This thesis uses an abductive research strategy to discover how individuals in a UK contact centre became first-line managers. Managers play a significant role in organisations as supervisors of staff, yet there is no general agreement as to what they do or how. Adopting an idealist ontology and a constructionist epistemology, this ethnographic project uncovered stories of becoming by using questionnaires, observations and interviews with twelve participants. The context was a private / public sector partnership to provide advice and guidance to a local community. The use by organisations of contact centres is maturing in the private sector and growing in the public sector. It is an especially important arena to explore in the UK economy as currently many contact centres that were outsourced to cheaper, high quality labour markets are returning to the UK. Analysis of data showed clearly that learning to become a first-line manager occurred throughout the life course in three distinct stages; formative development, and reflecting the values and behaviours of parents and teachers; pre-management occupational development, and the experience of being managed; and development actually in the role of a first-line manager. The thesis makes four contributions to the extant literature. Firstly, these three stages were shown to be the route in the transition from legitimate peripheral participation to mastery. Situated learning theory provides no such clarification. Secondly, learning to become a first-line manager did not necessarily change identity as many writers claim. Identities of first-line manager evolved by building on personal and occupational identities that had been developed earlier. Thirdly, teachers made a vital contribution to developing future first-line managers by affirming and strengthening family values. They also encouraged their pupils to recognise the connection between effort and gaining reward for achievement. Finally, the messy terrain of learning theory has been clarified, not as grand theory, but as mid-range theorising through a new conceptual framework. This schema synthesizes learning orientations with learning metaphors and learning viewed as a noun or a verb, and the various influences on learning from structure and agency. The four learning modes are adapt, assimilation, accommodation and aspire.

In this study, Interpretivist epistemology and abductive research strategy were used to examine transcripts of sixteen two-hour focused interviews. The research sample was a group of technical experts who assumed managerial responsibilities within their organisations (transitional managers). The subjectively perceived experiences of the transition were examined as well as the respondents' intersubjective interpretations of the transition from the organisational perspective. The aim was to explore the perceived characteristics of the transitional experience. The main findings of this study could be summarised as follows: firstly, it was found that there were three main types of transitional managers: the unwilling, the pragmatic and the eager managers. Secondly, the key motivations to take the manager role for all three categories were higher remuneration, technical peer respect and the respondent's new role as an organisational decision-maker. The third finding of this study was that there were two types of transitions, the complete transition which the majority of the eager managers went through and the technical transition which was experienced by the unwilling and the pragmatic managers. Related to that finding was the link between the type of organisation, its culture and the leadership skills required in that organisation. The fourth finding was that, irrespective of the amount of time in the manager role (six months to eleven years) or the type of transition (complete or technical), all respondents in this study continued to identify themselves as technical experts with the respondents who underwent a complete transition also seeing themselves as managers. Related to this finding was the respondents' continued identification as technical experts being largely due to their need to identify with their peers (other technical experts). The fifth major finding of this study related to a lack of career planning by the respondents and little or no succession and management development planning by the respondents' organisations. In a contribution to the theory of leadership studies, this study examined leadership as a social process, building on the existing leadership concepts and theories and putting them in a social context of subjective efforts by the researcher to interpret the respondents' transitional experiences through typification of the leadership characteristics into seven themes. The need to apply an individual contextualisation was seen as essential to understanding the transitional managers' response to their own transition. In doing so, the study has contributed towards narrowing the existing empirical literature gap on the transition processes. The contributions of this study need to be seen in the context that explorative research such as the one carried out here is not considered generalisable, as its aim was to explore and describe particular phenomena. Nevertheless, insights from this study were eight