Enacting emotional labour in consultancy work:playing with liminality and navigating power dynamics

While theoretical understanding of professional emotional labour has developed in recent years, methodological issues with capturing its practice mean that understanding of how professional emotional labour is enacted remains relatively limited. The current study utilises memory work to surface potentially unacknowledged meanings associated with the remembered performance of professional emotional labour as a proxy for the psychological access required to demonstrate dissonance between felt and displayed emotions. The article uses an emotionally charged feedback meeting between a management consultant and their client as an opportune context for surfacing the enactment of professional emotional labour. The combined memory work data - consisting of original meeting recordings and a parallel commentary developed in discussion with the consultant - are analysed through a Goffmanian lens in order to theorise role positioning as a tool of enacting professional emotional labour. A model is proposed that maps the roles adopted against the dimensions of playing with liminality and navigating power dynamics. We suggest the potential transferability of these findings to other situations of liminality and their relevance for management learning interventions

The Wicked World of Marketing Management

This paper reports some of the central findings of an extensive ethnographic study of a team of senior marketing managers in the UK subsidiary of a major multi-national supplier of branded consumer goods. It responds to repeated calls for more in-depth research that examines what marketing managers actually do and how their understandings inform their actions. It is argued that the particular character of the decisional milieu that confronts marketing managers has a central impact on their conduct and that this can be better understood by employing Rittel"s conception of wicked problems and Mischel"s conception of weak situations. It is demonstrated that the marketing managers studied confront a weakly situated wicked complex of commercial contradictions. It is contended that, due to their embedded formal techno-rationality, the marketing management discourse and pedagogy currently fail to speak to this reality of marketing management

In Search of Marketing Management : A Study of Managing in Marketing.

This empirical study attempts to craft a richer description, and deeper understanding, of the work of managers in marketing than that elaborated in the managerial work literature and within the marketing management discourse. Perspectives on both the character of the 'content' and 'conduct' of marketing manager work are sought. Several marketing managers, operating in diverse commercial contexts, were interviewed and observed. The field research deployed an array of longitudinal methodologies including programmes of diary-stimulated interviews, work shadowing, participant self-observation, and action research. A description of managerial work is developed that rests at an 'ontic level' between that of classical / 'Fayolian' management theory and the conceptualisations generated through the empirical study of managerial work. The developed model characterises the 'substance' of managerial conduct as the 'shaping and sustaining of commitments'. The model, based on a metaphorical temporal rope, elaborates the various interweaving strands and threads of what is argued to be the quintessence of managerial behaviour, the forms and characteristics of organizational commitments, the character of their crafting and conducing, and the properties of the so-emerged commitment webs. The 'content' of the subject managers' work is elaborated through the concept of endeavour portfolios, and the inherently political, weak-situation / wicked-problem character of their endeavours is illuminated. The 'rhetorical technology' of the marketing discourse is found to permeate the content of the subject managers' endeavours, and provide adequate labels for the strands and threads of their endeavours. However, outside of their use in the staging of truth effects, the processual prescriptions of the marketing discourse are not evident in their daily work. The marketing management discourse is found not to speak to the milieu, or substance of the subject managers marketing management. This 'substance' rests in their pursuit of innovative reconciliations for the complex of contradictions that confronts them

The Essence of Marketing Managerial Work:An Empirical Study of Managing in Marketing

Starting with a trickle in Scandinavia, stimulated into a torrent by the folklore vs. fact controversy of Mintzberg origin, the stream of investigations into the nature of managerial work, has spanned five decades, and turned back into a trickle. Despite this endeavour little progress has been made in answering Hales repeated question why do managers do what they do? We believe this study, and its developed conceptualisations, provide a powerful and novel response to this question. We contend that the essence of managerial work is the process of shaping and sustaining commitments. This model, based on a metaphorical temporal rope, elaborates the various interweaving strands and threads of what is argued to be the quintessence of managerial behaviour. The inherently political, weak- situation/wicked-problem character of marketing management is also illuminated. The marketing management discourse is found not to speak to the milieu, or to the substance of the subject managers marketing management. This substance is found to rest in their pursuit of innovative reconciliations for the complex of contradictions that confronts them

Causal social mechanism:from the what to the why

Over 40 years of research in the IMP tradition has resulted in a variety of different kinds of published outputs ; data, information, knowledge, concepts, stories, models, case studies, frameworks and even some things that we might like to call theories. The espoused objective of all this research is better understanding of the phenomenon of interest; industrial networks. However the nature and quality of those understandings varies enormously and depends not only on the character of the research and the objectives it was designed to achieve but also upon their, usually implied, epistemology and ontology. It is possible, though dangerous, to argue that in the social sciences there exist hierarchies of understandings. At the “base” there are very detailed descriptions of particular events and the entities that are involved. These descriptions are not usually generalisable. At the “summit” there are grand theories which explain, in some sense and according to particular ontological / epistemological schools of thought, the descriptions that are provided by “base” research findings. In sociology Merton proposed that there could be “Theories of the mid range”. “They are theories intermediate to comprehensive analytical schema and detailed workaday hypotheses”, (Merton, 1957:108). More recently there has emerged a school of sociology that seeks to conceptualise and deploy what they term social mechanisms (Hedstrom and Swedberg, 1998). To date there are over 600 citations of the Hedstrom and Swedberg book across many different social science fields. In this paper we describe the birth and development of the Causal Social Mechanism movement and proceed to a set of definitions. Next there is a section in which various possible ontologies are judged in terms of their compatibility with the concept. Examples of a wide range of Causal Social Mechanisms are then described and examples of those we judge may be relevant to Industrial Networks are presented. We suggest that the Causal Social Mechanisms approach is useful in helping theoreticians work across multiple ontologies and so offers significant opportunities for theory development

Sales and marketing resistance to Key Account Management implementation:an ethnographic investigation

The study of Key Account Management (KAM) is ubiquitous in business-to-business marketing research. Despite its importance within B2B research, however, few authors have questioned why actors may actually resist its adoption. In a novel 18-month longitudinal ethnographic study following one organization’s endeavours to implement KAM (Fitcorp), we examine the approaches adopted by organizational members to resist KAM implementation. Our understanding of how and why actors might resist KAM implementation reveals a continuum of resistance strategies that vary in severity (spanning disengagement to hostility). Further, we find a number of explanations actors draw on to justify their resistance to KAM implementation. These findings are discussed and implications for theory and practice are offered