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Examples of these ‘wellness’ programmes include Pepsico’s multi-million dollar ‘fitness’ centre, and the stress management programmes developed by the Trustee Savings Bank and Digital Equipment in the UK (Cooper, 1984). The ‘Staywell’ programme and Employee Advisory Resource of the Control Data Corporation in the US offered 24-hour advice on assessing health risks, medical screening and health education to help people to change life and work styles in healthy directions (Lucas, 1986; McKenna, 2000). ‘Companies have a major stake in promoting a healthier life style for employees, because of the potential benefits in reduced insurance costs, decreased absenteeism, improved productivity and better morale’ (McKenna, 1987: 403). McKenna (2000: 626–9) refers to a number of UK and US-based health promotion programmes, but also cites Ivancevich and Matteson to the extent that ‘quite a large percentage of employees who took part in wellness programmes stopped doing the exercises and showed an inclination to return to their old lifestyles’ (2000: 629).

In contrast to the wellness view, the Labour Research Department (LRD) concluded that ‘only a minority of organisations are tackling the problem directly’ and that the main effort is towards management rather than prevention:

Where they exist management ‘stress control‘ programmes peddle individual victim-blaming approaches to stress problems that in reality can only be solved by changing workplace organisation and relations. (LRD, 1988: 2)

This individualisation of organisational problems as personal pathological reactions is effectively demonstrated by the use of stress inventories in the diagnosis and ‘treatment’ of stress. Such inventories commonly rely on identifying the extent to which the individual fits the ‘Type A’ behavioural pattern which Rosenman et al. (1964) labelled coronary-prone behaviour owing to the correlation with increased rates of coronary heart disease. The traits associated with Type A behaviour include achievement orientation, status insecurity, time urgency, competitiveness and aggression, traits often erroneously associated with managerial or leadership ability. The inventories themselves are problematic, as indicated by Selye who claimed that ‘all stress inventories in common use are somewhat flawed because they fail to give enough weight to individual differences’ (Selye, in Cherry, 1978: 63). It is likely, however, that the mere use of a stress inventory does serve to educate and inform respondents as to the nature of their problems. In the main, attempts to modify Type A behaviour tend to concentrate not on relieving the source of the strain but on modifying behaviour through goal-setting and time-management techniques, so that the stress is in effect being actively managed though personal self-control. The result of this is a reduction of the strain felt by the individual into a managerial control variable determining fitness to the required organisational role.

This is further demonstrated by the differential focus on coping in mainstream accounts. Again the emphasis is not on dealing directly with the problem but with emotion-focused coping and what is termed cross-resistance. This latter is the notion that increasing adaptive capacities in one area, for example health and fitness, will increase resistance to other stressors, and is the foundation of the corporate wellness programmes discussed earlier. Emotion-focused coping is seen mainly in the popularity of relaxation training, and indirectly in what is possibly the most common corporate response to stress, counselling. Relaxation training and its derivatives including meditation and biofeedback are individual-centred techniques using exercises to reduce muscle tension and reduce stress through improved relaxation and identification of

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stress symptoms. Murphy and Sorenson (1988), in a quasi-experimental study of highway maintenance workers who were given either relaxation or biofeedback training, found that although the workers felt better both physiologically and mentally, the expected improvements in absenteeism and productivity were not manifested. What they did conclude however was that:

Stress management may be most useful as an adjunct to organisational change interventions e.g. increased participation in decision-making, improved worker autonomy,task identity and feedback and implementation of flexible work schedules. (Murphy and Sorenson, 1988: 181)

Stress counselling

Counselling is an even less direct approach to stress, and at its best is effected by ‘cognitive redefinition’ of the ‘problem’ in much in the same way that psychoanalysis requires patients to redefine their identity and world-view within a framework that makes their difficulties understandable. However, this kind of technique, like the ‘talking cure’ of psychoanalysis, would be expected to work best with long-term chronic problems and would not be cost-effective on a large scale due to the intense one-to-one relationship required. At its worst, employee counselling often consists of a short interview with a hired-in consultant in response to episodic or acute problems which cannot be solved in this fashion. What is taking place is, in effect, the location of the problem in the context of ‘organisational reality’, as in, ‘you need to pull your socks up or you’ll be in trouble’. There is nothing new here, of course. Baritz’s interpretation of the Hawthorne study points out that the outcomes of the research on employee counselling led some to the conclusion that ‘workers did not have compelling objective problems’ (1960: 201). The rationale for this, according to a counsellor cited by Baritz, was that their grievances could be dealt with by allowing them to ‘talk them out’:

It may not be even necessary to take any action on them. All that they require is a patient and courteous hearing,supplemented when necessary,by an explanation of why nothing can be done. . . . It is not always necessary to yield to the worker’s requests in order to satisfy them. (Baritz, 1960: 201)

It is the ability of this form of counselling to address, albeit on a superficial level, individual differences and subjectivity that makes it highly cost-effective in the stress management stakes, with the added benefit that it again persuades the individual that it is his or her problem. However it is unlikely to actually remove the source of the experienced strain and does not necessarily increase adaptive capacities. The role of the organisation in producing unhealthy systems and conditions of work is in danger of being ignored. In its place we get systems reinforcing the self-attribution of stress and anxiety as personal problems to be coped with in the fulfilment of our various roles rather than structural issues to be contested.

Employee assistance programmes

Such systems are in direct contrast to the early welfarist tradition (cf. Hollway) of industrial psychology, which focused on fatigue and working conditions and on

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organisational and job design as solutions. The modern focus is less likely to lead to environmental attributions of the causes of stress, and thus defuses possible sources of hostility and resistance to the organisation. Work in this area concentrates on the operation of employee assistance programmes, or EAPs, which manage the care of employees. Over 2 million employees are covered by EAPs in the UK according to the Employee Assistance Programmes Association (IPD, 1997). They state that ‘the rapid increase reflects the growing appreciation amongst employers that, as stress levels increase, an EAP is an attractive staff benefit which also has advantages for the employer’. EAPs are provided either in-house or by external contractors, the reasons given for their introduction being given in surveys by Cooper (cited in Magnus, 1995) and Berridge et al. (1997: 188–92) as primarily humanistic, helping employees deal with change and stress and giving the image of a ‘caring organisation’. Alker and McHugh (2000) argue that EAPs are primarily introduced for instrumental reasons, dealing with the consequences of change and the introduction of new working practices, and that:

there may at least be a ‘residual role’ for welfare and/or counselling in modern HRM practice as evinced by reported difficulties in handling counselling and similar problems and even in the enthusiasm for the EAP itself. In this sense managers and their organisations could be seen to be turning to EAPs in much the same way that they turn to personality tests in the selection and recruitment process – not because they work but because they provide an objectivised framework for the activity and a reduction in uncertainty for the sponsors of the activity. (Alker and McHugh, 2000: 316)

Wider critiques of EAPs reviewed by Carroll (1996: 19–21) are summarised in Table 18.1. These criticisms, coupled with increasing concerns about the cost of EAPs, have led to a focus on external, agency-led ‘managed care’, often run from remote call centres according to Bacharach et al. (1996). These systems ‘have become institutionalised in the American workplace as a mechanism for managing employees’ personal problems’ (1996: 262), with EAP professionals becoming ‘essentially management personnel’ (1996: 264). The response to this according to Bacharach et al. has been the rise of peer-based member assistance programmes, or MAPs, sponsored and run by labour unions and having greater levels of commitment to collective identity, peer support and issues of confidentiality. Although there is limited evidence of MAP-style programmes in the UK there is also evidence that systems of managed care are becoming more cost-attractive to UK institutions. At a meeting of the Scottish branch of the UK Employee Assistance Professionals Association (1998), a senior HRM director of a major Scottish bank and a director of a US/UK counselling provider responded to questions on managed care by saying that in future his organisation wished to focus its efforts on the ‘twenty most problematic areas’ identified by its counselling services. Apart from horrifying the counsellors present on the basis of the ethical issues of confidentiality raised, this response highlighted the fact that EAPs are about managing costs and not employee stress.

To deal directly with stress requires problem-focused coping, where individuals or groups might actively design their own working environments and methods, negotiate their own roles or acquire new capacities. Such an approach, though highly effective in managing stress, would necessitate the vertical integration of control over work design

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C r i t i c i s m s o f c o u n s e l l i n g a n d e m p l o y e e a s s i s t a n c e			TA B L E 1 8 . 1
p r o g r a m m e s
Involves:	Leading to:	Seen as:
Individualising problems	Politics and faction fights	Tool of management
Decontextualising problems	Shelving responsibility to	Weakness
Making problems apolitical	employees	Deflecting justified
Emotion management and	Absolution from	emotions
social control	compassion	Not integrated into
Ignoring environment/causes	Not facing implications	organisation
	of action/policy	Anti-collective

Source: L. Alker and D. McHugh (2000) ‘Human Resource Maintenance? Organisational Rationales for the Introduction of Employee Assistance Programmes’, Journal of Managerial Psychology, 15. 4: 303–23, based on M. Carroll (1996) Workplace Counselling, London: Sage.

and costs, and is consequently not highly popular. External experts could be brought in to design similar programmes that might have more wide-ranging effects than approaches based on emotion-focused coping, but costs would still be high, as with job redesign. Furthermore, the likelihood of being able to deal adequately with individual differences, as with home/work conflicts, would be low. They would also work less well with situational stress factors such as role conflicts, as these are in general less directly identifiable as consequences of the organisation of work than are environmental stress factors (noise, chemicals or working with VDUs). This is precisely because they are attributed to an individual’s incapacity to cope with the demands of work. The work of nurses and social workers provides a good example of organisations exploiting a person’s ability to cope with untenable situations to the limit, and only becoming concerned when the rate of turnover or lack of efficiency of skilled staff becomes difficult to manage.

Contesting stress

In contrast to the stress management techniques outlined above, the Labour Research Department offers guidelines for dealing with stress on a collective basis, urging union members to research stress-related workplace issues which could be negotiated with management, and to communicate results to all members and appropriate officers and institutions. The negotiation strategy itself gives the following advice:

•Concentrate on one, preferably winnable, stress issue to gain confidence.

•Do not be afraid to consider a long-term strategy.

•Don’t think of stress in isolation from other workplace hazards and issues.

(LRD, 1988: 22)

Such collective attempts to alter conditions for the individual and the organisation are in direct contrast to the individual-centred methods that invoke the ‘psychological fallacy’ that ‘since the organisation is made of individuals, we can change the organisation by

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changing its members’ (Katz and Kahn, 1978: 391). The LRD approach again highlights stress as an issue of workplace control, not only of job performance, but also of personal lifestyle in support of this. Commentators such as Steele and also Handy support this view in relation to worker assistance and health programmes, while Orlans notes that counselling often only deals with problems at the individual level (see Wheeler and Lyon, 1992: 48–9). For models of stress which go beyond individual level approaches and account for perceived levels of control, we need to go to work such as that of Karasek and Theorell (1990) or Fisher (1986). Karasek and Theorell link job strain to dimensions of demand from the situation, and the level of control, autonomy or jurisdiction discretion available to the individual in the workplace.

High job demands and loads can be perceived positively in situations of high control, but where control is low high demand is associated with strain. The outcome of this is that in hierarchical, authoritarian conditions, the best available coping response may be the reduction of effort (see Fisher, 1986: 157, 238), which raises the possibility of Taylor’s ‘systematic soldiering’ as a coping mechanism. Karasek and Theorell (1990) also give evidence that low levels of social support may exacerbate the relation between high demands and low control. Wheeler and Lyon (1992: 47) note that Karasek’s approach, ‘effectively recognises the relationship between the subjective experience of stress and the social conditions which may give rise to it’. Fisher takes this a step further in examining coping responses to stressful conditions as strategic responses, the range of which are constrained by life experiences and personal style. The implication of this trend in research is that not only are work and organisational designs significant sources of strain, but they may also limit our adaptive capacities to cope with it.

In studying stress at work we must not, however, forget the person who feels the emotions and strain created. Fineman claims that though organisations can be seen as ‘emotional arenas’, the persons within them are presented as ‘emotionally anorexic’, their emotions reduced to managerial control variables, ‘the feelings of being organised, doing work and organising are hard to detect’ (1993: 9). At the same time he asserts that stress has ‘come out’ as an issue, in that counselling is at least provided by some and also that there is a tacit acknowledgement that ‘being sick or off work for reasons of stress is acceptable – up to a point’ (1993: 219).

Emotional labour

The psychological pressures on individuals have been well documented, not only in terms of pressures to mould behaviour and identity, but in terms of the intrapsychic conflicts they can produce. Interpersonal conflicts and conflicts between role expectations are seen as causative factors in producing anxiety and stress. An example of the conflicts which fulfilling a role may induce is seen in Hochschild’s (1983) notion of emotional labour. Hochschild characterises emotional labour as ‘a covert resource, like money or knowledge, or physical labour, which companies need to make the job done’ (1993: xii). This was originally identified in occupations where individuals have to manage their emotions in order to serve the commercial purposes of the enterprise. Other writers on emotional labour (see Fineman, 1993) have extended such notions to the full range of behaviour in work organisations and most recently to resistance (see Sturdy and Fineman, 2001 for a comprehensive discussion). It should be noted that emotional labour is about the valorisation of human capital; it is not a ‘catch-all’

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phrase for anything to do with emotions and work (Fineman, 1993). Furthermore, Hochschild does make some differentiation between ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ labour, a construct that could link emotional labour directly to the questions of identity and impression management discussed in Chapter 21.

Using flight attendants and bill collectors, Hochschild (1983) showed how people are constrained to maintain emotions in their work – friendliness for the stewardess; suspension of trust and sympathy for the debt-collector – which relate only to the requirements of the job. This requirement extends beyond individuals and includes collective emotional labour:

It is not simply individuals who manage their feelings in order to do a job; whole organisations have entered the game. The emotion management that keeps the smile on Delta Airlines competes with the emotion management that keeps the same smile on United and TWA. (Hochschild, 1983: 185–6)

In such situations, where management attempts to mould the social identities of individuals and groups into images consonant with commercial demands, people often become estranged from their own feelings. As an interdependent process, emotional labour requires both the collaboration of the client and the adjustment of personal feelings to accommodate the client’s demands. For the emotional labourer, identification with the job itself can lead to difficulties in making constant adjustments to situations, and considerable socio-emotional costs may be incurred. Work in the ‘caring’ professions, for example, requires that people identify closely with their work or clients, and also that they exercise selfand emotional control over their role-based work. This may bring them into conflict with the levels of commitment required in their work, in that they have to constrain emotional responses to an extent that has serious consequences for their mental health and social relationships.

In order to respond to conflicts between commitment and capacity to act, people may burn out. Storlie (1979) argues that this occurs where the individuals confront an intractable reality that cannot be changed, so that the only effective response is to change themselves. The end result is that they continue to ‘go through the motions’, but remove any emotional or identity investment they had in their work. This acts as a defence mechanism against the stresses that may result from the conflicts between their own tendencies and their role demands. Emotional labour can thus lead the individual into a removal of emotion, labour being reduced to mere activity. This may have some benefits to the employer, but for the employee such numbing of emotional response leads to a loss of a central source of meaning for them. (See Kunda, 1992: 198–204, for an extended discussion.)

Emotion management

The control of labour in emotional terms has been explored in a number of case studies in the service sector, including a study of call centre work at Telebank by Callaghan and Thompson (2002). They use a distinction from Bolton (2000) which differentiates between pecuniary (according to reward) emotional labour, and philanthropic (according to endowment) emotional labour, which they illustrate in Telebank workers as follows: ‘At the weekend, on a Saturday, you get old women or men phoning and they just want to talk. It’s great, I love getting these calls.’

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That such chats require emotional labour is evident, but these emotions are not directly part of the remunerated emotional labour enacted in normal dealings with clients, as in Hochschild’s original conception. Rather, they are given as what Bolton terms a gift, which could also be given to others as an ‘extra’, even in formal organisational interactions. However, at the same time as such giving such emotional gifts, Telebank workers have to be aware of the other forms of labour they perform:

I’m quite happy to chat to them, but it’s always in the back of your mind, got to watch my average handling time. I think you set a better example for the bank. (Callaghan and Thompson, 2002)

This example serves to illustrate the other two categories of emotional labour which Bolton distinguishes: these are prescriptive (according to organisational or professional rules of conduct) and presentational (according to general social rules) emotion management, reflecting the demands of the work itself (handling times) and those of the culture that surrounds it (identification with the image of the bank). Bolton observes that ‘Hochschild’s concept recognises that employees’ private emotional systems have been appropriated by management as a renewable resource’ (2000: 163), but makes her categorisations on the basis that Hochschild does not recognise emotional labour in the ‘unmanaged spaces’ in organisations. It is not the nature of emotional labour which changes in Bolton’s formulation, but its range and scope in terms of what people have do to their emotions in order to survive and cope with their work. Philanthropic emotional labour is especially important here, as it illustrates how part of emotion management actually contributes to employees being able to make space for the expression of their own identities, or possibly to just get a breather in the relentlessly computer-paced modern workplace.

A more utilitarian typology of emotional labour is given by Mann (1999) in her discussion of what she terms the ‘have a nice day’ (HAND) culture endemic in the service sector. The HAND culture is of one what Mann claims are a number of scripted cultures which companies are ‘frantically foisting’ on their staff and customers (1999: 38). These scripted cultures and their associated display rules are discussed further in Chapter 21. The typology of emotional labour Mann puts forward is based on the work of Briner (1995) and reflects the fact that emotional display in work does not always match our own feelings, nor is it always in line with social and organisational expectations. On this basis emotional labour can be categorised as:

•Emotional harmony, where ‘displayed emotion is the same as expected emotion and felt emotion’.

•Emotional dissonance, where ‘displayed emotion is the same as expected emotion but different from felt emotion’.

•Emotional deviance, where ‘displayed emotion is the same as felt emotion but different from expected emotion’.

(Mann, 1999: 68–9)

Of these, emotional dissonance is the only area where true emotional labour is involved. In comparison with Bolton, all three of Mann’s categories could be classed as pecuniary, whereas only emotional harmony could be philanthropic in organisational terms. Both harmony and dissonance would be both prescriptive and presentational, while emotional deviance would be neither, and might better be classed as a coping mechanism

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or low-level burn out. Mann has extended her work on emotional labour through the Mann Emotional Requirements Inventory (MERI),which claims to ‘work out how much emotional labour you perform, on average, in your day-to-day working life’ (Mann and Ward Dutton, 1999: 115).

With the kind of typologies put forward by Bolton and Mann, we may be seeing the first step in the process of emotional labour being seen as a necessary skill in employees. As such, it might be operationalised into a technology of regulation to be accredited and appraised alongside all of the other explicit and tacit work skills appropriated as competencies by management and OB practitioners. The Mann inventory is at present a self-report technique, and we do not yet have to fill in ‘emotional development forms’ in our appraisals, but Callaghan and Thompson (2002) do give the example of the ‘rapport training’ given at Telebank which attempts to ‘recognise and extract worker emotions’. Such regulation is itself problematic, however:

The system of work makes building effective rapport difficult, workers are asked to produce both quantity and quality, to combine strength and stamina with emotional labour to deliver 180 second units of‘bubbly personality’one hundred and twenty times a day. (Callaghan and Thompson, forthcoming)

Even with rapport training, such pressure means that absenteeism is rife and that two years’ work out of an employee is seen as a ‘reasonable return on investment’ for some call centre operators. Emotional labour of whatever form appears to have the same problem of diminishing returns as emotional regulation does, as a mechanism for coping with stress (see section on ‘Role stress’ above). Under the conditions of work intensification inherent in much modern job design, emotional labour has its own catch-22 in that the more it is required, the more it can become a prelude to burn-out.

It is clear that emotional labour needs to be distinguished better from and contextualised within the other forms of labour we perform on ourselves and others in pursuit of organisational demands. McHugh (1997) identifies these other forms of managerial work as follows:

•operational labour – regulation of behaviour and discipline

•emotional labour – regulation of affective responses

•intellectual labour – regulation and construction of meanings and symbols

•dramaturgical labour – regulation of impressions and advocacy

•attributional labour – regulation and ascription of intent and commitment.

These categories need refinement and consideration of whether they apply to selfmanagement in terms of non-managerial work, but they do serve to illustrate that it is not just our emotions that we control in our working lives. The latter two categories in particular are discussed further in Chapter 21, but for now we simply need to note that each of these forms of labour carries its concomitant stressors and contributes to the role conflicts we suffer.

Stress and control

The psychological and physiological pressures which impinge on us are generally seen these days as being manifested as stress, though in other times and using other terms they

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have been linked more to notions such as fatigue, anxiety, alienation and even to neurotic and psychotic disorders. In fact, some commentators claim that stress is an artefact (see Briner and Reynolds, 1993 for an introduction to this debate), much in the same way that Seivers (see Chapter 19) claims motivation to be a product of the relations between psychologists and managers. Regardless of its status as a phenomenon, stress-related pressures and the individualisation of attributions of stress mean that we all face normative pressures, not the least of which centre around fitness to work. Such normative expectations form one basis of what is termed the psychological contract (Argyris, 1960, or see Schein, 1980: 22), and act as a form of control over the identities we are capable of constructing for ourselves in the workplace.

According to Kunda (1992: 11), ‘under normative control, membership is founded not only on the behavioural or economic transaction . . . but, more crucially, on an experiential transaction’. Although the expectations that arise originate within the interactions, goals, strategies or policies of the various individuals and groups in an organisation, in subjective terms they can also appear to originate in the organisation itself. Thus role expectations (see ‘Role stress’ above) are not separate and neutral consequences of status, position or skill. Rather, they are specific and interdependent products of a social organisation of work which itself depends for effective production on the internalisation of role demands. The divisions of labour resulting in fragmented work are likewise dependent on role specialisation being perceived as a natural social order.

Role socialisation and control

Salaman (1979: 133–6) raises the possibility that variations in role discretion and role expectations may be linked to strategic decisions on the forms of control exercised over different categories of workers. Professional employees face contradictory expectations arising from their peers, their external professional associations, and from the organisation itself. These have to be handled by the individual and managed by the organisation. Direct control by managers over professionals, involving rule-bound job definitions and tightly regulated behaviour, may conflict with the latter’s values and socialisation. A more effective form of control can be achieved through a focus on their roles as professionals, performing their organisational duties to the satisfaction and benefit of their masters or clients.

In contrast to the forms of control appropriate to professionals, ‘Role type control is less commonly employed with workers because senior members of organisations (and, possibly, the workers themselves) see the workers as being in conflict with the goals and reward system of the enterprise’ (Salaman, 1979: 136). The moulding of workers’ attitudes and behaviour can be identified with ‘adjusting one’s perspectives on what one will be able to achieve’ (Frese, 1982: 210). Since such ‘adjustments’ necessitate at least some internalisation and legitimation of structures of regulation, it may be expected that roletype control would be possible at most levels of organisations. But of course, not everyone in an organisation ‘knows their place’ or is resigned to powerlessness and helplessness. The informal socialisation of workers, or ‘learning the ropes’, will consist largely of learning the shortcuts around, and resistance to, organisational controls. Such knowledge and its associated activities confer at least some small sense of personal autonomy, meaning and hence identity to workers. Consequently, direct controls combined with elements of technical and bureaucratic control where possible or appropriate, are more often employed by management at lower levels of organisations.

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Socialisation within work is not necessarily directed at the technical aspects for other grades. When examining the socialisation of skilled manual workers into their workplace identities, Penn argues that such socialisation is more directed at ‘instruction into the appropriate actions of the trade’ (1986: 4). Such instruction and the identities it produces are aimed at generating scripts for interaction in the workplace. They deal with ‘Norms and procedures held to be appropriate for dealing with three groupings found in the workplace: fellow workers, other workers and management’ (1986: 4).

This process builds on anticipatory socialisation into work in the home and at school, in that apprentices require a commitment to deferred gratification and continued learning after the end of formal schooling. Hence there is a form of preselection for skilled manual work in that those who have previously internalised appropriate forms of meaning are preferred: ‘A certain degree of seriousness and moral uprightness is required by a sponsor who already works in a firm’ (1986: 4). In contrast, ‘tearaways’ who define their identities as inimical to authority and those who seek immediate extrinsic gratification in work are not wanted (Willis, 1977). Organisations, then, try to get the right kind of material to mould into the images they require.

The types of assessment techniques used in recruitment and selection procedures also reflect differential concerns, this time with the personality dimension of identity. The study by Hollway (1984) cited in the section on personality in Chapter 15 shows that the assessment of managers, and hence the forms of control used over them, is related to the ‘fit’ of their personalities into dominant organisational cultures. When reviewing organisational recruitment procedures in the British Army and Ford UK, Salaman (1979) also notes that this ‘fit’ is shown by the candidates’ willingness to demonstrate an ‘appropriate’ range of attitudes. Today, the need to fit has become so transparent in the recruitment process that the tactics used in attempts to control the impressions others gain of us in such a process are both an object of study (see Feldman and Klich, 1991) and a topic for training. This is explored further in the section on ‘Impression management’ in Chapter 21, but for the moment serves to illustrate the extent to which we are involved in the construction of our organisational roles.

In the above sense, roles are scripts which are themselves as essential to the labour process as the working practices, labour and machinery through which they are played out. Attempts to increase worker ‘participation’ can thus be seen not only as efforts to place individual goals more in line with organisational goals, but as attempts to produce role-based control of workers. The aim is to produce workers who will themselves initiate the enactment of the correct scripts, rather than having to be directed to do so. This produces savings for the organisation in terms of the amount of direct supervision necessary, and of course in terms of the number of supervisors needed. There is currently a parallel emphasis on the operational skills ‘content’ seen as necessary to make management education more responsive to the ‘needs’ of business. The management trainee is assumed to have the necessary role commitment and motivation to consent to organisational control structures. Thus ‘education’ becomes a process of exposing trainees to the ‘skills’, techniques and attitudes that will be required of them, and then teaching them how to recognise the appropriate contingencies in which particular scripts should be enacted. If we learn such scripts to the sensorimotor level (see Chapter 16) they may even become so automatic that they may be experienced as ‘natural’ or emotional responses to pressure, and such emotional responses have become a major object of study in recent years.