characteristic feature...

This paper questions three frequently asserted, interrelated claims about developments in management: that centralized, regulated bureaucratic organizations characterized by hierarchy and rules are inevitably giving way to decentralized and empowered post‐bureaucratic organizations characterized by internal networks and an internal market; that, as a consequence, the traditional managerial role of command and control is being superseded by one of facilitation and coordination; and that, in turn, managerial work as routine administration of work processes is being supplanted by the ‘new managerial work’ of non‐routine leadership and entrepreneurship. It is argued that these claims often rest on caricatures of bureaucracy and network organization and are neither new nor well supported by evidence. Against these claims, the paper adduces case‐study evidence which shows that, despite claims about ‘decentralization’ and ‘empowerment’, organizational change may entail not a radical shift to network organization, but more limited change to a different form of bureaucracy in which hierarchy and rules have been retained but in an attenuated and sharper form –‘bureaucracy‐lite’. Consequently, managerial roles continue to be defined in terms of individual responsibility and vertical accountability for an organizational sub‐unit, and managerial work continues to be preoccupied with monitoring and maintaining work processes, routine direction and control of staff and processing information in order to deal with the ambiguities inherent in the dimensions of managerial ‘responsibility’.

This paper oers a critical examination of the assumptions about managerial behaviour which underpin the concept of decentralization. Following an attempt to elucidate the key dimensions of the concept, together with some of their variations and ambiguities, it is shown how the claimed advantages of decentralization ow from assumed changes in managerial behaviour, away from compliance with centrally imposed instruction and regulation and towards seizure of business opportunities which, in turn, rest upon assumptions about the in¯uence of organization structure on managerial behaviour, the constraints imposed by centralized organization, the freedoms aorded by decentralization and managers' ability and willingness to take up these freedoms. These behavioural assumptions are reexamined critically and shown to be problematic. The paper concludes that little change in managerial behaviour may be expected from decentralization which entails no more than formal changes in managers' responsibilities without concomitant changes in managerial selection, development and remuneration.