ABSTRACT
Management is increasingly conceptualised as an identity project. In this chapter I discuss and seek to extend the implications of management as an identity project for how we understand, design and deliver manager education programmes. In particular, I examine and critique some of the normative assumptions about the nature of management that commonly underpin manager education programmes and propose how an identity perspective offers a very different conceptualisation of management and therefore a different purpose for manager education. I draw on empirical data from a case study of managers working in social housing, in which I demonstrate the range of expectations on managers from multiple constituents and the highly individual ways in which managers interpret and make sense of their organisational roles. I argue that the role of manager education should not be to produce the ‘right’ kind of managers with the ‘right’ kind of manager identity, but rather to support managers and organisations in making better sense of the highly fragile, contingent and contested position that we call management, and I propose some ways in which manager education programmes might be re-designed to deliver such an objective.
