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WEEK 6 THE NATURE OF MANAGERIAL WORK 2000s (2)

Prof Steve Fox Stephen.Fox@qmul.ac.uk Office Hours: 10.00-12.00am Every Friday in Semester Room FB3.34

CHANGE OF DEADLINE
Coursework Due: Monday 4th MARCH 2013 Drawing on the readings for weeks 01 06 on the debates surrounding the study of managerial work, write an essay (word limit 3,000) in answer to the following question:

Managerial work has been researched through a large number of studies using a wide range of methods over the last four to five decades. What are the most important findings in your view and why? Explain your answer with some evaluation of the research studies.

definition: The Public


public
adjective

1. of, pertaining to, or affecting a population or a community as a whole: public funds; a public nuisance. 2. done, made, acting, etc., for the community as a whole: public prosecution. 3. open to all persons: a public meeting. 4. of, pertaining to, or being in the service of a community or nation, especially as a government officer: a public official. 5. maintained at the public expense and under public control: a public library; a public road.

2 Readings

For the lecture: Heath, C., Luff, P. and Svensson, M. (2002) Overseeing organizations: configuring action and its environment. British Journal of Sociology, 53,2: 153-201.
For the seminar: Iedema, R., Long, D., Forsyth, R., and Lee, B.B. (2006) Visibilising clinical work: video ethnography in the contemporary hospital. Health Sociology Review, 15, 2: 156-168. Extra Reading None this week

Both Readings deal with public sector organizations


Why? Public sector organizations are publicly accountable They are subjected to forms of audit and surveillance that other organizations are not Surveillance Methods have something in common with Research Methods both seek to make practices more transparent And we see increasing pressure on private firms (e.g. the banks, internet service providers etc.) to become more publicly accountable, especially when mistakes occur This is part of what Mike Power (1997) calls: The Audit Society (cited by Iedema, 2006)

Surveillance Society
Michel Foucault Panopticism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

definitions:

public sector noun the area of the nation's affairs under governmental rather than private control control noun verb (used with object) 1. to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command. 2. to hold in check; curb: to control a horse; to control one's emotions. 3. to test or verify (a scientific experiment) by a parallel experiment or other standard of comparison. 4. to eliminate or prevent the flourishing or spread of: to control a forest fire. 5. Obsolete . to check or regulate (transactions), originally by means of a duplicate register.

definition: Public Scrutiny


scrutiny noun, plural scrutinies. 1. a searching examination or investigation; minute inquiry. 2. surveillance; close and continuous watching or guarding. 3. a close and searching look.

definition:

accountable (-kount-bl) adj.

1. Liable to being called to account; answerable. See Synonyms at responsible. 2. That can be explained: an accountable phenomenon.

definition:

responsible (r-spns-bl) adj.


1. Liable to be required to give account, as of one's actions or of the discharge of a duty or trust. 2. Involving personal accountability or ability to act without guidance or superior authority: a responsible position within the firm. 3. Being a source or cause. 4. Able to make moral or rational decisions on one's own and therefore answerable for one's behavior. 5. Able to be trusted or depended upon; reliable. 6. Based on or characterized by good judgment or sound thinking: responsible journalism. 7. Having the means to pay debts or fulfill obligations. 8. Required to render account; answerable: The cabinet is responsible to the parliament.

Recall: The Radical Change thesis

Du Gay et al., 1996; Drucker, 1988; Handy, 1989, 1995; Hechsher and Donnellon, 1994; Kanter, 1989; Mintzberg, 1998; Morgan, 1988, 1993; Peters, 1989; White, 1994; Zuboff, 1988.

All part of an emerging general management discourse of


Turbulence Flexibility Entrepreneurship

And the discourse of an organizational shift from Bureaucracy to Post Bureaucracy


See Heath et al (2002: 182) See Iedema et al (2006: 158)

Both of todays articles are positioned within this debate

Heath, et al., (2002)


Overseeing

organizations: configuring action and its environment


Victoria Station, London Underground, UK

Context:

Heath et al. (2002: 182): their Pitch


In this paper we wish to explore a relatively specific case in which CCTV and related systems are used to examine the conduct of people in public settings and provide resources to the management of human traffic and order. The cases in question are the station operation centres on London Underground. In particular, we examine how personnel within the operation centres, in the course of their daily work, identify events and problems and develop a co-ordinated response involving both staff and passengers. The paper is concerned with the ways in which station supervisors use CCTV to make sense of conduct and interaction within the station, and how they transform the ways in which both passengers and staff see and respond to each others actions. In examining the practical use of CCTV, the paper considers the design and deployment of system support for incident recognition, and re flects on a relatively neglected issue within the sociology of work; the significance of the local environment to the intelligibility and co-ordination of organizational conduct. IE how is sense-making a locally situated and occasioned achievement?

definition:
intelligibility noun,

1. the quality or condition of being intelligible; capability of being understood. 2. something intelligible.

Heath et al. (2002: 183)


Indeed the very emergence of workplace studies derives in part from an attempt to take objects and artefacts, tools and technologies seriously; that is, in the ways in which they feature in the production, intelligibility and coordination of practical organizational conduct. In

this paper, we would like to show

how the production of talk and its recognition is dependent upon the
participants abilities to shape and hear the talk with regard to occasioned and recognizable features of the local environment. We would also like to consider how talk and interaction features in the organization and transformation of that environment. In this way the paper is concerned with the embedded and embeddable character of action in the environment.

IE producing and hearing talk in real-time is dependent not only on human intent but upon the immediate local environment in which it is embedded

e.g. 1: Recognizing Overcrowding Simple example - Fragment 2


Illustrates: The interaction between team members through the full duplex radio which allows all staff in the station to speak to each other and overhear both parties to all conversations (p.184) Members working as a team.. Recognizing things together

e.g.2 Creating Distributed Coordination Complex example fragment 4


The next 4 slides show two different things The 1st two slides describe or represent what happens using Conversation Analysis (CA) Transcription Notation (as employed by Gronn, 1983) modified to include reference to video stills The 2nd two slides explicate what is going on in the interactions described in the 1st two slides

definition: to explicate

The idea and practice of explication is rooted in the verb to explicate, which concerns the process of "unfolding" and of "making clear" the meaning of things, so as to make the implicit explicit.
From Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explication

What do we get from this approach?


It provides a very detailed almost forensic analysis of practical (inter)action as it unfolds Between people & people Between people & objects Through various media Embedded within the scenic properties of a local environment referenced by the talk and action itself And shows how talk and interactions shape that local immediate environment in real-time

Whereas practice used to be counter-posed to theory


Theory vs practice Where theory was de-contextualised or abstracted from practice

Here we have practices made visible: explicated in their own terms With some relevance to theory drawn out in the Introduction and Discussion Whereas Gronn (1983) imposed various psychological interpretations on the interactions observed Heath et al focus on what interactions accomplish of achieve: how they shape and order the situation they are in i.e. how they manage things

Iedema, et al., (2006)


Visibilising

clinical work: Video ethnography in the contemporary hospital


Context: The Spinal Pressure Area Clinic within a NSW hospital, Australia.

definition:

clinician (kl-nshn) noun. 1. A health professional, such as a physician, psychiatrist, psychologist, or nurse, involved in clinical practice, as distinguished from one specializing in research.

2. A health professional who practices at a clinic.

https://www.rcn.org.uk/development/health _care_support_workers/professional_issue s/accountability_and_delegation_film

What Does Accountability Mean In Nursing? Top Answer Professional accountability in nursing is a legal and moral obligation to practice within ones scope of care, calling upon ones knowledge and skills to make decisions for the best interest of the patient.

definitions
work study - an analysis of a specific job in an effort to find the most efficient method in terms of time and effort. A time and motion study Job Analysis is the process of describing and recording aspects of jobs and specifying the skills and other requirements necessary to perform the job.
Task analysis is the analysis of how a task is accomplished, including a detailed description of both manual and mental activities, task and element durations, task frequency, task allocation, task complexity, environmental conditions, necessary clothing and equipment, and any other unique factors involved in or required for one or more people to perform a given task. Task analysis emerged from research in applied behavior analysis and still has considerable research in that area. Information from a task analysis can then be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design (e.g., design of checklists or decision support systems) and automation.

definition: Business Process Mapping

Business process mapping refers to activities involved in defining exactly what a business entity does, who is responsible, to what standard a process should be completed and how the success of a business process can be determined. Once this is done, there can be no uncertainty as to the requirements of every internal business process. A business process illustration is produced. The first step in gaining control over an organization is to know and understand the basic processes (Deming, 1982; Juran, 1988; Taylor, 1911). ISO 9001 requires a business entity to follow a process approach when managing its business, and to this end creating business process maps will assist. The entity can then work towards ensuring its processes are effective (the right process is followed the first time), and efficient (continually improved to ensure processes use the least amount of resources).

Iedema et al. (2006: 158)


Refers to 4 management initiatives impacting on clinicians in NSW, Australia: Improved Incident Monitoring Study (IIMS) Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Open Disclosure

(Australian Safety & Quality Council, 2003)

Patient-Centredness
(UK Dept of Health, 2005)

What do they aim to do?


These initiatives prescribe conducts considered central to maintaining trustful relationships with patients by disclosing the details of errors as soon as they transpire (in the case of open disclosure), and by structuring care processes around the clinical expectations of patients rather than around the preferences of units and departments (in the case of patient-centredness) (Iedema et al., 2006:157)

Q: What is their effect?


..they confront frontline staff with

dilemmas in the course of their everyday work, just as do IIMS and RCA. What these initiatives have in common is a twofold development. On the one hand, they push down to frontline staff the responsibility to take decisions about what to report, what to recommend, what to disclose, and what services to provide. On the other hand, all these decisions are subject to increasing organisational and public visibility and feedback. (Iedema, 2006: 157-8)

A: responsibilisation - (du Gay, 1996)


..these initiatives incur responsibilisation on the part of frontline clinicians (du Gay 1996) ..downward pressure on employees to engage with what used to be managerial administrative concerns: a pressure which Heckscher (1994) and others see as being post-bureaucratic in nature, due to the onus it places on frontline staff to be seen to selfmanage and self-organise their work. (Iedema et al., 2006: 158)

patient-centred multi-disciplinary team work at the spinal pressure area clinic

Excerpt (pp.162-3):

Excerpt (pp.162-3):

Corridor Work as liminal space cf. Gronn (1983)


Video-ethnography makes normally informal, invisible & immaterial work visible. The ethics are complex. But rather than using an Auditors categories, it uses members categories & in their hands can be empowering & democratising: enabling them to see & finesse the interactional & communicative work which, under post-bureaucratic conditions of responsibilisation (du Gay, 1996), is becoming an extra responsibility

..Upon observing and filming these heterogeneous and dynamic interactions, it became evident that the liminal space of the corridor provided a crucial resource and site for exchanging knowledge and decisions about patients, checking and confirming the significance of norms and rules, and engaging in immaterial labour to further peoples interpersonal relationships, agendas and concerns (Iedema, Long et al 2005). During a discussion about hospital organization, an infection-control clinician commented:
Corridor conversations. God, the place runs on them. We call them Corridor Conferences - we have them just outside the ward, and in the corridor outside the kiosk, youre always meeting people there and getting things sorted out You get more decisions made in Corridor Conferences than you do in meetings sometimes I reckon.

(Iedema et al., 2006: 163)

Activity Theory Actor-network theory Community of practice theory Conversation analysis Conflict Theory Critical discourse analysis Critical Realism Critical Theory Deconstruction Discourse analysis Dramaturgical analysis Ethnography Ethnomethodology Feminist theory Foucauldian Discourse analysis Grounded theory Hermeneutics Interactionism Interpretivism Knowledge management Knowledge-based view

Possible Perspectives Labour Process Theory


Marxist Theory Narrative analysis Networked learning theory Organizational learning theory Phenomenology Positivism Post-colonial theory Post-feminist theory Postmodern theory Post-structuralism Psychodynamic theory Realism Resource-based view Situated Learning Theory Social constructionism Social Network Analysis Socio-cognitive theory Structuralism Symbolic Interactionism

Functionalism

Social systems theory

Systems Theory

Objective

Tengblad (2006); Hales (2005)


Objective

Tengblad (2006); Hales (2005)


Objective

Gronn (1983)

Sims (1993) Watson (2001)

Activity Theory

Tengblad (2006); Hales (2005)


Objective
Workplace Studies

Gronn (1983)

Sims (1993) Watson (2001)

Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

Activity Theory

Willmott (1987) Tengblad (2006); Hales (2005)


Objective

Iedema et al., (2006) Heath et al., (2002) Gronn (1983) Marshall & Stewart (1981)

Workplace Studies

Sims (1993) Watson (2001)

Mintzberg (1973, 1975)

Activity Theory

Objective

Workplace Studies

Essay A Typical Structure


Title Abstract Introduction Something 2-300 word summary The topic, question, issues.. and my plan What has been said by whom.. and why (or how justified)? What I agree with and why? What I dont agree with and why? What I think beyond that and why? In sum: what I think is: One, 2, 3. List of all works cited & quoted

Literature Review Discussion

Conclusion References

Next Time: 2 Readings for Week 08

For the lecture: HBR Debate (1992) MBA: is the traditional model doomed?. Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec: 128-40. For the seminar: Fox, S. (1994a) Debating Management learning: I Management Learning, 25, 1: 83-93. Extra Reading Fox, S. (1994b) Debating Management learning: II. Management Learning, 25, 4: 579-97.

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