ILPC 2026

Manufactured Uncertainty and Contrived Competition: Understanding Managerial Job Insecurity in International Perspective John Hassard (Manchester University), Jonathan Morris and Rick Delbridge (both Cardiff University) Abstract The article examines the debate over insecurity and precarity in managerial employment. It addresses the discussion that while some commentators suggest advanced economies are characterized by managerial job insecurity, others argue for relatively stable tenure rates for managers. To make sense of this we offer qualitative, interview-based data for managers working in liberal-market (US and UK) and coordinated market (Japan) economies. The goal is to ascertain whether we have witnessed a sharp rise in managerial job insecurity internationally and if so can this be seen as a consequence of ‘contrived competition’ in the private sector and ‘manufactured uncertainty’ in the public. Specifically we argue that contrived competition and manufactured uncertainty is created by corporations either implicitly or explicitly cementing an atmosphere of employment precariousness and uncertainty. Ultimately, the proposition arising is that, contrary to some database and questionnaire studies, managerial job security is in fact widespread in modern economies. Keywords Contrived competition; managerial insecurity; manufactured uncertainty; precarious work. Introduction The issue of precariousness in employment has been largely associated with relatively low skilled work and, in the UK at least, with such labour market features as the growth of so called ‘zero hours’ contracts and the ‘gig’ or ‘access’ economy, and thus the rise of employment in organizations such as Uber, Airbnb and Zipcar etc (Pennycook et al., 2013; Philpott, 2014). However, a significant share of such employment contracts are actually associated with people in what might be deemed to be relatively privileged labour market positions. Nearly half, for example, are employed in the top three occupational groups: managers, professionals and technical staff (Brinkley, 2013). Furthermore, we have seemingly witnessed a sharp rise in managerial job insecurity internationally, and especially over the past couple of decades, despite significant evidence of enduring attachment to continued long-term jobs (Fevre, 2007). Many researchers have tried to account for this. Significant amongst them, Doogan (2009) notes that the seemingly related ties between long-term employment and job security can no longer be automatically assumed. Among the reasons for a break between these ties is an increasingly hegemonic corporate discourse of neo-liberalism, which has privileged financialization and shareholder value over employee concerns, notably as represented by corporate globalization. Additionally, this can be seen as a consequence of ‘contrived competition’ in the private sector and ‘manufactured uncertainty’ in the public (Doogan, 2009). This article explores these themes through analysis of a number of large-scale studies of managerial work. Six countries – including both developed and emerging nations and coordinated and liberal market economies (Hall and Soskice, 2001) – were examined over an extended period. The basic proposition upon which the analysis is based is that, contrary to several database and questionnaire studies, managerial job security is actually widespread in modern economies. The article contributes to the literature in a number of ways. First, it is empirically progressive – it adds, for example, to the research of Doogan and others by providing qualitative data on the issue; for the majority of previous studies have been based on quantitative government data sets. Second, it is internationally comparative – with such comparison being based on economy type as much as geographical location. Thirdly, it is temporally comparative – with the analysis being based not only on the contemporary employment situation, but through contrasting economic contexts both before and after the global financial crisis of 2008/2009. Importantly, the article argues that it is ultimately the corporate environment which has generated this managerial uncertainty – specifically the amount of wider restructuring that our case study firms experienced prior to and during the first phase of our research and which continued in the second and third phases (see below for research details). Specifically we argue that the situation of contrived competition and manufactured uncertainty has been created directly by corporations – either implicitly in certain cases, or explicitly in others – cementing an atmosphere of employment precariousness and uncertainty. To these ends, the article is divided into five further sections. The next section will explore the recent literature on job insecurity before the data is presented in the form of three case investigations. Finally a discussion and conclusions section is provided. Discussion and Conclusion Our interview data, drawn from managers in large organizations in six countries and over a fourteen year period, generally points to a trend of continued managerial uncertainty over job security. The responses however sometimes varied between organizations and even between managers in the same organization. This was perhaps understandable given the degree and nature of previous and ongoing restructuring in our sample organizations, such as at the auto plants GAC (US) and GAC (UK) and the US and UK utilities plants. Perceptions also differed somewhat by country, with arguably managers having far more immediate concerns about job security in the US, for example, than in Japan, with the UK placed somewhere in between. There were also differences between older and younger managers, with the former far more perplexed about job security than their younger counterparts, who often had similar concerns but were more accepting of a working milieu where employment could no longer be judged to be ‘safe’ and ‘reliable’ but rather was taken-for-granted as an ‘uncertain’ or ‘precarious’ phenomenon – simply ‘the way of the (modern) world’. Furthermore, there appeared widespread acceptance that younger managers would now naturally move to similar positions in other organizations, and through their own volition, rather than be tempted to fan the dying embers of ‘job for life’ or ‘cradle to grave’ employment notions, which had been rehearsed by older managers in the first stage of interviews but seemingly no longer. In later rounds of interviewing, this even appeared a widespread concept among managers in traditional Japanese organizations. Nevertheless, despite recurrent rounds of corporate restructuring, plus potential managerial employment uncertainties associated with the global financial crisis, job tenure rates remained extremely resistant. The managers interviewed were of course an unrepresentative sample in that they were corporate ‘survivors’. However, even with apparently stable tenure rates, they generally reported at least a sense of insecurity, even those who had effectively experienced one company careers. Indeed in the second round of interviews (2015) at the auto company GAC (UK), all of the interviewees fell into this category, a number having joined as graduates or even as apprentices and then been educated while in the employ of the company. Given that a fairly (but not exactly) similar situation pertained in the 2016 round of interviewing at the utilities company UKU, what explains the concerns that managers had about their jobs? We argue that our empirical evidence basically supports the earlier arguments of Doogan (2009) for ‘manufactured uncertainty’ and ‘contrived competition’. At the utilities companies older managers had been through privatisation followed by varying degrees of marketisation in the direction of facing full competition. Similarly local authorities were divesting themselves of service provision in a number of areas reflective of ‘manufactured uncertainty’. There was also considerable evidence of the destabilising influence of merger and acquisition activity: this was evident, for example, at UKU, which had been subject to considerable speculation of a foreign takeover at the time of the first interviews, and at the large Japanese engineering keiretsu; where the company had divested large loss-making parts of the business, again creating uncertainty. This seems similarly to support the argument of Burchell et al (1999) that the threat of M&A activity was the single biggest influence on perceptions of job insecurity. However we also argue that the ‘contrived competition’ argument extends beyond this. Our contention is that – whether intentionally or not – firms are creating uncertainty by the nature and extent of organizational restructuring. This was seen extensively in corporate actions both prior to and during the first round of interviews in the early 2000s, and represents a trend that supports Alvesson and Spicer’s (2016) argument that constant corporate restructuring inevitably leads to job uncertainty. Moreover to a large extent global competition explains this too, notably through the incessant pressures applied by large corporations on cost control, and particularly on maintaining low labour costs. One of the UK companies in our 2016 interviews, for example, was a multinational technical consulting firm. Here one of the key performance indicators, for all managers, was how much business they could transfer to India; where labour costs, even for highly skilled management consultants were much cheaper, this being a strategy that seemed to pertain also at other companies we visited in that round. Similarly the constant quest for managerial cost reduction was seemingly universal from the corporations we visited, irrespective of corporate performance. This is being driven however by something far more fundamental, the search for shareholder value. Again this often leads to ‘contrived competition’ engendered by corporations themselves in order to maximise labour productivity, and managerial labour in this case. In turn this heightens uncertainty about employment, or a form of what we term intentional corporate-induced managerial job insecurity. Ultimately, this is part of a wider institutional and ideological explanation of precariousness in contemporary capitalism in which neo-liberalism, financialization and shareholder value are increasingly hegemonic. Note Funding for these studies came from a variety of sources. For the first study funding was provided under the ESRC grant R000239288. For the second, funding was provided by Anonymous University, the Santander Foundation, the Alliance Foundation, China University of Business and Economics and Meiji University. And for the third by Meiji University and Anonymous University.