Unpicking the Managerial Stitches: Strengthening Critical Action in the Public Sector Workplace
Marion Macalpine
Sheila Marsh
DOI: 10.2190/WR.13.2.b
Abstract
This article draws on research and education with public sector managers in the UK health and social care sector to expose the intensity and rapid spread of private profit within public services. It conceptualises this spread as key to "high managerialism," which, rather than improving public services, enables the incursion of capital into the public realm with corrosive impacts. These include the perverse results of performance targets, distorted priorities, and dehumanised practices, which impact crucially both on public sector workers and on the public. We chart the shift from control through direct performance management techniques to the use of more nuanced, discursive resources for control. These include market structures and assumptions and "morphing" of public services into new forms akin to corporate models. Key contours, from the international arena to the individual manager, are interpenetrated by market discourse; this can "stitch" managers into a "common sense" notion of how to act within the structures of high managerialism: a business mindset held in place through fear and silence. The article describes how through our role in management education we draw on managers' possibilities and motivations to challenge this "common sense," using three interlinked strategies to work with them and help "unpick the stitches." These strategies challenge the normalisation of market assumptions; name and connect what is usually implicit and disconnected; and take a campaigning approach to action. Our work focuses on supporting the agency of individual managers who lead key public services to take a critical perspective, build on public sector values, and act for progressive change in their workplaces as well as for public service improvement.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.