MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

‘Legitimate’ managerial actions - stakeholders
The other tension is, of course, with the NEC, how they see their
role. So on appointments, what used to happen until fairly
recently, when we were appointing senior clerks they often had,
say, the President on the selection panel, right. Now that
doesn't happen any more because we are an employer. The
people we are employing actually work here. The NEC
members, whilst they run the union, they are not responsible for
hiring and firing. That is clearly in the authority of the General
Secretary and the SDGS and the personnel people. There is a
bit of tension about that and they get a bit fed up sometimes
when they see, like, if we're advertising a post. I think what
some of them would like is they decide what post gets
advertised and what post doesn't. My line on that, and we've
had advice anyway, concerning the legal bit of it, is that it is
clearly within the remit of the, like, the Chief Executive.
The Strategic Plan which has been referred to several times in this
chapter, is careful about boundaries. The Plan is ‘available’ to NEC
members but the responsibility for drawing it up lies with the General
Secretary and the Senior Management Team. The NEC is to be kept
‘fully informed’ and any policy issues arising from the Plan will be
submitted to the NEC for approval. Boundaries between governance
and management are thus clearly defined, even if they might at some
time be the subject of contest.
And the Rule Book is generally not felt to be crucial in defining
boundaries:-
Sometimes the Rule Book helped you and sometimes it didn't.
Rule Books are there sometimes for guidance; they certainly
establish where the power lies and conference became adept at
changing them on occasions.(Interviewee O)
Although it may be that there are reasons for this which have their
origins in power relations:-
To some extent senior managers are the custodian of the Rule
Book. If they had wanted to stand on the Rule Book and say
"look at this; it may not be popular with you but this is what the
rulebook says", I think we might have held the line on that. But
senior managers themselves have found it convenient to play to
their old constituencies, their old power bases.(Interviewee L)
The same interviewee suggested that other issues were in any event
more important for managers than the rules:-
There has been a fantastic amount of time spent in trying to
change the rulebook to bring the new union more together -- to
get more issues at the centre, to limit the veto of the various
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