Managing disruption :an autoethnography of a middle-manager.

Type of content
Theses / Dissertations
Publisher's DOI/URI
Thesis discipline
Sociology
Degree name
Master of Arts
Publisher
University of Canterbury. Sociology
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Language
Date
2015
Authors
Parker, Dennis
Abstract

The thesis describes and reflects on a middle-manager’s experience of a market-led economic based restructuring project in a New Zealand public sector organisation. The thesis takes the form of an autoethnography, a reflexive account of the writer’s personal experience while acting in a professional capacity. The use of autoethnography as a research social science methodology has been subject to criticisms relating validity and relevance. However, the value of this methodology is the potential to ‘situate’ the reader inside the events, providing a rich understanding of the lived experience of the emergence of a restructured organisation. The thesis shows how a hierarchical organisation, celebrating the primacy of management and the financialization of all transactions, required middle-managers to put aside their professional / vocational commitments to work and enter into and endorse fealty / loyalty relationships with senior executives. It shows how both the language and silences of organisational change served to rationalise a new ‘ordering’ of the ‘moral mazes’ of the organisation that not only demanded commitment be demonstrated through loyalty, but also positioned middle-managers, who were rendered as insecure as their colleagues / team members, as the mediators / controllers of the restructure project. The thesis argues that the negative affect exhibited by team members involved in the restructuring project was a direct consequence of the intervention methodology and communication style deployed by senior management.

Description
Citation
Keywords
Autoethnography, affect, moral mazes, financialization, fealty, ordering
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
Rights
Copyright Dennis Parker