Thompson Work Organisations A Critical Introduction (3rd ed)

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	Identity, ideology and technologies of regulation	348
	Managerial labour and identity work	350
	Managerial misbehaviour	352
	Conclusion	354
Part III
Theorising organisations		355
	Introduction: the story so far	355
22	Resources for orthodoxy	357
	Weber, bureaucracy and rationality	357
	Durkheim, human relations and social needs	359
	Systems theory	360
23	Critical alternatives	363
	Social action theory	363
	Radical structuralism	365
	Marx and labour process theory	365
	Radical Weberianism	370
	The postmodern challenge to rationality	374
	A masculine logic?	378
24	Critical social psychologies	381
	Internal critique	381
	Marxist psychology?	382
	From critical theory to postmodernism	385
25	Theory, knowledge and practice	388
	Paradigm diversity or closure?	388
	Management and theory	392
	Beyond criticism?	394
References		396
Name index		446
Subject index		456

List of Tables and Figures

Figures

6.1	A model by Smith and Meiksins	83
11.1	The flexible specialisation hypothesis	152
11.2	A post-bureaucratic organisation?	155
11.3	Model of the flexible firm	158
14.1	‘Psychological warfare’	216
15.1	The perceptual process	223
15.2	The 3Cs model of context–content–conduct and individual
	differences	238
16.1	Learning, change and innovation	250
17.1	Context and the communication process	261
17.2	Communication openness	262
17.3	Purcell’s scheme for mapping management styles	271
18.1	Stress and performance	278
19.1	The relation between productivity and performance	297
19.2	An integrated control theory model of work motivation	308
19.3	Management control of motivating influences	311
20.1	Group development process	318
20.2	The team dimensions model	328
21.1	Dimensions of misbehaviour	353
24.1	Differences between organisational paradigms in terms of their
	attention to social and psychological dimensions of organisational life	383

Tables

1.1	Extract from Pifco Holdings plc mission statement, August 1994	9
3.1	Contents page of Industrial Psychology, ed. Charles Myers	43
7.1	Managerial functions	92
7.2	Institutionalisation of distinctive management functions at separate
	levels of management	95
12.1	Henry’s table order of service	187
18.1	Criticisms of counselling and employee assistance programmes	285
20.1	Structure of ISE before and after the change of teams	326

Acknowledgements

It should be getting easier, but it isn’t. Producing a third edition has been a lengthy and demanding process. Without the help from colleagues, friends and reviewers, it would have been a far worse one. We would like to thank Sarah Brown at Palgrave and David McDonald at Curran Publishing Services for their expertise in helping the book to see the light of day. It is less clumsy if we make our acknowledgements separately.

Paul Thompson writes:

I wrote most of the second edition during my first year of a new job at Edinburgh, and the third during an equivalent stage at Strathclyde. Rational planning is obviously not my strong point. Nevertheless colleagues at both institutions have been an invaluable source of discussion and stimulation. In this respect I cannot let the tragic death in 2000 of Harvie Ramsay go unmentioned. He was the main reason I went to Strathclyde, and I still run ideas past an imagined Harvie, for this book and anything else, to see whether they pass a credibility test.

It is a commonplace that good teaching draws on participation in research. The same can certainly be said about writing textbooks. More specifically, parts of the book have benefited considerably from my work with particular groups and individuals, and I am grateful to them for being such a stimulating source of ideas, and for allowing me to draw from materials produced in or as a background to that research. I have drawn on work on the Scottish Spirits industry by Tricia Findlay, Alan McKinlay, Abigail Marks and Jim Hine, particularly with regard to the material on teams and on innovation. Chapters discussing knowledge work and the ‘New Economy’ draw extensively from my collaboration with Chris Warhurst, and more recently with George Callaghan on call centres. Joint work with both Chris Smith and Stephen Ackroyd has helped shape those sections of the book that deal with theoretical resources.

Alongside and beyond matters of collaboration, I would like to thank Johanna Hofbauer, John Jackson, Inge Runar Edvardsson, Stephen Ackroyd, Alan McKinlay and Chris Warhurst (and three anonymous reviewers) for reading and commenting on all or part of the book. Producing a book is also a profoundly practical affair, and I would like to thank everyone in the HRM office at Strathclyde, particularly Linda Hill, for their support. Finally, I would like to thank Gillian Pallis for her comments and support. No doubt she will be extremely glad, as I am, to see the back of the book, at least for another few years.

Dave McHugh writes:

I would like to thank my family for their forbearance and often exclusive use of the family computer, and a special thanks to my Dad, John McHugh, for just being the best. Thanks again to all of my colleagues who have helped in the past and in particular to Hugh Willmott, David Knights, David Collinson, Martin Corbett and Gibson Burrell, whose work has so much helped to shape my perspective on organisational behaviour. This time round, distinguished mentions in dispatches are due to Linda Alker, now at the University of Derby, and to Alison Alker and Deb Groves from the University of Central Lancashire, for being brave enough to work and write with me. Alex Haslam of the Australian National University deserves thanks for allowing Paul and me an early look at his excellent text on social identity theory, of which I would have made even more use given the time.

Introduction

Our aim in writing the first edition of Work Organisations was to provide a critical alternative to the standard, often American, texts that still predominated in the 1980s, as well as to some of the derivative British versions. These ‘standard’ texts tended to combine a narrow and prescriptive orientation to issues of management, structure and organisational design, with a behavioural agenda dealing with issues such as personality and perception, where a focus on the individual appeared to have little relationship to the more ‘structural’ material. Since that time, more alternative texts have followed us into that gap in the market. There are now conferences on ‘critical management’. All this is to be welcomed, but we still think this book has something distinctive to say, and a third edition gives us an opportunity to expand its scale and scope yet again.

There is a danger that ‘critical’ simply means the production of variations on an essentially managerial agenda. For us it has meant aiming to balance exposition and evaluation of mainstream writing and research with an attempt to bring together the large, but often fragmented, body of writings from organisation and management theory, labour process analysis, feminism, industrial sociology and social psychology

– where they are radical and relevant to the study of work organisations. Any orientation of this sort by definition has to be interdisciplinary, pluralistic and pragmatic in the choice of sources it draws on for inspiration.

The biggest problem we encountered was the question how to link the broadly sociological and more behavioural material. We did not pretend that any form of grand integration was possible. Our aim was to ensure that the discussions in the two main parts of the book were complementary in the kind of analysis used and issues discussed. We felt strongly that organisations are places in which attempts to shape the subjectivity and identity of employees are central to the purposes of management, and that this provided an important bridge and common focus between debates in the different chapters. We have continued to look for ways of integrating material, a result of which is that this edition has two new chapters, on teamwork and on learning and innovation in organisations, which provide opportunities to bring debates and approaches together.

This new edition also gives us the opportunity further to enhance the accessibility of the book for readers. Our main innovation this time round is to break up the material into more convenient chunks. There are now 26 chapters compared with the previous 12. Within this change of format, we are still trying to balance an introduction to key debates, with sufficient depth and reflection to engage with issues and ideas in a meaningful way. We have substantially revised and extended old favourites and included whole chapters on gender and on international management issues for the first time. Current debates on surveillance, managing diversity, knowledge work, high performance work systems and learning in organisations are introduced and evaluated.

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Structure of the book

It is worth reminding readers at the outset that a textbook is not like a novel. There is no narrative that requires you to start at the beginning and work through chapter by chapter until you find out ‘who done it?’ There are three parts to the book. The first focuses on the areas traditionally dealt with by organisation theory and more sociological and structural writings, the second on predominantly psychological material, while the third deals with more complex theoretical issues. Within these parts, most chapters have been designed to be read as stand-alone expositions and commentaries on theory and practice. We have tried hard continually to signpost links backwards and forwards from chapter to chapter.

Having said all that, it makes some sense to read Chapter 1 first, mainly because it tries to give a basic sense of the kind of approach taken in the book as a whole. It seeks to explore three main questions. Why are we interested in studying organisations? How should they be studied? And what are the general concepts and principles available to do so? These objects are achieved by contrasting the domain assumptions of mainstream and critical approaches. By this we mean some of the basic ways in which rival perspectives have looked at organisations and society. At this stage the idea is to keep it fairly simple. We do not look at theory or theories in depth, but instead at some of the underlying and underpinning assumptions. The more adventurous reader could go directly to Part III and follow this through, but it is not necessary to do this in order to follow the substantive discussions found in the intervening chapters, where we build up an understanding of theory and research in a more incremental way.

A great weakness of much organisational writing is the failure to locate analysis in its historical context. Chapter 2 seeks to show how the major characteristics of large-scale organisations in the twentieth and early twenty-first century – control, hierarchy and bureaucracy – came into being. In Chapters 3 and 4 we identify the origins and developments of the best-known ‘classical’ theories of organisation, notably Taylorism, Weber and the human relations movement. The focus is firmly on the attendant practices and their use by management, in the periods when the ideas emerged, the legacies left for later eras, and the continuities with management and organisation today.

Such practices, however, were never universal, at least not in the same form. A recurrent theme of the book is that different organising logics are embedded in contrasting sectoral, national and other institutional frameworks. For example, what is defined as management in Britain and North America is not necessarily the model elsewhere. This highlights the importance of the environment of work organisations. Yet such environments are often dealt with in a limited way, certainly once markets and technologies have been discussed. Chapter 5 first outlines and evaluates the mainstream literature, including contingency theory and population ecology. It then focuses on the new international environment, which gives us an opportunity to look in Chapter 6 at accounts of globalisation and its effects, and more recent institutional theories of organisation. This is part of a much wider analysis in this edition of issues of comparative organisation and international management.

The study of management rightly occupies a central place in the study of work organisations. But much of the writing has a narrow and technical conception of the nature of management and its activities. Chapters 7 and 8 contrast the extensive body of knowledge on management in mainstream literatures with radical perspectives and

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research focusing on analysis of management as control and as a labour process. A discussion of the extent to which management operates strategically is an essential part of this section. Traditionally, because organisations were conceived of as cohesive and unitary, the related theme of power was much neglected in mainstream writing. At best it was projected as a series of micro struggles, analogous to ‘office politics’. Chapter 9 examines this literature and contrasts it with models of power drawn from radical theories. Of the latter, concepts drawn from Foucault and his emphasis on disciplinary power have become particularly influential in recent years, and such theorising is explained and critiqued. Foucauldian perspectives have made their mark in analysis of gender and sexuality, but the issues go far wider than this. Organisations are gendered in many of their everyday ways of operation. Though this is a theme that runs throughout the book, Chapter 10 enables a closer examination of the process of gendering organisational analysis, with a particular emphasis on the ‘glass ceiling’ debate.

In recent times many theorists have asserted that a ‘paradigm break’ in work systems and organisational structures has taken place under the influence of new environmental challenges. Successive models of flexible specialisation, post-bureaucracy and the knowledge economy have tried to articulate these changes. These are complex issues across a huge variety of territories. For this edition we experimented with a variety of formats to capture these debates. In the end, we found that the most straightforward was to divide the material into two chapters: the first giving an exposition of those accounts claiming the existence of a New Economy and new organisations; the second giving space to commentaries and critiques that emphasise continuity with the past as well as change. Chapters 11 and 12 therefore really do need to be read as one section.

In the 1980s, corporate culture was perhaps the main talking point in managerial literature, and was put forward as the key factor for business success. Though new themes have arisen, this ‘symbolic turn’ in organisational theory remains influential with theorists and practitioners alike. Chapter 13 looks critically at the merchandising of corporate cultures and examines whether it is an attempt to constitute a new form of ‘organisation man’. Linking the debate to other contemporary issues such the rise of human resource management, the chapter examines the extent to which the management of cultures can be successful in generating commitment and internalising values.

In Part II we have likewise increased the number of chapters, for two main reasons. First, we have responded to readers’ comments by trying to improve ease of use in making topics and issues easier to locate within a more traditional structure. Second, we have tried to consolidate what were often separate strands of argument in the second edition, for example on subjectivity, stress, motivation and groups, into single chapters. In doing this we have had to increase the number of linking references to other chapters in order to maintain our argument that all of the topics explored are accounts of interdependent processes. Similarly we continue to revisit many of the areas covered in Part I, but viewing them from an organisational behaviour (OB) perspective. Readers will note for example some repetition of assertions of the relation of psychological knowledge to managerial ideology and practice. This overlap in the issues we investigate in Parts I and II is to some extent a recognition that, since many readers will only dip into the book and not read the ‘whole story’ as intended, these points must perforce be made often. Thus, as with Chapter 1, we recommend that

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readers try to take on board the contextual discussion of what we term the ‘subjective factor’, which has now been gathered into Chapter 14.

We start out in this chapter by introducing the theme of Part II, which is to assess the nature and adequacy of the mainstream agenda for an understanding of our experience of organisational life, and how this shapes the construction of the identities through which we face it. We examine the deficiencies of behavioural approaches and how major theoretical areas within OB have been incorporated into agendas of regulation and control. Since we began Work Organisations, the content of texts in the area has moved to address many of the issues we have raised and the wider perspectives we have promoted. However the major foundations of OB are still informed primarily from the perspective of ‘organisational psychology’, using the subject divisions within social psychology without consistently reflecting their more humanistic origins. As such, OB is still generally subordinated to its agency in legitimating, developing and refining the social practices and techniques through which subjective identities are continuously recreated in images appropriate to the relations of social production. Thus we move on to how strategies of control are supported by what we term technologies of regulation before considering and defining the elements of the ‘subjective factor’ in the study of organisations. These are manifested in the experiences of organisational participants and in the identities through which they transact with others in organisational environments. Our examination of these issues as a whole is viewed through psychological approaches that tend to focus mainly on behaviour as opposed to experience. The intention here is not however to ignore the sociological and structural accounts of subjectivity available in the areas covered in Part I, but to indicate how a closer articulation of structural and behavioural explanations can benefit the understanding of subjectivity in organisations.

In Chapter 15 we introduce the topics of perception, attitudes and personality in order to uncover the reciprocal assumptions made by others and ourselves in the production of our social and personal world. Perceptual processing and categorisation underlie all of the psychological processes we discuss in Part II and lead us through theories of causal judgement in attribution theory to a consideration of attitudes in their relations to behaviour. The importance of the gaining of public commitment to attitude change provides the linkage to a scrutiny of both personality theory and its role in organisational selection, and the process of acquiring a social identity.

Chapter 16 starts by presenting an expanded examination of learning, beginning with the adequacy of learning theories in the explanation of socialisation processes and moving on to look at roles, skills and learning styles. The relation of learning to development initiatives brings us to the phenomenon of the learning organisation and how it is constructed and differentiated from the wider notion of organisational learning. The role of the learning organisation in supporting the implementation of new working practices gives us the theme underwriting a wholly new section on change. We continue to use learning and development initiatives to exemplify the treatment of change in the organisational literature, particularly in relation to the psychology of innovation and creativity. The possibilities of sustainable innovation are explored and questioned on the basis of their dependence on the subjective creativity of individuals who do not always benefit from the change processes in which organisational innovation is implicated. From here we move on to consider the interpersonal processes that to such a great extent are seen as crucial to successful change and innovation. Chapter 17 deals with communication and leadership and now includes a new

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section on interpersonal influence linking the ideological deployment of communications to the support which leadership supplies to the maintenance of managerial identity. Leadership in terms of personal characteristics is critiqued in favour of models that emphasise both the role-based nature of the phenomena and the reliance on networks and the psychological processes of attribution to maintain leadership and mobilise the consent of others.

Chapter 18, which brings together accounts of stress, recognises how this most contentious of psychological reactions can lead both to deleterious consequences and subjective sustenance for those who endure it. Starting with the classic notions of role stress we move quickly into a critique of modern stress management techniques, with particular attention to counselling and employee assistance. A new section on emotion management reflects developments in the study of emotional labour and links to a discussion of stress and systems of control. Chapter 19 brings together two strands of argument from the second edition. First is an exploration of the classic content and process theories of motivation, leading into an examination of the adequacy of concepts such as goals and motivation itself for understanding organisational experience. Second, we use motivation theories as a base for the investigation of the mobilisation of commitment in modern work organisations. The focus on motivation and commitment is then used to explore the internalisation of self-controls and provide linkages to the study of groups in Chapter 20.

Older material on group formation, socialisation, cohesion and resistance is brought together as an introduction to a close examination of the phenomenon of teamworking. Teams, as discussed in Chapters 11 and 12, are at the forefront of contemporary work reform, and we examine the extent to which teams can mobilise the commitment of members before moving on to a discussion of the technical, governance and normative dimensions of teamwork. We close this chapter with a critical reflection of the way in which groups and teams are often erroneously conflated in the managerial and HRM literatures.

Chapter 21 retains the basic format of its predecessor, returning to consider in more detail the nature of identity, and the contrasting approaches and resources a redefined agenda would need to focus on to better address issues of subjectivity. In particular we address social relations, such as those of domination and gender, that are central features of work organisation. A new section on impression management leads into the issue of how subjectivity is experienced, structured and transformed within organisations. This is explored through the medium of the ‘identity work’ performed by organisational participants as a response to pressures on the identities they secure for themselves. These are viewed firstly from the context of the individual, then through a re-examination of the manner in which managerial identity work acts to structure the experience of everyone in organisations, regardless of hierarchical position.

Part III returns to the territory of the broader theorising of organisations. The discussion draws on and links to some of the substantive issues explored in previous chapters, as well as introducing new themes such as agency and structure. Chapters 22 to 23 examine in detail the theoretical resources drawn on in mainstream and critical writing. The question of rationality is a central one in both traditions and, through an examination of new, postmodern analyses of organisations, we explore the issues at stake and conclude that rationalisation remains a fundamental principle of organisational life and that rational enquiry, in a modified form, is an indispensable

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part of the theorising process. Chapter 24 consolidates previous material on critical and Marxist psychologies and adds a discussion of technologies of regulation in relation to modern human resource strategies. Chapter 25 ends the book with a wider discussion on the nature and uses of organisational knowledge. How do theorists using different paradigms speak to each other? How do managers use theory in practice? How can participants at work learn from past and present to create more democratic, as well as more efficient, organisations?

Part I