Kotarskaya Julia
Paul Thompson and Patricia Findlay
Changing the people: social engineering in the contemporary workplace
Corporate culture’s theory
Modes of workplace regulation:
|
formerly |
now |
- technical and bureaucratic Þ
approach
- treating in a regimented and Þ
calculative manner
- command and control Þ
- loyalty Þ
- language of control Þ
|
culture and the management of meaning
winning employees’ hearts and minds
- vision and values
- commitment
- language of seduction
|
Corporate culture means a provision of normative and behavioural scripts/ Values are passed through the organization via mission statements, documentation and meetings.
Many large companies try to undertake generalized change programmes, wrapped up in "changing the culture" rhetoric
There are two kinds of cultural rhetoric:
- Culture signified creating a vision or set of shared values that would guide the change process.
- Culture signified en inherited tradition or set of practices, normally identified as in need of transformation
The concept of corporate culture has passed through three stages:
- an impoverishing of the top-down conception;
- culture as a part of management’s armory of control;
- culture as the main currency of the new social relations.
In 1980s cultural approach was developed by Ouchi, Pascale, Athos, Peters, Waterman, Deal and Kennedy.
Critique:
the cultural tern in the workplace, though important, is not as novel, significant or effective as proponents believe.
From a historical point of view, there is a recurring interest in workplace social engineering: capital has always attempted in different ways to "manufacture the employee". There are two examples in conformation of the previous statement:
- "welfare work" program in the 1920s in the USA;
- tradition of "corporate paternalism" in Britain.
The changes in principles of management forms a cycle and looks as follows:
- after 1945 – management, which is based upon family networks and continuity of labor supply;
- 1960s – "hard system" and formalistic, procedural processes;
- 1980s – cultural strategies;
- 1990s – a confusion of downsizing, delayering, work intensification, more calculative, contractual employment relationships and the warm, fuzzy culture rhetoric of the 1980s.
Strong claim (current managerial initiatives and organizational change processes are producing a "productive subject") has weak evidences, because:
- assumptions about employees are read off from managerial subjectivity
- labour as a subject has gone missing
- we can’t observe any concrete effects on employee subjectivities or souls;
- there are natural limits to how fare we can get "inside people’s heads"
The basic questions for modern researchers are the following:
- the conflation of changing values and practices
- a broadening of the current narrow concerns with identity, to have a capacity to move identity work beyond a purely discourse-based framework; and to re-emphasize labour as knowledgeable agency or agencies acting to transform their conditions of existence;
- new ways of exploring the relationships between behaviour and values, including the ways in which employees draw on symbolic resources generated from new management initiatives