Introduction

In earlier chapters, we have seen that managers and their management instruments are blamed for exerting pressures on professional organizations and professional work. In this chapter, we will not deal with professionals on workfloors and their relations with managers, but we focus on managers themselves. Increasingly, in sectors like policing, education and healthcare, managers try to become professionals. Not so much as ‘managers’, but as ‘leaders’ of organizations that are pressurized by bureaucratic control and performance demands (e.g. Farrell & Morris 2003; Ackroyd et al. 2007).

We do this for two reasons. First and foremost, we show that the managerialization of public domains puts pressures not only on work processes, but on organizational processes as well. It becomes increasingly difficult to organize public service delivery, not so much because of npm models – which are often straightforward – but because these models are hard to implement, whilst performance expectations have intensified. Instead of seeing managers as the carriers of New Public Management and its models, we show how npm puts pressures on these very same managers. This explains why public managers want to become ‘professional leaders’; they can embrace performance expectations, and find the means for meeting them.

Secondly, we show how subsequent professionalization strategies – as coping strategies – imitate classic professionalization strategies. Managers try to build occupational spaces and professional associations that regulate managerial work. Just like traditional professionals who have institutionalized well-known forms of professional work in order to reduce work complexities and strengthen positions. Although this is done to reduce pressures on occupational groups, this in itself creates new pressures. Building spaces and establishing regulatory mechanisms is difficult, partly because managerial work is and remains ambiguous (despite clear npm models) and partly because public managers will never be ‘free’ – they are dependent on lots of other parties and stakeholders.

All in all, our basic question is, how do professionalizing public managers cope with the (managerial) pressures that are dominating public domains and their professional services? Empirically, we focus on the development of police leadership, which we see as a professionalization ‘project’ (cf. Larson 1977; Hodgson 2002; 2005), aimed at improving police organizations and the management of police work.