MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

‘Legitimate’ managerial actions - stakeholders
The civil service analogy is drawn by another manager, seeing the
prospect of the external influence of the senior manager, in her or his
external role, being diluted by structural changes:-
You might have Cabinet members in the same way that you do
in local government and the national government who not only
decide policy but also present that policy to the outside world at
the role of the officer is more a civil service role. So you can see
some really interesting dynamics (Interviewee H)
It is difficult to draw conclusions from these contributions but we see
leadership here as having an external focus, a political focus, a
strategic focus and a personal focus. This does at least give a good
deal of food for thought.
‘Legitimate’ Managerial Actions
8.17.1 Here we look at the practice of stakeholder management within
UNISON, influenced as it will be by the moral norms discussed above
on representative rationality within the union, many of which were
influenced by the idea of partnership. Views such as those in PCS
about the representative nature of the systems were not often
expressed, but they were evident:-
What I find is, because of the way we have gone, in my
particular services, one in particular, it is like the Executive that
is writing the motions, and the officers are drafting the motions
for a Conference, they are then amended by one or two
branches, people who happened to sit on the Executive and
then the motion ends up coming back to the committee and I just
sort of think -- where were the members in that loop? And as we
know, the other difficulty with Conference motions is that they
come from totally unrepresentative cliques who take advantage.
(Interviewee L)
The essence of the idea that the lay structure may not be entirely
representative is described in rather more practical terms:-
I am really interested in how much Unison attempts to find out
what all of its members want or as a broad a view across the
membership as possible and I think that, I suppose to be blunt,
my view is that the senior activist structure is one part of that but
it is only one part of that whereas, of course, the senior activist
structure believes itself to be the entire embodiment of that. So
we do, for example, focus group work and survey work on
Unison Focus and the magazine and perhaps, I'm sure you
would not be surprised to learn, people don't necessarily want
exactly what the activists think that they want and so I think our
job is to try and give people, the broad scope of people, as much
as possible of what they want that there is then a tension if you
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