Mastering Techniques or Brokering Knowledge? Middle Managers in Germany, Great Britain and Italy Giuseppe Delmestri and Peter Walgenbach Abstract What do middle managers do? Based on a conceptualization of knowledge as the capacity to act in response to uncertain, complex and ambiguous environmental stimuli, we analyse the role of middle managers in Germany, Great Britain and Italy as holders of different types of knowledge in relation to national institutions such as the education system, the system of industrial relations and the career system. We identify the common role of middle managers in the three countries as the responsibility to both maintain a positive social environment and to handle exceptions and solve unexpected problems. German and Italian managers are directly involved in the solution of technical problems, while their British counterparts act as brokers of technical specialized competences. Italian firms differ from German ones in that the role of middle managers is less formalized. Keywords: knowledge, institutional theory, middle management, leadership, careers Recent economic developments have refocused attention on middle management and its specific knowledge domains. Middle management was and still is the scapegoat of many modern management concepts, such as lean management and downsizing (Rabin 1999), although some researchers such as Nonaka (1988) and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) accord it a pivotal role in transforming tacit into explicit knowledge through a middle-up-down process. Downsizing has been referred to as the dead end of middle management, either because some of its responsibilities were pushed down the hierarchy, or because they were given to higher management (Rabin 1999). The delegation of middle-management responsibilities to lower hierarchical levels is argued to be related to the advent of so-called ‘knowledge work’ (Butera et al. 1997), which would absorb the skills and responsibilities of middle management. However, a first look at the literature on management reveals that there is a dearth of research on middle management, in terms of its roles, functions and knowledge domains. Furthermore, different views exist as to how the boundaries of the concept of knowledge work should be defined. Blackler et al. (1993), for example, emphasize Reich’s account of knowledge workers as ‘symbolic analysts’, as people who trade in the manipulation of symbols, combining technical insight with marketing know-how and strategic and financial expertise. Starbuck (1992) defines knowledge workers as possessing Organization Studies 26(2): 197–220 ISSN 0170–8406 Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA & New Delhi) 197 Authors name www.egosnet.org/os DOI: 10.1177/0170840605049464 Giuseppe Delmestri SDA, Bocconi, Milan and University of Bergamo, Italy Peter Walgenbach University of Erfurt, Germany