Mapping the Professional Who Manages: Identity, Narrative and Spatiality

Abstract

The focus of this inquiry is on the multiple identity construction of the professional who manages. Such a figure has largely remained shadowy in the professional and managerial literatures. Where they do appear, discussion is dominated by the spectre of conflict between their professional and managerial components. Professionals who manage tend to be placed in the polarised extremities of management whereby they are characterised either by their antipathy and resistance to anything managerial, or at the other extreme by their betrayal of their professional values and culture. Yet professionals who manage, despite the growth of specialised, generic management, still dominate the management of many professional organisations (including the law and education sites that informed this inquiry) and, as such, constitute an important and growing segment of the management sector. This thesis argues that this emerging organisational group needs to be recast out of the shadows of the professional literature. This thesis then sets out to explore the professional who manages, not as some composite figure constructed from polar opposites as discussed above, but as a unique managerial type characterized by what prove to be complex and fluid relationships between their professional and managerial identities. The central purpose of this research is to explore how professionals who manage characterise, relate, construct and reflect on the nature of the professional and managerial in their working lives. Secondly, the thesis aims to provide a strongly coherent and integrated theoretical framework, methodology and method. The vehicle for this is the narrative approach and its specific critical hermeneutic methodology and method as adopted in this research. Integral to the narrative perspective is the assertion that narrative can be considered as a privileged medium for identity construction research. Critical hermeneutics was selected because pragmatically it offers a way to both closely read and generalise from narrative, and theoretically because it can be deemed to represent a narrative kind of thinking lying between quite rigid poststructuralist and critical realist camps that have polarised narrative theory. Spatiality emerged as the dominant metaphor or motif in how professionals who manage articulated and understood the professional and managerial. Contrary to the dominant trend of the literature. these two were experienced as more either complementary or at most counter intuitive, as opposed to being in direct conflict. Metaphorically mapping the professional who manages involved an exploration of the places, territories, spaces and distances that characterise such a figure, while also capturing a significant kind of boundary positioning, thinking and sensitivity that distinguishes professionals who manage from their solely professional counterparts. This positioning was further explored in terms of its consequences for significant organizational behaviours and relationships.