The Changing Role of the Middle Manager in the United Kingdom

The article examines the changing role of the middle manager in Great Britain, including the changes affecting middle managers and of their reactions to the changes. Middle managers were defined very broadly in the six-country study to include all those below the small group of top strategic managers and above first-level supervision. The British legal tradition, which relies heavily on precedent, has no legal definition of management, let alone lower and middle management, that satisfactorily describes their status and responsibilities. The absence of a definition of what constitutes management in the country has in part, led to blurred management categories. Despite the many drawbacks of definition and on the assumption that a middle-management category can only logically exist in larger organizations, quantitative data are available from the 1981 official census figures concerning managers in central and local government, industry and commerce, who generally plan and supervise in non-agricultural enterprises employing 25 persons or over. Approximately 82 percent of the managers in large establishments at the time of the census were male, and approximately 18 percent were female, with females being more concentrated at the junior and lower-middle levels.