Introduction to Sociology: Organisations

 

We shall examine how organisational work and workers are controlled and directed using different strategies and mechanisms.

 

Basic Ideas

- Harry Braverman and Richard Edwards are key thinkers.

a) Control oscillates between contradictory pressures producing two distinct approaches to work design:

i) tight management / direct control: this reduces skills to a minimum as part of a strategy to maximise control over the content, pace, quantity and quality of work:

e.g., factory work and fast-food restaurants (work dictated by machine or script).

However, this generates withdrawal, antagonism, alienation, resentment, poor motivation and quality of work.

ii) delegated control / responsible autonomy: this engages and exploits workers’ willingness, motivation, intelligence and creativity through relaxed approach to job design and enhanced discretion; it allows for a degree of workers’ autonomy in the hope of obtaining better motivation and quality of work:

e.g., professional work, artists and self-employed contract workers.

However, this may clash with management’s need to retain control over discretion, quantity and cost of labour, and reduces management authority and power.

b) The strategy of management depends on which form of control has high costs and achieves competitiveness. The dilemma for the management is to retain control without damaging levels of production.

 

The nature of industrial production

- E.P. Thompson and Michel Foucault are key thinkers

a) Labour is a distinct product, unlike apple and land. Workers require motivation and have discretion over effort. Also workers are flexible and capable of doing many tasks.

We use the term ‘labour’ in two ways:

i) ‘labour’ as in actual labour effort; and

ii) ‘labour’ as in labour time – hired to work and then required to put effort, usually through wage-effort bargain.

b) The management pursues a dual strategy:

i) control and discipline – a system of punishment, fines, suspension and firing; and

ii) consent and moral responsibility – work identity, values and ethics (e.g., Protestant work ethics, such as pride in work), career and promotion and work status.

c) The management relies on a system of surveillance both direct/formal and indirect/informal; e.g., supervisors, peer reviews and self reviews.

d) The management aims to transform a chaotic collection of labourers into a regular, orderly and predictable behaviour through various control mechanisms and organisational culture:

i) organisational rules and procedures;

ii) work routines and habits;

iii) hierarchal authority;

iv) work norms and conventions;

v) demarcated jobs and responsibilities; i.e., division of labour; and

vi) career routes.

The outcome is a bureaucratic work structure, which achieves control and direction, and where workers develop appropriate reliable attitudes towards their work, product and employers.

e) Surveillance in organisations is a key theme in Michel Foucault’s work. The arrangement of rooms, hallways and open spaces in a building can provide basic clues to how its system of authority operates. In some organisations, open settings are provided in which groups of people work collectively.

Because of the dull and repetitive nature of certain kinds of industrial work (e.g., assembly line production) regular supervision is needed to ensure that the pace of labour is sustained. The same is often true of routine work carried out by typists, where their activities are visible to their supervisors. Foucault lays great emphasis on how visibility, or lack of it, in the architectural settings of modern organisations influences and expresses patterns of authority.

Surveillance takes two forms:

i) the direct supervision of the work of subordinates by superiors; i.e., shop-floor stewards; and

ii) more subtle supervision consists of keeping files, records and case-histories of employees.

Such records are used to monitor employees’ behaviour and assess recommendation for promotion.

Of course, individuals in lower grades do not simply passively accept the surveillance to which they are subject. They find all sorts of ways to create ‘free space’ and ‘free time’ for themselves, out of sight of supervisors. People may get to look at their records, and discover means of encouraging or pressurising their superiors to write good reports about them. Middle-level supervisors often connive in this because they want to keep the trust of the workers and have to be seen to be ‘doing a good job’ when they themselves are inspected by their superiors.

f) Surveillance is connected with discipline, which refers to co-ordinated regulation of people’s behaviour. Organisations cannot operate effectively if what goes on in them is haphazard. Discipline is promoted both by the physical settings of organisations and by the precise scheduling provided by detailed timetables. Timetables regularise activities across time and space – ‘efficiently distribute bodies’. A timetable makes possible the intensive use of time and space: each can be packed with many people and many activities.