Managerial work

Middle Managers’ Work in Recession and Austerity: A Longitudinal Study

“…Thus, the adoption of a longitudinal design enabled a fuller understanding of how the content of managerial work could be affected by contextual pressures that magnify or intensify managerial roles, but without necessarily radically transforming managers’ work. While this broadly confirms the suggestion that more critical reflections may conclude that there are more similarities than differences in managerial work (see Hales, ; Tengblad, ; Tengblad and Vie, ), the insights we generate may also form a partial explanation for such differing interpretations of managerial work in the literature. Our study demonstrates that, during highly pressured periods of time, managers may feel that their role has transformed radically.…”

“…Linked to the above is the importance of incorporating power and strategic choice in conceptualizing managerial work. Recent accounts of changes and intensifications of managerial work have explored the influences of environmental factors such as global competitive intensity (see Farrell and Morris, ; Hassard, Morris and McCann, ) and other factors such as gender and national culture (see Tengblad and Vie, ). However, many of the changes have been presented as prescribed and inevitable outcomes of environmental changes, with the strategic choice and power/control imperatives of executives overlooked.…”

“…However, the finding that the same managers offered widely differing accounts of their work over a four‐year period suggests that many existing conceptualizations that rely on data collected at single points may reflect incomplete accounts of the work of managers. This approach also helps to uncover some aspects of the ‘lived lives’ of managers and contributes a rare example of the practice‐based insights to theory development that scholars have suggested are lacking (see Korica et al ., ; Tengblad, ; Tengblad and Vie, ).…”

“…Tengblad, ) and into the evolving nature of the context of managerial work (e.g. Hales, ; Tengblad and Vie, ), the impact of recession and/or austerity and the choices executives make on the ensuing austerity measures have been relatively overlooked. The absence of critical scrutiny of the impact of economic recession in the management literature is a concern that is broadly shared by Latham and Braun (), who bemoan the shortage of reflective management research into the recent recession and the ongoing period of economic uncertainty.…”