scholarly journals Middle managers’ struggle over their subject position in Open Strategy processes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Violetta Splitter ◽  
Paula Jarzabkowski ◽  
David Seidl
Keyword(s):  
Middle Managers ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Open Strategy

Sandwiched: Exploring role and identity of middle managers in the genuine middle

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susann Gjerde ◽  
Mats Alvesson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Managers ◽  
Business Schools ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Top Management ◽  
Professional Work ◽  
Management Roles ◽  
Leader Role

This article explores middle managers in the professions from their position in the sandwiched middle. Based upon interviews with senior academics in management roles and their subordinates in UK business schools, we investigate this experienced middle through a metaphor that informs one particular subject position: to be an umbrella carrier. This position entails protecting subordinates from what is seen as unnecessary and/or damaging initiatives and information from top management above, in order to allow for good professional work to take place below. This form of countermanagement, which aims to weaken hierarchical pressure rather than enforce or uphold it, is informed by a stronger identification with the profession and subordinates below than with the leader role or the superiors above, and aids the middle managers in their identity work.

scholarly journals What do managers know? Wisdom and manager identity in later career

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 416-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Warhurst ◽  
Kate Black
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Middle Managers ◽  
Management Practice ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Management Learning ◽  
Learning Research ◽  
Contemporary Management ◽  
Work Management

In this article, we focus on the knowing of experienced middle managers in later career and make a twofold contribution to management learning research. First, we critically examine the construct of wisdom as a way of deepening understanding of such managers’ knowing and we respond to the call to provide empirical evidence of the manifestations of wisdom in contemporary management practice. Second, we assess the managers’ engagement with wisdom as a resource for identity-work. Management is increasingly conceptualised as an identity project, and we examine how managers deployed wisdom as a discursive identity resource. We show how wisdom was used to counter currently favoured normative narratives of evidence-based management and the associated subject position of the omniscient and rational, but never quite adequate, manager. We reveal how narratives of wisdom were drawn upon in constructing distinctive, valued and preferred managerial subjectivities sustainable in later career. Finally, we propose implications for management learning and manager education.

IC & OI The impact of intellectual capital on organizational innovation

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 1257-1265
Author(s):  
Fouad El-Gamal
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Capital ◽  
Middle Managers ◽  
Organizational Innovation ◽  
Sustainable Competitive Advantage ◽  
Dominant Dimension ◽  
Structural Capital ◽  
Corporate Innovation ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Depth Interviews

Intellectual capital can generate value for organizations and improve organizational innovation. This study aims to investigate the effects of intellectual capital on corporate innovation. Mixed research methodology approach has been used by combining both qualitative and quantitative analysis to explore and empirical examine the research model. The targeted population of interest is the licensed pharmaceutical manufactures, 90 organizations in the Egyptian pharmaceutical industry throughout its three main sectors (11 public, 70 local private and 9 MNCs). Statistical analyses are employed based on the questionnaires gathered from 39 pharmaceutical manufactures’ companies (44% response rate). In addition, sixty-three “63” in depth interviews have been conducted with both top and middle managers. The research findings indicate that all dimensions of intellectual capital (human, structural, and relational capital) have positive significant effects on organizational innovation of pharmaceutical manufactures’ companies. The study clarifies that the most dominant dimension is structural capital, which provides the largest and strongest support to pharmaceutical manufactures’ companies. The deep realization of the importance intellectual capital and its impact on innovation helps leaders to adopt accurate system to run organizational innovation in a better way, which lead to sustainable competitive advantage for organizations.

Theory is for everybody

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Athena Elafros
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Concrete Reality

In Feminism is for Everybody, bell hooks states, “[t]o be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality” (hooks, 2000, p. 110). Drawing on this insight, I offer one possible future for teaching theory in sociology based on my own subject position and experiences that seeks to imagine how social theory needs to change regarding a fundamental reorganization of what counts as theory, who counts as a theorist, who teaches theory, and how theory is taught.

Listening Like a Computer: Attentional Tensions and Mechanized Care in Psychiatric Digital Phenotyping

2021 ◽  
pp. 016224392110263
Author(s):  
Beth M. Semel
Keyword(s):  
Speech Sound ◽  
Smartphone Application ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Phone Calls ◽  
Digital Phenotyping ◽  
Human Research Subject ◽  
Audio Recordings

This article explores negotiations over the humanistic versus mechanized components of care through an ethnographic account of digital phenotyping research. I focus on a US-based team of psychiatric and engineering professionals assembling a smartphone application that they hope will analyze minute changes in the sounds of speech during phone calls to predict when a user with bipolar disorder will have a manic or depressive episode. Contrary to conventional depictions of psychiatry as essentially humanistic, the discourse surrounding digital phenotyping positions the machine as a necessary addition to mental health care precisely because of its more-than-human sensory, attentional capacities. The bipolar research team likewise portrays their app as capable of pinpointing sonic signs of mental illness that humans, too distracted by semantic meaning, otherwise ignore. Nevertheless, the team members tasked with processing the team’s data (audio recordings of human research subject speech) must craft and perform a selectively attentive machinic subject position, which they call “listening like a computer”: a paradoxical mode of attention (to speech sound) and inattention (to speech meaning). By tracing the team’s discursive and on-the-ground enactments of care and attention as both humanistic and machinic, I tune a critical ear to the posthuman promises of digital phenotyping.

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