Professionalising Management and Managing Professionalisation: British Management in the 1980's

Abstract

During the 1980's there is some evidence to suggest that the British state began to take a rather more pro‐active role in sponsoring and supporting managerial education and training with the longer‐term objective of producing a ‘professionalised’ occupational group or strata. A number of reports on the condition of management education and training in the UK (Mangham and Silver, 1986; Handy, 1987; Constable and McCormick, 1987) indicated that general provision in this area fell well below that provided by our major European competitors and, for the most part, was patchy, fragmented and poorly organised. The dire warnings of accelerated economic decline — due, at least in part, to the glaring intellectual and technical deficiencies of British management when compared to its various European counterparts — galvanised the state into undertaking a number of initiatives aimed at producing a more coherent, extensive and integrated system of management education and training (expansion of business/management schools in higher education sector; Charter Initiative; Enterprise Initiative; BIM support and involvement; positive response from ‘professional associations, such as IPM etc.). These initiatives — often taken in concert with a relatively small number of British owned and controlled multinational corporations (such as ICI) —were directed at transforming the culture and organisation of British management in the direction of a more ‘enterprising’ values system, combined with a more developed and integrated system of accreditation and training. The underlying ideological tensions — not to say contradictions ‐ between an enterprising or ‘entrepreneurial’ value system, on the one hand, and a professional or status— oriented value system on the other, were hardly recognised, much less debated. The organisational problems likely to accrue as a result of this underlying ideological conflict were also left unresolved. For the most part, they were sublimated within a pragmatically‐oriented drive “to do something” about the appallingly low level of management education and training in the UK as quickly as possible. The fact that some of the major actors or agencies charged with transforming the quality and standing of management education and training had rather different ideas as to how this objective was to be achieved (e.g. increasingly strained relations between Charter Group and BIM Universities) was also glossed over in the desperate rush to “get a slice of the action”. While initiatives of this kind — if not on the same scale that seemed to be envisaged — had been undertaken before in the 1960's and 1970's (Whitley et al, 1981), and certain developments had taken place in relation to particular technical specialisms within management as a whole (Armstrong, 1987), the 1980's witnessed a more concerted strategy of reform in which the rhetoric of ‘professionalisation’ played an important ideological and political role.