‘MAG Men’: Access to the Corridors of Corporate Power

Abstract

In this chapter we are introduced to the men who occupy senior executive and management positions in Manchester Airport. At first glance these ‘Manchester men’ seem to offer another illustration of those characters familiar to critical studies of management and organization, the testosterone-fuelled competitive masculine egos that operate in a world of corporate greed and intrigue (Jackall, Moral mazes: the world of corporate managers. Oxford University Press, New York, 1988; Collinson, Managing the shopfloor: subjectivity, masculinity, and workplace culture. W. de Gruyter, Berlin, 1992; Casey, Work, self, and society: after industrialism. Routledge, London, 1995). Here we discover organization as defensive, inhibited, paranoid, restrictive, punitive, and disciplinary, confronted with a ruthless world of economic competition and capital accumulation. However, in tackling the on-going problem of access the ethnographer was forced to confront the question as to whether such personalities and accompanying organization was the consequence of a certain mode of reflexive and constitutive practice deployed (often unwittingly) by the ethnographer. As we shall see, I was only able to improve access and advance my understanding of organization at Manchester Airport when I was able to achieve some distance from particular predispositions and value judgements inherited from an established repertoire of ‘critical theory’ in business and management studies. This was possible when I came to understand management as ‘MAG men’, a conceptual neologism inspired by an AMC television network drama ‘Mad Men’ which aired during the time of this research.