Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 www.elsevier.com/locate/aos

Accounting and management–labour relations: the politics of production in the ‘factory with a problem’§ Mahmoud Ezzamela,*, Hugh Willmottb, Frank Worthingtonc a Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, CF10 3EU, Wales, UK Judge Institute of Management Studies, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK c Liverpool Institute of Public Administration and Management, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK b

Abstract This paper examines the role of accounting in management–labour relations within the context of contemporary moves to re-conceptualise and reorganise manufacturing processes. We explore how new manufacturing and accounting discourses are received by employees, and how their (more or less accommodating) responses to such initiatives shape the trajectory of their introduction. So doing we show why a more adequate understanding of accounting’s presence and significance in the workplace does not simply require a little more attention to the politics of the production process but, rather, its positioning at the centre of analysis. We develop our argument by drawing on material collected from an intensive and longitudinal case study of a manufacturing plant of a large multinational company based upon participant observation and extensive interviews. We show how, following shifts in market conditions and company ownership, pressures to enhance productivity and improve profits led to several attempts by senior management at the plant to introduce change initiatives in production methods, management style, and accounting techniques. We demonstrate how shopfloor workers interpreted these initiatives as intensifying labour by reducing head count, leading them to resist these initiatives over a period of 13 years. We argue that during this period the rhetoric of corporate governance was mediated by workers’ ability to create a space through which their own interests were defined, articulated and brought to bear on the discourses and rationalities advanced by senior management in support of ‘new’ accounting (and management) techniques. By appreciating the presence and significance of labour in the politics of production, additional ways of accounting for the rise and demise of ‘new’ or ‘excellent’ accounting techniques are contemplated. # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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This paper is part of a larger research project funded by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Fifth Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Conference, University of Manchester, Manchester, July 1997 and at the Manufacturing Accounting Workshop, Copenhagen, March 1999. We are grateful for the many constructive comments made by Christine Cooper and other delegates at these meetings and by the two anonymous reviewers. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Ezzamel).

Over the last decade, researchers have examined changes that purport to engender ‘new’, progressive forms of work organization in manufacturing including initiatives to promote teamworking, flexibility, and multiskilling. (e.g. Ezzamel, Lilley, & Willmott, 1997; Storey, 1994; Whittaker, 1992). Celebrated developments include cellular manufacturing (see Alford, 1994) and just-in-time manufacturing (Schonberger, 1986). Corresponding changes in work organization encompass forms of

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Nomenclature ABC ABM JIT LP LPT MBF NDM OPT SPC TA TOC TQM VF

activity-based-costing activity based management just-in-time lean production labour process theory management by fact non-discretionary management optimal production technology statistical process control throughput accounting theory of constraints total quality management visual factory

empowerment and job-enlargement that are often portrayed as a new dawn of participative, co-operative management-labour relations. In parallel with these developments, changes in management accounting techniques have been commended, including Activity-Based-Costing (ABC), Throughput Accounting (TA), Cellular Accounting, Backflush Accounting, Economic Value Added and Strategic Management Accounting (Kaplan, 1994). We seek to contribute to an emergent literature that locates such accounting changes within wider debates that have included inter alia issues of national competitiveness, shifts in modes of corporate governance, reforms in manufacturing and management practice and demands for new forms of accountability commensurate with the aims and objectives of the ‘brave new workplace’ (e.g. Kenney & Florida, 1993; Miller & O’Leary, 1993, 1994). The role of accounting techniques in organizations is, however, mediated by workers’ willingness to embrace, or at least support, their operation. In the absence of their co-operation, production is halted and services are not delivered. Previous research has explored the role of accounting in wage negotiations and collective bargaining (e.g. Amernic, 1985; Croft, 1981; Foley & Maunders, 1977; Ogden & Bougen, 1985; Owen & Lloyd, 1985). Most studies (but see Amernic, 1985), however, have either focused upon the normative, in contrast to the empirical, roles of accounting,

and/or have abstracted their analyses from the specificities of the organizational settings of management-labour relations. It is not an exaggeration to observe that nothing much has changed since Bougen (1989, p. 205) noted that ‘‘There has been, unfortunately, a lamentable paucity of research in the accounting-industrial relations field.’’ Of the few studies that have sought to interrogate context-specific practices of accounting as they interact with industrial relations, Bougen (1989) examined the introduction of a profit sharing scheme in a historically-based case study. Other accounting research has explored the roles of accounting in the re-ordering of manufacture (Carmona, Ezzamel, & Guttierrez, 2002; Jones & Dugdale, 1995; Miller & O’Leary, 1993, 1994), but these studies offer scant empirical illumination of the relationship between accounting and the everyday practices through which labour articulates its diverse priorities and interests. Notably, Miller and O’Leary’s ‘politics of the product’ framework, as Arnold (1998) points out, omits the voice of labour. By concentrating almost entirely on (North American management) exhortations to the efficacy of new forms of accounting and factory organization, Miller and O’Leary ignore the politics of production (Burawoy, 1985). Outside the accounting field, sociologists of work, industry and organization have routinely disregarded the presence and significance of accounting in promoting, justifying and impeding the (re)organization of work practises, including those involved in new manufacturing processes. In effect, accounting is invisible within such studies, perhaps because it is regarded as esoteric or merely reflective (i.e. score-keeping) rather than constitutive and reproductive of change initiatives and their problematical implementation. Yet, as we seek to show, the development and use of ‘new’ accounting techniques to re-organize work, is of central importance. Work practices are quantified, assessed and reported through forms of accounting that are consequential and contested. Accounting operates as a key signifier that is enacted through management–labour relations in ways which enable and constrain how managerial prerogative and worker discretion are negotiated. Accounting-based measures indicate performance

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and are frequently coupled to reward. Their presence and operation is significant for the experience of work as well as the symbolic and material value that is placed upon it. As we shall show, in our case study accounting measures were deployed by managers in an effort to (re)draw the boundaries of relations with labour that are precarious, subject to revision and open to interpretation, scrutiny and challenge by managers as well as workers. This paper addresses the relationship between accounting and the politics of production by examining the translation of ‘new’ accounting knowledge into manufacturing practices, and the actions of labour, management and shop stewards at Northern Plant (a pseudonym). Northern Plant, in the North West of England, is the primary European manufacturing site of MotorCo (a pseudonym), a North American owned multinational company that acquired the plant from N-Gineering (a pseudonym) in the early 1980s. Our involvement at Northern Plant included participant observation and intensive, semi-structured interviews. One of the authors worked at the plant between 1979 and 1995 in a variety of shopfloor jobs including machine operator, assembly worker, and storeman. This experience was documented in field notes and, together with internal documents as well as over eighty recorded and transcribed interviews, each lasting between one and one and a half hours, with senior and middle managers, supervisors, shop stewards and shopfloor workers conducted between 1995 and 1998, forms the backbone of our analysis of the plant’s history and our accounts of the various change initiatives, including workers’ experience of these initiatives. Specifically, we place accounting-based change initiatives in the context of management–labour relations, with a focus upon the dynamics of worker resistance to planned organizational ‘change’. ‘New’ manufacturing and accounting methods, we contend, are devised and enacted within an ensemble of relations and traditions forged inter alia by pressures to provide an adequate rate of return for investors (or risk the flight of capital); to establish markets for the goods or services produced; and to transform hired labour into a profitable activity. The transformation of

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labour power into productive labour is a condition of the manufacture of the goods and provision of services from which a viable return on capital can be secured. The articulation and elucidation of this process of transformation and accumulation, we contend, is most fully developed in labour process theory (Knights & Willmott, 1989). However, while this theory discloses the operation of the capital–labour relationship at the heart of work organization, it is inclined to conceive of labour as an economic resource to be harnessed by strategies of management control without attending to labour as subjectivity that struggles to define and secure itself in a (precarious) sense of identity. Accordingly, the interests imputed to labour privilege their resistance to exploitative and/or degrading conditions of work, often to the exclusion of other concerns and associated lines of action that are dismissed as symptoms of ‘false consciousness’ (e.g. Thompson, 1989). We begin with a consideration of the importance and relevant means of addressing the dynamics of work organization, including the introduction of new accounting and management practices. We then sketch a brief history of Northern Plant—dubbed by MotorCo’s corporate management as ‘a factory with a problem’. Our focus is upon a series of change initiatives prompted initially by what management considered as ‘poor’ manufacturing performance and shopfloor discipline, which culminated in the launching of TA. When TA was perceived to fail to deliver its claimed benefits it was replaced by ABC/ABM. We explore forms of resistance that rendered these and other measures ineffective if not inoperable, and we account for this resistance in terms of the identity formation of employees1 at the plant- a sense of identity that was disrupted by the demands of the new practices and confirmed through employee opposition to them. While this formation occurred within an employment relationship conditioned by a ‘structured antagonism’ (Edwards, 1986) between capital and labour, we argue that this framework of interpretation is necessary but insufficient to provide an adequate 1 Our use of the word ‘employees’ refers to ‘workers’ whereas we treat ‘managers’ as equated to ‘employers’.

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account of the actions of workers at Northern Plant. In the final section, we connect our analysis to critiques of Miller and O’Leary’s (1993, 1994) influential discussion of ‘the politics of the product’. This provides us with a further opportunity to reiterate the central importance of management-labour relations, and in particular the subjectivity of labour, for understanding practices and processes of innovation in manufacturing and accounting.

Worker resistance and labour process theory Our analysis explores the dynamics of management control and worker resistance to new forms of accounting and accountability at Northern Plant, in contrast to other studies that restrict analysis to the narrower terrain of management– trade union relations. This is not least because, as we show later, worker resistance at Northern Plant was by no means always instigated or led by shop stewards at the site but often took its own course in a context where shop stewards accommodated as well as opposed management’s pressures for change—an ambivalent and shifting stance that acted to exacerbate worker resistance. Worker resistance and labour process analysis How are the dynamics of workplace conflicts to be interpreted? To address the relevance of management-labour relations for understanding the introduction of new manufacturing and accounting practices, we commend but also propose a reconstruction (O’Doherty & Willmott, 2001) of a tradition of analysis, in the form of labour process theory (LPT) (Marx, 1867/1976; Braverman, 1974), that places these relations at its centre. In his revival of LPT, Braverman develops a sharp critique of established traditions of industrial sociology, exemplified at its best in the UK by Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s (1968) study of affluent car workers, for its failure to connect adequately responses given by workers and managers to the social relations of production within which such views are incubated. More specifically,

LPT seeks to locate the agendas and actions of owners and managers of capitalist enterprises in a contradictory structure of class relations. The structure is understood to be contradictory because, while the relationship between the buyers (capitalists or their managerial agents) and sellers of labour is not necessarily zero-sum in terms of (re)organization of production and the distribution of surpluses (notably when growth and/or process improvement permits gains for both parties), it is systematically underpinned by capital’s institutionalised capacity to treat labour as a disposable commodity that is ‘freely’ traded in the market. This capacity is exercised, LPT contends, in capital’s struggles to seize and extend control over the hiring and translation of labour power into productive, profitable activity and, ultimately, in the firing of labour to restore an acceptable rate of return on capital invested. Orthodox LPT conceptualises ‘individuals’ (e.g. workers, managers, stewards) as ‘the personifications of economic categories’ (Marx, 1976: p.92). The merit of this formulation is that it avoids the psychologising of workplace behaviour wherein the actions of ‘individuals’ are abstracted from their embeddedness in history and political economy. Notably, instead of addressing the reality of managers’ actions or shopfloor work by attending directly to their beliefs (or ‘consciousness’)—such as managers’ belief in their professionalism and neutrality or workers’ expressions of satisfaction or fairness with their jobs—such ‘realities’ are situated within the historical conditions of their formation. Instead of regarding their accounts of work as reflective of its realities, they are analysed as articulations of their respective positionings with a mode of production where managers and workers exist, fundamentally, as economic categories—as agents of capital and/or as suppliers of labour. A limitation of orthodox LPT follows directly from its treatment of management and labour as economic categories as the significance of self-identity—of managers as well as workers—in the negotiation and practical operation of management–labour relations is disregarded (Knights & Willmott, 1989). Insisting that such concerns are constitutive of these social relations, rather than simply shaped by them, can be interpreted as a

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return to the terrain of ‘cow sociology’ occupied by those engaged with the measurement of worker attitudes and their expressed levels of job satisfaction. However, this disregards the continuities with the radical tradition of labour process analysis in which the focus is upon subordination and exploitation, and which understands satisfaction and compliance to be symptomatic of the complexities and contradictions of management–labour relations rather than indicative of a new consensus or, more grandly, an end of history. It may be that, in some circumstances, workers and managers are minded to embrace without reservation the economic categories to which orthodox LPT contrives to assign them. Accordingly, the worker may become a passive, commodified slave of managerial instruction or may struggle against the subordination through collective revolutionary action; and the manager may slavishly pursue the agendas of investors without regard for his/her career prospects or s/he may recognise the commodification of managerial labour and join in the struggles to overthrow capitalism. However these and other (less extreme) possibilities are contingent rather than necessary; and they are emergent through participation in diverse social relations (outside as well as inside the hours of employment) through which a sense of self identity (or indeed multiple identities) is forged and secured. Self-identity may ultimately be an illusion in the sense of being the product of contingent and arbitrary processes of historical and cultural formation (Willmott, 1986, 1994). But it is an important illusion that employers and employees are routinely inclined to nurture and defend; and it is therefore a significant element in the negotiation of management–labour relations. Both parties to such negotiations seek to preserve or expand a space in which their respective narratives of self can be maintained rather than undermined. The challenge, then, is to recognise the presence and influence of self-identity formation, reproduction and transformation but without reverting to a form of bourgeois analysis that psychologises management–labour relations. When positioned in this context, a key ‘driver’ of managerial work is the recurrent search for

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means of re-organizing business operations (from production to marketing and after-sales securing service) that will sustain the means of securing surplus value (profits/personal wealth) from labour for example, by developing accounting calculations that provide more relevant or useful measures of labour’s productivity and cost. Methods of management control may be overtly economistic and coercive, in which case labour is treated as an expendable commodity tout court (e.g. ‘‘produce more or risk dismissal’’). However, since the cooperation of ‘responsible’ labour is routinely sought, methods of managing may be favoured that strive to gain or harness its ‘consent’ (e.g. allowing labour to work ‘with the minimum of direct supervision’ so long as targets are met). Frequently, practices of management control contain a volatile and shifting mixture of both elements. Deploying LPT brings (narrow) managerial accounts of the impact of accounting on management-labour relations in the new workplace, such as Miller and O’Leary’s (1993, 1994), into sharp relief. It shows how labour’s (apparent) willingness to engage with management in ‘joint proprietorship’ of a ‘brave new workplace’ involves processes of negotiation—processes that are conditioned less by the dawn of a ‘new economic citizenship’ that heralds cooperative management–labour relations than by ongoing conflicts and accommodations (Edwards, 1986, 1990). LPT understands conflicts in managementlabour relations to be endemic, if suppressed, because when ‘managers buy workers capacity to work (labour power), they buy a peculiar sort of commodity’ (Friedman, 1990: p. 178). Unlike other resources available to capital, this ‘commodity’ is unusually indeterminate, extremely malleable and wilful. Its malleability provides capital with the creative potential it needs in order to accumulate private wealth from the productive activity of labour. But the means of harnessing this potential are routinely found to be imperfectly compatible with the preferences and priorities of labour with respect inter alia to job security, job-satisfaction, promotion prospects and financial reward. The existence of established preferences over which management can exert

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limited influence suggests that its control over the organization of the labour process is never exercised exclusively on its own terms. As Friedman points out, the expenditure of labour power cannot be specified in advance of the sale of labour, nor guaranteed once sold to capital. Productive effort is realised only by capital soliciting labour’s acceptance of the conditions under which it is bought and sold in a market economy and rewarded, symbolically and materially, thereafter. One potential shortcoming of discussions of management control that focus upon ‘the manufacture of consent’ (Burawoy, 1979), or ‘concerted control’ (Barker, 1999), is that they pay minimal attention to labour’s capacity to resist and disrupt such initiatives (e.g. Delbridge, 1995; Sewell & Wilkinson, 1992). There is a tendency to overlook how employees enter into co-operation with management with certain expectations of their own and anticipated outcomes in mind (see Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999; Gouldner, 1954; Roy, 1952; Thompson & Bannon, 1985). For some commentators, e.g. Miller and O’Leary, the language and ideology of the ‘new workplace’ appears to be so powerful that workers not only lose their ability to express any effective opposition to new forms of accountability and control, but ‘even any sense or awareness of their own self exploitation’ (McKinley & Taylor, 1998: p. 175). Intensive case studies of lean manufacturing that focus directly upon workers ‘lived experience’ of JIT and TQM production methods (e.g. Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998a; McKinley & Taylor, 1996) have demonstrated the danger of assuming the omnipotence of new forms of management control and of exaggerating their capacity to exclude or remove forms of employee resistance. Even under conditions that could hardly be more favourable for a ‘corporate ideology to colonize the psyche’ of a workforce (McKinley & Taylor, 1998: p. 189), effective resistance is not only still possible, but also takes place. A considerable number of case studies support this view (e.g. Graham, 1994; Pollert, 1996; Rinehart, Robertson, Huxley, & Wareham, 1994; Stephenson, 1996), and even those studies that proclaim the ‘end of worker resistance as we know it’ often contain evidence to the contrary

that is either ignored or rendered irrelevant to the basis of their analysis (e.g. Miller & O’Leary, 1993, 1994). Understanding worker resistance The message from these studies is that employee resistance to new forms of accounting and accountability in contemporary manufacturing is both formally and informally organized, sometimes planned, overt and systematic (e.g. Beynon, 1984) but often spontaneous, disparate and covert, organized by agents acting collectively or as individuals motivated by clearly defined aims and objectives, or by contingent or expedient considerations in specific personal situations or local circumstances (see Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994). These studies also suggest that much of what we call resistance in organization cannot be understood as, or reduced to, an outcome of the objective conditions of capitalist employment relations. Additionally, analysis of the experience of management-labour relations requires an appreciation of how subjectivity and identity is implicated in acts of resistance in organizations (Jermier et al., 1994). From an orthodox industrial relations and LPT perspective, the conduits fixing power relations are clear and unidirectional: ‘The flow is always from capital to labour, [and] the subjectivities appropriated to each are fixed objectively, through class position; that is, by relations to the means of production’ (Clegg, 1994: p. 276). To ascribe to capital or management the supreme sovereign status of the conduit of power is, however, problematical, given the range and complexity of identity formations in organizations beyond those determined by class relations. These include not only the embodiment of aspects of occupational identity, but also gender, ethnicity or sexuality, along with marital, community or consumer status, etc. In our case study differences of occupational identity and associated aspirations are counterposed to comparatively homogeneous gender and ethnic identities, and especially a sense of identity, as independent, self-organizing subjects that had been forged during the early years of the plant’s operation.

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Conventional industrial relations theories of conflict, including LPT, are inclined to look for ‘generalizable principles’ that account for how collective action is possible, how it is mobilized and how it is played out in various contexts, but not how it is organized subjectively (see Kelly, 2000). In the case of Northern Plant, such analyses of conflict at work do not provide a plausible account of resistance. Workers contested only certain conditions of exploitation (i.e. lean production), not exploitation per se, but sought to preserve other conditions (i.e. a system of un-planned responsible autonomy, see below) under which they had developed a sense of themselves as independent subjects, seemingly and deservedly ‘free’ from direct management control. As we will show, under the management control system that prevailed at the plant prior to efforts to introduce lean production workers enjoyed a considerable measure of autonomy that went far beyond even the most relaxed forms of control in manufacturing to which workers are usually willing to consent (see Burawoy, 1979; Gouldner, 1954; Thompson & Bannon, 1985). A distinctive symbolic space opened up in which workers struggled to develop, extend and defend a sense of themselves as independent self-managing and resourceful agents who were better able to work productively in the absence of management control. Subsequent efforts of management to introduce lean production were not simply perceived as something that would breach existing frontiers of control and established effort-bargaining mechanisms that existed between management and labour at the plant. Instead they were viewed as something that would degrade their self-identity by usurping their self-organization. This anticipated degradation of self, we will suggest, not only fuelled worker’s resistance to lean production and associated accounting practices, but also gave it potency and effectiveness that management was unable to confront with any real or lasting effect. Resistance was so difficult to manage precisely because it was discursive, largely unorganized, distancing in nature (see Collinson, 1992, 1994), ‘misbehaviourbased’ (Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999) and lacking in any apparent overall aim or objectives. Indeed, resistance at Northern Plant (eventually) came to

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resemble what Foucault has called ‘hyper and pessimistic activity’2.

Northern Plant: manufacturing and accounting in transition From the early 1970s to the mid 1990s Northern Plant went through a number of major changes in respect of demand for its main products, the organization of its manufacturing arrangements, management control strategies and accounting practices (see Table 1). When N-Gineering opened the Plant in 1971, it employed 70 people who manufactured and supplied a very limited range of high-tech automotive products to two major European-based vehicle manufacturers. Within less than ten years the plant was established as the flagship of N-Gineering’s European operations. By the late 1980s it was employing almost 700 people and generating an annual sales turnover of around $70 m. In this section, we present an overview of these stages of Northern Plant’s development before focusing upon the use of new accounting measures. We pay detailed attention to the early phases because, we subsequently argue, the formation of workers experience and knowledge during this period is of key importance for understanding the nature of their response and the effectiveness of their resistance to ‘new’ manufacturing and accounting initiatives. Unplanned responsible autonomy The expansion of manufacturing operations at Northern Plant has been built upon high-tech 2

As Simons (1994) points out, Foucault consistently refused to commit himself to explaining what he saw as the meaning and purpose, and moreover, any concrete examples of what in real terms the lasting effects of the conditions of possibility of resistance to power/knowledge might be. In Foucault’s view, in seeking to define what resistance is, what it means, what its purpose and potential possibilities are, we face the danger of then seeking to limit what ought to be achieved by it. He suggested that subjects need no clear goals as a rationale for resistance, other than to feel compelled to take issue with, and therefore (permanently) protest against, the oppressive forms of power/knowledge that govern the administration of their daily lives. But Foucault also recognized that protest against (perceived) injustices is no guarantee of liberation from oppression but may actually reinforce it (ibid.).

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Table 1 Management control/managerial accounting at Northern Plant 1971–1998 Product demand

Manufacturing arrangements

Management control strategy

Managerial accounting techniques

1971–1975 Emergent but Group technology Increasing

Unplanned responsible autonomy

Conventional standard costing based

1975–1986 High

Group technology with some use of JIT/TQM production methods

Unplanned responsible autonomy

Conventional standard costing based

1986–1991 High

group technology with more strategic use of JIT/TQM production methods

JIT/TQM-based teamworking system Consideration of (ABC) Programmed responsible autonomy but continuing with standard costing

1991–1995 High

Process-based cellular manufacturing

JIT/TQM-based self-managing teamworking methods Programmed responsible autonomy

(TA) throughput accounting with (TOC) theory of constraints

1995–1998 High

Product-focused cellular manufacturing Self-managing cellular based autonomous production teams Programmed responsible autonomy

(ABC) with (ABM) activity based management and (VF) visual factory and (MBF) management by fact

R&D expertise pioneered in the aviation industry where N-Gineering had originally operated. Prior to the mid-1980s, N-Gineering pursued an armslength policy towards managing its overseas operations, a policy that enabled Northern Plant to develop on-site R&D and manufacturing expertise that, in less than a decade, had become the benchmark for the industry. From the early 1970s, Northern Plant pursued a customer relations policy that actively sought inter-company co-operation on issues of product development, price, quality and delivery performance. This earned the plant a reputation for high quality product design, development and manufacture. Throughout the 1970s N-Gineering remained at the forefront of a rapidly expanding global market. In the early 1980s, it enjoyed approaching a 90% market share world-wide. Given this market position and its reputation for product quality, there was little pressure on N-Gineering to extend its sporadic ad hoc experimentation with Japanese style quality control methods and production techniques (e.g. quality circles and JIT) that occurred from the 1970s until the mid-1980s. It was during this period that a series of informal management-labour agreements had been reached.

Workers would ‘‘deliver the numbers’’ to meet constantly pressing output requirements in return for having discretion over how work was organized. The combination of high wages, paid to attract skilled employees, labour control over the production process and lack of comparable employment opportunities created a disincentive to find work elsewhere. Hence, there was an extended shopfloor memory: most of the workers who were at the plant in the 1990s had been employed there since the 1970s. Until the mid-1980s, management willingly surrendered the organization of work practice to labour so long as production levels were maintained. Demand for the product was strong and unremitting so that the costs of imposing controls were perceived to be greater, and certainly more hassle, than simply allowing employees to organize their work in whatever ways would deliver output targets: [Northern Plant] was simply expected to produce, pro rata, what it had always produced—a figure that was based upon, and effectively capped by, the use of time and motion studies to determine what levels of output could be expected (Senior Manager).

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Output targets were officially determined by a measured day rate system. This required operators to hand in a performance (job) card to their foreman at the end of each shift, thereby supplying the relevant information to satisfy N-Gineering that the plant was operating efficiently. Yet, in practice, the measured day rate system had become little more than a ceremonial undertaking that permitted a negotiated order where formal procedures bore little relation to shopfloor practice: in those days, we’d just throw anything we had at a problem to get round it. . .money, men, overtime, whatever. This was what kept everybody happy so it didn’t seem to matter how you got the parts out so long as the customer got them. That’s what this place was built on getting the parts done, getting them out the door, working together, just dealing with things (cell leader, our emphases) Our ethnographic evidence indicates that, as soon as workers had fulfilled the agreed level of output, a range of pursuits filled the remaining hours before the job cards were completed and returned to the foremen at the end of the shift. These pursuits—which were known about and tolerated by managers—included card schools, darts, chess, table tennis competitions, sleeping areas, drinking dens, etc. There were also regular excursions to the pub, not infrequently with foremen participating. Workers would cover for others to allow them to go home or ‘disappear’ for lengthy periods during working hours. They were able to ‘make the numbers’ in what, in some cases, was only a fraction of the time allowed by the time-and-motion calculations. If the goods produced failed to satisfy quality standards, workers took responsibility for re-working them in their ‘free time’. When managers faced particularly pressing delivery requirements, workers co-operated by guaranteeing output requirements in the quickest time possible, even if these reached beyond the official output levels of the measured day rate. However, workers co-operation and ‘flexibility’ was conditional upon management’s willingness to preserve shopfloor discretion over work organization.

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In sum, a highly indulgent (Gouldner, 1954) ‘flexible’ set of working practices emerged that we characterise as unplanned ‘responsible autonomy’. The concept of ‘responsible autonomy’ is drawn from Friedman (1977) who argues that, when faced by the wilfulness of labour upon which managers depend for goods to be produced, they negotiate a position between two, ideal-typical possibilities: ‘direct control’ involving the aspiration to eliminate discretion through close supervision, or ‘responsible autonomy’ which involves managers in shaping rather than suppressing employees’ capacity to exercise discretion (e.g. through selection, training and organizational development programs) by educating them to be responsive and ‘responsible’ to employer priorities. During the early years of Northern Plant, workers willingly exercised their discretion to ‘‘make the numbers’’ in a way that involved minimum managerial intervention in ‘shaping’ this capacity. Their ‘empowerment’ was not ‘planned’ or significantly conditioned by formal programs initiated by management. Instead, it articulated, and served to maintain, workers’ sense of identity as men who (predominantly) took pride in outwitting and marginalising managers in order to subordinate them to the workers’ priority of labouring for as short a period as possible to receive the available material rewards. Management endorsed this arrangement because it served to eliminate much uncertainly about whether delivery commitments to customers would be met. The ‘‘self–managing’’, negotiated order of management-labour relations was equally important to the workforce. It allowed them to exercise a considerable measure of control over when and how their labour power was deployed. This was subsequently reflected in their rose-tinted recollections of this period as a ‘golden past’ (see Gabriel, 1993; Gouldner, 1954)—a time when it was ‘‘a laugh’’ and when ‘‘everyone [both workers and managers] got stuck in together’’. This period was also significant, we will argue, because it allowedworkers to gain insights into what they could expect, some years later, from management’s plans to introduce team-based ‘lean’ manufacturing and production arrangements.

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During this formative era in the history of Northern Plant, accounting calculations were not particularly obtrusive or plentiful, yet they both underpinned and masked the social organization of production by providing the basis for determining what were deemed by both parties to be acceptable production targets, based on measured day rates. Similarly, the use of standard costing provided the basis for defining what were acceptable levels of production costs. To be clear, all waste and inefficiency were not driven out in setting these standards and targets. Rather, slack was built into time-and-motion calculations in order to draw the boundaries of the feasible region defensible to the parent within which workers and managers could reach consensus about organizing work. By emphasizing standard costs and measured day rates as the production targets on the shopfloor, the accounting system projected an external view of Northern Plant as an efficient and well-run unit in a way that placated the parent company. The accounting system also masked the social organization of ‘unplanned responsible autonomy’ as an informally negotiated order between plant workers and managers. As long as workers ‘‘made the numbers’’ by delivering to output targets, their discretion over the organization of their work remained unchallenged by management who were complicit in this undeclared bargain. If, on occasion, some recalcitrant workers pushed plant managers into a corner, however, they would retaliate by withholding benefits, such as overtime, or the supply of parts that would ensure the early finish of the ‘less cooperative’ workers. In this way, managerial prerogative was invoked but not in a way that posed any significant threat to the reproduction of unplanned responsible autonomy.

respond to demand, and it offered little incentive for headquarters to exert pressure upon Northern Plant managers to secure the extension and success of sporadic experimentation with variants of quality circles, SPC, and JIT. The unspoken agreement between plant management and workers was for the production quota to be delivered in return for workers exercising daily control over the organization of production. N-Gineering’s hands-off policy towards Northern Plant management meant that managers had little incentive to change their undeclared bargain with the workforce. At the time of N-Gineering’s acquisition by Motor-Co in the mid 1980s, new competitors entering the field were increasingly challenging N-Gineering’s domination so that its market share, albeit of an expanding market, fell to 55% by the end of the decade. The expansion of ‘lean’ manufacturing methods throughout the industry added pressures for ‘change’ as N-Gineering’s major automotive customers called for new quality standards and JIT delivery discipline. Following its acquisition by Motor-Co, N-Gineering underwent a major strategic re-organization of its activities, involving the introduction of flexible manufacturing methods. This re-organization resulted in Northern Plant losing to its sister European plants a large proportion of what had previously been its most profitable business. Northern Plant was allocated responsibility for manufacturing only a limited number of products in a highly competitive segment of the market. Very quickly, virtually all production became what the plant called ‘ex-works’, which meant taking products straight from the end of production lines in an effort to meet delivery schedules. By mid-1989 frequently missed deliveries were resulting in costly air-freighting of products to customers around the world.3 Increasing competition, changing product

Towards programmed responsible autonomy To better understand the dynamics of management-worker-steward relations during the late 1980s and 1990s, which we explore in some detail below, it is relevant to appreciate that, up to the mid 1980s, N-Gineering enjoyed a strong market position. This was well recognised by a workforce who were on the receiving end of recurrent pressures to

3 Deliveries had always been late, but when the plant had the lion’s share of the market customers had no alternative sources of supply without sacrificing quality, and hence they tended to wait for the late deliveries from Northern Plant. From 1989 onwards, however, competition became much stronger and the plant’s market dominance was eroded significantly, with new, high quality, competitors being able to deliver the product more quickly. This problem was made more acute after the change in product mix to the high volume, low margin type B product.

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mix, price and delivery requirements from major customers, and mounting demand for increased performance and profit levels from its parent company also pushed Northern Plant into crisis. The plant’s financial controller’s recollection of this period was that: We were introducing a new scheduling system, which was quite complex, and we were also losing a lot of money because we’d moved out of passenger car [type A] business and we were doing predominantly commercial diesel [type B] business instead. So, suddenly, almost over night, for reasons which were determined by a [new] European management group, when [Northern Plant] entered 1989 we had a horrible sales mix in a plant that was suffering some industrial relations problems, and we were losing money—up to £300,000 per month because our delivery performance was in crisis. These problems were construed to have resulted in a significant loss of credibility with both major customers and the parent company. There was a threat that remaining production at the plant would be moved elsewhere if immediate improvements were not forthcoming. Motor-Co’s solution to the plant’s poor performance was to press for an ABC overhead recovery approach to measuring the plant’s performance that was coupled with head-count reductions: Every time we produced an additional bad result, although I didn’t share this with a lot of the people in the organization at that time, North America’s [Motor-Co’s] reaction was ‘reduce the head count’. Then we’d have another bad result the next month, because we weren’t making anything on time in ‘89, and we’d get ‘have you reduced the head count, when are you going to reduce it further?’ (Financial Controller) In the wake of the crisis, productivity gains associated with flexible manufacturing methods, teamworking and co-operative management–

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labour relations were considered vital for reviving the plant’s competitiveness and profitability. Motor-Co.’s manufacturing initiatives articulated a strategically-focused change programme, spearheaded by a drive to establish cellular manufacturing throughout its operations world-wide. At Northern Plant, management introduced a whole series of changes in production and accounting methods which are discussed in the following section. These initiatives were construed as technologies that would generate new measures to remedy past deficiencies and act as the plant’s ‘driving force’ for change. Managers sought to consolidate these initiatives by re-engineering ‘process based’ manufacturing into ‘product focused’ cellular manufacturing (Alford, 1994) as the means that would finally establish the plant as a ‘truly’ lean manufacturing facility. However, a refusal of the workforce to cooperate with these schemes (see below) meant that the advent of cellular manufacturing was restricted to changes in the technical, but not the social, organization of production.

Optimised production technology and throughput accounting In this section, we track management’s efforts to introduce a series of programs at Northern Plant in response to intensified competitive pressures and change in product type. More specifically, we explore how these programmes were launched in an attempt to introduce new working methods including more disciplinary accounting techniques. ABC, TA and cellular manufacturing In the early 1990s, consultants had commended the contribution of ABC to Northern Plant’s needs, and especially to manage the shift from Type A (passenger car parts) to Type B (commercial diesel parts) product. However, while conceding that ABC could be helpful in reducing the unit cost of commercial-diesel production, they argued that its cost allocations were inaccurate:

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My argument about ABC is that however carefully you try to allocate costs to a part or a product, you’re never going to get it a hundred percent right, so why bother trying to allocate these costs. Why not say to yourself ‘Oh, well we know how much the material costs and that’s a hundred percent [accurate], then we have this pool of other costs that we don’t have to allocate. . .’ Okay, you have to take your counter bills costs, but however you try and spread them back to the parts there’s always going to be a guess [involved] (Financial Controller) The newly formed cellular accounting team was concerned that ABC’s focus upon cutting costs, instead of maximising plant utilisation, would exacerbate growing industrial unrest at the plant. It was argued that to emphasise cost reduction as a strategic priority would only serve to deepen the growing gulf between management and the shopfloor: O.K. you can tell people ‘‘we’ve got a horrible sales mix, that its costing us say $2m a year in profit’’. But once you’ve said this once or twice or three times everybody gets bored with the story. . . everyone was aware of this anyway, that we had a bloody big sales mix problem because out on the shopfloor they were trying to cope with it everyday, with more set-ups, with smaller batch sizes, etc. So what we wanted to do was drag people’s mind off just head count reduction and to emphasise the most wealth producing aspects of [the] business. Cos [by then] we’d already devoted eighteen months to trying to get rid of people and literally every management meeting hinged on ‘‘have you got rid of so and so yet ? (Financial Controller) Plant management’s choice of technique was thus directly informed by an assessment of the anticipated effect of its adoption upon the workers. By problematizing and discrediting what was deemed by its parent and the consultants as ‘excellent accounting’, in the form of ABC, discourses

were promoted by senior managers at the plant to pave the way for throughput accounting (TA) and the theory of constraints (TOC). Not only was the problematization of ABC at Northern Plant inseparable from the discourses that were marshalled in support of the introduction of TA, but the merits of each were evaluated in terms of their anticipated effects upon management–labour relations. Given the continuing buoyant demand for this type of product in an expanding market (even though N-Gineering had been experiencing a sharp decline in its own market share after the mid 1980s because of intense competition), the benefits to be derived from squeezing operating expenses were seen to be comparatively limited in relation to the potential of TA which, in principle, would enable the removal of bottlenecks that impeded ‘throughput’, and thereby recapture some lost market share.4 Experimentation with TA and OPT (Optimal Production Technology) coincided with a [new] cellular manufacturing strategy that was introduced to the workforce through a series of in-house training seminars held in 1990/1991. These seminars had five relatively distinct, but inter-related objectives; (1) to (re)introduce the concepts of JIT and TQM, teamworking and flexibility to employees, within the context of the proposed cellular manufacturing plans; (2) to explain the importance of the role of TA and TOC within this system of production; (3) to promote the concept of ‘continuous improvement’, by introducing workers to the idea of understanding their role in production in ‘value-adding’ and ‘nonvalue-adding’ terms; (4) to promote the role of a range of new corporate driven HRM, initiatives to facilitate employee ‘involvement’ and ‘empowerment’; and (5) to explain the internal 4 Our positioning of worker resistance to managerial control in relation to changing product markets and product mixes (e.g. the change from Type A to Type B products) parallels Froud et al.’s (1998) attentiveness to ‘external’ conditions, and especially exchange rate movements between the dollar and the yen, to account for Caterpillar’s problems and, relatedly, to challenge the adequacy of management’s diagnosis of the company’s difficulties and the relevance of its PWAF (or, in our case, ABC) programme as a remedy for them.

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organization of each manufacturing cell which was to involve a number of autonomous selfmanaging ‘teams’ comprising managers, R&D technicians, supervisors, and skilled and semiskilled production workers. The techniques associated with the five interrelated objectives were presented by management as a means of enabling workers to gain a greater understanding of the ‘financial realities’ of their involvement in production, and not just as more convenient accounting devices for measuring their performance. Management were sufficiently aware of worker sensitivities about the use of accounting to extract increased productivity to make efforts to ‘sell’ the techniques in a way that emphasised the benefits, as managers construed them, of workers gaining a more informed appreciation of the activities that added value. Accordingly, plant management acted against corporate advice by refusing to introduce ABC because of its perceived emphasis on headcount reduction, with its anticipated detrimental effect on management–labour relations. Managers emphasised that TA/TOC, with their wealth creating emphasis, offered an important catalyst for ‘change’ that had been absent in previous efforts to operationalize ‘new wave’ manufacturing and production methods. When combined with HRM initiatives, managers claimed that TA would make it possible for workers in each ‘cell’ to take ‘ownership’ of cell costs and become more responsible and committed to the parent’s new manufacturing philosophy. In this way, as Jones and Dugdale (1995: p. 319) have suggested, it was anticipated that workers would willingly constitute themselves as ‘producers of profit rather than [simply] products’. To suggest that this emphasis formed part of a cynical campaign by management to deceive workers about the new techniques would be to exaggerate the extent to which managers were ‘organized’ and had a well formed plan of action, whilst simultaneously understating their recognition of the difficulty, verging on impossibility, of successfully misleading this particular workforce. Managers were anxious to construe the proposed changes in ways that they thought would not unnecessarily upset the workforce, but this was done

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in a pragmatic, rather than carefully calculated or Machiavellian, manner5. Cell managers and supervisors claimed to welcome cellular manufacturing in principle but, at the same time, had little faith in it ever being fully operationalised on two accounts. First, despite its focus upon improving throughput, the new cellular strategy was perceived to be largely irrelevant to the market pressures that it sought to exploit: low-volume short-batch production runs, and frequent changeovers and set-ups to cater for different, and more often competing, customer requirements. Second, cell managers and team leaders anticipated that these initiatives would encounter determined shopfloor resistance.

5 It is important to recognize that prior to the introduction of lean production, first-line managers at Northern Plant had operated in conditions, as they saw it, that were relatively ‘conflict free’, and like shopfloor workers, enjoyed a ‘good living’ from the plant ($25,000 and $17,000 basic-pay respectively in 1995, in addition to which they earned anything up to 40% of this figure in overtime payments). It is also important to recognize that they enjoyed the same benefits as shopfloor workers by ensuring the latter were able to ‘make the numbers’. Once production quotas were reached, especially on the night and afternoon-shifts, foremen retired to relax in their office, in full view of shopfloor workers, and often with workers themselves. This usually involved reading, playing cards, chess, computer games or simply chatting to ‘kill time’ until the end of the shift—and, as we have noted, on occasions accommodated excursions to the local pub. However, unlike shopfloor workers, foremen at Northern Plant readily accepted that the ‘‘the gravy train’’, as they referred to it, ‘‘was over’’. They understood that workers refused to accept this; that workers’ commitment to ‘making the numbers’ had not been unconditional; and that workers regarded lean production and ‘cellular accounting’ as an assault on established frontiers of control, including the opportunity to earn overtime pay, which they had no intentions of surrendering without a struggle. It was for these reasons that attempts by foremen to instil into workers the ‘financial realities’ of their involvement in production amounted to little more than appeals to them to accept the inevitability of ‘change’, and to recognize that they would still enjoy a ‘good living’ from the plant. So, rather than trying to deceive workers with ‘cellular accounting’ rhetoric, the typical argument used was that lean production when combined with ‘cellular accounting’ techniques guaranteed the plant’s future. While this might well eventually necessitate less overtime, the foremen argued that any reduction in earnings capacity would be compensated by the opportunity for greater leisure time and/or more time spent with their families.

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Market pressures Cell managers and team leaders noted how production schedules were still ‘‘regularly altered‘‘ or ‘‘broken into’’ without warning or at short notice; or, as one cell manager put it, in response to ‘‘which customer complained the loudest’’. It was argued that production control failed to plan or program the OPT system effectively enough to provide accurate or up-to-date information on schedule requirements, shortages or arrears that were to be given priority. So, despite senior management’s [apparent] commitment to the OPT system as the core component of its cellular manufacturing strategy, it was claimed that little, if anything, changed: On night shift, it’s Production Control’s job to decide what kits [products] need to be built, when they need to be built, where the parts [components] are and, because we have so many arrears, to prioritise all this. . .what happens in reality, is that I get information from production control, I get information from the afternoon [shift] supervisor and I get information left in the dispatch area from the sales department, but in the majority of times, the three bits of information don’t match up. (Night-Shift Superintendent) Sharing these frustrations, cell leaders and supervisors stressed that the OPT system remained ‘‘a major headache’’; further, they claimed that they received neither useful information from the cellular accounting system, nor the support for improving productivity that was intended to come from the cellular accounting team. One cell manager observed that the accounting information received remained ‘‘very much historical’’ and of ‘‘little, if any, use’’: Things change hour by hour and so we’d need information on a day to day basis, as a minimum, to be able to manage as well as we should do. But even so, everything runs so fast that even if you did get the amount of information you’re supposed to get, on a daily basis, you wouldn’t have time to go through it or sort it out. So you just try to keep ahead.

You set your plan and just go at it. (our emphases) Our informants suggested that pressures to placate customers meant that attempts to operationalise the new cellular manufacturing programmes were repeatedly subverted and that the new accounting system offered no remedy for this recurrent problem. Workforce interpretations and resistance On the shopfloor, TA was interpreted as a means of concealing increases in efficiency that would otherwise put pressure on management to improve wages and/or conditions of service. Workers interpreted the real purpose of TA, Kaizen costing and TQM to be manipulative. Their introduction was assumed to be motivated by a desire to get workers to work harder and to reduce headcount: TQM and Kaizen are just another form of time and motion study. They say that [it] tells them that they can make thirty or forty percent savings on production and the wage bill, but that’s because they’ll have less men doing more work. So why should we accept doing more when we know there’ll be job losses. (Operator) With Kaizen they’ve moved machines round into U-shaped cells, so they can have continuous [one piece] flow. They’re saying they need to cut the space down between machines to cut the walking time for operators so we can be more efficient. What they’re really saying is that they want you stuck on a machine and never getting a break. . .working like battery hens. (Operator) Yet another operator pointed out that in each balancing U-shaped cell, each man would do three parts then pass them on to the next man so that at the end of the day a man ‘‘can’t leave the cell unless there’s someone else to take his place. . . So this [one piece flow] is like going back in time to when people had to put their hands up to leave the job.’’ A Material Handler suggested that most operators perceived benefits in ‘‘teamwork, quality

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and problem solving, and Kaizen’’, but still saw these changes as the manifestation of management’s concerted effort to intensify labour: ‘‘what they [management] want is to take away from people not giving them more. You can see that there’s only one way it [lean production] can go, and that’s to a reduction in manning levels and [an] intensification of the production process.’’ Given this strong reaction by the shopfloor to TA, Kaizen and lean manufacturing, it was no surprise that the Financial Controller pointed out that the introduction of TA ‘‘caused bedlam’’, and one Maintenance Manager said ‘‘I think the days of Throughput Accounting are numbered’’. Cell managers and supervisors, not just operators, preferred to see a return to the previous standard costing system. The ‘cellular accounting’ team made sense of this resistance by claiming that standard costing efficiency reports were ‘‘what managers understood’’. Having ‘‘grown up’’ with standard costing, they alleged that managers had learned how to ‘‘manipulate efficiency’’; and in the view of one cell accountant, cell managers ‘‘probably got their job simply by being good at doing this’’. Cell accountants claimed that cell managers had an irrational fear of the new system. Cell managers and supervisors countered that this was a ‘poor’ if not naive evaluation of the situation, as it disregarded the strength of worker resistance to ‘new’ working practices. Attempts to make this clear to senior management resulted in the latter reemphasising the role of cell managers and supervisors as ‘change agents’ within the plant. Cell managers were urged by senior managers to demonstrate their commitment to the values and philosophy of lean production by empowering rather than controlling workers. Cell managers and supervisors perceived themselves to be caught in a ‘‘no win’’ situation, between demands to achieve productivity gains under what they saw as ‘‘impossible conditions’’, and the requirement to achieve these gains by managing the shopfloor only at a distance (see Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998a). The battles surrounding the TA initiative, advocated by senior management and spearheaded by the specialist cellular accounting team, are symptomatic of the complexity of relations where inter alia, cell managers are resistant to the

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change as it threatened their established routines and expertise, and workers were able to exploit divisions between senior and supervisory tiers of management in a way that acted to discredit the claims of both. A regular tactic employed by workers was repeatedly to point out to supervisors that it had become obvious to them that it was cell managers who gained all credit for ‘changes’ made in the technical organization of production, and had enhanced their career prospects with the company in doing so6, whilst leaving supervisors to take all blame for the corresponding lack of progress made in attempts to advance planned changes in the social organization of production. To drive this point home, workers constantly exploited the contention that ‘‘the days of the oldstyle foreman in manufacturing are over’’, an assessment that was difficult to refute because new mangers and supervisor recruited to Northern Plant since it was acquired by MotorCo were ‘‘degree merchants’’7. In response to these contradictions, supervisors in particular found themselves drawn back to a 6 Certain cell managers, some of whom had been promoted from the position of supervisor, had gone on to fill more senior positions, and/or joined a number of project teams working on change, quality, training and preferred buyer-supplier relations initiatives at the plant in the UK and at other MotorCo sites in Europe and the USA. Those who remained, regardless of whether they had considered and/or applied for these posts, were then taunted for not having ‘‘what it takes to make it’’ under lean production—in the guise of education, personal knowhow, expertise and/or man-management skills. 7 From 1990s onwards, MotorCo insisted that all new managers and supervisors recruited to Northern Plant must be qualified to degree level. We do not know whether they had been briefed to do so, but it was clear to shopfloor workers and existing supervisors that these recruits adopted a ‘professional distance’ from both workers and existing supervisors. Workers used this observation to exploit existing supervisors’ fear of dismissal, by claiming that the new cell-managers and supervisors had been brought in to spy on them, to monitor their behaviour and man-management skills and performance, and then to report this back to senior management so that they would eventually replace existing staff once they had learned their job. This possibility was taken seriously by supervisors who regularly voiced this concern to senior management. In response, they received the assurance that this was not the case. But, at the same time, they were told that only some of the supervisors were willing and able to make the transition from traditional ‘old-style foremanship’ to the skills and attitudes deemed necessary to a regime of lean production.

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policy of simply ‘‘making the numbers’’ as a way of demonstrating their efficiency to senior managers. Instead of managing the new scheduling adherence system as intended, supervisors endeavoured to meet the most urgent output requirements in the fastest way possible, just as they had done prior to the introduction of cellular manufacturing at the plant, arguing that had they not done this they ‘‘wouldn’t have survived’’. To this end, they were obliged to ‘bend rules’ and ‘indulge’ the workforce in order to secure their cooperation. This tactic produced the desired effect for senior managers who, ultimately, were more concerned with keeping customers happy by despatching orders on time than with policing their own programs. However, as we have stressed, the tactic rendered middle and junior managers more vulnerable to the demands of shopfloor workers who were quick to exploit the situation as a means of continuing to resist the introduction of ‘new’ working practices. Operators urged supervisors to remember that so long as output targets were met regularly on time for delivery ‘‘no one [really] cared whether ‘TQ’ is in or not’’. It was ‘‘only common sense’’ that all that ‘‘really mattered’’ was whether or not the plant was profitable for the parent, and that ‘‘it must be’’, otherwise it would have been closeddown. Workers also repeatedly taunted managers by refusing to interpret managers’[apparent] commitment to ‘change’ as anything other than a strategy of ‘self-interest’, designed to enable them to ‘‘get on’’ at the expense of workers who would be demanded to work more intensively or possibly lose their jobs. The advice of the shopfloor to these managers was ‘‘not to rock the boat’’, but, instead to ‘‘keep the lads happy’’, otherwise they would be left with no choice but to ‘‘screw them’’. Reassurances were given by workers that, contingent upon the ‘attitude’ of cell managers and supervisors, components would continue to be produced in sufficient number to ensure that there were no come-backs from senior management. By pursuing ‘distancing’ strategies of resistance (Collinson, 1992, 1994) workers ‘outflanked’ (Clegg, 1989) attempts to introduce new lean

production practices. By ostensibly acquiescing to management’s call for their active involvement in planning and facilitating ‘change’, the shop stewards at the plant blocked moves in the direction of teamworking and ‘empowerment’ through a process of ‘resistance through negotiation’. The stewards formally welcomed the ‘empowerment’ bestowed upon workers by teamworking, but demanded that managers take this commitment to greater involvement seriously by recognizing and addressing shopfloor concerns about its practicalities and consequences. To summarise, OPT, TA and TOC were the preferred vehicles of the cellular accounting team for improving manufacturing performance at Northern Plant. These techniques were favoured because, in contrast to ABC, they would not add additional fuel to the simmering fire of industrial unrest at Northern Plant. What senior managers failed to anticipate was, firstly, the difficulty of consistently applying these techniques in the face of delivery schedule pressures; and, secondly, resistance from cell managers and supervisors who, feeling themselves to be in a ‘‘no win’’ situation, became easy targets for criticism by shopfloor workers. Resistance to OPT and TA, promoted and guided by discourses which articulated the lessons learned during the earlier phase of ‘unplanned responsible autonomy’, problematized the assessment of senior managers that OPT and TA would improve the performance of the plant. The mechanisms of governance and the politics of the product (Miller & O’Leary, 1993, 1994) were thus embroiled in a process of continuous negotiation and re-configuration through the politics of production.

Another strategic response and the role of accounting The lack of progress from these initiatives, in terms of the introduction of ‘lean’ production based upon cellular manufacturing techniques, resulted in MotorCo labelling Northern Plant a ‘factory with a problem’. Following a series of visits by MotorCo directors, which included crisis meetings with workers and shop stewards as well as plant managers, their evaluation concluded that

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the plant suffered from a serious lack of discipline8. Production cost was identified as unacceptably high, and this was traced to operations inefficiency, over-indulgence in overtime shifts, and the absence of an adequate cost structure to guide decisions.

because of the way we’ve been educated to cost them. They will not recognise the value of a man being taken out of a production line unless they see a tomb stone in the car park. (Operations Excellence Manager)

[The plant has] huge premium costs to support the increase in demand for the product. . .penalty costs for late deliveries. . .costs to ship the materials in and airfreight the product out, large subcontracting costs, and horrendous amounts of overtime costs. (Financial Controller)

Unless the man is made redundant, the cost of his wages continued to be included in production cost even if he was moved out of production. This frustration with costing procedures and their failure to visualise operations and activities was widely shared. As one Manager stated:

Managers saw the gaming by operators to produce below their capabilities during normal time to earn financially lucrative overtime pay as the major problem. One HR Manager said: ‘‘The problem is that if operators are supposed to produce say 500 [units] in a week and they only produce 300, the consequence is that they’ll get overtime on Saturday and Sunday’’, consequently, as another Manager said ‘‘horrendous costs are [being] incurred.’’ Managers also lamented the failures of accounting practices used to cost activities properly: Some of our finance people have a great deal of difficulty costing some of the activities 8

At these meetings, MotorCo’s announced that levels of attainment of ‘world-class’ manufacturing standards at all of its manufacturing facilities were being gauged against ‘benchmarked’ performance levels in output, quality, flexibility, teamworking and overall financial performance. These benchmarks were allegedly drawn from its model’ lean production facilities in southern France and South Carolina, USA. Few performance figures or specific details of the ‘excellent’ HRM initiatives were ever presented to workers at Northern Plant, although visits to the French plant by shop stewards and a selected number of workers were arranged to demonstrate firsthand what lean production can achieve. This initiative was abandoned after the first visit, principally because the French plant’s production mix was nothing compared to Northern Plant—a difference upon which workers and their shop stewards immediately seized to discredit the exercise and those responsible for initiating it. Given the comparative complexity of the Northern Plant’s production mix, the high-tech nature of its manufacturing requirements, including the high number of change-overs required to manufacturing a wider-range of products than those produced by its French sister plant, they concluded that Northern Plant was performing ‘‘surprisingly well’’.

What we’ve got to do is get a proper cost structure of all of what we do, of the product, production, the supply chain we have to deal with. We’ve got to create a vision of what the Plant will be like when it is properly costed. . . Until we’ve got a proper model of the profitability of the site we can’t get where we want to be. These factors together contributed to a perception at higher levels that plant managers were not doing a good job, which was blamed on lack of competence or fear of militant operators: ‘‘The problem is that I don’t think management have been allowed to manage, or they haven’t been able to manage this Plant, because either they’re not capable of it or they are afraid to manage it. Maybe it’s beyond their capabilities’’ (Senior Finance Director). The preferred remedy was the replacement of plant managers right down to the level of supervisors9. It was announced that the 9 Some longstanding supervisors were released from the plant as early as the late 1980s, following MotorCo’s demand to see a reduction in headcount due the financial crisis at the plant, following the decision to dedicate the plant to the production of predominantly Type B products (see 10th, 11th and 12th pages of this article). By the mid 1990s, senior managers at the plant, and/or MotorCo, had lost all faith in all remaining longstanding supervisors, all of whom, despite being unionised, were over the next few years unceremoniously fired. By 1999, none of the plant’s original shopfloor supervisors, who were employed prior to the introduction of LP, remained. Several senior managers suffered the same fate. In all cases, without exception, supervisors were given one minute’s notice to clear their desks before being escorted from the plant, gripped at the back of the upper-arm by a senior personnel manager charged

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task of these replacements, supported by a senior management task-force drawn from MotorCo plants, was to evolve a ‘‘no-nonsense’’ approach to managing the plant. These developments immediately resulted in a major revision of the plant’s change strategy, including the role played by TA which was now considered totally at odds with MotorCo’s overall manufacturing strategy: At the time throughput accounting was probably the right decision, because if you’ve got the business, you can work at improving on price providing that you can make the product. But the problem with throughput accounting is that as long as you’re growing and so you have high volume, it’s good news, volume eliminates fixed costs and all sorts of things. But you plateau out and the business doesn’t grow any more, then you have to change to something different, something like ABM. I don’t know because I’m not an accountant, but it seems that you just can’t do throughput accounting when you’re in a fixed volume situation, you have to be growing. (Senior Manager) TA/TOC and Cellular Accounting were to be replaced by a number of new ABC-driven accounting initiatives. These included the ‘visual factory with gently guiding them out of the plant via a long walk past certain manufacturing cells on the shopfloor for all to see. This always took place on Friday mornings. Shopfloor workers learned to await the event with the morbid fascination of the ‘mob’ at the medieval ‘burning stake’ and ‘execution scaffold’ so vividly described, inter alia, by Foucault (1977). Alternative routes out of the plant, well beyond the ‘gaze’ of the shopfloor, which would have saved these ‘victims’ of lean production this apparent humiliation, were available. No explanation was given to us, or to shopfloor workers who constantly badgered managers to shed light on why this particular route was preferred. Workers consequently gave their own ‘explanation’, which clearly echo’s what Foucault/ Foucauldian theorists would contend, arguing that this ritual was intended to intimidate existing managers; to remind them of what was in store for them if ‘‘they got it wrong’’, as workers put it to them. They were always quick to remind managers of this, and to add weight to their contention, by cruelly inviting them to observe for themselves the extent of senior managers malevolence towards ‘‘those who fail’’, in how heartily they seemed to devour their lunch in the plant’s canteen on Friday’s as opposed to other days!

(VF)’ (Grief, 1991), Activity-Based Management (ABM), and Management By Fact (MBF). ‘Management by Fact’ and ABM The new concepts were launched through a series of in-house training seminars/workshops by a ‘Strategic Accounting Group’ (SAG). They were introduced to the workforce as a ‘‘tool-box’’ of data gathering techniques that would help reinforce the importance of cost control whilst identifying and removing the under-utilisation of resources within the plant. SAG claimed that the role of these tools was to support the plant’s existing TQM and HRM initiatives, and that the metrics of the visual factory ‘VF’ (Grief, 1991) and MBF, would render all manufacturing and production processes more ‘visible’ and, therefore, subject to corrective intervention to achieve continuous improvement: Key objectives are laid down for us, but we have a lot of other metrics to work from to give us the scope to look at what improvements can be achieved in reality, such as internal quality performance, inventory costs, scrap levels, PPM (parts per million), product defects, customer satisfaction, delivery performance. (Business Manager) An ex-Machine Operator who became one of six shopfloor employees recruited to an ‘Operational Excellence Change Team’ commented: In theory ABM and MBF are part of TQM. But the data you can get from MBF can tell you everything. It allows you to look at an entire cell or a single machine and pull out how much down-time there’s been on any shift on a given day and why. The message was drummed up throughout Northern Plant that MBF had to be made to work: MBF is not allowed to fail, it’s come from America [the parent] so it’s high profile stuff as far as they [plant managers] are concerned. They’ve got to do it and got to make it work. It’s not like when TQ first came in, when you

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could duck and dive and tell them [managers] to sod off, because it ropes you into it. (Shopfloor Member of the Change Team) The implementation of MBF involved the use of time and motion study to measure the manufacturing capability of individual machines and assembly operation within each U-shape cell, and also the ‘manufacturing capability’ of the cell itself. This data was then used to determine optimum cell output targets. The underlying premise of MBF was to ‘‘let the facts speak for themselves’’ as a basis from which to identify and apply appropriate corrective measures for remedying an under-utilisation of the plant’s material and human resources. Despite the rhetoric emphasizing the importance of these new concepts/techniques, for managers they were all secondary to financial performance. One Business Unit Manager said: We talk a lot about the voice of the customer, customer focus and TQM, and have done for a number of years now, but I would say this still remains secondary to financial targets as far as headquarters are concerned. . .We are still getting the strong message saying that if we missed the sales we’re still expected to achieve the margin. Day-to-day output and performance levels were monitored and displayed in bar-charts etc. on a series of highly visual performance indicators located in each cell (see also Dohse, Ulrich, & Walsch, 1991; Delbridge & Turnbull, 1992). Yet, despite this proliferation of financial measures, a number of managers were concerned at the failure to communicate their importance to the shopfloor. One Middle Manager suggested: ‘‘I don’t think we do a very good job of communicating the importance of reduced production costs, or taking time out to make it more visible line by line.’’ Another Production Manager noted some improvements, but then pointed to the resistance to these new measures as operators refused to fill in charts: It’s very hard work simply getting people to fill in charts all the time. They don’t see the value of it and it’s not part of the culture here. People know they are being measured

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and will be held accountable for what they do. They don’t like it, so they don’t fill them in. MBF was interpreted by the shopfloor as a dangerous development in the parent’s new disciplinary ‘change strategy’: MBF doesn’t entertain the idea of the shopfloor just coming into work, getting on with things, and going home without getting involved. . . It’s worse than TQ and SPC because it’s a measurement of everything at the same time, and it’s difficult to deal with as well because if you’ve got a machine that isn’t producing the amount it’s capable of producing it gets ‘time studied’ in a particular way. What [managers] do is they get the machine set up exactly as it should be set then you can’t argue why it can’t do its score and if you do [argue] they’ll say ‘okay, let’s get MBF back on the job to see why.’ (Assembly-Cell Operator) Thus MBF was particularly resented by the shopfloor because it resulted in managers intervening in their work practices and, given its tight disciplinary focus, significantly reduced the scope for the shopfloor to control the work pace or carve out break times.10 MBF was widely viewed by the 10

These possibilities had been a normal feature of established working arrangements through which a narrative of self-identity had been articulated and reproduced. We can shed some light on why workers were concerned about a machine being ‘‘set up exactly as it should be’’. Skilled setters, when setting machines (e.g. tooling them) often slow down or speed up machining cycle-times in order to save wear and tear on tooling and therefore time and space for themselves and/or operators. Altering cycle times cuts down on the number of tool changes or tool adjustments that may have to be made to correct defective parts, thereby creating the opportunity to book none-existent ‘downtime’, and therefore increases in free time for leisurely pursuits. Put simply, altering cycle-times enables operators to meet estimated output targets earlier than official machining capabilities suggest they can. One example would be booking ‘fictitious’ machine break-downs, tool changes and/or down time caused by the ‘need’ to apparently check or correct manufacturing or quality specifications, or wait for a setter to do these jobs. This kind of informal control, based upon tacit knowledge of ‘‘what a machine can actually do and how it runs’’ (Manwaring & Wood, 1985) rather than the specifications of manufacturing engineers, is of mutual benefit for those involved. MBF presented a ‘cause for concern’ for workers because it prevented such practices from remaining hidden or undetected.

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operators as a hostile disciplinary technique that sought to measure and visualize their activities to make them amenable to the immediate intervention of managers. One Fork-Truck Driver commented:

through the notion of ‘activity pools’—was seen to provide the basis for a more critical appreciation of human resource activity in essentially valueadding and non-value-adding terms:

MBF made workers genuinely angry, because you could see straight away that it was about surveillance, about keeping you on the job, about constantly measuring everything you do to get more and more parts out of less and less people. . .. MBF doesn’t pretend not to be about what it’s designed to do, which is put people on the dole, and so basically it provoked a really heavy reaction from people.

It’s not really ABC so much that’s driving the change but ABM. The difference between them is that ABC is where you just work your costs out, whereas ABM is where you can do something with the information you get to run your business. (Financial Controller)

Given this understanding of MBF by workers, managers found it difficult to secure meaningful co-operation from the shopfloor: There’s very little co-operation from the shopfloor though. Management has had to try to force operators to co-operate. They won’t [co-operate] because they see it [MBF] can reduce manning levels. . . to get the data the cell leaders have to go around and actually ask the operators for it and then fill in the charts themselves. Then when a member of the Change Team tries to feed it back to the lads on the shopfloor they won’t talk to him, they just say ‘fuck-off’. (Machine Operator) ABM was introduced as a human resource planning and budgeting system that was also designed to support MBF (Berry, Broadbent, & Otley, 1995). As a derivative of ABC, the intended role of ABM was to enable employees to conceptualise different manufacturing and production processes as activity pools. Activity pools are premised upon ABC’s analysis of the role that activities play in ‘causing’ costs to be incurred in production processes. The intent was that, by appreciating this connection, workers would understand in financial terms the interdependence between different ‘essentially task-based’ manufacturing and production processes. While ABC was assumed to present a more critical view of the relationship between the use of resources and the allocation of costs to those resources, ABM—

To illustrate this distinction, the Strategic Accounting Group produced a selected number of activity profiles of workers from each of the manufacturing cells.11 These activity profiles were presented by the SAG as a ‘‘true and accurate’’ representation of how much time workers actually spent daily in ‘‘real’’ ‘value-adding activity’ in production. Representing data to workers in this way was intended to demonstrate the amount of spare labour capacity SAG claimed to have remained ‘untapped’ in the day-to-day running of production, and the potential productivity gains to be made from utilising this ‘capacity’. However, some managers expressed concern that ABM was just a fad that, like its predecessors, was not likely to last all that long, because ‘‘It’s all about opinion and about nothing else. I think it’s better than standard costs but I don’t think it’s the ‘beall-and-end-all’.’’ Yet, ABM gathered momentum and quickly displaced TA: ABM is being driven by the CEO [of MotorCo]. So while our [Northern Plant] Finance Director was doing his Throughput Accounting on a 11 The profiles were drawn from a series of interviews between these personnel and members of the SAG and a newly trained in-house ABM and MBF ‘change team’. Data was collected from questions related to a specific range of ‘everyday’ tasks and responsibilities performed by workers at the point of production in relation to: (1) the frequency and duration of manufacturing set-up times, waiting time, breakdown times, the responsiveness of machine-setters and/or maintenance personnel to these ‘problems’; (2) the nature and regularity of any [other] interruptions to, or delays in, manufacturing processes or the flow of production, supply of parts or material to and from required locations within and between cells; and (3) quality control ‘problems’.

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small scale in the plant, that’s now getting washed away by the tide of ABM. (Manager)

Workers resistance and the war of attrition: ‘keeping the narrative going’ Rather than refuse any dialogue with managers and risk total alienation, the shopfloor chose to pursue a strategy of keeping the ‘narrative’ going in which a willingness to embrace change was espoused but without surrendering any ground: What you have got to do is watch what you say, and watch what you get drawn into discussing with them [managers]. Because if you show them that you accept what they say, all you’ve done is set yourself up for a regular pasting [from managers] all day everyday for not doing enough because you can’t do enough, because with the activity based thing [ABC] and MBF they’ll want more. Most of us won’t talk [to managers] when it’s to do with TQ or this Activity Based thing because they’re designed to get inside your head. . . once you’ve accepted that there are problems with the way things are done and they can be improved by so-called facts, then you’ve accepted the fact that the time you have now to get ‘your score in’ or to have a break will be gone. (Cell Machine Operator) ‘Keeping the narrative going’ helped workers to drag things out over a longer time scale, thereby delaying the ‘evil’ of the new changes. It also offered workers a respite from the boredom and intensity of work, so that attending meetings became an end in itself. One Truck Driver said: They [workers] were happy to go to meetings because basically ‘it gets them off the machines for an hour or so.’ Also, when they were there, the questions that were asked were about nonsense. Things were challenged, not because they were that bothered about them, but because it dragged things out as much as possible. . . this always led to windups, to piss-taking, and basically making a

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mockery out of it all to get a laugh out of it. Going to the meetings basically involved strolling down to personnel, getting a coffee on the way, having a chat to your mates, doing the same coming back, eventually getting back to the job and then counting it all as down time. During cell briefings, training workshops, and other meetings the technique of ABM and the data produced by it were challenged by the shopfloor in much the same way as in previous accounting initiatives. In one ABM training workshop that we attended, one Machine Operator remonstrated to the SAG Team training personnel present: You people can measure this and that and whatever you like but it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t show what you’ve got to deal with when you have a problem, it doesn’t show how long it takes to get a setter, a new tool sorted, or a fault or whatever. So what we’re here to listen to is crap that has nothing to do with reality. During the same workshop, other workers endorsed this view by adding that it was both ‘‘ridiculous’’ and ‘‘insulting’’ to be involved in training programmes that were designed to tell workers, who in many cases had 20 years’ firsthand experience of manufacturing in Northern Plant, how to improve production processes. Workers either refused to accept the validity of the data, claiming that it was beyond their understanding; or the data was dismissed as ‘‘just more management bullshit’’ aimed at work intensification. Alternatively, workers argued that ABM offered only an abstract account of ‘‘what workers do’’, rather than what they ‘‘actually do in reality’’. The activities were discredited on the grounds that inadequate account was taken of a wide range of short-batch production runs. These required workers to address the complexity of day-to-day problems that defied measurement in this simplistic way. In response, SAG argued that ABM had been specifically designed to measure such ‘activity’, but only in value-adding and nonvalue-adding terms. This response only served to fuel workers’ suspicion that ABM was designed

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for work intensification; to render the shopfloor accountable for poor performance, down-time, or any other stoppages or interruptions to production, irrespective of their causes. In another workshop, the argument reached its climax when one worker became irate, claiming that the SAG had no respect for the fact that: It’s the lads on the shopfloor working together and not the idea of getting rid of what they do that had made [Northern Plant] a success well before the SAG even knew the plant existed. (Operator) The irony of this incident was that, at the time, this Operator had worked at the Plant (unknown to the SAG) for only 18 months. After this meeting he told us that exploiting this much vaunted view of the more long term employees in this way had: Left management knackered, because they can’t handle it. They don’t know what to say when you say ‘it’s us and not them who built the plant up’. The best thing though is that they’re not sure whether you’re winding them up, and they can’t say you are because we’ll walk out [of the workshop] with a cob-on. (Operator) It is important to note that shopfloor hostility towards MBF/ABM was not simply a consequence of perceived limitations of these techniques. It was also because the techniques were seen as part of an ongoing ‘onslaught’ by management determined to discipline the shopfloor. Operators were getting frustrated and angered by managers’ claims that operators were a problem because of the latter’s reluctance to embrace change initiatives: This new management are saying we’re a problem because we’re not flexible, because we won’t accept change. We are saying, we are flexible; we can run any machine you like. . . But what they mean by ‘flexibility’ and what we mean are not the same [thing]. They think it’s me wanting to do my job, the setter’s job, maintenance job, and jump on a machine in between. (Materials Handler)

Operators presented themselves as being prepared to embrace ‘change’ willingly—so long as what change meant complied with their own expectations, rather than management’s. Operators were quick to point out that their work practices had undergone significant change, and that they have taken on a lot, but they were not prepared to be manipulated by managers to accept changes that were aimed at exploiting their labour and future careers for the purposes of short-term gains in the form of a reduced wage bill. Further attempts by SAG to explain that the VF ‘concept’, MBF or ABM, which were designed to introduce workers to the concept of working smarter rather than harder, faced intractable arguments and uncooperative behaviour from workers. The VF concept, for example, was condemned as a management plan eventually to introduce a system of total surveillance over the shopfloor, and its MBF initiative was subsequently relabelled ‘‘management by fear’’: This [MBF] is a bad one. If they [management] get this in you won’t get a minute to yourself, you’ll be ‘screwed down’, and that’s what they’re after, to be able to make you account for everything you do for a full shift and if you can’t, they’ve got you haven’t they, and that’s it, that’s all, this [MBF] is about nailing you down. (Machine Operator) The attitude of the shopfloor towards this perceived continuous tightening up of discipline by management was to pour scorn on management’s authority, claiming that they see through management rhetoric as nothing more than squeezing more profit out of labour: We’re being told [at cell meetings] either you perform, do the work [MotorCo] want in the numbers they want and the quality they want, or they’ll simply go somewhere else or subcontract it because they’re not making money. They must be. Last year we had seventeen people on this section, we now have seven. Ten men have gone, ten men’s wages, and they’re saying they’re not making money . . .They must think we’re fuckin thick. (Operator)

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Given their ability to debunk and discredit management’s disciplinary measures, operators were intent on taking on management on the assumption that, without securing full co-operation from the shopfloor, managerial initiatives were doomed: At the end of the day, they [managers] know they need people’s co-operation. So they can try and get total surveillance in as much as they like, but they can’t be everywhere and on everyone’s case at the same time. They can’t stand at the side of people’s machines like a permanent fixture, watching them, seeing how they do the job, if they’re doing it their way. (Materials Handler) The patience of operators was wearing thin as managers kept pushing for more surveillance and disciplinary measures. Operators experienced a gradual withdrawal of much of the discretion they enjoyed previously over the organization of their work activities and the use of their work time: We’re [the shopfloor] sick of being warned for anything they want to warn us about. Silly little things that they think they can get away with to keep on at you to do things exactly the way they want: stopping for a coffee, a smoke, reading the papers, and having a chat. So the men are angry. They’re angry with seeing people being pulled and warned constantly by bully boys. (Machine Operator) Given this anger, and operators’ belief that managers, no matter how hard they tried, cannot effectively monitor everything at the same time, a war of attrition developed as operators sought to frustrate and humiliate managers: [We want] to make the bastards [managers] claw at everything they get, to make it as hard and as horrible as possible at every stage, so that they hate you and hate the thought of actually having to deal with you in the first place. If you’re prepared to keep putting things in their way, anything, just to ware them down, to piss them off, even though

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you’ve actually agreed to accept to go with what they want. . . What I’m saying is that you’ve got to get them so pissed off that in the end you get them to stop short of what they want.’’ (Machine Operator) Operators undermined the authority of managers either genuinely or sarcastically—for example, by presenting themselves to the directors of the parent as more caring about cost savings than managers. Following the introduction of ABM, MBF and the VF, efforts were made to reduce and eventually eliminate the role played by quality control inspectors by transferring their responsibilities to machine operators and assembly workers. The Plant Convenor summed up the shopfloor views of this development, which was introduced by the Quality Department Manager, by presenting it as short-sighted and damaging to Northern Plant in the long term: This put the onus for quality on the people who make the parts, people who are not trained to do it and don’t have the time to do it anyway. When we had [quality control] inspectors on the lines and viewers on assembly we had good quality all the time and we were winning all kinds of awards. Then they took the viewers off. All they were doing though was saving on the wage bill, but without thinking about the consequences; he lost the company a fortune because of the problems he caused.

Tightening surveillance through accounting and provoking more resistance By late 1995 the struggle over the introduction of these [new] accounting practices had intensified. Senior management announced that the data gathered and processed from the activity profiles indicated that the plant was operating at forty percent below its manufacturing capacity. In the spring of 1996, workers were given a management ultimatum that they must ‘‘produce more or risk the sack’’. In a series of crisis meetings that followed this ultimatum, workers were informed that

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MotorCo will no longer ‘‘tolerate the plant’s continued resistance’’ to change. Corporate management introduced a series of new disciplinary measures specifically designed to gain much closer managerial control and surveillance over the shopfloor. These included ‘non-discretion management’ (NDM), a new time and attendance policy and a new disciplinary code of conduct. NDM required all supervisors to adhere to a uniform and consistent approach to managing and disciplining the shopfloor. Each of the U-shaped cells was to be patrolled at 2-hourly intervals and, without exception, workers were to be disciplined if their performance, without adequate reason, fell short of targets determined by MBF. This discipline took the form of automatically issuing offenders with a written letter of concern that was registered with their cell manager and the HRM Department. Letters of concern were issued for what management deemed poor work performance(s); poor house-keeping; bad attitude; unnecessary, or un-accounted for absence(s) from work stations; poor time-keeping or absenteeism; or any other offence thought to warrant concern. NDM was widely viewed by the shopfloor as a major restriction: NDM doesn’t allow you to make any decisions, you just adhere to it. You can’t use your discretion because you are just a ‘tool’. [It’s there] to discipline people (Supervisor) These new disciplinary measures precipitated a period of increasing tension. One Operator suggested that through NDM corporate management was simply ‘‘sending the message [to the shopfloor]’’ that ‘‘they’re going to discipline people ‘out of the door’’’ (i.e. by sacking them) as a means of ‘‘breaking’’ shopfloor resistance. Workers initially resorted to contriving forms of ‘down-time’ that enabled them to account for lost production or poor performance figures. They achieved this by booking breakdowns, waiting time, or any stoppages or interruptions to the flow of production that had either never occurred, or recorded more time than it actually took for themselves, machine setters or maintenance personnel to fix these problems. In certain cases, workers avoided or

refused to record output figures or stoppages, sarcastically claiming that they had either forgotten or had been ‘‘too busy’’. Stalling and/or draggingout the process of recording output or performance levels was intended to wear management down and thereby ‘‘force them to back-off’’, as one worker put it. Workers reinforced the message that plant management could expect at best minimum compliance to the rules and procedures of the new disciplinary regime. Workers also signalled their intent to consume as much of management’s time as possible in routine progress chasing and to make management expend time and effort in re-asserting and enforcing the rules and procedures of the new disciplinary regime. As one Operator said ‘‘[NDM] works both ways; if this is the way they want to ‘manage’ then that’s fine, but it’s up to them to get it right, not us’’. The attitude of the shopfloor was: We had no choice but to take them [management] on over these things. What things like MBF amount to is lean manufacturing in all its glory. Which is about screwing people and getting rid of as many jobs as possible in the process, so you can’t afford to ignore it. (Shop Steward) In January 1997 workers almost unanimously voted to take strike action. Their main grievances were focused upon the new time and attendance policy. This, they protested, had been imposed upon them without prior negotiation between the plant management and elected trade union representatives. As one worker indicated, ‘‘[NDM] is a sacker’s charter’’. It was widely viewed by workers as designed not only to impose totally unrestricted managerial power, control and surveillance over the nature and organization of production, but also to usher in a regime of ‘‘management by fear’’ that functioned by arbitrarily targeting workers for dismissal as a means of applying pressure to others to conform to the entire NDM measures package. In March 1997 workers implemented their earlier decision to take strike action by beginning what was intended to be a series of random 1-day strikes and an over-time ban. If this action failed to win concessions, the threat was to

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follow it with an indefinite all-out strike. Legally, the shop stewards were required to give only 24 hours’ notice before each 1-day strike took place. They therefore adopted a strategy of ‘‘hitting them [management] randomly and at short notice’’, as one Shop Steward claimed. This involved choosing a different day each week on which the strike would take place, but informing management of this as late as [legally] possible in order to inflict maximum disruption to production schedules and output targets in ways that management could least easily control. After only two 1-day strikes, management conceded to the workers’ demands and abandoned NDM. The shop stewards informed management that they would not be prepared to discontinue industrial action without the latter’s agreement that its time and attendance and disciplinary policies were appropriately revised, following ‘‘proper’’ consultation between the HRM Department and the shop stewards. In less than a week, the outcome of this was a (new) policy agreeable to both the plant’s new senior management and the shop stewards. Withdrawal of NDM, however, did not inhibit corporate management’s search for greater control and surveillance over the shopfloor. There have been renewed, albeit more cautious, attempts to operationalise fully ‘new’ disciplinary accounting measures in the plant. In response, further strike action has been threatened but not carried out. The ‘new’ accounting measures continue to be contested and fought over as the politics of production unravel new dynamics that are mediated by the nature and history of the plant’s management–labour relations.

Discussion In order to provide a broad overview of worker– management–steward relations at Northern Plant, we have described its constituent groups as if they were fairly unified and pursuing consistent objectives. It is of course possible to disaggregate their respective orientations and priorities to highlight divisions and fractures. Conflicts over lean production and novel accounting practices at the plant occurred not only between management and

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labour, but also ensued within and between different shopfloor groups including shop stewards. To be sure, shop stewards at the plant did challenge lean production and new accounting methods, and on occasion, actively enticed workers to oppose their introduction by threatening industrial action. Yet, compared to the majority of the membership, the stewards were decidedly less ‘militant’ or ‘intransigent’. Following official AUEW Trade Union policy (since the mid-1980s: see Ackers, Smith, & Smith, 1996), the stewards largely accepted, and to some extent welcomed, the prospect of new wave manufacturing and working practices as these were expected to involve training, education and multi-skilling that were claimed to be of benefit to their membership. The stewards’ later aversion to, but not total rejection of, lean production, only arose from a belated appraisal of its ‘meanness’ — an awareness that developed during long and protracted negotiation with management over the terms and conditions of its introduction. Their view of how this apparent ‘meanness’ of lean production should be challenged, however, differed from that of their membership. As we have shown elsewhere (Ezzamel, Willmott, & Worthington, 2001), the shop stewards sought to avoid what they saw as the potentially negative implications of lean production, ‘by negotiating it in as a damage-limitation exercise’. Their membership, in contrast, adopted a stance designed to distance themselves as far as possible from the prospect of ever working under these conditions12. At the outset, workers did not totally reject lean production. Changes in the social organization at the plant, resulting from the introduction of new technology or the application of innovations in flexible production systems were commonplace at Northern Plant. The plant’s rapid expansion in the 1970s was a consequence of an enthusiasm for innovation in both the design and manufacture of its product, and its experimentation with group12

As this account showed, shop stewards at Northern Plant were prepared to talk endlessly about their willingness to accept new (team) working practices, providing management remained responsible for making such arrangements work, but remained unwilling to walk even one step in management’s direction to enable them to achieve this.

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technology (Alford, 1994, see below) that they shared. Since it increased employment and job security at the plant, which is located in an area that has traditionally suffered relatively high unemployment, such innovations had traditionally been well received by workers. In any case, established industrial relations agreements meant that the introduction of new working practices at the plant was automatically subject to collective bargaining—usually only at annual pay negotiations. As with previous major innovations, workers were attentive to the possible implications of lean production for existing frontiers of control and their potential effect upon job security. But they were not automatically opposed to its introduction. The subsequent strength of worker opposition to lean production, as opposed to the more accommodating stance of their stewards, was not simply the result of recognising the potential ‘meanness’ of this mode of production but a combination of a number of factors, including, ironically, the promise of polyvalence.13 Workers at Northern Plant were sceptical of promises of high-levels of training, education or skillenhancement that management claimed would accompany introduction of lean production. It was considered implausible that all workers at the plant would, or indeed could, be afforded the opportunity of skill-enhancement, let alone a mature apprenticeship- assuming that all of them would want to take this opportunity if it was presented to them. Indeed, some workers were indifferent and many resistant to the prospect of skillenhancement from the outset. Many declared to management and their stewards that they had no 13

The promise of becoming more ‘skilled’ was a highly attractive proposition for many machine operators at the plant. Many of them already unofficially performed certain aspects of skilled work that they had acquired by assisting skilled men to re-tool and re-programme during machine changeovers. They also acquired minor CNC (Computerised numerical Control) tooling and product quality control programming skills, which setters taught then, to save down-time during production runs. The prospect of working with manufacturing engineers, and the promise of the opportunity to progress to the position of manufacturing engineer, was similarly attractive to many skilled workers. Skilled workers could however, realise this aspiration whether or not lean production was introduced, whereas semi-skilled workers, could achieve skilled status only by its introduction.

interest in becoming a ‘skilled-man’. For these workers, given what they saw as the commodified nature of all work in manufacturing, ‘skilled-work’ was only marginally ‘better’ than non/semi-skilled work. Others argued, as labour process theorists contend (e.g. Bratton, 1992; Dohse et al., 1991), that ‘skill-enhancement’ under lean production is a misnomer; a tactic used by management to ‘blur the lines’ between craft and semi-skilled work in a way that results in de-skilling not en-skilling and promotes work intensification, eventually leading to job-losses. Many workers at the plant accepted and indeed supported craft workers’ defence of craft demarcation-lines. In their view, having served an apprenticeship, craft workers had a right to protect the privileged status and position they held in the labour process, not least of all to preserve the integrity of craft work for future entrants. Like Collinson’s (1992) workers, many workers at Northern Plant believed they had ‘missed their opportunity of apprentices on leaving school at age 15, and to enter into a mature apprenticeship now as an adult would amount to taking the opportunity of an apprenticeship away from the current generation of school-leavers. Others, however, were less sympathetic, believing craft workers to be arrogant and contemptuous of the plant’s non-craft workers, who they saw as ‘lesser [shopfloor] beings’, and who they were preventing from ‘getting on’. However, in general all workers, irrespective of their views of new wave manufacturing initiatives, and each other, remained cautious as they sought to avoid being drawn into accepting lean production without formally negotiated agreements reached by their stewards that specifically guaranteed: (1) equal opportunity to inhouse skill training and education for all workers through to a mature apprenticeship; (2) job-security for those who did not wish to take this opportunity; (3) a no-compulsory redundancy policy, and; (4) trade union involvement in the planning, organization and administration of multi-skilling and mature apprenticeship training schemes. Lengthy negotiation failed to produce a mutually agreeable training policy acceptable to both management and the shopfloor. This led workers to question management intentions and

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to lose faith in the shop stewards’ ability to protect their interests by securing from management the introduction of a genuine multi-skilling programme, rather than simply a ‘multi-tasking’ (see Sharpe, 1996) agreement that, they believed, would lead to work intensification as management’s primary aim. The major obstacle to the introduction of lean production at Northern Plant that emerged from these negotiations, however, was the craft-workers’ response to multi-skilling. This was a more intractable problem. Semi-skilled shopfloor worker had rightly anticipated that the plant’s time served skilled/craft workers would not accept a multi-skilling that allowed ‘dilutees’ (i.e. non-time-served workers) into their ranks14. When, as expected, the skilled workforce refused to agree to multi-skilling, and, moreover, rejected management’s proposals for a mature apprenticeship scheme, talks not only broke down but also were stalled indefinitely. There were also divisions within management. In addition to obvious differences in seniority and functional responsibility amongst managers, some managers were more sympathetic to worker concerns, believing that senior management initiatives could be counterproductive for securing the degree of employee cooperation necessary to implement forms of lean production. Other managers were either blind to, or dismissive of, such concerns and their implications, and viewed forms of worker resistance as irrational, disruptive behaviour that required tougher action. Recognition of this diversity within the ranks of workers, shop-stewards, and managers with regard to workers’ levels of skill, as well as length of service and the strength of their identification with the values and practices that fuelled worker resistance to management initiatives should not, however, deflect attention from examination of the principal dynamics and prominent features of the relationship between workers and managers at Northern Plant. Central to this relationship was the sustained resistance of the workforce to management’s 14 As Penn (1986) shows, craft-workers in manufacturing have traditionally defended craft-knowledge from management and non-skilled workers and ‘dilutees—non-time-served ’ skilled workers, and the internal demarcation lines that exist between specific craft workers (i.e. electricians, fitters, toolmakers, setters, grinders) to protect their interests.

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efforts to introduce lean manufacturing during the late 1980s and 1990s. It might be concluded that the managers at Northern Plant simply lost the initiative for change during the early stages of negotiations, never regained it, and that this failure accounts for the strength of opposition to new working practices they subsequently faced. By the same token, it could be said that the ‘uncompromising’ determination of the stewards to secure a beneficial outcome to change for their membership was a key factor in explaining the resistance encountered by management to its lean production initiatives. A sophisticated labour process model of conflict at work (Edwards, 1986) would identify these two factors, perhaps orchestrated by stewards’ tacit support for worker ‘misbehaviour’ that served to subvert management’s authority and unity, as broadly sufficient to account for the situation. Indeed, how else could one explain how machine operators develop the understanding that TQM means ‘less men doing more work’, and then act on this insight to confront management? This model of industrial relations, we suggest, positions the ordinary shopfloor worker as a bit player in industrial conflict, preyed on by management on the one hand, and protected on the other by dedicated shop stewards’, totally committed to protecting worker interests (see Beynon, 1984; Darlington, 1994). In the case of Northern Plant, however, worker resistance was not motivated solely, and perhaps not even primarily, by a concern to protect material conditions of employment (i.e. pay, conditions and job-security), or established ‘frontiers of control’ (Edwards, 1979). Other important considerations, which we characterise as ‘identity concerns’, fuelled their resistance to change. A determination to preserve social spaces at work that would enable them to confirm a sense of identity shaped during an earlier period of the plant’s history generated conflict not only between managers and workers but also between workers and their shop stewards. Determined to preserve established working practices in the face of their threatened erosion by efforts to introduce lean production, the workers accused the stewards of lacking the same commitment or determination. Shop stewards regarded their shopfloor membership not so much

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as straying beyond control, but as ‘beyond (their) contempt’, interested only in short-term financial ‘self interests’. The stewards perception, which our own analysis questions and relates to an excessively materialistic and patronising unionist discourse, was that their members were too readily prepared to accept ‘‘any shit’, or strike any deal (with their foremen) to acquire the ‘gravy jobs’ (see Burawoy, 1979); to gain ‘excessive’ over-time as payment for ‘score-busting’ (i.e. making the numbers in record times, to which they might one day be held to account as their official output targets), or, as it was put more contemptuously by an ex-trade union convenor at the plant, simply because ‘‘some of them just like grovelling’’. To explain this, and following Clegg (1994), a scene from a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western perhaps more accurately portrays the nature of resistance at the plant in the wake of its planned investment in lean production than the classic Western Movie industrial relations scenario. That is, it took the form of a screenplay comprising ‘transitory, fleeting, ambivalent and semiotically insecure subjectivities’ (Clegg, 1994: p. 275) constituted by a wider sense of insecurity borne of perpetual suspicion, mistrust and the constant fear of betrayal from each of the different dyads within the triad of the individual agencies ultimately commited to ‘no cause but their own’ (ibid.).15 15 During the research it was difficult to find respondents amongst the shopfloor protagonists of resistance, the shop stewards or managers themselves who were not somewhat bewildered by how the resistance to lean production had continued for such a lengthy period. The search for a plausible explanation was in fact a regular topic of conversation not only between shopfloor workers themselves, but also between workers and managers. These exchanges—typically between foremen and workers—often caused production to be lost. Indeed, such matters were often discussed for quite lengthy periods, with the former conveniently perched on the side of a machine or workstation or while workers were on ‘walk-a-bout’ as they skived off from their designated workstations in a whole host of ingenious ways without any genuine reason or permission. Such day-to-day activities were conducted openly with impunity, without fear of reprimand or disciplinary action from management. These social practices were in fact so deeply ingrained in the collective thought of both workers and mangers at the plant that not only were they simply accepted norms, but totally ‘taken-for-granted’ as part and parcel of the culture of management-labour relations at Northern Plant.

A ‘stand-off’ ensued between managers who were reluctant to attempt the imposition of new working practices on the shopfloor for fear of provoking industrial dispute; workers who were resistant to offering the slightest concession to management for fear of work intensification; and shop stewards caught between the two. The stewards were unprepared to (openly) support worker’s intransigence towards change, for fear of being led into an industrial dispute over lean production by their membership, which they believed they would not win. Yet the stewards were equally unprepared to acquiesce to management demands for them to cultivate a more reasonable response to change amongst the workforce, which they believed they could not deliver even if they wanted to, and which risked provoking wild cat industrial action (Gouldner, 1955) that they could not control. Either outcome, as the stewards protested, would probably have resulted in the defeat of the union, which they believed neither they nor their membership could afford. The stewards therefore contrived to parry pressures from management for change by communication of what would, or would not, be acceptable to their membership while, at the same time, side-stepping membership pressure for a firmer stance, including occasional shopfloor calls for industrial action, by skilfully deflecting these demands.16

16

The shop stewards themselves called for industrial action only when they deemed the strength and legitimacy of their position with management to be under threat, or when they found pressures from the shopfloor became over-barring. Threats of industrial action, however, rarely if ever came close to being carried out. More often, shop stewards used the threat to impress upon management that they had the full support of their membership if action was deemed necessary. Threats of industrial action were therefore used mainly to check occasional attempts to impose new working practices at the plant outside of established management-trade union negotiation procedures, or to counter moves to undermine their rights as the legitimate representatives of the shopfloor, for example, by attempting to circumvent them to deal with workers directly to promote new working practices. This had the effect of rendering the shop stewards militant in the eyes of management, and corrupt in the eyes of their membership. The stewards defended their actions by claiming that they were necessary to protect the position of the trade union at the plant as the gatekeepers of industrial action.

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We have set our examination of how, at Northern Plant, new accounting techniques introduced to secure leaner production were resisted by a workforce that interpreted them as measures designed to weaken, manipulate, or restrict their exercise of discretion in the context of an established and entrenched pattern of management– labour relations. Although the stewards played a part in mediating between ‘unruly’ shopfloor workers and ‘overbearing’ managers, we have stressed that forms of conflict and processes of resistance at Northern Plant cannot adequately be understood in terms of classical managementunion battles and skirmishes over pay and conditions. Pay and conditions were undoubtedly significant and often became an overt, mutually recognisable focus of disputes. But recurrent struggles, we have suggested, were provoked and fuelled principally by innovations that posed a threat to established forms of identification and means of reproducing narratives of self identity. The articulation of workers’ concerns occurred through interactions on the shopfloor between workers, with supervisors and at meetings where politically astute, but not necessarily militantly leftist or unionist, workers would be active in pushing issues, often in humorous ways, so that other, less politically attuned workers, would be schooled about the significance and implications of management’s efforts to introduce change. Discontent would be harnessed and support mobilised by demonstrating how management demands could be lampooned, subverted, parried and deflected in ways that drew those in who enjoyed a ‘laff’ and a release from boredom occasioned by scraps and confrontations with management. In this precarious way, ‘solidarity’ amongst diverse and fractious members of the shopfloor was manufactured as different orientations—comprising politically aware workers who were disaffected with the union; traditionally ‘militant’ workers and others who were ardent and unquestioning union supporters, as well as a residual number of politically disinterested or ‘naive’ workers who simply enjoyed the spectacle of watching supervisors and managers being knocked off their perches—were brought together to frustrate and impede managerial change initiatives.

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Resistance might otherwise be interpreted simply as workers’ opposition to measures that threatened the material basis of their relationship to capital as sellers of labour power. In contrast, we have argued that it was not just, or even principally, the threat of the loss of their jobs that galvanised resistance to management’s repeated efforts to change work practices but, rather, workers’ immersion in a narrative that prized a culture of what we have termed ‘unplanned responsible autonomy’. Prior to Motor-Co’s quest to modernise the plant, workers had negotiated high levels of overtime and considerable ‘free time’ in exchange for their effort and co-operation in managing production. Workers’ involvement in self-managing practices, informal organization and co-operative management-labour relations, underpinned by the standard costing system, provided them with knowledge of the practical meaning of concepts such as flexibility, quality consciousness, empowerment, employee involvement and Kaizen. When management subsequently sought to introduce ‘new wave’ manufacturing and production methods and new accounting techniques, these initiatives were interpreted by workers as attempts to incorporate their involvement and co-operation into a new, nonnegotiable, or at least more tightly circumscribed, social organization of production. These developments, it was anticipated, would restrict their involvement and influence over the social organization of production. It would also narrow opportunities for confirming and reproducing their self-identity as knowledgeable agents of production, as contrasted to becoming docile servants of the new production methods and accounting techniques—techniques that workers perceived to impose managerially programmed forms of discretion upon them. This made workers determined to preserve practices in which their sense of knowledgeability and identity could be articulated and maintained. Having exercised considerable discretion over the organization of work during the era of unplanned responsible autonomy, which provided a (nostalgic) benchmark for interrogating the significance and likely consequences of each new initiative, workers could readily anticipate what the ‘new’ practices (e.g. teamworking)

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would mean in terms of work intensification and the squeezing of both ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ time. The experience of unplanned responsible autonomy informed their understanding of subsequent management initiatives and fired their resistance to the exercise of programmed discretion demanded by the ‘new’ accounting measures. The prospect of working within what was construed, in the light of workers’ previous experience, as a nonnegotiable and uncompromising system of production was readily discerned and collectively resisted. Workers’ retention of a substantial measure of discretion, or exemption from managerially designed control, coupled with their capacity to engage in diverse forms of ‘misbehaviour’ and resistance, enabled them ‘to keep a particular narrative [of self] going’ (Giddens, 1991; p. 54), a narrative resting on a celebration of their superior knowledge and understanding of high-tech manufacturing and ability to ‘manage’ complex production mixes. By preserving this narrative, workers contrived to outwit and outsmart management’s efforts to control the sphere of action within which they developed and exercised their control over the labour process. Worker resistance also drew a measure of support from local managers in so far as they assessed ‘new’ organizing and accounting initiatives to unsettle established management–labour relations and/or have self defeating consequences for raising output. Shop stewards shared workers’ suspicion of management’s claims about lean production but were more inclined to accept the union view that it would be possible to negotiate an up-skilling agreement, and were therefore reluctant to support workers’ unqualified resistance to the new initiatives.

Conclusions This paper has presented an intensive case study of Northern Plant in an effort to shed further light on the introduction of ‘new’ accounting practices in contemporary work organizations, and to link these initiatives to the context of managementlabour relations. By examining the history of developments at Northern Plant over more than

twenty years, we have connected efforts to introduce new manufacturing and accounting practices to changes in ownership and market conditions. We noted how, for example, following a change of ownership, new initiatives including flexibility, teamworking, and cellular manufacturing were launched, and with these came a demand for ‘new’ accounting practices. We began by summarising briefly the sequence of events. Initially the parent favoured ABC, but senior management at Northern Plant viewed this as counter-productive for its market and labour conditions. Aware of the history of managementlabour relations at Northern Plant, its managers sought to avoid ABC because they anticipated that employees would perceive its effects as degrading their conditions of employment and limiting traditional opportunities and scope for self-organizion. Accordingly, the Plant managers introduced TA, but this was interpreted and resisted by workers and middle and first-line managers who viewed it as a device for labour intensification and concealing efficiency improvements that could provide a basis for negotiating better pay and conditions. Subsequently, TA (and TOC) was disbanded in favour of a package comprising ABM and Management By Fact (MBF), which then met with the same fate as TA. This resistance eventually prompted a highly coercive response from corporate management as managers at all levels in Northern Plant were replaced. At the same time, the focus of accounting techniques shifted with the withdrawal of delegated authority to middle management who were to be brought under the constant gaze of senior management. Greater, and more direct, accountability measures were imposed on them. In the face of entrenched resistance, corporate management intervened by applying a variety of direct controls, such as NonDiscretionary Management (NDM) coupled to MBF. In response to effective and damaging industrial action, management conceded to shopfloor demands by withdrawing NDM. To understand such shifts and counter-shifts, we have argued, does not simply require giving a little more attention to the politics of the production process, but rather positioning it at the centre of analysis. For it is these management-labour relations, we

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contend, that facilitate or frustrate, and smooth or disrupt, the practicalities of accounting for factory production. More specifically, a fuller appreciation and exploration of senior managers’ dependence upon middle and first-line managers as well as workers’ co-operation—and the latter’s capacity to develop more or less effective forms of covert and overt resistance—is required. By tracing the dynamics of management control and employee resistance, and indeed workers’ control and management resistance, we have sought to provide one illustration of how the introduction and abandonment of a series of ‘new’ management and accounting initiatives was conditioned by the politics of production. We do not claim that the case of Northern Plant is typical or representative. But neither are we in a position to concede that the dynamics explored in this paper are unparalleled, even if they are dramatically articulated. We have been at pains to emphasise the particularities of the history of Northern Plant in terms of workers’ specialist skills, its benign product market conditions and the ethos of ‘unplanned responsible autonomy’ that was negotiated in its early years. In this respect, Northern Plant illustrates the obverse of dynamics observed in a sister study where a very different pattern of management-labour relations at StitchCo, forged within a distinctive complex of product and labour markets, mediated employees’ receptiveness to the introduction and implementation of new manufacturing practices and associated accounting methods (Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998a). So, while it is impossible to draw out any generalisations about the introduction or consequences of lean production from a single case study, we believe that insights into the dynamics of its implementation are of more general relevance. In particular, we have commended attentiveness to the significance of processes of identity formation and reproduction in assessing and accommodating change initiatives, including efforts to implement lean production. We conclude with a consideration of how our analysis compares to, and serves as a corrective for, the analysis of new management and accounting initiatives advanced by Miller and O’Leary (1993, 1994). We concur with Miller and

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O’Leary’s concern to shift the terms of reference of the debate on accounting change from the purely economic (e.g. transaction cost theory) to the realm of the political—that is, the realm where debates occur, interpretations are made, negotiations are entered, deals are struck and coalitions are formed. Their analysis also valuably acknowledges how, for example, the discrediting of certain accounting techniques is inseparable from the strategies used to promote the authority and ‘value’ of those commending alternative accounting techniques. The emergence of accounting is usefully linked to competing and negotiated conceptions of the product, the factory, and emerging modes of governance. Our analysis, however, indicates that the ‘politics of production’ is a crucial omission from their analysis. Miller and O’Leary’s analysis of Caterpillar implies that management’s intentions are actualised in the formation of ‘economic citizens’, without dealing with whether, or how, this process is accomplished (see Froud et al., 1998). Miller and O’Leary (1994; p. 38) identify and elaborate dimensions of the process, noting that it opened up a domain of ‘‘empowerment, discretion and negotiation. . . traversed by tensions and potential conflicts’’. But they do not show how these tensions shaped, enabled or constrained the ‘actualization’ of cell proprietorship, nor do they incorporate an examination of these dynamics within their account. It is noted that new demands were continually arising—for example, with regard to the challenge of aligning working arrangements with the ideal of customer-driven manufacturing—and it is reported that efforts ‘to re-make the identities of the workers’ in response to these demands were ‘fragile and temporary’ (ibid: 40). Yet, Miller and O’Leary offer no investigation or discussion of the practical operation and effects of these efforts in organizing the introduction and development of Caterpillar’s Plant with a Future (PWAF) programme through which ‘‘new economic citizenship [was] given form and content’’ (ibid). In their analysis, the voice of labour is conspicuous by its absence as its cooperation is tacitly implied. In effect, labour is presented as passively accepting the changes introduced by management at the Caterpillar’s Decatur Plant.

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In her commentary upon Miller and O’Leary’s work, Arnold (1998: p. 666) similarly calls attention to ‘the absence of all traces of class conflict. . . in the very domain where Marxian analytical concepts are most powerful, the domain of production’. To counteract the silence within Miller and O’Leary’s analysis, Arnold points to union activists’ accounts of Caterpillar’s attempt to enrol workers into a new economic citizenship that are at least suggestive of the contradictory consequences of this policy for management credibility and employee morale.17 In our examination of management and accounting initiatives at Northern Plant, we too have sought to recognise worker resistance but without substituting the determinism of historical materialism for the alleged indeterminacy18 of ‘postmodern’ readings of the role of accounting in organizations and society (Arnold, 1998: p. 665). We accept the importance of appreciating how the experiences and discourses of workers are conditioned, though by no means exclusively or exhaustively, by what Arnold characterises as ‘the logic and internal contradictions of capitalism’ (ibid, p. 680). In our analyses, we have sought to move beyond orthodox Marxian conceptualisations of management control and worker resistance, which tend to read them unproblematically as articulations of class interests that allegedly drive rational strategies for their pursuit or defence. Instead of examining these conditions as forces or mechanisms that exist independently of agents whose actions are governed by 17

Arnold (1998) notes that workers in the Caterpillar factory were cautioned by union representatives to guard against the ‘‘false sense of security’’ (our emphases) of believing that ‘teamworking’ and concepts such as ‘self-management’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘employee involvement’ might in practice mean anything other than work intensification (see the response by Miller and O’Leary, 1998). Northern Plant workers, in contrast, had experienced forms of ‘teamworking’, ‘self-management’, and ‘employee involvement’ during the period prior to the Motor-Co take-over—and had subsequently jealously defended this pattern of management–labour relations. They did not need to be cautioned about the ‘false sense of security’ invoked by the buzz words relating to ‘new’ manufacturing practices. Their past experience led them, rightly or wrongly, to regard intensification as an inherent feature of ‘lean’ manufacturing. 18 What Arnold describes as ‘a seemingly coincidental conjunctive of discursive practices’ (Arnold, 1998; p. 670).

them, we have sought to show how ‘conditions’ are enacted through discursive practices that are articulations of specific complexes of management-labour relations. These complexes are embedded in the capital-labour relationship but are irreducible to it. More concretely, when examining initiatives to introduce ‘new’ accounting techniques to Northern Plant, we have shown how a regime of ‘unplanned responsible autonomy’, negotiated between management and shopfloor workers in an earlier era, returned to haunt management. An expedient negotiation of cooperation during the 1970s and early 1980s effectively ‘produced’ workers who proved to be virtually unmanageable when management sought to introduce new methods of control. We have argued that the ‘the politics of the product’ at Northern Plant were shaped and reshaped by employees’ determination to resist and subvert initiatives that threatened to reduce the sphere of action in which they were able to confirm and embellish a sense of self-identity as highly knowledgeable agents of the production process. This narrative was articulated and brought to bear on efforts to introduce the ‘new’ accounting measures. The subjectivity of labour, whether ‘organized’ or not (Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998a), is a medium as well as an object of change. It is centrally implicated in the politics of product and production (Knights & Willmott, 1989). It is therefore relevant, contra Miller and O’Leary, to appreciate how manufacturing is contingent upon workers’ willingness to behave in particular ways, and their perceptions of the relevance of ‘new’ manufacturing and accounting techniques for protecting and defending social spaces in which narratives of self can be confirmed and maintained. Our analysis shows how the warrant for, and implementation of, the ‘new’ accounting techniques is mediated by the politics of production as the subjects and objects of these techniques articulate, negotiate and pursue their interests in the turmoil of the ‘new’ workplace (Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998a, 1998b). This applies with equal measure to workplaces where the constitution of employees’ subjectivity within different social formations and production processes renders them more receptive, or at least less resistant, to change,

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including the introduction of new manufacturing and accounting methods. Only by appreciating the presence and significance of labour in the politics of production, can a less partial way of interpreting the practical application of ‘new’ or ‘higher performance’ techniques be advanced.

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