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Unity and division in a building society

Department of Management and Centre for Social Theory and Technology, University of Keele, Newcastle-under-Lyme, North Staffordshire, UK
Keywords History, Corporate culture, Building societies, Management styles, Management attitudes Abstract This paper reports a study of managers in a small English building society. Its intent is to stress the importance of members' contested understandings of the history of their institution. Management in this organisation were both a unitary and a divided group collective in some respects but divided in others. This is demonstrated with particular reference to managers' different accounts of the organisation's past and the ways in which these were deployed as relevant resources for avoiding extinction in the future.

Contesting histories
Martin Parker

Contesting histories

589
Received February 2001 Revised October 2001 Accepted February 2002

Introduction
. . . the facts of history never come to us ``pure'', since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder (Carr, 1964, p. 22).

As Carr argued almost 40 years ago, what counts as history is a matter of interpretation. This paper will investigate a small example of the contestation of history, in order to demonstrate that members' different understandings of an organisation's history can inform their attempts at organisational change[1]. In order to do this, I will be reporting an interview and observation study of the management of a small English building society pseudonymed the Moortown Permanent Building Society (MPBS)[2]. My broad objective is to demonstrate that an adequate account of the construction and use of history within organisations should account for both consensus and conflict organisational history can be a resource for both integration and distinction. In order to achieve this I will recount managers' talk about their organisation in order to argue that there were two major divides one within MPBS head office and the other between head office and the branches. Importantly for the purposes of this argument, these divides were centrally organised around employees' understandings of the past and consequent orientations to the future, but both divisions were negotiated within a shared set of assumptions about powerful actors and the value of conservatism in protecting the organisation from extinction. As should be obvious, I am treating ``history'' here as a cultural matter. That is to say, as a set of stories which construct the past, not a litany of ``facts'' which can be excavated in order to provide a true account. This is not a new position, either within historiography (Carr, 1964; Jenkins, 1995) or organisation studies (e.g. Munro, 1998). So, in theoretical terms, the paper rests on a broadly social constructionist understanding that history (like culture) is

Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 15 No. 6, 2002, pp. 589-605. # MCB UP Limited, 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810210449550

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something an organisation is, not something it has (Smircich, 1983). I assume that understandings of an organisation's history are one of the resources which members can use to construct the organisation on a day to day basis. However, I am also assuming that an organisation can be conceptualised as a ``temporary and fraught coalition of coalitions'' (Watson, 1994, p. 111). Or, as Barley puts it, organisations are:
. . . speech communities sharing socially constructed systems of meaning that allow members to make sense of their immediate, and perhaps not so immediate, environment (Barley, 1983, p. 393).

But since there be may be more than one ``speech community'' within an organisation, the history and culture of that organisation should not necessarily be understood as a priori unified and consensual. Taking social constructionism seriously would seem to suggest that when organisational members talk about the differences between ``us'' and ``them'' they are referring to divides that are meaningful to them and that inform their actions within particular contexts. After all, an earlier tradition of organisational research Gouldner (1954, 1957), Burns (1955), Dalton (1959), Becker and Geer (1960) took it as axiomatic that a group or individual's understandings of particular organisational issues differed according to their position within the organisation. Whether it was Gouldner writing about ``group tensions'', Burns about ``cliques and cabals'', Dalton about managerial politics, or Becker and Geer's ``manifest and latent cultures'' the dominant assumption was that reference groups were multiple, cross-cutting and sometimes contradictory. It seems to me that this neglect of insights from earlier research on organisational ``climate'', ``personality'', ``atmosphere'' and so on reflects a substantial amount of disciplinary amnesia about research on organisations generally (Jacques, 1996; Parker, 2000b). In this paper, I will show that organisational history can be formulated as a processual and contested set of understandings (professional, departmental, generational and so on) that pertain in a particular socially-defined space. Members' talk that takes an organisation as its topic will hence generally reflect these understandings in language and symbolism which reflects assumptions about self and other's role, as well as relying on divergent formulations of the history and central purpose of the organisation (see Young (1989), Kunda (1992), Martin (1992), Watson (1994) and Parker (2000a) for similar approaches). The study of history then becomes an attempt to understand factions and alliances within, in this case, the management of an organisation and their relation to a collective past and an imagined future. This also implies that we should be careful about assuming that groups of managers have a clear unified ``strategy''. Much of the post-Braverman labour process literature on management has indeed suggested that management are a divided group (Friedman, 1977, 1990; Armstrong, 1984; Teulings, 1986; Murray and Knights, 1990; Collinson, 1992). After all, organisational changes developed by managers are not simply collectivist but are also intended to intervene in other

managers' practices. This paper echoes this literature in demonstrating the dangers of assuming that there is one management strategy, or even that managers are a group that always recognise much practical sense of commonality. In MPBS, despite much reference to a consensual organisation, there were clear divides which meant that one group looked backwards and inwards for their inspiration whilst another group looked forwards and outwards for theirs. The past ...
I do not know of anything more thrilling, anything more calculable of creating happiness and joy for a man and a woman to have redeemed their mortgage debt, going proudly home with their title deeds in their pocket feeling that they have a roof over their heads as long as life lasts, independently of anything or any authority (Enoch Hill, Chairman of the Building Society Association and native of Moortown speaking in 1930 quoted in Ashworth, 1980, p. 117-18).

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The genesis of the English building society ``movement'' (note the evangelical connotations) was in the friendly societies, money clubs, sick societies and burial societies formed from the 1750s onwards[3]. MPBS was founded in 1863 and was a fairly typical example of a building club with philanthropic and nonconformist roots that became a permanent institution. Moortown itself was a small market town that expanded in the industrial revolution with the textile industry. Despite its small size, Moortown was not only the head office location for two societies, the MPBS and the much larger Empire Building Society, but also the birthplace of a number of significant figures in the development of the movement. It was often suggested to be an unique place with a distinctive ``community spirit''. One MPBS manager claimed that the reason that building societies thrived in Moortown was ``the traditional thinking of a thrifty countryfolk of the day''. For most of their early history, building societies were small conservative organisations with only a small number becoming expansionist and entrepreneurial. MPBS was one of the former; it did not even begin to open branches until the mid 1950s, more than 30 years after other societies. For many smaller societies the mutualist ethic remained central, profit being secondary to assets and number of ``members'' in measuring success. Notions of independence and local responsibility appeared to have been crucial throughout the society's history, just as ideas of self-reliance for home owners initially propelled the growth of the movement as a whole. The centenary booklet describes the founder Directors as . . .well known public spirited men . . . tradesmen of good standing or professional men with practices in Moortown and . . . staunch pillars of the local churches. The building society they had planned and launched was not to be for their benefit but for the benefit of the artisans and craftsmen of the town and surrounding district (MPBS Centenary Booklet, 1963, p. 7).

From the 1950s onwards these ideas were sustained by the society's Moortownbred general manager Fred Roach who was described as a forceful character with an ``aura'' or ``reputation''. Mr Roach worked for the society for 55

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years, as general manager for 35 years, until his retirement from the post of chairman of the board in 1990. On beginning my research I attempted to obtain an interview with him but was advised by the new general manager that this would not be a good idea until after he resigned.
He is old fashioned and he might not like outsiders coming into the company. Best to keep apart in case he throws you out.

592

Mr Roach had an extremely centralised approach to controlling ``his'' building society one manager characterised him as the pope passing decisions down from the Vatican and effectively controlled the organisation through his charisma and forcefulness. In his early days he attempted to see every single application that came into the building society an echo of the times when directors would personally inspect any property that the society might lend money on. This vetting procedure was in many ways the central task of the society and involved making judgements about the ``status'' of ``acceptable'' borrowers. Fred Roach was very ``choosy'' about the mortgages he would accept and he had clear opinions about what the public wanted and how MPBS could serve their needs.
. . . throughout its history the Society's loans have been made almost entirely on houses being bought by Mr and Mrs John Citizen people with modest but regular incomes, with no extravagant taste in housing and who live within their incomes (MPBS Centenary Booklet, 1963, p. 23).

It must also be noted that for most of Mr Roach's tenure building societies operated in a sellers' market. Interest rates were effectively set by cartel in London and ``competition wasn't a word they were familiar with'' (manager). They operated waiting lists, which in MPBS's case reached 16 weeks in the early 1970s, and branches were set lending limits. Mortgage availability was reliant entirely on investment business, rather than using money markets, and hence the policy was to suddenly stop lending until more funds had been raised. Under the leadership of Fred Roach, the society changed little in 50 years and, even when no longer general manager, his influence lived on in the organisation as an active and interventionist chairman of the board. His successor was his long serving assistant whilst his secretary was promoted to the head of the new business department. The interim replacement retired in 1989 but during his brief tenure had rapidly become known as ``shuttlecock'' because his decisions were continually being questioned by Mr Roach. The new general manager, Mr McAuley, was a very different character. He was in his early forties and was not a native of Moortown, but had already worked in the society as chief accountant for ten years. McAuley was regarded by most interviewees as being of a different generation and approach than the two previous general managers a dynamic executive who acted on new ideas very rapidly. Yet, as a few managers noted, it was also a powerful style that was in some senses similar to that of Fred Roach, who finally retired shortly after Mr McAuley took over. That being said, it was clear that the two men were not

particularly fond of each other as Mr Roach commented, ``he doesn't need me, McAuley, he can manage''. At the time of the research, MPBS employed about 130 staff, over half of whom were based in Moortown head office with the rest in the 16 branches. Most of the head office staff were Moortown natives and staff turnover was relatively low. MPBS's personnel policies could be characterised as paternalistic. There was no trade union representation but a Joint Consultative Committee (JCC) consisting of managers and staff representatives. This was a common arrangement in building societies. At the time of the research, only 13 out of the then 100 plus building societies recognised a trade union, and larger staff associations had twice as many members as the union could claim for the whole sector (Thompson, 1990). This paternalism also extended into career trajectories. The society had traditionally recruited into the ``post room'' and promoted internally from there this was the path that was followed by Fred Roach. As a result, most of the staff were on an age-related pay structure within a rigid career hierarchy. Employees were expected to stay with the society and work within the rules; in return they would effectively be guaranteed a job for life. The rules themselves were strict and comprehensive. State legislation and directives from the building societies commission regulated the activities of everyone from the general manager to the individual cashier. Hundreds of computer and paper audit programmes, as well as cash counting spot checks, were employed following a manual which specified their frequency and timing. In sum, at the time of the research, MPBS could be seen as a tightly knit, centrally managed organisation strongly rooted in senses of sectoral, local and personal continuity. But there is, of course, another side to this history. . . . and the future Throughout the 1980s it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the world outside Moortown. The business environment that MPBS operated in had undergone substantial changes with the Building Societies Act and the Financial Services Act (both 1986) legislating a substantial deregulation of the market. Insurance, share dealing, pensions, mortgages and estate agency all became areas that were no longer tied to particular types of institution but could be entered by any financial organisation. One consequence of this was an acceleration of mergers, acquisitions and share flotations amongst building societies resulting in fewer, but larger, institutions. In 1880 there were over 2,000 societies, by 1980 this was reduced to 273, and at the time of writing the figure is 67. For MPBS in 1990 this meant that, however strong its finances, it might be bought by any predator with the money to spend on tempting investors. From the late 1980s onwards there was much media comment and speculation on the increasing number of mergers and contested take-overs (Building Societies Gazette, 1990; Slaughter, 1990). An influential report entitled ``The inevitable death of small and medium sized societies'' suggested that there was no niche market and that plans for merger should be made immediately (Mortgage Finance Gazette, 1991).

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How MPBS managers dealt with the threat of extinction will begin to illustrate my suggestions about a divided management culture within the organisation and the central importance of understandings of history. The older, more senior head office managers interviewed were keen to stress that merger was not at all desirable and anyway ``Mr McAuley would rather die first''. Their favoured scenario for the future of building societies was that larger societies would look more like banks whilst smaller ones would stick to the ``traditional'' building society model.
I think a lot of building societies in the middle ground have got a problem because they are not big enough to compete with the nationals yet their costs are too high to compete with societies of our type.

In general older head office managers brashly dismissed any danger ``we're so strong that we don't feel that it's a threat at all''. To countenance merger at all was clearly taboo Fred Roach's ghost would not like it. On the other hand, it was acknowledged by younger head office managers and most branch managers that MPBS would make a good acquisition for a medium-sized society trying to expand into their region and hence that merger was possible or even likely. Branch managers in particular commented that they felt that they were simply not able to compete, and felt that this was the first sign of trouble for the society. MPBS would be taken over unless some ``serious decisions'' were made soon. A friendly service and long history would not save the society from market forces that was ``bollocks''. However, in accordance with the views of the older head office managers, MPBS did not change course. Innovations such as share dealing and more branches were rejected, as were automatic teller machines and cheque books which would ``attract the wrong sort of customer'' or lose the ``personal approach''.
My view is if you want a cheque book you go to one of the banks. . . . That's a personal view it may not necessarily be shared by all.

Assertions that the general public tended to trust building societies more than banks or insurance companies were common and it was suggested that the majority of the society's customers were fairly ``traditional'' and ``wouldn't think about going to [another society]''. This appeared to mean that they were older and relatively well off. A small, old and regional society that was trusted might weather the storm. In terms of lending policy the society had undoubtedly become a little more liberal or ``realistic'' in the ``standards'' it applied. However, it was stressed by older managers that this did not mean ``cavalier'' as other societies were accused of being a lack of control which had resulted their facing take-over. Terms such as ``security'', ``proof'' and ``judging the applicant'' were used as a counter to the danger of bad mortgages and the low level of arrears problems was a source of particular pride for older head office managers. Despite this resistance to changing the core business away from what was articulated as ``traditional'', there was an attempt to update the corporate image.

In the past, most of the advertising had been done ``in-house'' by untrained MPBS employees and since Fred Roach considered the branches as only ``somewhere to go and pay your money'' little attempt had been made to make them look attractive.
The attitude prior to now from the board is ``oh this is a waste of time, we know all there is to know, we know what people think'' which is dangerous ground from a marketing point of view (Younger manager).

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In 1989 a public relations company was employed to assess the image the society projected and their survey concluded that it was ``old fashioned''. Mr McAuley hence agreed that changes to the corporate image were necessary including shortening the name of the society (it was previously titled the Moortown Permanent Benevolent Building Society), changing the logo and standard colour, regularising publicity and window displays, refurbishing branches and introducing uniforms for the counter staff. It seemed that MPBS was trying to change its image without insulting its history. The structure was to be preserved but its fac ade was to be modernised. In order to understand some of the reasons and implications of this rather confused and conservative strategy for organisational change it is necessary to look in more detail at the two main divisions within the management of the organisation. Head office gamekeepers and poachers Head office had an atmosphere of controlled bustle subdued conversation and telephone purring; desks piled with paper, staplers, stamps, calculators, forms and files. Managers worked in glass walled offices or screened areas that looked over clusters of desks. Only the general manager had a completely private workspace. His office was wood panelled, large, tidy and had a private toilet. In the centre of the building was the ``strongroom'', a barred room containing deeds and contracts. I was told that the head office atmosphere was ``lively'' and ``free and easy'' with little rivalry between departments and first names being commonly used.
We're lucky, or exceedingly good, at choosing our staff. Maybe it's something that's come down from the top. It permeates an organisation.

There were also many social and sporting events in which society members got together outside work, often in the social club directly adjacent to the head office building. It appeared that these activities were mostly engaged in by Moortown staff the distance to travel for other branch staff was often prohibitive. Yet, despite this presented image of ``togetherness'' of a common culture there were also, as suggested above, tensions between managers that neatly echo Gouldner's (1957) distinction between ``cosmopolitans'' and ``locals''. The group of senior managers were older, often close to retirement, appointed by Mr Roach and not enthusiastic about moving away from the assumptions and routines that had served in the past. They had been promoted to their positions

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after long periods of service within the company and often talked about the value of their years of experience. As one of them said:
You can't teach people how to look at a mortgage application you have to have a gut feeling about it.

596

On the other side were a group of younger managers in their twenties and thirties, professionally qualified, appointed since Mr Roach retired and hence with between one and three years experience in the society. They appeared to relate well to their staff and did much to encourage an open and friendly approach to management. One of them suggested that they had actually changed the atmosphere of the organisation quite significantly from a more formal, hierarchical form of control. One illustration of this divide was with reference to the relationship between head office and branches. Contact was maintained primarily through the new post of Branches and Agency Controller. He suggested that the dominant feeling of head office management prior to his appointment had been that ``branch staff are there to get business but branch staff are not there to be trusted''. Now, however, he and the younger managers favoured limited decentralisation the ``them and us'' attitude was ``out of the past'' and branch decision making was vital. This manager, an ex-branch manager himself, talked about facilitating team spirit by stressing that they were all ``working together within the same organisation''. Hence it was vital to his ``credibility'' and ``authority'' that he was not seen as another head office ``administrator''. The older staff, on the other hand, favoured continued central control because, as one of them said, an employee's role should be one of:
. . . implementing the policies and procedures that the board have laid down. They are the ones who are making the decisions as to what we do and we follow those. . . . The board requires certain things from me and my job satisfaction is keeping as closely to those limits or requirements as I can. That's where I get the satisfaction out of, not out of power, [but] out of submitting to what they want.

In practice, this latter group again had it their way and decisions remained centralised. Though some responsibility for arrears was delegated for a time, branches did not have enough information to process this work which had resulted in it being taken back into head office to the evident satisfaction of the older managers. As a result, despite certain younger managers' support for limited change, head office remained a focus of power just as it had been for Fred Roach. The majority of head office staff rarely met branch staff. ``I'm very much a head office person I don't get out a great deal'' was a common response. The physical separation exacerbated this ``they only know most of us by a voice at the end of a telephone and equally the same our side''. Radical voices were continually tempered by an acknowledgement that centralised control had always worked in the past. Even the Branches Controller suggested that substantial delegation would cause huge problems since many branch managers had no experience in this area. If they were too focused on targets

and had control over their lending then they might over-ride the system with little concern for quality.
I'd misuse it as a branch manager. If I was under targets and I would think ``well yeah, by hook or by crook to get my salary increase. If I can make my own offers I'll bend the rules wherever I can do it''.

Contesting histories

He characterised himself as ``a poacher turned gamekeeper'' who knew the loopholes in procedure and was out to plug them. In other words, branch managers could not be completely trusted and to give them too much power was to encourage the unthinkable bad mortgages, financial instability and eventual take-over. So how did branch managers respond to this? Branches roundheads and cavaliers As indicated above, branch managers had little discretion. Other than petty cash, all major decisions were made in Moortown. They had no input on rates, mortgage policy or marketing initiatives, rarely had access to market or management information and, as a result, continually complained of ``not understanding what the hell is going on''. At the same time they were keen to stress the increasing turbulence of the markets they worked in ``there are so many more players on the pitch than there were''. These were ``dramatic'' changes which meant staff must become more ``sales oriented'' because profitability was the key to survival in this new environment. New competitors ``couldn't give a toss'' whether customers could afford the mortgage and were simply out to get their commission on insurance sales. New customers were also more ``disloyal'' and entrepreneurial in their dealings with financial organisations.
Ten years ago, somebody gets x thousand in an estate and [we] say ``oh I think you should put this in a Moorlands termshare''. . . . Whereas now they've read their Money Mail the week before and they want 20 in a Standard Life Bond, Six in a PEP and another three in a TESSA and ``I want the cheque now thank you very much'', and they go off and make their own arrangements.

597

Even their dealings with professional contacts had become more instrumental because there was so little ``walk-in business''. In order to keep them sweet branch managers needed to take their more unusual proposals as well as safer clients.
We can't afford to suddenly go back to the Fred Roach syndrome and say . . . you've got to run round Moortown naked before you can have a mortgage.

Discretion over their job content was hence vital to branch managers and this was often critically compared to jobs in head office.
I think you get different people in head offices and branches. I mean personally I don't think I'd like to be in head office. . . . You get a more cavalier attitude I think generally speaking at the branches . . . at head office it's the rules and that's it.

Head office did not appreciate how much publicity and sales work branches did and also that they do not just send ``any old rubbish'' for mortgage clearance.

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The centre gave the impression that they felt ``all branch managers are liars'', whilst claiming their own superiority ``I didn't get where I am today by doing blah blah blah . . .''. As a result many head office staff were depicted as timeserving ``pen-pushers'' obsessed with ``trivia''.
There are a number of areas in head office where people have become so cloistered and institutionalised in their own departments that they haven't got an awful lot of common sense, and I say that with some feeling.

598

This criticism was particularly applied to older head office managers ``glorified typists'' who ``shouldn't be in charge'', ``an absolute waste of space'' or ``of the old dinosaur variety''. The policy of promotion and pay by seniority was criticised on these grounds because it resulted in certain managers occupying jobs when they were clearly unsuitable for doing so. The Assistant General Manager in particular was derided for his inappropriate dress sense (a pin stripe suit) and his attempt to ensure that branches had enough cleaning materials earned him the title ``manager pots and pans''. Until 1990 he had been in charge of branches yet had never worked in one. Unsurprisingly, branch managers felt that the divide between them and head office was not becoming any narrower ``they think we're a load of cavaliers, and we think they're a load of roundheads''. Decentralised control would only happen if functions were ``dragged screaming'' from head office's hands. Even the Branches Controller was losing his branch orientation and becoming a head office administrator who toed the ``company line''.
He'll come out with something that you know 18 months ago he'd have argued all week about.

Though the post was an excellent idea, in practice it was not working as branch managers wished it would because he had now become a ``mouthpiece'' for Mr McAuley. Clearly the branch managers had substantial criticisms of head office. They felt it was populated by backward looking managers who cared more about their ``glass house'' than the ``real world'' outside, cared more about the past than the future. In summary then, it would seem that the organisation was centrally divided over the degree to which history should inform the present. The older head office managers attempted to keep ``tradition'' alive, whilst the younger head office managers and branch managers attempted to modernise, to reject nostalgia and ridicule history. Mr McAuley's promise of change combined with the threat of extinction had served only to make these divides the subject of greater contestation. The final section of this paper will look at how the organisation managed to change without changing, how dominant members of MPBS carried its heritage of centralism and paternalism forwards as a solution to its current problems. Change without change: ``as safe as the pyramids''
I don't think they've any wish to be avant garde or innovatory because I don't think the public want it. But they would be innovatory if the public wanted them to be, I'm sure they would, well I know they would. Because they've got a very clear idea that without the public they

just don't prosper. But I think all that's happening now is that they've changed the name, they're changing the signs, bringing offices up to date, all of which there's nothing very innovatory about that. They're merely serving the public, that's all (Fred Roach).

Contesting histories

As I have described, from Mr McAuley onwards there was a sense in which MPBS was beginning to change fairly rapidly on the surface. Head office and branches were refurbished involving the removal of old furnishings and the redistribution of space. Conservative wooden panelling was replaced with streamlined grey and black. Mr McAuley was often cited as both symbol of and reason for change a man born outside Moortown, with ``newer fresher ideas'', ``bringing us into the different era''. He even seemed to be fairly accessible to staff for general queries and problems:
He's good on the ground . . . He even goes to staff parties and does the conga with everyone else (Younger head office manager).

599

Communication between staff and management was supposed to be becoming less hierarchical and Mr McAuley claimed to be keen to explain and justify his decisions and involve others in the decision-making process. He was supported in much of this by younger head office managers and branch managers who were keen on diversification into new products and encouraged development of neglected areas such as training, induction courses, appraisal and management development. One branch manager characterised this as a form of perestroika for MPBS which was beginning to result in changes lower in the organisation. Staff and branch managers were asking more ``uncomfortable'' questions and the staff section of the JCC becoming more forceful in its demands. In early 1991 the staff committee expressed severe protest at the imposition of a salary award at less than inflation with only onethird of staff getting the bonus award necessary to bring them up to the inflation rate. Management agreed to discuss the award but refused to change it. A younger head office manager commented that this appeared to indicate that the JCC was actually ``non-joint and non-consultative'' and suggestions of voting against directors' fee increases were made as a symbolic protest against this action. Whilst this may seem a minor form of dissent, it must be remembered that for MPBS such activity was previously almost unknown. So organisational change was occurring in MPBS but it was happening slowly and carefully it was a form of change that delivered little, symbolic rather than challenging the values and traditions of the older managers. Despite his image Mr McAuley was still cautious in his approach, preferring his accountancy focus on ``the bottom line''. He was radical, but only radical within the context of a highly conservative organisation. For example, his understanding of marketing was limited to advertising and MPBS's marketing consultant suggested that he was far more interested in the design of the corporate carpet than developing a marketing database. Financially his conservatism was reflected in a continued resistance to raising funds on money markets legislation allowed for up to 40 per cent, an average society would raise between 10-15 per cent but MPBS still raised less than 1 per cent. This

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meant that its lending policy was reliant largely on the instabilities of investment and hence echoed Fred Roach's ``stop-go policy''. In addition the emphasis on control meant that moves towards decentralisation were treated with caution on the grounds that audit would be made more difficult and the quality of the mortgage book left by decades of care would be under threat. As one older head office manager put it:
One of the branch managers, in a bit of an exchange during a branch managers meeting, said to me ``if we didn't get mortgage business you wouldn't have a job.'' And I said to them ``yes but if you get the wrong sort of business none of us will have a job''.

Because of this, more outspoken critics of history felt that things were simply not moving fast enough. One branch manager felt that Mr McAuley had begun well but was ``disappointed'' that he had not fulfilled the promises he had made on appointment. Central direction and control was still ``too rigid with written instructions''. Mr McAuley, like Fred Roach, was also increasing his own executive autonomy by reducing the power of the board to question it. He justified this by suggesting that it would allow him more time to spend on organisational business and make him less ``insulated'' from his staff, but many of his branch managers and younger staff felt that they saw little evidence of this happening. If the change-oriented faction felt Mr McAuley was not moving fast enough, older head office managers seemed to feel the opposite. Whilst they were never critical, they were not effusive in their praise and used phrases like ``the general manager takes the view that . . .'' and ``there is always resistance to change but . . .''. In general they gave the impression that they knew things had to change but that they did not want everything to change. There was rarely any visible dissent, criticism was expressed indirectly ``I don't want to be negative about things at all''.
My own personal view is that whatever changes we make to make sure we're competitive must not be at too high a cost because in the end that cost might not be something that we can stand.

The ghost of Fred Roach was vitally important in symbolising this conservatism. When referring to Mr Roach most older head office employees were almost reverential. I was often told ``Mr Roach always used to say . . .''. When Mr McAuley was praised it was in comparison to Fred Roach. No criticism was ever attached to Mr Roach for resistance to change, instead he was often characterised as a ``man of his time'', who ``built this society on rock''. Without his leadership in ``running a tight ship'' the society might have been swallowed up like so many other societies had been ``we're still around and there's five hundred that have disappeared''. Change-oriented managers were more critical but were also careful, even if in a light-hearted way, to ensure that their comments would not be seen as heretical.
You will anonymise this I hope, I don't want to be seen as the branch manager who said Fred Roach was hopeless.

Hence, when criticism was being voiced it tended to be prefixed with ``it has been said . . .'', ``it could be argued . . .'' and was tempered by the same acknowledgement that, as a result of Mr Roach's tight control over the ``purse strings'', the society had a very strong mortgage book and a low level of arrears problems. The corporate image programme is a helpful example of this ambivalence about change, about detaching the present from the past. It was not radical in its conception or implementation. By the end of the research counter staff uniforms were still not issued and some branches remained to be refurbished. The new logo was a re-design of an older symbol for longevity and security a pyramid with the motto ``firm and lasting'' and the colour had been used on previous publicity material. Though ``benevolent'' had been dropped from the name, ``permanent'' was kept the general manager arguing that this ``still keeps the feeling of mutuality''. Older managers suggested that this was again to prevent customers from feeling that their friendly traditional building society had changed too much ``what we had, a lot of our members liked''. Change was made ``without overdoing it'' in order not to ``frighten to death a lot of the people in Moortown''. This would allow them to attract and retain a certain kind of customer because:
The older ones perhaps tend to like it as it is whilst the younger generation like the newer things.

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Clearly the intention was that these traditional values must not be lost in a ``streamlined'' organisation that ``moved with the times''. It seemed that amongst the dominant group of older head office managers there was a powerful nostalgia for a ``quieter world'' when customers came to the building society as a supplicant and were not captured by estate agents or solicitors first. This was a longing for the days when people would be prepared to wait for insurance quotes, when they were not so ``worldly'' about financial matters and things used to be done ``just so''.
Things were very straightforward, repetitive, you learnt something and you were confident that it was hardly likely to change much at all. Whereas now things are very different.

Ironically, assumptions about the ``traditional'' customer were also descriptions of Moortown and MPBS inward looking, nostalgic and conservative yet there was no actual information on customers themselves. Indeed, one older head office manager suggested that MPBS did not operate in large cities despite the fact that four of the biggest branches were located in conurbations of more than 250,000 population. As Fred Roach put it:
We've always taken a lot of notice of what the people in Moortown want and what the people in the small towns round about want too.

He went on to note that the two first branches were opened in two major cities because the volume of business from agencies there justified it. The overall picture was well summarised by one of the younger head office managers who had worked in other financial service organisations. He felt that

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the building society movement, and particularly this society, was still rooted in its history of Methodist mutuality which contrasted significantly with the ``aggressive yuppie'' culture of the rest of the new financial services sector. It did seem to be the case that, despite talk about change, MPBS was still a highly conservative organisation. Slow and superficial developments were not changing the values of many key members. The old/young and head office/ branch divides within the organisation reflected emergent tensions but power still remained at the centre, with a latter day version of Fred Roach who knew what was best for his Society. At the time of writing, the organisation is still independent. Whether it will survive for long is another matter.
I don't know. I mean it's difficult to say I've only been here for 24 years! (Older head office manager).

Conclusions
I was the boss people listened to me (Fred Roach).

In this paper I have shown that management strategies in MPBS could best be understood with reference to divisions over the meaning of the organisation's history. The key to understanding the organisation appears to be the power of central members' constructions of its traditional commitment to mutuality. The story and symbol of Fred Roach crystallised certain ideas about conformism and respectability and constructed a context for members to understand other employees' actions what Gouldner once called a ``Rebecca myth'' about the golden past (Gouldner, 1952, p. 346). The importance of nostalgia has occasionally been mentioned by others writing on organisations. Gabriel (1993) has written about the importance of ``organisational nostalgia'' a longing for home, for past events, certainties and triumphs. More generally, Grint (1994), Lilley (1995), Munro (1998) and Case (1999) have argued that organisational change often involves some rewriting of history the changing of assumptions about the appropriateness of what was done in the past. In some sense, as Munro puts it, the past has to be ``rubbished'' in order that the future can be characterised and brought into being. It seems then that the understandings of history held by certain actors within organisations can serve as a powerful countervailing pressure to certain kinds of change. To paraphrase many of my MPBS respondents, ``things may have been hard in the old days but there was pride in a job well done and a sense of community''. The problems of organisational survival further crystallised this myth and foregrounded strategic divides between some managers and others. Certain topics the relationship between branches and head office, lending policy, corporate image became contested terrains with some members articulating them as essentially surface ways of ``keeping up with the times'' but others as reflective of core changes in the way that the society needed to operate. Old local definitions of the efficiency of paternalist bureaucratic control were being contested by cosmopolitan ideas about the new marketplace and profitability.

So this study illustrates the importance of an analysis of both consensus and conflict. All the MPBS managers had a broadly similar set of values relating to their understandings of the sector and the particular role that the organisation had played in Moortown itself. But it is not enough to assume that this meant that everyone always agreed on the significance of this heritage. In practice the divides covered above reflected very real differences as to how history should inform action. At opposite ends of the continuum, older head office managers wished to emphasise the way that historical precedent should inform any present practice whilst branch managers wished to reinvent the organisation with little reference to its past. Between these two extremes there were two kinds of alliance younger head office and branch managers formed a reformist tendency with reference to diversification, whilst young and old head office managers tended to be reactionary with regard to decentralisation. Different managers could articulate both unity and division in their talk at different times depending on the context and the issue (Parker, 2000a). Or, to put it another way, managerial politics was conducted through the deployment of shifting reference groups. The balance of power meant that the conservatives effectively had their way at the time, but it could reasonably be expected that imminent retirements meant that this was a situation that may not have lasted long after the research was completed. In conclusion, I would suggest that this paper has illustrated that there is not necessarily only one history in use within an organisation. Terms like history and culture are often taken to imply sharedness, a normative consensus or negotiated order, when in practice organisations might be just as well formulated as sites of division. An individual may use the organisation, or the organisation's management, as their reference group in a particular piece of talk but very often they do not. As Burns suggested 40 years ago:
. . . if we are observing behaviour of people in a particular milieu . . . we shall find certain conduct definable as in accordance with the norms of the milieu; other conduct will be acted out as sanctioned or governed by the norms of groups or categories outside the milieu by reference groups; other behaviour still will be sanctioned or governed by the norms of groups forming particular social enclaves within the milieu (Burns, 1955, p. 471).

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I think this means that we should be suspicious about claims to historical homogeneity. As illustrated above, organisational members may have shared values. After all, some minimal ``sharedness'' is functionally necessary for the organisation to carry out its basic tasks. However, there may also be substantial and enduring divides which are broadly recognised across the organisation and inform strategies that attempt to deal with an uncertain future. Whether these divisions can be ``managed away'' is another matter but I would suggest it is not likely or desirable. Kunda (1992) and Willmott (1993) have argued that the imposition of a ``monoculture'' or ``unitarist'' frame is potentially totalitarian precisely because it attempts to stifle debate about alternatives. Organisational democracy might not be well served by managers who wished to cajole their subordinates into believing that there were no

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legitimate divergences of opinion. As I have illustrated in the paper, the example of organisational history is central here. It is precisely because we do not all see the past in the same way that we orient ourselves to different futures. In any case, the tension between nostalgia and novelty is one that cannot be so easily dissolved, precisely because these are concepts that are parasitic on each other. In formal organisations, as in other social arrangements, history informs present practice but it does not determine it. But this is to say no more than Carr did 40 years ago, that the writing of history is an interpretive act that takes place in the present.
Notes 1. Thanks to my respondents at MPBS who gave their time for this research to take place. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Labour Process Conference at Aston University, Birmingham. 2. The research consisted of 26 visits to the organisation over a period of 18 months during 1990-1991. In all, 33 semi-structured interviews were tape recorded, much documentary material analysed and fieldnotes generated during all the visits. Hopefully, given the nature of this special issue, the age of the research will not affect the credibility of the conclusions! 3. The empirical material reported in this paper is also used in Parker (2000a). References Armstrong, P. (1984), ``Competition between the organised professions and the evolution of management control strategies'', in Thompson, K. (Ed.), Work, Employment and Unemployment, Open University Press, Milton Keynes. Ashworth, H. (1980), The Building Society Story, Franey & Co., London. Barley, S. (1983), ``Semiotics and the study of organisational and occupational cultures'', Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 28, pp. 393-413. Becker, H. and Geer, B. (1960), ``Latent culture'', Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 5, pp. 304-13. Building Societies Gazette (1990), ``Small societies doomed'', 4 August. Burns, T. (1955), ``The reference of conduct in small groups'', Human Relations, Vol. 8, pp. 467-86. Carr, E.H. (1964), What is History?, Pelican, Harmondsworth. Case, P. (1999), ``Remember re-engineering? The rhetorical appeal of a managerial salvation device'', Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 36, pp. 419-41. Collinson, D. (1992), Managing the Shop Floor, de Gruyter, Berlin. Dalton, M. (1959), Men Who Manage, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. Friedman, A. (1977), ``Responsible autonomy versus direct control over the labour process'', Capital and Class, Vol. 1. Friedman, A. (1990), ``Managerial strategies, activities, techniques and technology'', in Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (Eds), Labour Process Theory, Macmillan, London. Gabriel, Y. (1993), ``Organisational nostalgia'', in Fineman, S. (Ed.), Emotion in Organisations, Sage, London. Gouldner, A. (1952), ``The problem of succession in bureaucracy'', in Merton, R. et al. (Eds), Reader in Bureaucracy, Free Press, New York, NY. Gouldner, A. (1954), Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, Free Press, New York, NY.

Gouldner, A. (1957), ``Cosmopolitans and locals'', Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 2, pp. 281-306. Grint, K. (1994), ``Reengineering history'', Organisation, Vol. 1, pp. 179-201. Jenkins, K. (1995), On `What is History?', Routledge, London. Jacques, R. (1996), Manufacturing the Employee, Sage, London. Kunda, G. (1992), Engineering Culture, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA. Lilley, S. (1995), ``Disintegrating chronology'', Studies in Cultures, Organisations and Societies, Vol. 2, pp. 1-33. Martin, J. (1992), The Culture of Organisations: Three Perspectives, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Mortgage Finance Gazette (1991), ``Bell tolls for small societies'', May, p. 7. Munro, R. (1998), ``Belonging on the move: market rhetoric and the future as obligatory passage'', Sociological Review, Vol. 46, pp. 208-43. Murray, F. and Knights, D. (1990), ``Inter-managerial competition and capital accumulation'', Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Vol. 1, pp. 167-89. Parker, M. (2000a), Organisational Culture and Identity: Unity and Division at Work, Sage, London. Parker, M. (2000b), ``The sociology of organisations and the organisation of sociology: some reflections on the making of a division of labour'', Sociological Review, Vol. 48 No. 1, pp. 124-46. Slaughter, J. (1990), ``Building societies: to wed or not to wed?'', Observer, 29 April, p. 36. Smircich, L. (1983), ``Concepts of culture and organisational analysis'', Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 28, pp. 339-58. Teulings, A. (1986), ``Managerial labour processes in organised capitalism'', in Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (Eds), Managing the Labour Process, Gower, Aldershot. Thompson, H. (1990), ``Has BIFU's time come?'', Building Societies Gazette, August, pp. 24-5. Watson, T. (1994), In Search of Management, Routledge, London. Willmott, H. (1993), ``Strength is ignorance; slavery is freedom; managing culture in modern organisations'', Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 30, pp. 515-52. Young, E. (1989), ``On the naming of the rose'', Organisation Studies, Vol. 10, pp. 187-206.

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