Men Who Manage: Fusions of Feeling and Theory in Administration

341 Pages·2013·19.81 MB·English

by  Melville Dalton

MEN WHO
MANAGE

MEN WHO
MANAGE
Fusions of Feeling and Theory
in Administration
Melville Dalton
With a new introduction by David Shulman
¡3 Routledge
Taylor & Francis Croup
LONDON AND NEW YORK
Originally published in 1959 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published 2013 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2013012843
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dalton, Melville.
Men who manage : fusions of feeling and theory in administration /
Melville Dalton.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-5294-4
1. Management. 2. Industrial management. 3. Industrial sociol¬
ogy. I. Title.
HD31.D2 2013
658.4--dc23
2013012843
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5294-4 (pbk)
Contents
Introduction to the Transaction Edition, by David Shulman vii
Foreword, by George H. Hildebrand xv
Preface xvii
Acknowledgments xix
1. Introduction 1
2. Managers on Paper 8
3. Power Struggles in the Line 18
4. Relations between Staff and Line 71
5. Local Meanings of High Level Labor Agreements 110
6. The Managerial Career Ladder 148
7. The Interlocking of Official and Unofficial Reward 194
8. The Interconnections of Formal and Informal Action 218
9. The Manager between Formal and Informal 241
10. Conclusions 262
11. Appendix on Method 273
Bibliography 287
Name Index 301
Subject Index 307

Introduction to the
Transaction Edition
David Shulman
One of Melville Dalton's research informants told him: "there is just
as much politics here in the plant as there is in Washington" (p. 79).
How many people would agree with that declaration for their work­
places if reflecting on their experiences in a candid and unguarded way?
In Men Who Manage,1 those political struggles and unofficial actions
that normally remain out of sight are put on open display for readers
to analyze. Melville Dalton details the "intangible worlds of private
understandings" (p. 95) that managers have regarding how to pursue
upward mobility, operate without following all the rules, engage in
conlicts across hierarchical levels, compete over rewards and manage
personality factors that covertly inl uence reputational assessments.
Dalton examines those topics thoroughly and they are classic topics of
scholarly inquiry in business. He documents their inevitability in and
signiicance for conducting effective managerial work. In the spirit of
the best older ethnographies of businesses, Dalton uses qualitative data
1. A note on this book's title: Men Who Manage is titled in two misleading ways. The
use of the word men as opposed to men and women or people is a historical anachronism.
Both men and women are managers. Assuming by fiat that the realm of management
belongs, as a whole, to men is erroneous. Dalton did collect research on females in
management at one of his sites. In addition to the title being inappropriately limiting
and thus unintentionally offensive at this time, the title also inaccurately describes the
book's content. The book is about the social situations that managers encounter and
strategize to do their jobs. Because the title unfortunately refers to men rather than the
social situations arising in managing, the title conveys a misplaced emphasis.
vii
viii INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
in the form of stories and observations to make his insights relatable
and compelling.
This introduction will not offer an outline and summary of each
chapter. I'm not writing as a book reviewer or summarizer here. I write
as an admirer of organizational scholarship who wants to communicate
with an audience sharing similar interests three reasons why this book
is well worth reading. First, Dalton has written a prescient examina¬
tion of how the realities of hierarchical conflict emerge in formal and
unofficial battles, of how informal cliques operate in workplaces, of
how individuals deal both over and under the table, and of how work­
ers battle the imposition of new rules and technologies. These themes
remain important to scholars of business and organizations in current
research.
Second, Dalton's writing style is clear and his examples are recog­
nizable. Dalton offers readers a return to a period of scholarly writing
where an engaging quality was not sacriiced to meet the contemporary
professional requirements of staccato hypothesis statements, dense
literature reviews and quantiication. That stated, the book does not
read like a novel; yet it is nice to read a scholarly work where we can
easily recognize real people rather than theoretical abstractions of them.
Third, Men Who Manage is a foundational work on the significance
of researching "workarounds" in sociological studies of business and
management and warrants recognition in that regard as an inluential
classic.
The term "workaround" seems mundane and devoid of glamour.
The term refers to an informal step taken to circumvent a problem.
The simplicity of the term fades when people move to the level of
identifying the types and functions of workarounds as sociologically
significant acts in workplaces. Workarounds are efforts to escape the
rationalizing processes of new rules in bureaucracies. Managers who
agreed on union contracts who covertly support unoficial rewards to
keep the peace are engaging in workarounds that violate the contract.
The workaround idea has a tremendous salience in organizational
theory. It addresses that people inhabit institutions and the agency that
they exercise to preserve autonomy against imposing staff controls. The
workaround is an agentic response to the iron cage that bureaucracies
can impose. Within that agency is a forum for collective action and
mobilization. Workarounds are also venues for fighting conflicts where
in more public spaces people must appear to oficially accept being on
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION ix
the same team. They are where individuals look out for number one
when they are oficially constrained to appear to put collective rules
ahead of their careers. The ability to innovate and use workarounds
is also viewed as a deining characteristic of the leader-manager who
adapts to challenges and gains respect successfully without being pinned
down by dificulties. Through encountering Dalton's many examples
of workarounds, readers will learn more about how managers work
effectively when they confront challenges.
The workaround, at heart, represents a resourceful blending of
meeting formal and informal expectations. The effective manager who
understands and can act on workarounds is respected more than one
who does not. Importantly, many workarounds provide administrative
functionality. The workaround blend of the formal and informal enable
the managers that Dalton studied to complete important administrative
tasks like recruiting, production, retention, decision-making and upward
mobility when obstacles threatened those tasks.
Many who have read Men Who Manage see two main contributions
in the book. These contributions are its analysis of relations between
line and staff employees and Dalton's examination of the unofficial
work practices of organizations. These actions are captured through
his detailing of many examples of workarounds. In sum, Dalton con¬
cluded that:
Rules are not sacred guides but are working tools to be dropped, revised,
ignored as required in striking successive balances between company goals
on the one side and their personal ends and the claims of supporters on
the other (p. 247).
Important scholarship addresses issues of its time while also illu¬
minating new questions. With regards to the latter, Dalton observes
contradictions and ironies that are inherent in workarounds that warrant
additional inquiry. First of these is a rules versus interest contradic¬
tion. Members of organizations may feel that they have to break the
organization's rules to serve either their own individual interests or the
organization's. It is an interesting irony that organizational rules and
organizational interests can contradict one another. These contradictions
are evident in situations where workers break the organization's own
rules to serve the organization better, for example, by compensating
a vital younger employee with unoficial rewards that are otherwise
blocked by oficial rules of compensating by seniority. This contra-