Theorizing Managerial Work: a Pragmatic Pluralist Approach to Interdisciplinary Research
| Date | 01 March 1997 |
| Published date | 01 March 1997 |
| Author | Tony J. Watson |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.00034 |
Management: an especially suitable case
for interdisciplinary treatment
Management is a research area which immedi-
ately suggests itself as one which can benefit from
interdisciplinary insights. It is an activity carried
out by human individuals who, in addition to be-
ing members of groups and employees of organ-
izations, are unique beings with their own values,
abilities, anxieties and interests. It therefore re-
quires insights from disciplines which attend to
issues of human individuality. But these have
to be related to issues of structure and process.
Managers’ identities are closely implicated in
an occupational activity which takes them into
economic behaviour, involves political activity,
utilizes linguistic and rhetorical skills, requires
moral judgements and, above all, involves them
day in and day out in social processes, structures
and practices. At first sight this would mean the
theorist turning to sociological, psychological,
socio-psychological, economic, political, anthro-
pological and linguistic sources for conceptual
tools.
The theoretical work that accompanied and
followed the fieldwork which was carried out for
the book, which became In Search of Manage-
ment (Watson, 1994a, 1994b) drew upon a variety
of disciplinary sources to achieve the key research
aim. This was to understand the relationship
between the particular ideas, values, theories and
practices of managers as unique human individ-
uals and the broader patterns within which the
work organization as a whole is shaped to per-
form in its social and economic environment. The
research involved a twelve-month period of parti-
cipant observation work within the management
of ZTC, a company developing and manufactur-
ing telecommunication equipment. To make sense
of what was seen, heard and experienced meant
not just looking across different so-called para-
digms within organization theory, but also seek-
ing theoretical insights from across different
disciplines within the social sciences.
In the area of organization theory earlier work
(Watson, 1986), which took up and extended
the resource dependence perspective developed
by writers like Pfeffer and Salancik (1978), was
continued and from the more applied manage-
ment theory tradition Peters and Waterman’s
(1982) notion of organization cultures relating to
a general human need for meaning was utilized.
But this took the work into parallel themes in
social theory such as Berger’s (1973) notion of
how culture functions to create nomos in human
societies, and issues of relating ‘structure and
British Journal of Management, Vol. 8, 3–8 (1997)
Theorizing Managerial Work:
a Pragmatic Pluralist Approach to
Interdisciplinary Research
Tony J. Watson
Nottingham Business School, The Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham NG1 4BU, UK
Management research is especially open to the benefits of using insights from a variety
of social science disciplines but it should not use these indiscriminately. A strategy of
pragmatic pluralism is proposed as a way of ensuring that concepts taken from differ-
ent social science paradigms or disciplines are drawn together into a single coherent
perspective to shape the particular study to which they relate. This is illustrated with
reference to an ethnographic study of managerial work carried out by the author.
© 1997 British Academy of Management
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