Sub-theme 53: Behaviour, Management and Work
Kathryn Fahy
Lancaster University Management School, UK
David Oliver
HEC Montréal, Canada
Anne D. Smith
University of Tennessee, College of Business, USA
Call for Papers
What is the nature of contemporary managers’ work? In this track, we explore how managers handle pressure related to their
career and work, internal organizational pressures, and environmental changes. First, pressure on contemporary managers may
emerge from boundaryless careers and changes in job identity. Second, middle managers face internal organizational pressures
such as strategy involvement, lateral conflict, rivalry, and disruption of informal networks of activities. Third, managers
attend to environmental changes such as sustainability, crises, and new practices and industry logics. This sub-theme examines
ways in which managers deal with these pressures through utilization of stories and discursive devices, changes to work design,
upper echelon guidance, sensemaking, emotional engagement, resiliency, and managerial learning.
Kathryn Fahy is Lecturer in Strategic Management in the Centre for Strategic Management, Lancaster University Management School. Her current
research interests focus on discourse and narrative in strategic change and rhetoric and legitimization of radical organizational
transformation. Her research has also focused on practice theoretical approaches to understanding organizational knowledge
and learning, and corporate responses to environmental sustainability pressures.
David Oliver is an Associate Professor of Management at HEC Montreal. His research interests include organizational identity, the practice
of strategy, and stakeholder engagement. His research has appeared in journals such as 'Organization Studies', 'British Journal
of Management', 'Human Relations' and the 'Journal of Business Ethics'.
Anne D. Smith is an Associate Professor of Management and the Flaskerud Professor in Business at the College of Business, University of
Tennessee Knoxville. Her research focuses on strategy processes and middle managers using qualitative methodologies. She is
an incoming associate editor at 'Organizational Research Methods'.
