Group analytic methods beyond the clinical setting – working with researcher-managers.

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Group Analysis, Vol. 50 (2), March 2017, published by SAGE Publishing, All rights reserved.Group analytic scholars have a long history of thinking about organizations and taking up group analytic concepts in organizational contexts. Many still aspire to being more of a resource to organizations given widespread organizational change processes which provoke great upheaval and feelings of anxiety. This article takes as a case study the experience of running a professional management research doctorate originally set up with group analytic input to consider some of the adaptations to thinking and methods which are required outside the clinical context. The article explores what group analysis can bring to management, but also what critical management scholarship can bring to group analysis. It considers some of the organizational difficulties which the students on the doctoral programme have written about, and discusses the differences and limitations of taking up group analytic thinking and practice in an organizational research setting.Peer reviewe

Experiencing uncertainty – on the potential of groups and a group analytic approach for making management education more critical.

This document is the Accepted Manuscript. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Management Learning, November 2017, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507617697868. Published by SAGE Publishing. All rights reserved.This article points to the potential of methods derived from group analytic practice for making management education more critical. It draws on the experience of running a professional doctorate for more experienced managers in a university in the UK over a 16 year period. Group analysis is informed by the highly social theories of S.H. Foulkes and draws heavily on psychoanalytic theory as well as sociology. First and foremost, though, it places our interdependence at the heart of the process of inquiry, and suggests that the most potent place for learning about groups, where we spend most of our lives, is in a group. The article prioritises three areas of management practice for which group analytic methods, as adapted for research environment, are most helpful: coping with uncertainty and the feelings of anxiety which this often arouses; thinking about leadership as a relational and negotiated activity, and encouraging reflexivity in managers. The article also points to some of the differences between the idea of the learning community and psychodynamic perspectives more generally and the limitations of group analytic methods in particular, which may pathologise resistance in the workplace.Peer reviewe

Audit as political struggle: the doxa of managerialism clashing with the uncertainty of real life

Auditing firms tend to promote rule-bound orthodoxies about management based on the fiction that the world is more predictable than it is. Managers in INGOs find that long-term planning requires endless readjustment. This article explores what happens when these conflicting knowledge regimes clash during auditing. It draws on Bourdieu’s ideas to illuminate how different forms of social capital come into play in conflicting versions of management and control, whether centralised and prereflected or distributed and adaptive. In this case, a conflict during audit was resolved through negotiation and the establishment of alliances, showing how being audited requires complex political skills

Planning to innovate. Designing change or caught up in a game?

“The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Perspectives in Public Health, 131 (3) 2011, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2010: on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/”In this article I engage with some orthodox theories of the management of innovation and change, which take for granted the idea that they can be predicted and controlled. Organizations are thought to be systems with boundaries, which managers acting as engineers, or doctors, can 'diagnose' and restore to 'health', or order differently. As an alternative, and by drawing on an experience of working with health service managers, I argue instead that change and innovation arise as a result of the interweaving of everyone's intentions. Organizations are sites of intense political interaction and contestation, and exactly what emerges is unpredictable and unplannable, even by the most powerful individuals and groups.Peer reviewe

Managing Amid Paradoxes: Perspectives of Non-Profit Management Education

Christopher Mowles, Michael Herzka, ‘Managing Amid Paradoxes: Perspectives of Non-Profit Management Education’, in Waltraud Grillitsch, Paul Brandl, Stephanie Schuller, eds., Gegenwart und Zukunft des Sozialmanagements und der Sozialwirtschaft: Aktuelle Herausforderungen, strategische Ansätze und fachliche Perspektiven, (Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2017), ISBN 978-3-658-15981-8, eISBN 978-3-658-15982-5.Peer reviewe

Successful or not? Evidence, emergence, and development management

Original article can be found at: http://www.informaworld.com/ Copyright Taylor & FrancisThis article offers a critique of the dominant ways of conceiving of, managing, and evaluating development. It argues that these management methods constrain the exploration of novelty and difference. By drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, particularly the theory of emergence, the article calls for a broadening of our understanding of how social change comes about. Arguing that the domain of development is not a narrow technical discipline, but an intensely social and political practice of mutual recognition, this article calls for a greater focus on power and processes of relating as they affect local interaction between people.Peer reviewe