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                                 Emotion Work                                         

                                            Chapter 7

 The Work of Managers

“I love this job. But sometimes it nearly drives me mad.

I think I am a good manager. There is satisfaction in that, real satisfaction.

But at times I think I’m totally wasting my time. I reckon I work  with some of the best people around.

 We’ve got all the brains, all the skills you could want.

But where is it getting us?”

T.J. Watson  from In Search of Management.  

          In the last 10 or more years the work of managers has changed significantly from what went before. There have been more incentives to perform productively, and more controls. This raises a question as to whether managers are not losing some of the prestige they had for most of the twentieth century. At an extreme, one can ask are they being proletarianised; becoming like the clerks and manual workers they once managed?

          In order to address this question it is necessary to ask firstly what is it that managers actually do? There has always been a populist scepticism that management is a residual activity, less important than actual production. Further that the clerks, or other producers, could potentially manage themselves. The need for management has rarely been doubted, the issue is who does it; one or many?  The examples of workers self management, of trade unions themselves managing their members, of workers co-operatives, all show the existence of alternatives to managers as a separate group.

          British, and some American, research has shown a scepticism about what managerial theorists have said that managers do. One study showed that managers were more like reactive socialisers, than rational long-term decision-makers. They solved problems, or fought fires, with words through networks of colleagues and subordinates. Managers were seen as living in a whirl of activity. They flitted from topic to topic. They respond to the initiatives of others, rather than initiate themselves. This research has been criticised as misleading because of the research methods used. Various styles of participant observation, including time budgets,  may  make the manager seem to be without a rational strategy for the firm’s future. On the other hand, research using diaries and structured questionnaires, may produce a picture of the manager as the rational decision maker, and strategist. As Hales argues,

           "Diary studies inevitably focused upon contacts and time allocation, structured questionnaires generated work elements, whilst participant observation studies made much of 'informal'     behaviour."

          (Hales, 105: 1986). 

Given that the diary entry is a recollection  of the event , at varying times after the event, this raises some problems. The most obvious one is that the later writing up from memory is likely to be different from the earlier experience of decision making or whatever.  Indeed, the written diary entry may very well produce a more rational account of the event than it warrants.  In research conducted in 4 banks I provided a diary with  hourly entries over one largely typical week (Caffrey, 1995). This may have been too frequent, and did not allow time for lengthy entries. However, out of a possible maximum of  1,750 entries only 3, or possibly four, entries could be described as rational. This goes against the view of managers as long term strategists, and rational decision makers.

          I list the four ‘rational’ below.

1        Meeting risk manager... 10 minutes... re. Credit limits per client.

          2        Meeting with colleagues to discuss problems facing a particular area. Held in response to communication from one of                     the    afflicted users. Result: users understand course of action required; next steps identified.

          3        Staff meeting to persuade (satisfactorily) a member of staff to take paid leave from next month prior to retirement, to avoid inter-personal conflict with her successor.

          4        Formal disciplinary interview with member of staff.

          The first action appeared rational in the sense that it was clearly focused on one issue, and one client; also action resulted. The second action related to the software being introduced into the bank, and this manager was a technical expert who solved the problem for many users. The issue was unclear to the users, but clear to the expert; and there was an outcome. The third action was clearly focused on two people, with a successful outcome. The fourth action is not so clear cut. The manager was clearly of the opinion that this was a successful meeting, and the outcome was a disciplinary warning about time keeping. The person receiving this discipline would probably have seen this meeting in another light.

          If only the first three actions are accepted as examples of rational management, then the very brief entries of the majority of the respondents do seem to support  the view of the manager in a whirlwind of activity. Typical entries are as follows:

          1        Began writing up report.

          2        Back to report.

          3        Client correspondence/telephone queries.

          4        Demonstration meeting ... 6 attendees... side tracking/ poor  presentation/ no agenda. 

          5        Working lunch to discuss progress on report.

          6        Teaching session ... working of new download system ... muddled understanding.

          7        Chat re yesterday's review.

          8        Management by walking around.

          9        Urgent detailed read through of faxed management plan,  requiring comments to-day! 30 pages.

          10      Ad hoc items.

          Not all these items clearly  indicate a whirlwind, but 4,5, 6 and 9 do seem to. Rather all items show the respondent  reacting  to outside pressures. Number 7 can be seen as a later reconstruction of events, and perhaps more rational than yesterday's meeting. It can also be seen as an informal complaining session with no further outcomes. Indeed, my argument in a feedback session at one bank was that being rational implied having an outcome. This  was hotly disputed. Instead mutual understanding was seen as more rational!.

          So what the manager does is unresolved. I also distributed a questionnaire, to be completed at home, at the weekend, after the diary had been completed. This was intended to allow for exactly the rational reconsideration of the weeks events, that might not have been possible in a whirlwind of activity. In particular, respondents were asked to assess on a five point scale the efficiency of any meetings they had attended in the week.  The total scores for all banks were as follows;  where 1 is the highest score, and 5 is the lowest.

Table 7.1

If the two top scores of 1 and 2 are taken together, then nearly half of all meetings attended were seen as positively efficient. This result does fit earlier research, and presents managers as rational. Asking managers if meetings attended were helpful, or unhelpful to them. produced  a figure of 103 helpful, and 48 unhelpful. This is an even stronger positive response than the efficiency question. Here nearly two thirds were positive about the experience of the meeting. But being helpful was interpreted differently by the respondents. For some it was like efficiency, it involved an outcome. For others it was merely sharing information; or helping colleagues with a problem, or chatting about mutual concerns. Where a meeting was informal, this often meant a short discussion with a friend in person or on the phone, or by electronic mail. Where a meeting was more formal, and all those due to attend were  present, then many of these got a low score. Distinguishing formal from informal meetings was not easy. One attendee described walking down a corridor and being dragged into a meeting unexpectedly! This was explained as being a consequence of there being fewer middle managers than before, so anyone could be called in to help. This almost playful atmosphere may go some way to explain the positive responses to both efficiency and helpfulness. It also raises the question of how rational these managers were  based on the questionnaire evidence. 

          Another way of attempting to discover how rational these managers were involved allowing nearly a full page at the end of the questionnaire to enter a response to how helpful the diary was in helping to "creatively imagine other ways of organising the working day?" Although the content of what was written was very  interesting, the main purpose was to see how many of the 35 managers would consider reflectively the experience of hourly entries at work, and answering 15 questions at the weekend at home. The number who wrote 5 or more lines was 18, just over half the total number. This fits the half or more who found the meetings at work efficient or helpful. However, when the actual content of these informal comments are looked at a different picture emerges. I list below some typical comments.

1        I find many meetings wasteful, an excuse for arguing, or time-wasting.

          2        Too many meetings mean that you are not getting enough information to do your job.

          3        Actually thinking about what I was doing hour by hour was a useful exercise. It made me split my work into manageable chunks.

          4        The level of success obviously varies. I have benefited from seeing first hand, what the lack of planning can cause.

          5        Analysing the effectiveness of meetings should improve planning, and objective setting, for future meetings, particularly when you have control   through the chair.

          6        What is lacking is not so much creative ideas as self  discipline.

          7        Due to typical pressure of the week the additional burden of completing this has not at this time proved welcome.

          8        Meetings scheduled for 4 p.m. onwards seem to be unpopular as people are rushing to finish tasks by the end of the day.

          9        The nature of the job is very reactive to situations, and a substantial amount of time each week  can be spent fire-fighting.

          10      Meetings are a serious business event, and should be treated as such by all participants!

          11      Too many interruptions to the working day, i.e. by having  informal meetings at inconvenient times!  

          Comments 3 and 5 above stand out  from the rest. Comment 3 came from a manager who had clear objectives for the day, but had not allocated specific times to different tasks. This change in working practice based on the experience of completing the diary would seem to be more rational, in the sense that an appropriate amount of time was allocated to each task. In another bank, a merchant bank,  one young manager was so impressed with the improvement in their time management through using the diary that she altered the company's diary layout for future use.

          Comment 5 is different. This could be described as hyper-rational, almost neurotic. There is a clear idea of what a rationally run meeting would look like, allied to the need for strong control from the chair. This can be read as evidence of a series of successful and rational meetings in this bank. Or it can be read as a response to many irrational meetings, which produces a need for a more authoritarian style of chairing, and indeed managing generally.

          These two comments were atypical, and are the only evidence of rationality amongst the lengthy responses on the final page of the questionnaire. Comment 6 came from an older manager, who took early retirement as the research came to an end. I had defined young managers as being under the age of 35. This manager was involved in my initial approaches to the bank and gave me permission to conduct the research. She insisted on being involved, and completed the questionnaire and diary. This comment can be seen as expressing exasperation on her part about the behaviour of the younger managers in formal meetings. She was rather out of tune with the then new ideas of flatter structures. This involved taking out the middle layers of management, described as bureaucratic fat; and replacing them with younger managers. These younger managers were given more responsibility, and given it earlier than in the past. But there were fewer senior and more experienced managers around to get advice from. The young managers had to help one another. This probably accounts for the "creativity" that she objected to. Further, the word creativity suggests some form of play, like being dragged into a meeting room from the corridor. This play would contrast sharply with the more formal, and more old fashioned, style of conducting meetings to which she had been accustomed. The amount of play amongst younger managers, mostly recently graduated from university, can easily be exaggerated. However, we are some distance from comments 3 and 5. 

          Attempting to understand some of the dissatisfaction with attendance at business meetings all respondents were asked to give their own reasons for what were experienced by them as inefficient meetings. Comment 1 is perhaps the most pronounced expression of dissatisfaction. These reasons are listed below:

          Reason                  Number of times mentioned:

Poor Preparation                       18

Poor Communication                17

Unclear Agenda                        16

Unclear Objectives                    12

No Decisions Taken                  8

Poor Timekeeping                     5.

          Putting the first three together, a picture of considerable informality emerges. The relatively low objection to non-decision taking was addressed in a later feedback session with the managers. Their argument was that this was not a problem as decisions could be taken easily elsewhere. This reinforces the idea that the meeting was informal, even playful. The low level of  poor timekeeping emerged in discussion as a radical underestimate, as there was no agreement on what good time keeping was across these banks. I was not able to quantify how late one had to be to be counted as a poor timekeeper. The impression was given that this was relatively unimportant, that people could come at a variety of times. Those who objected to this did so strongly. But they were a minority. They did not succeed in stopping the majority being informal and playful.

          Had I used participant observation in this research there would probably have been clearer evidence of  the fire-fighting mentioned in earlier research, and in comment   9 above. The deliberate choice of diary and subsequent questionnaire was an attempt to see if the rationality that this was expected to produce, was actually fairly superficial. Returning to present my findings to the same respondents 6 months later produced much doubt in the rationality by the respondents themselves. The most revealing discussion revolved around decision makingxe "decision making".  It transpired that any outcome, including some few decisions had to be passed to a senior manager for ratification. Further this manager had to forward their decision to yet another manager. There were, in total, nine levels of decision making. Coincidentally, this figure of nine was the same across two of the banks. One was a high street retail bank; the other a merchant bank. Given that these young managers knew of these nine levels, this goes some way to explain the lack of concern over decision making. It also reinforces the view of the meeting as informal and playful, as others would take the final decision.  By returning to discuss the findings I discovered the extent of informality that I had first missed. Rationality may well exist amongst older more senior managers in the hierarchy, there is little evidence of it here amongst the younger managers. They were in a whirl of, mostly pleasurable, activity. 

          Other  research has focused on attempts to analyse the effects of various initiatives to make managers more productive in the current period of economic uncertainty. There is a history to be written of a great variety of initiatives over the last twenty years. One could start with programmes of customer care. This involved personalising telephone responses to potential customers. The operator identified themselves by their first name. This was called getting closer to the customer. However, the next person one talked to may not have undergone this new training, and a more traditional response may be given. Another initiative was called quality circles. Workers were asked to provide solutions to their work problems. Those successfully implemented by senior management were rewarded.  However, not everyone was in a quality circle, and when one returned to the traditional workplace, the traditional non-quality practices continued. This undermined commitment to the quality circle. Both these cases pointed to the need for the whole firm or organisation to change. This produced total quality management.

          If the two previous examples were bottom up, the new total quality  initiative was top down. This more thorough change had many parts. Firstly there was the idea of the internal customer. This introduced the market place into the firm, whereas before it had been seen as existing outside the firm. Everyone was a potential or actual internal customer. So workers and managers had to own their service or product. This meant that you checked your work for errors before you sent it on to the next worker/manager, or internal customer. One consequence of this was that there was no need for a separate, or final, quality check or specific quality department. Quality was built in at all levels.

          Secondly, there was the ideal of right first time, every time. This implied constant attention to detail, and continuous improvement. This produced constant small changes to products and services. This in turn required small print advising the customer that what they expect may be different from what they get.

          Thirdly the ideal of more than meeting the customer’s expectations, of delighting the customer, was seen as reducing the number of items returned for repair under warranty. This not only reduced costs, but also retained the good name of the firm.

          Fourthly, the ideal of just in time production involved the reduction of inventories of raw materials, and storage costs. This meant that costs of storage were passed back to original suppliers. The smooth running of the manufacture, or service, meant there was no provision for mistakes. When this happened everyone pitched in to keep everything on schedule. This created the need for all workers to be multi-skilled. This in turn created considerable stress.

          Two recent studies, one close grained and empirical, the other more theoretical, looked at the consequences of these initiatives for the workx of managers. In his book “In Search of Management Tony Watson argues that ideally management should be about directing an organisation to long term viability through strategic action (Watson, 1994). This appears to mean that all managers should be clear about what current strategy is, what contribution they themselves have made to it, and what their local responsibility is to carry out the strategy. What the study found was that the strategy was created by directors of a holding company. The local directors appeared to make little contribution to this strategy, and the local managers made no contribution.

          In this situation there was a clear hierarchy. Senior managers made strategy, and local managers and workers carried it out. Indeed local managers were more overtly critical of senior management, than they were of their own workers. Local managers felt themselves constrained, and not empowered through owning the quality message. Local managers were not strategists. They complained that they had to do things because management consultants said so; they were not sure themselves, and so could not persuade those below them. These managers become to resemble men in the middle, as old style foremen were once called. Indeed in so far as the managers were men in the middle, they were closer to the proletariat than senior managers. They were also like the proletariat in that they feared losing their jobs, what they called

          “getting the brown envelope”!

          (Watson, 185: 1994)

          These were managers who repeatedly said that they loved their jobs; who were initially enthused by the quality message. They introduced radical changes in factory organisation. No one owned a job anymore. Instead there were various skill levels. One was allocated to one such level, and within that level one could do any work. This has also been called flexibility, and multi-tasking. Making these changes was enabling for these managers, because they accepted the quality values behind these changes. The workers were also supposed to have been exposed to these values in attempts to change cultures. However, as the workers were even further from senior management than the local managers, they may not have experienced this as empowering; rather it was more stress. This makes the point that the culture has to be accepted in the first place for these changes to be accepted, never mind work.

          Another aspect of the quality message was a belief in flatter structures. This was the need to remove bureaucratic fat, especially amongst managers. The belief was that with fewer levels of decision making there was more of a possibility that managers could have a say in what strategy was, and how to implement it. Indeed some researchers claim to have found instances where this has worked, albeit in smaller organisations (Dopson & Stewart, 1990). Here the managers felt that they had control over their working lives. Watson found that his managers felt that they too wanted this control, and were very much less concerned with control over their subordinates.

          Although Watson’s study is one of the abject failure of the quality message in making management more effective for the long-term viability of the firm, there is a belief that in other, perhaps smaller, organisations this might work. Despite this there is the problem that with flatter structures there is little chance of promotion up a long hierarchy. This requires a belief in quality, with little prospect of individual promotion. One works hard to improve the service/product, to delight the customer, etc. without the reward of promotion. Performance related pay is a recent solution to this problem.

          Performance related pay is meant to motivate young managers, who are no longer motivated by regular promotion through upward mobility within the organisation’s hierarchy. There are two obvious problems with this. One is how does one measure performance? Are there pre-set criteria? Are these agreed in advance or merely imposed by senior management? Even with agreed, and accepted criteria, there is the second problem of the application of criteria to individuals. This is seen most acutely where managers are engaged in similar, or broadly similar work, and in teams that meet regularly. The local and often detailed knowledge that one can have of one’s colleagues work over the year can be a basis for scepticism, when one performance is measured and rewarded differently from another. If this scepticism is then mixed with envy, the easy functioning of the work group will be adversely affected. The mechanisms by which this functioning was affected included passing on the performance indicators which  managers themselves  had received to the work group they  managed. One member of the work group called this ‘Pyramid Selling’.

          "People who you thought were very clever, you realise that they're       not

 ...          you know he's sitting there twiddling his thumbs all day ...       you think,

 well all right, he's delegated ... you feel a bit used and abused by it, but you know,

 that's what they say is effective       management anyway, isn't it? ... I have targets to

 work too ... my          first target is to provide an efficient service to the

 production           department ... and then I have five other targets , let's say

 things           like improving the safety record , or introduce a new system of

           work ... And then you see your boss's targets, which his boss has given him,

 and you've got two of his targets! ... So, he's using your  targets, you see      ...

          And you're using the people below you to achieve yours?

          Oh yes, yea, of course you are, yes."

          (Watson, 184: 1999)

          This line manager is clearly aware of a hierarchy, and his place within it. The resentment which he feels to the manager above him does not stop him behaving in the same way to those below him. The probability that those below will also feel resentment to this line manager is great. This will make team working more difficult. As will working in the  team with those above for this line manager. Yet managers all want to have team working which achieves the goals set for the team. There can be ‘Pyramid Selling’, the passing on of the individual manager's targets to the team, but in any case the general performance of the manager will be judged, in part,  by the performance of the team he also line manages. The achievements of the team can contribute to the career success of the line manager.     

          The second, and much less sympathetic, study was “Making sense of Management (Alvesson & Willmott, 1996).   They continue Watson’s concern about the lack of co-operation within management with respect to strategic decision making. As they put it, the managers in Watson’s study were strategy takers, and not strategy makers. This was a manipulative use of power.  It was made to appear rational, partly because it was currently fashionable, and had been recommended by consultants. Other firms were also doing similar things, and those managers who had been on management training courses knew this.

          Alvesson and Willmott argue that employees come into an organisation bringing notions of fairness and justice with them. In a famous study of affluent workers in the 1960's it was similarly found that workers brought values from outside work (Goldthorpe et al., 38:1968). But these values were instrumentalism, that is work meant wages; and privatisation, which meant that the home was important. This made it quite plausible that values did come from outside work, but raises the question of which values. Indeed it may be that there are a variety of values coming from outside, and one needs to look at the early family life of workers, and the influence of religion, social class, and education on the family. Fairness and justice are abstract values and may well have different meanings for workers in different work contexts. Nonetheless these notions come into conflict with the new initiatives for redesign of managerial work. The new initiatives are often presented as rational. This presentation is seen as the trivialisation of reason, equating reason with making the right purchasing decision. In this study managers are seen as people who get things done through other people. In this process managers may require more flexibility, and possible redundancy from their subordinates. Managers may view this as the application of reason, and some did in the Watson study: or they may engage in some critical reflection. This critical reflection is all the more likely if these rational procedures are likely to produce their own redundancy. In fact Watson’s managers were keenly aware of this possibility. This was the brown envelope metaphor.

          However, Alvesson and Willmott reserve their greatest scorn for the latest management initiative, called business process engineering.  Here teams are created with representatives from each of the main departments in the organisation.  Each team is responsible for a separate product or service. There are no longer separate functional departments staffed entirely by accountants, engineers, etc. This has the advantage that a customer enquiring about an order or sale no longer has to be transferred from one functional department to another. The team can handle all queries. The number of individuals in the team reflects the processes the organisation already works on, and the number of departments it already has. This style of organisation has large claims made for it. It reduces delivery times. It reduces the cost of sales. It reduces the size of the inventory of stocks and raw materials. This reduces need for space, and so reduces the cost of renting/buying/ maintaining space.

          But the main claim for business process engineering is that it creates a real need for the team to learn about other functional areas than the one in which they have been professionally trained. So, the accountant will learn about engineering, and each of the other functional departments, which exist in the team. Ideally, and in time, one member of the team can see the whole job through all the old functional departments. This reduces the need to supervise others, which supervision is not seen as adding value. When all this works then reengineering demands that employees deeply believe that they work for their customers, not their bosses.

          The enthusiasts for this current style argue that it cannot happen bottom up. There is a need for a Czar to introduce it from the top down. Put differently, it is the task of senior management to ensure enough training so that the values of all managers fit the new organisation. Then the managers take all the necessary day to day decisions. These managers are now empowered. Senior managers should restrict themselves to taking long-term strategic decisions, and inculcating values.

          This empowerment is only to take approved decisions that fit the long-term strategy. This is empowerment within constraint. How loose or tight this constraint is will depend on how well the organisation is doing in the market place. The creation of flatter structures will already have made some managers redundant. Multi-skilling, doing everyone else’s job in the team, will produce more stress; and in time may make some members redundant.  Finally, the czar’s top down imposition of the new organisation may very well produce, what Alvesson and Wilmott call, critical reflection. For those beginning to question the wisdom of this new style, the injunction from the enthusiastic advocates is to shoot the dissenters.  In participant observation of the training for this new style, I found that managers who were sceptical were given one more chance. If they had not become believers within one or two years, then they were threatened with redundancy.

          There are serious implications in this new style for the continued existence of previous occupational and professional cultures, in which many managers had been trained. I discovered some cases of bankers who did not feel the need to continue with professional banking exams, because they had already reached managerial status under the new style. Training in, now old fashioned, personnel management was superseded by Human Resources training, which is more congruent with the new style. In so far as the new style undermines the previous occupational cultures, the possible existence of alternative values to the new style diminishes. In particular the value of fairness is seen by Alvesson and Willmott as coming from parts of society outside new style organisations. The top down activities of the new czars sharpens this conflict of values. To the extent that the short-term victories of the czars in introducing new styles succeed, then the value of fairness reduces. However, this short-term successxe "success" often has the consequence of redundancies. Multi skilling can be reconceptualised as the intensification of labour, where any one individual does more work. This reduces the need, in the short term at least, for the existing number of employees. The subsequent experience of unemployment may raise questions of fairness more sharply than before.

          Truly believing in the new values, enthusiastically engaging in multi skilling, did work very well for a number of bank managers I interviewed. They were keenly aware of bank mergers, and subsequent redundancies at the time of interviewing. However, they also believed that the bank was a good employer in terms of providing in-house training in a variety of practical and managerial areas. These managers knew that their skills would mean that they could easily get another job if they were sacked from the bank. This shows the individualisation of employment. There is actually little concern here for the customer or the employer. This is an individual survival strategy. Whether it works or not also depends on the larger trends in the economy, boom or slump. As to the proletarianisation of these managers, if a new job is found quickly after redundancy, as a manager; then proletarianisation will not have occurred. If no new managerial job is found, or worse no job at all; then proletarianisation is a real possibility.

          If the issue here is one of beliefs, then just believing may stop proletarianisation: that is one may get a job which fits these beliefs. Many such jobs do exist.  However the fragility of the belief shown above makes proletarianisation a real possibility. If the issue is status, just reaching managerial status, the question is more open. Flatter structures have created many more, especially young, managers. Will employers sack the younger or the older managers first? This is very unclear. Practice seems to vary. For older managers the long experience of managerial status can bring a reluctance to take on any new job. This may mean unemployment; and proletarianisation if they are well below retirement age, and have little savings. For younger managers the issue is, will their new skills actually produce a new managerial job? If not then a non-managerial job will mean proletarianisation.         

          A final consideration relates to the presently fashionable business process engineering approach to management. In so far as the long term, and frankly idealistic, claims of this approach to genuinely produce multi-skilled work groups is taken seriously, then there are a variety of radical consequences. One is that if the roles of say marketing and engineering are eventually interchangeable, in the sense that each of these two people have learnt all of the others knowledge and skills, then one of the two is redundant. Or, at least, both will not be needed in the team all day and everyday. Another consequence is that in learning about the other person’s knowledge and skills, one may not be keeping up to date with developments in one’s own area of expertise. This has consequences for one’s future performance in the firm. Thirdly, and relatedly, if one is a member of a professional organisation such as engineering, professional bodies may have serious reservations about marketing managers doing engineering work without professional training or membership. It may be unlikely that marketing people will plan new production schedules, at least in the short term, but they will be discussing engineering details over the telephone with customers. Fourthly, the success of a manager is closely related to the success of all the team. The various measures of success include financial measures, and also comparisons with other teams. The overall visibility of one’s work is much greater with this system.

          In his latest study Tony Watson shows how the manager’s dependency on the team and those below them works in practice. The manager is given a series of performance indicators for the year. Watson found that some of these indicators were handed on to other managers who reported to the first manager. One manager, on the receiving end of two of these indicators called this system a kind of Pyramid selling, which was described earlier.

          This raises so many questions. Is this seen as fair, in the way discussed above, or not? Arguably the quote from the aggrieved manager about pyramid selling  could be interpreted both ways. It is unfair for the manager above oneself   to pass the targets down the hierarchy. Alternatively, the first charge of unfairness can be seen as an implicit reference to the wider social values from outside the firm, which the individual has brought with them into the firm. Further, the second charge of  unfairness, when handing down indicators to those below, can be seen as mere consistency. The system involves handing down indicators at every level. This cannot apply, of course, at the very bottom, or the very top. Yet another interpretation is that of an unthinking acceptance of the status quo, when passing down to others, but not accepting the status quo,  when indicators are passed down to oneself. This seems to imply a rather selective use of a wider set of values. Put more crudely, all who manage others are rising in the firm at least partly on the achievements of others. This can be seen as delegation, it can also be seen as a situation where managers are less in control of the work they do with the introduction of this system. This is because they rely on the good team work of their team, who may well be aware of pyramid selling specifically, or more generally that the whole team's efforts benefit their immediate line manager. To the extent that this specific or more general awareness exists, then there may be envy and/or resentment; which in turn may affect the team's achievements generally, and as measured by performance indicators. Not all managers seem to be aware of the existence of this conflict, never mind attempting to manage it. The manager quoted above seemed to be aware of a problem, but seemed not to have a way of dealing with it. In the merchant bank I discovered an even clearer awareness of the problem. One manager talked of the co-existence of   both conflict and co-operation in the team. But even she had no solution.

          What this summary of recent research studies shows is that younger managers, under the age of 35, do spend most of their time in a whirlwind of activity. Older managers, and directors of international concerns, may well be more rational in the sense of long term strategic planning and inculcating the new values of quality etc.. Part of this strategic planning may involve younger managers and clerks and manual workers loosing their jobs as electronic banking becomes technically more feasible. This fear of unemployment is managed through a more or less enthusiastic acceptance of frequent training. Training in time management and tidy desks was very common amongst my research subjects. There was a sense of competition to achieve as much training as possible to make oneself more employable than others in the event of unemployment. Indeed one young manager choose her employer on the basis that they promised more training than another employer. This prior preparation for insecure employment does raise questions about the commitment to the firm. This is surprising given the extent of informal playful social relations at work, and the fact that these young managers were seen as successful by themselves. Some had experienced moves from one department to another, which was usually seen as a  promotion, and more than once. Hierarchy still existed, some nine levels, even if there were fewer managers in the hierarchy; and possibly fewer levels than in the past. This lack of commitment may be in part a feature of relatively new entrants in the bank. It may be that  the new culture of flatter structures and individual career management has been more powerfully adopted by younger managers; even though the structures are more flat at the bottom than higher up the hierarchy. 

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