Darren Mccabe
Biographic Data
| ID | 4273092 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Darren Mccabe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Darren |
| FAMILY NAME | Mccabe |
| SIGNATURE | MCCABE D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Keele University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9938-2085 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 160 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 26 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Invisible minds
The dominant wellbeing discourse (DWD) in neoliberal economies can be understood as a form of bio-power that presupposes healthy individuals. It seeks to produce subjects who take responsibility for their wellbeing and, in this way, render themselves productive. Drawing on interviews with individuals who volunteered a diagnosed mental health condition (MHC), we explore how they resisted the negative associations with MHCs through making their con…
This Is the End'? An Ethnographic Study of Management Control and a New Management Initiative
Over recent decades, critical scholars have quite rightly warned of the control implications of new management initiatives. There is a danger, however, of treating control in a 'distal' way or as an 'end'. Through drawing on proximal theorising, we make explicit what is often implicit in such accounts, which is that control is best understood as unfinished, in process, for it is inherently contingent and unpredictable. Viewed in this way, control…
There is a crack in everything’
Why is resistance a pervasive feature of organizations? We seek to add to the established ways of understanding resistance by arguing that it may emerge owing to the rationality and irrationality, order and disorder that imbues organizations. We explore how such conditions create ambivalent situations that can generate resistance that is ambivalent itself as it can both facilitate and hinder the operation of organizations. Drawing on ethnographic…
The Day of the Rally
The literature on organisational culture suggests that ceremonies or rituals reinforce control. By contrast, this article contributes to the literature on resistance, culture and ceremony by arguing that ceremony can also be understood as a form of resistance. It does so through drawing on ethnographic research, first, to explore how a ceremonial 1-day rally during an academic dispute was productive for frontline employee resistance (ceremony as …
Numericalizing the other
This article explores how a strategy discourse in a UK bank reproduced a managerial preoccupation with costs, control and numbers that was grounded in the extant culture. Through engaging with this discourse, strategists displayed numerical ways of thinking, which suggested that they did not ‘see’ those on the receiving end of the strategy as human beings. The article contributes to the strategy literature first by exploring how ‘strategists’ are…
‘It’s just a job’
This article contributes to an understanding of the nexus between humans and animals by drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a British chicken factory and, more particularly, by exploring the emotional subjectivity of Meat Inspectors employed by the Food Standards Agency to oversee quality, hygiene and consumer safety within this plant. We argue that these Inspectors displayed a complex range of often contradictory emotions from the ‘mec…
Curiouser and curiouser!’
The metaphors in Morgan’s (1986) Images of Organization largely imply order, rationality, stability and manageability. This reflects that the text is concerned with facilitating the design and management of organizations. This article draws on Lewis Carroll’s (1865) novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to propose Wonderland as an alternative metaphor that places at centre stage issues such as absurdity, irrationality, uncertainty and disorder. …
The Tyranny of Distance
Inspired by the insights of Franz Kafka, this article explores the problem of ‘distance’ in a UK bank, particularly by focusing on one of its back-office processing centres. Distance refers to a way of not seeing those below us in the hierarchy; this might mean that we act in ways that display little thought or concern for the experiences of others. It is argued that the ‘distance’ created between human beings through bureaucratic ways of organiz…
The kill programme
It has been argued that ‘dirty work’ is characterised by strong occupational and workgroup cultures. This literature has mainly focused on direct workers, but this article largely attends to indirect ‘dirty’ workers, specifically meat inspectors, through ethnographic research conducted in a UK slaughterhouse. Four arguments are developed; the first is that ‘dirty workers’ may not all display group cohesiveness; indeed, individualisation may be mo…
Making out and making do
This article draws on fieldwork conducted in the back‐office of a major retail UK bank and explores how, when introducing change, management drew on contradictory normative and rational discourses. Its primary concern is to explore how, in this context, employees engaged in contradictory acts that combined elements of both resistance (‘making out’) and consent (‘making do’) that are difficult to disentangle. It is argued that although both are mo…
Accounting for Consent
This article draws on the case of a UK bank to consider why branch employees tolerated conditions that impoverished their working lives. The article explores how we are defined as particular types of subject and how we turn ourselves into subjects. The particular focus is on how we simultaneously understand ourselves as economic, cultural and autonomous subjects and how this contributes to the production of consent. It is argued that our propensi…
Strategy-as-Power
‘Strategy-as-practice’ (s-a-p) scholars have urged us to attend to the messy realities of strategy so as to increase the relevance of research for practititoners. This article, whilst recognizing the need to focus on what managers do, develops a critique of this literature. It argues that the s-a-p approach (Whittington, Jarzabkowski, Johnson, Balogun) and the earlier ‘Power School’ (Mintzberg, Pettigrew, Pfeffer) share much in common as both pre…
Enterprise contested
This article analyses the ‘enterprise’ discourse (Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose, 1989) that endeavours to reinvent employees as responsible, autonomous, self-regulating, customer-focused, team players. In this study of a major UK bank, the staff both endorsed and turned the enterprise discourse back on management and so the boundaries between dissent and consent are blurred. The case study highlights that enterprise does not arrive fully formed and c…
Who's Afraid of Enterprise
This paper explores two discourses that are bound up with `producing' two types of subject in a UK Bank. An enterprise discourse, which stresses responsible, customer focused, team players that use their initiative and a Fordist discourse, which conceives of employees as mechanical beings who repetitively process work. Through attending to the work experiences of back office clerks, the paper considers how the latter discourse `represses' the for…
Individualization at Work
This article explores how power can individualize, rendering us isolated and fearful, but also how power can be wielded to challenge such conditions. It is argued that subjectivity should not be confused with individualism, for although we are all individualized, and understand ourselves as individuals, subjectivity is constituted through social relations, that give rise to collective meaning, sentiments and affiliations. These issues are conside…
Organization and Innovation
Waiting for Dead Men’s Shoes’
Managers are often represented as exercising power over others through different discourses such as strategy, total quality management and reengineering. This article seeks to add to our understanding of innovation by considering how managers are also constituted through power relations such that their subjectivity becomes embedded within a particular cultural context that in turn imbues the innovations they adopt. A case study of an insurance co…
A Different World
This article explores how business process reengineering (BPR) is informed by a masculine discourse that emphasizes competition, control and conquest while simultaneously appealing to care, trust, nurturing, creativity and teamwork. We explore how this contradiction is reflected in the language and practice of management. We demonstrate some of the ways in which this contradiction infuses with, subverts and may ultimately undermine BPR. We locate…
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered
Recent managerial discourses share similar assumptions about organizations and the means to their greater efficiency. One of these is a faith in teamworking as a method of ensuring that human resources are effectively mobilized to achieve the unquestioned benefits of any specific technology or prescriptive programme. In this article we will explore what teamworking means for employees' lives within an automobile manufacturing company. We question…
Ain't Misbehavin'? Opportunities for Resistance under New Forms of 'Quality' Management
In this paper we explore the development of a new regime in a major bank where total quality management (TQM) has recently been introduced. A number of recent critics have suggested that TQM all but eliminates resistance either through a management regime that removes waste or through the totalising discourse it propagates. We argue that new management innovations associated with TQM and `empowerment' are effective in increasing control over work…
Total Quality Management
This article examines a co-operative union-management approach towards Total Quality Management (TQM) by recourse to a case study from the auto components manufacturing sector. Its purpose is twofold; first, it suggests that in contrast to much critical thinking, under certain conditions TQM need not undermine trade unions. Indeed, it is argued that a more moderate trade union stance towards TQM, in some circumstances, may prove to be a more effe…
Making Sense of "Quality?"-Toward a Review and Critique of Quality Initiatives in Financial Services
This article provides a broad classification and critique of the theoretical and empirical approaches toward quality initiatives. These are the "technical" managerialist, social managerialist, and critical nonmanagerialist approaches. The technical managerialist approach is based upon the flawed assumption that practice follows policy almost like night follows day. By contrast, focusing on intraorganizational politics and the tensions of hierarch…
Jointism and the Role of the Workplace Union in the auto‐components Industry
This article is part of a case study history, from the British auto‐components industry involving a changing workplace regime from the late 1970s through to the 1990s. Employing the concepts of ‘dual commitment’ and ‘incorporation’ we explore, partly through the voices of participants, the process of involvement in that regime. We consider the implications for how trade unions might respond to policies on ‘jointism’, and for management vis‐a‐vis …
"When "Life Is but a Dream
In this article, we explore the genesis and operation of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) within a medium-sized U.K. bank from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. We dismiss the claims of those evangelical gurus who assume that BPR can be decontextualized and decoupled from organizational politics and posit that BPR can be managed instantaneously and unproblematically. Instead we argue that BPR is likely to be constituted by and through politica…
Dreams and Designs on Strategy
Any management discourse, such as Total Quality Management (TQM), has power effects that can transform individuals into subjects who secure some sense of their own identity through participating either as managers or employees in the practices it embraces. The central argument of this paper, however, is that despite these power effects, TQM is not nearly as effective or rational in controlling employees as its gurus exhort or its critics fear. Th…
Dreams and Designs on Strategy
Any management discourse, such as Total Quality Management (TQM), has power effects that can transform individuals into subjects who secure some sense of their own identity through participating either as managers or employees in the practices it embraces. The central argument of this paper, however, is that despite these power effects, TQM is not nearly as effective or rational in controlling employees as its gurus exhort or its critics fear. Th…
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered
Recent managerial discourses share similar assumptions about organizations and the means to their greater efficiency. One of these is a faith in teamworking as a method of ensuring that human resources are effectively mobilized to achieve the unquestioned benefits of any specific technology or prescriptive programme. In this article we will explore what teamworking means for employees' lives within an automobile manufacturing company. We question…
Ain't Misbehavin'? Opportunities for Resistance under New Forms of 'Quality' Management
In this paper we explore the development of a new regime in a major bank where total quality management (TQM) has recently been introduced. A number of recent critics have suggested that TQM all but eliminates resistance either through a management regime that removes waste or through the totalising discourse it propagates. We argue that new management innovations associated with TQM and `empowerment' are effective in increasing control over work…
"When "Life Is but a Dream
In this article, we explore the genesis and operation of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) within a medium-sized U.K. bank from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. We dismiss the claims of those evangelical gurus who assume that BPR can be decontextualized and decoupled from organizational politics and posit that BPR can be managed instantaneously and unproblematically. Instead we argue that BPR is likely to be constituted by and through politica…
Enterprise contested
This article analyses the ‘enterprise’ discourse (Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose, 1989) that endeavours to reinvent employees as responsible, autonomous, self-regulating, customer-focused, team players. In this study of a major UK bank, the staff both endorsed and turned the enterprise discourse back on management and so the boundaries between dissent and consent are blurred. The case study highlights that enterprise does not arrive fully formed and c…
There is a crack in everything’
Why is resistance a pervasive feature of organizations? We seek to add to the established ways of understanding resistance by arguing that it may emerge owing to the rationality and irrationality, order and disorder that imbues organizations. We explore how such conditions create ambivalent situations that can generate resistance that is ambivalent itself as it can both facilitate and hinder the operation of organizations. Drawing on ethnographic…
Curiouser and curiouser!’
The metaphors in Morgan’s (1986) Images of Organization largely imply order, rationality, stability and manageability. This reflects that the text is concerned with facilitating the design and management of organizations. This article draws on Lewis Carroll’s (1865) novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to propose Wonderland as an alternative metaphor that places at centre stage issues such as absurdity, irrationality, uncertainty and disorder. …
Making out and making do
This article draws on fieldwork conducted in the back‐office of a major retail UK bank and explores how, when introducing change, management drew on contradictory normative and rational discourses. Its primary concern is to explore how, in this context, employees engaged in contradictory acts that combined elements of both resistance (‘making out’) and consent (‘making do’) that are difficult to disentangle. It is argued that although both are mo…
The best laid schemes o'TQM
This article explores management's strategic decision making in relation to Total Quality Management (TQM). It demonstrates that management's strategies are fraught with politics and power relations, which influence the ‘choice’ of strategy and the way in which such strategies are ‘implemented’. Hence, management's strategic decision making may not be planned and rational, and their behaviour is often contradictory which may undermine TQM or rend…
Accounting for Consent
This article draws on the case of a UK bank to consider why branch employees tolerated conditions that impoverished their working lives. The article explores how we are defined as particular types of subject and how we turn ourselves into subjects. The particular focus is on how we simultaneously understand ourselves as economic, cultural and autonomous subjects and how this contributes to the production of consent. It is argued that our propensi…
Waiting for Dead Men’s Shoes’
Managers are often represented as exercising power over others through different discourses such as strategy, total quality management and reengineering. This article seeks to add to our understanding of innovation by considering how managers are also constituted through power relations such that their subjectivity becomes embedded within a particular cultural context that in turn imbues the innovations they adopt. A case study of an insurance co…
This Is the End'? An Ethnographic Study of Management Control and a New Management Initiative
Over recent decades, critical scholars have quite rightly warned of the control implications of new management initiatives. There is a danger, however, of treating control in a 'distal' way or as an 'end'. Through drawing on proximal theorising, we make explicit what is often implicit in such accounts, which is that control is best understood as unfinished, in process, for it is inherently contingent and unpredictable. Viewed in this way, control…
The kill programme
It has been argued that ‘dirty work’ is characterised by strong occupational and workgroup cultures. This literature has mainly focused on direct workers, but this article largely attends to indirect ‘dirty’ workers, specifically meat inspectors, through ethnographic research conducted in a UK slaughterhouse. Four arguments are developed; the first is that ‘dirty workers’ may not all display group cohesiveness; indeed, individualisation may be mo…
Jointism and the Role of the Workplace Union in the auto‐components Industry
This article is part of a case study history, from the British auto‐components industry involving a changing workplace regime from the late 1970s through to the 1990s. Employing the concepts of ‘dual commitment’ and ‘incorporation’ we explore, partly through the voices of participants, the process of involvement in that regime. We consider the implications for how trade unions might respond to policies on ‘jointism’, and for management vis‐a‐vis …
Total Quality Management
This article examines a co-operative union-management approach towards Total Quality Management (TQM) by recourse to a case study from the auto components manufacturing sector. Its purpose is twofold; first, it suggests that in contrast to much critical thinking, under certain conditions TQM need not undermine trade unions. Indeed, it is argued that a more moderate trade union stance towards TQM, in some circumstances, may prove to be a more effe…
The best laid schemes o'TQM
This article explores management's strategic decision making in relation to Total Quality Management (TQM). It demonstrates that management's strategies are fraught with politics and power relations, which influence the ‘choice’ of strategy and the way in which such strategies are ‘implemented’. Hence, management's strategic decision making may not be planned and rational, and their behaviour is often contradictory which may undermine TQM or rend…
Making Sense of "Quality?"-Toward a Review and Critique of Quality Initiatives in Financial Services
This article provides a broad classification and critique of the theoretical and empirical approaches toward quality initiatives. These are the "technical" managerialist, social managerialist, and critical nonmanagerialist approaches. The technical managerialist approach is based upon the flawed assumption that practice follows policy almost like night follows day. By contrast, focusing on intraorganizational politics and the tensions of hierarch…
Jointism and the Role of the Workplace Union in the auto‐components Industry
This article is part of a case study history, from the British auto‐components industry involving a changing workplace regime from the late 1970s through to the 1990s. Employing the concepts of ‘dual commitment’ and ‘incorporation’ we explore, partly through the voices of participants, the process of involvement in that regime. We consider the implications for how trade unions might respond to policies on ‘jointism’, and for management vis‐a‐vis …
"When "Life Is but a Dream
In this article, we explore the genesis and operation of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) within a medium-sized U.K. bank from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. We dismiss the claims of those evangelical gurus who assume that BPR can be decontextualized and decoupled from organizational politics and posit that BPR can be managed instantaneously and unproblematically. Instead we argue that BPR is likely to be constituted by and through politica…
Dreams and Designs on Strategy
Any management discourse, such as Total Quality Management (TQM), has power effects that can transform individuals into subjects who secure some sense of their own identity through participating either as managers or employees in the practices it embraces. The central argument of this paper, however, is that despite these power effects, TQM is not nearly as effective or rational in controlling employees as its gurus exhort or its critics fear. Th…
Total Quality Management
This article examines a co-operative union-management approach towards Total Quality Management (TQM) by recourse to a case study from the auto components manufacturing sector. Its purpose is twofold; first, it suggests that in contrast to much critical thinking, under certain conditions TQM need not undermine trade unions. Indeed, it is argued that a more moderate trade union stance towards TQM, in some circumstances, may prove to be a more effe…
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered
Recent managerial discourses share similar assumptions about organizations and the means to their greater efficiency. One of these is a faith in teamworking as a method of ensuring that human resources are effectively mobilized to achieve the unquestioned benefits of any specific technology or prescriptive programme. In this article we will explore what teamworking means for employees' lives within an automobile manufacturing company. We question…
Ain't Misbehavin'? Opportunities for Resistance under New Forms of 'Quality' Management
In this paper we explore the development of a new regime in a major bank where total quality management (TQM) has recently been introduced. A number of recent critics have suggested that TQM all but eliminates resistance either through a management regime that removes waste or through the totalising discourse it propagates. We argue that new management innovations associated with TQM and `empowerment' are effective in increasing control over work…
A Different World
This article explores how business process reengineering (BPR) is informed by a masculine discourse that emphasizes competition, control and conquest while simultaneously appealing to care, trust, nurturing, creativity and teamwork. We explore how this contradiction is reflected in the language and practice of management. We demonstrate some of the ways in which this contradiction infuses with, subverts and may ultimately undermine BPR. We locate…
Waiting for Dead Men’s Shoes’
Managers are often represented as exercising power over others through different discourses such as strategy, total quality management and reengineering. This article seeks to add to our understanding of innovation by considering how managers are also constituted through power relations such that their subjectivity becomes embedded within a particular cultural context that in turn imbues the innovations they adopt. A case study of an insurance co…
Organization and Innovation
Individualization at Work
This article explores how power can individualize, rendering us isolated and fearful, but also how power can be wielded to challenge such conditions. It is argued that subjectivity should not be confused with individualism, for although we are all individualized, and understand ourselves as individuals, subjectivity is constituted through social relations, that give rise to collective meaning, sentiments and affiliations. These issues are conside…
Who's Afraid of Enterprise
This paper explores two discourses that are bound up with `producing' two types of subject in a UK Bank. An enterprise discourse, which stresses responsible, customer focused, team players that use their initiative and a Fordist discourse, which conceives of employees as mechanical beings who repetitively process work. Through attending to the work experiences of back office clerks, the paper considers how the latter discourse `represses' the for…
Enterprise contested
This article analyses the ‘enterprise’ discourse (Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose, 1989) that endeavours to reinvent employees as responsible, autonomous, self-regulating, customer-focused, team players. In this study of a major UK bank, the staff both endorsed and turned the enterprise discourse back on management and so the boundaries between dissent and consent are blurred. The case study highlights that enterprise does not arrive fully formed and c…
Strategy-as-Power
‘Strategy-as-practice’ (s-a-p) scholars have urged us to attend to the messy realities of strategy so as to increase the relevance of research for practititoners. This article, whilst recognizing the need to focus on what managers do, develops a critique of this literature. It argues that the s-a-p approach (Whittington, Jarzabkowski, Johnson, Balogun) and the earlier ‘Power School’ (Mintzberg, Pettigrew, Pfeffer) share much in common as both pre…
Accounting for Consent
This article draws on the case of a UK bank to consider why branch employees tolerated conditions that impoverished their working lives. The article explores how we are defined as particular types of subject and how we turn ourselves into subjects. The particular focus is on how we simultaneously understand ourselves as economic, cultural and autonomous subjects and how this contributes to the production of consent. It is argued that our propensi…
Making out and making do
This article draws on fieldwork conducted in the back‐office of a major retail UK bank and explores how, when introducing change, management drew on contradictory normative and rational discourses. Its primary concern is to explore how, in this context, employees engaged in contradictory acts that combined elements of both resistance (‘making out’) and consent (‘making do’) that are difficult to disentangle. It is argued that although both are mo…
The Tyranny of Distance
Inspired by the insights of Franz Kafka, this article explores the problem of ‘distance’ in a UK bank, particularly by focusing on one of its back-office processing centres. Distance refers to a way of not seeing those below us in the hierarchy; this might mean that we act in ways that display little thought or concern for the experiences of others. It is argued that the ‘distance’ created between human beings through bureaucratic ways of organiz…
The kill programme
It has been argued that ‘dirty work’ is characterised by strong occupational and workgroup cultures. This literature has mainly focused on direct workers, but this article largely attends to indirect ‘dirty’ workers, specifically meat inspectors, through ethnographic research conducted in a UK slaughterhouse. Four arguments are developed; the first is that ‘dirty workers’ may not all display group cohesiveness; indeed, individualisation may be mo…
Numericalizing the other
This article explores how a strategy discourse in a UK bank reproduced a managerial preoccupation with costs, control and numbers that was grounded in the extant culture. Through engaging with this discourse, strategists displayed numerical ways of thinking, which suggested that they did not ‘see’ those on the receiving end of the strategy as human beings. The article contributes to the strategy literature first by exploring how ‘strategists’ are…
‘It’s just a job’
This article contributes to an understanding of the nexus between humans and animals by drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a British chicken factory and, more particularly, by exploring the emotional subjectivity of Meat Inspectors employed by the Food Standards Agency to oversee quality, hygiene and consumer safety within this plant. We argue that these Inspectors displayed a complex range of often contradictory emotions from the ‘mec…
Curiouser and curiouser!’
The metaphors in Morgan’s (1986) Images of Organization largely imply order, rationality, stability and manageability. This reflects that the text is concerned with facilitating the design and management of organizations. This article draws on Lewis Carroll’s (1865) novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to propose Wonderland as an alternative metaphor that places at centre stage issues such as absurdity, irrationality, uncertainty and disorder. …
The Day of the Rally
The literature on organisational culture suggests that ceremonies or rituals reinforce control. By contrast, this article contributes to the literature on resistance, culture and ceremony by arguing that ceremony can also be understood as a form of resistance. It does so through drawing on ethnographic research, first, to explore how a ceremonial 1-day rally during an academic dispute was productive for frontline employee resistance (ceremony as …
There is a crack in everything’
Why is resistance a pervasive feature of organizations? We seek to add to the established ways of understanding resistance by arguing that it may emerge owing to the rationality and irrationality, order and disorder that imbues organizations. We explore how such conditions create ambivalent situations that can generate resistance that is ambivalent itself as it can both facilitate and hinder the operation of organizations. Drawing on ethnographic…
This Is the End'? An Ethnographic Study of Management Control and a New Management Initiative
Over recent decades, critical scholars have quite rightly warned of the control implications of new management initiatives. There is a danger, however, of treating control in a 'distal' way or as an 'end'. Through drawing on proximal theorising, we make explicit what is often implicit in such accounts, which is that control is best understood as unfinished, in process, for it is inherently contingent and unpredictable. Viewed in this way, control…
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (19 works) · Public relations (16 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Business (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Economics (10 works) · Engineering (9 works)