Managing disruption :an autoethnography of a middle-manager.
| dc.contributor.author | Parker, Dennis | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2015-09-28T20:08:14Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2015 | en |
| dc.description.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. | en |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10092/10976 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://dx.doi.org/10.26021/3601 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | University of Canterbury. Sociology | en |
| dc.relation.isreferencedby | NZCU | en |
| dc.rights | Copyright Dennis Parker | en |
| dc.rights.uri | https://canterbury.libguides.com/rights/theses | en |
| dc.subject | Autoethnography | en |
| dc.subject | affect | en |
| dc.subject | moral mazes | en |
| dc.subject | financialization | en |
| dc.subject | fealty | en |
| dc.subject | ordering | en |
| dc.title | Managing disruption :an autoethnography of a middle-manager. | en |
| dc.type | Theses / Dissertations | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Sociology | en |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Canterbury | en |
| thesis.degree.level | Masters | en |
| thesis.degree.name | Master of Arts | en |
| uc.bibnumber | 2124788 | |
| uc.college | Faculty of Arts | en |
| uc.embargo | 24 | en |