This book examines management and management-related activities as a feature of everyday life. Any person or group that attempts to influence or shape the behaviors or experiences of others may be understood as engaging in management activities. The study of management involves the study of achieving understanding, providing direction and coordinating activities with others across an endless array of humanly engaged terrains. Management Motifs provides a research agenda for an interactionist approach to the study of management activities. Moving well beyond more organizationally-based understandings of managers and management, it examines the pragmatic accomplishment of management activities and the generic social processes that accompany them. This work addresses diverse issues related to management such as: holding and doing office, pursuing cooperation, developing policy, envisioning and advocating for missions, establishing teams and generating team identities, sustaining team endeavors and managing self. By attending to management-related concerns as a generic feature of human group life, the authors develop and articulate a research framework for the study of managing and management.

Scott Grills, Professor, is a sociologist at Brandon University, Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. His research attends to generic social processes from a symbolic interactionist perspective. His published research has included work in the substantive areas of administration, deviance, education, health and illness, music, political life, and research methods. He has held management positions in multiple settings including faculty associations (at the local and provincial level), the performing arts, academic associations and university administration (at decanal and vice-presidential levels). He has served as the president of four organizations, including the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Robert Prus, Professor Emeritus, is a sociologist at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. A symbolic interactionist, ethnographer, and social theorist, he has been examining the conceptual and methodological connections of American pragmatist philosophy and its sociological offshoot, symbolic interactionism, with classical Greek, Latin, and interim scholarship. As part of this larger project, he has been analyzing some of Emile Durkheim's lesser known texts (on morality, education, religion, and philosophy) mindfully of their pragmatist affinities with symbolic interactionist scholarship and Aristotle's foundational emphasis on the nature of human knowing, acting, and community-based interchange.