Subjugation and Subterfuge: Struggling with Metrics as a Middle Manager in a UK Business School

This thesis explores the behaviours and emotions which emerge when middle managers in Higher Education (HE) use metrics as a tool to measure organisational performance. It uses autoethnography as a methodological approach, employing research narratives and reflexive inquiry. These narratives explore micro-interactions at work to enquire into the social, political and emotional relationships which emerge when managing using metrics. Whilst recognising that metrics may be useful at an abstract level as a means of opening an exploration of what gets done and what is valued, this research also identifies that metrics can be taken up in ways that may also be used to blame and shame others. Managing using metrics in this way can lead middle managers to feel as if they are stuck ‘in the middle’, lacking agency. This raises ethical concerns with regard to the uncritical application of metrics. These feelings of ‘stuckness’ are often not discussed in formal meetings, instead they tend to be expressed in jokes, lewd gestures and gossip. Managing using metrics may present middle managers with a double bind (being stuck between two unpalatable choices) which can lead to feelings of futility and a lack of agency. Acknowledging feelings of hopelessness, subjugation and stuck patterns could enable managers to become more aware of their habitual responses. They may then come to recognise that there are moral decisions to be made about what they can question and what they may do which could enable them to act in political ways that may be more nuanced. This thesis also highlights that strong emotions may emerge when metrics are used. This may make it harder to talk about how we are working together, including our vulnerabilities. Acknowledging that metrics may evoke emotional responses may help middle managers increase their capacity for coping with the anxieties of feeling ‘caught in the middle’. As we come to expect strong emotions, we may be able to engage, more imaginatively, in how we might act. Processes of subjugation and subterfuge emerge in paradoxical patterns of conforming and resisting, and inclusion and exclusion, and emerge as gossip, joking and ribald acts, which have the potential to shift existing power relations. Subterfuge is a ubiquitous emergent pattern which middle managers might expect to see in working with metrics, and which can be paradoxically constructive and destructive (and sometimes both at the same time). Subversive acts are not simply pejorative activities. They are both a chance to try to keep work human in a metricised environment and also to play a valuable part in the negotiation of who we are and how teams work together.