Working at the boundaries: Middle managerial work as a source of emancipation and alienation

Ricardo Azambuja () and Gazi Islam
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Ricardo Azambuja: ESC Rennes School of Business - ESC [Rennes] - ESC Rennes School of Business
Gazi Islam: EESC-GEM Grenoble Ecole de Management, IREGE - Institut de Recherche en Gestion et en Economie - USMB [Université de Savoie] [Université de Chambéry] - Université Savoie Mont Blanc

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Abstract: The current paper examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary work, characterized as the work of negotiating between multiple roles at the interstices of organizational groups. Through an ethnographic study of a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore the ambivalent experience of boundary work as characteristic of professional middle managerial workers. Our managers described themselves as proactive and reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on the other. We examine this tension as a contrast between forces of emancipation (i.e. sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment and reflexivity) and alienation (i.e. fatigue, lack of self-determination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). We discuss these forces and their implications for managerial work in the light that, in our findings, managers routinely shift between being agential and reflexive mediators-boundary subjects-and interfacing and coordination devices-boundary objects.

Keywords: experience of work; politics of everyday life; boundary objects; boundary subjects; Brazil; ethnography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01959107v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Human Relations, 2019, 72 (3), pp.534-564

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01959107

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