In corporation after large American corporation, business leaders are restructuring their operations to maintain competitiveness. They have placed new objectives such as reducing labor costs-by extracting concessions from professional and manual workers and increasing worker productivity across 

the board (what some call "skimming the fat" from inflated firms)-at the forefront of top management rhetoric and policy.

Corporate leaders now argue for flexibility and change. To set the performance of U.S. corporations back on track, they warn, firms must change their compensation systems for professional and managerial employees (from bureaucratic systems to meritocracies), transform themselves from rigid bureaucracies to flexible, less hierarchical structures, and shift from centralized to decentralized management practices.^[1] These new policies radically challenge the terms and conditions of growth-engendered, bureaucratic, and generous employment contracts: the regularized, stable framework of rules governing wages, promotions, and discipline (Edwards 1979).

Transforming corporate cultures also will lead to more competitive corporate performances, according to this new outlook. The idea that corporate cultures can determine the success or failure of large firms has captured the imagination of business observers, academics, and lay persons alike. Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence (1984) popularized the successful entrepreneurial cultures of such companies as Hewlett-Packard and Procter and Gamble, while studies of the flexible "art of Japanese management" (Athos and Pascale 1981; Ouchi 1981) alerted the public to all that was wrong with rigid American bureaucrats.^[2]

The business press has taken up the thread, exploring the virtues and disadvantages of evaluating firms from the cultural vantage point. Pascale (1984) extolled the virtues of this perspective, arguing in Fortune magazine that management must pay attention to the culture of the firm because a strong culture "supplements formal rules," whereas a weak culture "can make organizational life capricious." In a more skeptical vein, Uttal (1983), also writing in Fortune , cast a wary eye on the "corporate culture vultures": consultants who capitalize on their alleged expertise in repairing and redirecting company cultures.

Belief in the significance of culture has become powerful enough that many of its advocates claim that poor, or under-managed cultures literally can block successful corporate change (Businessweek , 14 May 1984; Halloran 1985). Many companies now try to transform bureaucratic orientations, to push managers to become more entrepreneurial and to take more risks, in order to overcome the harmful effects of poor cultures.^[3] Top managers try to administer new meaning throughout the firm by manipulating company symbols, myths, and history and to overturn complacency by appealing to the pride and loyalty of all company employees.

American Security's strategic management exploited these claims, using the management training seminars to reshape the bank's culture. The issues debated in these seminars are at the heart of the transformation and possible degradation of managerial, professional, and white-collar employment: a necessary transformation, according to the contemporary management theorists, if U.S. industry is to regain its international competitiveness.

The managers who were the subject of this study did not have a direct formal role in formulating American Security's restructuring processes, although they were targeted as the principal agents for achieving them. Through the training seminars, strategic management inculcated an ideology of nonbureaucratic, coercive management that would secure the legitimacy for, while obscuring, their restructuring agenda. The seminar trainers gave middle managers the tools to ease out growth-based employment policies and mobility opportunities and to usher in an employment framework shaped by constraint, decline, and an ongoing struggle to achieve profitability. Middle managers were charged with the mission of garnering the consent of employees to the daily, not-so-regularized business of the firm.

If the corporate culture program and the new management methods outlined in Chapter 2 represent the theory of individual judgment or autonomous management, then the seminars and the act of teaching the new program represent the practice, and the trainers the practitioners of individualizing management. In this uniquely collective setting within an otherwise tremendously fragmented social system, middle managers were exposed to the conditions facing other managers and were systematically subjected by the trainers to strategic management's agenda. In addition, the seminar trainers attempted to contain and channel possible resistance to the new managerial agenda by getting managers to discuss their fears of and objections to change and to admit collectively the need for a re-created management. The seminar interactions therefore provide an opportunity to examine the process whereby middle managers were targeted as agents and objects of corporate restructuring.

Management Training and Managerial Consent

Management training programs serve, in part, as an arena in which control over, and consent from, management will be gained. Utilizing an elaborate apparatus of in-firm personnel relations, human resources, and management development departments as well as outside consultants, top management in many firms has devoted substantial resources to train managers away from the "point of production" in order to produce and reproduce managerial commitments and ideology.^[4]

As early as the 1930s, personnel experts in American industry recognized the importance of special training programs for foremen, above and beyond any "managerial expertise" that could be acquired from experiences on the shop floor (Jacoby 1985). Personnel managers used these programs to reshape foremen's role in a highly volatile political context: top management and personnel specialists believed that foremen's behavior could block, or conversely lead to, unionization of workplaces. "The revival of foremen's training," Jacoby (1985) argues in his study of the emergence of bureaucratic personnel practices, "was industry's plan to use foremen as its first line of defense against unionism" (p. 230).

Training programs attempted to educate foremen about the limitations on their power, encourage them to sell workers on company propaganda, train them in the human relations approach to make them better managers, and bolster their loyalty to the company (Jacoby 1985, pp. 230–231). Thus such programs functioned to regulate the arbitrary exercise of power by foremen and to promote a greater identification between the objectives of foremen and the company. Patten (1968) similarly emphasizes the fact that firms, the War Manpower Commission established during World War II, and YMCA foremen's clubs trained foremen in the area of human relations theory (pp. 110–117).

Management training programs emerged concurrently with a new appreciation for "the mind of management" in the early decades of this century. Corporations, unable to assume a managerialist orientation, used these training sessions to professionalize and create an "elite" management (Bendix 1956, p. 320). The methods used to reshape the managerial orientation-teaching the human relations approach to managing employees; administering performance ratings of managers through tests and interviews; scheduling weekend, evening, and other regular staff meetings-added up to an agenda of "intensive communication," one aim of which was that managers should manage in a more enlightened and effective fashion.

Some have prescribed training and education programs as a means to gaining managerial-level employees' participation in new corporate goals. One way of smoothing the route to corporate reorganization may be to involve managers in diagnosing current organizational problems. Such organization-wide participation in training programs may increase an overall and coordinated, rather than a departmental or competitive, point of view (Argyris 1955). Furthermore, participation in collective organizational settings is often used to exert top managerial control, contain conflict, and co-opt resistance (Dickson 1981). By organizing group sessions, "top management can establish a framework for participation which allows them to retain effective control" (Dickson 1981, pp. 162–163).

The level of financial commitment made by U.S. firms to management training underscores an ongoing preoccupation with securing managerial commitment to and participation in corporate life. According to a 1986 survey, more firms offer formal training programs to middle managers than to any other occupational group, with the exception of executives (69.5 percent of the firms that responded provide training for executives; 68.9 percent provide training for middle managers; and 61.2 percent of the firms offer training to first-line supervisors; the next highest occupational category to which firms provided training was office/clerical at 50.8 percent). Furthermore, in the firms surveyed, middle managers receive on the average more hours of training (44.2 annually) than any other occupational group (see Gordon 1986b, table 1, p. 49). Another survey concludes that by the year 2000 the average manager will spend eighty-two hours per year in training programs, suggesting that there will be little abatement of this emphasis on training and retraining managers (Fulmer 1986, p. 70).^[5]

Indicated by purely economic measures, American Security Bank's seminars represented an extremely significant deployment of resources. The training seminars were organized by an elaborate management development division, set up in 1983 for the sole purpose of administering the managerial turnaround. The management division was staffed by American Security's management-level employees rather than outside management consultants, although outsiders were initially employed to assist in designing the program. At any given time approximately twenty-five managers were teaching the classes; in addition, several managers and supporting staff ran the operation.

The management development division paid a high price to provide a comfortable, even generous setting for the seminars. For the first two years the seminars were nearly always conducted in resort hotels around the state, where all participants stayed for the entire five days.^[6] With all expenses paid at vacation-like locations and paid time off from jobs, the seminar week was seen as a privileged break from work.

In structure and timing, the seminars departed radically from the way in which managers had been socialized in the past, changes that indicated a significant organizational measurement of the training. Before the management training program was introduced in 1983, managers received no regular, systematic training as managers in American Security Bank.^[7] Although a manager might have attended one of a number of thematic classes at some point in his or her career (such as classes in communications, career planning, and leadership or functionally specialized classes such as credit training or use of on-line computer systems), few had attended occupational classes that would prepare them for their new role. Furthermore, participation even in thematic programs was inconsistent across the bank. Employees of the bank were frequently promoted into management positions without first undergoing managerial job training. This historical lack of rigorous socialization of managers throws the new agenda for middle managers into even sharper contrast; the new regime represented a major reallocation of organizational resources to re-creating management.

Finally, the use of bank employees to teach the seminars provides testimony to the ideological dimension of the training. Each seminar was run by three trainers, drawn from diverse sectors of the bank. Managers who worked as trainers did so for two years, after which time they returned to the working ranks of management. Coming from diverse organizational locations throughout the bank, the trainers were individuals who had chosen the training position either as a respite from their normal work or because they had been redeployed as a result of restructuring.^[8] Their personal histories with the bank allowed these in-house trainers to claim that they identified with both the plight of managers and the need for new corporate goals; theoretically they possessed the legitimacy to galvanize others to the mission of the training seminar. The trainers and the seminar attendees were, after all, part of the same big American Security "family."

Many of the seminar trainers evinced what amounted to a religious devotion to strategic management's goals, taking extremely seriously their assignment to incorporate middle managers into the fold of corporate change. As one particularly articulate woman impressed on me, her purpose in working as a management trainer was to spread Wedgewood's message and "give everyone an opportunity to change." Another felt that he had "always been in the role of a change agent, but it was never explicit"; in the role of seminar trainer, he felt that he had found his calling. Even one male trainer who appeared to be somewhat cynical about his "cheerleader" role continually and persuasively turned his acerbic style to the objectives of the seminar, using sarcasm and irreverence to get middle managers to laugh at and criticize themselves.

Despite the sincerity and enthusiasm with which the trainers undertook their mission, their dual structural position imposed a notable tension within the seminar proceedings. On the one hand the trainers were integrated into the personnel management apparatus of the bank; in this sense they were the agents of strategic management's agenda. On the other hand, their insider status occasionally made them more vulnerable to managers' hostility. Their common position as managers in the bank increased their empathy with middle managers, often leading them to accept passively the full brunt of managers' criticisms about the organizational changes taking place.

Their struggle to reconcile these two facets of their position, to make sense of the hostility showered on them by seminar participants, without, for the most part, condemning those participants, was often painfully apparent. At several very awkward moments in the seminars, the trainers truly lacked answers for the concerns participants were raising. However, this did not stop the trainers from otherwise maintaining a very consistent approach in steering and controlling group discussions.^[9]

Inside the Management Seminars: Organization and Politics

My position at a table with the trainers in the back of the seminar room gave me a comprehensive view of the entire seminar proceedings. In contrast, only a handful of participants could see us. Those attending the seminar sat at a U-shaped arrangement of tables: facing each other around the U, the fifteen to twenty-five participants were fully visible to one another. The very formal, even lavish, environment (all the tables had floor-length skirted tablecloths; each place setting had an elegant name card facing outward for all to see; large pitchers of ice water were placed every few feet along the table; and every position had a pile of literature-fat binders full of seminar information-along with pens and pencils imprinted with the company logo) contributed to a sense of important purpose. Indeed, we were all about to embark on the very serious and collective endeavor of reconstructing management.

American Security's management seminars shared many characteristics of human potential courses; the "take responsibility for your own actions" ethos, so dominant in the human potential movement, enhanced the objective of individualizing management.^[10] Managers participated extensively, as the trainers encouraged them to examine and discuss their feelings about the many changes confronting them. Although there was a high tolerance for "sharing" one's feelings, however, the range of topics and the tone in which they were discussed were closely managed by the seminar trainers.

The trainers walked the participants through a number of curriculum modules and attempted to delimit carefully the directions in which discussions could move. The objectives of the seminar included describing the theory behind the newly instituted performance planning, coaching, and evaluation system (PPCE),* and discussing situational leadership and the new corporate culture, otherwise known as "Vision, Values, and Strategy."

Techniques to regularize management pervaded all aspects of the seminar and its preparation. The standardization of course materials and curriculum created a coherent and professional image of the project at hand. Visual devices such as charts, graphs, and poster-size illustrations were hung around the conference room. Each class member received reams of written material mass-produced for the seminars by the bank's management development division. Consisting of books explaining the use of the PPCE, salary administration, and how to be a career counselor to one's employees, the material also included a number of articles on corporate culture, change, and resistance to change from such business publications as the Harvard Business Review .

Before attending the seminar each manager engaged in a self-monitoring exercise by filling out a "leadership practices inventory" (LPI) and administering this same inventory to his or her employees. The inventory assessed how good a leader each manager was from the perspective of both the manager and the people he or she managed. (Inventory items asked whether they managed conflict or change well and whether or not they were good decision makers.) The manager submitted all the inventories to the management development staff, who tallied up the results. The trainers distributed computerized tabulations of each manager's leadership skills, results that were later used to analyze and suggest improvements for the manager's performance.^[11]

The trainers began by having participants state their names and what they wanted to gain from the seminar. Managers' statements simultaneously reflected their uneasiness about the very meaning of the managerial role in the context of the bank's crisis and expressed their interest in viable management guidelines. Comments ranged from "I want to learn how to be a good people manager," "I need to learn hands-off managing," and "I want to learn how to get good people to work harder when they don't want to" to "I'm trying to decide whether or not I even want to be a manager," and "I need to learn to cope with the PPCE."^[12]

The trainers then proceeded with a presentation that showed how the bank's changes were related to the crisis in the banking industry. Always careful to emphasize the factors external to the firm that were creating a need for a new managerial orientation, the trainers showed the "big picture"-the turbulent environmental and financial conditions facing the bank-and its effects on working conditions in the office and on the shop floor. The discussion of the bank's financial and organizational difficulties, market factors in particular, parallels the "exposure strategy" cited by Whalley (1986) in his study of engineers. Firms encouraged a "managerialist" orientation by exposing their engineering employees to financial and organizational information about the company's competitive situation (p. 227). Presumably exposure compels employees-professional or managerial-to identify with and work to achieve profitability objectives.

Starting with the principles of the new corporate culture captured in the program of Vision, Values, and Strategies, the trainers demonstrated how the larger direction and profitability of the bank directly affected and were affected by what went on in the bank's many divisions, offices, and branches. They further argued that they could offer concrete tools to enable managers to make a positive contribution to the bank's larger direction.

The trainers introduced the Performance Planning, Coaching, and Evaluation (PPCE) procedure as the mechanism linking corporate strategic plans to daily work processes at all levels of the bank. The procedure would allow middle managers to translate top management's plans for a leaner, more entrepreneurial, nonbureaucratic organization into concrete personnel and employment policies. As one trainer noted, discussing a chart that showed the relationship between corporate business plans and the "action plans" of individual managers, the PPCE "holds this whole scheme together."

Throughout the seminar exercises, managers demonstrated a good understanding of the big picture and agreed with the general need for greater productivity to improve the financial health of the corporation. The consensus emerged that to rectify the current crisis, action was necessary at all levels of the corporation. This consensus is the axis of intra-management unity, representing the convergence of middle and strategic management interests.

But another consensus emerged, one that united middle managers but separated them from strategic management. While lower-level managers agreed with strategic management's agenda for achieving larger profitability objectives, they diverged from that agenda over the methods by which those objectives could be achieved. Although corporate restructuring created very different pressures for different groups of managers, these managers nevertheless agreed that the new managerial orientation would undermine rather than promote long-term consent to the restructuring process; they felt that their ability to elicit productive work behavior was threatened by what they perceived as a skewed definition of entrepreneurialism and an arbitrary set of management methodologies.

Middle managers anticipated heightened politicization resulting from the new emphasis on using individual managerial judgment to push through a new productivity program. In the context of contraction and the decline of organization-wide mechanisms of control, the arbitrary management schemes and the new definition of management on which they were based would weaken bases for managerial authority. The trainers countered these concerns by reinterpreting the organizational politics of corporate restructuring as neutral organizational problems caused by individual psychological maladjustment, and to be solved by individual managerial judgment.

Extracting Greater Effort: Minimum Job Requirements

Recent theories of corporate structure have blamed lack of productivity and innovation in large corporations on too great a dependence on centralized, bureaucratic rules. Thus some have argued for replacing strictly bureaucratic organization with less hierarchical, more fluid structures which would facilitate decentralized, innovative management action (cf. Kanter's [1983] discussion of the "integrative" corporation). American Security Bank imported elements of this critique of bureaucratic behavior into the new management platform. One attempt to redress the ills of bureaucracy consisted of weaning managers and employees from the allegedly binding and stultifying job descriptions on which positions had historically been based.

Emphasis on merely satisfactory job performance, according to the seminar trainers, was a legacy of a profitable, complacent banking environment. Managers who did not look for ways to wring more out of the jobs and the people they managed were encouraging mediocrity. Thus managers should look for ways to "raise the bar"*: to upgrade jobs by raising the "minimum job requirements" (MJRs)* for positions. In so doing managers could become innovators in their own units. The trainers argued that middle managers should reorient their thinking away from bureaucratically constricting, standardized job descriptions based on position and focus instead on increasing results in order to contribute to improved corporate performance. This they would do by setting "stretch objectives"*: upgrading people by pushing them to achieve even higher levels of output.^[13] In lieu of specific recommendations for upgrading jobs and jobholders, the seminar trainers continually advocated leaving managers alone to upgrade through vigorous and flexible use of management judgment.

The trainers informed me, before "class" began, that the discussions of MJRs were always the most difficult modules of the seminars, because managers held so much "irrational resistance" toward this fundamental change in their orientation to managing. This precaution heightened my anticipation of the module devoted to the MJR. What was it about this topic that could unnerve the trainers so much that they would warn me about it beforehand? Why were middle managers so protective of "across the board" or organizationally consistent MJRs?

The discussions of minimum requirements for a job demonstrate why American Security's managers held a quite rational resistance to the demise of a bureaucratic framework for managing. From middle managers' perspective, companywide standardized job expectations were important for regularizing their evaluations of employees' performance. The loss of such standards connoted a level of chaos that would undermine the new responsibilities with which these managers were saddled. Yet in the seminars the trainers insisted that the bank, in its current process of change, could no longer come up with positional levels appropriate for the entire corporation. Managers must use their own judgment instead and take responsibility for determining new and higher job expectations.

After introducing the idea that managers should deemphasize minimum job requirements and emphasize increased results, one of the trainers attempted to neutralize the politics of upgrading jobs and individuals. Rather than discuss MJRs as an important benchmark by which managers could consistently evaluate employees, this trainer attempted to get managers to think of MJRs as something merely psychological. Calling MJRs "only a tool, only a consideration in the thought process," she anticipated managers' reluctance to abandon a more centralized framework for managing, acknowledging in a sympathetic voice that "many of you will find it hard to come up with positional MJRs." She went on to place the onus on managers, however, saying "You as manager need to go through the thought process, figure out what you need. There are very few positions in the corporation for which we can come up with across-the-board MJRs."

She admonished the seminar participants not to expect centralized guidelines in measuring employee performance. Insisting that standardized job requirements were inappropriate for a firm as diverse and changing as rapidly as American Security, this trainer suggested that they were, in fact, the true impediments to productive management; reworking productivity standards through the appropriate thought process was the sign of the truly entrepreneurial manager.

Another trainer hinted at the real purpose behind "deemphasizing" MJRs; he repeated the charge that standardized expectations of employees block innovation and productivity. His approach is telling, for it recasts the productivity problem as a problem of individuals and their psychological propensities. "Let's think about human nature," he argued. "If we just had MJRs, why would people work any harder than just the minimum?"

One trainer, named Kathryn, reiterated that managers should be "raising the bar" (or minimums) of as many jobs as they could. Dave, a seminar participant, argued against managers' role in utilizing personal judgment to shift the boundaries of productivity in this way: "If we don't have a standard, we can't do this." Kathryn insisted that in fact Dave did have a standard-his managerial judgment. Management judgment simply did not carry weight with Dave, however. Thinking ahead to his work situation, Dave touched on the contradiction between the agenda of the seminar (to get managers to increase productivity and to slim down the corporation in a context of contraction and declining rewards) and the tools being offered to managers to achieve that agenda. He insisted that strategic management should execute the new corporate agenda more directly by selling assets and closing unprofitable units, arguing that middle managers did not have the means to manage effectively by individual judgment. To Kathryn's claim that he possessed a valid standard, Dave replied, "No, I don't, but the corporation does. And this is leading to change and downgrading. We cannot manage these processes without a corporate standard."

Middle managers quickly caught on to what it meant in practice to deemphasize standardized job descriptions in the service of higher productivity levels. Helen argued that if everyone in her unit were told that they had different and fluctuating MJRs, she could say goodby to any possibilities for increasing productivity. Her employees would constantly be at Employee Relations (an employee/management mediating unit within the bank) to force greater consistency in evaluation procedures. Other participants jumped into this discussion, with Mavis asserting that "If there are different MJRs for fourteen different people in similar jobs, there is going to be trouble." A trainer intervened to redirect what had become a very contentious drift, arguing that raising job minimums to different levels for different individuals was a very natural task, simply part of a thought process in which managers logically connected individual job performance with the larger profitability objectives of the firm.^[14] "We may be getting off on a tangent. The key is that managers must go through the thought process of knowing what you need for business goals and articulate these minimums to employees. It's a tool."

The trainers' behavior during discussions of MJRs and objectives visibly expressed their discomfort at being the objects of managers' antagonism. They walked nervously around the room, they more frequently interrupted discussions among participants, and they called for unscheduled break intervals at the peaks of heated discussions.

Trainers also used dismissive statements, such as "We may be getting off on a tangent" or "That's an excellent point and I'd like to save that for a future discussion" to defuse "hot points" during the seminars. But this marginalizing tactic did not deter Helen from insisting that concepts such as "thought process" and "individual judgment" were vague and of little help. The trainers might extol the virtues of management theory, claiming it provided an orderly and rational means of gaining greater worker effort, but the difficulty of managing the politics of a speedup were clear to Helen. Her concern, she argued, was not with abstractions and theory, but with "fairness and consistency. The practicality [of managing up employees' performance] is, you'd better know what you're doing."

The seminar trainers used the language of thought process to promote a framework of individual, innovative managerial action, at the same time playing down the negative implications of the new framework. The language allowed the trainers to dilute the significance of both the pressure on middle managers to increase productivity and the lack of centralized guidelines for doing so. In the framework of individualized responsibility, MJRs were no longer a set of guidelines for evaluating job performance: they were no more than an element of the thought process through which managers had to go to increase productivity.

Managers were not agents of a speedup of their employees' work: their role in increasing results was merely part of a thought process in which working to increase productivity steadily was a normal task, to be rationally incorporated into a manager's everyday job. The trainers minimized the import of "raising the bar" by expressing surprise and scoffing at the disturbed responses of the seminar participants. Recasting the political problems of consent and cooperation as simple individual problems, the trainers insinuated that any rational manager should be able to resolve the "minor" conflicts of organizational change.

At the same time, the insistent focus on managerial judgment to increase productivity formalized strategic management's agenda to individualize the responsibility of corporate change. As managers repeatedly voiced their dissent to having to manage each individual employee with less centralized guidance, they met even greater insistence that they were to use situational leadership to obtain higher performance levels from all employees.

In response to managers' apprehensions about the new emphasis on increasing results, one of the trainers cavalierly suggested that managers should simply write in (on employee performance evaluations) as much stretch as possible. After a manager carefully considers all aspects of a position and an employee's capabilities, that manager should "take risks" to "encourage workers to increase output": the trainer asked, "Shouldn't we raise the bar? Don't we ask more of them?" Sandy, a branch manager concerned about the disruptive aspects of both the random application of high stretch levels and the sudden transition from rewards for efforts and seniority to rewards for results, was very agitated as she asked, "How do you arbitrarily raise the bar for someone who has worked with the bank for fifteen years?" The trainer gave a response that reflected the individualizing thrust of situational leadership: "You know management isn't easy. You've got to use J. You need to get involved in the process. We can't give you a cookbook."

The managers attending the seminars did not disagree with the need to find more effective ways of managing, but they did protest the impact that these particular methods would have on managerial effectiveness and legitimacy. Chris's response further illuminates middle managers' dilemma over the demise of more standardized guidelines in this organizational context. Chris was responsible for over eighty indirect reports in an area management group in the retail division. She was an extremely accomplished employee and had received the bank's prestigious "golden pin of merit" (an award given out by the corporate personnel department for outstanding performance); at the end of the week-long seminar her fellow participants voted her "best manager" of their class. Presumably an ideal manager from the perspective of top management, Chris expressed her agreement throughout the seminar for many of top management's goals. But she was also quite articulate about her differences with certain aspects of those goals.

After a particularly long and antagonistic discussion of the process of raising the bar and deemphasizing minimum job requirements in which she urged that managers not penalize employees for managerial misjudgment, Chris attempted to sum up the basis of the group's opposition to the methodologies presented by the trainers: "I think we felt threatened when you said to take away the minimum job requirements. You're taking away one of our important measuring tools." Her comment seemed to embolden Ralph, who earlier had expressed anger when the trainers denied the importance of bureaucratic standards. He interjected, "You got my back up over the terminology change. Different areas have different needs and standards. When you admit the importance of MJRs I don't get bent out of shape. I'm going to go back and do things exactly the same way I have been." Judging by the rather defiant murmur that followed his words, this opinion was shared by others as well.

Managing Structural Change

Managers' fears were exacerbated similarly when they were confronted with the demand to increase productivity and set new objectives in the context of "nonnegotiable" changes*: loss of personnel and funding and possible workplace closure. These structural transformations complicated managers' role in pressuring employees for greater work effort. And the language and management method of individualization failed to obscure the exploitative nature of the changes taking place, on which individual managerial legitimacy had little bearing.

Barry, for example, had comanaged a branch for several years in the position of branch administrative officer. He insisted that a key problem from his perspective lay in getting his employees to stretch (to become more productive) when the branches were undergoing staff reductions. Barbara, another branch manager, articulately summed up the contradiction inherent in demanding stretch in a context of diminishing resources:

As managers we're told to cut staff; we're told to turn our tellers and ourselves into quality salespeople; and as managers we are supposed to increase our supervision and general productivity. Branch managers are really figureheads in terms of authority, yet we're under all this pressure: there is not really very much we can do.

These pressures similarly affected Rose, who managed fourteen loan collection officers in the Southern California area. As the loan function was being centralized, her loan officers couldn't "really give quality customer service. We don't have the expertise or tools anymore to give informed answers to customer questions." Further under the gun because her unit was responsible for loan collection at precisely the time that the bank was facing unprecedented loan defaults, Rose expressed great frustration over the fact that at her previous branch loan officers had been pushed to "sell paper": to lend out money as rapidly as possible.

Rose's lack of control over the way functional changes affected the jobs of her loan officers undermined her ability to understand existing productivity objectives, quite apart from formulating new and higher ones. The transformation of this

function held other implications for Rose's job, because an increase in customer complaints (due to confusion over the new organization of the loan process) appeared on her PPCE as one negative measurement of her ability to "manage change." When Rose expressed a great deal of anger about the bank's continuing to make loans when its loan losses were beginning to look severe, Kathryn suggested that Rose should seek innovative ways of facing the managerial challenge and recommended that Rose ask herself "What can I do to help this situation?" This individualistic recommendation triggered a long and heated discussion about managers' actual lack of control over their work situations.

Managers were supposed to manage employees in a context of extreme organizational uncertainty as the structure, labor process, and function of divisions changed unevenly throughout the bank. When managers raised concerns about managing uncertainty, they were given individualizing mechanisms for coping.^[15] Middle managers frequently lamented the fact that they were kept in the dark about pending corporate changes. Kathryn, one of the trainers, responded that managers should not reveal their ignorance about the corporate restructuring process to their employees. Good managers, she argued, were opaque and would maintain individual legitimacy by concealing the inadequacy of their knowledge about the decline of the organization.

Managers should not be transparent. If a manager has to make a decision and it is difficult-for example, if you're involved in a major centralization of functions, or redeployment-when you're communicating these changes to the employee, you should not be transparent.

You don't want to be saying "I don't really understand why the company wants us to do this, but . . ."

Helen, who managed a group of data-entry workers, expressed her frustration with this cryptic approach to managing change. One of the objectives on her PPCE on which she would be evaluated was to increase the productivity of her workers. But rumors were sweeping through her unit that some of these positions were going to be eliminated. Her work group had subsequently been severely demotivated (sic) and she had been unable to justify stretching on other than purely coercive terms ("no stretching, no jobs"). Thus what was transparent in her position was her lack of control over and knowledge about the fate of the unit and her inability to conceal the exploitative aspects of demands for a greater contribution to the firm.

Her workers plied her with questions about their future. She told her seminar colleagues, "If I don't know why something is happening, I will say I just don't understand." She felt that this bluntness, although it was a kind of manipulation, would lend her far more credibility in the managing process. Kathryn retorted, "What is your gut feeling? Use the Big J; be proactive; think ahead and be more managing and instrumental." Helen responded, "I will try to find out what's happening, but I am often unable to do so."

Kathryn refused to admit any larger organizational responsibility for managers' dilemmas, continuing instead to pin responsibility for managing conflict and change squarely to the shoulders of middle managers. She expressed an extreme version of the individualist argument. "You're responsible for your own fate," she claimed.

The corporation may own your job but you own your career. You have to try to manage the situation. If employees think they can see through you, you won't get a commitment from them. The onus is on managers. Managers have to write the PPCEs; you have to be taken seriously. Managers have to support top management. You have to be genuine. We don't want "just compliance" from managers.

Sandy contended that this managerial approach to change was simply irrelevant to her case: her employees discovered their branch was closing only when some workers came by to place a bid on the reconstruction of their building. As one single manager, Sandy rejected the idea that her legitimacy would justify, much less obscure, this type of corporate change.

In the course of the seminar no definitive solutions were given for achieving significantly higher productivity levels when employees and managers were unsure of their occupational outcomes and when managers, with fewer personnel and budgetary resources, lacked legitimate grounds for making employees work harder. When seminar participants persisted in pushing harder to know how they were to extract more from employees with fewer resources and guidelines, the trainers continually redirected responsibility for the solution back onto the managers. As one trainer stated, "We used to use the SPM as a source for all dos and don'ts. But times have changed. We can't only follow rules; we have to ask ourselves: Does this make sense?"

Nor were managers satisfied that genuinely autonomous exercise of their judgment was unambiguously sanctioned by top management. Managing out looked like a murky process to middle managers, because the consequences of pushing workers to unreasonable limits to increase productivity were clear. If a manager had not clarified and documented every aspect of a work situation to the employee but had nevertheless fired or downgraded him or her, the employee might feel that he or she had been misled and later sue the bank-a turn of events for which the manager would ultimately be held responsible.

Several discussions centered on the procedures and implications of managing out. The trainers used "case studies" to teach managers how to identify and deal with poor performers. Many managers, however, were concerned about the ambiguities of this process. Andy had managed eight people in a branch in the Los Angeles area for seven years. He had been told that if a manager used language such as "might terminate" in an employee's PPCE, and a labor board brought a case against the bank for wrongful termination, "the judge might highlight the 'might' and inquire what the alternatives were. It would shore up the employee's case against the manager."

The sensitive nature of managers' position in managing up or out was further driven home by Ken, who had managed four lawyers in the bank's litigation department for three years. As an older man, Ken had a perspective on the firm's legal position gained from many years of private practice outside the bank and from his location in the administrative inner sanctum of the bank. Ken was adamant; once a promise to an employee had been violated, he warned, a manager should anticipate legal action taken by that employee. "You're in a litigation context," he argued, "once a major screwup has happened in personnel policy."

In one module of the seminar, trainers and participants discussed a case study of a female employee who brought a discrimination suit against American Bank. The intention of the discussion was to ascertain who and what had been responsible for bringing on the suit. Tom, one of the trainers, argued that the fault lay with the manager: "Lack of communication is the root cause of the problem. She can file a discrimination suit-but what happens to American Bank when a suit is filed? It gives the corporation a bad image. Managers should be talking to employees who feel discriminated against. " Managers would be directly evaluated, on their PPCEs, on how well they used their judgment in avoiding these negative scenarios.

Almost without fail, managers responded with confusion and frustration to trainers' claims that managers must exercise discretion and judgment in dealing with employees. As one participant wryly noted, "We're given discretion about disciplinary action, but if I follow exactly what I want, the bank may be sued. I constantly must look for advice. My employees know the SPM-they would be great managers." At which point one of the trainers redirected the discussion: "Let's keep this question in mind. I hope we can answer this during the week. We have to remember the Big J. Your judgment: Can I do this or can't I?" Every so often the contradictions inherent in the Big J would bubble to the surface. When Diane questioned how a manager was to suspend a so-called poor performer, the trainers went to such lengths to caution her that she burst out, "What happened to my judgment as a manager? Suddenly I can't do anything unless I ask seventeen people before I send someone home."

Behind the concerns that managers had about increasing output was the very serious problem of defining output and productivity rates in production contexts that defied easy codification and quantification; this problem characterized many of the work sites within this bank, and of course, many work sites within firms and industries in a "postindustrial" or service-based economy. The fact that managers were being asked to increase productivity when minimal standardized guidelines existed for many jobs in the first place led to a good deal of confusion and frustration, expressed both in the training seminars and in interviews.

Ken, the corporate attorney mentioned above, was furious about the individualizing bias and the vague standards for productivity, in which all responsibility for productivity was deemed to be the middle manager's. When his seminar group was shown a diagram illustrating how each manager was supposed to increase the output of his or her department by getting every employee to stretch, he exclaimed, "How does this get affected if the input is inadequate? When I don't have enough people I cannot increase output."

Trainers insisted that output was the responsibility of the manager. Bill equated output with a manager's efforts, asserting that employees will strive to accomplish what they think the boss wants: "It's the manager who doesn't see the environment properly, who doesn't expect enough stretch, who doesn't give challenging enough assignments." The trainers referred to managers who would not get their employees to stretch as deadwood, old-timers who resisted change. Despite this condemnation, Diane blurted out in frustration that she would rather quit than extract stretch from her employees through the criteria proposed by the trainers.

The individualizing thrust was similarly expressed whenever seminar participants attempted to direct discussion of the current profitability crisis toward strategic management. When trainers admonished them for middle managerial shortsightedness and for being more self-centered than firm-centered, seminar participants in turn challenged the firm's historical stress on what they called "corporate" as distinct from "moral" values and questioned whether top management was "being honest" about the root causes of the current dilemma.

The trainers trivialized dissenting individuals' efforts by forcing participants to "own" their contesting statements as mere personal opinions, again neutralizing the political issues of organizational restructuring by characterizing the dissenters as organizational miscreants. Anytime participants questioned the incompatibility between the human needs of people who worked in the corporation and the needs of profit making, trainers dismissed the seriousness of the conflicts and reduced them to "breakdowns" in managers' communication of the goals of the corporation to individuals.

Managers anticipated many contradictory consequences from having to increase productivity and reduce personnel just as standardized measures to implement this ambitious agenda were disappearing. Thus intramanagement conflict crystallized in a struggle over the very meaning and function of bureaucracy. As strategic management pushed the ideological critique of managerial bureaucrats, middle managers asserted their case for centralized, bureaucratic criteria in order to implement the new agenda. The seminars became a site of struggle over the terms of management: managers challenged the new definition of entrepreneurial management in an environment of contraction and challenged the ways in which they were supposed to extract greater effort from those they managed.

Conclusion

Do the American Security Bank seminar proceedings mirror a battle taking place across the ranks of American corporate management, a struggle over the theory of management and over corporate management practices? Other examples support the claim that corporations use cultural programs to position managers as objects and agents of corporate change in this current era of industrial restructuring. These examples also point to high levels of conflict within management over the new norms contained in cultural platforms.

The very terminology of reporting in business publications suggests a cultural onslaught against middle levels of management, a trend not confined to information, financial, or service industries. One of the most well-publicized efforts deliberately to transform a corporate culture has been that of General Motors Corporation. Changing its culture was a tactical move in a long-term effort to "reinvigorate" the company's business standing (Businessweek , 7 April 1986). In its "corporate civil war" (presumably the equivalent of American Security's "cultural revolution"), the auto firm cracked down on a perceived "culture of complacency" and the ethos that permeated what chief executive officer Roger Smith called the "frozen middle" of management. Thawing out that frozen middle by eliminating bureaucratic layers of managers-eliminating one-quarter of its managerial work force by 1990, to be precise-was one of the central aims of GM's corporate culture program (Fortune , 10 November 1986).

A similar effort was undertaken by the Ford Motor Company. The firm administered tests of managerial style and culture in workshops for managers; 76 percent of those tested were classified as "noncreative types," too willing to accept authority (Wall Street Journal , 3 December 1985). One observer declared the 1980s the "decade of the cultural revolution" after American Telephone and Telegraph adopted a program for changing its company culture during its breakup (Turnstall 1986). Prechel's (1986) study of a corporate cultural change in a large steel company yields conclusions much like those drawn in this chapter: the emphasis on changing cultures can be a transitional strategy of almost last resort for top managements in declining and restructuring industries. As Ray (1986) suggests, the arena of culture may constitute the last frontier of control for corporate top management.^[16]

The growing attention paid to management ideology and culture reflects a greater preoccupation with reshaping the values of American management to make managers willing ushers of corporate change. But in important ways these new management philosophies obscure organizational changes that undermine rather than promote managers' ability to act as agents of change.^[17]

The conflicts taking place in the seminars are significant insofar as they reflect a lack of unity about the means and ends of the new corporate restructuring agenda. But the seminar proceedings also fueled and heightened antistrategic politics. Managers regularly expressed their skepticism about the aims of strategic management as they were transmitted in the seminar. If anything, the seminar heightened their awareness of the contradictions in the new orientation. Frank Cosgrove stated that top management was charging middle managers with reducing the bank's personnel but was hiding this mission behind depoliticized and optimistic language and "opaque" management. In his opinion, strategic management was asking middle management to manage by Theory X under the pretense that it was using Theory Y. In other words, managers were supposed to appear enlightened (the Theory Y manager) yet act in a more coercive fashion (the Theory X manager).^[18] One branch manager could find no better term for the management philosophies, presented in the seminar and in the array of management literature distributed throughout the bank, than "brainwashing."

The theorists of new management philosophies have presented an ideal picture of nonhierarchical participatory corporate structures. They focus almost exclusively on the drawbacks of bureaucracy and criticize managers for preserving bureaucratic rigidity. They minimize or ignore, however, the degree to which bureaucratic norms provide an important source of consent to objectives corporate America is under so much pressure to achieve: such norms ensure rewards and regularize relations within the workplace. Under conditions of organizational contraction, centralization, and the elimination of monetary or mobility incentives, managers may view bureaucratic norms as one of the few sources of their ability to manage. Managers' demand that certain rules be left intact does not necessarily indicate organizational conservatism (although certainly in some cases it may): rather, as American Security Bank's middle managers recognized, their ability to secure consent and gain greater productivity levels depends to some degree on regularized reward and feedback procedures.

The current focus on controlling managers through corporate culture and ideological reform parallels attempts through the scientific management movement to control lower-level production and clerical workers. Whereas scientific management programs break down and colonize the physical movements of lower-level workers, corporate culture agendas attempt to specify the precise content and meaning of middle managers' social relations.

Striving to control employees through cultural mechanisms, however, may be limited in the same way that scientific management was limited in its applications to lower levels of workers (Edwards 1979, pp. 97–104). The theory of cultural control frequently ignores such variables as the historical and organizational context of the workplace, the complex and unequal relations between different strata of management, and the relations between managers and those they manage. This theory also ignores the fact that cultures emerge from the actual structures of organizations and work processes; deliberate attempts to transform culture from the top down and at a purely symbolic level may thus face serious obstacles (Ouchi and Wilkins 1985, p. 476). The vibrant entrepreneurial cultures that the new management theorists wish to create may be most typical in expanding, growth-based firms and may not be replicable in firms facing serious profitability pressures.

Middle managers' responses to change at American Security can best be explained by the particular organizational context in which they were to exercise the new managerial agenda. Calling for entrepreneurialism, flexibility, and heightened use of discretion, the new agenda simultaneously delimited what an entrepreneur was, how his or her tasks should be executed, and the repercussions of failing to exercise discretion in a way that served the corporation's purposes. In short, the platform of the new corporate culture substituted coercive, individualized responsibility for the autonomy and flexibility of the entrepreneur.

Furthermore, in the view of middle managers, strategic management's definition of arbitrarily inflated productivity standards, opaque management, and flexibility were inviable and potentially costly to the firm. Located at the intersection between the global changes of the firm and the effects of these changes in the bank's various work sites, managers predicted that the new methods would fail. The success of the program depended on exploiting managers' individual legitimacy, but the program itself undermined the legitimacy they needed to achieve corporate objectives.

Ralph, a manager, commented on the difficulties of acting like entrepreneurs and innovators in a context that continually undermined legitimacy, authority, and autonomous action. "We're encouraged to develop entrepreneurship; we're given visions, values, and strategy. But they're unfocused in relation to what managers have to do. When it conflicts with reality it's a problem." And insofar as the seminars were the site of strategic management's attempts to produce new managerial standards that contradicted the realities managers faced every day, the seminars became the site of struggle over the very definition of entrepreneurial behavior and over the terms by which managers were to extract greater effort from employees.