DOING THINGS WITH WORDS: THE CASE OF

‘MANAGEMENT’ AND ‘ADMINISTRATION’

MARK LEARMONTH

Over the last two decades, management, rather than administration, has become the
dominant category through which both academics and practitioners talk, write and
argue the organization of public services. More recently, the discourses of leadership
have also been increasingly deployed in this context. Based on interviews with UK
National Health Service trust chief executives, the article examines these particular
discursive changes, exploring what the distinctions do rather than what the categories
might represent. It reminds us of some of the things we do (in reality and to reality)
when we deploy such words, especially in the debate about control. It also suggests
possibilities for disturbing the dominance of the terms that are generally axiomatic in
constructing arguments about the public sector; a dominance that has come to favour
the interests of some as it denies the interests of others.

INTRODUCTION
A generation ago, until the early 1980s, people in the UK National Health
Service (NHS) who were referred to as administrators generally held rela-
tively prestigious jobs (and were mostly men); the term manager was not
widely used in official job titles. In contrast, NHS workers called administrators
today are typically relatively poorly paid (and are mostly women) while the
term manager has become a common job title, generally conferring status on
its holder. In the same period, the public sector more generally has seen a
range of other discursive changes, with the language of markets and
consumerism often more or less consciously imported from the private
sector (Parker and Dent 1996) such that public sector institutions have come
to be re-presented – as public enterprises (Hoggett 1996). In the UK under
New Labour, the ‘discourse of modernization’ (Newman 2000, p. 45) has
added an emphasis on social goals, with achievement increasingly articu-
lated in the language of leadership (Currie et al. 2005).
But these sorts of changes in language are generally assumed to be merely
an expression of the revolutionary transformation of the public sector – from
old public administration to new public management (Dunleavy and Hood
1994). Terms such as leadership, management and administration appear
therefore to be simply the names of different things in the world. However,
what this essay seeks to show is that these words, in themselves, can be
understood as discursive resources that have fuelled public sector change;

Mark Learmonth is in the Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham.

Public Administration Vol. 83, No. 3, 2005 (617–637)

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Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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furthermore, their capacity to act in this way has been underplayed or

ignored in much of the literature in the field.
Grey has observed that
the ascription of the term ‘management’ to various kinds of activities is
not a mere convenience but rather something which has certain effects.
The use of words is not innocent, and in the case of management its use
carries irrevocable implications and resonances which are associated with
industrialism and modern Western forms of rationality and control.
(1999, p. 577)
So, rather than assume that language merely reflects reality, this paper
understands language as actively engaged in the constitution of reality. And
given that management (rather than administration) has become the domi-
nant category through which both academics and practitioners talk, write
and argue the organization of public services, the aim is to reveal and
problematize some of the constitutive effects of this discursive practice. In
particular, the aim is to bring to our attention the kind of things we do
(in reality and to reality) when we deploy such words.
A central claim elaborated throughout this essay is that the resonances
associated with management represent an important means by which
certain normative ideas about the way healthcare should be organized have
come to be naturalized (Learmonth and Harding 2004). The desire is to
expose such naturalization to critical consideration by following work in the
linguistic turn that is emerging in organizational studies (Alvesson and
Kärreman 2000; Deetz 2003), especially those which look to the late Jacques
Derrida for its principal theoretical inspiration (for examples of Derridean
research in the organization of health care see, for example, Fox 1997; Wood
et al. 1998; Learmonth 1999, 2004; Peterson and Albrecht 1999; Traynor 1999).
Analyses following Derrida understand language not merely as central to
organizing, but, more radically, as Currie and Brown have put it, they
assume that language ‘in all its forms…are simultaneously the grounds, the
objects, and the means by which struggles for power are engaged in’ (2003,
p. 565). The essay draws attention to this insight in relation principally to the
management/administration dualism in the NHS by seeking to nurture
critical reflection upon how the dominant language used has rendered
the world intelligible and contestable in particular ways. And thereby,
following Willmott, to ‘expose and disrupt habitual patterns of thought by
inducing greater self-consciousness about the presence, operation and parti-
ality’ (1998a, p. 89) of such language.

MANAGERS: NOT ADMINISTRATORS

In 1983, at the request of the Secretary of State for Health and Social
Security, a team of businessmen headed by Roy Griffiths produced the
NHS Management Inquiry (DHSS 1983). This document was widely read as

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 THE CASE OF ‘MANAGEMENT’ AND ‘ADMINISTRATION’ 619

recommending the adoption of ‘a clearly defined general management

function throughout the NHS’ (DHSS 1983, p. 11). Such proposals had been
made before, but with no effect (Wistow and Harrison 1998). This time, how-
ever, within two years, the Thatcher government announced that managers
had been appointed at all levels of the NHS (Klein 1995), albeit in the teeth of
bitter opposition from many of the healthcare professions (Timmins 1998).
Although, at the time, some commentators were less than enthusiastic
(see, for example, Day and Klein 1983; Hunter 1984, 1988; Davies 1987;
Pollitt 1993), many of the individuals who came to be called managers were
themselves deeply committed to what they believed were the new ideals of
general management (Strong and Robinson 1990), even though most had
previously been known as administrators (Petchey 1986). In the officially
sanctioned rhetoric of the late 1980s, the NHS had been ‘transformed from a
classic example of an administered public sector bureaucracy into one that is
increasingly exhibiting qualities that reflect positive, purposeful manage-
ment’ (Best 1987, cited in Flynn 1992, p. 66; see also Harrison 1988, 1994 for
the detailed policy background).
These events are all some years ago now. But having myself spent almost
17 years in the NHS, during which I was known first as an administrator
and then as a manager, I still have some vivid memories of the heady period
after the release of the NHS Management Inquiry. In this sense, I was not
entirely surprised that even after so many years, traces of the period when
senior staff members were called administrators were apparent in the
research interviews that form the basis of this paper.
The interviews were conducted during 1998 and 1999 and involved 16
NHS trust chief executives in hospitals in the north of England. They were
intended to investigate how such individuals made sense of their profes-
sional world. The interviews were both unstructured and qualitative (see
Mischler 1986) and were framed simply by an opening question: ‘what do
you see as the heart of your job?’ This format continued by ranging across a
wide set of topics in a fluid and informal manner as the participants them-
selves chose. (For more details on the approach to the empirical work and
for other material from the study see Learmonth 2001, 2004.)
As a preliminary to the interviews, and, at the time, primarily in order to
contextualize their answers, I invited each respondent to describe their
professional background. Of the 16 interviewees, one was a clinician, two
were accountants and one had come in to the NHS from another sector
within the last decade. In the case of the other 12, an exchange such as the
following is typical of the very beginning of the interviews:
Q: If I could just ask you what your professional background is
A: Well administration, health service administration
Q: Right right, good good. OK first question then, I’d like to ask you to
describe the heart of your job
A: Leadership

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Q: Right right fine ha ha. Tell me about leadership

A: Well we, er I, am personally accountable for the managerial perform-
ance of the organization, the organization consists of three thousand
people and to achieve my objectives I physically can’t do it myself;
when I was an administrator I had tasks to do which I did myself but
as a leader you inspire, lead, manage others to do the work
Yet another answer might be the following
A: my professional background? I mean I came into the health service as,
at that stage, a career administrator, straight from university; on to the
administrators’ training scheme and if you like moved into manage-
ment, as management developed in the NHS, from an administrative
background…

This sort of opposition was not something that occurred merely at the start
of the interviews, though the striking regularity with which it did occur at
the start was what prompted a search of the transcripts for other examples.
In the course of the interviews, the radical differences claimed to exist
between administrators from the past and current chief executives were
sometimes elaborated at length:
just as a caricature I would make the observation that many administrators
in the 70s and 80s the top ones were employed mainly, well mainly, for
their brain power per se as I say a lot of them were intellectuals Oxbridge
graduates and so on; and the current generation of chief executives are also
very clever people but they have their skills are now rooted in common
sense and people skills. So it’s not just about administering legal or finan-
cial affairs which require a certain set of administrative skills and brain
power it’s more to do with empowering people and leading people and
having those skills. And I’ve many a time come across in my career people
whose intellect has got in the way of their common sense, people skills. So
it is they’re now different animals…
There are a number of ways in which these sorts of statements could be
interpreted. Perhaps the commonest in studies of the organization of public
institutions would be to see them as historical claims of an empirical nature:
claims, which in principle, are open to verification. Indeed, there is now a
long tradition of analyses that seek to answer the sort of question posed by
Boyne: ‘[h]as public management replaced public administration?’ (1996,
p. 680). For examples that are representative of contrasting responses to this
question, see Hughes 1994 and Farrell and Morris 2003.
But to see the question as a straightforwardly empirical one is to fail to
reflect upon how the commonsense assumptions on which such research is
grounded have come to be socially constituted both as a practice and as an
object of analysis (Knights and Willmott 1992). For example, downplayed by
this kind of empiricism are the ways in which such work may have a double

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hermeneutic effect (Giddens 1984). Academics who develop technical

definitions of management and administration to guide the conduct of their
empirical work necessarily do so by drawing upon commonsense ideas
about the distinction. Thus their work may not merely add to the stock of
knowledge, it also has the potential to contribute to the dynamic process of
renewing and extending the received meanings of the terms, enabling
practitioners to incorporate elements of the academic definitions as integral
features of their own accounts (Willmott 1998b). It is interesting to note in
this respect how the interview excerpts resonate with definitions of manage-
ment and administration like the one provided by Hughes:
Public administration focuses on process, on procedures and propriety,
while public management involves much more. Instead of merely follow-
ing instructions, a public manager focuses on achieving results and taking
responsibility for doing so. (1994, pp. 3–4; italics in original)
So another complication with seeing administration and management as
more or less unproblematic terms representing different things in the world
is that, typically, in both practitioner and academic accounts, management is
preferred – the terms are hierarchically dichotomous. In other words, for
Hughes (1994), as well as for my respondents, management involves ‘much
more’ than administration. Calling certain practices administration and
others management is thus not simply to name them, it does things to them,
most obviously perhaps, in the sense that it values them in different ways.
To illustrate the point, let us take another excerpt from the interviews. Here,
a chief executive is talking of the top management team immediately preced-
ing her appointment (including the former chief executive). According to her,
they had been unable to cope with the new demands of partnership working:
there [had been] no radical or strategic thinking enough to do that sort of
work; em [name of hospital] used to be peopled by a bunch of adminis-
trators basically …
Of course, this statement could be read as an empirical claim, but whether or
not we want to read it in that way, it does things that amount to more than a
setting out of a state of affairs. For example, it is pretty clearly a denigration.
Indeed, the addition of ‘basically’ suggests that the term administrator is
widely understood pejoratively in the NHS, conjuring up images of what
Parker and Dent have called the ‘reactive functionary’ (1996, p. 349). But
note also how the denigration of administrators also allows the speaker to do
something else with her words – to construct a sense of her own self. She is
(emphatically) not an administrator; she is radical and strategic. These,
conventionally, are some of the defining characteristics of people in charge of
excellent organizations (Peters and Waterman 1982). These sorts of statements
can in addition be read as making one’s identity as a manager reliant upon
administration in the sense that what a manager is and does is made intelligi-
ble by being opposed to administration – managers are not administrators.

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And indeed, for the speakers, constructing a certain sense of self is

something that all the interview excerpts above can arguably be said to do;
something likely to be missed if the excerpts were to be read merely as
potentially true or false claims about the changing nature of workplace
duties (Giddens 1991; Halford and Leonard 1999; Brown 2001). Understanding
oneself as a manager (not an administrator) provides positive cultural
valences that enable one to construct an affirmative reflexive understanding
of self. It is good to be able to think of oneself as a radical and strategic man-
ager or an empowering leader – not as (merely) administering paperwork
(Clarke and Newman 1993; Alvesson and Willmott 2002). Furthermore, and
relatedly, being known as a manager (not an administrator) is more likely to
construct the sort of public image that others may see as legitimate – and to
which they will therefore defer. As Clarke and Newman have pointed out, the
‘discourse of managerialism…is part of the process through which “adminis-
trators”, “public servants” and “practitioners” come to see themselves as
“business managers”…“strategists”, “leaders” and so on’ (1997, p. 92).

PERFORMATIVITY
In order to explore further what the words ‘management’ and ‘administra-
tion’ might do, let us turn to some of the work of Jacques Derrida, a thinker
whose ideas are of particular value in analyses concerned with the relation-
ship between language and the world to which (we might assume) language
refers. The corpus of Derrida’s work is large by any standards, both in terms
of the range of issues with which it engages and its sheer volume. It should
be added here that the strand of his work that examined language as perfor-
mative far from exhausts the potential of his ideas to inform political science
(Beardsworth 1996) and organizational theory (see Cooper 1989 and Jones
2004 for reviews). But as far as performativity is concerned, for Derrida
(1979), in a radicalization of John Austin’s (1962) How to Do Things with
Words, language never only states the way things are, it is also always
performative – where performative language, following Royle, is language
that ‘does something, in actuality, in reality, with reality’ (2000, p. 9; italics
omitted). And it is Derrida’s radicalized version of Austin’s ‘speech acts’
theory that I want to use to understand the words ‘management’ and
‘administration’ as performative.
Austin referred to those speech acts he considered merely to set out a state
of affairs as constative; but his interest was in speech that, in and of itself,
does things – using the term performative for such utterances. Austin’s
concern, as he put it, was with the: ‘performance of an act in saying
something as opposed to [the] performance of an act of saying something’
(1962, p. 99; italics in original). Instead of considering a statement such as
‘there is a bull in the field’ (Austin 1962, p. 32) primarily as a constative
statement – in terms of what it describes about the scenery – Austin
privileged what the statement does, asking whether it might be a warning, a
request, a complaint and so forth.

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Derrida’s thought has a number of affinities with Austin’s in that they

both unsettle the traditional image of communication as the straightforward
transportation of meaning from one speaker to another (Potter 1996).
Derrida welcomed Austin’s move as an antidote to ideas that underpin,
among other things, traditional understandings of empirical inquiry and
I quote Derrida below:
Austin was obliged to free the analysis of the performative from the
authority of the truth value, from the true/false opposition.…The perfor-
mative is a ‘communication’ which is not limited strictly to the transfer-
ence of a semantic content that is already constituted and dominated by
an orientation toward truth. (1979, p. 187; italics in original)
However, their ideas diverged when theorizing how words do what they do.
Austin argued that the ‘force’ (1962, p. 100) of a performative is provided pri-
marily by the authentic intentions of the speaker, usually allied to the context
in which speech is uttered and the lack of ambiguity in the formulation used.
So, for Austin, a priest in a wedding ceremony who says: ‘I pronounce you
man and wife’ would be uttering a speech act which would be successful in
doing something (marrying the couple) because of the intentions of the priest
and the couple involved – along with the context and the unambiguity of the
formulation. In opposition to Austin, however, Derrida made clear that for him
the force of a performative is not intention, but citation. The notion of iterability
or citation is what for Derrida underlies any ‘successful’ performative:
Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat
a ‘coded’ or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pro-
nounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not
identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identi-
fiable in some sort of way as a ‘citation’. (1979, pp. 191–2; italics in original)
To continue the example of marriage, Derrida is pointing out that a priest
can only marry someone because the words spoken are recognizably part of
a marriage ceremony: ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ must be a citation for
it to marry a couple. Citation, Derrida argued, is prior to intention; indeed, it
is a condition of possibility for intention to operate. This is not to deny that
intention and context have a role in speech acts, but, as Derrida argued,
intention and context ‘will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and
system of utterance’ (1979, p. 192).
Following Derrida, then, if terms like management and administration do
things in the world, they operate, not primarily because the intention of the
speaker successfully governs the action of speech, but because these words,
in some sort of way, are citations. Indeed, it is surely uncontroversial to
claim that both management and administration have become conventional
categories to use in representing the organization of public services such
that it is now hardly possible to make intelligible statements in the field
without recourse to these terms. Derrida’s point (perhaps not too distant

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from Giddens’s double hermeneutic) is that the effects on the world of these
terms rely upon the accumulation of academic research, official reports,
routine talk and so on in which these terms are deployed. Part of the value
of his work therefore is that it enables us to see something of what language
does – the first step, it is submitted, in making it do different things.
Derrida revisited these ideas and the controversies they spawned in
Derrida (1988) also developing the general theme in work including Derrida
(1992a, b; 1996; 1998 and 2000). Others have used ideas about performativity
explicitly influenced by Derrida’s radicalization of Austin: see, for example,
Butler 1995, 1997; Sedgwick and Parker 1995; Sedgwick 2003. Arguably also
related is performativity in the sense it is used within Actor Network Theory
(Law and Hassard 1999) given Latour’s acquaintance with Derrida’s work
(Latour and Woolgar 1986). However, as far as I can determine, the way in
which Derrida uses performativity has not influenced its increasing deploy-
ment in analyses representing behaviour understood as a response to
performance management (see, for example, Ball 2003) although, since one
of Derrida’s interests was making connections through accidental word
morphology (Derrida 1981, 1986), caution may be required before drawing
any categorical distinctions.

MANAGEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION DOING THINGS

Let us take some more excerpts from the interviews to illustrate in more
detail what talking about management and administration might do and
how the effects might work. The excerpts all come from talk about the chief
executives’ conflicts with doctors (for the general background, see Harrison
et al. 1992; Harrison and Pollitt 1994; Hunter 1994; Harrison 1999; Llewellyn
2001) and are used here to theorize some of the consequences and implica-
tions of the discursive change from administration to management that have
generally been marginalized in this debate. Following Cooper, it is important
to emphasize that because it is the words ‘management’ and ‘administration’
that do things, it is these actual words themselves that have become ‘the very
object of the conflict. It is necessary to understand that, viewed in this way,
language and speech are not merely the vehicles for the expression of con-
flict but become the objects to be appropriated’ (Cooper 1990, p. 194).
So first:
A: when consultants actually want to diminish what I do they call me an
administrator.
Q: Yes, I remember that from the early eighties.
A: Still do, still do, because that’s about your job is to support what we
do; accepting that I’m actually a chief executive gives me a leadership
position…
Here, consultants are said to do something with words: for the respondent,
simply by being called an administrator renders him diminished;
conversely, what gives him a leadership position is being called a chief

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executive. The words ‘administrator’ or ‘chief executive’ in the mouth of a

consultant have a force that works in a way that is not dissimilar to the
wedding pronouncement of a priest. Following Derrida, we understand that
this speech act can do the things it does because it has accumulated cultural
intelligibility given constant authoritative use – its citation in particular
ways. Indeed, in this excerpt, the interviewee felt able, as it were, to cite the
accumulated cultural intelligibility associated with the terms: administrator –
that’s about your job is to support what we do; chief executive – gives me a
leadership position. Of course, the speaker does not have to be a consultant
to achieve these effects; as we saw earlier, chief executives calling one
another administrators have a very similar sort of impact.
It follows, then, that viewed in this way, one of the performative effects of
saying ‘I am a manager’ (and ipso facto not an administrator) is that it is a
legitimatory device – a legitimatory device hidden by understanding it
merely as a (constative) statement of fact. What the excerpt also illustrates is
Cooper’s point cited above – how the words ‘management’ and ‘administra-
tion’ have in themselves become objects to be appropriated in the conflict
over what they do. Words associated with management construct and legiti-
mate an organizational world in which the speaker felt he had supremacy;
‘administrator’, on the other hand, does things that undermine the prestige
and authority he would like.
Such insights are reinforced and further explained by the next excerpt in
which some of the history of the power relations between doctors and
managers (or should we say administrators?) are represented in more detail:
A: earlier on in my career where the successful administrators in the six-
ties and seventies were those which were actually able to facilitate
what the doctors wanted to do that’s how you were judged.
Q: Right, not influence it at all?
A: Well you might influence it provided you didn’t tell people you were
influencing it; it was actually quite a clever game – you let the doctors
think that it was their idea but actually your skills were in terms of
making it happen and using the process or whatever. Of course the
real skill was that you didn’t make happen those things that you
didn’t want to make happen, but if you made nothing happen then
you were not a good administrator and you would alienate the doctors
and then you would be unsuccessful…
Prior to the publication of NHS Management Inquiry, administrators were
widely seen (by themselves and by medical staff) as doctors’ support workers
(Harding and Learmonth 2000). Any prestige they might have had arose from
their success in fulfilling doctors’ wishes rather than from the activities they
chose independently (Harrison 1988). This much is relatively uncontroversial.
But one way of reading the above excerpt is to see it as an implicit state-
ment that the re-labelling from administrator to manager that was licensed
by the NHS Management Inquiry was not one that necessarily altered the

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substance of administrators’/managers’ activities. Senior administrators of

the past and contemporary chief executives can be represented as carrying
out much the same activities – according to this excerpt, making things
happen, more or less as they feel appropriate. However, individuals called
administrators had to make sure that what they did appeared to be done in
the service of others. Their self-identity was therefore continuously defined
as subservient and secondary – the need to be able to subvert the apparent
relationship by playing ‘quite a clever game’ no doubt merely reinforced
this identity. However, the implicit corollary to the status of the administra-
tor is that what being called a manager does is it legitimates the so-called
manager acting in a way that is independent of ‘what the doctors want’ –
thereby radically changing the nature of their respective senses of self.
What both these last excerpts illustrate therefore is that the discursive
change from administration to management can be understood as a resource
to be called upon in struggles for power and legitimacy. But interpreting
Derrida, Butler has pointed out that ‘a performative “works” to the extent that
it draws on and covers over the constitutive conventions by which it is mobi-
lized’ (1995, p. 157; italics in original). All the talk we have examined so far
clearly draws on the conventions about management and administration in
the NHS; these terms work as a performative, however, because the
associations that now surround them have come to be naturalized. Constant
citation has covered over the constitutive conventions by which the effects are
mobilized: so much so that it has been forgotten that both management and
administration are conventions. The cultural intelligibility associated with the
terms have become ‘truths’ through frequent repetition (Lawler 2002). Para-
doxically enough, administration and management can do things as words
because people who use the terms generally assume that they do nothing; they
are thought to be merely the labels for distinct ‘things’ out there in the world.
Simultaneously drawing on and covering over the constitutive conventions
of management seems to have been something that the respondents generally
achieved by deploying the term management as an apparently uncontrover-
sial and routine way of talking about all sorts of activities. For example:
One of the things that I learnt was that we often expect too much of
doctors – in terms of their ability to manage and also their capacity to
manage and their commitment to do the things that managers have to do
because their livelihoods depend on it – doctors don’t [have to do these
things]. And I felt that, [and] the medical director he felt, that the
emergence of clinical governance was an opportunity to refocus the
doctors’ role on clinical management, leadership and the management
increasingly of clinical practice informed by evidence, rather than on the
management of service delivery and staffing budgets and so on…
In this excerpt, the speaker deploys the term management in at least two senses.
There is the more or less conventional sense of management – the distinctive
occupational functions of certain people identified as professional managers by

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their job titles. Management in this sense is represented as ‘the management of

service delivery and staffing budgets and so on’ – which the speaker believes
doctors need not do. However, in juxtaposition to this, he also uses the same
term – ‘management’ – to represent rather different functions, functions he con-
siders to be legitimate medical duties: ‘clinical management, leadership and the
management increasingly of clinical practice informed by evidence’. But it is
not implausible to believe that what he is talking about here could equally have
been represented in more traditional language, as part of the ordinary, routine
duties that senior medical staff have done for many years; that is, without
recourse to the term management.
Deploying management in this context does things then by re-presenting
medical work as managerial. And if managerial language successfully colo-
nizes doctors’ routine talk and thinking, they are likely to come to understand
their own identities as managerial, at least in part (Halford and Leonard 1999).
Of course, the logic of such an understanding tends to imply that they should
be accountable to the professional expert in the field – the chief executive –
and, furthermore, that more traditional considerations for the NHS, especially
ones based on welfarism, caring and compassion, can plausibly be played
down and rendered subservient to the tough job of ensuring good economic
management (Parker 2000). As Grey has argued: ‘it is the insinuation of man-
agement into a huge range of human activities and actors previously thought
of as lying outside the specialist domain of management which constitutes
one of the key “achievements” of managerialism’ (Grey 1999, p. 572).
Management, like any other term, can of course have a number of shades
of meaning that potentially allow distinctions to be constructed between say
the ‘management of clinical practice’ and the ‘management of service delivery
and staffing budgets’. But for Derrida these distinctions are always precari-
ous because these shades of meaning are not discrete ideas that might in
some way exist without the term and can therefore be separately signified
by it. Derrida suggests not that terms allow or include multiple meanings
but that all a word’s meanings are always present when the term is used,
regardless of context or intention. Words such as management always simul-
taneously ‘refer to a same that is not identical, to the common element or
medium of any possible dissociation’ (Derrida 1981, p. 127; italics in original).
The final excerpt, given below, is intended to illustrate further how ‘man-
agement’ can refer to a same that is not identical and the effects of its doing
so. Again it comes from another chief executive’s account of interactions
with medical staff and is taken from the point at which I had asked the
respondent to explain (what for me was) her intriguing use of the term
consultant-managers:
Q: do you mean all consultants are managers or do you mean that there are
certain consultants who are managers like clinical directors or whatever?
A: Okay, I mean both. All consultants are managers em; not all consultants
would recognize that or recognize the implications of that as readily as

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others do but they all manage resources, they all manage their time,
manage junior medical staff and have therefore particular accountability
for them…
Her statement about what she means by manager – ‘I mean both’ –
coincidentally happens to be a fair summary of part of what Derrida is
getting at in his understanding of language – the ability of language to refer
to the same that is not identical. Furthermore, it illustrates how her striking
repetition of ‘manage’ can be understood to function simultaneously as both
a constative and performative speech act.
On the one hand, the accumulated cultural intelligibility of management
means these statements can be seen simply as constative; that is, as setting
out the facts about management as a more or less universal activity that is as
desirable and inevitable for doctors to do as for everyone else. Read in this
way my respondent is saying that it is simply the case that senior medical
staff manage resources, manage their time, manage junior staff and so on. At
the same time, other cultural associations that also surround calls to manage
(for example, industrial and economic ones) give these statements a perfor-
mative dimension – implying that economic prerogatives should be the
supreme consideration over all others. Indeed, such statements can be read
to suggest a desire for a managerialist rationality to colonize the way
medical staff regard their time and their relationships with colleagues – each
being constructed as ‘resources’ susceptible to instrumental calculation for
which they have ‘accountability’.
In summary, then, Martin Heidegger once observed that ‘language is the
house of Being’ (cited in Rapaport 2003, p. 29). What the deployment of the
language of management does is it shapes the kind of ‘house of being’ that
people in the NHS inhabit. In as much as this language acts in ways that are
unexamined, management (and administration) impose versions of social
reality on those involved – the dominant language limiting what can be
spoken, thought and known (Westwood and Linstead 2001). This imposi-
tion is one that might be understood as what Catley and Jones have called
structural symbolic violence. The resulting domination, they say, ‘is some-
thing you absorb like air, something you don’t feel pressured by; it is every-
where and nowhere and to escape from that is very difficult’ (2002, p. 28).

DISCUSSION
In spite of the difficulties involved, Derrida consistently tried to find ways of
lessening (if not escaping from) this symbolic violence – what he himself called
‘violence and the letter’ (1976, pp. 101–40). In work that develops Heidegger’s
insight, Derrida introduced a paradox that he called a rule of language:
We only ever speak one language…
(yes, but)
We never speak only one language (Derrida 1998, p. 10)

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 THE CASE OF ‘MANAGEMENT’ AND ‘ADMINISTRATION’ 629

It is true that all speakers – of English, for example – speak the same
language in the sense that all competent English speakers can talk intelligi-
bly to one another about, let us say, management. But the respondents, espe-
cially perhaps in the last two excerpts, who seemingly talk of ‘management’
as the single appropriate term for a range of activities, might be interpreted
after Derrida as insisting that we only ever speak one language; that is, my
language, the language of managerialism. This latter attitude is one that
Derrida (1998) called monolingualism.
In his essay monograph, Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida (1998)
argued that an illusion of monolingualism allows cultures, traditions and
nations to become thinkable; not merely in the sense that they would other-
wise be unimaginable, but that without monolingualism, thinking as a
collective simply cannot take place. The deployment of manage and
management in these excerpts, then, might be interpreted as ways of
incorporating others into the language practices of managerialism; putting
others into a signifying environment that constructs and identifies them as
particular social beings with an identity that is, in part, marked by the
(managerial) language they speak.
Nevertheless, for Derrida, there was always an insistent ‘yes but’ in
response to the appearance of monolingualism. In spite of sometimes
powerful voices to the contrary, for Derrida (1998) we never speak about
organizing practices (or anything else) in just one language, because even
within an apparent state of monolingualism, other languages are always
present. For example, following Derrida, we understand that what manage-
ment might be and do is not an established, positive given. Indeed, as we
have seen, the language of management works together with what it
opposes – the language of administration – according to a complex interplay
of implicative differences. What makes management management, and
administration administration, takes place in a constituting process in which
management calls upon administration as an Other so as to be able to
demarcate itself, and be what it is, in difference from administration
(Derrida 1978; Gasché 1995). Indeed, much of the talk we have examined can
be read as attempts to maintain definite demarcation lines – boundaries
between management and administration that secure the purity of manage-
ment and therefore secure for the speaker a settled sense of self as a
manager, not an administrator.
But the paradox of boundaries is that they don’t just separate – they also
connect (Derrida 1987). Thus, in spite of (or, better, because of) attempts to
separate them, anything called management in the NHS necessarily has a
connection with administration. Such connections mean that what manage-
ment is – and what it does – is intrinsically precarious: the apparent mono-
lingualism of management is always at risk of being contaminated with an
other language – the language of administration. As the chief executives
themselves implicitly acknowledged at the start of their interviews, and as
those (both consultants and chief executives) who call chief executives

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630 MARK LEARMONTH

administrators make explicit, claims to be a manager are ineluctably

connected to administration.
It is likely, therefore, that these connections limit what the language of
management can do in health services, and possibly in other public services.
For individual chief executives, even those who have never been adminis-
trators themselves, the discursive history of the term manager in the NHS
always has the denigrated shadow of the administrator behind it: people
called managers are intrinsically vulnerable to being cast as ‘mere’ adminis-
trators. And in the UK, in the wider policy context of Blairite modernization,
a reliance upon the word management in government documents and
ministerial speeches might signal an uncomfortably close continuity with
the legacy of the New Right’s market-based reforms, given that the initial
popularization of the discourses of management in the public sector
occurred under Thatcher. Needless to say, both these sorts of associations
are likely to discomfort many health care professionals who might be
expected to resist ‘management’ becoming the unnoticed, common-sense
term for significant aspects of their work (Hewison 1997; Lee-Potter 1997).

The turn to leadership

Perhaps it is the negative associations accumulated by management and
administration that underlie the popular and officially sanctioned turn to
leadership that has occurred in the last few years, not just in health but in
many other parts of the public sector (Ford 2004). It may well also account for
other discursive shifts in the NHS that reduce the need to deploy the terms
manager and management, especially in clinical matters. Prominent examples
include senior nurses being described as modern matrons or nurse consult-
ants (rather than nurse managers) and the control of clinical activities being
officially designated clinical governance (rather than clinical management).
At the beginning of New Labour’s first term of office (which is when the
interviews were conducted), the discourse of leadership was clearly available
to chief executives in the NHS in the sense that the word was regularly men-
tioned – in fact it occurs in most of the excerpts used in this paper. However,
whereas management was made intelligible by opposing it to administration,
at this stage, leadership was not generally constructed through sharp distinc-
tions with management – the two terms seemed to have been used more or
less as synonyms. But this situation may well have now changed. As Parker
has pointed out, under ‘New Labour…management itself…[is] beginning to
go out of fashion (now being discursively articulated as something rather like
administration) and leadership…[is] the new panacea’ (2004, p. 175).
Thus by 2002, on the National Nursing Leadership’s Project web site, a
government minister, Lord Hunt of King’s Heath, the then Parliamentary
Undersecretary of State in the Department of Health, was able to say:
Good clinical leadership is central to the delivery of the NHS Plan. We
need leaders who are willing to embrace and drive through the radical

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 THE CASE OF ‘MANAGEMENT’ AND ‘ADMINISTRATION’ 631

transformation in services that the NHS requires. Leaders are people who
make things happen in ways that command the confidence of local staff.
They are people who lead clinical teams, people who lead service
networks, people who lead partnerships, and people who lead organiza-
tions. (http://www.nursingleadership.co.uk 2002)
Such statements about ‘clinical leadership’ bear comparison with the
respondents’ talk of ‘clinical management’ cited earlier. Both sorts of state-
ments can, of course, be seen as constative claims – both sorts of statements
were no doubt intended to represent the world as it is: nurse ‘leaders are
people who make things happen…’; consultants ‘manage resources, they all
manage their time, manage junior medical staff…’. But again, understand-
ing either statement as only constative overlooks (and thereby reinforces)
what such words do. Deploying leadership, as I have argued in respect of
management, can also be seen as a speech act that does things – in the above
extract, it seems more or less calculated to have the effect of ‘regulating
employees’ “insides” – their self-image, their feelings and identifications’
(Alvesson and Willmott 2002, p. 622). Indeed, throughout the public sector,
the official endorsement of leadership to represent organizational practices
can be interpreted, in part, as a growing recognition that calling activities
‘leadership’ does more than calling them ‘management’ (and, it goes
without saying, more than ‘administration’) in terms of encouraging
individuals to identify with policy aims.
In the NHS, more specifically, leadership’s relative lack of negative associ-
ations (at least for the moment) makes leadership a term likely to be inoffen-
sive, perhaps attractive, to many health care professionals – and others – as
the new central resource in the construction of their self-image. Indeed,
throughout the public sector we might all appear to speak the one language
of leadership now. But as the above excerpt shows, being a good leader is
not just about romantic notions such as an ability ‘to drive through…radical
transformation in services’. Axiomatic to being a ‘good’ leader is also
compliance with official definitions of what ‘the NHS requires’ – as
enshrined in the NHS Plan.
In a further radicalization of Austin, Derrida argued that all words always
have a performative element fundamentally because representational
practices cannot simply represent things themselves: ‘in the first place
because there is no thing itself’ (Derrida 1976, p. 292). This statement is not a
denial of the materiality of the universe; the point he is making is that our
representational practices are always irredeemably implicated in the
constitution of how we think of a ‘thing’ ‘itself’. Words for Derrida do things
most fundamentally by making reality intelligible in particular ways.
So in the context of our current debate, reading Derrida might remind us
that apparently static concepts and categories such as leadership, management
and administration do not reflect entities in an external world separate from
our understanding of them. While commonsensically we may conceive of a

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632 MARK LEARMONTH

particular happening as, say, ‘doing administration’, another as ‘doing

management’ and yet another as ‘leadership’ such happenings are best
understood to be intrinsically amorphous, fluxing and undifferentiated. It is
our efforts at organizing happenings into categories that give them meaning –
that constitute them as administration, management or whatever. It is
submitted, then, that leadership, management and administration are
performative at root because they represent methods of engaging with
organizational practices that make such practices intelligible in particular
ways. Their taken-for-grantedness makes them appear to be only ways of
communicating different empirical realities. Read in this way, leadership,
management or administration become merely provisional, subjectively
significant and thus contestable heuristics to make the world comprehensi-
ble (Knights 1997).
It follows, then, that many activities carried out by NHS staff ‘are’ man-
agement or leadership in the sense that they are currently given these
names; however, these same activities are always potentially not manage-
ment or not leadership in the sense that they can always be called by other
names – and as we have seen, they have been given different names in times
past. What a particular activity ‘is’ does not rely on some essence within it –
things like leadership, management or administration, indeed all categories
through which we experience the world, are human creations, a reflection of
conventional ways of apprehending the world and not a reflection of what
the world is ‘really like’ (Frug 1984; Cooper and Law 1995). What leader-
ship, management and administration have come to represent therefore has
been made to appear self-evident through an inescapably arbitrary process
of inclusion and exclusion of significance, a process held together only by
convention and power (Willmott 1998a).

CONCLUSION
Unfortunately, academics who rely upon terms like management and lead-
ership for representing organizing activities as though the terms are
unproblematic, unwittingly reinforce the processes of convention and
power mentioned above. Such research implicitly takes the managerialist
side in conflicts over language by lending independent authority and status
to a belief that the organizational practices that are now called leadership
and management ‘really are’ these things in their intrinsic essence. As a
result, this kind of work also simultaneously diminishes the availability of
alternative representations of organizational life for deployment by other
interests – reducing the means through which such managerialist construc-
tions can plausibly be contested.
So what can academics and other commentators do in the light of this
debate, faced with the hegemony of the language of management or leader-
ship for the representation of public organizing activities? On the one hand
we cannot use leadership, management and administration without their
automatic appropriation, by one side or another, for doing things in the

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 THE CASE OF ‘MANAGEMENT’ AND ‘ADMINISTRATION’ 633

conflicts over language to which I have drawn attention. On the other hand,
we must use these sorts of terms to make ourselves intelligible. After all,
I had little choice but to call respondents ‘chief executives’ (although in
doing so, as we saw, I gave them a leadership position); furthermore,
‘management’ and ‘administration’ are integral to the titles of most journals
in the field, as indeed is the case here, that would be the natural outlet for
this sort of study.
But Derrida’s work ‘ “lives” on this “contradiction” [according to
which]…the necessary is impossible, or rather the impossible necessary’
(Derrida 1992a, p. 200). A research agenda that takes these problems
seriously then would follow Derrida, not by relativizing terms such as
management and administration so that any distinction is denied, but rather
by the detailed scrutiny of the precise points at which distinctions are
invoked so that easy and comfortable assumptions about their implications
could not be made. Thus, we might examine (as I have started to do here)
what invoking distinctions do rather than what the distinctions are. And in
particular, perhaps, whose interests are favoured and whose denied when
strong distinctions are made to appear to be plausible.
Such an understanding of language does not simply apply to the
words on which this essay has focused, but has potential in any area of
policy analysis. For example, Clarke and Newman made a very Derri-
dean move when they listed a series of common oppositions through
which they claimed public service values are constituted by their very
difference from ‘business’ values (1997, pp. 124–5). For them, the word,
‘the public’, in formulations such as public sector, the public interest and
so on ‘serves as a symbolic marker of a terrain beyond the individualism
of the consumer identity [in dominant political discourse]. It represents
something “other”, expressing an alternative set of values which are
cherished’ (ibid. 1997, p. 124). In ways that resonate with these argu-
ments, Ford and Harding have explicitly employed performative theory,
influenced by Derrida, in focusing on the distinction invoked by govern-
ment ministers between patients and consumers. They argued that the
‘elevation of the consumer to the status of master…pressurize [public
sector] workers into conforming to managerial diktat through using
customers as a normative tool in the colonization of the psyche of the
worker’ (2004, p. 826).
As we have seen, words are performative precisely because their deploy-
ment is unexamined, taken for granted and assumed to do nothing. So what
policy academics might do is to call attention to the language practices in
their fields, practices that have come to constitute social identities and
relations. In this way, perhaps, we can then start to open up what Laclau
and Mouffe have called a ‘discursive space’ (2001, p. x); that makes possible
representations that would otherwise lie outside of what could be said or
thought (Calás and Smircich 1991). This would be an exercise with emanci-
patory potential. As Laclau (1996) has put it,

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634 MARK LEARMONTH

[i]f people think that God or nature have made the world as it is, they will
tend to consider their fate inevitable. But if the being of the world which
they inhabit is only the result of the contingent discourses and vocabular-
ies that constitute it, they will tolerate their fate with less patience and
will stand a better chance of becoming political ‘strong poets’. (p. 122)
After all, Derrida stated that he did not want his work to ‘remain enclosed in
purely speculative academic discourses but rather…aspire to something
more consequential, to change things’ (1992c, p. 8; italics in original). And
I submit that the insights in this paper have the potential to change things by
nurturing scepticism about the institutionally prescribed meanings of policy
and managerialist language and inform other ways to understand such
language. Once new elements in such texts are uncovered, we can neither
see this language – nor act in the worlds we thought they represented – in
quite the same way again.

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