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In the middle of managers Occupational communities, global ethnography and the multinationals Tuomo Peltonen Ethnography 2007; 8; 346 DOI: 10.1177/1466138107081028 The online version of this article can be found at: http://eth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/3/346

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FIELD FOR THOUGHT

In the middle of managers Occupational communities, global ethnography and the multinationals ■

Tuomo Peltonen University of Oulu, Finland

A B S T R A C T ■ International management is a discipline that has yet to develop ethnographic sensitivity to the links between macro-level changes in the political economy and organizational structures and micro-level meanings and everyday life. Hassard et al. (this issue) argue that by using ethnography to study formation of middle managers’ communal experiences, international management could attune to the new organizational ideology and its actualization in the everyday life of local actors in multinational corporations. In this response to Hassard et al., I note that middle managers represent a distinct occupational group that has been affected profoundly by the restructuring and delayering initiatives in corporate organizations and that their anxieties and uncertainties, shared as they may be across countries, are arguably different from the experiences of other occupational groups. Additionally, ethnographic method has traditionally studied local cultures and sites, and even the recent calls for ‘global ethnography’ remark that ethnographic research cannot present a total vision of the world systems or transnational institutions. Instead, what ethnography can offer is description of the lives of managers and other corporate actors as they, together with the ethnographer, participate in the transnational flows, mobilities and ideologies from the viewpoint of the legacies of their local occupational and communal traditions.

K E Y W O R D S ■ ethnography, occupational communities, multinational corporations, post-industrialism, globalization

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The discipline of international management has been preoccupied with two distinct perspectives on the social structuring of multinational corporations (MNCs). On one hand, there is a stream of studies investigating the worldwide convergence of organizational structures and practices (Kerr et al., 1960; Pugh and Hickson, 1996): this body of work supports the view that multinational corporations seek to achieve efficiency through the formation of a homogeneous context for employment systems, managerial ideologies and cultural beliefs (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989; Egelhoff, 1993; Hedlund, 1993). On the other hand, a rival approach has investigated the role of national differences in actual organizational practices and employment frameworks in the various local contexts of an MNC (Bamber et al., 2004; Brewster, 1999; Ferner and Hyman, 1998; Whitley, 1992; Whitley and Kristensen, 1996). This stream, broadly defined as the divergence approach, argues that national institutional environments have such an effect on organizational structuring that the forces of global convergence tend to weaken considerably, if not fade away completely before reaching the realm of everyday action in MNC local units (Ferner, 1997; Ferner and Quantanilla, 1998; Morgan et al., 2001). Of the two perspectives, the convergence approach has been traditionally linked to functionalist studies of international business and management, dominated by different variants of systems theory as well as the use of positivist methodology. The divergence perspective, on the other hand, has been utilized increasingly as a descriptive sociological alternative, aiming to reveal the persistence of national structures and cultural patterns in the operations and processes of multinational organizations and international business activities. Unlike the convergence approach, research examining national differences has used multiple types of data that have been interpreted heuristically in order to craft a grounded description of national business systems. Drawing upon comparative studies in industrial relations, economic sociology and organization theory, the divergence view is offered as a distinctive research programme investigating the local embeddedness of organizational structures and practices in the face of the seeming globalization and homogenization of management doctrines and business logics (Morgan et al., 2001). The problem with both views is that they conceptualize organizational life in multinational corporations from a structural perspective. Despite its commitment to inductive research strategy and local sensitivity, the national business systems approach pays little attention to the ways in which organizational members make sense of and interpret the world of work and management. Considerations of meaning and agency tend to be less central than in the contemporary organizational theory, where issues around meaning, identity and interpretation have been the focus of several influential streams over the last two decades (Clegg, Hardy and Nord, 1996). On

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the other hand, the institutional theory underpinning the divergence perspective leans on a distinct conception of the societal contexts of economic organizations. Its main emphasis is on the role of national systems, such as employment and industrial relations structures, ownership and corporate governance conventions as well as the overall shape of the business networks and firm communities of a particular country. However, the selective focus on national institutions and business systems makes it difficult to conceive of large multinational corporations as the constituents of their own institutional and ideological context. Although the international management literature notes the existence of an â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;MNC effectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; taking place alongside more nationally based institutional forces (Ferner and Quantanilla, 1998; Westney, 1993), the elaboration of the preconditions and consequences of convergence brought about by the articulation of the state-of-the-art structures of the transnational corporations has remained a largely unfulfilled project in management studies. The article by Hassard et al. (this issue) is an attempt to respond to the current shortcomings in international management research by arguing for community-based ethnography that sensitizes us to the lived experience of organizational members within MNCs. Their theory of context draws upon the recent debates in the broader domain of management and organization studies concerning the rise of a new organizational archetype that reflects the changes in the global political economy and the structure of employment relations across developed industrial countries. This new ideology of organizational and managerial work moulds the discursive and material landscape of salaried work in large corporations in a way that leads to identical experiences of stress, uncertainty and global inequality amongst the employees. These shared fears and anxieties, as well as the communitybased responses to the new conditions, transcend the structural differences of national business systems by creating new working life contexts so strong in their exploitative and oppressive nature that the human experience will gradually converge across national and institutional divides. The argument of Hassard et al. (this issue) is that ethnographic approaches that shed light on the communal making of meaning are invaluable in enabling a richer description of the effects of economic globalisation on organizational life than the other research traditions currently used as frameworks for the study of international management and multinational business enterprises are capable of delivering. In this article I will offer a constructively critical reading of the argument of Hassard and his colleagues. My primary concern is twofold: on one hand I would like to suggest that their focus on middle managers as subjects of ethnographic study should be accompanied by an elaboration of the changing context of corporate structures and occupational communities. My claim is that middle managers are in a particular position in relation

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to the changes in multinational companies and corporate economy. Postbureaucratic organization structures offer far fewer possibilities for whitecollar community building and solidarity at work than the pre-globalized contexts prevalent in the archetypical post-war corporations of the industrial age (Casey, 1995). It may therefore be good to contrast the experiences of the middle managers with the responses and view of the other groups such as the networks of executives or the communities of floor level workers when theorizing the insights generated from particular ethnographic and qualitative data. On the other hand, the focus on the occupational community of middle managers as the object of ethnographic fieldwork brings in the question of the possibilities and limits of ethnography in responding to the issues around divergence versus convergence. Occupational communities have traditionally been the actual cultural tribe that the ethnographer has described in various forms of organizational or workplace research. The idea of an organizational culture, let alone a multinational organizational culture, is too vast and dispersed to be covered with the ethnographic method that is distinctively restricted to a spatially and temporally limited social group whose life is intensively observed. Instead, a more feasible solution would be to follow an occupational group of middle managers and corporate professionals to their global connections, quests and encounters with the other groups and actors. ‘Global ethnography’ (Burawoy, 2000; Marcus, 1995) could be regarded as an approach that is well suited for studying the life of managers in multinational corporations in a fashion that focuses the attention of the observer a specific occupational community while allowing the global flows, connections and controversies to be conceptualized as part of the context for the local occurrences and interpretations. Ethnography cannot offer a total view of a multinational corporation or any other trans-national system, merely a grounded portrayal of the locally embedded responses to global ideologies and practices.

The occupational community of middle managers The first issue concerns the choice of middle managers as the work community studied within the broader context of multinational corporations and international business. Middle managers are an occupational and organizational group that has suffered severely from the waves of restructuring and delayering taking place in global corporations (Grey, 1999; Heckscher, 1995). They have traditionally been in a position of implementing strategic changes at the level of workplaces and communities of practice and acting as the mediators between workers and executives (Jackall, 1988).

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Similarly, middle managers are currently involved in the managerial aspects of the changing work conditions, experiencing the human consequences of corporate actions such as lay-offs, abrupt restructuring activities and effectiveness programs that have been initiated as responses to the recent global economic shifts and opportunities. At the same time, they are also objects of similar transformations as a group of salaried employees deriving their sense of community from a distinct position in the corporate hierarchy (Watson, 1994). Companies have made middle managers more directly accountable for their performance and, with the demise of bureaucratic structures, lower level management posts have declined sharply over the past years. Ironically, job cuts have often been implemented in the form of empowerment reforms supervised by the middle managers themselves (Denham et al., 1997). This shift has been accelerated by the widening of the gap between the top executives and the rest of the employees. General managers have enjoyed considerable increases in financial compensation in the form of bonuses, stock options and golden parachutes, guaranteeing them an access to the very elite of global capitalism, whereas the employment contract between the corporation and the non-executive employees has developed towards a more transactional type of relationship where attachment to the organization is market based and contingent on the results or â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;value addedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to the corporate competitiveness by the individual employee. Middle managers are increasingly caught up in a contradictory position, being committed to managerial expertise and loyalty towards the corporation and at the same time having to bear the burden of global capitalism and its organizational effects. There is an intrinsic contradiction in the present situation of middle managers that may highlight the fears and uncertainties associated with corporate work at the expense of other possible interpretations in the lived experiences captured with the help of the methods of ethnographic field inquiry. Had Hassard et al. (this issue) gone one step up or one step down in the corporate hierarchy, the local meanings might have taken a different shape and tune compared to the fragmented identities and waning communal solidarity of middle managers. The highranking business professionals in corporate management, accounting and finance and management consulting have at their disposal cultural and economic resources incomparable to the upper echelon lifestyle of the corporate employees during the industrial age. They are the makers of the market economy and hence enjoy a power elite status in the globalized world system that is geared towards shareholder value and free market ideology (Aboulafia, 1998). The high class of the new economy inhabits the business districts of global cities where it is offered opulent services and sites for conspicuous consumption that distinguish its members from the regular employee-consumers contenting themselves with a more frugal

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lifestyle (Sassen, 1998). This new class is distinctively trans-national in its outlook, pursuing a similar lifestyle in different national contexts – a lifestyle marked with a detachment from the communities tied to a distinct place or task and instead characterized by a habitual movement from one place to another, all designed to create an impression of a ‘home’ for the privileged groups (Bauman, 1998; Peltonen, 2006a). The new economy has meant not only mounting financial rewards for the elite of global capitalism, but it has also produced a profound gap between the rich and the advantaged and the rest of the participants in the corporate system. Although sometimes the line between the privileged and the oppressed can be rather thin, in most cases the communities of middle managers and nonexecutive professionals such as engineers are cast in the same precarious category as the rest of the salaried employees of large multinational corporations. Middle managers but also middle class in a broader sense have to an extent lost their identity as the backbone of the ordered liberal societies and organizations that provides stability to the system. The social status of the ‘symbolic analyst’ (Reich, 1993) work especially in finance and accounting has been heightened in the post-industrial economy at the same time as the profession-based technical and administrative expertise is becoming less valued beyond the immediate utility offered to the respective modules in the changing configurations of flexible production processes. On the other hand, the traditional worker occupations may have an advantage over the decomposing professional communities insofar as the traditional solidarity based on class antagonisms is still characterizing the formation of work identities of the remaining blue-collar employees in industrialized countries. Although the rise of China and India has created a mounting threat to the economic feasibility of maintaining production in industrialized countries, not all manufacturing or service jobs are exported to low cost countries: several of the production processes require skilled workers to ensure the quality of products whereas at the same time services like retailing maintain a vast workforce ensuring the efficient distribution of goods and smooth operation of local stores and hypermarkets critical for sustained customer satisfaction and a coherent brand image. In many countries, workers are still well organized and the trade union movement has been actively improving its own international organization in order to react to the complexities of globalization (Peltonen, 2006b). The old culture of resistance amongst workers continues to offer a sense of belonging and compensatory reward through the formal and informal activities of struggle and worker unionism (Casey, 1995). The same kind of a communal dimension is still lacking from the recent movements within educated occupations that are beginning to from around the problematic of precarious employment facing the current student generation as they enter working life. While there have been high profile public protests against the casualization of

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professional and administrative work (such as the Paris riots in March 2006), this activity is still far from the politically legitimized and workplaceoriented programs of trade unions. As Casey (1995) notes, manufacturing workers are not burdened by the desire to climb management hierarchy and are not as competitive as white-collar workers, who feel more aggrieved and conflicted toward the company as a result of the changing rules of the game. White-collar employees are thrown into new competitive games that have become more intense and fine-tuned as a result of the fall of bureaucratic structures that used to provide a relatively clear frame for careerism in the industrial age corporations (see Jackall, 1988). The shelter of the boundaries created by division of labour and hierarchical ladders in the middle management work has vanished in favour of a Machiavellian type of pursuit of individual interest and competition against one’s colleagues and team members (Grey, 1994). Additionally, the professional identities of lower level managers have suffered a setback as a result of new corporate structures that assign specialists to project teams where supervisory and team leadership skills have replaced the value of professionalism and the ability to contribute to organizational processes from the separate ‘staff’ units detached from the turbulent world of the ‘line’ operations of the actual business units (McCann et al., 2004). According to Casey (1995), middle managers have lost the possibility to craft a communal identity based on their administrative or occupational background and have, instead, been left to live with the artificialities of corporate culturalism offering only a simulation of familial, intimate relationships in the realm of organizational work. The contradictions between the engineered images of corporation as a pre-industrial community and the actual realities of micro-competition and institutionalized uncertainty lead to anxiety and ambivalence as middle managers try to find meaning in the context where the old comfort from industrial divisions and positions has been taken away, with only the fabricated corporate culturalism providing a possibility for social bonding and meaning at work (Kunda, 1993).

Towards global ethnographies in multinational corporations The choice of occupational communities (Van Maanen and Barley, 1984) or communities of practice (Orr, 1996) as the focus of ethnographic analysis is also supported by the ethnographic method itself: the majority of organizational ethnographic studies have studied the life of specific occupational groups in the broader context of organizational and economic change (e.g. Aboulafia, 1998; Kondo, 1990; Kunda, 1993; Van Maanen, 1991; Watson, 1994). This may not only reflect the artificiality of engineered organizational culture but also the fact that the ethnographic research process

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diverts the attention to a community of practice into which the ethnographer is accepted as a temporary member. Occupational communities resemble in some sense the pre-modern tribes that were the original objects of study of ethnography and cultural anthropology before ethnographic methods spread into other fields of human and social sciences, including management and business studies (Chapman, 1996–7; Prasad and Prasad, 2002). For example, in a recent study of contract software engineers conducted by Barley and Kunda (2004), the intention of the ethnographic description is to uncover the experiences and behaviours of different actors making up the market for contract labour. However, the substantive conclusions and reflections based on the fieldwork circle back to the issues related to the nature of occupational community as a basis of social identity and institutional backbone of the software engineers (Barley and Kunda, 2006). Ethnographic sensitivity to the texture of social life in large organizations seems to suggest that group identity and the creation of emotional shelter against the pressures of capitalism and managerialism are woven into occupational tribes that cultivate mutual solidarity and a sense of belonging, even under the harshest conditions of organizational domination and exploitation. Works like Casey’s (1995) study of the changing senses of selfhood in a multinational corporation could shed light on the different reactions of communities of workers, professionals and managers to the structural economic and institutional shifts in the conceptions of work. Casey’s study is exemplary of the way in which ethnographic research can incorporate a detailed description of sensemaking and everyday life with global transformations in the economic and social structures. Casey examines the theoretical issues emerging from ethnographic analysis by using extensive fieldwork material gathered during one year of participant observations to provide a feeling of ‘being out there’ that connects theoretical debates on the post-industrial economy, corporate culturalism and new employment contracts into a rich description of the psychological and social processes reproducing and contesting the emerging new order of corporate life and employment. The study is one of the few ethnographic works that are based on an extended period of unrestricted participant observation in a large multinational corporation. As such, it suggests that delineating an organization and the complexities of its everyday life and communities of practice from a perspective that affords theoretical depth as well as convincing reporting of the actors’ experiences requires long immersion in the social life of a workplace as a participant observer. This differs from the typical trend in business studies where it is common to spend a couple of days in the field and to complement participant observation with interviews, documents and other qualitative material, resulting in scholarly reports that are characterized by ‘quick description’ rather than carefully crafted stories

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offering rich portrayals of communities from the natives’ point of view (Prasad, 2005). However, long periods of participant observation, particularly if combined with any interest in studying organizational behaviour across cultures in a multinational corporation, may be extremely difficult to implement in practice (Laurent and Van Maanen, 1993; Marschan-Piekkari and Welch, 2004). Large multinational corporations are powerful actors that can decide not to give access to an organizational scholar investigating cumbersome issues that are of no immediate relevance to the business imperatives of the company. Even if the researcher manages to convince the gatekeepers of the usefulness and credibility of his or her fieldwork project, the corporation can withhold access at any time during the participant observation period. Establishing a rapport with the gatekeepers and, later, with the key actors of the community observed requires the use of effective impression management tactics and some pre-existing relationships before corporate managers trust the academic ethnographer enough to let him or her participate in the everyday organizational rituals without limitations (Aboulafia, 1998; Jackall, 1988). After access, the next issue often is how to gain a comprehensive view of the multicultural and multi-site organization with the help of fieldwork methods. A typical yet highly problematic solution is to create a team of researchers who work individually in the local units under the supervision of the main researcher. This kind of solution is bound to create an additional ‘organization’ on top of the communities studied, with its own coordination and interpretation complexities that may divert attention from the theoretical reflection to the cross-cultural dynamics of the research team. Instead of following the life of the managers, the team is inclined to take its own cultural diversity as the topic of writing (Hearn, 2004). One of the most promising routes to tackle the challenges of doing ethnography in the globalizing workplace is what Burawoy (2000; cf. Marcus, 1995) calls a ‘global ethnography’, a form of a theoretically oriented qualitative fieldwork focused on global connections and cultural formations. Burawoy (2000) argues that although ethnography is traditionally understood as the study of the local and micro-phenomena, it has also been historically connected to social transformations and how they are enacted and experienced in everyday life. The meaning of ethnography should not be exclusively associated with the tribal form of communities but with a theoretically open immersion of the ethnographer in the perspectives and patterns of experience that its subjects are going through in their social lives (cf. Willis, 1977). In the post-industrial age, as the conceptions of space and time change, the ethnographer is also obliged to shift the understanding of his or her craft to accommodate the conceptualization of culture and community to the emerging new forms of sociality. According

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to Burawoy (2000: 4), ‘in entering the lives of those they study, ethnographers attune themselves to the horizons and rhythms of their subjects’ existence. The ethnographer, then, has a privileged insight into the lived experience of globalization’. The forces of globalization, creating new connections, reconfiguring the global space and manufacturing new divides, can be experienced in a number of different ways. To some extent, this means combining the search for locally embedded descriptions with new cross-national connections and globally mobile work careers that contextualize everyday life in the multinationals. However, it also calls for the ethnographer to uncover the cultural legacies of the past that communities are preserving within their constellations of habitual practices and repertoires of tacit knowledge. As Marcus (1995) notes, global ethnography is not an attempt to provide a total view of the world system but, rather, to allow ethnography to pay attention to the connections between multiple locations that are increasingly important in understanding the cultural and political contexts of the local communities situated in the webs of global economy. Global ethnographies of middle managers, thus, take the form of following the actors through the landscape of flatter organizations and free market ideologies. While considerations of the occupational communities hit by waves of layoffs and job relocation as proposed by Hassard et al. (this issue) is one way to explore the human consequences of global capitalism, intensified interaction with the corporate actors across the boundaries of time and space represents another concrete phenomenon that has not been studied ethnographically despite its obvious influences on the work of middle managers (Prasad and Prasad, 2002). International projects and business processes require working with a dispersed team of experts and managers that communicate with the help of advanced information technology tools such as emails and videoconferences. Professional employees are expected to be on call at times when the regular workers are off duty, with work being carried out in one’s leisure time through cell phones, laptops and home-based Internet connections. Additionally, multinational companies are treating their dispersed cadres of professional employees as one integrated labour market within which job seekers are assumed to be willing to relocate in case shifting manpower needs cut jobs in one’s current location and create new vacancies in units abroad (Harzing and Ruysseveldt, 2004). One of the implications of globalization is that managers and professionals frequently travel to meet their team members or to familiarize themselves with the many sites in which the corporation has production or subcontracting facilities. Full-blown expatriate assignments are on the decrease and it is becoming more and more common for corporate managers to travel on a weekly basis or to commute to another country

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while their family stays in the home country (Mayerhofer et al., 2004). Detaching the everyday surroundings of working life from the traditional office context of managerial work adds a further element of individualization and alienation to the already displaced class of middle managers and corporate professionals. The time that used to be spent on the intricacies of workplace culture and systems of organizational politics and power is now used up in anonymous places characterized by globalized consumption, such as airport lounges and culturally standardized environments of business hotels (Peltonen, 2006a). An ethnographic study of frequently travelling middle managers and other business professionals in multinational corporations could shed new light on the social consequences of globalization. It could be hypothesized that some kind of a sense of shared concerns and narratives about the future of a middle management community in the market driven logic of global capitalism might emerge from these encounters (Casey, 1995). Should anything resembling an embryonic form of a cultural community emerge from the ethnographic excavations, this would not probably be identical to the discourses of high life cosmopolitanism of bankers, top executives and business consultants, nor would it be based on the class consciousness of the resistant yet well-organized worker groups. Instead, new awareness of the trials and tribulations of managerial and professional work under global capitalism could be built around the discovery of the convergence of emotional responses and human costs that new organizational ideologies and reformed conceptions of employment and the self give rise to. The unfolding of the local dynamisms related to global connectivity and the role of the search for belonging and camaraderie in the life of the middle managers, however, are to be unravelled in the future only with the help of global ethnographies delving deep into the everyday minutiae of organizational and managerial life.

Concluding reflections As Hassard et al. (this issue) strikingly note, international management is a discipline that has yet to develop ethnographic sensitivity to the links between macro-level changes in the political economy and organizational structures and micro-level meanings and everyday life. Conventional literature on multinational corporations emphasizes cross-border unity and functional cohesion at the expense of the embeddedness of organizational practices in national institutions and cultural frames of reference. On the other hand, the business systems approach that is introduced as a sociological alternative to the functionalist accounts remains mostly at the level of institutional environments and firm behaviour, thus ignoring the

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local activities and interpretations among managers and employees. Hassard et al. propose that this state of research has made it difficult to consider to the extent to which the institutional context is in fact creating a convergence of experiences across countries. Their argument is that by using ethnography to study the formation of middle managers’ communal experiences, international management could sensitize us to the new organizational ideology and its actualization in the everyday life of local actors. In my broadly sympathetic response, I have argued that middle managers represent a distinct occupational group that has been affected profoundly by the restructuring and delayering initiatives in corporate organizations. Their anxieties and uncertainties, shared as they may be across countries, are arguably different from the experiences of top executives and high-level business professionals as well as from the troubles of the traditional worker groups represented in corporate workplaces: the common concerns of middle managers reflect not only the common distress over increasing workloads and the fear of lay-offs, but also a deeper aggression and confusion over the extreme individualization of careers as well as the loss of collegial solidarity (Casey, 1995). The cross-cultural convergence of experiences and cultural interpretations is likely to be qualitatively different among various occupational groups, implying that shifts within one occupational community in the context of globalization should be contrasted with those of the other organizational groups and communities of practice. Additionally, I have noted that pursuing an ethnographic study in a multinational corporation has its own practical and methodological problems that need to be taken into account when discussing the prospects of the anthropological fieldwork approach in the development of international management studies. Ethnography is interested in the local and situated, which means that it is relatively difficult to use it as a methodology with which one can obtain a comprehensive view of a multinational corporation. Even the recent calls for multi-sited ‘global ethnography’ point out that ethnographic research cannot present a total vision of the world systems or transnational institutions since it is not suited for holistic mapping (Burawoy, 2000; Marcus, 1995). What it can do, though, is to offer rich descriptions of selected communities living the conditions of time-space compression and intensified competitive pressures characteristic of globalizing business organizations. Thus, instead of generating global accounts arguing for or against convergence of the everyday realities of multinational corporations, ethnography can offer more modest descriptions of the lives of managers and other corporate actors as they, together with the ethnographer, participate in the transnational flows, mobilities and ideologies from the viewpoint of the legacies of their local occupational and communal traditions. Such global ethnography could perhaps at last re-unite the best

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of the anthropological heritage with the continuing fascination with the role of ‘culture’ in formal organizations.

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