‘Waiting for Dead Men’s Shoes’: Towards a Cultural Understanding of Management Innovation

Abstract

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 company is drawn upon so as to explore how managers may resist new discourses that seem to threaten established ways of thinking and acting. It is argued that innovations reflect and reproduce the past, while simultaneously reshaping it, in ways that are intended and unintended.