A Portrait of the Organizational Manager

Management is a feature of everyday social life within which culture lays claims to an organization of the social. As Magretta and Stone (2002:5) observe, contemporary management has an overarching role as organizations increasingly become the vehicle of choice for implementing the work of society. Management is a theme that pervades government, commerce, art galleries, theatres, and even the home. But, as Hales (1993:1) observed, the terms “management” and “manager” are beset by ambiguity, confusion and obfuscation. The concern of this text is, however, the specific use of these terms in the context of a commercial organization. Here, the term “organization” presents a socially constructed boundary around a region of the universe — our social world; a “bounded” universe.18 Within this bounded universe, I follow Chaney (2002:8) in noting that the term “culture” is profoundly effective, in that it makes sense of the variety of the social, offering a mode of explanation with infinite scope. Contextually therefore, culture is something an organization is; it is a representation that Anthony (1994:28) describes as a pattern of ‘…economic and social cooperation reinforced by custom, language, tradition, history, and networks of moral interdependence and reciprocity.’ But the organization is also commonly to be understood, in concretized terms, as this or that organization.