Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization: Inside the Factory of the Future [1 ed.] 9780415749053

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Series editors: Rick Delbridge and Edmund Heery Cardiff Business School, UK Trade Unions and Workplace Training Issues and International Perspectives Edited by Richard Cooney and Mark Stuart Men, Wage Work and Family Edited by Paula McDonald and Emma Jeanes Gendering and Diversifying Trade Union Leadership Edited by Sue Ledwith and Lise Lotte Hansen Gender and Leadership in Trade Unions Gill Kirton and Geraldine Healy

The Transformation of Employment Relations in Europe Institutions and Outcomes in the Age of Globalization Edited by James Arrowsmith and Valeria Pulignano Financial Services Partnerships Labor-Management Dynamics Peter J. Samuel

www.routledge.com

Alan McKinlay and Philip Taylor

Minimum Wages, Pay Equity, and Comparative Industrial Relations Edited by Damian Grimshaw

Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization

ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS

ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS

Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization Inside the Factory of the Future Alan McKinlay and Philip Taylor

Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization

Michael Foucault’s idea of ‘governmentality’ asks us to look at ways that powerful groups imagine their authority and how this informs specific genres of knowledge. Using Foucault’s philosophy as a lens through which to interpret radical managerial innovation, this book traces how abstract managerial ideas about maximizing production flexibility and employee freedom were translated into concrete, day-to-day practices at the Motorola plant in Easter Inch, UK. Using eyewitness accounts, the book describes how employees dealt with the increased freedom Motorola promoted amongst its employees, how employees adapted to managerial changes, specifically the elimination of large-scale management, and where the ‘managerless’ system came under strain. A fascinating case study of the benefits and caveats of ‘the factory of the future,’ this book is essential reading for researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates interested in the areas of management studies, human resource management, and organizational studies, among others. Alan McKinlay is Professor of Human Resource Management, Newcastle University Business School, UK. He has written extensively about long-run developments in industrial relations and work organization. He has contributed to journals such as Business History and Organization, among others. His most recent edited book is Creative Labour Working in the Creative Industries, with Chris Smith, which has gone into a second edition. Philip Taylor is Professor of Human Resource Management at Strathclyde University, UK. He is a world-leading expert on management strategy and work organization in call centres. He has written articles for the International Journal of Human Resource Management, Industrial Relations Journal, Human Relations, New Technology, and Work and Employment journals. He was the coauthor of The Meaning of Work in the New Economy and coedited Future of Worker Representation.

Routledge Research in Employment Relations For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

Series editors: Rick Delbridge and Edmund Heery Cardiff Business School, UK Aspects of the employment relationship are central to numerous courses at both the undergraduate and the postgraduate levels. Drawing on insights from industrial relations, human resource management, and industrial sociology, this series provides an alternative source of researchbased materials and texts, reviewing key developments in employment research. Books published in this series are works of high academic merit, drawn from a wide range of academic studies in the social sciences.

8 New Unions, New Workplaces A Study of Union Resilience in the Restructured Workplace Andy Danford, Mike Richardson, and Martin Upchurch 9 Partnership and Modernisation in Employment Relations Edited by Mark Stuart and Miguel Martinez Lucio 10 Partnership at Work The quest for radical organizational change William K. Roche and John F. Geary 11 European Works Councils Pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will? Edited by Ian Fitzgerald and John Stirling

12 Employment Relations in NonUnion Firms Tony Dundon and Derek Rollinson 13 Management, Labour Process and Software Development Reality bytes Edited by Rowena Barrett 14 A Comparison of the Trade Union Merger Process in Britain and Germany Joining Forces? Jeremy Waddington, Marcus Kahmann and Jürgen Hoffmann 15 French Industrial Relations in the New World Economy Nick Parsons 16 Union Recognition Organising and bargaining outcomes Edited by Gregor Gall

17 Towards a European Labour Identity The Case of the European Work Council Edited by Michael Whittall, Herman Knudsen and Fred Huijgen

25 Social Failures of EU Enlargement A Case of Workers Voting with their Feet Guglielmo Meardi

18 Power at Work How Employees Reproduce the Corporate Machine Darren McCabe

26 Trade Unions and Workplace Training Issues and International Perspectives Edited by Richard Cooney and Mark Stuart

19 Management in the Airline Industry Geraint Harvey

27 Men, Wage Work and Family Edited by Paula McDonald and Emma Jeanes

20 Trade Unions in a Neoliberal World British Trade Unions under New Labour Gary Daniels and John McIlroy

28 Gendering and Diversifying Trade Union Leadership Edited by Sue Ledwith and Lise Lotte Hansen

21 Diversity Management in the UK Organizational and Stakeholder Experiences Anne-marie Greene and Gill Kirton 22 Ethical Socialism and the Trade Unions Allan Flanders and British Industrial Relation Reform John Kelly 23 European Works Councils A Transnational Industrial Relations Institution in the Making Jeremy Waddington 24 The Politics of Industrial Relations Labor Unions in Spain Kerstin Hamann

29 Gender and Leadership in Trade Unions Gill Kirton and Geraldine Healy 30 Minimum Wages, Pay Equity, and Comparative Industrial Relations Edited by Damian Grimshaw 31 The Transformation of Employment Relations in Europe Institutions and Outcomes in the Age of Globalization Edited by James Arrowsmith and Valeria Pulignano 32 Financial Services Partnerships Labor-Management Dynamics Peter J. Samuel

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Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization Inside the Factory of the Future Alan McKinlay and Philip Taylor

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Alan McKinlay and Philip Taylor The right of Alan McKinlay and Philip Taylor to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McKinlay, Alan, 1957– Foucault, governmentality, and organization : inside the factory of the future / by Alan McKinlay and Philip Taylor. pages cm. — (Routledge research in employment relations ; 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Motorola Semiconductor Products Inc.—Management—Case studies. 2. Management—Employee participation. 3. Organizational change. 4. Industrial relations. 5. Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. I. Title. HD9696.S44M676 2014 331.2—dc23 2013038665 ISBN: 978-0-415-74905-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-79634-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

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The Will to Empower: Governing the Workplace

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2

Working for the Yankee Dollar

27

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Greenfield Site, Greenfield Labour?

53

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‘Not Just Another Number’: Empowerment, Discipline, and Teamworking Freedom

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Confession, Discipline, and Freedom

102

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‘Just Like Any Other Factory’

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Bibliography and Other Resources Index

157 167

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Acknowledgements

We have incurred many debts in researching and writing this book. Our special thanks to the people of Motorola, Easter Inch, who welcomed us into their lives. We hope that we have captured something of their experience of the hope, exhilaration, and frustration of their working lives. The project would not have been possible without the support of Mike Hickes and John Brannigan. Fiona Gifford and Gwyn Pugh provided enormous insights into the philosophy and practices of teamworking in Easter Inch. Robert Henderson offered thoughtful and provocative reflections on the experience of imagining, realizing, and being part of the ‘factory of the future.’ John Boyle provided invaluable help with some of the interviews of former staff of Motorola, East Kilbride. Chris Carter, Patricia Findlay, Bill Knox, Alistair Mutch, and Michael Rowlinson were exemplary colleagues and friends. Tony Slaven, the founding director of the Centre for Business History in Scotland, was supportive of an unconventional attempt to historicise contemporary business practice. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Leverhulme Trust.

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The Will to Empower Governing the Workplace

INTRODUCTION If one question runs through Michel Foucault’s work, it is how do we govern ourselves and govern others? Foucault addresses this question through historical research into the development of forms of knowledge and practices of power that treat people as both the subject and object of scrutiny. This discursive innovation, coupled with a whole series of institutional practices, results in the construction of a ‘subject’ to be known, that is, a process of knowing that necessarily objectifies the subject. This insistence on the cultural and historical specificity of the changing nature of the subject registers, for Foucault, the untenability of any humanistic argument predicated upon some notion of a universal, transhistorical subject. No longer can particular attitudes or acts be ascribed convincingly to some universal human nature. The complex, often paradoxical, interplay between discipline and freedom forms the terrains within which we live our modern lives. This is the subject of the chapter’s opening section. Discipline has an obvious double meaning that is seldom taken seriously by commentators. First, and by far the most common reading, is that discipline refers to practices and places of constraint and correction. A second meaning of discipline, of course, is a body of knowledge tied to practices, but this sense is much less favoured by acolytes and critics alike. In Foucault’s double sense, expertise is disciplinary to the extent that an individual or group’s behaviour can be predicted or retrospectively interpreted in terms of how closely it matches a specific category or identity. Writing of the role of expert testimony in criminal proceedings, Foucault makes observations that might serve as a useful general guide. Expert testimony aims ‘to show how the individual already resembles his crime before he has committed it.’ Thus the expert provides ‘proof of a form of conduct, a character, and an attitude that are moral defects while being neither, pathologically, illnesses nor, legally, offenses.’1 All sorts of prior behaviours are invested with a cumulative meaning and become symptoms of abnormality. Nor is this an end of the matter. Foucault is equally insistent that subjects are not constructed exclusively by authoritative disciplines but also construct themselves through and against these

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dominant discourses. Individuals construct their own identities by their interpretation and embodiment of some version of the dominant discourse. Identity is a process of both institutional or social construction and individual action. The point of such expertise, as Jeffrey Nealon points out, is not to devise a singular, central binary that distinguishes between the normal and the abnormal. Power gains most when it is applied most widely and in great detail: ‘Foucaultian . . . norms do not primarily work to exclude the abnormal; rather, they work ceaselessly to account for it as such—to render it as normal or abnormal—and in addition to link it with the murky, amorphous category of life or lifestyle.’2 Identifying the deviant is a prelude to the proliferation of analytical categories and reformative practices that produces—multiplies—the number of identities available to subjects, rather than reducing them to a simple normal/abnormal distinction. Of course, this proliferation is a precondition to the efficient and continuous measurement and calculation that so effectively make and legitimise expert knowledge. Here Foucault is suggesting that what is needed to understand the rise of neoliberalism is not so much a political economy as a political statistic. Discipline should be efficient, or at least justified in terms of efficiency and in forms that provoke as little resistance as possible.3 This is best achieved through targeting impersonal actions or behaviours rather than specific types of individuals, particularly when the unstated objective is to reform precisely those individuals. The most effective forms of disciplines, then, are those that are not explicitly prohibitive or punitive but that foreground their productive, positive objectives. Here the effectiveness of a disciplinary practice is that it minimises, if not avoids, resistance with all its attendant uncertainties. We will elaborate on this in the second section, which outlines the development of Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Disciplinary power seeks to be imperceptible and unremarkable. The exercise of power and control becomes a dull routine, all the more effective when those subjected to it are scarcely aware of its operation. Further, disciplinary power works most effectively though administrative routines from which the administered perceive some benefit from compliance. How we might approach an example of the processes of translation of corporate ideals into the routines of the so-called factory of the future is considered in the final section. GOVERNING THE WORKPLACE Governmentality has proved to be perhaps Foucault’s most productive concept. Governmentalist studies have spread across the social sciences and the humanities. Yet ‘governmentality’ was not a neologism coined by Foucault. Rather, it was a term invented by Roland Barthes in 1957 to capture the technocratic drift of French politics that reduced issues of government to questions of efficiency, at least rhetorically. The most profound political act, following Barthes, is to neutralise questions of power as technocratic

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administrative issues, nothing more. This takes issues of, for instance, power or poverty out of public debate and defines them as primarily administrative, not political, matters. This depoliticisation radically circumscribed public awareness and debate. For Barthes, this slippage of social transformation to public administration was so obvious that governmentality—a term he thought useful, if clumsy, even ‘barbarous’—required little further elaboration. Foucault was introduced to the term during the late 1950s and early 1960s when he and Barthes were part of the circle of the newly formed Tel Quel, a journal that blurred the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and of the more established political and theoretical journal Critique.4 In an important sense, Foucault did not just borrow—somewhat apologetically—the term ‘governmentality’ from Barthes but problematised the ways in which government depoliticised what were inherently political issues, from welfare, to economic performance, to security. What should be studied was not the presentation of ideologies but the practices of government. Here, of course, Foucault goes beyond Barthes’s original term. One of Foucault’s closest friends and colleagues, Paul Veyne, observes that this approach involved an abiding concern with what people actually did.5 Foucault did not search for underlying causes or the hidden agency of society or history. Indeed, Foucault can be usefully interpreted as a very knowing empiricist determined to understand how taken-for-granted facts and practices came about and were, in their turn, dislodged by other, no less compelling, eternal verities. The mechanisms that depoliticised welfare—or rather defined it as a moral failing of individuals to be contained by the state—were critical, not just the efficiency of such state interventions.6 Methodologically, Foucault directs us to study those technologies that produce populations to be managed and specific forms of individuality, rather than the state or institutions per se. Crucially, however, this does not mean that the state is of no consequence. The state, particularly in neoliberalism, argues Foucault, plays an increasingly strategic role not as the source of governmental powers, but as the regulator of their manifold conditions of existence. The defining motif of contemporary political strategy is calculation, not transformation. Foucault outlined what he meant by governmentality in a series of lectures at the Collège de France in 1978 and 1979. These lectures chronologically and intellectually bridged his research on disciplinary techniques and his final research on the emergence of modern subjectivities in the History of Sexuality. We should be cautious in talking about bridges between different parts of Foucault’s work because it suggests—much too emphatically—two quite different territories, the earlier ‘disciplinary’ Foucault and a later concern for ethics and subjectivities that can be misread as a rejection of his own previous work on prisons, hospitals, and asylums.7 There is, however, little doubt that these lectures were vital in the development of Foucault’s thinking. There was, however, no wavering in his lifelong concentration on understanding the unfolding of power as a political, legal, and social

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concept as well as its specific formations. Equally, in no sense do the lectures involve a rejection of his work on discipline, surveillance, and the individual.8 Rather, just as disciplinary power did not replace sovereign power so much as supplement it, so governmentality—with its focus on populations— signals the addition of another distinctive mode of power. Similarly, Foucault remained certain that power should not be identified with the state, a certainty expressed in his famous dictum that cutting off the king’s head—or thinking beyond the state—was theoretically essential. No less important, this theoretical manoeuvre was necessary to the development of progressive social movements that did not assume that capturing the state was sufficient for progressive, far less revolutionary politics. In the Collège de France lectures, Foucault observes that his refusal to make governmentality synonymous with the state reflects the much broader meaning of government that was current until the eighteenth century. His inference is clear enough: this broader, archaic meaning of government needs to be revived in order to understand contemporary forms of rule and order. Foucault’s 1978–79 lectures were not just based on the resurrection of archaic notions of the so-called arts of government but were also, of course, rooted in contemporary shifts in liberalism, precisely the rise of neoliberalism. From the eighteenth century, Foucault suggests, governmentality has involved some combination of political and pastoral powers. By political power, Foucault was referring to the familiar freedoms of Western democracies: universal suffrage, common rights, a legal system independent of the executive. Pastoral power, on the other hand, is less familiar as a political concept: a form of power that compels individuals to become individuals through producing truth about themselves. The archetypal form of pastoral power is a confession that allows—or rather, forces—individuals to develop their individuality through the contemplation of their public behaviour and private thoughts. All of this is couched in a pastoral system in which the individual receives consolation, guidance, and protection from the pastor. In its secularised form, pastoral power becomes the ways in which the modern state produces the conditions necessary for the free, liberal individual by assuming responsibility for the security and well-being of the population.9 Here Foucault uses the term ‘conduct of conduct’ to capture the interplay between those performative technologies that prescribe behaviours and those that encourage self-control. I think that if one wants to analyse the genealogy of the subject in Western civilization, he has to take into account not only techniques of domination but also techniques of the self. Let’s say: he has to take into account the interaction between those two types of techniques— techniques of domination and techniques of the self. Neither is reducible to the other; and neither can be understood solely in its own terms. He has to take into account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by

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which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, he has to take into account the points where the techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion and domination. The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we call government. Governing people, in the broad sense of the word, is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself.10 When Foucault speaks of technologies, he means this in the broadest sense—all those social, organisational, mechanical, and digital ways that shape individuals’ behaviours and attitudes and within and against which individuals make themselves. Technologies are not simply a reflection of preexisting social relations, nor an expression of power. Technologies of power are, rather, the variety of mechanisms that constitute social relations, that create specific forms of individual and populations to be variously freed, empowered, rehabilitated, and so on. Technologies, for Foucault, are specific to institutions and particular projects that seek to understand some aspect of the social—a population—and to remake individuals in some way. It is this inescapable combination of a political rationality and a technology that defines a governmentalist project. Foucault had a peculiarly ambivalent relationship to political theory. On the one hand, he was dismissive of general theories of power or the state while, on the other hand, prepared to develop his argument through an engagement with, amongst many others, Bentham, Machiavelli and Marx. Specifically, Foucault was responding to the theoretical and political choices of the mid-seventies. Theoretically, he rejected any notion that the operation of the state was reducible to the logic of capital or that the development of the modern state involved a long process of functional accretion.11 Politically, his was also an implicit rejection of any Leninist political strategy that hinged on the capture of the state. Despite his many speeches, interviews, and commentaries on contemporary politics, Foucault rarely allowed himself to be drawn into debate with political opponents or theoretical critics, always preferring to develop his own research agenda rather than respond to others. In his Collège de France lectures through the mid-1970s, Foucault preferred to offer an oblique commentary on emerging neoliberal thought and policy via meditations on marginal philosophers and long forgotten statesmen. Of course, Foucault was acutely aware that this reluctance to engage directly with contemporary theorists tended to fragment and obscure his argument. This readiness to use the lectures as a conceptual proving ground gives them a provisional feel that has stimulated an explosion of interest in the unfinished business of governmentality. However, we can surely read Barthes’s original meaning of governmentality as evaluating the state—as well

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as politics—in terms of its efficiency and efficacy as a constant theme in Foucault’s theoretical development and in his own political activism. Consider Foucault’s reading of Machiavelli. Machiavelli is important for Foucault not so much for his advice on political strategy as for what that advice signified in terms of who had access to political knowledge. In other words, Machiavelli represents the separation of ‘the arts of government’ from the person of the prince. Machiavelli’s advice may have been intended for the Prince’s ears only, but, once printed, it became public knowledge, a way for others to judge the validity, integrity, and wisdom of royal strategy. Statecraft becomes not private counsel but, at least in principle, replicable in other domains. Foucault spoke often of the analytical need to cut off the king’s head, to accept that the modern state is not the source or even a privileged place of power. Analogously, this is suggested by the relationship between the prince and his adviser. Over time, the arts of government became a form of expert knowledge. Just as the arts of government become separate from the body of the prince, so the ways in which state efficiency is judged emerge as part of the rise of liberalism and then the common sense of all kinds of institutions. Classical liberalism, for Foucault, has a double focus: on the one hand, maximising the liberty of the individual and, on the other, constantly assessing the legitimacy and efficiency of government in terms of whether its reach is unjustifiably extended. Just as the state is the guarantor of individual liberty, so it is always suspect. Utility is a suspicious principle that evaluates and also limits the will to govern: ‘the utility of the individual and the general utility will be the major criteria for working out the limits of public authorities and the formations of a form of public law and administrative law.’12 The state’s mission to maximise the public welfare must be matched with a frugality driven by the search not just for efficiency but also for safeguarding the liberty of the individual citizen. Or, as Patrick Joyce put it in his The Rule of Freedom, ‘In liberalism rule is ceded to a self that must constantly monitor the very civil society and political power that are at once the guarantee of freedom and its threat.’13 The liberal state can only fail when confronted with this impossible task of reconciling the need to reduce its scope while extending its responsibilities. It is much better for the state to adopt strategies that seek to increase its effectiveness by influencing individuals to behave in ways that improve the welfare of the population. The state need not legitimise this strategic reliance upon civil society and individuals only in terms of efficiency. Rather, this shift towards neoliberal governmentality is justified as a way of expanding freedom beyond the state. Neoliberal governmentality is inherent in classical liberalism. Liberal governmentality cannot be exclusively defined from the perspective of the state because ‘civil society’ codefines the limits of the liberal state.14 The main advantage of governmentality is that it problematizes classical liberalism’s double distinction between the state and civil society, on the one hand, and between the individual and power, on the other. So the ways that the ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ are defined are no longer a natural distinction but

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one based on specific governmentalist projects. In the factory, the corollary is that the redrawing of the legitimate responsibilities of management, team, and individual becomes neither technocratic nor natural but a reordering of power and knowledge. This process of representation is neither a return to a so-called natural state nor simply a strategic choice but rather part of a governmentalist project that cannot be understood with reference only to specific decision makers or even to an individual firm. The translation of governmental logics across domains is a highly contingent, iterative, and reciprocal process. And, of course, this entails innumerable labour processes: the formulation of categories; the identification of contradictions, ambiguities, and uncertainties; and the refinement and extension of categories. In turn, this demands administrative labour: the design of forms that capture and code data that creates populations and individuals. Data has to be coded, ordered, filed, enumerated, and analysed to identify what problems are to be managed, if not how, and then to clean, refine, and perhaps rethink the data and its categorical composition. All of this work—administrative, intellectual, but above all material—is essential to a system of governmentality. The development of population technologies was paralleled first by a move to probabilistic statistics. No less important were prosaic innovations in office technology—from ledgers to horizontal filing systems—capable of handling, categorizing, and sorting massive increases in administrative data.15 Second, the development of population technologies was paralleled by a flurry of ways of securing individual identities: passports, fingerprints, phrenology. So, for Foucault, the prison was no longer the only or even the most important site of rehabilitation. From the mid-nineteenth century, prisoners could start in solitary confinement and, through good behaviour, progress through stages of less austere cells and prisons until achieving a moral level that merited a form of probation. All of these stages of moral improvement centred on the capacity of the individual for self-surveillance as a necessary prelude to self-improvement. All of these factors were calculable and were central to the statistical formation of the social sciences.16 From the first, British social science was a social arithmetic of populations and a moral calculus of individuals. The definition and representation of a territory to be governed, a problem to be managed, is a political process. Paradoxically, the legitimacy and reach of this political process are greatest when presented as an uncontestable ‘fact’ to be administered. Governmentality suggests not just a flattening of public debate but that, paradoxically, this depoliticisation is hidden in plain sight. Now, it is not that the territory or problem does not necessarily exist prior to—or independently of—this process of representation. Rather, Foucault is simply pointing out that there is not—and never can be—a simple one-to-one identity of the real and the representation. Moreover, it is the representation that matters in terms of the unfolding of a governmentalist project. Or, as Barbara Townley puts it, ‘before a domain can be governed

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or managed, it must first be rendered knowable in a particular way.’17 Crucially, both disciplinary and governmentalist forms of power/knowledge are predicated upon the free choices of autonomous individuals. Where discipline is continuous, visible, and understood by all, governmentality shrinks disciplinary structures and processes and relies ever more heavily upon the responsibility of the individual and assessments of risk for the population as a whole. Foucault introduces the idea of conduct of conduct to suggest the oblique, indirect ways in which individuals are steered and encouraged towards one set of behaviours, but rarely compelled or directed.18 Disciplinary power involved separation, confinement, and a totalising search for comprehensive control, predicated upon some notion of an autonomous, wilful self. Where disciplinary power involves separation and isolation, the conduct of conduct pursues the incorporation of the individual or group. Where disciplinary power concentrates inspection, control, and choice at the centre, the conduct of conduct is based on the practical minimum of regulation and the maximum dispersal of responsibility and choice to the smallest feasible group, preferably the individual. If disciplinary power is exemplified by confinement and stasis, then the conduct of conduct assumes, welcomes, and creates the conditions for movement and circulation. The conduct of conduct, in other words, is not just a system of rule that speaks of freedom: the system is predicated upon the achievement of self-regulation by autonomous individuals. There is also a difference in scale, at least in potential. One of the preconditions of disciplinary power is that the individual understands that there is the constant possibility that he or she is under observation. This is another kind of prisoner’s dilemma: how to calculate the likelihood that the individual will be observed at any given moment, as well as, the seriousness of the deviation and the severity of the resulting punishment. Here, the prisoner may have only the sketchiest data about the probability of being watched, but even that uncertainty can be assessed in terms of the utility or value of the infraction. Systems that rely upon the conduct of conduct are radically different in that all parties are aware that they are never under scrutiny that aspires—or pretends—to be continuous. So, while the conduct of conduct is not confined to specific places and contexts, it does carry these novel sets of risks and obligations. Where disciplinary power imagines a closed world and a continuous process of individual rehabilitation or improvement, the prior existence of the autonomous, self-regulating individual is the norm to be assumed, to be created, and to be protected, if necessary, from his or her own failings. Discipline has a particular spatial strategy based on enclosure, on division, and on limited, highly controlled movement, whereas governmentality assumes movement, circulation, and that the individual is part of the population.19 Panopticon prisoners retain their autonomy in order that they might allow themselves to be reformed. In the neoliberal form, the individual is imagined not just as decarcerated but as completely free.

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The conduct of conduct is, as Foucault appreciated, an inherently risky strategy of rule. The reliance upon the choices of free individuals is, however, neither naïve nor based upon a flawed idealism. Rather, the risk attached to strategies of conduct of conduct is one of the inescapable costs of such systems of rule. At best, then, any governmentalist regime achieves an unstable equilibrium, a temporary equipoise in which risks, costs, and returns are measured and found acceptable or optimal but never fully satisfactory. No governmentalist system achieves permanent stability: the calculation of risk becomes central to any strategy, the way in which the state assesses its success in improving welfare or a company measures productivity or competitiveness. The point, surely, is not that power increasingly colonises freedom or that resistance restores some measure of freedom. Foucault was utterly consistent in his insistence about the modesty of his enterprise. He never presumed to offer a universal theory of power or anything else for that matter. Nor was this a false modesty. Rather, Foucault researched the complex negotiations between freedom and power and how these were grounded in particular times and places. There are, of course, important similarities between disciplinary power and governmentality. Both involve a necessary, if infinitely complex, relationship between power and knowledge. Both construct an object of knowledge to be understood and acted upon, never one without the other; the intelligibility of that object makes their management possible. Both understanding and action involve complex systems of administration that construct data to be sifted, analysed, sifted, compared, and archived in various ways. All governmentalist systems are therefore failing systems, but systems whose capacity to recognise and dissect this failure provides them with a crucial dynamism: ‘We do not live in a governed world so much as a world traversed by the “will to govern”, fuelled by the constant ambition registration of “failure”, the discrepancy between ambition and outcome, and the constant injunction to do better next time.’20 The impossible fantasy of neoclassical economics of a self-regulating market, restlessly searching for the optimal equilibrium, is the template for a society of self-regulating individuals who shoulder all risk as the price they pay for their empowerment. Applying neoliberalism to the corporation entailed the rejection of planning and of centralisation, much less any cross-subsidisation between divisions. The financialised corporation becomes a kind of capital market in which the centre operates as a peculiarly well-informed and ruthlessly comparative investment bank. Infusing market disciplines inside the corporation paralleled the rise of employee empowerment. Critically, the legitimacy claims of employee empowerment were derived from the new freedoms gained as bureaucracy and hierarchy receded. The rejection of corporate planning was mirrored by the celebration of the immediacy and moral purpose associated with teamworking. Nor were these simply economic moves. To move to market disciplines was to expose the individual citizen and employee to the morally invigorating

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power of market forces. The creation of such radically new images of the nonunionised employee, no longer bound to collective customs and contracts, but as an empowered associate whose drive and initiative were liberated as spurs to their team. But such radical new freedoms brought new demands for new kinds of truth to be produced: individual commitment had to measured and compared, and team members had to rate the organisation’s capacity for enlarging their freedom, in addition to assessing each other’s capacity to use this new freedom: Even in the most privileged spaces of contemporary life, in the efficient and transparent US workplace and in the therapeutic family, neoliberalism requires that we delineate, even more sharply, distinctions between those capable—and so those incapable—of self-government. Fear of failing to meet the obligations of self-government presented by the demands of daily living heightens the surveillance of self and others. The market-derived competitive logics of demands for accountability infusing so many spheres of everyday life exacerbate the need for continual policing.21 WORKING WITH FOUCAULT One of the main gains of a governmentalist reading of managerialist manifestos of competitiveness and empowerment is that it takes them seriously. Managerial discussions of teams, empowerment, and freedoms cannot simply be dismissed as so much ideological smokescreen for their real— hidden—objectives and strategies. A feature of contemporary capitalism is that managerial strategies are often openly discussed. Any sustained ethnographic research of managers and executives is much more likely to reveal the utter conviction of the overwhelming majority of managers in, for instance, empowerment projects. Such scepticism as one encounters is usually confined to doubts about whether the organisation or more particularly its workforce are ready to grasp the new opportunities to liberate themselves and each other from the twin evils of bureaucracy and hierarchy. Governmentalist projects that target the organisation or the workplace are legitimised in several ways: flexibility, efficiency, inevitability, but always in terms of the expansion of individual freedom. Individuals are understood as demanding ever more freedom, a demand to which managers respond by ceding greater autonomy, even—or perhaps especially—when this involves the compression or the elimination of managerial career ladders. Further, granting others more autonomy signifies their own selflessness, their own sacrifice for the greater good. All the better if the managers’ sacrifices are visible, tangible, and widely remarked upon or emulated by peers. Managerial authority is no longer conceived of as an organisational given, derived from the individual’s occupancy of a specific place in a hierarchy. Rather,

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managerial authority is now contingent rather than certain; it is consolidated only through a combination of demonstrable personal worth and technical and coordinative competence. Management itself becomes suspect, not just specific managers. For managers, this radical new uncertainty over their status is not a cost to be borne but a daily challenge that confirms their personal and collective sense of a mission of organisational and individual renewal. The manager becomes a figure who is both actively empowering others while reducing the certainties of his or her own role and career. Taken to its logical conclusion, this managerial utopianism would see managers’ own disappearance as the ultimate proof of the success of their project. The cost for the empowered individual is the assumption of wider responsibilities—that they are now active, self-motivated human resources required to engage with corporate objectives, not simply passive objects that await orders to perform tasks on command. Again, it is important to note, first, that management draws comfort and purpose from the assumption that their will to empower is an extension of personal freedom in general. This will to empower is not an imposition of personal freedom but rather an act of revelation: an uncovering of a natural democratic set of possibilities that are latent, suppressed by hierarchical structures and by directive, disabling management styles. Second, the move to empowerment, though philosophically, organisationally, and competitively compelling, is fraught with the risk of managers who are reluctant to—or incapable of—shedding established structures and styles, as well as of employees so damaged by their organisational experience that they cannot embrace and live their empowerment. Empowerment is performative to the extent that individuals empower themselves. This is a constitutive discourse that does not describe what actually is or even what could be but that helps to solidify what it is possible to think, do, say, be, and feel as an empowered associate and team member. By invoking empowerment, managers issue a promissory note of freedom that is impossible to redeem in full. There is, then, a sense of both of complex transition and necessary fragility in empowerment projects. If the field of change management reflects the will to know organisational change the better to direct it, then this is paralleled by a permanent unease that is expressed through the measuring of individual commitment. It is not entirely fanciful to suggest that Chris Galvin, corporate executive and guru and scion of Motorola’s founding family, is a corporate philosopher of governmentality. Galvin, as we shall see in Chapter 3, was a powerful advocate of a dispersed form of power and regarded managerial authority as entirely contingent upon how thoroughgoing this dispersal was in practice. Motorola managers’ responsibility was to translate Galvin’s philosophy into a coherent, workable, durable set of practices that could govern a multinational corporation according to this credo. The inevitable gap between the promise of any governmentalist project and its complex, messy outcomes does not necessarily invalidate its internal logic, moral authority, or feasibility, at least in the abstract. Indeed, quite the opposite, for failure is almost always partial or can be interpreted as due

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to exogenous factors. Failure, then, is rarely system-wide and can be read as a failure of implementation rather than of setting impossible objectives. Failure is attributed to imperfect or incomplete governmentalist technologies rather than to the inherent impossibility of the project. In practice, we know little of how governmentalist projects fail or, much more likely, how these partial failures are interpreted and trigger the remaking or refinement of specific technologies.22 Critical accounts of neoliberalism have focused on the attacks on trade unions, regulation, and job security. The common thread has been the negatives of neoliberalism, the destruction of social democracy as a viable way of organising economic and social life. Now, this destructive dimension of neoliberalism is real enough but ignores its productive intent. Or, more accurately, such critiques search for resistance to neoliberalism as the only productive affect that really matters. In other words, neoliberalism aims to transform key figures of social and economic life: citizens are recast as consumers, managers as leaders or entrepreneurs, workers as associates wedded to corporate missions. Each of these transformations was justified in liberating individuals, providing them with more choice and more responsibility for their own fate: the outcomes were attributable to the capacity of the individual to actively embrace these new possibilities. The enemies of freedom, real and imagined, were to be vanquished, not simply to eliminate undesirable institutions but to produce new active individuals, whose first, perhaps only, responsibility is to themselves and their families. Neoliberalism was not, for governmentalists, reducible to the pursuit of class interests. Nor was neoliberalism an ideological smokescreen. Neoliberalism did not simply repress through the vengeful instincts of conservative politicians but was a productive force, deeply invested with a sense of its moral purpose. More generally, ‘for perhaps we could say that every style of government also implies a way of living, a form of life, a mode of existence. An ethic of how one is governed is also an ethic of how one governs others, of how one governs oneself.’23 Neoliberalism recasts the visible hand on the organisation not just as a competitive presence in the marketplace but as the benign, if demanding, setting for individuals to improve themselves economically and morally. The contemporary corporation is subjected to a double audit. First, the organisation is judged by the market in terms of price, quality, and so on. Second, it is judged by itself and by its staff in terms of how far it delivers on its promise of expanded individual freedom, mutual respect, and service to all. Both judgements are instrumental, and both are inescapable. Defining empowerment and teamworking as essential to competitiveness is a way of reforming the factory and the individual: making profit makes better people and vice-versa. This oblique link between the improvement of the individual and organisational competitiveness is typically conveyed with reference to an imagined past. Conventionally, this is invoked through images of overbearing management and restrictive bureaucracy. The aim is

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to make management redundant or, at least, irrelevant as a function. Teams would undertake the classic management functions of coordination and control with little of the friction or cost of hierarchy. Managers, however, would remain some kind of presence in the workplace, but theirs would be an almost transcendental presence. Managers would be few in number but colossal in their symbolic power. Whereas managers embodied not just hierarchy and control but also unjustifiable limits to employee choice and action, they also constituted and reproduced unequal power relationships and represented an organisational arrogance that required and sustained employee dependence. Certainly, this was an unwanted and—perhaps— unintentional result of conventional management and organisation. The task of the new leader was to design and embody an organisation that could empower employees to assume wider responsibilities as a form of selfimprovement, not just as a cost-saving measure. Empowered employees cannot be compelled to exercise their new autonomy for then the results would last only as long as the application of force. Rather, sustainable empowerment had to emerge from the individual, not dragged from them by compulsion. LONDON GOVERNMENTALISTS The most sustained and innovative development of Foucault’s sketch of what he meant by ‘governmentality’ has been by a group of scholars clustered around Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, a group we shall refer to as the ‘London governmentalists.’ The London governmentalists follow Foucault in his rejection of a state-centred political economy, and for them, this had two consequences. First, the state was not ascribed a special place in contemporary capitalism. In part, this also reflected the hugely hesitant ambivalent moves by the British state to adopt a corporatist approach to, for instance, industrial relations and, of course, with the election of the first Thatcher government in 1979, the complete rejection of corporatism. For neoliberalism, the state was not a solution to any problem but rather cast as the cause of every social and economic ill, from poverty to failing competitiveness. Second, the London governmentalists, like Foucault, were responding to the arid structuralism of Althusserian Marxism. There were more similarities between Louis Althusser and Foucault than either were prepared to acknowledge publicly. Positively, both offered antihumanist critiques indifferent to human experience; both turned philosophical thinking back on itself to question the conditions of existence of particular theories, ideologies or practices; both stressed the materiality of discourse; both pointed to the ubiquity of certain disciplinary techniques across very different types of western institution.24 Part of the difficulty of the reception of the London governmentalist project was that it remained cloistered, much more concerned to fashion its own theoretical and methodological approaches than to engage with critics.

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The focus ensured that key figures were not distracted by debating alternatives and able to innovate through widening the scope of their empirical and historical research. Another difficulty was that Foucault’s initial and highly exploratory thoughts on governmentality were used by the London governmentalists before Foucault’s lectures were widely available in translation. Equally, the development of governmentality thinking took off during Foucault’s final years when he had turned his attention to the governance of individual identities. There was not, then, a clear trajectory of translation and reception, theoretical development, followed by application and then refinement. Rather, a much messier process of theorising through historical and empirical research, combined with the adoption of promising parallel developments in quite unrelated fields such as the history of technology. The messy process of innovation was made messier still by this complex interweaving of individual careers and ‘governmentalism’ as a collective project. Now, it may be argued that a certain imprecision and hesitancy of analytical language constitute a small price to pay for the sustained innovation of governmentalist research and that the frequent use of the conditional tense and the careful avoidance of strong, declarative sentences was an apt echo of Foucault’s own disavowal of overreaching theoretically. Foucault always insisted that his ideas were no more than a toolkit and, accordingly, that their value should be judged according to their usefulness. If we accept this modest description, then looking for the coherence of a single unfolding project in Foucault is not only futile but misses the point entirely. A toolkit, after all, is something that the artisan—or researcher—gradually builds over time, often dependent upon the specific needs of particular jobs. In the case of governmentality, the toolkit was extremely rudimentary, with new tools added, others improvised through use, and still others abandoned. There was, as key governmentalist figures such as Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller have always insisted, no slavish application of Foucault but rather a sophisticated process of theoretical trial and error through use. Again, by refusing to engage in an endless, fruitless reprise of what Foucault wrote or, worse still, what he really meant, they opened up space for innovative thinking. Fidelity to Foucault’s concepts was never the London governmentalists’ concern, but their determination to develop and push beyond Foucault was very much in keeping with how he hoped his work would be used. Importantly, governmentalists have never aspired to provide a grand theory of power—or anything else for that matter. Again, following Foucault, governmentalists stress the modesty of their project and the essential modesty of their empirical and historical analyses. Governmentalist terms. such as ‘assemblage’ and ‘bricolage,’ convey the sense that the authors are investigating somewhat messy realities of contested expertise, disputatious experts and policy makers, disappointing technologies that seldom wholly succeed and that fail in unpredictable, ambiguous ways, and so on. Of course, neither Foucault nor Rose was blind to this obvious criticism. But Rose, like Foucault, is more interested in how a settled political rationality, such as

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neoliberalism, creates demands for novel, experimental, and improvised technologies of government, again in the very broadest sense. The sometimes hesitant language of the London governmentalists can be interpreted as being as improvisatory as the processes of translating rationalities into the programmes and technologies that they are studying. Governmentalists begin from a set of empirical and historical, not theoretical, questions. Who governs what? According to what logics? With what techniques? Towards what ends? However, Nikolas Rose, unquestionably the central figure in governmentalist studies, provides detailed guidance about how to distinguish the defining moments in the unfolding of a governmentalist project and the sorts of practices that should be examined. Rose insists that the process begins with the emergence of a governmentalist rationality, which is the historical variability and situational contingency of the problems that have seemed appropriate to be governed, the sites within which these problems come to be defined and delimited, and the diversity of authorities that have been involved in more or less rationalized attempts to address them. They have analysed the languages of description that have made these problems thinkable and governable and their dependence upon the concepts, explanations, arguments and theories of . . . [various] experts. They have examined the different ways in which such strategies of government depend upon and disseminate certain conceptions and models of the persons to be subjected to government . . . they have mapped the different spaces opened up for government . . . The have charted the assembly of complex and hybrid technologies of government, linking together forms of judgement, modes of perception, practices of calculation, types of authority, architectural forms, machinery and all manner of technical devices with the aspiration of producing certain outcomes in terms of the conduct of the governed. . . . And they have suggested that, at particular historical periods, there are family resemblances amongst the various ways of thinking and acting upon human conduct that give them a kind of strategic coherence.25 The italics are Rose’s own, and he has highlighted not just the key terms but also something of the relations between them; that is, temporally, governmentalist projects begin with the identification of a problem and then go on to the articulation of an increasingly wide-ranging and fine-grained language of description. This descriptive language develops analytical depth through the articulation of models of persons—and so of populations—to be governed. This is followed by the development of technologies of government that may be confined to specifically designed spaces. It would be easy to misrepresent this as a rather clumsily staged process. However, governmentalist research is careful to stress the enormous historical and contextual contingencies that shape specific projects to govern the conduct of others.

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Equally, it is clear that all of this hinges upon the exercise of agency by all kinds of actors, from managers to state bureaucrats, to experts of one kind or another. There is no easy transmission from the identification of the problem to be governed to the emergence of specific technologies of governing. All of this entails complex negotiations and translations through a range of actors, all of whom will have quite different languages, incentives, power, and authority. Governmentality does, however, take certain key definition as axiomatic. Contemporary political rationalities are taken almost as the root formula for all other rationalities tied to particular institutions and locales. By far, the most insistent contemporary political rationality is neoliberalism with its distinctive stress on maximising individual freedom while minimising regulatory or organisational restraint. Governmental rationalities invariably establish ideals of how free individuals should act, and this normative definition is a necessary precondition for the development of expertise and practices designed to realise this ideal. Governmental technologies interact with political rationalities both to enable and establish often frustrating practical limits on how far individual freedom can be maximised and institutional constraints minimised. This kind of interaction establishes the nature of political debate and the manifold. Governmentality is—and Rose is completely consistent in this—an open-ended, empirical approach that does not ascribe priority to any analytical category, far less subscribe to any overarching grand theory. Indeed, when articulated in this way, Rose’s statement of governmentality is very deliberately not a theoretical project. Again, none of this was explicit in Foucault, and it is the real achievement of governmentalists that they have developed an approach that has been relentlessly innovative while deliberately avoiding any theoretical closure, a principle that remains true to Foucault’s own lifelong project. It is precisely this openness that has allowed governmentality to travel so widely across quite different academic disciplines. Nikolas Rose’s general methodological remarks about how to do governmentalist research can be thought of in another, much more specific way. In other words, Rose is simply restating—at most, clarifying—but not reformulating Foucault’s own method. First, begin by identifying a problem—say, crime—then the political rationality—say, liberalism infused with Benthamite utilitarianism—that informed how that problem was imagined. Next, analyse the specific technologies—such as the Panopticon penitentiary—devised to address that problem in ways that are consistent with the political rationality. This is, of course, precisely how Foucault proceeded in his study not just of the prison but also of the hospital and the asylum. Now, if Foucault—or Rose—had stopped there, what one would have is a fairly unexceptional, even anodyne, almost empiricist methodology that emphasises contingency over any form of structural necessity. ‘What is distinctive,’ argues Paul Rabinow, ‘is Foucault’s identification of the problem situation, the situation of the process of a specific type of problem making, as simultaneously the object, the

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site, and ultimately the substance of thinking.’26 We can easily and legitimately extend Rabinow’s point about Foucault to identify the distinctive contribution of Rose and the London governmentalists. First, their analytical stress on increasing individual freedom is a crucial part of a series of political rationalities, most obviously of neoliberalism. And this philosophical and political pursuit of increased individual freedom has had massive effects on the ways that we conduct and regulate all aspects of our social life, far beyond the narrowly economic. And these manifold effects cannot be traced back or ascribed solely to the unfolding of a capitalist economic logic. Second, through a whole series of historical and contemporary studies of various governmental technologies, especially those based on calculative techniques, that measure otherwise wildly incommensurate social activities and categories, London governmentalists have accounted for how well individuals make themselves free through new categories of identity. As an analytical perspective, then, governmentality is far from a theory of power, authority, or even of governance. Rather, it asks ‘particular questions of the phenomena that it seeks to understand, questions amenable to precise answers through empirical enquiry.’27 For those weaned on and wedded to the grand theories of Marx or Weber, there will always be something unsatisfying about a Foucault that aspires to understand the particular, never to theorise the universal. William Walters has tentatively suggested that governmentalism need not confine itself to an ever increasing series of specific case studies but could conceivably generate something more comprehensive: In place of the quest to develop all-encompassing theories . . . that paint an epic picture of modernity, and offer themselves as the general coordinates in which to locate the specific, . . . Foucault . . . turns this relationship on its head. It commits itself towards careful empirical investigation into the many little lines, contingencies, negotiations, fractures and mutations that give rise to specific features of the present. It calls for ascending analyses that draw wider conclusions only on the basis of aggregating these always partial investigations. A bigger picture is possible but it only takes shape in a manner comparable to the painting style of pointillisme pioneered by Signac and Seurat: not through the technique of the broad brush stroke but a hundred thousand little encounters between brush, paint, light and canvas.28 Now, this image of the careful compilation of fine detail into a large-scale meaningful canvas appeals not least because it allows us to hold onto the possibility that such scale is possible, if only the artist is sufficiently skilful and patient. But whatever the appeals of this metaphor, it remains extremely hesitant and difficult to reconcile with either Foucault’s own work or that of the London governmentalists. The messy, contingent, spatial, and temporal specificity that is central to the governmentalist approach would have to be sacrificed to even approach such a project. Such a theoretical and

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methodological sacrifice would be to undermine precisely the distinctive advantages of governmentalism. Adherence to governmentalism entails the complete abandonment of even the possibility of grand theory or any sense that the pursuit of a big picture is a valid enterprise, no matter the skill or patience of the artist. Governmentalist studies are criticised for their silence, or at best ambiguity, on matters of agency and explanation. Often such questions are evaded by providing a tryptic of concepts of uncertain provenance or meaning, or the reader is distracted by dense historical detail. Governmentalist studies can easily be read as a strange kind of surface literalism that do little more than reproduce and render coherent the texts of the powerful and the expert. Foucault is little better, often nodding in the direction of how groups challenge governmentalist systems, even creating novel alternatives, before saying that this was not his research project, irrespective of his political campaigning. Ironically, the analytical strength of governmentalist studies is rarely matched by any sense of the impacts of resistance on how rulers rule, much less how the ruled cope with or contest their subordination. For Mark Bevir, such lapses are not inherent in governmentality but are structuralist residues in how the concept has been developed since Foucault’s death: Work on governmentality can lose sight of the fact that people create meanings and practices. Sometimes it seems to treat meanings as things that exist as part of systems of signs quite apart from the actors who make them. In addition, hostility to agency can appear to lead to a kind of determinism. Systems of signs can appear not only to exist apart from the actors who make them but also to define what these actors can say and how they can say it.29 Governmentality studies often read as if a certain system of knowing populations while affecting individual behaviour is almost clinically perfect, a perfection that makes them politically anodyne or, worse, uncritical and wholly pessimistic reproductions of neoliberalism. Others suggest that Foucault’s original concept was not just underdeveloped but fatally flawed by lapsing into a teleological grand narrative in which neoliberalism becomes the end point of history.30 Indeed, such is the ambition—and reach—of neoliberal projects, that governmentalism runs the risk of taking them at face value so that the aspirations of programmes are read as their outcomes. This is, suggests William Walters, completely at odds with Foucault’s theoretical and historical intentions: Muted is the capacity for registering subtle shifts in the knowledges, imaginations, spatializations and territorializations of government. Marginal is the commitment to empirical investigation of the world of practices, technologies, expert knowledges, counter-products and the like without which apparently vaster networks of power would have

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little chance of impressing themselves upon our lives. And virtually absent is the sense, . . . that things refuse to march in step; of the present not as an epoch, an age, or answerable to a singular logic or zeitgeist, but as a pluralized entanglement of many times. These kinds of emphasis and sensitivity are, if not missing, then muted in certain uses of governmentality.31 This is not an indictment of governmentality so much as a warning that it must serve as a method by which to analyse the particular rather than serve as a grand theory of neoliberalism. The self-watching, anxious individual of neoliberalism is seen everywhere, to the point of easy parody. Even sympathetic commentators accept that this tendency to reify and, paradoxically, to universalise neoliberalism is a methodological danger inherent in the governmentalist approach: [R]egimes of government and self-government follow a more or less polished program, often documented and supported by scholarly research, giving rise to carefully planned procedures. It only makes sense to speak of regimes of governing when they have become manifest. Studies of governmentality are aimed above all at such programs and procedures. By contrast, the forms of resistance and counter-conducts are contingent. They have to be accounted for, but they are not calculable. There is a science of government, but there cannot be one of the art of not being governed.32 The ambiguous language of the London governmentalists is deliberate in two senses. First, it is intended to register a conceptual uncertainty that their terms are never definitive and never intended to be more than suggestive. This was particularly the case in their earliest writing. Second, they use an elliptical language to convey the uncertainties and ambiguities in the governmentalist projects they are analysing. The governmentalist approaches to poverty, health, or management may have a relatively clear sense of their overarching objectives but are much less clear about the technologies that will deliver on their promises. Again, this hesitancy is inscribed in the language of governmentalist projects and is the most pronounced in their formative moments. Conceptual and linguistic hesitancy is used to convey risk, to ensure that those charged with the development of the technologies of rule are conscious that their tasks have a moral and creative purpose. Over time, any governmentalist system consolidates its internal logic, develops an increasingly comprehensive and self-confident language, and acquires a more sophisticated set of operational practices. At their most inchoate, governmentalist systems are akin to what Charles Taylor refers to as ‘social imaginaries.’ A ‘modern social imaginary’ is a combination, largely unspoken, if not quite taken for granted, of politics predicated upon liberal freedoms and assumed to produce a better life for all. Taylor understands

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the social imaginary as something more than an intellectual framework, although it almost certainly includes some measure of logic and evidence. Nor is a social imaginary instinctual or in any way precultural: it is, however, implicit in all sorts of institutions, representations, and assumptions.33 A social imaginary is close to what Gramsci termed ‘commonsense,’ the broad, shared sets of assumptions that prefigure the ways in which institutions are devised, governed, or questioned. The modern social imaginary understands the distinction between state and civil society as a moral order, an artifice. Taylor takes it as axiomatic that the distinctions and tensions between the state and civil society, between the individual and the social, are inherently unresolvable. Further, Taylor argues that these terms have experienced a relentless process of ‘redactions,’ expanding in scope and intensity: first, being applied to an ever greater variety of institutions; second, the requirements of liberalism gradually intensify, becoming increasingly continuous and ever more fine-grained. Any political order and, indeed, an ever expanding range of civil society institutions find their legitimacy dependent upon how sell they satisfy the dual but competing demands of the modern social imaginary: individual freedom and collective order. Politics becomes the expression of a moral order or, rather, assumptions and aspirations about a private and public order that prioritises the individual, freedom, and reciprocity as the moral bases of social order. Politics in both Foucault and Taylor are legitimate to the extent that it expands individual freedom and develops the reciprocal bonds between those individuals to strengthen social order. Individuality, mutuality, and order, suggests Taylor, have been freighted with greater significance and in more and more institutional settings. Through redaction, the modern social imaginary has moved from being the arcane discourse of an elite of legal philosophers to being all but universal in the West. Equally, this moral ideal of individuality and order has become ‘integral to our social imaginary, that is, the way our contemporaries imagine the societies they inhabit and sustain.’34 The modern social imaginary assumes many forms and is used to guide and measure the realities of individual lives and institutions. The modern social imaginary is, then, always a spectrum that involves understanding and prescription in some measure or another. In at least five ways, Charles Taylor’s notion of social imaginary intersects that of Foucault’s governmentality. First, both Taylor and Foucault look to the eighteenth century and the emergence of liberal individualism as central to a continuing modern social imaginary. Of course, they are hardly unique in this. Second, Taylor, no less than Foucault, is careful to argue for the materiality of his concept. There is no dichotomy between a social imaginary and the practices and experiences of rule and order; nor can there be. Third, Taylor is no less dismissive than Foucault of the value of simple transhistorical general rules that reduce complex social changes to, say, an economic imperative. In what is a deliberate echo of Foucault, Taylor argues that the rise of self-discipline is both a cause and effect of liberal government.

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Liberal government requires maintaining social peace and order, which also allows personal freedom. The tariff of individual freedom is a request ‘to work on yourself, not just leaving things as they are but making them over. It involves a struggle to reshape ourselves.’35 Third, for both, the tensions between individual freedom and the social contract are inherent and cannot be fully or permanently resolved. Fourth, the diffusion of some aspects of the social imaginary is a second-order matter that cannot be resolved abstractly but is necessarily an empirical question. Fifth, for both Foucault and Taylor, the expansionist nature of the modern social imaginary and the dynamism of governmentalist regimes makes it almost pointless to look for causality in any definitive sense and much more rewarding to examine how particular individuals and populations are imagined and managed. The term ‘imaginary’ is deployed to suggest the open-ended, often unstructured nature of what Taylor has in mind. Whereas a theory can be refuted through logic, evidence, and experience, a social imaginary is altogether less susceptible to logical or evidential challenge and is thus infinitely more durable and adaptable. A social imaginary is not entirely dependent upon the clarity of its assumptions or its internal logic, although it requires a certain surface plausibility. Taylor, like Foucault, is indifferent to understanding the causes of emergence of the modern social imaginary. Again like Foucault, Taylor is even less interested in how these ideas migrate between specialist enclaves or into the general political discourse. For both Foucault and Taylor, the effect of these changes is much more important than their journey. In practice, governmentalists have shown little concern about tracking ideas over time and between quite different forms of institutions. There has been some appropriation of the language of ‘actor network theory,’ which ascribes agency to nonhuman technologies, irrespective of whether that technology is hard, such as a new metal with greater tensile strength, or soft, such as a new system of managing and measuring productivity. More mainstream ideas of path dependence would also help us understand processes of technological diffusion. Path dependence stresses that competition between rival technical standards does not necessarily result in the ‘best’ product winning. Rather, the process of early adoption and of the pace of minor, perhaps cumulative, innovation decides which of the rival technologies becomes the industry standard. Notions of path dependence readily lend themselves to historical research. Increasingly, path dependence is applied not just to hard technologies that gain increasing economic returns and legitimacy through wider adoption. Institutional strategies, structures, and administrative processes also follow path-dependent patterns.36 Path dependence shares notions of contingency, self-reinforcing, stochastic reproduction—and a rejection of common-sense causality—that are echoed in Foucault and London governmentalism. Given such a path dependence, then governmentalist rationalities, programmes, and technologies will perhaps share family resemblances but never be simple analogues. It is not too fanciful to propose that the move from an ill-defined

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social imaginary to a specific governmentalist technology—complete with various practices for collecting, storing, comparing data and rehabilitative interventions—would trace such a path. As we will see in the next chapter, Motorola, especially after the corporation adopted fine-grained measures to improve product quality, was an organisation wedded to the notion that all processes, whether technical or social, can be measured and governed. All organisational processes had standard operating procedures (SOP): meetings of a certain size had standard durations and agendas, each whiteboard had to have a certain number and colour of pens, and each theme had a standard colour. The very notion of an SOP assumes that technical standards already exist and can be met if particular routines are followed. Or, although the technical standard may not be fully established or unambiguous, it is sufficiently clear to allow the SOP to clarify acceptable standards for participants while producing a population, measurable norms, and, crucially, indicators of actual or likely deviance. Here we follow Peter Miller and Tim O’Leary’s suggestion that the factory is best thought of as a laboratory, ‘an intrinsically theoretical and experimental space, one where phenomena are created.’37 For Motorola’s corporate HR function, they had taken their old models of management as far as they could. Further, the evolution of Motorola’s ‘corporate philosophy,’ as well as the increasingly global nature of the business, had far outstripped the old technology of personnel management.’ It was time ‘to recognise that we must let go of these old technologies and embrace the new technology of Human Resources.’ This transition ‘is one of moving from a defensive, creativitystifling orientation to one that welcomes diversity and embraces change.’ Especially for senior managers, this required both that they jettison their ‘battlefield’ expertise in favour of experimentation and that they embody a more open, problem-solving culture. This, it was emphasised, was not a small concession to a specific, passing programme. Yet the use of the active tense speaks of a process rather than a completed act; it speaks of a necessary hybridity in the management style of the individual and a spectrum of techniques in which the present reflects a borrowing from the future and the past. Rather, the new HR must develop a new expertise, new technologies of management: I don’t stand before you today as an expert because none of us are exports in this area. What I can do is begin with myself and re-examine my orientation and skills. . . . You can do the same because like me, you too may be guilty of accepting and in some cases advocating incongruent structures and systems and you too continue to talk about the new paradigm and hold tightly onto parts of the old one.38 The organisation and the manager embody the notion of ‘continuous improvement’ as a form not just of infinite failure but as a realistic, never fatalistic, recognition that the individual and the organisation are always a work in progress. This recognition of inevitable failure becomes a mark of

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the organisation’s realism and moral purpose. The inevitability of failure is the spur to increased self-discipline and the endless search for more exacting controls over technical processes and more effective methods of liberating individuals and teams. For contemporary leaders, this mode of understanding themselves and the organisation has radically altered the way they think about their own power and authority. The legitimacy of managerial authority is never complete and can never be taken for granted. Rather, their authority is always contingent not just on the effectiveness of their choices and actions but on how these are routinely discharged. Equally, their authority cannot be derived from their expertise, which is always in decay, nor from their organisational status. Although the contemporary leader acknowledges that such sources and assumptions of power used to hold true, it is precisely their rejection of these outmoded certainties that provides them with their legitimacy, however contingent. To think of power and authority as so radically uncertain and so utterly dependent upon everyday personal conduct is a complete departure from the technical authority vested in the impersonal figure of the bureaucratic office holder. Paradoxically, that this is a difficult and, in practice, impossible form of leadership makes it all the more challenging in terms of the leader’s self-discipline and self-improvement. We hear echoes of this tension in Motorola’s self-confident articulation of a corporate philosophy and much less emphatically by the leadership of the Easter Inch factory. Similarly, the Easter Inch leadership team self-consciously talked of experimentation, that they were pioneering a new form of organisation whose success depended upon individual employees’ choosing to embrace the new, expanded freedoms of a factory quite unlike any other that they had experienced. ‘Motorola started from scratch and has taken this [philosophy] to utter extremes. But that is the only way to do it.’39 Empowerment, of course, also impacts upon how workers work and how associates associate. For, as Huhtala observes, these new working methods all involve that the individual self be both the locus and agent of control.40 Contemporary self-management contains self-direction, self-monitoring, and self-empowerment. To paraphrase Nikolas Rose, whereas employees were previously to be managed, now they were ‘conceived as individuals who are to be active in their own government.’ The team ‘is not simply the territory of government, but a means of government: its ties, bonds, forces and affiliations are to be celebrated, encouraged, nurtured, shaped and instrumentalised in the hope of producing consequences that are desirable for all and for each.’41 Structures and processes are to be devised—and their effectiveness measured in terms of—how far they release individual and collective potentials that were previously constrained, if not suppressed, by management and organisation. Agency resides with the workers themselves, often with very few structural prompts in terms of reward or how to calibrate different aspects of their physical and psychological effort. The risk and uncertainty that Motorola corporate managers were extolled to embrace was no less profound for individual employees. They were exposed to agents of forms

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of power and knowledge that were both voluntary and coercive. For management, consent is only minimally tolerable; active engagement is acceptable, by degrees; coercion is, by definition, certain to be counterproductive. Again, this involves a self-denying ordinance for management that requires subtle discrimination between the levels of engagement by individuals and teams. Management must act only to strengthen the practical and moral capacities of individuals and teams in order to identify those moments when and how to intervene. Better still if such management interventions are limited and unobtrusive and allow, never compel, individuals and teams to determine their own ends. The management of the conduct of conduct relies not just on the development of shrewd analytics of individuals, teams, and populations but on an equally sophisticated interpretation and application of, wherever possible, indirect tactics by managers. Such tactics are not second-order problems the answers to which can be easily derived from corporate philosophies. Rather, they involve operational managers translating such philosophies, with all their ambiguities, into daily routines that are highly contextual and often improvised. If anything, operational management confronts even more complex conceptual and practical problem than those executives who sketch out the corporate philosophy. Management in the new workplace involves, to paraphrase Barbara Cruikshank, striking ‘the delicate balance between governing too little and too much, to govern by maximising the will of the governed rather than deterring it.’42 Empowerment required order and dynamism, engagement and questioning, a constant unsettling process of reform.

CONCLUSION The guiding assumption of neoliberalism is that to govern less is to govern better, that is, more efficiently, more legitimately. Programmes of government have a moral character. Moral both in the sense of the self-declared purpose of the rulers and also in the sense of reforming the character of the ruled. Once deviation was clearly established by governmental technologies, then corrective action, in some form of other, must be applied for the good of the individual and society.43 For Foucault, the technologies of governmentality are always geared to producing individuals better able and more willing to self-discipline. This is an inherently risky project which, by definition, always involves trial and error, slippage between the vaulting ambitions of neoliberalism and the recognition that even the most successful project necessarily fails to a greater or lesser extent. Translating the imaginations and strategies of corporate philosophers such as Chris Galvin into workable designs and technologies is a task of enormous complexity. The design of the factory of the future represented a continuation—perhaps a radical extension—of the notion that the task of contemporary management is to produce organisations without managers.

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NOTES 1. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–75 (London: Verso, 2003), 19, 20. 2. Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 51. 3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane, 1977), 218. 4. Daniel Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 80–1; Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press, 2006), 6–7; Sylvie Patrou, Critique 1946–1996: Une Encyclopedie de L’Esprit Moderne (Paris: Editions de I’Mec, 1999); Alan McKinlay and Eric Pezet, ‘Accounting for Foucault,’ Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010), 486–95. 5. Paul Veyne, ‘Foucault Revolutionizes History,’ in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 146–82. 6. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (London: Palgrave, 2008), 2. 7. Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 149–52. 8. John Marks, ‘Foucault, Franks, Gauls: Il faut defender la societe: The 1976 Lectures at the Collège de France,’ Theory, Culture and Society 17 (2000): 128. 9. Thomas Lemke, Foucault, Governmentality, Critique (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2011), 13–14. 10. Michel Foucault, ‘About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self,’ Political Theory 21 (1993): 203–4. 11. Bob Jessop, ‘From Micro-Powers to Governmentality: Foucault’s Work on Statehood, State Formation, Statecraft and State Power,’ Political Geography 26 (2007): 35. 12. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 44. 13. Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), 4. 14. Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality,’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991a), 103; Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Gales, Gouverner par les Instruments (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2005), 88. 15. Alan McKinlay, ‘Following Foucault into the Archives: Clerks, Careers, and Cartoons,’ Management & Organizational History 8 (2013), 137–54. 16. Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association 1857–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 143–72. 17. Barbara Townley, ‘Beyond Good and Evil: Depth and Division in the Management of Human Resources,’ in Foucault, Management and Organization Theory, ed. Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey (London: Sage, 1998), 193. 18. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 341. 19. Stewart Elden, ‘Rethinking Governmentality,’ Political Geography 26 (2007): 30. 20. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government,’ British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992): 191. 21. Majia Nadesan, Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2008), 213.

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Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization 22. Stewart Clegg, Tyrone Pitsis, Thekla Rura-Polley, and Marton Marrosszeky, ‘Governmentality Matters: Designing an Alliance Culture of Inter-Organization Collaboration for Managing Projects,’ Organization Studies 23 (2002): 336. 23. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 283. 24. Warren Montag, ‘ “The Soul Is the Prison of the Body”: Althusser and Foucault, 1970–1975,’ Yale French Studies 88 (1995): 53–77. 25. Nikolas Rose, ‘Government and Control,’ British Journal of Criminology 40 (2000): 322–3. 26. Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 19. 27. Nikolas Rose, Pat O’Malley, and Mariana Valverde, ‘Governmentality,’ Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences 2 (2006): 85. 28. William Walters, Governmentality: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge, 2012), 88. 29. Mark Bevir, ‘Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance,’ European Journal of Social Theory 13 (2010): 430–1. 30. Danica Dupont and Frank Pearce, ‘Foucault Contra Foucault: Rereading the “Governmentality” Papers,’ Theoretical Criminology, 5 (2001): 133. 31. Walters, Governmentality, 113–14. 32. Ulrich Brockling, Susan Krasman, and Thomas Lemke, ‘From Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France to Studies of Governmentality: An introduction,’ in Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges, ed. Ulrich Brockling, Susan Krasman, and Thomas Lemke (London: Routledge, 2011), 17. 33. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 34. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 6. 35. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 38. 36. John Mahoney, ‘Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,’ Theory and Society 29 (2000): 509–48. 37. Peter Miller and Tim O’Leary, ‘The Factory as Laboratory,’ in Accounting and Science: Natural Enquiry and Commercial Reason, ed. Michael Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 121. 38. Donnell and Miraglia, Motorola Staff Presentation, ‘Unity of Purpose,’ May 1990. 39. ‘Motorola,’ Electronic Times, November 1992. 40. Hannele Huhtala, The Emancipated Worker? A Foucauldian Study of Power, Subjectivity and Organising in the Information Age (Helsinki: Commentationes Scientiarum Socialicum, 2004), 152. 41. Nikolas Rose, ‘Government and Control,’ British Journal of Criminology 43 (2000): 330. 42. Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 51. 43. Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 178.

2

Working for the Yankee Dollar

INTRODUCTION Motorola was one firm in a concentration of American multinationals that established the so-called Silicon Glen in the central belt of Scotland after 1945. From the 1980s, American firms were joined by Japanese and Taiwanese multinationals. The experience of the factory of the future has to be located in this longer-run history. We begin by considering work organisation in American branch plants and the long-run development of collective bargaining in Silicon Glen. The factory of the future was not a continuation of existing practice but a radical departure from the experiences of Silicon Glen. Our aim is to demonstrate the development—and continued diversity—of work organisation, employment contracts, and industrial relations across American subsidiaries. Finally, we sketch the history of Motorola’s first Scottish plant, in the new town of East Kilbride, just outside Glasgow. This plant’s experience was important both as a marker of how corporate personnel practices developed from the late 1960s onwards and in terms of the conceptualisation of the factory of the future. More immediately, Motorola East Kilbride was a formative experience for two of the handful of key managers who formulated the plans for Easter Inch. AN AMERICAN MODEL Between 1945 and 1970, the central belt of Scotland was the recipient of the greatest inflow of American direct investment outside Canada.1 Major American corporations, such as Caterpillar, Hoover, IBM, ITT, Kodak, NCR, and Timex, all established important production facilities before 1968. These firms were initially drawn to Britain by restrictions in dollar imports to the UK and the Commonwealth and then by the need to locate inside the Common Market.2 The reasons why U.S. corporate investment was so concentrated in this part of Scotland were more diffuse: regional aid, combined with a political willingness to short-circuit Whitehall decision making; the serendipity of Scottish forebears among visiting executives; and

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an abundant supply of skilled engineers and labour accustomed to the disciplines of mass production. The first wave of American firms arrived in the late 1940s and early 1950s and included IBM (Greenock) and NCR (Dundee). Most early arrivals were in light engineering, but electrical engineering and electronics assumed ever greater importance from the mid-1960s onwards. NCR shifted from making a wide range of electrical-mechanical cash registers to computers in 1969, a transition entirely reliant on the assembly of U.S.-produced components.3 By 1975, the Scottish Council for Development and Industry could justifiably claim that ‘Scotland is now the capital of the whole European electronics industry.’4 The early entrants came loaded with ideological baggage that was the product of a strong belief in individualism and managerial prerogative. The insistence on unlimited managerial autonomy was accompanied by an aggressive anti–trade unionism, an attitude forged during the labour conflicts of the first decades of the twentieth century. These battles against union organising stimulated the construction of innovative corporate labour policies. By the mid-1920s, Charles U. Carpenter, head of NCR’s labour department, could boast that he had defeated trade unionism. Anti–trade unionism was the trigger to the transformation of NCR’s employment practices. All hiring and firing was a central function, not left to operational management or shop floor supervisors. Denied a collective voice, individual employee grievances were routed through a central personnel function, subject to formal rules. Again, codification and centralisation both made individual voice a plausible mechanism and defined employment policy and practice as a strategic, not operational issue. Over time, these policies became more engrained and gained ever greater authority Labour was always a strategic matter for American multinationals. British personnel professionals recognised the innovativeness of American companies, particularly when contrasted to their own primitive practices and marginal strategic role. On the other hand, even enthusiastic observers were sceptical about the reception of American practices by British workers. I wonder if it is possible that American companies may cause irritation by their excessive ‘posterisation.’ . . . one is met at the employees’ entrance with a bank of flowers which spell out ‘PROTECT OUR GOOD NAME’ and every office and section had posters on the same theme. From every point one could see anything from six to twelve of such exhortations. IBM, Greenock, have the same idea when every section and office is asked to ‘THINK.’5 Viewed from American headquarters, innovations in personnel management should have been introduced almost wholesale into their British subsidiaries. The British managers of subsidiaries played no part in formulating corporate personnel policies, nor had they sufficient power or authority to

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negotiate their implementation in practice. In practice, this resulted in such a recurring corporate frustration that subsidiary managements proved incapable of fully realising corporate strategy. The temporary transfers of American personnel staff were rare and largely confined to the establishment of a greenfield site and moments of crisis. American-owned plants used job evaluation to set hourly rates to free themselves from the pressures of local labour market norms. U.S. firms were determined to maintain control over internal wage structures. Where British manufacturers attempted to use piecework to regulate production, American-owned firms relied on organisation and technology to increase efficiency, rather than driving labour or by using productivity bargaining. Equally, American subsidiary management doggedly refused to deviate from these principles, even when under severe pressure from key workers, unions, or important customers.6 There were few, highly reluctant exceptions, such as Timex and NCR. In the main, American firms deliberately remained outside powerful employer associations that were fundamental to the British system of industrial relations until the mid-1980s. However, in the Scottish new towns, American immigrant firms banded together to compare wage rates, skill needs, and union activities. The main objectives were to dampen the possibilities for pattern bargaining and to limit interfirm labour mobility. In Glenrothes, for example, from 1964 Burroughs Machines and Beckman Instruments formed the cornerstone of an ‘Industrial Consultative Committee on which all major employers are represented, [that] ensures that any problems which might affect harmonious working are fully discussed and resolved resulting in broadly uniform work practices.’7 This committee functioned effectively for around three decades. The first wave of American firms used assembly lines to pace labour. In Timex, for instance, machine pacing was particularly intense in the all-female assembly departments during the plant’s first decade. ‘You were like a battery hen. You just sat on all these lines and all these watches were coming down in containers. The atmosphere was good but it never stopped.’8 Tasks were highly routinised, often taking no more than an instant or a few seconds to complete. The target for a typical assembly task—inserting balance wheels into casings—was 8,000 per shift.9 One female Timex line employee worked on the next stage of assembling balance wheels from the kits. ‘Every day felt like a month,’ recalled another Timex assembler: It was very boring—you worked on a machine that had a wee die and you just put the balance wheel in and the wee bitties on top of them and then pulled this handle. It went with a swish of air—and you just sat and done that all day long.10 Supervision was tight. Random quality inspections combined with direct, tangible presence of supervisors on the line. For the line worker, to breach quality standards was to risk 100% inspection of every item they produced.

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This ensured not only that the individual could not earn their production bonus but also jeopardised the throughput upon which their workmates’ earnings depended. The older the plant, the more likely it was to be unionised. Even inside the same American corporation, longer established plants were the most likely to be unionised.11 Skilled craft workers, attracted to IBM by the promise of high earnings, often initially retained their union cards as their passports back into the open labour market, and then as much for their insurance value as out of any deep obligation to their union or the craft community. Skilled workers’ informal job controls were simply swept away by IBM as trade jurisdictions were blurred or eliminated by in-house training. A series of radical product innovation in the mid-1960s finally ended any lingering prospects for sustaining craft conventions in the Greenock plant. Conversely, for nonapprenticed workers who had been upskilled by IBM, these new skills were valid only in the plant’s internal labour market. In just over a decade, IBM had created a phalanx of workers whose earning capacity was locked into the plant’s internal labour market and for whom trade unionism promised little and entailed considerable personal risk. For such workers, union recognition would inevitably raise general questions of IBM’s definitions of skill and could jeopardise their status in the internal labour market. After 1954, union attempts to organise inside IBM were fitful at most, and even the number of individual cardholders dwindled significantly. When IBM Greenock began its internal works council in 1962, it was not, then, a reaction to any immediate prospect of a successful union organising campaign but rather intended to forestall even the possibility of unionisation. Works councillors were nominated by their immediate colleagues, represented all departments, and could be chosen by secret ballot, if necessary. For works councillors, including several former and current union members, this was an effective vehicle for collective representation on plant-level issues and developed their informal influence. In short, the IBM works council proved to be a satisfactory and durable ‘voice’ mechanism that also allowed councillors to gain the personal authority necessary for some measure of informal bargaining activity. Certainly, the works councillors argued that there was no need for unionisation, since this limited form of representation satisfactorily complemented IBM’s responsive, if individualised, personnel system. Using legislation that forced recalcitrant employers to accept the result of a workforce ballot about union membership and recognition, four unions decided to use IBM as a test case in 1977. IBM placed severe restrictions on the unions’ access to the workforce and waged a concerted propaganda campaign, including sotto voce promises of a substantial tax-free bonus if the ballot rejected union recognition. Less than 10% of the workforce voted in favour of union recognition, a result that devastated the few activists inside the plant. The ballot confirmed union officials’ view that sophisticated multinationals should be considered off-limits for sustained recruitment campaigns and that their efforts should be concentrated

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on defending their core memberships in the embattled heavy manufacturing sectors.12 The absence of union representation did not signify corporate indifference to employee attitudes and behaviour. IBM’s strategic paternalism was not based simply on favourable contracts. Rather, there were a series of individual, workgroup, and plant-wide surveys to gauge employee opinion. Front-line managers, in short, were under intense scrutiny in terms of eliminating any minor grievances and maintaining a stable, committed workforce.13 Despite this, IBM did not necessarily succeed in constructing a committed nonunion, much less an antiunion workforce.14 Rather, for the IBM workforce at least, union membership was both conditional and situational. It was conditional in that the IBM respondents would join a union if this did not carry such a heavy penalty and had a realistic prospect of delivering sustainable contractual gains, and it was situational in that they considered it unlikely that union membership could improve on the contractual conditions offered by IBM to the individual employee. As the shipbuilding and heavy industries of west Scotland collapsed through the early 1980s— despite union resistance—the trade-off between job security and relatively favourable contracts for nonunionism strengthened its appeal.15 MOTOROLA Motorola established its first Scottish plant in East Kilbride in 1969. Motorola located in Britain to get inside tariff barriers, to gain access to state—especially military—contracts, and to fill the gap in the emerging semiconductor market left by sluggish European producers. Through the 1970s, state contracts waned, and corporate demand, especially from sister divisions in consumer goods, rose significantly.16 During this decade, Motorola, like other American semiconductor producers, developed spatially dispersed production systems as part of a portfolio designed to minimise risk and maximise economies of scope.17 Foreign direct investment—rather than production under licence or joint ventures—was essential for American semiconductor firms seeking to protect their technological advantages.18 Initially, Motorola East Kilbride was a low-volume producer of expensive ceramic integrated circuits for military or mission-critical commercial use. The transition to high-volume silicon wafer production for a broad range of commercial uses was complete by the early 1980s. Before 1983, Motorola East Kilbride effectively rationed the chips shipped to industrial customers.19 From 1983 onwards, silicon chips increasingly became commodity products purchased in bulk in global markets rather than produced to order for specific purposes. East Kilbride was chosen because of the availability of a large female workforce and the absence of any other electronics company offering employment contracts and working conditions equal to Motorola’s.20 In

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this respect, it followed the pattern of other American inward investment. It differed from American transplants in the coherence of its labour strategy and in its determination not to compromise its nonunionism. The consolidation of extensive international alliances of semiconductor and computer manufacturers provided a stable operating environment for Motorola to expand its European production. Employment grew quickly through the mid-1970s, plateauing in the mid-1980s at around 1,500 employees. Over the next decade, Motorola East Kilbride sustained slow but steady employment growth, peaking at around 2,200 in the early 1990s. Retrenchment characterised the second half of the 1990s, and contraction, punctured by a change in ownership in 2004, prefigured virtual closure in 2009. The pattern of employment growth paralleled the spread of semiconductors into all forms of industrial and commercial applications, while contraction spoke of globalisation and an industry beset by discontinuous product innovation. Historically, almost two-thirds of the workforce was female, overwhelmingly concentrated in routine production and clerical work. The feminization of low-skill assembly work—and the definition of feminized tasks as low skilled—was more pronounced in Scottish electronics than for female workers in British industry more generally. Equally, an extreme degree of occupational segregation by gender was established during the sector’s emergence in the early post-World War II years and deepened over time.21 For the first 15 years of its existence, almost two-thirds of the workforce lived within a three-mile radius of the East Kilbride plant and relied heavily on family and friendship networks for recruitment for permanent and temporary employment.22 Young workers, especially females, formed the core of this routinised manufacturing workforce.23 Designing highly routinised work processes predicated on managers’ assumptions about the ‘nimble fingers,’ self-discipline, and attentiveness of women was, of course, hardly new.24 Importantly, however, it was not teenagers but young mothers in their mid-twenties whom Motorola sought.25 All manufacturing plants are, to a large extent, local. This is particularly true when the workforce comprises large numbers of female workers, and even more so where contracts are part-time and organised around family schedules. Recruitment, as Nance Goldstein puts it, ‘aimed at having workers who are careful, self-disciplined and neat.’26 In short, hire on the basis of the individual’s appearance, behaviour, and appearance, rather than technical skill or even performance in a dexterity test. Motorola was exceptional, perhaps unique, in its strategic approach to recruitment. Motorola did not recruit female labour that had experience with mass production. Motorola looked for a particular type of so-called green labour, not young females but rather more mature married women, preferably with school-aged children. The East Kilbride plant’s personnel manager explained this strategy in 1981: We are the highest hourly payers . . . we can easily attract the high quality female labour force we want for out direct production. We take . . .

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women without factory experience—we do not want any undesirable habits. Our production is very different from the old dirty engineering type shopfloor—we require a different approach to work—and our process is unique. Previous experience would be impossible and it’s just not necessary. . . . The average operator is 35 with a couple of kids who’s returning to work. Often she’ll have done office work before—some have even been junior school teachers or nurses.27 Although Motorola’s pursuit of a consistent recruitment strategy was singular, its hiring processes were much more pragmatic and short term. Indeed, during the recruitment surges of the mid-1970s and early 1980s, Motorola relaxed its recruitment procedures still further. Hiring was the responsibility of ‘an older lady, not a high-powered recruitment specialist. She knew all the people, knew their kids’ names, knew how they were getting on at school, knew the family’s reputation. It was absolutely lovely.’ That was enough to ensure that a daughter, friend, or neighbour was hired. One former assembler recalled: ‘I got a couple of women into the Motorola. I knew them. They were nice women, tidy houses, nice kids. That’s what I told my supervisor. I knew they would fit in.’ The sponsor’s judgement was based on the evidence of the woman as a homemaker, even if she had no direct knowledge of her performance at work. ‘It was all families and friends of families.’ The result was that ‘nearly everybody we worked with had common ground. We all fitted in with one another and we got on socially. It was a certain type of people.’28 In assembly areas. there were 14 supervisors, 11 of whom were female.29 Female supervisors were in charge of all-female processes. Equally, the next level of management, departmental supervisors, were all male and had quite different employment histories: the employment histories of female supervisors were dominated by Motorola, but male supervisors and middle managers all had extensive manufacturing experience, almost all in high-volume environments, including some from other American multinational branch plants. Motorola East Kilbride conformed to a corporate policy that neither recognised nor negotiated with trade unions. Motorola never wavered from its direct dealing policy. Through the 1970s, one of the final exchanges of the recruitment interview involved Motorola’s enquiring whether the applicant was a member of a trade union member. Through a ‘tight smile,’ the interviewee would be informed that, although this remained a matter for the individual, unions were not recognised and therefore could deliver no tangible benefits. During their interview, prospective Motorolans were asked directly for their views on trade unions. ‘Marie,’ who was hired in 1978 for the twilight shift, replied that she ‘had more to bother me than unions, . . . but then I found out that if you had said that you believe in unions you wouldn’t have got started. You had to watch what you said.’30 Scottish Enterprise trumpeted strike-free industrial relations as a major attraction for corporations locating in Scotland. More than this, prospective inward

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investors were reassured that union recognition was purely a matter for the firm and not subject to legislation. Falling unionisation has characterised contemporary labour relations in the UK. . . . Only 16% of all US plants established in Scotland during the 1980s recognise trade unions at present. In high technology sectors, this figure is even lower at 11%, whilst in the electronics industry none of the US companies which have come to Scotland during the eighties are unionised.31 Researchers into the fate of industrial democracy in the early years of the first Thatcher government registered not just the novelty of contracts, management style, and employee involvement in one American high-tech multinational based in Scotland, but their strangeness. The desire for fluidity and flexibility necessary for rapid change has resulted in an industrial relations package that was characterised by informality. The company has no unions, it has very few formalised procedures, for instance in the UK plant there were no collective agreements, no yearly pay round, nor formally constituted workforce/management committees for consultation. . . . In participation terms the landscape was very flat indeed with no familiar points of reference. Yet even without a sense of collective activity the company was promoted as a participative one but participation was seen in a much more non-institutional and functional way. The management stressed that rather than being anti-union they sought to transcend such a position.32 This was truly terra incognita, a flat landscape with none of the familiar institutional markers of the endless struggle between capital and labour. There was not even a language that spoke of employment, management, and task. Rather, the workforce was more likely to use a polite discourse that stressed personal and mutual responsibility, quality, and ‘of loyalty even kinship to the company.’33 The bewildering geography of the new workplace had none of the institutions that mediated power relations or none of the functions that crystallised authority relations in unionised manufacturing. For the outsider, employee participation was difficult to see, far less to evaluate. Whereas employee participation in factories governed by collective bargaining necessarily involved politics of representation—of an entire workforce, a trade, or a workgroup—in the new workplace, participation was thoroughly individualised. The main plank of Motorola’s union exclusion strategy was to remove any obvious cause for employee dissatisfaction. So-called second wave U.S. firms, especially semiconductor manufacturers, deliberately used personnel policies and practices based on relatively high wages and meritocratic internal labour markets to reduce any demand for unionisation.34 Average

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earnings for all types of employee were 5–15% above local and industry averages. For assembly operatives, generous shift premia boosted earnings still further. Twice-annual plant bonuses of a week’s tax-free pay were awarded to all staff before the summer and Christmas shutdowns. Motorola took care to ensure employees understood that high salaries and bonuses were directly attributed to plant and corporate performance. ‘Rena,’ a Motorola veteran of 20 years, explained that ‘because we were grateful for the job, we knew it was payback time. We were happy to do our job right. The twilight shift was always a fast shift, you got a lot done because you knew you only had a few hours.’35 Although this stress on the link between the individual, the plant, and the corporation was ‘drilled down into the fabric of everyday operations,’ the focal point was the annual salary award every December.36 Visiting corporate executives, plant managers, and departmental supervisors would all make presentations tailored to specific workgroups that underscored the indivisibility of Motorola as an organisation. Wages and conditions were not delivered by collective bargaining or even by individual effort. Corporate performance, then, was linked to movements in the individual’s base salary. It was life-changing coming into the Motorola environment. The salaries, the health care, training, open management, promotion opportunities. Financially, especially for people who worked night-shifts, were always higher than outside. Females soon earned more than their husbands. You could see the impact on people, Motorola visibly changed their life: better clothes, better car, better holidays. Things were changing for them: a major step up. This new life-style was all down to working for Motorola.37 East Kilbride was not just a new town; it was a young town. From the mid-1960s, arrivals to the new town were predominantly newly married or young families. For over two-thirds of the town’s inhabitants, the move was voluntary in order to gain better paid employment and improved housing. [C]lerical and manual workers in the new towns are exposed to many of the forces at work shaping new patterns of working class life. The move to the new towns may be defined as a conscious and intended break with the past rather than an involuntary decision imposed from above, as is usually the case in rehousing from clearance areas.38 One contemporary sociological account went so far as to conclude that the greater material ambition of these ‘affluent workers’ triggered greater female employment and a shift towards a ‘new symmetrical pattern of family life emerging in the new towns.39 There was no clear, visible link between job grades and salaries to allow informal earnings comparisons by employees. Single status contracts and

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highly individualised reward packages were vital to sustained operational flexibility.40 Earnings were decoupled from specific tasks. In any case, Motorola reminded every employee receiving a raise that this was not a matter for discussion inside the plant or the home. Nobody ever spoke about their salaries. You never knew what salary was attached to each job. The salary was what the individual earned, rather than a grade or length of service. There were annual appraisals but you were told explicitly not to discuss how this went with your colleagues.41 All employees received the same fringe benefits, irrespective of length of service or status. The full range of fringe benefits was paid to all employees, including part-time workers, after a short qualifying period. In 1982, around 40% of production workers were part-time, and all were female.42 Nonsalary benefits included free private health care for the employee and their entire family. For the average employee, fringe benefits were worth around 30% of salary. The total cost to Motorola was approximately 11% of employment costs. For Motorola, private health care had a practical objective: it minimised absences. The absenteeism rate was consistently under 2.5%.43 During the early 1970s, Motorola gained a reputation as a ‘good’ employer in the local labour market. Quite apart from the high wages and benefits, Motorola also had clear advantages over other local employers, particularly for part-time female employees. Above all, Motorola did not use part-time contracts as a short-run means of responding to market fluctuations. Generally, women electronics workers were particularly exposed to volatile employment as management hired and fired according to the market.44 Other local employers, including American manufacturers, gained a reputation for hiring and firing. During the recession of 1970–71, full-time employment in the local labour market dropped by only 3.0%, whereas the number of part-time workers dropped by 26.7%. Similarly, in the expansion of 1972–73, full-time employment increased by 6.6% while part-time workers increased by 20.6%.45 Motorola, by contrast, experienced steady growth, punctuated by steep step changes in their workforce. For Motorola, job security was a defining feature of the tie between the individual and the corporation, a characteristic that gained credibility and force by this contrast. Inside the plant, workforce confidence in corporate employment security was bolstered—not eroded—by significant investment in capital equipment that stripped out manual tasks. The increased automation of semiconductor production in the decade after 1975 opened up massive opportunities for demanning. Up to 30 manual assemblers with three months’ training each could be replaced by a single worker with two weeks’ training. Increased chip functionality further reduced female assembly work.46

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Whereas a significant minority of East Kilbride’s female assembly workers used part-time employment to supplement incomes in the short run, Motorola’s job security meant that family budgets became increasingly dependent upon continued employment. One late 1960s study of high labour turnover among women electronics workers concluded that the greatest single source of dissatisfaction was disrespectful supervisors whose arbitrary use of harsh sanctions was perceived as unfair, excessive, and a way of disguising their poor coordination of production. This was compounded by a form of work design based on management perceptions of operators as incapable of exercising the most prosaic initiative. Also, management’s belief that it had a ‘plug-in’ workforce was consistent with their readiness to hire and fire labour as demand fluctuated.47 For women on the twilight shift, this meant that husbands were inevitably drawn into day-to-day child care or at least into discussions about its practicalities. Moreover, over time, it became ever clearer that this was not a temporary expedient in which female employment was geared to financing a holiday or Christmas presents, but a permanent arrangement. High wages, stable contracts, an open management style, and the mysterious quality that attached to semiconductor manufacture all combined to mark Motorola as a different kind of employer, a different kind of factory. East Kilbride was self-contained, a private place; a place where everyone knew each other and the outside world was outside; the rest of the world didn’t know or understand Motorola. Some of that was about the technology but it was also because Motorola was a special, (pause) privileged place. Everyone—inside and outside—thought you were lucky, somebody special if you worked for Motorola.48 There were two quite distinct labour processes in East Kilbride, a distinction that had an important impact on managerial thinking about manufacturing organisation. The first form of work organisation in Motorola East Kilbride was silicon wafer manufacture. ‘Wafer fab’ was the least efficient phase of the production process: due to temperamental capital equipment, the perishability of the silicon, and extreme quality levels. From its entry into large-scale silicon manufacture in 1963, Motorola concentrated on maximising yield levels in wafer fab.49 Nevertheless, until the early 1980s, semiconductor production remained labour intensive, based on bonding and encapsulating chips by hand under a microscope. The cost of automated assembly was prohibitive, especially given the rapid obsolescence of successive generations of memory product.50 At this stage, while low wage rates remained important to profitability, this was a secondary consideration given the high value of each chip. Improved efficiency and quality levels were achieved through a preventative maintenance regime and strict adherence to tightly defined work rules. Over the long run, best-practice microelectronic corporations that located in Britain far outstripped productivity

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growth in electronics or manufacturing.51 Even so, Motorola struggled to keep up with booming demand, a pressure that underpinned the corporation’s pursuit of round-the-clock production and consequently the premium management placed on maximising the workforce’s temporal flexibility.52 Wafer fabrication was performed in clean rooms that workers entered by airlocks, after being washed by air showers. Operatives were forbidden to wear jewellery, perfume, or makeup, and they were dressed in whole-body coveralls—bunny-suits. Only the operative’s eyes were visible, and those were behind a mask: denied mascara, some operators even dyed their eyelashes. Essentially, silicon wafers are layers of chemicals and gases, interconnected by etched channels. Silicon wafer fabrication is a complex process that uses dangerous and volatile materials in which the product of each step has its own shelf life.53 Maintaining product flow is the key supervisory task. Each layer is added in a distinct phase—per a recipe—that must conform absolutely to procedure: It wasn’t simply a matter of stamping a something out of a piece of sheet metal, it was following a very defined procedure at each process step. Process steps had defined criteria for each task: everything had to conform to that recipe. Each process step had to be followed exactly: material had to be added at a certain time, at a certain temperature. Everything had to be monitored. It was essentially a chemical process; it was a chemical plant in the early days. Every layer we put on to the wafer of silicon was based on various types of gases and liquids, all of which—bar none—were highly dangerous. It was a highly controlled environment.54 The hazardous nature of the manufacturing process and the high cost of waste combined to produce the need for a highly controlled environment. For the individual operative, pulling on the bunny suit and passing through the airlocks into the fabrication department were practical and symbolic reminders of the overriding importance of safety, hierarchy, and obedience. ‘It was like scrubbing-up for an operating theatre, everything had to be super-clean. You couldn’t tell one person from another once you were in your suit. As soon as you were changed, you were a non-person.’ The impersonal environment and the solitary, almost introspective nature of working in a bunny suit were too much for some: ‘you were no longer “you”; some girls couldn’t take it, but I just had to get used to it.’55 The intense measurement of yield, quality, and safety drew workers into a setting where they were much more likely to express loyalty to their workmates and to the process than to Motorola. The job wasn’t hard, but you were exhausted at the end of your shift. You had to keep your wits about you all the time. The [clean room] was very quiet. You could drift away, if you weren’t careful. That’s when

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you made mistakes, when you weren’t ready. Performance was measured all the time . . . for the shift. So, you were responsible for your job and for how the shift’s quality performance.56 The nonsequential layout of the equipment, its sensitive nature, and the need for constant monitoring meant that clean room workers had little opportunity for socialising on the job. The main supervisory responsibilities were in monitoring product flow and diagnosing machine breakdowns, rather than managing the bunny suits. Inside the clean room, even a minor act of insubordination jeopardised quality and safety, and it was regarded as a disciplinary issue for the workgroup, not merely for the supervisor. One girl brought in chocolate cake to celebrate her birthday. Traces were found on the machinery. An entire batch was condemned, all twelve hours. That was an expensive mistake. Everyone felt guilty, even those girls who had refused the chocolate. We should have told the supervisor before it was dished out. We let [the girl] down. We were all reprimanded and the girl was given a formal written warning. The force of such a reprimand was all the greater for its rarity. Just as the workgroup accepted that discipline was partly their responsibility, so they implicitly endorsed that punishment of an individual team member represented a collective reprimand. Every worker has become a manager of herself and her colleagues—and a suspicious, watchful supervisor at that. The impersonality of the production process was paralleled by the formality of the social relations of production. Operatives were selected by a test of their literacy and numeracy and given four weeks of training before starting in fabrication or moving to a new task. Although these tasks were defined as semiskilled, the ability to monitor and record data and to be attentive to the integrity of the fabrication process as a whole was essential to individual performance and plant safety. ‘There were rules for everything, forms for everything. Every detail was written down, checked, and checked again.’ Given the elimination of autonomy from the operatives’ tasks, there was little opportunity to gain advancement through work performance. Safety demanded absolute conformity to job rules. Fab workers appreciated the interdependence of their tasks, and Rena, a fabrication worker, drew an analogy with the physical composition of the semiconductor. [I]t’s like photographs laid on top of one another. Every picture has got to be aligned perfectly to the one below, so if one was a wee bit to the side then the next layer was also misaligned. It was like a pile of bricks—if you get the second one wrong, it’s going to topple over. It was so precise and had to be done just right.57

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Although fabrication appeared to be a series of isolated individuals performing discrete tasks, each was conscious of their interdependence: ‘if you made a mistake everybody else got held up, the rhythm was spoilt.’58 There were few opportunities for routine job rotation. Generally, an operative spent at least a year on any one task before being reassigned. For management, the aim was not to increase job satisfaction or flexibility but to ensure the depth of knowledge necessary for effectiveness, while deterring the easy familiarity that could encourage an operative to take shortcuts or risks. Issues of efficiency and individual productivity were not ignored but rather submerged in language and practices that stressed safety and quality. Yield management was the subtext of safety. The second form of work organisation in Motorola East Kilbride consisted of final test, device assembly, and despatch. Final test involved careful visual inspection and scrupulous attention to design and quality procedures. Although these tasks were much more individualised, there was no measurement of productivity. Maintaining quality levels was, however, of enormous importance. The labour process remained highly labour intensive. The intricate and varied operations involved manipulating fragile components that could be seen only through magnifying glasses or microscopes, which were extremely difficult to automate. One assembler recalled that when she started in Motorola in 1975, ‘everything was manual’ and based on small batches, baked in domestic-sized ovens. For five hours on each five-to-ten twilight shift, she used air pens to lift tiny devices and then straightened the hair-fine wires that ultimately plugged the component into an electronic circuit.59 These tasks expanded and gradually became more automated from the late 1970s as high value-added ceramics gave way to commodified silicon chips. Nor did this high-volume production carry any of the hazard risks of wafer fabrication. There were none of the airlocks, bunny suits, or complex, time-sensitive tasks of fabrication but rather a conventional manufacturing environment. Operatives wore uniform jackets, and the tasks were much simpler and less well-defined, although as the product line diversified, there was a growing need for labour flexibility. Where safety meant that workplace rules were obeyed almost automatically in fabrication, the assembly areas called for more hands-on management. This was particularly the case when the first cohorts of assembly workers had grown accustomed to an exceptionally high degree of autonomy. ‘We decided how fast to do jobs; who was doing what. Management came later,’ laughed one assembler. For one manufacturing manager, when he arrived in 1983, ‘the drum beat of performance’ had been established, but it was haphazard at most and was far from being a high-performance factory.60 In the assembly areas, coordinating tasks and rapid job rotation was the main supervisory responsibility. Again, there was no management blueprint for extensive job training and task rotation. Rather, rotation grew organically as the women assemblers learned to cope with the absence of coworkers and to offset tedium: ‘you could learn all the jobs if you wanted. You

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could move about, if you wanted.’61 The single status of assemblers and the fact that there was neither a hierarchy of tasks nor a gradated, visible pay structure attached to work organisation, eased this process: ‘we were all the same, just women working for their families. It wasn’t a career or anything, all the jobs paid the same, so why not switch?’ Gradually, job rotation became an issue for supervision, not exclusively for the assembly workers. By the late 1970s, for the supervisor, job rotation was a way of offsetting routine, broadening the operatives’ experience, and reducing personal frictions. Flexibility was critical in the assembly and final test areas. However, functional flexibility remained largely achieved by the assemblers’ self-organisation: ‘you didn’t wait until you got bored, you just switched with someone else.’ And ‘if you saw someone struggling you would muck in. It was obvious: you didn’t need a supervisor to tell you to do that’s just common sense, common decency.’62 Similarly, as the plant’s personnel director explained, temporal flexibility was not organised bureaucratically but by assemblers juggling production needs against family commitments amongst themselves: ‘People accommodate each other on shift changes. They work this out among themselves. The local workforce supplies a great variety of working patterns.’63 Flexibility was achieved in a way that reinforced worker autonomy and deepened their personal involvement in key production decisions, such as scheduling. Whatever pragmatic reasons underpinned this decision to condone such a high degree of employee control over working time, it was all the more remarkable given the demands of a continuous process such as semiconductors. And, of course, Motorola management learnt that devolving such decisions to assemblers bolstered the plant’s participative culture and achieved the necessary flexibility while minimising the costs of coordination and control. Just as operative tasks were much simpler, so the supervisor’s core activity shifted from coordinating the technical to the social dimension of production. But, reflecting the formality associated with the dangers of wafer fabrication, discipline remained highly formalised. Motorola supervisors did not develop the array of informal tactics to discipline individuals and workgroups characteristic of British manufacturing. ‘There was nothing “behind the scenes”, no “quiet words”: everything was upfront and by the book,’ recalled one experienced supervisor who had worked in both areas.64 All disciplinary processes were offline and involved Personnel staff. All grievances, irrespective of who initiated the process, were assumed to be an individual or interpersonal problem. All parties were judged in terms of their ‘ownership of a problem and their willingness to find an acceptable resolution. The very fact that HR had been notified meant that an issue had become a test of a manager’s competence and authority. Supervisors and managers could not simply use their rank or seniority or a production imperative to legitimise a decision: ‘nobody could absolve themselves of personal responsibility. You couldn’t just order someone to do something; you couldn’t rely on HR: you had to sort things out.’ At all levels of the organisation, the Personnel/HR

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function was designed as a check and balance against manufacturing. This was a structural tension designed to put cultural pressure on manufacturing to adhere to corporate values and, just as importantly, to place performance pressures on—and within—corporate, factory, and workgroup cultures. This was, as we shall see in Chapter 6, vital to the trajectory of the factory of the future. ‘There were,’ insisted the plant’s former HR Director, ‘real consequences for any supervisor who didn’t treat people like human beings. Supervisors would be publicly disciplined if they contravened the culture. At least in the short run, cultural conformity trumped performance.’65 There was no sense that this was resented by supervisors as a limit on their power. Rather, the formality of disciplinary procedures confirmed that their role was exclusively focused on organising production. Equally important, by defining discipline as an issue for professional, organisational intervention, it removed—perhaps confirmed—that the supervision of workplace sociability had to be ‘a lot softer,’ ‘almost gentle,’ no matter how pressing the production imperative. From the late 1970s, there was extensive training in so-called soft motivational supervisory skills that, at the very least, implicitly confirmed that Motorola would not tolerate harsh, confrontational management. Supervisors hired from Chrysler’s notoriously confrontational Linwood plant had to be reeducated in the type of quiet supervision expected at Motorola: ‘It was tough for them, they didn’t all make it. They had to unlearn supervision based on secrecy and shouting into control by speaking quietly to people, keeping calm in meetings. They had to be effective, not just ruthless for the sake of it.’ However, there were ‘no corporate directives about supervision, no “higher power” ’ monitoring the daily routines of supervisors. The emphasis on soft managerialism was underscored by a system designed ‘to flush out unhappiness’: You also had the opportunity to express your dissatisfaction. Any grievance was acted on immediately by management. As a manager that was an operational imperative: any dissatisfaction, no matter how trivial or misplaced, had to be acted upon straight away. And you had to let the aggrieved individual or team know you were acting, and acting quickly. As a manager, the organisation expected you to respond to your direct reports. Everyone knew that managers had to act quickly (pause) almost publicly. Good managers would use that to demonstrate how good they were, how responsive they were to their direct reports needs. Good managers would sometimes let a small operational problem emerge so that they could be seen to be dealing with it for their team.66 There was no top-down imposition of a corporate culture. Rather, a set of highly abstract corporate values were being interpreted and mobilised in support of local practices. Factory management was the key driver in embedding culture in everyday work experience. Equally, corporate values, broad as they were, did not exhaust the possible values lived and developed in the

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factory. Fairness was not a corporate value in any clearly defined sense, yet it was not incongruent or contradictory. On the shop floor, however, notions of fairness were critical. So fairness ‘meant that teams were constantly assessing their supervisor’s competence, the organisation of material flows for instance; and how fair they were.’ ‘Fair’ meant allowing to speak out but also ensuring that all workers contributed to group productivity. In contrast to the other Silicon Glen mass assembly plants, where the workgroup acted as a shield against arbitrary and unfair supervision, at Motorola, workgroup norms could also be enforced as a form of self-discipline. Motorola’s emphasis on the human side of production had not always been derived from an established corporate philosophy but gradually evolved, accelerating through the mid-1980s. For convinced Motorolans, this was the period in which they came to understand employment relations and corporate structures in intensely personal, psychological terms. We were starting to ask managers to examine themselves, not to take their position—their authority—for granted. I was part of that: I started to question myself in terms of performance, in terms of how I conducted myself. The difference was that we were starting to ask those around us to ask us questions. We didn’t know how to do it at first, but we knew we had to assess ourselves . . . not just once a year, but every single day. What we didn’t know was that this was about employing people, managing people, on an emotional level. We understood the positive stuff, reward and recognition, but we didn’t understand the sanctions people placed on themselves. Gradually, I understood that doubt was a good thing, a productive force, a way of making myself a better employee, a better manager, maybe even a better person. Powerful stuff.67 Motorola East Kilbride was organised in a conventional functional hierarchy. For Production, systems were based on individual tasks and managed by supervisors whose prime responsibility was coordinating workflows, not enforcing discipline: a ‘conventional organisation with a language of team: A sense of team, not in any concrete sense, but membership, being part of Motorola.’68 One tangible sign that Motorola regarded the employee as a long-term asset was the value ascribed to training. By 1982, every employee had to complete at least 40 hours of training per year in order to qualify for an annual salary increase. The range of training quickly expanded beyond immediate production concerns. Partly to relieve pressure from overburdened quality training providers, broader educational programmes were quickly introduced and expanded to include topics such as the management of change and persuasion skills. Initially, the increased importance of training was not part of a concerted corporate or plant management strategy. Training addressed some of the practical needs of a workforce that grew by almost one-third in the five years 1978–82, coupled with rapid technological

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change in semiconductors and product diversification.69 As it expanded in scope and intensity, training quickly assumed three main organisational objectives. First, training provided company-specific skills, especially in quality control and improvement. By training new and established staff together, Motorola aimed to deepen learning and to ensure the coherence of the plant’s culture. This was also recognition that the young workforce recruited during the plant’s growth phases remained with Motorola. Low labour turnover meant that the workforce was aging with the plant. A new job grade of senior assembler was created to provide some semblance of a job ladder for female assemblers. Senior assemblers assumed limited responsibility for coordinating their workgroups but not materials or product. Diagnostic skills remained the prerogative of technicians and supervisors. This divide was not just technical but was gendered: senior assembler was a realistic aspiration for women, but supervisory and technical roles were monopolised by men. Given significant product innovation, technical training was essential but became a vehicle for individual development: Training was all part of the continuous development of the person: your own expertise, your own confidence, building yourself as a person. Training was directed towards making you think about improving yourself as a person and going beyond what you thought you could do.70 Training, in other words, was not necessarily—nor, perhaps, primarily— technical. Nor was training geared to the individual’s current job or simply a prelude to promotion. Individual growth and the sense of opportunity were also a metaphor for the individual possibilities provided by an organisation that favoured internal promotion to external recruitment. The East Kilbride plant had a fairly shallow structure. You could look at the organisation chart and say, ‘well, I’m only five steps from the CEO’. The reality, [laughs] of course, was that the five levels stretched from here to eternity.71 Each promotion was preceded by an elaborate series of lateral moves: ‘but that still gave you a sense of proximity, of personal reach. The organisation chart looked human, not monumental. Although this was more an illusion than a reality, it felt real enough.’ To be subordinate was to be an ambiguous equal; to remain subordinate was to reject the possibility of becoming a Motorolan. Constructing—or rather, elaborating—an internal labour market not only gave all individuals choices about their career and material reward but also presented them with categorical choices about their identity. Training became a form of continuous audition. For the individual, hierarchy made long-term career planning possible, especially in a successful, growing company. Astute, ambitious individuals recognised that training events were one of the main ways in which Motorola ‘trawled for

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talent.’ Training provided a platform for individuals to display themselves and their capacity for further personal development in order to develop a broader range of managers. Day-to-day competence, by contrast, could impress only the individual’s direct supervisor and even then on a much more restricted range of competencies. Motorola increasingly used training as a controlled environment in which to deepen the socialisation of ‘Motorolans.’ For example, particularly in the late 1980s, the corporation stressed Six Sigma quality levels as necessary to meet Japanese competition: practical improvement became part of every individual’s annual appraisal. ‘Quality product, quality people, quality this that and the other. Your behaviour had to conform, without being told. Before you knew it people had become Motorolans.’72 There was no need for overt culture training. ‘It was not an alien environment: easy, relaxed, but you knew where all the lines were, what the boundaries were. You could call your manager “John”, but you were well aware that he was still your manager.’ One 20-year Motorola manufacturing veteran reflected: I was a Motorolan, I am a Motorolan. I’m not embarrassed to say that, others might be. Motorola brought out the best in me, allowed me to find the best me. Sure, I learnt a lot technically but I didn’t need to leave the real me at the front gate like I would have in other companies. No: Motorola wanted you to be a whole person when you were at work. In fact, it made me a better person because I learnt so much about myself, how to project myself, how to manage myself. Yes [laughs], I was a Motorolan.73 Asked why he accepted being a Motorolan when others rejected such a close identification with the corporation, he replied that, for him, ‘it was more than a corporation’: I didn’t have an ‘M’ stamped right through me. It was never about blind loyalty. [Motorola] was a badge that I chose to wear. [pause] Actually, it wasn’t a badge: it was much more than that, it was more that I saw myself in the organisation’s values. I wanted to be a Motorolan. I wanted to be known as a Motorolan. I am a Motorolan.74 MANAGERS OF CONTENTMENT HR report directly to corporate. While we work with local manufacturing management we never work for them. The biggest part of my job was managing contentment.75 The deep global recession that struck the semiconductor industry in 1985– 86 introduced a new dynamic into the management and organisation of

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Motorola East Kilbride. The pressure to maintain margins triggered the recruitment of a new group of manufacturing managers from Texas Instruments, a corporation organised around tough confrontational management and tight numerical control over production. This impacted on HR in two ways. First, it accelerated the slow drift to measuring the soft dimensions of organisation. Culture quickly became something that was measured and managed daily, rather than the subject of abstract discussions. This was understood as an extension of the detailed process measurements that were part of the everyday life of the plant, an extension, moreover, that had a natural credibility. We opened the books. Numbers for everything, from the task to the department to the factory. People were comfortable using numbers to make their argument: they were their numbers. Most of our process measures had been developed or refined by our own people.76 Motorola’s open-door management style and direct-dealing philosophy was deepened by this experience. Practices were not derived from a fully formed corporate philosophy so much as Motorola’s knowledge of empowerment played catchup with developments in factories like East Kilbride. The employee relations function formalised how it monitored and managed the dense lattice work of communications that had been established from the early 1980s. Annual ‘state of the nation’ meetings were attended by the entire workforce. These were primarily to review the plant’s competitive position and prospects. Technical, logistical, and coordinative issues were dealt with by departmental meetings. People issues were the primary issue of monthly ‘slice meetings,’ which were convened and chaired by the Employee Relations function, although the agenda was set by the invitees. As one Employee Relations specialist put it, we were a talking shop; but we were always talking about performance. Managers, supervisors, production workers, any conversation was never just talking. Managers were always listening out for problems, always listening for any small ways behaviour did not match up to the words. There was even training sessions about active listening. The values weren’t just words, airy-fairy, but part of our everyday vocabulary. . . . Even where those values were unspoken they were always there. Everyone could see—feel—the direct correlation between words and values, words and actions. . . . The problem was those managers who thought the values were propaganda. Then the values became words, just words. Of course, everyone could smell a phoney.77 In a factory that relied heavily on face-to-face communication, this meant that ‘values’ management—as well as multilateral scrutiny of an individual’s sincerity—was an inescapable part of everyday life. Management by talking

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was an endless, demanding process requiring subtle interpretation and persuasion. Perhaps the most important check on the effectiveness of production management and corporate communication was the three-person Employee Relations team daily routine of checking that there were no ‘niggles’ on the shop floor: ‘we were anticipating problems all the time. It was always about the hot spots.’ There was no formal recording of these daily interventions, no detailed analysis of the nature of the problems or of the complainants. Immediacy and visible managerial responsiveness took priority over sophisticated analysis. Finally, there was a factory-wide Employee Committee composed of 20 representatives nominated by their department. This committee could barely be counted as a form of collective representation and never considered or generated controversy. Factory management met every Friday afternoon, and HR issues were prioritised: ‘this kept [manufacturing] managers on their toes: employee satisfaction was part of their bonus plan.’78 In Motorola East Kilbride, the recession in semiconductors triggered the arrival of senior production management from Texas Instruments, a company with a reputation for tight control over manufacturing efficiencies. This had a double impact on factory governance. First, the structural tension between manufacturing and HR provided space for the latter to reimagine their role as both sustaining and protecting the corporate culture: ‘our role was to protect the values’ against TI’s ‘kick-ass, take names’ mentality. HR’s job was to bring hope to the organisation. Now we knew that this was a tough sector. HR had to be about big words: hope, decency, trust, respect. My role was a business partner and also independent. I never ended up in the General Manager’s pocket. Because if you’re in your General Manager’s pocket you lose all your independence: you’re just a nasty apparatchik, part of the whole ‘get the stuff out the door culture’. We had to live that independence passionately.79 Second, the incoming TI management’s notion of discipline through confrontation was far removed from Motorola’s ‘quiet supervision.’ The General Manager would tour the factory in readiness for the management meeting: ‘Every Friday morning he would have captain’s rounds, take polaroids [sic], saying nothing, no facial expression. At the afternoon meeting there would be public floggings.’ It wasn’t easy, simple or comfortable. There was an edge to our people initiatives. Maybe we didn’t really understand how to balance performance and commitment. They [incoming TI production managers] felt that we were asking them to hold back and meet world class targets. Now, commitment and performance wasn’t [sic] enough, it was about how you built commitment, how you achieved performance.80

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For HR management, this exposure to strident demands for a step change in performance meant that they no longer ‘had to keep people happy at all costs.’ This was a dilemma for an HR function that was structurally distinct from production management. HR was always a corporate function that reported directly to Motorola’s Chicago headquarters. HR defined its role as the custodian of the corporation’s cultural values. A factory-wide performance management process—linked to salary and bonuses—had been installed in 1983, but this had generated additional labour costs with no productivity improvement. From 1985, however, performance management was refined with tighter measures of quality, yield, and behaviour and ratings inside a department now based on a bell curve distribution. Managers were forced to distinguish between their staff and identify high performers for additional salary and training. Similarly, the intensified statistical scrutiny of manufacturing required HR to justify the impact of ‘soft’ processes in numerical terms: ‘It was unbelievable. We measured everything. We had training about how to talk to each other; we measured how we talked to each other; we measured how others spoke to us; we measured how we felt about ourselves.’81 Motorola did not develop any factory-wide—far less corporate-wide— analytical tools to measure the depth and impact of the corporation’s values on performance. In a sense, this reflected a fundamental assumption that the relationship between the individual and the organisation should be direct and unmediated. At the factory level, the only measure was the individual performance appraisal that was tied to salary and bonus. This was a robust, discriminating process. Individual or task productivity was not measured. Productivity was measured by function or process. Function, group, or departmental performance targets formed the majority of any individual’s appraisal, up to 60% of their annual ‘score.’ The balance reflected an individual’s behaviour. In turn, this increased the importance and take-up of soft skills training. The results of individual appraisal scores were aggregated across the factory and over time. This meant that departmental scores were subject to central oversight and statistical normalisation. Anomalies, performance dips, or sustained improvements were highlighted and analysed, forming the basis of individual feedback. Whatever the limits of this process in terms of analytical sophistication, the appraisal process had significant organisational impacts. ‘Everyone knew that culture and values mattered; everyone knew that this was part of performance appraisal; everyone knew that behaviours were being assessed all the time’ in terms of cultural congruence. We squared the circle by giving manufacturing managers cultural targets. You’d better believe it: when you link cultural targets to individual performance and reward, you change behaviours. Manufacturing managers were bought into the culture, you might say.82

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CONCLUSION The experience of Motorola East Kilbride was an important part of managerial thinking about the New Easter Inch facility. All American companies, especially microelectronics manufacturers, treated labour recruitment as a strategic issue. Until the 1980s, the emphasis had been on recruiting young, female workers to perform highly routinised tasks. The presumption was that task simplification was both the most effective method of minimising any damage caused by high labour turnover. For Motorola East Kilbride, female workers proved to be long-term employees rather than ‘birds of passage.’ The first lesson drawn was that controlling recruitment was vital but that crude social demographics had to be replaced by more sophisticated psychological categories. Second, hiring a ‘local’ labour force could prove to be double-edged sword. On the one hand, the East Kilbride plant’s experience was that local—and family—hiring produced a stable, disciplined workforce. On the other hand, plant and location became tied together and could generate patterns of association and loyalty that were distinct, different, or opposed to Motorola. Quite simply, with the Easter Inch plant, Motorola no longer wanted to assume the responsibilities of a corporate paternalist. Third, as the experience of many American multinationals had demonstrated and as the contrast between the East Kilbride plant’s two labour processes had confirmed, task and technology could not be relied upon to discipline a workforce. Fourth, while training was an essential vehicle for introducing technical change, it provided a highly controlled environment for management to confirm corporate culture. Fifth, the East Kilbride plant’s experience confirmed management’s view not only that the deep socialisation of employees was possible but also that it had significant benefits: inside the closed, secure, relatively well paid world of Motorola, culture management left no space in which unionisation could emerge. Over a decade, Motorola developed a more or less coherent assemblage of practices that was in search of a philosophy. Local practice paralleled and, in some ways, preceded the articulation of a corporate ‘values’ philosophy. It is difficult to argue that this was a strategy derived from favourable product market conditions. At most, one could say that excess demand and fat margins sustained or expanded a set of personnel and production practices that were as much local as they were corporate. As we shall see in the next chapter, the design of the social organisation of the factory of the future also involved significant breaks with the experience of Motorola East Kilbride. NOTES 1. John Dunning, American Investment in British Manufacturing (London: Allen & Unwin, 1958), 58; Peter Dicken and Peter Lloyd, ‘Geographical Perspectives

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

on United States Investment in the United Kingdom,’ Environment & Planning A, 8 (1976): 697. Raymond Miskell, US Private and Government Investment Abroad (Portland: University of Oregon Press, 1962). Yao-Su Hu, The Impact of US Investment in Europe: A Case Study of the Automotive and Computer Industry (New York: Praeger, 1973), 273. Scottish Council for Development and Industry, Opportunities for Industrial Development in Scotland (Edinburgh: Scottish Council, 1975), 3. Ministry of Labour, Monthly Report, June 1958, National Archives, London, LAB10/549. Donald Mackay, David Boddy, David Brack, John Diack, and Norman Jones, Labour Markets Under Different Employment Conditions (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), 113, 405. ‘Glenrothes,’ 2 December 1983, Glenrothes Development Corporation, file 50306; Glenrothes Development Corporation, Annual Report, 1964, 128. Interview, Female Assembler, 24 October 1994, Dundee, McManus Museum, DM.OR.47. Interview, Ingrid Welsh and Sheena Webster, 11 October 1994, Dundee, McManus Museum, DM.OR.48. Interview, Female Subassembler, 24 October 1994, Dundee McManus Museum, T/94/D17.OR.46. Andrew Hargrave, Silicon Glen: Reality or Illusion? A Global View of High Technology in Scotland (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1985), 112. William W. Knox and Alan McKinlay, ‘Working for the Yankee Dollar: American Inward Investment and Scottish Labour, 1945–70,’ Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 7 (1999): 1–26; William W. Knox and Alan McKinlay, ‘ “Organizing the Unorganized”: Union Recruitment Strategies in American Transnationals, c. 1945–1977,’ in Union Organizing: Campaigning for Trade Union Recognition, ed. Gregor Gall (London: Routledge, 2003), 19–38. Nancy Foy, The IBM World (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), 112–14. Tony Dickson, Hugh McLachlan, Peter Prior, and Ken Swales, ‘Big Blue and the Unions: IBM, Individualism and Trade Union Strategies,’ Work, Employment and Society 2 (1988): 519–20. Bill Lever, ‘From Ships to Chips in Greenock-Port Glasgow,’ in Global Restructuring, Industrial Change and Local Adjustment, ed. Phillip Cooke (Swindon: ESRC, 1986), 198. Edmond Sciberras, ‘The UK Semiconductor Industry,’ in Technological Innovation and British Economic Performance, ed. Keith Pavitt (London: Macmillan, 1980), 289. Allen Scott and David Angel, ‘The Global Assembly-Operations of US Semiconductor Firms: A Geographical Analysis,’ Environment and Planning A 20 (1988): 1055. Franco Malerba, The Semiconductor Business: The Economics of Rapid Growth and Decline (London: Frances Pinter, 1985), 35, 108. Michael McDermott, ‘Multinational Manufacturing and Regional Development: External Control in the Scottish Electronics Industry,’ Scottish Journal of Political Economy 26 (1979): 289–92. Sunday Times, 26 January 1969; The Times, 18 April 1969. Alan Peters, ‘Women, Skills and Divisions of Labour in the Scottish Electronics Industry,’ European Planning Studies 1 (1993): 519, 523. Jeffrey Henderson, The Globalisation of High Technology Production: Society, Space and Semiconductors in the Restructuring of the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1989), 127–30.

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23. Richard Pearson and Alan Gordon, Key Skills and the UK Semi-Conductor Industry (London: Institute of Manpower Studies, 1983), 11. 24. Harriet Bradley, Men’s Work, Women’s Work: A Sociological History of the Sexual Division of Labour in Employment (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 168– 9; Miriam Glucksmann, Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Inter-War Britain (London: Routledge, 1990), 61–2. 25. Veronica Beechey and Tess Perkins, A Matter of Hours: Women and Part-Time Work and the Labour Market (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 15, 32–3. 26. Nance Goldstein, ‘Silicon Glen: Women and Semiconductor Multinationals,’ in Women’s Employment and Multinationals in Europe, ed. Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989), 120–1. 27. Joanna Foord, ‘Conflicting Lives: Women’s Work in Planned Communities,’ PhD diss., University of Kent, 1990, 408. 28. Interview, Assembly Worker, November 11, 2010. 29. Foord, ‘Conflicting Lives,’ 393. 30. Interview, Inspection Worker, June 2010. 31. Scottish Enterprise, US Corporate Excellence in Scotland: The Attitudes and Experience of Executives and Managers in Scottish Based US Plants (Glasgow: Scottish Enterprise, 1990), 17. 32. Peter Cressey, John Eldridge, and John MacInness, Just Managing: Authority and Democracy in Industry (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1985), 38. 33. Scottish Development Agency, Labor Performance of US Plants in Scotland (Edinburgh: SDA, 1984), 20. 34. Booz Allen & Hamiton, The Electronics Industry in Scotland: A Proposed Strategy (Glasgow: Scottish Development Agency), 31. 35. Interview, Final Assembly Worker, October 2010. 36. Interview, Employment Relations Manager, November 2008. 37. Interview, Development Engineer, September 2010. 38. G. McDonald, ‘Social and Geographical Mobility in the Scottish New Towns,’ Scottish Geographical Magazine 91 (1975): 46–7. 39. McDonald, ‘Mobility,’ 47. 40. Kevin Morgan and Andrew Sayer, Microcircuits of Capital: ‘Sunrise’ Industry and Uneven Development (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 173. 41. Interview, Engineering Manager, November 2010. 42. Neil Hood, Steven Young, and James Hamill. East Kilbride Labour Study (East Kilbride: East Kilbride Development Corporation, 1982), 48–51. 43. East Kilbride Development Corporation. East Kilbride: A Labour Study (East Kilbride: East Kilbride Development Corporation, 1986), 198. 44. Irene Bruegel, ‘Women as the Reserve Army of Labour: A Note on Recent British Experience,’ Feminist Review 3 (1979): 12–14. 45. Gordon Cameron, James McCallum, and Gordon Adams, An Economic Study Conducted for the East Kilbride Development Corporation (London: Coopers & Lybrand, 1979), 25–6. 46. Alan Peters, ‘Industrial Location and the Electronics Industry in Scotland,’ PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1990, 15. 47. Ray Wild and A. Hill, Women in the Factory: A Study of Job Satisfaction and Labour Turnover (London: Institute of Personnel Development, 1970), 35, 40–3. 48. Interview, Clean Room Supervisor, June 2009. 49. Malerba, Semiconductor Business, 18; Sciberras, ‘UK Semiconductor,’ 114–15. 50. Joseph Grunwald and Kenneth Flamm, The Global Factory: Foreign Assembly in International Trade (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1985), 51.

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Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization 51. Luc Soete and Giovanni Dosi, Technology and Employment in the Electronics Industry (London: Frances Pinter, 1983), 51–2, 62–3. 52. Electronic Times, May 1974, 4–6. 53. Jan Mazurek, Making Microchips: Policy, Globalization and Economic Restructuring in the Semiconductor Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 48–53. 54. Interview, Wafer Fab Supervisor, June 2009. 55. Interview, Production Worker, October 2010. 56. Interview, Production Worker, November 2010. 57. Interview, Fabrication Worker, 11 November 2010. 58. Interview, Fabrication Worker, 7 November 2010. 59. John Keller, ‘The Production Worker in Electronics: Industrialisation and Labor Development in California’s Santa Clara Valley,’ PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1981, 82–97. 60. Interview, Employment Relations Manager, January 2010. 61. Interview, Assembly Worker, September 2009. 62. Interview, Assembly Worker, October 2009. 63. Scottish Development Agency, Labor Performance, 21. 64. Interview, Clean Room Supervisor, September 2010. 65. Interview, HR Director, October 2009. 66. Interview, Employment Relations Manager, January 2010. 67. Interview, HR Director, October 2009. 68. Interview, Development Engineer, November 2009. 69. Nance Goldstein, ‘Gender and the Restructuring of High-Tech Multinational Corporations: New Twists to an Old Story,’ Cambridge Journal of Economics 16 (1992): 269–84. 70. Interview, Process Development Engineer, 2010. 71. Interview, Personnel Manager, November 2008. 72. Interview, Technical Sales Manager, March 2009. 73. Interview, Production Manager, March 2010. 74. Interview, Employment Relations Manager, January 2010. 75. Interview, Employment Relations Manager, January 2010. 76. Interview, HR Director, October 2009. 77. Interview, Employment Relations Manager, January 2010. 78. Interview, HR Director, October 2009. 79. Interview, Employment Relations Manager, January 2010. 80. Interview, Quality Manager, September 2009. 81. Interview, HR Director, October 2009. 82. Interview, Compensation Manager, October 2002.

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INTRODUCTION The design of the factory of the future was informed by three elements: market assumptions, individual experiences, and Motorola’s corporate philosophy. It is impossible—and futile—to ascribe which of these three elements had priority: all were necessary to the design process. Competitive strategy was based on assumptions about the long-run development of a nascent mass market for mobile telephones which, in turn, was predicated upon Motorola’s experience of semiconductors and consumer durables markets. Bound up with these experiences was the development of a distinctive Motorola corporate philosophy. There was no causal chain that meant that market experience caused strategy, which then produced a corporate philosophy. There was no cause and effect in this process but rather complex relations of entailment. The strategy and philosophy made sense only when considered together. The moment of innovation was when the new Easter Inch management team was asked to design the new factory, adding their own personal and collective experience to the process. The first section considers Motorola’s corporate strategy and philosophy. Motorola’s corporate philosophy developed from a seed bed of welfare paternalism, common among mid-twentieth century American corporations.1 Motorola consistently defined respect for the individual, transparency, and trust as the hallmarks of their corporate philosophy. This was a permissive philosophy that was sufficiently broad to allow great diversity in local practices. We then turn to the design process for the factory of the future. The design team of the factory of the future drew on Motorola’s philosophy, but that did not limit their autonomy. There were no guides as to how the corporation’s philosophy should be translated into practice. Nor was there a corporate blueprint for the organisation of the new plant. Further, Motorola’s corporate structure allowed considerable operational autonomy. Finally, we sketch the recruitment and socialisation of the first recruits for production work. Recruitment was understood as vital to the success of the factory of the future, the moment when management had maximum control over the plant’s culture.

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A CORPORATE PHILOSOPHY? From 1980, Motorola pursued a rapid and thoroughgoing Japanisation of its competitive strategy and corporate structure. For 50 years, Motorola had been a highly centralised corporation, content to emulate rather than innovate and reliant upon low-cost manufacturing for competitive advantage. A series of humiliating reversals at the hands of Japanese manufacturers in core American markets in the second half of the 1970s forced a fundamental reappraisal of its organisational capabilities.2 A strategy of continuous product innovation through mass customisation was paralleled by moves toward a networked organisational structure in which control over strategic decisions was gradually dispersed throughout the global corporation. The Chicago headquarters retained control over fundamental R&D activities and strict oversight of personnel policies: operational decisions were devolved to regional executives and factory management. Corporate control was maintained through tight financial management: targets, such as market shares in specific niches, and production markers, such as the rate of efficiency and quality improvement. Based on their experience in the semiconductor industry, Motorola executives anticipated that the product life cycle for cellular phones would be short, characterised by steep rises in production volumes and equally rapid declines. The corollary of explosive growth and obsolescence profiles was dramatic price falls through successive product generations. Again, like semiconductors, no company could draw exceptional profits for any prolonged period from first-mover advantage. Any technological lead was certain to be nullified quickly in an industry prone to rapid convergence in product specifications. One result of these market characteristics was that all the players were exposed to extreme time pressures, both in product development and in reshaping production systems. This was a demanding global marketplace that compelled constant, radical product and process innovation The understanding of the inevitability of disintegrating mass markets was central to Motorola’s corporate strategy. The new Motorola phone factory was shaped by this corporate strategy, but equally important was the corporation’s stress on the importance of values as the determinant of all decisions. Motorola was not alone in the development of a philosophy of a values-driven organisation. Motorola was preeminent among the corporations seeking not just to restructure their operations but also to remake the very nature of business. Indeed, Motorola was one of the touchstones of this movement. Part of the difficulty was the ease with which such corporate philosophies can be dismissed as mere vanities or as an ideological smokescreen or as such an elevated set of standards that any institution or manager would fail more or less miserably, more or less immediately. The critic’s task could not be easier: simply demonstrate how managers fall short of these lofty corporate ideals. A governmentalist reading, on the other hand, would

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have us read these texts as the commonsense of corporate management, serious texts with a serious purpose and treated with something approaching reverence by their intended audiences. Governmentalism suggests that the so-called secrets of contemporary management are hidden in plain sight. Chris Galvin’s ascension to CEO in 1982 marked the adoption of a corporate restructuring based on transforming Motorola into ‘a decentralised, adaptive, self-organising network of functions, products, and diverse markets. The route to this transformation was bottom-up.3 Galvin was central to the development and popularisation of what became known as the ‘values-driven organization,’ not just in Motorola but across American corporations. Galvin does not offer an apologia for power or the institutional responsibilities of corporations. Rather, he provided a sense of how power should be lived. Certainly, other Motorola executives looked to the Galvin family as a ‘role model’ not just for business but for life in general.4 Galvin was, however, careful to signal that his aim was much more modest: to anthologise something of his long personal experience as a corporate officer for Motorola. Stylistically, this meant that his language was to be personal, direct, and uncomplicated. This was a cue for corporate managers: communicate through the personal and experiential, never the abstract. This was the way to communicate and legitimise such a corporate philosophy. Intellectually, his disavowal of the systematic meant that he was not developing some overarching philosophy but rather a practical guide for life and for improved corporate performance. These final two terms—‘personal life’ and ‘corporate performance’—were understood as necessarily linked, that is, improving the individual was the essential precondition to improving corporate performance. Any organisation seeking to achieve a step-change in performance and sustainable competitiveness should forget restructuring or cost-cutting programmes and start the much longer-term project of engaging the individual. Motorola executives were acutely aware that, of necessity, empowerment comes from below and cannot be willed from above.5 Ethics trumps economics every time; that is, Motorola values were not to be discounted, either to make a profit or to avoid a loss. Indeed, business decisions were taken only if all ethical issues had been cleared. We shall have more to say about the theory and practice of empowerment in the next chapter. Empowerment was a central concept in Galvin’s Motorola. Empowerment without values was licence. Empowerment with values provided the space for personal development but with a demanding and continuous selfand collective discipline. Motorola ‘must,’ as Chris Galvin put it, ‘be valuedriven rather than compliance-driven.’6 The onus was placed not just on self-surveillance; managers were aware that their ‘values’ performance was as important as output. This was both a massively ambitious project but also one that promised to reduce corporate monitoring costs almost to zero. Galvin recognised that risks were associated with this emphasis on values, which promised to liberate the individual while increasing levels

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of commitment, efficiency, and competitiveness. For Galvin, leadership abounded with irresolvable paradoxes. The most demanding paradox was that between the limits of the leader as an individual and the reach of her or his influence. He and she can spread hope, lend courage, kindle confidence, impart knowledge, give heart, instil spirit, elevate standards, display vision, set direction, and call for action today and each tomorrow. The frequency with which one can perform these leadership functions seems without measure. His and her effectiveness and personal resources, rather than attenuating with use, amplify as he and she reuse and extend the skills. Like the tree whose shadow falls where the tree is not, the consequences of the leader’s act radiates beyond the fondest perception. Again we see the paradox of the leader—a finite person with an apparent infinite influence.7 Here Galvin is suggesting that leadership and empowerment were both a more realistic and more efficient form of discipline: realistic in that it acknowledged that the leader’s decisions and actions inevitably reach far beyond their specific target, and efficient in that the judicious use of the dynamics of leadership and followership can massively reduce the need for the standard operating procedures to ensure compliance. Again, Galvin made no attempt to justify through philosophical first principles, preferring to draw his authority from his own experience, particularly the sense that his father, Motorola founder Paul, extended him considerable autonomy bounded by an unseen paternal care.8 This freedom, Bob Galvin reflected, constituted an exacting discipline: ‘my father treated me to the most demanding discipline. He trusted me! This is the highest respect that one person can give to another. It is the most demanding motivator. One does not dare let the other person down. . . . Trust is a power.’9 None of this was de novo. An important part of its appeal was that is was consistent with the paternalism practised by the Galvin family from the 1930s. Andy Affrunti, a corporate executive who played an important role in Motorola’s move to compete on the basis of zero defects, recalled that just as he relied on 14 Motorola blood donors for his wife’s survival, so he was ‘happy to be picked’ as one of the ‘many Motorolans’ to donate over 200 pints of blood for the desperately ill Paul Galvin in 1959: ‘when Paul Galvin died it was a sad day for my whole family. He was the man I called my “second father”, after all. His death was a blow.’10 For Galvin, the ‘technology’ of leadership involved maintaining consistency in every day-to-day interaction, large or small. The symbolism of every moment had the potential to reinforce or damage any explicit corporate message. Of course, the symbolic importance of conversation has been long understood by corporate management. The difference with Galvin was that this was raised from being a subtext of management to a central, perhaps

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definitive, theme. Leadership was, for Galvin, most tangible in intimate settings but became most important when projected to the most distant of settings. Leadership had, then, a global reach, a potency and immediacy that made it immeasurably more efficient—if riskier—than bureaucratic control.11 In a survey of the contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment to the founding of the American republic, Bob Galvin reflected on the meaning, aims, and limits of government. From the Greeks, Galvin argues, the American Founding Fathers took the key principle of governance that ‘the chief goal of government was the excellence of people,’ the pursuit of ‘what human beings could become.’12 Government tempered this ambition with institutional checks and balances and a belief in the pursuit of self-interest. The final and perhaps best known element of Motorola’s corporate philosophy was its emphasis on total quality management. Motorola’s first, tentative turn to quality management emerged between 1979 and 1982, when it appointed its first corporate executive dedicated to improving quality. This shift in executive functions was followed by the adoption of Joseph Juran’s ideas of statistical quality control and, more importantly, the aspiration of engineering a series of step-changes in quality performance across the corporation through bottom-up engagement.13 Juran’s dual focus on rigorous measurement and engaging the shop floor reflected his own professional starting point as a Taylorist industrial engineer in Western Electric’s famous Hawthorne Works. As we saw in Chapter 2, Motorola’s redefinition of product quality was initially a response to new quality standards set by Japanese corporations. By the late 1980s, this was expressed as the Six Sigma process in Motorola, a coherent system of statistical process control that reached into every aspect of the business.14 Six Sigma was a defect rate of better than 99.99966% flaw-free. In Motorola, 3.4 million defects per million opportunities moved from being a specifically manufacturing metric to something akin to ‘a mature organisation-wide philosophy that exposed everybody and every process to measurement based strategies for process improvement. Even the ‘soft’ stuff of the organisation was measured. Motorola moved to ‘metrics for everything: management by empirics.’15 By the mid-1980s, Six Sigma had been institutionalised in Motorola’s central training function, later Motorola University, and had been extended from manufacturing to all business functions and processes. Common measures of quality improvement were also extended across the corporation. Rates of quality improvement, then, could be measured and compared not just in terms of specific processes but as a universal corporate metric. Quality, in turn, was integrated into Motorola’s corporate philosophy. Indeed, quality was how Motorola sought to close the gap between the Galvin’s values aspirations and the individual employee. At Motorola, the quality control process was much more than a neutral, technical process. Rather, quality discursively and procedurally constructed the employee as an active agent and set limits to that engagement. Bob Galvin became the leading voice in corporate America’s shift to total quality management as critical to

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restoring competitiveness. Whereas quality control had long been a corporate function, now it had to become personal. We have operated very substantially under the rubric of quality control. Our institutions, our companies have had quality departments. And the old testament was that quality is a company, a department, and an institutional responsibility. The new truth is radically different. Quality is a very personal obligation. If you can’t talk about quality in the first person . . . then you have not moved to the level of involvement of quality that is absolutely essential. . . . You must be a believer that quality is a very personal responsibility.16 Motorola was developing the technologies that translated programmes of government into everyday practices. The connection between the individual, the corporation, and competitiveness was in the innumerable short-life project teams formed—and dissolved—across Motorola plants.17 This process of embedding innovation through grassroots project teams was deployed extensively from the mid-1980s and covered all aspects of Motorola’s operations, not just quality.18 The diffusion of Six Sigma triggered a proliferation of quality project teams. However, although the language of teams emerged in the mid-1980s, teams were not the basic organisational unit. Bob Galvin gained huge publicity by adopting the habit of walking out of meetings about a business unit’s performance once the quality figures had been discussed. His action was intended to confirm what his key concern was and so what the organisation’s should be.19 Again, Galvin was using his leadership and his very public actions not just as a way of underscoring corporate priorities but also to project the style of leadership expected across Motorola. Galvin quickly became something of an evangelist for the values-driven organisation. Inevitably, Galvin was forced to consider a wider range of conceptual issues, notably about the nature of power, authority, and, above all, leadership. This opened up the intellectual, experiential, and practical space for developing the individual as a leader, not as a manager. Inside Motorola, Galvin articulated and embodied a language of leadership management that was to be emulated throughout the organisation. Power was not finite, nor a stock, and certainly not a zero-sum game. Rather power is relational, useful, and expansive. Sharing authority did not diminish the leader’s power but increased its reach while also diminishing passive resistance. Most managers think about power too narrowly. To them, power is the control that comes from formal authority associated with position: the power to give orders to subordinates and know that their orders will be followed. This power is, in fact, in increasingly short supply. In today’s environment, that kind of license is not likely to expand since it presumes a static world in which leaders know all problems

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in advance and their expertise perfectly matches their organizational position. Even less available is the power of coercion. Managers who long to force compliance are now handcuffed by employee rights and attitude, cultural disapproval, and organizational complexity. The old command-and-control style no longer works.20 There was less than subtle subtext running through management literature of this type. To follow its advice was to be in the vanguard of management thinking and practice; to ignore this advice was to be stuck with an outmoded and irrelevant notion of power. For Bill Isaacs, an influential consultant among Motorola’s corporate executives, this new language of so-called soft power aspired to free the individual, the workgroup, and the organisation. Again, like much of this genre of management writing, this stemmed from a deep dissatisfaction with the language of structure and control, coupled with an acute awareness that notions of culture management had not delivered. Indeed, the shortfalls of culture management had opened Motorola executives to deeper explorations of the language and meanings of everyday interactions. The promise was that, ‘by becoming more conscious of the architecture of the invisible atmosphere in our conversations, we may have profound effects on our worlds.’21 The process was as fragile as it was subtle. The executive was someone not just of foresight and enterprise but also highly reflexive and sensitive. Positively, contemporary switched-on managers recognised the limitations of formal power and sought ways to utilise their authority to mobilise the power and ingenuity of their peers and subordinates. Nor dare astute managers slip into manipulation because this would soon be discovered and rebound on them. The manager/leader must embody virtues that elicit willing participation far beyond compliance. For Bob Galvin: The focus shifts from deciding and directing to creating and monitoring an evocative situation, stimulating an atmosphere of objective participation, keeping the goal in sight, recognising valid concerns, inviting unequivocal recommendation, and finally vesting increasingly in others the privilege to learn through their own decisions.22 The leader must abandon driving behaviour in favour of restraint, integrity, and openness. Indeed, performance—whether efficiency, quality, or competitiveness—becomes a by-product of values. Process and values, not performance, become the key objectives. This was power that spoke softly and in humble terms. This was power that acknowledged—indeed, revelled—in its awareness of the knowledge of others, of the power vested in subalterns. Inside Motorola, Galvin’s practice of ‘walking the halls,’ of listening to the employees, achieved legendary status. But this was a legend that set the expectations of how all Motorola managers were to behave. Galvin paid particular attention to middle managers as the brokers of corporate philosophy

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and the implementers of executive decisions. By 1983, ‘middle management’ had become a large constituency, with an average span of control of five people or fewer.23 By targeting this constituency as critical to major organisational change, Galvin sought to enlist, rather than attack, ‘middle management’ as a major resource, a way of making and disseminating innovation rapidly while provoking minimum resistance. Peter Senge, the guru of the ‘learning organisation,’ argued that Galvin pioneered a new form of corporate leadership: the ‘servant-leader.’24 In other words, the conventional models of corporate strategy, structure, and change remained top-down in that support for organisational innovation was enlisted after the objectives and often the implementation campaign had been decided. The conventional leader, then, was active, and the organisation, if not passive, was defined as a problem to be solved. The servant-leader, such as Galvin, conversely, blurred the distinction between the active subject—the executive— and the object—the organisation. For Galvin, ‘My job is to listen to what the organisation is trying to say, and then make sure that it gets forcefully articulated.’ Note that there were no intermediate institutions or voice mechanisms to intrude between the servant-leader and the organisation. This was not, then, some pluralist notion of representative democracy. Everything hinged on the servant-leader’s willingness to listen and respond to the organisation in an unmediated way. Equally, the servant-leader’s capacity to hear, empathise, articulate, and activate the organisation’s concerns was critical to his or her legitimacy. Only deep continuity, an immersion in the organisation, and the instinctive personification of a shared culture will preserve the servant-leader’s authority. This was a generative, dialogic form of authority that was channelled through an individual only to the extent that she or he exemplified the organisation’s values. Again, this was represented as an enormously powerful and efficient way of leading a large organisation, yet the implication is that it was also one that is inherently fragile. Did Motorola articulate a corporate philosophy? Motorola’s philosophy had, at best, a structure that deployed broad terms with little or no internal logic. This mattered little for most Motorolans; it simply provided a broad framework in which concepts were evaluated in terms of individual behaviours and collective experience. Daily routines, not conceptual rigour, was the acid test for such a corporate philosophy. There was certainly an endless appetite for discussions of values, their importance for the individual and the organisation, their representation, and as a lived experience. For Motorolans, indeed, Galvin provided a language of the good corporate life. This was not just an aspirational language but spoke to the lived realities of managers and managed, leaders, and led at Motorola. One can question the coherence of Motorola’s corporate philosophy, but not its importance as the touchstone of managerial thinking and action. Importantly, the task for operational management was not to follow corporate blueprints for performance management or work organisation. Rather, operational management had free rein to imagine—or alter—tasks and work organisation so long as their decisions and behaviours

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remained consistent with Motorola values. Practices were not determined by corporate headquarters. Rather, there was a dialogue, often implicit or even imagined, between local management and corporate executives and the corporation’s philosophy; local innovations involved ‘a bit of shrewd guesswork,’ and ‘the interpretation of corporate cues’; it was ‘almost subliminal.’ We knew the philosophy and we knew the East Kilbride realities: our job was to move between the two, be shrewd, always try to use your imagination, be inventive. We were Motorola, a global high-tech corporation, we had to be ingenious. . . . If you had a bright idea there was nobody to stop you trying it out. It was the place to be if you were a bright, young, ambitious man.’25 Motorola’s corporate philosophy was, then, subject to interpretation on the ground: ‘Big words, big values . . . Supervisors, workers, managers all understood what it meant to them, here and now.’ Corporate philosophy was a mesh through which all exchanges and relationships passed: ‘people take it seriously in terms of how it’s lived, not just how it’s spoken about.’ Another HR executive with almost 30 years service in Motorola explained that ‘Motorola values were the fundamental values of a good life. If you lived by those values you became a better person.’26 DESIGNING THE FACTORY OF THE FUTURE The emerging European mobile phone market was serviced by two Motorola plants, Stotfold in Hertfordshire, England, and Flensberg, Germany. Neither site was suitable for expansion: Stotfold was landlocked, and Flensberg’s cost base was regarded as excessive for the fine margins of a mass market. The task of finding the site for the new factory was allocated to two relatively young executives who were given just two weeks to reach their decision. There were no corporate guidelines or oversight. Eire, Portugal, Spain, Wales, and Teesside were all considered and rejected in favour of Bathgate, midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh. All of the potential sites offered accessibility, cheap land, development grants, and low labour rates. The Scottish site was chosen for three reasons; the support of the Scottish Development Agency; the ready availability of a large pool of disciplined and ‘sufficiently educated’ labour; and the endorsement of other American manufacturers based in Scotland.27 Compaq and IBM, in particular, highlighted the fact that a robust, nonunion, direct-dealing environment was sustainable. ‘The demographics made Scotland attractive for a fast growth, low cost, hassle-free plant.’ All of these factors convinced Motorola that Scotland provided a low-cost, adaptable labour force. For the Motorola executives, there was only one small, lingering doubt. The nearest town, Bathgate, had been the site of a failed British Leyland truck plant: ‘We most certainly

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did not want to establish a company town. Quite the opposite: we wanted to disassociate Bathgate from Motorola. Bathgate and British Leyland spelt failure: too many ghosts.’ The exorcism of these ghosts was written into the policies of the new plant. There was to be no corporate sponsorship of any kind for the locality. Most importantly, labour was to be sourced from as wide a geographical spread as possible, local hiring was to be minimised. The design process assumed the form of an extended conversation between a small group of managers—representing the major functions, accounting, HR, operations—and stretching over several months. Again, there were no corporate guidelines to be enacted and little corporate oversight beyond informing Chicago that they were adhering to the project’s timescale. There was no corporate involvement in the design of the Easter Inch plant, nor any deep executive support. The radical organisation design of Easter Inch never had a corporate champion; its future was completely dependent upon meeting production targets set by the Chicago headquarters. Motorola is a very top-down company. They drive you by targets: how many, when. And they can change those targets almost hourly and you have to react. As long as you keep meeting those targets then you’ve got autonomy. If you’re not meeting your targets then Motorola is right down on top of you. I don’t think anybody at the top of the cellular business said these guys are free to do as they see fit.28 For those involved, these ‘weeks of brainstorming’ had ‘the feel of a highspeed philosophy seminar. . . . The debates were abstract and grounded— always. But the abstract was never sacrificed to the practical, or vice-versa.’29 As one relatively junior member of the management team put it: ‘There were a lot of big words flying about—philosophy, dignity, values. But the most important thing wasn’t the words but what it felt like. It was different, we did expect a lot of ourselves and each other, we did show our confidence in ourselves and each other in how we behaved, not just what we said. ‘I was in love with what we were doing.’30 Despite differences of emphasis, the management team was unanimous that the factory had to be designed for high performance and radical innovation: I always got really annoyed when VPs etc saw this as soft, as a social experiment. We genuinely believed we’d deliver on volume and make better quality products etc. It wasn’t ‘soft,’ it wasn’t a ‘social experiment,’ it was very much driven by performance. It was hard-edged; everyone was empowered to make decisions, but everyone was accountable.31 Although there was no corporate blueprint for the new factory, Galvin’s, The Idea of Ideas was something of a touchstone for the management team: ‘We used that as our credo to ask ourselves, “Well, what do we want.” We tried to draw up a kind of cultural blueprint from that’:

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I felt a connectedness to Motorola, especially to Galvin’s The Idea of Ideas. Many of us did. We felt a passion for the corporation and a sense of personal connectedness with the Galvins and their values. That was real, tangible, personal.32 Equally important was the mix of experiences brought by the management from their previous employment in Motorola and other multinationals. For two key members of the small management team charged with establishing the new plant, their personal experience of another Motorola mobile phone factory, Stotfold, was crucial. The Stotfold experience provided a marker of what the new factory should avoid. Stotfold was not an experience upon which to build but rather one to be rejected wholesale. The second Stotfold manager was an HR executive, ‘Mike.’ Mike joined Motorola in 1985 from a background in unionised manufacturing. His decision to leave unionised manufacturing was prompted by his increasing discomfort with the adversarialism of collective bargaining: ‘At the most personal level, I felt incredibly uncomfortable with this continuous confrontation, this adversarial industrial relations, that was structurally, strategically organised to produce conflict. I was looking for something different.’33 Mike was recruited to the Gates Corporation, which was anxious to stave off the threat of unionisation: his task was to secure a nonunion environment. Motorola was one of the companies he benchmarked, and he was surprised to be offered a job there. The Stotfold plant made engine management systems plus firstgeneration cellular phones, initially only in small volumes for the Japanese market. Pay systems and work organisation were radically different in the two areas of the plant. In Stotfold they had whole families in the place. It created all sorts of tensions. Nepotism, favouritism, feuds. Supervisor at work, husband at home: it just didn’t make sense. We decided that we had to keep that whole family dynamic out of the new factory. The Stotfold factory was relatively remote, contributing to high levels of absenteeism and labour turnover. In turn, Motorola responded by hiring temporary labour. The management team concluded that they were locked into a vicious cycle that produced a ‘lack of performance discipline.’ For one member of the management team, however, the inversion of the flaws experienced in Stotfold was taken too far in the organisational design of the new plant: They looked at Stotfold and said, right, these are the things we won’t do and that became dogma. Crazy. Instead of designing for success they started from a position of being completely the opposite of what Stotfold was, including stupid things. That was part of the thing of now having managers because they were unhappy about the structure of

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Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization Stotfold, the job that managers did there. . . . In Stotfold an accident of the factory was there was no room for production lines and technical support close to the line. They were close, but at the other side of a wall. So we had the whole engineering department in an office and the factory was next door. So you had to come out of the office into a yard to get into the factory. This was not a good thing: these guys are supposed to be supporting the line and keeping an eye on it, anticipating problems. But that was an accident of the building. But what they decided was, we’ll have no offices: we’ll just have a factory. That wasn’t the right answer. All of it came from this desire to do the opposite of Stotfold.34

The founding management team began from what they understood to be clear and inescapable commercial imperatives: mobile phones would be commodity products with rapid changes in functionality and design. Building in organisational overheads at the early, luxury stage of the market would be unsustainable when the product was commoditised. This commercial imperative, combined with the unrelenting demands of mass production, meant that the management design team always tempered their ‘philosophical conversations . . . with a healthy dose of hard-headed business sense’: In conventional organisations, manufacturing is a function just like anything else. It often has equal weight. Manufacturing is the core work process. It is the only value-added work process. The only thing that earns Motorola money out there is when somebody takes two components and puts them together. Everything else is overhead: in organisations that is lost sight of. The only person that delivers customer satisfaction is the person who makes the phone, packs it the box or sends the invoice. The rest of us are all here to make sure that happens. Unfortunately, in conventional organisations when manufacturing fails to make its numbers, everyone points the finger at manufacturing. So you have all these people in the grandstand and you only have manufacturing when you are on the pitch actually playing the game. We wanted to fold the organisation inside out. You can’t philosophise those realities away: you have to make your philosophy practical.35 Equally, the new factory had to remain consistent with Motorola values, which, together with their personal experiences, pushed the management team towards team-based organisation. Together, these commercial and cultural imperatives mean that ‘we had to create an extremely shallow organisation to avoid loading infrastructure costs onto manufacturing. We had to create a really productive environment, an environment where people were absolutely engaged, where they could personally grow, and where we could produce high-quality product.’36 The management team concluded that only self-directed teams, entirely without supervisors, could satisfy these

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commercial and cultural imperatives. Reducing overhead was not the only reason for the team model; it had to have ‘a cultural pay-back as well: be true to the organisation, not just sitting on top of power but having to influence it personally, through conversation, rather than just pulling levers.’37 Avoiding management overheads—avoiding ‘the people who walk on carpet’—meant that overheads were not loaded on the plant during the phase of the product life cycle where scarcity meant fat margins that had to be sustained when the product was commoditised. Engineering specialists, for example, were on the floor ‘dealing with things they had to touch and feel, not in endless meetings dealing with abstractions.’38 Eliminating direct supervision not only reduced costs but necessitated short communication lines that would encourage teams to take more operational decisions and encourage organisational responsiveness: ‘Discipline would be personal and inter-personal, nothing to do with structure. We made lots of heroic assumptions . . . that adhering to the values would generate high performance in ways that we couldn’t even begin to imagine. Our job was to let that happen, to channel it perhaps.’39 The balance between articulating high-minded philosophical concepts and imagining the demanding realities of mass customisation found common ground in team-based organisation. Indeed, operational managers had little trouble in accommodating terms drawn from Motorola’s philosophy into practical decisions. ‘Gwyn,’ the plant’s managing director, embodied the new style of manager, but one of his colleagues observed that he ‘wanted to fold the organisation inside out. Now, this is not high-order philosophical thinking. This is high-end operational thinking [pause] with a philosophical skin about teams.’40 The three Motorola executives transferred from Stotfold were joined by a handful of others recruited from Silicon Glen multinationals. Managers recruited from other microelectronic corporations also contributed important experiences. Digital was at the forefront of the corporate revolt against Taylorism and provided important insights into teamworking. Positively, teams could not only deliver efficient volume production but could also cope with rapid shifts in product range and steep increases in volume. Negatively, Digital’s introduction of teams involved an incomplete transition from traditional supervisors, albeit renamed team leaders. The Digital experience was that the very existence of line management and supervision cut across team ‘voice’ and innovation. So, although Digital supervisors were, at least in principle, answerable to teams for their decisions, this was a dialogue that confirmed the primacy of the supervisor.41 Supervisors, even when renamed as team leaders, were to be avoided in Easter Inch because they constructed a barrier to communication and inevitably compromised the promise of teamworking. For a key manager recruited from Digital, its strength was the ‘strong humanist’ philosophy that it shared with Motorola. But the actual culture was quite different. Digital was a somewhat intellectual, engineering-oriented, very much into consensus ‘democracy’

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Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization almost to the point where any one person could stop anything. It was extremely consensus-driven. It had a low propensity to take action. My disposition was ‘let’s get in motion; let’s learn by doing stuff rather than think about it, debate, find consensus.’ The Digital emphasis was always design and agreement. Quite different from Motorola. I would try to bring information, get in motion, let’s try something and see what comes out. Motorola was very different: the propensity for action was very high.42

For this ex-Digital manager, it was essential that team autonomy was balanced against production responsiveness. In other words, the Digital experience suggested that effective, rapid team decision making could not be a form of participative democracy. This first group of managers had to confront the paradox of their role in the new organisation of translating a series of market signals, corporate philosophies, and personal experiences into a coherent set of organisational practices. They had, as one put it, to imagine ‘how to make a philosophy happen’: They didn’t know how to make a philosophy practical. Just to operationalise this stuff, to ask how; how to do we get it going. Lots of ideas but they didn’t actually know how to do it. They didn’t have the skillset to take a group of people and help them relate to one another. That was one of the things I was good at was mediating some of that stuff: to make things work, make things practical.43 The conceptual and practical viability of teams entailed a quite different conception of routine management. Teams held the promise of massive efficiency in the number of managers, but it meant that the small leadership team had to be conscious that they had to project the values of the organisation, a responsibility that placed them under the constant scrutiny of teams: ‘Everything is visible, especially management. Remember leadership is a behaviour not a job.’44 A manager gains respect—not through hierarchy—but through good communication, competence, dealing with things quickly. Your behaviour becomes the model for how everyone should behave. We thought, talked about leadership as a personal style, and as a collective presence. The management team were all different individuals but we had to make sure that certain behaviours were shared. We understood that we had to have a presence, a presence that would influence others. With that influence we wanted to ensure that leadership was visible, was used everyday, was also normal—not unusual—something that people encountered as a reminder. Basically, that leadership—never management—becomes part of the organisation’s DNA.45

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The unity of manufacturing performance and the making of teams were expressed in the description of the members of the leadership team who assumed responsibility for ‘total process development.’ These transfers were the primary vehicle for embedding the plant’s values in the teams. Management training for total process developers (TPDs) ended by reminding participants that, although they were relatively few in number, the plant’s success depended on how thoroughly ‘you live the team concept.’ Remember, it is a long-term process. Be patient, you and the team are learning a completely new method of management. The managers of the future will be measured on how well their team manages itself, not on how well you manage them.46 For Motorola, there were four stages to the management role, stages that paralleled the development of the teams. First, managers were responsible for developing, explaining, and popularising the vision. ‘You have to live the vision.’ One poster in the leadership area listed a series of everyday ways to ‘live by the standards.’ From always ‘confronting . . . poor or slovenly behaviour’ to ‘catch[ing] people doing something right.’ This list borrowed the corporate tag line: ‘Remember Leadership is a Behaviour not a Job.’ The second stage was assisting the teams to learn the necessary cooperative and interactive skills. Learning was distinguished from training, which denoted the passivity of the teams: the primary vehicle for durable learning was experience. Thirdly, the manager assumed the role of facilitator as the self-directed teams grew in confidence. Finally, the manager could ‘step back, allow teams to manage day-to-day activities.’ Only then could managers begin to address strategic issues such as customer satisfaction and new technologies. Managers were reminded that ‘this is a long-term process . . . it requires patience, understanding and support.’ Management—and team— development was not so much about gaining a range of competencies as promoting personal growth. For a manager to develop a team was not simply a technical task but a form of self-development. Humility and vulnerability in managers were essential in promoting team development in that they signified openness. Even when the manager could more easily solve a problem than the team, the team was to be given the space to apply the factory’s problem-solving techniques. Such managerial self-effacement was both practical and moral. It was practical in that applying problem-solving techniques to relatively simple matters developed the skill and embedded the expectation that the team would act independently. Equally, the manager could concentrate on strategic questions rather than on firefighting. This was also a form of personal moral development: by enhancing organisational reflexivity, managers enhanced their own self-awareness. The only explicit theoretical input to the management teams thinking about organisation design drew upon R. Meredith Belbin. Although all those involved dismissed any suggestion that they had simply applied

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Belbin, his influence was profound. For Belbin, teamwork meant that operational decisions were taken wholly by the team and that that empowerment involves a certain withdrawal by management.47 He was also careful to specify that teams did not signify collectivism but rather an acceptance of individual differences.48 Much of Belbin’s appeal lay in this respect for individuality and its congruence with values-driven organisations like Motorola. Belbin’s case for teams was both historical and pragmatic. It was historical in that Belbin argued that universal literacy and citizenship and the growth in female employment reduced the authority of maledominated hierarchy. It was pragmatic in that it accepted that the untried nature of team-based organisation demanded experimentation and innovation in management techniques. Belbin offered not so much a road map for the shift to teams as a vocabulary that allowed a greater appreciation of the individual, group and organisational dynamics involved. The core of Belbin’s approach was a typology of nine team roles, each of which had a specific set of attributes and ‘allowable weaknesses.’ The ‘resource investigator,’ for instance, is ‘extrovert, enthusiastic, communicative. Explores opportunities. Develops contacts’ but tends to be ‘overoptimistic,’ and interest wanes once the initial enthusiasm has passed. Each of the nine roles can be hybridised and is associated with a particular form of relationship. Some individuals can prove adept at several roles over time or more than one role simultaneously; others have a narrower role repertoire. Implicit in Belbin’s notion that individuals can adopt primary and secondary team roles was a sort of psychodemocracy in which people filter down their psychological team roles until they find their best match. Belbin’s team technology was a mixture of psychometric and personal inventory tests to be used inside teams: to develop existing teams rather than create them from scratch by matching personalities to role types. The real importance of Belbin’s technology was to ‘know thyself,’ to ‘extend . . . self-insight’: There is . . . a strategy for finding the real self. That strategy rests on reconciling two separate strands of information. One derives from self-assessment and the other from the assessment of others. Information derived from the perceptions of the self and of others about the self needs to be put together systematically, sifted, normalized and eventually interpreted to provide a working profile that can act as a reference base for decision-making.49 Individuals will be enabled to clarify their team roles and assess their effectiveness. As individuals develop self-awareness, so teams move from the solipsism of ‘adolescence’ to the self- and mutual respect of ‘maturity.’ However, Belbin’s technology is aimed not just to improve the individual’s understanding of themselves and their team roles and therefore organisational performance but also to make organisational life more meaningful and increase societal cohesion.50 To dismiss, even to critique, Belbin for lack of rigour or impracticality is to miss the point. Belbin located her work

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between the academic and the practical worlds. Belbin makes no sustained attempt to draw authority solely from one or the other. Rather, Belbin seeks legitimacy from both and neither simultaneously. Now, it was certainly true that the Easter Inch managers did not cite Belbin as an authority or refer to any of the team roles in any systematic way. Nevertheless, the importance of Belbin to their thinking is clear in three ways. First, the rotation of individuals through several organisational roles in their teams, notably team coordinator, was not just a way of eliminating overhead costs but a practice that confirmed their empowerment and echoed Belbin’s notion of personal growth through the expansion of the individual’s repertoire of team roles. Second, Belbin’s insistence that personal development came through exposure to disciplined self-reflection and the judgement of knowledgeable others was central to Easter Inch’s system of peer review. We shall return to peer review in Chapter 5. Third, Belbin confirmed for the Easter Inch managers that their design was innovative, developmental for the individual, and capable of delivering high performance. The conversational nature of the plant’s design process meant that little was documented in extended narratives. For the most part, this conversation was captured and prompted by images of trigger words. However, the Easter Inch management team did produce a Ten Point Blue Print for Flat Organisation. The organisation was to be ‘primarily’ based on ‘process not task’: ‘Flatten the hierarchy by minimising the subdivisions in the processes. It’s better to arrange teams in parallel, with each doing lots of steps in a process, than having a series of team, doing fewer steps’ (see Figure 3.1). All operational routines—production measurement, holiday planning, materials ordering—were the team’s responsibility rather than the prerogative of a support function. Each month, one team member assumed responsibility for one of these ‘secondary jobs,’ which were rotated and allowed no exception. Senior leaders—even offline staff—were to be responsible for manufacturing and performance. Simultaneously, coordination was to be devolved to teams: ‘Combine managerial and non managerial activities as often as possible. Let teams take on hiring, evaluating and scheduling.’ The logic of communication and training was quite different from the universalism of Motorola: ‘Inform and train people in a just-in-time basis, need-to-perform basis. Raw numbers go straight to those who need them in their jobs, with no managerial spin.’ The management team anticipated that the self-discipline of teams would far surpass that of any supervisor. ‘A supervisor is just one person, just one pair of eyes. If the team becomes a supervisor then you multiply that power and it is constant.’51 The plant’s physical layout was also designed to maximise the sociality of the production line. U-shaped lines meant that the start and end of the process were parallel (see Figure 3.2). The imagining of the new plant was a highly informal, face-to-face process. Far from following a corporate blueprint, there was a total absence of corporate involvement in this process. There were very few moments of structured reflection or attempts to formalise the new plant’s constitution.

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One exception was the Gleneagles Accord, a meeting of the Easter Inch management team to review the early months of the Brucefield so-called nest factory. The management team concluded that the plant’s strengths were self-evident: the quality and commitment of our people. The weaknesses, on the other hand, were managerial and organisational. First, ‘incomplete/ unclear understanding’ of management roles. Second, Staff Associates were falling short of the requirements of a radical team-based organisation.

Figure 3.1

Easter Inch Organisation Chart

Source: Courtesy of Robert Henderson.

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Figure 3.2

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Easter Inch Production Map

Source: Courtesy of Robert Henderson.

They were ‘too traditional, short-term, task oriented’ and warned themselves that ‘we lose the culture by reverting to type under pressure.’ This was a potent warning for a management team sensitised to the nuances of culture and the symbolic importance of their actions. In the pilot plant, Brucefield, managers were acutely aware that they were being watched and assessed by manufacturing teams. At Gleneagles, the management team completed a survey of their preferred style of working and decision making. Without exception, their leadership styles were reported as ‘directive’ with the lowest tendencies towards ‘delegative’ or ‘participative’ styles. Simple awareness is probably not a frequent or strong enough influence to change this. I suggest you adapt some type of periodic device that allows the people of Easter Inch to give the management staff feedback on your management style.52 This was an advocacy of a formal reporting process in which manufacturing teams assessed their managers in terms of their personality and behaviour: this technology was not developed. The first wave of Manufacturing Associates (MA) recruits—sourced through an agency—were introduced into the small nest factory, Brucefield. For Belbin, recruitment was ‘a technology of casting.’53 For Motorola: Ten years ago, we hired people to perform set tasks and didn’t ask them to do a lot of thinking. If a machine went down, workers raised their

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Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization hand, and a trouble-shooter came to fix it. Ten years ago, we saw quality control as a screening process, catching defects before they got out of the door. Ten years ago, most workers and some managers learned their jobs by observation, experience, and trial and error.54

All recruits were interviewed at length by the entire management team. At first, the management team had a clearer idea of the type of person they wanted to avoid than they did of the personality types they sought: What we didn’t want to do was recruit people who had been made redundant from other companies—such as steel—otherwise we’d be bringing in their culture. So we recruited from other places. . . . We were able to select a broad mix of people and do a proper job of inducting them into the new way of working, without having to unpick their preconceptions.55 For the recruitment manager, ‘we don’t hire people, we hire attitudes.’ An internal memo emphasised the strategic importance of recruitment. At the moment we can control the culture through the recruitment process. But that’s where our control as managers begins and ends: as soon as someone is hired then we can not longer control the culture, we have to negotiate the culture.56 During a briefing session about how the management team anticipated coping with mass recruitment, there was a consensus that expediency should not lead to any dilution of the strict selection process: ‘In a sense, we have to think of our selection procedures, especially the psychometric testing, as a quality control. [pause] Raw material, that’s it: we’re selecting the right people as raw material.’57 Motorola used the recruitment process as a testing bed for new techniques for the corporation. The plant’s general manager described prospective assemblers and engineers as ‘guinea pigs’ for psychometric tests designed to search for signs of ‘team spirited qualities.’ Strong candidates deployed vivid, clear images of their past work experience. The elaborate, lengthy recruitment process was itself a deterrent to all but the most determined applicants. The Brucefield interviews were informal and were used to develop the protocols used for the mass recruitment programme for the new plant. A single production line was transferred from Stotfold and used to familiarise the 30 or so new hires, who quickly grew to around 200. Targets for the development factory were modest, and any shortfall was made good by continued production at Stotfold. Motorola measured phone production UK-wide, not by specific plants, eliminating any corporate pressure on the new plant: [D]elivery was not the most important thing for the organisation and they were not called to account. That reinforced their sense of

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organisational freedom. The most important thing was not meeting targets but how they worked as a team. Producing a philosophy was more important than producing phones.58 This small cohort of first hires developed into a cohesive group, acutely conscious of their role in developing the philosophy and practices of the factory of the future. Initially, this group were not treated as guinea pigs but as ‘collaborators in . . . something unique, something that was philosophically demanding, something that aimed to be the best in Motorola, the best in a global market. We wanted—expected—ordinary people to make themselves extraordinary.’59 The image of Motorola as a different kind of company and of Easter Inch as a very different kind of factory was powerfully signalled in recruitment advertising. ‘It’s like stepping into a different world,’ trumpeted one newspaper advertisement, a manufacturing world in which employees did not simply make phones but could remake themselves. Although the facility and the organisation began as a blank page, nobody comes into it as a blank page. Everybody comes into it having experienced the traditional organisation with all the traditional expectations. But that’s probably both a drawback and a strength because people come here knowing that it’s going to be different. They have to be willing to take a chance with us, to make this new form of organisation work.60 The letter accompanying each application form stressed that ‘everyone at Motorola participates in the drive for total quality, so jobs are not just about doing work, but looking at the how it’s done and constantly improving for the future.’ The most powerful advertisement featured five pictures of smiling assembly operators giving their impressions of working for Motorola. The testimonies stressed the openness of the factory, the friendliness of the managers, and the supportive nature of teamworking. Teamworking was the dominant motif. ‘Margaret,’ aged over 35 and with no previous electronics experience, spoke of the ease with which she picked up the job and her delight with her team: ‘I love working in a team and we’re all good friends.’ Motorola outsourced the conceptualisation of the recruitment and selection programme for the new plant to Selection Research International (SRI), a subsidiary of Gallup. SRI assumed responsibility for translating the vision of a team-based, flat organisation into a set of psychological measures to be used in the selection process. ‘The plant must be sourced with those whose natural talents, competencies and motivations match the roles, the culture, and the expectations for the plant. One definition of talent is the unique fit of an individual’s abilities to job outcomes, and it is to this identification of such talent that Selection Research is dedicated.’ SRI provided a selection

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‘technology’ based on linking attributes—‘life themes’—to ‘measurably successful’ individuals in a variety of roles: ‘life themes—consistent patterns of thought, feeling, and behaviour which characterise the individual, and are spontaneously arousable.’ These individual attributes could not be changed by their environment, although different organisations accentuate certain ‘life themes’ and cause others to be sublimated. Life themes were uncovered by a seemingly natural, but tightly managed, conversation. Given the scale of the recruitment and selection process, SRI would train and then certify Motorola staff once they had achieved ‘at least an 85% level of agreement in the consistent analysis of these scored and objectively measured interviews.’61 Only 7% of the applicants were hired. SRI identified 12 ‘life themes,’ each with distinctive measurable traits and observable behaviours. Each life theme had a quotidian referent, which was readily surfaced during conversation. Five of the 12 traits were about the individual’s relation to task, product, and targets. Focus, for example, was the life theme that measured individuals’ degree of goal orientation, their concentration, and their refusal to be distracted by low-priority tasks. Similarly, ‘kinesthetic’ referred to individuals’ energy levels, their willingness ‘to put in long hours of work when it is necessary.’ Interviewers were to listen for respondents who reported that they were early risers and for ‘hobbies . . . likely to include physical activities.’ Seven of the 12 life themes identified as particularly important for Easter Inch were about how individuals related to their immediate workgroup, to management, and to the organisation. The relator life theme was the ability ‘to manage their feelings so that they can have a positive impact on their associates.’ Conversely, ‘when the Relator theme is low, MAs will treat their colleagues as though they were things rather than people.’ The concept theme measured the individual’s natural propensity to understand their place in organisational systems, and, when this was weak, the MA ‘will be at best an unconscious competent.’ Similarly, the discipline and responsibility themes suggest individuals’ capacity to structure their life and their identification with the collective. No hierarchy of traits was identified by the SRI technology. However, exceptionally, SRI agreed to incorporate management’s insistence that absolute priority be given to the team score. A high team score reflected an individual’s level of satisfaction from working together with other people in a group in order to achieve a goal. They enjoy thinking how people work together and they can co-ordinate the activities of a small group. They particularly enjoy the team spirit and will continuously work to have good feelings on the team. This attribute reflected not just how an individual derived satisfaction from being part of a team but also his or her capacity to reflect on interpersonal relations and how they might be improved. ‘When the Team

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theme is in low evidence,’ on the other hand, ‘MAs will work as individuals rather than as team players. They will think a good deal about doing their share of the work, rather than thinking about how the group as a whole achieves its goals.’ SRI applied their perceiver interview to 11 MAs employed in the pilot plant. This study produced a range of total scores: three MAs scored below 30 from a possible 84, and eight recorded scores of 31 and above. For SRI, these results ‘shows evidence for a range of talents among a small sample of MAs’ and confirmed the technology’s capacity to discriminate between individuals. A wide spread of scores was recorded for ‘the Relator, Concept, and Responsibility themes. By contrast, the scores on the Achiever theme are clustered around the lower end of the range,’ suggesting that the respondents are ‘more likely to stop working when they have done their share, rather than saying that I can do more or how can I help.’ HR reduced the complex process of selection into ‘a series of easy decisions. You treat it as a production process.’62 Seventy-five per cent of applicants passed the front-end numerical test, administered by line associates; the MAs did the first face-to-face interviews to reduce the pressure on HR. The scoring and pass rates of the 120 Associates conducting the initial interviews were measured against HR norms, a form of statistical quality control. Initially, the involvement of line workers in the selection process was a pragmatic response to the impossibility of HR’s being able to cope with the volume and complexity of the recruitment process. Inevitably, this was quickly absorbed into the plant’s cultural project, and Associate interviewers were defined by HR as ‘passionate gate-keepers.’ Even at this formative stage, however, there was an element of defensiveness in HR’s language: drawing Associates into the selection process deepened their appreciation of the plant’s culture, and that recruitment was vital if they were to ‘protect the Magic Kingdom.’ Importantly, two precepts were based upon the Stotfold experience. First, recommendations from current workers carried no weight; the recruitment process was inviolable. Second, only one MA per family was permitted. There was, then, to be no hiring through family or friendships, to protect against the dense shop floor networks that management had encountered in Stotfold. But even the one-person-per-family rule buckled under the pressure to ramp up workforce numbers. Every recruit went through a two-day induction programme. The importance of language was clear from the outset. The workforce were never referred to collectively as ‘workers’ or ’employees’ and, indeed, seldom as ‘associates.’ By far the most common term used by Motorola managers was ‘folks.’ Complex team games were important exercises, driving home the message that this was an environment in which employees had to think for themselves and act collectively. The games centred on small groups constructing complex objects to precise but changing specifications. Alterations to specifications came without warning and were requested by ‘customers’

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who were actually HR observers. The game reinforced several key points: the factory’s dependence on demanding, fickle customers; task speed was not necessarily more important than quality; and planning and reflection— interacting as a team—were more important than individual effort. The most dramatic part of the induction programme came at the end of the second day. The group walked to the factory’s upper floor and were asked to look west. The facilitator asked what they saw. Outside in the middle distance lay what looked like a huge abandoned car park, strewn with debris and broken concrete. The puzzled inductees’ reply was, as the facilitator expected, ‘a wasteland.’ In fact, the new employees were looking at the ruins of an abandoned British Leyland truck factory. With a dramatic flourish, the facilitator pointed outside: ‘that’s what happens if you don’t perform, you get overtaken by the competition.’ During the initial phase, Easter Inch management were preoccupied with recruitment. There was no infrastructure to monitor and measure the impact of teamworking on efficiency, quality, or the internal dynamics of the teams. There was, however, a single snapshot consultancy exercise to evaluate the adequacy of the induction programme. There was an unresolved, indeed unconfronted, contradiction in the rigorous selection of individuals and their haphazard allocation to teams. In part, this was due to time—‘we didn’t have the time to do that sort of profiling’—a pressure that forced management to rely on their experience and judgement of the new employees: ‘It wasn’t that we didn’t think about it, but we didn’t have a structured tool to do it.’ Management’s observation was that those who scored highly on initiative and personal responsibility traits were good at sourcing materials and ‘good seeds’ for new teams.63 For MAs, the positive aspects of their early experience of teamworking centred on increased involvement in problem solving and the absence of direct supervision. A short management-commissioned running survey of a limited number of MAs underscored the centrality of the team to the generally positive perceptions of the new plant. Again, the management team chose to use a short, flawed survey to gather impressions quickly, knowing that this sacrificed analytical depth. The most important characteristics of an effective team for the MAs were trust, the interdependence of team members, and their collective independence from direct supervision. In all, the survey suggested that for plant management, the workforce prioritised the mutuality of teamworking over productivity or continuous improvement. Focus groups reinforced the survey findings. The removal of direct supervision allowed the teams a greater role in resolving both technical and logistical problems. By far the most important gain was the lightening of supervisory control. The net result was enhanced job satisfaction, greater self-confidence, and a wider awareness of the team’s location in the labour process. In short, the new team organisation was supporting Motorola values, the prime objective: production efficiency, quality, and flexibility would, management assumed, inevitably follow.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have examined the assumptions, philosophy, and hopes that lay behind the design of the factory of the future. The management team responsible for designing the factory enjoyed almost complete autonomy from corporate oversight. The broad thrust of Motorola’s corporate philosophy—humanist, individualist, and values driven—was a constant, if implicit, part of all management conversations and decisions. Although Motorola’s values were broadly consistent with those of other American multinationals, there were important conceptual and practical contributions by recruits from other Silicon Glen corporations. We have also stressed the informality of the process, the complex extended conversations within the first group of managers. Equally, the ‘Originals,’ the first-line workers who had joined the Brucefield nest factory, played an important role in developing these ideas in practice. We have also sketched how Easter Inch managers’ designs reached into recruitment and selection for the new plant. This complex, intense process also drew on management’s negative experience of another Motorola plant, Stotfold. It was not that the technologies of teamworking were derived from a set of philosophical values and market imperatives so much as the management team had to maintain, if not extend, this logic. The translation of corporate philosophy into organisational structures, team procedures and individual practices was complex, multilayered, and highly improvisatory. NOTES 1. Sanford Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 2. Frederic Scherer, International High-Technology Competition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 52–7. 3. Carrie Leana and Denise Rousseau, ‘Relational Wealth: The Advantages of Stability in a Changing Economy,’ in Relational Wealth: The Advantages of Stability in a Changing Economy, ed. Carrie Leana and Denise Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7. 4. Michael Winston, ‘Leadership of Renewal: Leadership for the Twenty-First Century,’ Management Development Review 9 (1996), 15–17. 5. Duane Windsor, ‘Change Management Competencies for Creating Collaborative Organisations,’ in Team-Based Organizing, Vol. 9, ed. Michael Bayerlein, Douglas Johnson, and Susan Bayerlein (Oxford: JAI Press, 2003), 54. 6. Chris Galvin, ‘Preface,’ in Uncompromising Integrity: Motorola’s Global Challenge, Robert Galvin (Schaumburg, IL: Motorola University Press, 1998), 4. 7. Robert Galvin, The Idea of Ideas (Schaumburg, IL: Motorola University Press, 1991), 27–8. 8. Harry Petrakis, The Founder’s Touch: The Life of Paul Galvin of Motorola (Schaumburg, IL: Motorola University Press, 1991), 198–9. 9. Galvin, Idea of Ideas, 11–2.

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Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization 10. Sam Affrunti, A Personal Journal: 50 Years at Motorola (Rolling Meadows, IL: Motorola University Press, 1994), 113. 11. Phil Harkins, Powerful Conversations: How High-Impact Leaders Communicate (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 96. 12. Robert Galvin, America’s Founding Secret: What the Scottish Enlightenment Taught Our Founding Fathers (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 38. 13. John Butman, Juran: A Lifetime of Influence (New York: Wiley, 1997), 175–6, 192. 14. Pete Pande, Robert Neuman, and Roland Cavanagh, The Six Sigma Way: How GE, Motorola, and Other Top Companies Are Honing Their Performance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), 6–7. 15. Interview, Motorola Quality Manager, 2009. 16. Robert Galvin, quoted in Harry Roberts and Bernard Sergesketter, Quality Is Personal: A Foundation for Total Quality Management (New York: Free Press, 1993), xiii. 17. Jagdish Sheth, The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies: And How to Break Them (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2007), 56. 18. Allan Cox and Julie Liesse, Redefining Corporate Soul: Linking Purpose and People (Chicago: Irwin, 1996), 34–5, 69. 19. Charles Farkas and Suzy Wetlaufer, ‘The Ways Chief Executive Officers Lead,’ in Harvard Business Review on Leadership (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review, 1998), 131. 20. David Bradford and Allan Cohen, Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership (New York: Wiley, 1998), 183. 21. William Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 30. 22. Larry Johnson and Bob Phillips, Absolute Honesty: Building a Corporate Culture That Values Straight Talk and Rewards Integrity (New York: AMACOM, 2003), 122. 23. Todd Jick and Mary Gentile, ‘Bob Galvin and Motorola, Inc.,’ in The Challenge of Organizational Change: How Companies Experience It and Leaders Guide It, ed. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Barry Stein, and Todd Jick (New York: Free Press, 1994), 424–5. 24. Peter Senge, ‘Robert Greenleaf’s Legacy: A New Foundation for Twenty-First Century Institutions,’ in Reflections on Leadership: How Robert K. Greenleaf’s Theory of Servant-Leadership Influenced Today’s Top Management Thinkers, ed. Larry Spears (New York: Wiley, 1995), 217–40. 25. Interview, Development Engineer, November 2011. 26. Interview, Compensation Executive, November 2011. 27. Interview, HR Vice President, July 2010. 28. Interview, HR Director, October 2010. 29. Interview, HR Vice President, July 2010. 30. Interview, HR Manager, May 2009. 31. Interview, HR Manager, May 2009. 32. Interview, Easter Inch, General Manager, October 2010. 33. Interview, HR Vice President, July 2010. 34. Interview, HR Director, October 2010. 35. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, 1992. 36. Interview, HR Vice President, July 2010. 37. Interview, General Manager, October 2010. 38. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, November 2009.

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39. Interview, HR Vice President, July 2010. 40. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, October 2010. 41. David Buchanan and James McCalman, High Performance Work Systems: The Digital Experience (London: Routledge, 1989), 129–37. 42. Interview, Organisational Development Manager, October 2010. 43. Interview, Organisational Development Manager, November 2009. 44. Motorola, Corporate Briefing, ‘Leadership,’ 1991. 45. Interview, General Manager, 1992. 46. Motorola, Easter Inch, Plant Briefng, 1992. 47. R. Meredith Belbin, The Coming Shape of Organizations (London: Routledge, 1996), 51. 48. Belbin, Coming Shape, 97. 49. R. Meredith Belbin, Team Roles at Work (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1993), 81–2. 50. Belbin, Coming Shape, 101. 51. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, 1992. 52. Leadership Team, ‘Feedback Session,’ November 1990. 53. Belbin, Coming Shape, 101. 54. William Wiggenhorn, ‘Motorola U: When Training Becomes an Education,’ Harvard Business Review 68 (1990): 71. 55. Interview, General Manager, October 2010. 56. HR, ‘Recruitment Briefing,’ 1992. 57. Interview, HR Officer, 1992. 58. Interview, Motorola Product Planner, July 2009. 59. Interview, HR Vice President, November 2009. 60. Interview, Motorola HR European Director, June 2009. 61. Selection Research International (SRI). Recruitment and Selection Programme. October 1990. 62. Interview, HR Manager, May 2009. 63. Interview, HR Associate, May 2011.

4

‘Not Just Another Number’ Empowerment, Discipline, and Teamworking Freedom

INTRODUCTION For over two decades, teams have been part of Western management’s answer to any competitive challenge. Teams held the promise of engaging workers, freeing managers from shop floor firefighting, and solving the innovation-efficiency dilemma. Teams were a way of eliminating all sorts of costs: supervision, quality control, much of the routine of HR. Teams also delivered, at least potentially, benefits beyond efficiency: ever improving commitment and ceaseless improvisation. Far from being the end point, governing at a distance was merely the precondition of an open-ended, inventive, more human form of work organisation. By definition, then, teamworking was intended to produce certain well understood economic benefits as well as other, much less tangible, much less predictable psychological and social effects. Crucially, the economic, psychological, and social imperatives were treated as inseparable. Or, rather, the economic benefits of teamworking were seen as outcomes of the psychological and social. Managing the psychological and the social were the primary drivers of the economic. The Foucauldian scholarship about the changing nature of work organisation has little to say about the productive dynamics of power and knowledge about teamworking. Rather, Foucauldian studies have concentrated upon the dystopian Foucault, a Foucault of infinite surveillance. In the first section, we shall take Foucault’s insistence upon the productive nature of power and knowledge seriously, without assuming that the governing strategies of Easter Inch’s leadership team were simply translated into practices. Indeed, from the first, Easter Inch’s leadership were clear that they were opening up untried territory in terms of their radical vision of empowerment and teamworking. This forms the subject for the second section of this chapter. The plant’s leadership team were acutely aware that, far from constructing a totalising system of surveillance, they were establishing a factory regime that had forsaken almost all of the structures of hierarchy and processes of compliance that operated in mass assembly factories, including Motorola’s sister plants.

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VISIBILITY, EMPOWERMENT, AND TEAMS I appreciate what Motorola are trying to do but I feel that they are trying to change human nature—workers are workers.1 For Foucault, power and knowledge are necessarily related. One cannot be thought as distinct from the other, nor does one cause the other. Just as power creates, so it also presupposes knowledge.2 Although concerned with the broad transformation of society from the late eighteenth century, Foucault chose to trace the development of power/knowledge through the histories of specific institutions: the prison, the clinic, and the asylum. These were more than case studies, however, but rather grand overarching metaphors offered by a philosopher who rejected totalising philosophies. Particular fields of knowledge emerged, defined, confirmed, and transformed how power was exercised by—and within—particular institutions. Foucault viewed power and powerlessness as mutually constitutive rather than as defined in terms of cause and effect. Equally, Foucault was careful to stress the historicity of disciplinary practices and their institutional forms. The central motif of each of Foucault’s historical studies is how different subjective forms of social life were laid open to calculation and change—in short, how individuals and populations were rendered governable. This is not, however, a story of humanistic progress. For example, Foucault rejects the conventional depiction of the move from the physical torture of criminals to their moral rehabilitation as socially progressive. Rather, he regards the increased attention to moral rehabilitation as the alternative to corporal punishment as symptomatic of the emergence of a new set of disciplinary practices, not as the humanisation of carceral practices. The parallels with the development of the factory system are striking. As Nikolas Rose aptly puts it, the twentieth century witnessed the progressive psychologisation of work, providing managers with ‘a vocabulary and a technology for rendering the labour of the worker visible, calculable, and manageable.’3 In this sense, the so-called soft management techniques, following in the tradition of Mayo’s human relations school, are potentially more penetrating and pernicious than those in the Taylorist lineage. The psychological pressure on workers to seek personal satisfaction through their assimilation of corporate goals of quality, flexibility, and involvement implies a profound subjugation of individual subjectivity. The objective is to induce in the inmate a sense of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.4

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Perhaps the most striking image used by Foucault was that of the Panopticon. Foucault drew on Jeremy Bentham’s unrealised plan for a perfect prison in which individuals isolated in their cells would never know if they were being scrutinised from a central observatory. Crucially, the ‘carceral gaze’ is based on one-way looking, which objectified the individual under scrutiny. ‘Power,’ explained Foucault, ‘is exercised by virtue of things being known and people being seen.’5 The gaoler peering through the cell door’s ‘Judas hole’ is simultaneously exercising power and consolidating a knowledge base of what constitutes normal or acceptable behaviour. At first sight, Easter Inch was the antithesis of Bentham’s Panopticon, which, for Foucault, epitomised the disciplinary logic of modern organisations: separation, inspection, centralised comparison, making individuals remake themselves. Where the Panopticon orchestrated physical separation and mental isolation before an unseen gaze, the organizing principles of the ‘factory of the future’ were inclusion and cooperation. In an important sense, this was a factory of representation: function was a visible and legible part of its physical structure. The building design was ‘entirely consistent and empathetic with the open, human organisation we were creating. A building that was completely open, a building in which there was complete visibility, accessibility. A building that was Motorola, a space designed around Motorola values.’6 Not only was there no physical equivalent of the Panopticon’s central inspection tower, there were no hidden spaces occupied solely and in private by managers or technicians. There was minimal spatial separation between production and support activities, and there was frequent movement between the two areas. Computer workstations were routinely used by line workers without seeking any prior permission. The absence of covert spaces or forbidden areas was intended to symbolise the absence of any covert managerial agenda and to speak rather of openness, equality, and meritocracy. The interpenetration of productive and administrative activities was designed to maximise face-to-face communication between line workers and the factory’s small team of administrators and even smaller leadership team. The removal of physical and hierarchical barriers to communication also represented the removal of bureaucratic distortion of communication: production and the teams were the organisation’s hub. The source of any instruction was not a corporate bureaucrat remote from the line but personally known to and accessible by assembly workers. ‘No individual can hide behind their job title in here. Status counts for nothing. Everyone knows that anyone can challenge any instruction. The MAs don’t stand on ceremony—if there’s something they don’t agree with, they tell you immediately.’ The plant’s physical layout was designed to maximise the density and complexity of interactions between the teams and the support areas. The plant’s architecture could also be read as symbolic of a hidden discourse of control and surveillance. The factory was no less ‘a machine of observation’ than the archetypal panoptic clinics and prisons of the

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nineteenth century.7 The plant’s most striking physical feature was its glass exterior and interior walls. The external glass walls were not reflective: the plant’s exterior announced the building’s presence, rather than reflecting its surroundings. Perhaps the contrast with Bentham’s Panopticon was more apparent than real for, contrary to his often callous rationality, he envisaged the Panopticon not as an intimidating gothic structure but as an elegant, uplifting public building made of the most advanced materials of his age, iron and glass. In an unpublished passage that resonates across the centuries with Weber’s famous description of the modern bureaucracy, Bentham envisaged his ideal prison as an ‘Iron cage glazed’: ‘It will be a lantern; it will be a bee-hive; it will be a glass bee-hive without a drone.’8 Glass, as Gane reminds us, is a material that ‘can be lived as a new liberation, indeed as a new intensified interpenetration of interior and exterior, a new transparency and visibility, a new purity, yet . . . it does not facilitate a genuine opening onto the world while it abolishes its mysteries.’9 Glass was selected as the dominant building material to symbolize the organization’s transparency. In practice, however, the glass walls laid open the factory’s structure of power for inspection by all and for understanding by none. Again, the leadership team consistently stressed that the team-based organisation was an essential precondition to competitiveness. This insistence on the pragmatism of the organisation meant that the leadership vehemently rejected the idea of the factory of the future as a corporate laboratory for new approaches to work and organisation ‘because manufacturing is such a compelling discipline,’ You have to manufacture every single day, every single hour, every single minute. It operates on real time. Phones drop off the line in real time. If the line stops for half an hour that time cannot be recouped—ever. That’s the nature of manufacturing. You have to make them regularly— and in volume—to a consistent quality. It’s a very rigid discipline. I don’t believe you can apply words like experiment to that, a factory cannot be an experiment. Every second counts. If the line stops for half an hour that time cannot be recouped. The teams are a very serious business proposition. . . . a factory cannot be an experiment.10 The relationship between the factory’s architecture and social engineering was evident even in the canteen layout. The wedge-shaped canteen made it impossible for the entire workforce to be addressed from a single point. Even the tables were formatted to reinforce the workgroup as the key referent for the individual. Tables were fixed in a mosaic pattern that precluded them from being rearranged into different settings. Each table had four fixed seats that made it awkward to speak to, far less hold a conversation with, the occupants of a neighbouring table. Nor was this design simply to maintain order. Rather, since rest breaks and mealtimes were irregular and settled by each team according to work pressures, the result was that nonwork time was invariably taken with one’s immediate workmates. One final

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detail confirmed the importance management ascribed to maximising social control, even over informal socialising. Newspapers were forbidden in the plant, even in the canteen. At first we assumed that this was a precaution to prevent any contamination from the newsprint. However, the real purpose, as one manager explained, was ‘focus.’ He continued, ‘lots of little production issues can be disposed of in the canteen. Newspapers are a distraction. We want people to focus on work. People can discuss things over tea that are difficult when they are making phones.’11 For senior managers, a prime virtue of teamworking was that surveillance was both more intense and continuous than in hierarchical structures: The team can manage all the time, whereas a supervisor can only do so some of the time. Teams are fierce self-managers. Successful managers are almost selfless in how they give themselves to their teams. We want that dynamic in every team, in every team-member. Selflessness and authenticity are critical to success. This is hugely demanding: emotionally, psychologically, practically. We wanted the Associates and the teams to be pushing themselves into uncomfortable spaces, to understand themselves better. That’s the way to understand yourself better, see where you start to feel strain: then, reflect on why; then work on how to improve. The Associates and the team—both—have to develop the capacity for self-help. Without that, you need managers: managers are a response to, and symptomatic of failing individuals, thwarted teams. Managers can solve problems but at the cost of self-development for the Associates.12 So powerful is this image of permanent watchfulness that there is a very real danger that it shifts from being a vision of the rationality of power to a description of the reality of shop floor life. Indeed, the same Organisation Development Manager continued by stressing that there should be no misreading of teamworking as all about mutual surveillance: ‘of course, people are here to make phones, that’s why we’re all here. It’s not as though people do nothing else except monitor themselves and each other.’ The agency of the individual and the collective was the basic assumption that underpinned Easter Inch’s teamworking regime. The necessity of the active engagement of the individual and the team was taken as a given, albeit that agency was understood to be risky. Inside the teams, individual tasks were relatively routine, but changes in product specification, the introduction of new technologies inside a particular product’s life cycle, and sporadic material flows all combined to place a premium on flexibility and collective problem solving. Operative skill in placing delicate components had been all but eliminated by automation. Hand soldering was, similarly, superseded by flow soldering, which in turn has been displaced by surface mount technology. From 1980, inside a decade, the manual skills of inserting and soldering components onto circuit boards had

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given way to tending process technology.13 Interpersonal and communication skills were prioritised over manual competence. As we have seen, since 1980 Motorola had made increasing social demands of its manufacturing employees ‘must be able to do basic problem-solving—not only as individuals but also as members of a team. We need people willing to work against quality and output instead of a time clock.’14 On the Easter Inch lines, between the ‘back end’ assembly and the ‘front end’ automated process equipment was a small area dominated by two whiteboards and a flip chart. The whiteboards reported hourly and daily targets against the yields actually achieved. The flip chart recorded parts that were out of stock or in short supply and projected the likely times of resulting bottlenecks. These running records were maintained by all workers. The small open space around the boards was where groups of workers exchanged information about how to shift labour between workstations to cover for breaks or accelerate specific parts of the work process. Importantly, this meeting area was not simply where the teams congregated to report production metrics. Rather, the meeting area was itself a productive space, where MAs made the social relations that the plant’s leadership considered as important as mobile phones, perhaps more so. ‘It’s not physically demanding work,’ explained the plant’s HR manager as we began our fieldwork, ‘but it is a very demanding process in psychological terms. The teams will be making themselves while they are making phones.’ Who worked at Easter Inch? The Easter Inch workforce was divided into half who had previously worked in microelectronics and half with no previous experience. Roughly, four times as many women as men had worked in microelectronics. Those with previous microelectronics employment were more likely to be amongst the first wave of recruits and around three years older, at 28, than those new to the industry. Just under one-third of the workers with microelectronics experience had previously worked in teams, about double that of those recruited from outside the sector. MAs with other microelectronics experience were more likely than those without it to rank their personal qualities as more important for their recruitment than any other factor. Those MAs with most microelectronics experience and the greatest seniority were more likely to perceive themselves as having greater control over their own pace of work than their teammates with less experience and seniority. The temptation is to ascribe this difference to the greater socialisation of those with the longest employment. Alternatively, however, this perception of greater personal and collective control over work planning and pace did not reflect a deeper attachment to the team culture so much as their location in the labour process. More experienced MAs were concentrated on the front-end surface mount machines, which tended to drive line pace; those with less experience were concentrated in the assembly, testing, and analysis sections and were more exposed to sporadic ebbs and flows of work, completely beyond their control either as an individual or as part of the team. MAs in the assembly areas were more likely to be critical of teamworking in theory as well as in practice: at it strongest, MA

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critics felt that teamworking was little more than a veneer on the routine of mass assembly: ‘Although you do feel more responsible . . . this is a clever ploy to make you feel more independent. . . . We’re basically “puppets on a string.” ’ However, there are paradoxes even in what seems to be a wholly negative assessment by a 22-year-old, back-end assembly worker. On the one hand, he opens by noting that he has perceived himself to have more and control; on the other hand, he qualifies this by recognising that this is an autonomy that was designed by others and constrained by the line, rather than constructed by him or by the team. Others went further, seeing teamworking as being nothing more than a subtle potent ideology. One 50-year-old female MA dismissed notions of team autonomy: ‘nothing could be further from the truth. They believe they are pulling the wool over your eyes but we know what they are about—the decisions are made then passed on in a way to make you believe you helped make them.’ Around 45% of the Easter Inch workforce had previously been members of a trade union. There were no significant differences in terms of age, gender, or microelectronics experience between this group and the rest of the workforce. There were no sharp differences between these two groups except in questions about skills, teams, and contracts. In terms of skills, past union members rated technical skills and knowledge of work organisation more highly as the reasons for being hired than those without them, for whom their personality and teamworking skills were more important. Former trade unionists were less positive about their employment contracts, salary, and career prospects in Easter Inch than those with no past union membership. Irrespective of their workstation, former trade unionists were much more likely to understand their task, as paced by the line, than those with no past union membership, whose desire ‘to show that I am a good worker so that I can improve myself’ was prioritised. There were consistent and significant differences between men and women MAs. For female MAs, the key reasons they were hired was their capacity to work in teams, communication, and personality. Conversely, men were more than twice as likely as women to agree that ‘technical knowledge’ or ‘knowledge of the work process’ were important reasons why they were hired by Motorola or allocated to their current workstation. In terms of task performance, there was no significant difference between men and women, except for manual dexterity, which women regarded as much more important than men. Again, this may simply be a reflection of the concentration of women on inspection and product placement, tasks that entailed manipulating tiny parts onto printed circuit boards. Job rotation was driven by process needs rather than to enhance working life or to organise cross-task training by the team. ‘We’re not managing activities for people. Manufacturing is our target not contentment.’15 The stress on teams’ devising their own solutions to process issues was deliberately reflected in management’s decision to limit offline training to culture rather than tasks. For the plant’s leadership, learning essential manufacturing tasks was secondary to absorbing team norms. Each

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manufacturing fault provided the novice MA with a lesson in quality and the team an opportunity to improvise its internal work organisation, central to making the team effective. Indeed, the negative aspects of the early period of teamworking were interpreted to be outcomes of deliberate management policy. Maintaining production while completing demanding secondary jobs often proved stressful, especially given the limited training available for these roles. Associates routinely complained of the lack of training in basic competences such as soldering that resulted in poor quality, rectification work, and greater pressure on the assembly teams. There were no more than marginal differences in how men and women experienced line pacing. In terms of teamworking, men’s and women’s experiences and perceptions differed little, although women were marginally more positive than men that team decision making was ‘preferable to conventional supervision.’ The teams were responsible both for the production of products and for a particular, company-approved, social relations of production. In addition to their production tasks, team members also performed 11 ‘secondary or coordinating roles.’ All secondary roles had some degree of reporting outside the team. These secondary roles were, however, less about liaising with other teams and functions than measuring and monitoring individual and team performances. While coordinating material flows and maintaining routine records such as holiday entitlement were neutral administrative tasks, these were far outweighed by the assimilation of control activities by the teams. Measuring and comparing scrap and quality rates between different workstations was far from a neutral reporting procedure but was a crucial disciplinary function. The team was also responsible for controlling attendance and timekeeping. ‘Amazing really,’ one manager enthused, during the plant’s first few months, ‘someone doesn’t turn up and the team will phone them at home and drag them into work. No manager would pull a stunt like that.’ Even more significant was the team’s use of the factory management information system to measure and record the team’s performance on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The team’s internal disciplinary function was based upon developing each MA’s sense of obligation to the team and upon the team’s obligation to the individual to help them improve themselves. Management’s understanding of teamworking always involved some vision of self-discipline and collective control: [B]ecause people are so highly integrated and everyone has the same terms of reference, control is not an issue that has to be managed: deviance is very visible. People can hide deviant attitudes with appropriate behaviour. Not in teams—you can’t hide what you really think from the people that you work beside. Teams are—will always be—like hothouses.16 For MAs, the positive aspects of their early experience of teamworking centred on increased involvement in problem solving and the absence of direct

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supervision. A short management survey of MAs underscored the centrality of the team to the generally positive perceptions of the new plant. The most important characteristics of an effective team for the MAs were trust, the interdependence of team members, and their collective independence from direct supervision. In all, our surveys suggested that the workforce prioritised the mutuality of teamworking over productivity or continuous improvement. The net result was enhanced job satisfaction, greater selfconfidence, and a wider awareness of the team’s location in the labour process. For one 29-year-old male: Since I joined Motorola I feel more confident about myself as a person and as a Manufacturing Associate working in the factory. The Motorola culture has made me say this because in any other factory or job I’ve felt pushed around and told what to do whereas here I’m active in making decisions and helping the team achieve goals and achieving targets. Basically it’s bloody brilliant and if it’s still open I’ll be here until I retire.17 The MAs reported that the absence of external supervision was replaced by the mutual discipline of the team: ‘I feel that it is better with no supervisors as you still get your work done without being hounded by someone all the time as you don’t want to be seen to be lazy or the rest of the team would soon let you know.’ Self-discipline was not a burden and a welcome alternative to supervisors: ‘Don’t feel that I am at work at times. A relaxed atmosphere allows you to talk without having a supervisor breathing down your neck.’ James Barker calls this constructing ‘a generative discipline’ that enables teams ‘to act in apparently useful and productive ways’: This discipline is a powerful force of moral reasoning in teams. It is the essential ethic that enables them to work together effectively. . . . A generative discipline is more than a simple convergence of values. It is the internalization of those values so that team members see them as the essential knowledge of a methodical and ethical way of life.18 In all, our surveys suggested that the workforce prioritised the mutuality of teamworking over productivity or continuous improvement. The net result was enhanced job satisfaction, greater self-confidence, and a wider awareness of the team’s location in the labour process: ‘I find working at Motorola a refreshing change. It’s different from any other company I have worked for before. I like working in a team and feel we get on well together. You are treated like a person and not just another number,’ reported one 34-year-old female assembler.19 A recurring theme was that the teams were not necessarily supervised from the outside, but that did not mean that they were unsupervised. One

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42-year-old veteran who remained supportive of teamworking in theory, ‘but in practice it’s somewhat chaotic. The strongest individuals take the initiative and eventually make all the decisions so, in effect, become a selfelected supervisor. . . . I don’t know if I’m in favour of a return to the old supervisor/worker system, but a definite compromise of some kind of recognised authority on the line is needed.’20 Such ambivalence and uncertainty about the tension between the abstract philosophy of teamworking and the more complex realities that delivered team autonomy is usurped from inside. The informal authority of ‘the elect’ could be understood by novice MAs as a form of supervision inside the team. Or, more graphically, the reality of teamworking would always fall short of its promise: ‘Motorola’s theories are good but not in practice. . . . Animal Farm. A strong voice will always bully down the rest of the team, then be patronised by a Staff Associate letting the main problems go unsolved.’ The individual MA and the team were, in this view, doubly subordinated: first to the ‘strong voice’ inside the team and then from outside by a Staff Associate. For management, team-based organisation demonstrated three defining advantages in its early stages. First, it reduced the managerial overhead. Second, it reinforced the practice and ideology of teamworking. Third, routine organisational problems were confronted immediately by those most closely involved rather than referred to management. To the virtues of speed and responsiveness was added the benefit that the team was responsible for policing its own activities. Individuals are not focused solely on their own tasks but also on the team and, beyond that, the organisation. For individuals, empowerment involved both the exercise of agency and accountability. People grew into the culture: they gradually realised that the boundaries were much wider. Everyone knew they would be held to account. Everyone knew they were allowed to speak out—expected to speak out. Nobody was to be passive.21 This agency engendered the sense that nobody was exempt from being challenged for her or his behaviours as well as for their performance. The anecdote goes around of a shouting senior plant manager being upbraided ‘quietly and publicly’ by a female MA who asks to see his Motorola values card: ‘Oh, I see yours says the same as mine. I thought it must be different.’ This exchange became part of the plant’s mythology and was endlessly recounted as an example of agency, respect, and the responsibility that ‘people hold each other to account, regardless of status.’22 The role of Team Coordinator was mandatory for all team members and was rotated every month—without exception—to prevent it from becoming ‘a surrogate “supervisor” ’: The Team Coordinator’s role is to act as the ‘mouthpiece’ of, and window to, the rest of the team. For the month of tenure, the Team

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Notionally, the team set its own agenda, but, in practice, it was based on pragmatic, production issues: running daily and weekly production output against targets; that day’s production plans, including any catch-ups; progress chasing. The Team Coordinator not only convened these short, daily meetings but also had responsibility for collating and disseminating incoming data and relaying data outwards. Team Coordinators were not responsible for decision making, planning, or review, which remained the prerogative of the team. Nevertheless, this was a high-profile role that was ‘dreaded by most Associates.’ The role was ‘highly restricted’ but ‘we recognised that it was important in the routine and in embedding the culture.’24 In many ways, the Team Coordinator was intended to embody the ideal individual MA. Basic skills were assessed in terms of error rates in, for instance, soldering or mechanical assembly. Team Coordinators were also measured on the effectiveness of their forward planning and prioritising of each of the workstations of their team. This was measured in terms of the cost of backlogs at any workstation, especially if the particular backlog recurred several times. The value of a backlog was weighted so that any recurring problem was identified quickly and the pressure on the Team Coordinator increased. Recurring problems were used to identify any underlying issue, such as sporadic material flows of an operator unable to maintain the line pace. The Team Coordinator’s personal performance was permanently displayed in the team’s meeting area and constantly updated: ‘Chart updated hourly for output. Quality data provided at daily meetings.’ The Total Process Developers (TPDs) were key figures on the new shop floor. The notion of total process self-consciously drew on the sense of the team and the line together as a single, unified sociotechnical system. TPDs did not work on the line but were Staff Associates who combined their offline professional role with a responsibility for a team’s development. This concept ‘says that there is no manufacturing: we are all manufacturing. Manufacturing is not a distinct function: it is the raison d’être of the organisation.’25 Charged with dual responsibility for implementing teamworking and maintaining production targets, the TPD was a deeply ambiguous figure caught between the conflicting pulls of management and teams. The concerns of TPDs, whose prime function was to install teamworking, mirrored those of team members. TPDs, in particular, were the focal point of the new organisation. The TPDs’ team development role entailed a significant shift in their thinking and instincts. The TPDs’ prime goal was to make teams self-managing in the fullest possible sense: ‘Step back, allow teams to manage day-to-day activities,’ advised their training manual. Building selfdirected teams is ‘a long-term process . . . it requires patience, understanding

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and support.’ The TPD, like others in leadership roles, should not be afraid to admit their mistakes because ‘vulnerability promotes openness.’ Conversely, ‘when the team makes mistakes it is essential not to find blame but to help the team to learn from them.’ And ‘it was essential that the teams should be learning problem-solving techniques’ not in the abstract but in the everyday sense: ‘teams don’t make problems; managers should never solve problems.’ ‘Remember,’ TPDs were told, building self-directed work teams ‘is a long-term process. Be patient, you and the team are learning a completely new method of management. The managers of the future will be measured on how well their team manages itself, not on how well you manage them.’26 Every team was supported by a TPD who was responsible for facilitating the teams’ technical and social development. The TPD was not measured through any metric or evaluated by their team: ‘We didn’t have a system for measuring TPD effectiveness. But we were able to share our experience and exercise our judgement: we were learning as we went along.’ The TPD’s experience was judged in terms of how best to avoid their assuming a supervisory role or taking decisions, even when under pressure, that would compromise a team’s development. ‘TPDs were under tremendous stress. They were asked to constantly reflect on their personal style, to avoid taking decisions, when their previous training and careers had marked them out as problem-solvers. Some TPDs felt powerless by the need to embody leadership, not management; others managed their behaviours but were torn up inside.’ One engineer and TPD, ‘Jim,’ reflected that he had a picture of what I should be as a leader and how that’s different from being a manager. But this means that I can’t be myself. I understand what being a leader means, but it means that I’m always doubting myself, although I try to keep that private . . . not let the team see me hesitate. I have to be a leader all the time. Boundaries are very important. If they are too broad, you are asking people to do what they can’t. If they are too tight, you are being directive and the team doesn’t learn anything. You need to make a contract with the team and then put in the control limits. That way there’s a feedback loop and you know when to get involved again. You can only ‘pick up the ball’ so often for a team before they find out they never really had it in the first place.27 Insofar as TPDs were subject to managerial scrutiny, it was in terms of their individual rather than team development. Although TPDs were understood as ‘team champions,’ they did, however, have ‘an oversight role,’ that is, ‘to ensure that targets are set and achieved, standards of quality and behaviour are maintained and team roles are carried out.’ Each TPD typically supported two lines of 60 Associates. TPDs were full-time transfers for a fixed period of six months. Defining the TPD role as temporary was a reflection of the assumption that this kind of intervention would become

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progressively unnecessary as teams matured and—again—to guard against the emergence of identifiable supervisors and supervisory roles. ‘We were acutely aware of the need to avoid management, especially hidden management, since that would inevitably be found out.’28 The temporary nature of the role also had the benefit of developing and spreading the new managerial skills required by Easter Inch. TPDs could be drawn from any part of the organisation. Initially, however, TPDs were almost exclusively engineers and male, reflecting the importance of product and process development in the first wave of the plant’s recruitment. The TPDs were allocated a Staff Sponsor, who acted as a mentor but whose visibility on the lines meant that they were also an important check on ‘supervisory behaviours.’ A growing issue for the plant’s leadership team was the absence of any legitimate means to intervene in team decision making. The facilitator had no right to intervene without the invitation of the team and even then within limits defined by the team. For key figures in manufacturing management, the self-discipline required by the TPDs ran counter to their capacity to deliver on aggressive output targets: ‘We’ve created a eunuch concept for the facilitators in that they have no influence over the team other than by persuasion.’29 Every member of the management team had responsibility for developing a particular team. The TPD role was complex and involved conceptual, psychological, and performance responsibilities. Charged with dual responsibility for implementing teamworking and maintaining production targets, the TPD was a deeply ambiguous figure caught between the conflicting pulls of management and teams. This ambiguity was clear to the TPDs from the beginning. The most telling example was how you spoke to people when they came to your desk for help. Quite often you’d be really busy but you had to deal with it yourself, not pass it on to somebody else. You had to share what you knew, you had to show that you had time for them, that your job was helping to solve their problems. Fix things fast—if you lost half an hour at the start of the day, you never caught up. Fixing things fast was about maintaining a sense of urgency: you had to create that sense of urgency, that sense of purpose. . . . Everyone was there for the same reason: production, quality, so that you had to send a message whenever you spoke to an Associate, that we both had the same objective. You had to react in the correct way. Production first, Associates second: leadership was about getting that message home in everything you did, how you looked, how you spoke, always being available personally. I was personally accountable to them in the same way that they were personally accountable to each other.30 The concerns of TPDs, whose prime function was to install teamworking, mirrored those of team members. For the TPDs, teams were slow to

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accept responsibility for efficiency and quality, much less process improvements; rather than embracing the demands of accountability, teams ‘fear the end of the hour,’ when yields and quality were reported on the team’s whiteboard. Internally, the system of rotating organisational roles ran the risk of creating an informal system of supervision; that is, key individuals maintained effective control even of the coordinative tasks that they had nominally passed to others. The rotation of coordinative roles did not necessarily eliminate supervisory authority but rather deformalised it and made it less visible to TPDs. Already, the TPDs had concluded, teams were proving resistant to any hint of managerial intervention. Frustrated that ‘teams were becoming havens for dead wood,’ the TPDs had no leverage over team internal dynamics. The ambiguities of the TPDs’ role were clear even in the plant’s formative months. On the one hand, the TPD was responsible for the success of the teams as a social unit and that they met efficiency and quality targets. This necessarily drew them into turf wars, with individuals performing secondary jobs such as logistics or quality. Just as any TPD intervention was decried by the team as the return of direct supervision, so a defensive reaction by individuals protecting the integrity of their secondary role diminished the space for the TPD. In practice, the prime role of the TPD was to be a managerial troubleshooter rather than to facilitate the team’s internal decision-making processes. ‘The TPDs should really be called TPO’s because they act as if they own the lines. The TPDs are really production managers. They drive the work.’ The result in this early period was an uneasy stand-off. TPDs were kept at arm’s-length by the teams and gradually withdrew from the developmental aspect of their job. This made the TPD an increasingly ‘managerial’ figure, reluctant to be drawn into the internal dynamic of teams but compelled to confront pressing production problems. ‘Just what do staff sponsors actually do?’ asked one line worker, ‘they should be more visible, not just come on the line when things are bad.’ This tension was hardly surprising because maintaining line pace and never stopping the line unless absolutely necessary was critical to maximising output. AUTONOMY AND DISCIPLINE A key indicator of the symbolic and practical importance of teamworking was the frequency, duration, and content of team meetings. Initially, the teams met at the start of each shift for approximately 15 minutes. The duration was not fixed by management or convention but by the team. Initially, team meetings frequently lasted for over an hour. Emergency meetings to deal with some unexpected development—a drop in quality, a bottleneck, or supply problem—were convened by the team and involved everyone, not just those immediately concerned. From the first, routine and ad hoc meetings focused on how to meet production targets, never on soft issues of

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internal team relationships. One worker hired from Japanese manufacturer OKI found Easter Inch ‘more laid back’: When I started here I couldn’t believe it because groups of people were just standing about. And the meetings—amazing. Anybody could call a meeting and the line would stop. That would never have happened at OKI. It was constant in there; you were hard at it all the time. . . . I thought to myself when I started, how does this place make a profit? You hardly see an engineer in here, but in OKI there would be engineers on the line all the time. And if something went wrong there would be engineers, supervisors all over the place, bawling, ‘get that fixed in ten minutes’. It’s not like that in here. You could go six hours in this place and they wouldn’t know what was happening.31 Within three months of full production beginning, however, the frequency, content, and control of team meetings was changing fundamentally. Routine daily meetings quickly gave way to exceptional events to deal with acute bottlenecks. Often a full week would pass without a daily meeting. Team meetings were not always called by team members but rather increasingly only by the staff TPD. The content also changed from an inclusive process chaired by different team members in rotation to more restricted events led exclusively by the line’s TPD. A shortage of components leads to a backlog of half-finished phones, for example. The TPD calls a meeting of the 14 workers on the line’s back end—the labour-intensive finishing tasks. In a nine-minute meeting called by the TPD, he told the team that, with just one hour left on the shift, they had completed less than 40% of their daily target. ‘We’ve got a problem we have to talk about. We need a good last hour. What’s the problem? What do people think?’ Silence. ‘The problem is that there’s no urgency. There’s people standing around not thinking that there is a problem. OK, we’ve got an hour [claps hands energetically]. If any of you feel that they’ve got nothing to do, stay behind and I’ll make sure that you’ve got something to do.’ There was little sense of mutual control left in such exchanges: the team was a passive audience rather than an active contributor. ‘They say there are no supervisors,’ said one MA on the Excalibur line, ‘but you see people working harder when certain people come on the line.’32 Equally, attempts by the TPDs to redress the drift towards a more overt supervisory role was read by the teams as uncertainty or lip service. The TPDs were aware that fast rising production targets were changing their relationship with the teams: I’m spending all my time making plans and no time developing the team . . . and I know that’s really bad. I’ve just been given a target of 12,000 phones to come off the line in ten full working days. It’s just not going to happen. I haven’t called a team meeting this morning and

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I know that’s really bad. Usually, every Monday morning we have a full team meeting to discuss build plans. It’s bad when that doesn’t happen.33 Remember, there were no neutral administrative tasks: every coordinative task played some part in making—or unmaking—team autonomy and self-discipline. The change was no less apparent to the line workers: The team idea is good but there are problems. I started eight months ago and it was great. If anyone wanted to discuss a problem we’d stop the line and have a team meeting. I thought that this was the way it should happen. Now there’s no time because we’ve got to get the numbers out. . . . Generally speaking team meetings last about ten minutes. It’s a matter of “here’s the number of PCBs we’ve got to get out: let’s go and do it”. It’s too fast at the moment: it’s all targets, numbers.34 Not only had the initiative for calling team meetings shifted decisively from the team to front-line management—something noted by all and regretted by most—the space necessary for building the social relationships of teamworking was increasingly squeezed by rising production targets. The so-called elect, the veterans of the original nest factory, were acutely aware of their declining authority inside the teams and were now seldom able to challenge managerial inroads into team decision making. The original group of around 50 who had formed the core manufacturing workforce in the experimental Brucefield nest factory, a number that grew to around 200, had the most complex relationship to the concept and changing dynamics of the growing Easter Inch factory. After all, the elect made up the group that established the practices of teamworking, especially the centrality, autonomy, and authority of the team. The elect had enormous informal authority in the factory. They were involved in the recruitment, training, and socialisation of many of the plant’s new recruits. They were the bearers and custodians of teamworking, responsibilities that they were acutely aware of. A key part of the team’s disciplinary function was that corrective actions had to be not only as immediate as possible, designed to improve the performance of the individual, the team, and the line, but also proportionate. The stress experienced by the elect increased as established teams were broken up in order to start new lines based on them. Building a new team was demanding for experienced MAs, in terms of longer hours and the emotionally draining process of establishing new personal relations, possibly for the third time. Nevertheless, the elect saw it as their responsibility to maintain team autonomy and collective discipline. This was a complex process in which they had no formal authority, and their most important resource was holding tightly onto the language and founding principles of teamworking. On one new line, three of the elect, a group referred to by

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the plant leadership as ‘the matriarchs,’ found themselves having to hold in check their inexperienced team who were ready to advocate that ‘Walter,’ an unpopular MA, be dismissed for his ‘bad attitude’ and poor timekeeping. The background to this incident was a series of newly formed teams bringing impromptu corrective actions against individuals, including veteran Motorolans, as retaliation for challenging poor performance on the line. In other words, the original sense of individual responsibility and collective discipline internal to the teams was not as easily absorbed as team autonomy by new teams. On the one hand, the team were determined to exercise what they regarded as their right to discipline their errant colleague. On the other hand, ‘the matriarch’s knew that such a serious act would trigger an intervention by the TPD and the plant’s leadership team. For the matriarchs, such a meeting represented further damage to the team’s autonomy and risk to the team’s development. At all times, of course, the matriarchs risked the accusation of ‘acting like a supervisor,’ which would have jeopardised their personal authority. For, as seemed likely, if the TPD’s intervention resulted in the team’s recommendation being rejected, the new team would question whether teamworking could be made to work. The outcome was that the disciplinary moment was postponed until the next peer review meeting, when Walter would receive the team’s verdict. The matriarchs sustained the concept and practice of the team by channelling the team’s anger at a disruptive colleague into the plant’s approved process. The matriarchs’ authority and team autonomy were both maintained, but this was an uneasy truce, for it suggested that the TPD could not be asked for help without this reinforcing his role as someone with managerial authority. Implicitly, keeping the TPD at a distance was an admission that the team no longer had power over the TPD, who could now draw his legitimacy from outside the team. With the responsibility for embedding the team culture on a new line, combined with their training and troubleshooting roles, the matriarchs were under enormous pressure. Participation in team meetings also became more restricted. The unwieldy participative democracy of the original meetings gave way to a form of representative democracy in which each area would nominate someone to attend. For those who had experienced the relaxed, open fora of the factory’s early days, the move to representative meetings was a serious erosion of the teamworking philosophy. Newer employees, particularly those who were delegates, regarded the representative meetings as more democratic and practical than the often chaotic, full-scale meetings. For the elect, however, the picture was one of loss. For ‘Chantal,’ one of the first MAs recruited, the elect clung to the remnants of the original teamworking ethos: ‘There’s Mary, Elizabeth—me—and John, we all came here together. We’re all split up now, we still do a lot of talking at the meetings but now we’re just faces in a crowd.’35 The elect saw themselves as personally and collectively making, developing, diffusing, and defending teamworking. This difficult task was made more difficult still by their isolation on the vastly expanded shop

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floor. Not only did the elect have to ensure the complex translation of teamworking into newly formed teams, they did this against infinitely greater and more immediate production targets, which reinforced the pressure for TPD interventions. Nor were there any mechanisms for this group to meet, share their experience, or articulate their shared misgivings to the plant’s leadership team. The elect failed to translate their experience of team autonomy and self-discipline into modes of working and codes of conduct that were readily understood and endorsed by newcomers. The elect were too few in number, too scattered, and too embattled by the technical demands of embedding new lines to establish viable team-based sanctions and incentives with newcomers. More than this, Chantal added, ‘some TPDs see you as a problem if you speak out of turn. It didn’t used to be like that.’ Irrespective of these different perceptions, the loss of the all-embracing team meetings inevitably narrowed the horizons of the teams, reducing their knowledge and control of the line as a whole. The representative meetings signified that, at most, workers would own a small section of the line and that TPDs would assume control over decisions over the line as a whole. [P]retending to give workers a say in production targets or for orders does not alter the basic nature and demands of the job. We are basically assembly workers and nothing else.36 Ramp-up and work intensification made it difficult enough for the teams to complete their secondary tasks, much less sustain the developmental dimensions of teamworking. In theory, the accessibility of senior management to act as mediators should have reduced these pressures on the teams. However, in practice, the senior managers were simply stretched out too thin for them to be of practical value on the lines. ‘Because the organisation is thinly stretched,’ observed one MA, ‘requesting help is sometimes ignored unless you go “mob-handed.” ’ Indeed, the reduced visibility of plant leadership was read by the experienced MAs as symptomatic not just of increased scale but also of the erosion of the plant’s original teamworking philosophy. Another noted that managers are rarely seen on the line. Everybody talks about feedback, but all too often when managers do get around to coming on the lines, all they give us is negative feedback like not reaching targets, poor attendance, poor quality, poor housekeeping. And although I agree they should complain about these issues, they should also help the team resolve them and work with the teams to resolve all aspects of our working. This MA remained wedded to the concept of teamworking: although critical of management practices, this was a criticism that hoped for more

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sustained and sophisticated managerial interventions to improve teamworking. Implicit, though, was a sense that the team had the necessary autonomy but had not constructed a rigorous method of dealing with its internal dynamics. As production targets were ramped up, the pressures on the teams increased while material flows remained erratic. This combination increased the pressure on TPDs to intervene more frequently and to grow impatient even with the few team meetings that stopped the line completely. TPDs were calling short meetings of sections of the line. Originally, convening team meetings had been solely the team’s prerogative, and the TPD played a supporting, circumscribed role, without the authority to initiate or lead meetings. ‘As time goes on,’ remarked one 25–year-old female assembler with extensive microelectronics experience, ‘less and less time is being spent on team meetings. We can’t have a meeting without outside help. It’s almost like having a supervisor.’ Equally, TPDs and facilitators who used to attend every team meeting ‘religiously’ increasingly did so only by special request from the team. The TPDs increasingly interventionist role eroded the team’s sense of autonomy and collective control. More than this, TPDs became identified with decision making, particularly when that decision then worsened bottlenecks or resulted in downtime: ‘Facilitators and sponsors are taking all the decisions and when they fuck up we have to suffer by doing overtime and twelve hour shifts. I feel if we made the decisions and fucked up we would be more willing to make up for it. We were told when we started that we run our line—we do not.’ Each shortfall in materials produced periods when sections of the line were immobilised and then subject to ‘extra pressure’ from the TPD, which caused ‘unrest and depression in the teams.’ Increasingly, then, the ambiguities of the TPD’s role were clarified as internal collective decision making gave way to external direction. Paradoxically, although Fordism relied upon tightly defined jobs, it produced a range of collective, organised, and cultural forms of resistance based on the individual, the workgroup, and the workforce. Teamworking, on the other hand, is based upon broad and flexible individual job descriptors and tight forms of mutual surveillance and control. Where Fordism was based upon—and generated—forms of work organisation to counter worker opposition, teamworking colonises the individual’s and the workgroup’s cultural terrain. But much of the critical literature registers the limits to the construction of a managerial hegemony on the new shop floor and the resilience of worker opposition. The evidence for any hegemonic effect is fragmentary and based upon projections of managerial ambitions rather than on any settled reality in the workplace. Indeed, teamworking may weaken rather than enhance managerial legitimacy precisely because it introduces concepts such as enlarged individual and team autonomy and control over operations. In practice, ceding such open-ended control over work organisation is extremely complex and difficult for management to deliver. Encouraging workers to expect

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greater control over work than firms can countenance or managers are able to provide may generate low trust. The language of teams provides workers with a powerful new cultural framework that can be turned against firms and managers or, at the least, enable them to ‘renegotiate the boundaries of managerial authority.’37 We shall return to this theme in the final chapter. The plant’s small leadership team struggled to cope with the demands of a rapidly growing workforce and embedding new products and new production lines. There was an awareness that the original concept of the team-based organisation was buckling under this pressure. However, the leadership team had no hard measures of team sociality, a major gap. ‘We didn’t have an organisational thermometer. We relied on walking about, talking, what our eyes saw. Nothing more.’ While there were no central systems to measure individuals or teams, managers did exercise judgement. During the plant’s start-up and growth phases, managers were visible on the line. You had your blue coat on most of the day. So you didn’t need any clinical measurement, you kind of knew, you were there, you could see what was working, see the results. If a team was falling behind you would get them together in real time. We never had an analytical system that drilled down into team dynamics: we dealt with problems in real time. Teams were never project managed, it was very organic. While the judgements of a small, tightly knit group of managers was sufficient during start-up, it was rapidly overtaken by expansion. Judgement, explained one HR manager, was not ‘a depth technology.’ We had pockets of knowledge, moments of insight, but no system of knowing. We didn’t have a technology to understand teams, all we had was our own judgement. Ironic: a high-tech company with such a lowtech approach to people and teams. Certainly, there was nothing like real-time, continuous measurement: nothing with that kind of analytical power.38 One key member of HR, with a background in psychological research observed: There was no central observatory tracking individuals against the norm. Why would you measure the soft stuff? We just believed that if we organised ourselves in teams that it would show in performance: hard measures such as yield, quality, scrap.39 Indeed, the plant’s information systems struggled to keep up with basic payroll issues, much less monitor workforce performance and behaviour.

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Paradoxically, then, there was no centralised, cumulative, or comparative knowledge base that the leadership team could interrogate to better understand how the dynamics of teamworking were unfolding inside Easter Inch. The technical limitations of the plant’s information systems were one powerful reason for this crucial limitation in managerial knowledge. However, even if sufficiently sophisticated information systems had been available, it is not certain that such a knowledge base would have been constructed. After all, the dispersal of power to the teams was based on the presumption that they alone could solve the problems of teamworking in practice. Constructing a centralised analytical database would have spoken of power outside the teams and provided management with knowledge, power, and purpose to intervene inside the teams, interventions that would have been entirely contrary to the vision of the team as a technology to expand freedom. CONCLUSION Narratives of self-subordination ignore the potential of HR systems to contain incompatible objectives and to generate a language of collective decision making that workers can mobilise against managerial control. For line workers, the plant’s main strengths were cultural and the weaknesses technical. Hierarchy was not immediate, personal, and obvious. Hierarchy was not entirely invisible, but it did require individuals to imagine hierarchy, to interrogate their routine experience, in order to make sense of the organisation’s structure through a miasma of day-to-day pleasantries, rhetorics of respect, and practices that rendered the egalitarian promise of teamworking plausible. We also saw that the ambiguous figure of the TPD carried the uncertainties of balancing production imperatives with team development, their personal authority, and the authority of the collective. Team autonomy limited their capacity for direct intervention. Each incursion into team autonomy came at the expense of the TPD’s legitimacy, especially in the eyes of the elect. Yet, for the team, there were few ways that TPDs could maintain their legitimacy, much less extend it. Inside the teams, newcomers stressed the autonomy of the team but did not necessarily balance this with the sense of self and collective discipline established by the original Brucefield teams and carried into Easter Inch by the elect. The elect bore a heavy responsibility for embedding the autonomy and internal disciplines required by Easter Inch’s radical vision of teamworking. The limits on centralised information systems meant that Easter Inch had severe shortcomings in terms of the governmentalist technologies. Easter Inch developed technologies of empowerment that were limited to the specific team and that had no way of understanding the population of individuals and teams across the plant. The systems of governmentality were not so much flawed as incomplete.

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NOTES 1. ‘Bootsy,’ MA, 1993. 2. Christopher Dandeker, Surveillance, Power and Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline from 1700 to the Present Day (Oxford: Polity, 1990), 23. 3. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1989), 95. 4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane, 1977). 5. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (London: Harvester, 1980), 154. 6. Interview, HR Director, January 2009. 7. Paul Hirst, ‘Foucault and Architecture,’ Architectural Association Files 26 (1994), 57. 8. Jeremy Bentham, cited in Janet Semple, Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 116. 9. Mike Gane, Baudrillard’s Bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 39. 10. Interview, Organisational Development Manager, November 2009. 11. Interview, HR Manager, 1993. 12. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, October 2008. 13. Patricia Findlay, ‘What Management Strategy? Labour Utilisation and Regulation at Scotland’s “Leading Edge,” ’ DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1990, 223–6 14. William Wiggenhorn, ‘Motorola U: When Training Becomes an Education,’ Harvard Business Review 68 (1990): 71. 15. Interview, Design Engineer, December 1991. 16. Interview, Organisational Development Manager, November 2009. 17. Manufacturing Associates Survey 3/49, Comments page. 18. James Barker, The Discipline of Teamwork: Participation and Concertive Control (London: Sage, 1999), 117–8. 19. Manufacturing Associates Survey 2/66, Comments page. 20. Fieldwork Interview, May 1993. 21. Interview, HR Manager, 1993. 22. Similarly, Barker, Discipline, 154. 23. Motorola, ‘Organisation and Roles,’ 1991. 24. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, November 2009. 25. Interview, HR Manager, 1993. 26. Easter Inch, Briefing, 06069–10 to 30. 27. Fiona Gifford, ‘A Study of Leadership in Motorola, Easter Inch,’ MBA diss., Edinburgh University, 1993, 59–64. 28. Interview, HR Associate, November 2009. 29. Interview, Engineering Manager, 1994. 30. Interview, HR Director, October 2010. 31. Manufacturing Associates Survey 3/52, Comments page. 32. Interview, MA, Fieldwork, May 1993. 33. Interview, TPD, Fieldwork, October 1992. 34. Interview, MA, Fieldwork, October 1992. 35. Interview, MA, Fieldwork, November 1992. 36. Manufacturing Associates Survey 3/63, Comments page. 37. Steven Vallas, ‘The Adventures of Managerial Hegemony: Teamwork, Ideology and Worker Resistance,’ Social Problems 50 (2003): 204. 38. Interview, HR Associate, November 2009. 39. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, November.

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INTRODUCTION The team was the basic unit of the Easter Inch factory’s organisation. The absence of supervisors meant that the teams were responsible for almost every function normally associated with managing and managers. In any case, managers were too few in number to personally supervise production, and the plant’s philosophy required that they refrain from intervention in day-to-day decision making. The virtual absence of managers meant that some other mechanism had to be created that served both as a means of developing and enforcing workplace discipline, in the narrow sense, while producing and underscoring both individual and team autonomy. Peer review was the mechanism explicitly designed to meet both objectives. Peer review was not a crude instrument of social control. Quite the opposite: peer review was regarded as the technology that allowed individuals to become more self-knowing and to exercise their freedom more expertly, the better to contribute to effective teamworking. The self-controlling self, writes Nikolas Rose, ‘calculates about itself, and that works upon itself in order to better itself.’1 Even the individual’s most private domain offers neither the opportunity for the most temporary of refuges before the psyche is exposed to interrogative technologies.2 The plant’s Manufacturing Associates (MAs) were not understood to be passive subjects to be inculcated with new values. Indeed, the MA was understood as an individual whose autonomy was an inevitable effect of—and essential to the possibility of— the plant’s unmanaged organisation. We shall look at how peer review was imagined and designed by the plant’s leadership team in the second section of the chapter. We begin, however, by sketching Foucault’s analysis of the history and importance of Christian confession for the development of Western organisational practices and the ways in which individuals are defined, make, and remake themselves. Now, it might seem preposterous to use Foucault’s insights into the structure of the confession, an innovation of early medieval Christianity, to shed light on human resource practices in a late twentieth-century multinational. However, as Foucault remarked during a seminar in 1982, his interests in Christianity were about production

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and were as materialist as those of Marx’s: ‘where any technique of production also requires modification of individual conduct—not only skills but attitudes.’3 We then turn to the design of peer review. Finally, in the third section, we turn to the experience of peer review in practice. Remember that what was being asked of the MAs was that individuals assess themselves and their peers, not just in terms of what they produce or the way that they worked, but what these signified about their attitudes and whether these were consistent with the plant’s philosophy. Work becomes not an activity to be performed and assessed in terms of volume, value, and quality but a text through which the individual can be read and judged. Specifically, we consider how the plant’s leadership understood and responded to unexpected expressions of individual and collective agency: namely, the collapse of both the disciplinary and developmental objectives of peer review in the face of workforce resistance and the failure to embed both dimensions into the rapidly expanding workforce. FOUCAULT AND CONFESSION The confession was central to Foucault’s incomplete and partially realised history of sexuality.4 Confession becomes the technique used for the making not just of sexualities, but of all forms of modern identity. The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence, at least the virtual presence, of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires confession. . . . [Confession] is finally, a ritual in which the expression alone . . . produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises salvation. . . . By virtue of the power structure immanent in it, the confessional discourse cannot come from above . . . through the sovereign will of a master, but rather from below, as an obligatory act of speech which, under some imperious compulsion, breaks the bonds of discretion or forgetfulness.5 In the preamble to a lecture, Foucault recounted a courtroom exchange in which the accused admitted his guilt but offered neither explanation nor motivation. The judge was indignant, for admission alone was not enough. It was not enough for the accused to admit guilt, to recognise the authority of the court, and to signal his readiness to accept its punishment. ‘Much more is expected of him,’ argued Foucault. ‘Beyond admission, there must be confession, self-examination, explanation of oneself, revelation of what one is.’6 This slippage between the religious and legal meaning of confession

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represents Foucault’s own intellectual journey, away from penology of Discipline and Punish and moving towards an examination of early Christian practices that were essential to his late work on the history of sexuality. Here, as elsewhere, Foucault knows that his audience was ever ready to find contemporary echoes in his classical musings. The danger is that the historical and philosophical strictures of genealogy all too easily give way to glib analogy. This is a recurring tension not just in Foucault but in governmentalist research more generally. A more generous interpretation would be that this is but one more example of Foucault’s tendency to use a term such as ‘confession’ as a stylistic catch-all for a wide range of practices.7 Indeed, this was the defence Foucault offered during a somewhat impatient exchange with an interviewer who pressed him on his surprisingly tidy accounts of complex historical processes. Foucault readily conceded that his accounts were suspiciously neat and that, in practice, long-run historical processes were ‘such a mess, such a shambles.’ His ‘very general definition,’ he insisted, was intended to avoid precision and analytical closure: What I mean by ‘confession’, even though I can well see that the term may be a little annoying, is all those procedures by which the subject is incited to produce a discourse of truth about his sexuality which is capable of having effects on the subject himself.8 If we substitute ‘himself’ for ‘his sexuality,’ there is no loss of meaning. Elsewhere Foucault expressed this will to confess as essential to Christianity: ‘Everyone . . . has the duty to know the faults he may have committed: he has to know the temptations to which he is exposed. And, moreover, everyone . . . is obliged to say these things to other people, to tell these things to other people, and hence, to bear witness against himself.’9 Here, Foucault is pointing to the myriad ways that confession moved from an exclusively religious role to become both prosaic and ubiquitous: [T]he confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life . . . and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself; in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else.10 If the confessional was appropriated by psychoanalysis, then this was but one version of the myriad ways that secular purposes and institutions

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have unconsciously adopted this method. Foucault expressed his thinking on the relationship between confession and government—by which he meant almost any form of settled social organisation—when he provided the questions that formed the course he delivered at the Collège de France in 1979–80: How is it that within Western Christian culture the government requires, on the part of those who are led, in addition to acts of obedience and submission, ‘acts of truth,’ which have this particular character that not only is the subject required to speak truthfully, but to speak truthfully about himself and his faults, his desires, the state of his soul etc? How was a type of government of men formed where one is required not simply to obey, but to demonstrate in stating it, that which one is?11 The particular appeal of the confessional mode lies in its reach into the most intimate spaces of our relationships and ourselves. Of course, this is not to say that the confessional mode is never subverted, evaded, ridiculed, or trivialised. Far from it: the confessional mode has become so ubiquitous as to be banal. However, even in its most debased form, we recognise the banality of particular confessions precisely because we are so familiar with the conventions and expectations of the genre. We have become so expert in the confessional mode that we are able to gauge the authenticity of the revelation and the integrity of the individual’s narrative.12 For this is Foucault’s central insight about the confessional mode: it long ago escaped the privacy of the confessional box to become a more or less universal process. ‘In fact,’ noted Foucault, ‘the organisation of the verbal confession, the act of the confession has underpinned our knowledge since the end of the middle ages, . . . and was the result of many types of both very visible and obvious, innumerable complex processes, through which Christianity binds individuals to demonstrate their truth and their truthfulness as an individual.’13 The confession is about the disclosure not just of what was hidden from others but also hidden from oneself: ‘to bear witness against himself.’14 The judgement of others first requires that the individual judges himself. Truth was a particularly important concept for Foucault, if never a straightforward one, and he went to great lengths to define his meanings. Truth was not something ethereal or given only to a select few but woven into every aspect of power and everyday life. ‘Truth,’ he insisted, was not ‘outside or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.’15 The production of truth was central to any system of governmentality. ‘My problem,’ Foucault told a group of historian interviewers, ‘is to see how men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth.’16 It

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is axiomatic for Foucault that although truth is highly contextual, there are nevertheless ‘general politics’ of truths that, while contested, shape the ways that arguments and evidence are considered and assessed. But while regimes of truth are dominated by ‘a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media),’ these are only the most visible, most durable institutions that produce truth. The importance of such institutions is in the ways in which they establish, legitimize, and generalise the mechanics of knowledge production. It is not that specific knowledge is unimportant but that these institutions produce the ways that knowledge in general is—and should be—produced: ‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements. ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relations with systems of power that produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it—a ‘regime’ of truth.17 There are innumerable other institutions in which different forms of knowledge are produced, contested, and regulated. However, in Foucault’s work, the recurring theme was how we imagine individuals as subjects of one kind or another: as delinquents, paupers, perverts. This was not yet another way of writing about social control. Rather, Foucault had a quite different purpose: that even in all these diverse, extreme settings, power and truth were predicated upon the subject’s capacity to exercise free will and choice. Power and knowledge are seldom surprised, if always perturbed, by resistance that speaks of freedom, however constrained. Perhaps Foucault’s most direct, although still oblique, discussion of contemporary technologies of subjectivity was in his remarks on the emergence of the individual confessional. As always, Foucault’s lectures on the long, slow development of ’technologies of the self’ were couched in terms of detailed historical accounts of ancient Greek philosophies and guides to living, and how these were appropriated, adapted, or forgotten by early and medieval Christian thought and practices. In particular, Foucault argued that the Fourth Lateran Council, convoked by Pope Innocent III in 1215, which deliberated for some 18 years, was pivotal in creating new religious practices of confession.18 The mechanical and psychologically empty penitential system of public, physical displays of contrition and mass absolution was displaced by confession, which made individual conscience and inwardness central to the practices of faith. Medieval confession spread from the monastery to the laity as a response to the threat of heresy, and this diffusion was accompanied by a shift from being a public event to a private process. Over time, the sacrament was psychologized: that sin lay not only in words and deeds but also in private thoughts. In language that paralleled Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and anticipated his History of Sexuality,

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John Bossy described the development of the private confessional box as ‘a new technology of the confessional’: ‘to seclude both priest and penitent from the mass of people who were otherwise thought likely to press against them.’19 The architecture of the Gothic cathedral was designed to produce a collective sense of wonderment, a glimpse of the sacred. The scale, proportions, and detail of the cathedral created a discursive site of sacred and temporal hierarchy and order that was intelligible only when filled with the public. For the pious, the experience of the divine was public. The confessional box, however, was completely private: the penitent was hidden from all, save the divine gaze.20 After all, the confessional box was designed to protect the privacy of the parishioner, while the fine mesh grill both allowed for the audibility and stopped any wandering fingers. The privacy of penitential architecture gave physical form to the psychologization of the confession. In part, the move from public to private confession was to diffuse power from Rome to the humblest parish priest.21 The parish priest became the focal point of a vast network of institutions and the long-run expansion of the priesthood.22 All of this was a significant rationalisation of religion. Sacramental penance had become, as Talal Asad observes, the universal discipline for creating the truthful conscience. . . . The church knew full well that confession was not an isolated act, that in its creative aspects, as in its incriminating ones, it was a special modality of dialogue informed by power, a unique process that linked the idea of bodily pain (here, or in the hereafter) with the exchange of question and answer in the pursuit of truth.23 The confession was the technique that allowed the priest to gauge the scope and depth of a parishioner’s religious knowledge as well as the venality of their sins. Indeed, the dissemination of the techniques for conducting sacramental confession was also an effective way of improving clerical education while also increasing the Church’s capacity to govern at a distance.24 Inevitably, once confession was defined as essential, if its effectiveness was assured, then this risked reducing the ritual to mere routine: routinisation could subvert personal sincerity; clerical education was necessary if confession was to develop and retain its penetrative force. The missionary and educative zeal of the Jesuits remained at odds with, for instance, the Jansenists who remained sceptical about the value of frequent confession.25 The codification of sin and the grading of penance provided a menu of pastoral responses. This was a vast literature, stripped of intellectual content, whose ‘practical orientation’ was symbolised by its organisational innovation of alphabetical ordering and indexing for ease of reference and rote learning.26 Conversely, penitents were also educated in the practicalities of their sacramental obligations: it was sinful, for instance, for a penitent to seek out a strange confessor in order to receive a less onerous path to absolution.27 This flood of didactic penitential manuals contained a complex moral

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arithmetic in which the Ten Commandments vied with the Seven Sins for popular understanding. Whereas the Ten Commandments were clear-cut, the varying grades and ambiguities of the Seven Sins made them ‘familiar, flexible, covering remedy as well as disease.’ ‘[T]he Sins were a more serviceable slate on which, guided by the priest, one might perform an annual calculation of the moral account or annual moral check-up; their prominence in the penitential season cast a shadow over the rest of the year.’28 Or, as Louis Chatellier puts it, the difficult act of seeing oneself clearly and understanding transgressions required a shift ‘from a controlled imagination to an analytical spirit applied in self-knowledge, . . . to make the devout into an “interior man.” ’29 The private confession did not displace public penance quickly or completely.30 After all, the logistics of individual confession were intimidating. Where the public confession and absolution of an entire town could be accomplished in minutes, hearing private confessions on a similar scale could involve an entire day.31 Similarly, for the most pious individuals, preparing for Easter confession could be preceded by several days of instruction and retreat, ‘the better to probe the depths of their soul.’32 Foucault was well aware of this, as well as that the diffusion of confessional practices was associated with their simplification. But this does not detract from his argument. Equally, the point is not the accuracy of the moral arithmetic of medieval believers, but the novelty of its very possibility. Ever analytical, the Jesuits monitored and reported on the solemnity and rigour of how parish priests conducted confession and other sacraments, as well as their volume and frequency.33 Gradually, over several generations, priests were equipped with a growing canonical literature about how to conduct confession, a process that effected a gradual standardisation of how priests administered the various sacraments.34 The increasing literacy of the priest not only distinguished him from his flock but better equipped him to meet the challenges of Protestantism.35 Clerical authority was necessary for the political value of confession since it inscribed hierarchy and discipline in the penitent, in the confessor, and in their relationship.36 For want of compelling historical evidence, it is easy to exaggerate the importance of the sacrament for the Catholic laity. However, the 1215 reforms proved impossible to deliver fully in practice: The idea of using confession to enlist the conscience as the supreme agency of moral control, however psychologically brilliant, was completely at odds with the social and mental universe of all but a small segment of the population. It is doubtful how far it had been fully assimilated by the majority of the clergy (who) continued to offer a religion of ceremonies of, relics, pious practices, charity, and communal values to the mass of ordinary believers. . . . What might in theory have been the greatest repressive movement in European history disintegrated before (the peasantry’s) largely mute tenacity.37

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Indeed, one priest in rural France in the early eighteenth century recorded that his parishioners were never more than desultory in their devotions, especially in fine weather.38 However, at the least, confession was now a serious routine for the examination of conscience, personal prayer, and self-improvement: a process that allowed the individual ‘to manage sin and guilt effectively.’39 But evidence of the impact of the individual auricular confession is not essential for Foucault’s argument. Again, it is important to remember that reconstructing the actual practice of confession is not Foucault’s purpose. Rather, Foucault’s argument is that the innovation of the auricular confession—with all its attendant manuals—was a crucial technology in the formation of the modern individual, lonely before God and himself.40 Foucault was well aware that the regular audit of the self by the self had deep roots in antiquity. Indeed, in the final years of his life, his lecture series at the Collège de France was devoted to understanding the complex relationship between Christian practices and ancient philosophy. Foucault argued that the practical philosophical exercises of the ancients were controlled by the individual the better to understand and cope with life’s vicissitudes. In Christianity, on the other hand, such practices became part of a power relationship in which the individual was subordinated and piety was conditional upon the routine renunciation of the self. For Foucault, this process of disseminating confessional practices after 1215 was an absolutely crucial moment in the history of subjectivity in the West, or in the relations between subjectivity and truth, when the task and obligation of truth-telling about oneself is inserted with the procedure indispensable for salvation, within techniques of the development and transformation of the subject by himself, and within pastoral institutions.41 Salvation becomes conditional upon telling the truth to oneself and a powerful other. The government of people requires, then, not just obedience but what Foucault terms ‘acts of truth.’ As is so often the case, it would be badly mistaken to read Foucault as describing what actually happened as opposed to the architecture of what ought to have happened. Far from being bleakly determinist, Foucault’s purpose here—as elsewhere—was to reveal the contingent and fragile nature of government in all its forms. Whereas the inquisition had sought to produce truth by inflicting bodily pain, the confession was predicated upon the assumption of a subject capable of reflection, whose truths were more profound if freely given. Words gradually displaced the mortified body as the medium making and demonstrating truth: truth was not visible on the body but had to be articulated by the individual.42 For Foucault, this was not so much a register of progress as the replacement of one method of discovering truth by

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another. The confession was not so much speaking of truth to power as a conversation in which the priest gradually became better equipped to generate further revelations. The priest became an active participant in an open-ended conversation, not just a passive listener. Inherent in this ritual was that confession can never be complete: the soul can never exhaust confession. Entry into church, far less the confessional box, was to enter a liminal space that signified leaving the workaday world behind. For Foucault, confession, despite the Church’s injunction that it be an act free from external compulsion, is inherently coercive. Although confession was no longer dragged from the body by physical force, it was predicated upon an unequal power relationship. The visceral nature of sovereign power had been superseded by an enveloping disciplinary power quietly exercised through ritual and a shared expectation about the right to interpret and judge. By definition, confession can never go far enough and so calls for permanent introspection and watchfulness. This new regime of perpetual penitence was predicated upon a new linkage between the procedures of verbal confession and the techniques of interpretation and selfexamination.43 According to Foucault, this linkage is decisive: not only did it give birth to the practice of exhaustive and permanent confession, but it also provided the first sketch of what became the Christian’s and, more generally, the Western individual’s subjectivity. Crucially, salvation now lay not through austere monasticism or saintly perfection but was a work of continual improvement. To confess is to renounce some aspect of the self; only through self-sacrifice can the confessing subject achieve some measure of truth. To speak the truth about oneself entails opening oneself up to the interpretation—and almost certainly the judgement—of others. As Jean-Michel Landy puts it: The political device behind the obligation to reveal the truth about oneself is laid bare. If Christianity instructs the subject to know himself, if it forces him to examine and verbalize what he is, it is because that quest will make him a subjected subject. By demanding that the Christian speak the truth about himself, he is forced on a quest that can only be undertaken from a position that brings him into subjection—since the relationship of the subject to his own ‘truth’ is mediated by an Other, and this Other requires submission and dependency. Behind the confession lies a political technology of obedience.44 Confessional techniques aimed first to reveal deviant thoughts and deeds and second to develop a better understanding of the signs or symptoms that are indicative of future misdeeds or impure thoughts. Deepening self-knowledge is, then, the necessary prelude to improved self-mastery, and self-mastery is, in turn, essential to a more complete obedience. Since a total sublimation of the self is impossible, confession is rendered perpetual and impossible, without hope of finality.

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There is a certain ambivalence in Foucault’s writing on modern man as a ‘confessing animal.’ There is—perhaps—some astonishment at how completely this confessional mode has come to dominate the ways in which individuals construct their identities. For Foucault, the confession becomes the central route to modern knowledge. Foucault reverses the Platonist, Christian, and Cartesian dualism that regards the souls as the prisoner of the body. Rather, argues Foucault, the concept of the soul reduces the body to mere instrument or machine, territorialises it, and licenses a textualising of its movement and instincts. The body is not thought outside the domain of articulated desires and expressed guilt feelings. . . . the sense of the individual that he/she is distinct entails the prevention of political action. Power maintains itself on the basis of separating and confining each persona separately, each in their confessional.45 Sacramental confession was the moment that opened up the self to reflection, examination, and self-management. Although there was the promise of consolation, this was a promise that offered no more than temporary respite from guilt. Thomas Tentler, perhaps the most distinguished modern historian of sacramental confession, accepts that the ritual opens up the psyche to new forms of discipline, tempered by the elusive goal of forgiveness. The element of psychological guilt as a central sanction is vitally important. For while it is true that the encounter with the priest entails submission and shame, the heart of the system is reliance on internal feelings of guilt. If the system is working, sinners will feel guilt outside the confession; and confession will help ensure that guilt is elicited independently of the presence of any other human body. The institutions of forgiveness belong most decidedly to a system of discipline primarily through guilt.46 For Foucault, it is, after all, but a short step from the enclosed space of the confessional box, under the watchful, hidden eye of the priest, to the solitary cells of Bentham’s Panopticon. Here, Foucault reflected, was the overarching theme of his life’s work: My objective for more than twenty-five years has been to sketch out a history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves: economy, biology, psychiatry, medicine and penology. The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value but to analyse these so-called sciences as very specific ‘truth games’ related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves.47

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DESIGNING PEER REVIEW To show a positive attitude: talks about and emphasises positive aspects of team goals and performance; positive about team members and the factory; makes constructive suggestions; gives recognition and praise to other team members/teams; has a will to do spirit; willing to give constructive and honest feedback to others.48 At first sight, peer review was a curious administrative mechanism. After all, peer review had no immediate or even obvious impact on production. Nor was peer review linked to promotion or reward. The categories reported by peer review were those behaviours and attitudes identified as crucial in the recruitment process: energy, seeking to improve oneself through interaction with others, commitment to task and to wider, less tangible social objectives. The managerial language was wholly positive: empowerment released energy, initiative, and commitment. However, the efficiency of teamworking was predicated upon an absence of conventional hierarchy and control. The extensive formal freedoms of teamworking were the necessary prerequisites of the plant’s flat structure and highly devolved controls over work processes. For the formal freedoms of teamworking to be realised in practice, however, required something more; that is, the formal freedoms of teams had to be underscored by MAs acutely aware of their individual and collective responsibilities. This awareness was to be made and reinforced through peer review. Peer review was not simply an addition to teamworking but was essential to the teamworking regime: ‘constant monitoring of the . . . subjective process of teams at work.’ Teamworking was, then, understood both as a release from one form of bureaucratic control and as essential to the creation of a new, deeper form of discipline exercised by individuals on themselves and their teams. In this sense, the absence of a clearly defined managerial ideal of the perfect MA or team was completely consistent with a regime designed at once to be cathartic, therapeutic, and disciplinary for the individual and the team. Peer review was intended to be a disciplinary and revelatory process simultaneously. ‘The philosophy of peer review,’ explained the plant’s organisational development manager, was that the interrogative process would generate visible, mutual self-control. Motorola pioneered peer review but only in a limited way in a few locations.49 However, this was sufficient to establish the legitimacy of peer review in the eyes of corporate Motorola. Peer review was a collective process to increase the individual’s regulation of the self. I start with a model that has two basic processes, disclosure and feedback. Knowledge of self and others increases. I believe that knowledge is the central mechanism in relationships. A team is a relationship and it has to have that knowledge process inside it. I have seen organisations’

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operating teams without building in those dynamic knowledge processes. The teams quickly falter and they don’t resolve conflict. I believe in peer review 100% as a knowledge device, vital to a learning—a self-learning—organisation.50 Peer review took the organisation’s design philosophy to its limit; that is, the organisation was designed with production at its core: peer review was the mechanism that required individuals to manufacture themselves. Peer review was an attempt to measure not just ‘Units, or Sigma Value, or Hours per Unit, or ROA, or cost levels, but our expectations of individuals in Teams.’ This approach is adopted because: Key characteristics such as skill, knowledge, experience and personality are reflected in the behaviour. Behaviour is observable, it can be reported reliably and be the subject of a constructive and welcomed feedback process.51 A member of the HR team noted the assumption that behaviour was measurable and a reliable indicator of the person: We were always judging behaviours. Of course, behaviour was understood as the manifestation of the person. In that sense we were making people accountable for themselves in a profound way. We judged each other as people. That’s one thing we found out through peer review: you can modify behaviours but values are much deeper and simply will not be managed. We didn’t know that when we started: we thought we could manage performance, behaviours and values.52 Peer review was intended to be a continuous process, not restricted to, say, quarterly audits. While production indicators such as efficiency, scrap, and quality were measured and reported continuously, the assessment of an individual’s behaviour could not so easily ‘be recorded on a day to day basis, however, we should be reviewing the trends we see in the team and individual behaviour over the review period. What we discuss should be specific instances of behaviour.’ Individual information needs to be fed back and evaluated for accuracy and action. While overall team performance needs to be evaluated reasonably regularly, often to ensure that it stays on track, it may be difficult for the team to evaluate each individual in depth with the same frequency. It may have little value. The team may decide to draw a review schedule so that each person receives a full review once a quarter. However, each person needs to agree to the team evaluation of their contribution on a monthly basis. Monthly reviews would be when the individual scores 1 point above or below the score attained last month,

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All the peer review documentation was clear that critical feedback should not be confined to the formal reviews but part of everyday life: ‘We need to give feedback all the time, not just once a month.’ The model was based on a simple assumption that, for most, the review would register routine infractions that would require only the most modest changes in attitudes and behaviours. Equally, it assumed that the MAs would welcome the judgement of their peers as an opportunity to improve their performance. Peer review was strategically vital as a control mechanism but also as the main vehicle for challenging and so confirming the ideal of the empowered MA. Peer review aimed to make the self more transparent to the individual and to the team. Peer review was the moment when the team self-consciously turned in on itself. It was also an efficient mechanism in its use of colleagues as continuous assessors. The concept of peer review was threefold: first, to force the individual to articulate a narrative of his- or herself, together with their team; second, to establish, then deepen a new relationship between the individual and the group as a constant, exterior check on the individual’s fidelity to that narrative; finally, over time, to make successive peer reviews develop a consistency to the individual’s narrative that would lend it deepening authority. Of course, peer review was not an open-ended therapeutic conversation. This was not about developing what Foucault termed the ‘art of living’ but a limited, functional exercise whose objective was to allow MAs to make and remake themselves more productive. To paraphrase Foucault, all those who worked at Easter Inch had a confessional obligation imposed upon them, a duty to explore who they were, to admit the faults to which they had succumbed, and, finally, to act as confessors to others. This obligation and the structure of peer review also spoke to the possibilities of empowerment. At its most fundamental level, empowerment meant that individuals were routinely, tangibly answerable to themselves and to others, rather than controlled by distant management, formal rules, or abstract notions of organisational culture. Of course, the unfolding judgement of the team and the confessant’s response also refined members’ capacity to reflect upon themselves and others. The practice was cumulative and expansive. The self and others can be interpreted and interrogated more expertly, more dispassionately. Unlike the confession, however, there was neither a confessor nor a script. In this sense, then, the team became both a confessor and counsellor working without an organisational script. Peer review was a route to self-knowledge. The data was compiled so that the individuals’ scores could be compared to the team’s range and, if necessary, broken down into particular attributes, the better to identify an individual’s failings. The ultimate aim was that MAs would stand as constant witness over themselves, observing, assessing, and

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correcting their behaviours and attitudes. To talk was to improve. To hear testimony from close co-workers rather than remote managers was designed to bolster the credibility of the process. Co-workers’ intimate knowledge of each other was reinforced in the ritual of peer review: the depth of knowledge was developed and demonstrated through the accumulation of testimony. This was to remind individuals that nothing could be hidden from the continuous scrutiny of others. More importantly, however, peer review was not so much about what individuals deliberately hid form others as what others revealed about what confessants unconsciously hid from themselves. To speak in the confessional mode was the responsibility of every MA. The freedom of the team built into the organisation’s fabric was tempered by the personal and collective responsibility invoked through peer review. A searching review and thoughtful confessant were seen as reciprocal gifts, one to the other. It is, of course, extremely doubtful that many MAs engaged in this perpetual labour of vigilance. However, that was precisely what was expected of them if peer review was to operate effectively. For how else could peers be judged, and so improved, if they were not carefully observed not just in terms of performance but also in their words, silences, gestures, and hesitations? The teams were advised to be alert to how they—and others—‘lived the values through the behaviours’: body language could, for instance, be read for withdrawal from team meetings. There was no need to wait for ‘wry comments or asides’; better ‘to nip any problems in the bud’ by having ‘a quiet word’ with individuals, not just so that they would know that they were being observed but also so that they could take their own ‘corrective action’ before it became the subject of a peer review. Any of the behaviours—visible markers of an individual’s values—could be scored not just through the binary of present/absent but could be graded as present and adequate (or not) or improving, static, or declining—all with some notion of the rate of improvement or deterioration. Each point had associated remedial actions. The act of holding others to account invited individuals to monitor their own behaviours in a similarly precise manner. Reflection about another also increases the individual’s knowledge of the behaviours, how they may become manifest, how they may be scored, and how they may be improved. Governing others becomes a method to make ourselves more governable. Peer review was, like confession, a ritual: it took place within a certain cycle, in a specified physical setting, and directed by a set of protocols. Production was halted. No time limit was set on the peer review session. The entire team—without exception—sat in a semicircle facing the two confessants seated facing their peers. The staff facilitator sat at the end of the semicircle and slightly behind, just out of sight of the team and the confessants. The process would proceed with each MA in turn assessing the task performance, the practical and psychological contribution to the team, the individual’s commitment, and the extent to which the person embodied and projected the plant’s values. As each individual spoke, all other participants

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were to remain silent. All participants were expected to be careful that their demeanour or body language conveyed no meaning. Peer review was a significant event and was expected to be taken extremely seriously: there was no rule that forbad laughter, but it was understood that laughter was inappropriate. Remaining silent until the end had two purposes: first, to avoid any personalisation of exchanges and, second, to force each successive contributor to extend, develop, and deepen the comments of their predecessors. Thus, the team’s judgement would be cumulative and so less identified with specific individuals. In a sense, this was a reversal of the confessional order. The team spoke almost as confessors to the two MAs who heard known, suspected, and mysterious truths about themselves. Just as there was to be no dialogue until the team had delivered its verdict, so there was no switching of places during the process. Equally, if the confessant became upset or argumentative, there were to be no conciliatory or consolatory gestures. The concept was to place deviant and marginal attitudes and behaviours temporarily at the centre of the group, the better to define them as deviant and render them even more marginal. Again, the plant’s organisation development agreed that the formal setting was intended to ‘feel unfamiliar, to put people—literally—in a different place. We required people to get beyond— behind—their immediate, emotional reactions; to think, rather than feel.’54 The facilitator would intervene directly only in the most exceptional or extreme moments. Normally, the facilitator would do no more than ensure that the MAs delivered their judgements in turn. The silent confessant was not to interrupt the process and, only at the end, to acknowledge the judgement, but not to challenge or offer mitigation. After the peer review, the MA confessant was expected to reflect upon their team’s assessment and consider ways to improve their performance and psychology before they were next reviewed. Peer review was, in part, a trigger for personal reflection. The experience of being assessed by one’s equals was, in turn, expected to make individuals more competent to assess themselves and others. Peer review, again like confession, was a ritual designed to be one in which the individual learnt how to behave, how and when to stay silent, how and when to speak. Peer review was not public in that participation was restricted to the team. Equally, it was not public in the sense that the ritual was not split into participants and spectators: everyone was a participant, however reluctantly. The team becomes a collective confessor with the authority to prompt and then interpret the individual’s behaviour, to pass judgement, and to hear the individual’s response. Finally, the team/confessor hears the individual’s reaction and determines its adequacy. The very structure of peer review acknowledged the individual’s autonomy and right as a speaking subject. Similarly, peer review, like confession, was productive— and reproductive—of identities: the penitent individual, the silence of passive resistance, or the helpful team anxious to contribute to the individual’s rehabilitation or improvement. The confession produces confessants and confessors, produces obedience, penitence, resistance. Peer review demanded that

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individuals retrace their actions and motives in search of transgression in thought or deed. The process was predicated upon the assumption that the self was inherently guilty and was geared to find fault, not to praise. Also, in peer review, individuals moved between the roles of confessor and confessant, radically dispersing the power to speak, to hear and to judge. Just as the promised closure of confession was endlessly deferred by its iterative nature, so also peer review was predicated upon a conception of the individual as always in danger of transgressing. Although the confessional ritual of peer review was designed as a celebration of autonomy, the monthly cycle necessarily produced a constant unease in the individual and a readiness in the group to pursue further confessions and categorisations.55 At the core of the Easter Inch philosophy was the concern with how the self makes, and fails to make, itself through dialogue into the ’empowered associate.’ Motorola did not, however, provide authoritative interlocutors to channel these strategic conversations. Facilitation was distinct from all of the plant’s other coordinative functions performed by the teams. The devolution of control and coordination tasks was efficient and also symbolic. The devolution of what were normally ‘managerial’ tasks meant that the plant’s leadership team could not maintain their authority by claiming privileged expertise or a monopoly of specific tasks. Leadership authority required an acceptance of the inversion of hierarchy and a capacity to embody these new virtues. The humble role of facilitator in peer review was the most tangible symbol that the plant was understood to be an organic whole. After all, a favourite metaphor among the leadership team was that the workforce was ‘a tribe’ and they were ‘elders.’ The labour of vigilance could be efficiently and legitimately performed only by the tribe as a whole. The leadership team was subject to peer review, no less than the MAs. Foucault was at pains to emphasise the difficulties of embodying the habits of confession and, indeed, the interpretive role of the facilitator and the confessor. But there was no corporate equivalent to the confession manuals that guided uncertain priests or neglectful penitents. Facilitation by staff sponsors was extremely restrained. ‘It was difficult to find the time to reflect upon what you had experienced. There were dramatic moments, but mostly people were very quiet.’ This silence was interpreted as based on anxiety rather than reflection. Direction was forbidden, so facilitation was, at most, oblique. For one experienced HR manager, this required restraint and self-discipline: ‘it was a test. I constantly had to stop myself from intervening to increase the pace of the group dynamic and deepen the process. You had to become comfortable with silence and deliberately miss opportunities for interventions. The most you could do was nod to encourage someone, but you had to remain on the edge of the group rather than become its focus. Things had to be going very wrong before you could step in.’ For management, the primary purpose of peer review was developmental, but it was also the prelude to ‘corrective action of unacceptable performance and behaviour.’ If the individual failed to respond to a collective

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admonishment, then the team could decide to trigger the Corrective Action Procedure (CAP). CAP was a more formal and focused discussion of performance that involved the team, the individual, and a facilitator from the Personnel Team. Again, the team was the primary agent in this process, not the facilitator sitting in from Personnel. The facilitator’s role was ‘supportive, to help maintain the direction of the conversation, . . . but not to get involved in the detail.’ CAP was rarely used. Initially, the facilitator’s main function was to limit the teams to addressing performance and ‘behaviours’ rather than ‘attitudes and values’: ‘some of the teams could go too far and try to fix “attitudes.” Because CAP was partly a continuation of Peer Review and partly the first step in the normal formal disciplinary process, the facilitator’s job was difficult. The facilitator had to make sure that a corrective action was agreed upon based on performance that could be reviewed afterwards. Attitudes can’t be reviewed in the same way. Associates can observe— experience—behaviours, but that can’t be enough for an escalation to a formal disciplinary process.’ If CAP did not produce the agreed improvement, then a member of the executive team attended all meetings as an observer. ‘In theory, CAP can end in dismissal; in practice, it never did. A couple of people left during the process, but they were not dismissed in the traditional sense.’ The invocation of CAP was, in itself, a recognition of the limits of peer review. The objective, however, was not ‘to give peer review teeth [but] to bring the individual back into the team. Punishment is not the purpose of CAP. A CAP also forced the team to think that—maybe—they had failed the individual in some way, that—maybe—the team had not worked hard enough to help the individual improve.’ The plant’s leadership was acutely aware of the novel, demanding, and strategically important role of peer review in the plant’s organisation. Peer review was a powerful tool. It was a tough process: tough on the individual; tough on the teams; tough on the organisation to oversee the whole process The decision to sustain the peer review process even when the plant had expanded to four thousand associates was about keeping a strong element of the original concept: an active culture, individuals can’t rest on their laurels.56 For the architect of the peer review, however, the process was not just of strategic importance to the organisation but also emblematic of a philosophy that pursued self- and collective discipline through enhanced individual freedom. Being free is impossible; becoming free is even more impossible, [pause] unthinkable, but it’s what we have to do [pause] . . . have to try. In a small way, that was the thinking behind Easter Inch, especially peer review. We are told that work is where we’re held captive, where ‘the manager’ represents the authority of ‘the father.’ Making people free,

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or giving them the chance to be a bit freer was a way of reducing overheads and inflexibility. We reversed conventional organisational thinking: by allowing—or making—the individual to develop, that was our first productive act. There was nothing utopian in our thinking: it was hard-headed every step of the way.’57

THE EXPERIENCE OF PEER REVIEW The greatest help to us all in this process is to remember at all times to respect the individual, in this way we can make the Performance Review a powerful process for personal and team development. . . . This situation may involve us in saying things which at first sight someone might not want to hear so we need to think before we speak.58 The rituals of peer review were learnt, or rather constructed, quickly. Initially, ‘people didn’t know what to make of it. Nobody had experienced anything like it before. There was no manual to tell you what to do. You couldn’t prepare for it. Everyone was used to a supervisor telling them how they were doing, not their workmates. . . . It was strange.’ Some peer reviews were small, with around eight participants; others were much larger, with up to 20 participants. All MA meetings, including peer reviews, shared a backdrop of the bustle and noise of production. Over the course of 18 months, the MAs understood how the mechanics of peer review operated. However, the purpose of peer review became more, not less, obscure, as the teams became more experienced in the system’s operation. In our first survey, twothirds of respondents confirmed that they understood ‘what peer reviews are trying to achieve.’ Only 12% were completely unsure of peer review’s purpose. Eighteen months later, employee opinion was almost equally divided, with 20% neutral. From the first, peer review meetings were unpopular, and their unpopularity grew over time. Never more than one in ten of the workforce ‘looked forward to peer review meetings,’ and never less than 60% dreaded them. Interestingly, almost two-thirds—with a peak of four out of five—of MAs consistently reported that peer reviews did nothing ‘to get rid of tensions in the team.’ Paradoxically, although peer review meetings were widely despised, there is strong survey evidence that the teams learnt to draw the sting from the process. Although between 24% and 37% ‘felt intimidated’ by peer review meetings, the percentage who were not intimidated ranged from 37% to 49%. This suggests that, although a significant minority remained ‘intimidated’ by peer review, a sizeable group learnt how to cope with the demands of the process. Three-quarters of MAs consistently reported disliking having to assess their teammates, and fewer than 12% were ever in favour of it. Conversely, being assessed by others was

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viewed more positively by between 22% and 30% of MAs. Some 50–60% of MAs were, however, as uncomfortable with being assessed themselves as they were with assessing others. Over time, peer review was understood as a process that damaged ‘the confidence of the team.’ So, while peer review was always understood to be corrosive to the team’s collective identity, this perception hardened over time. After 18 months, 79% of MA respondents disagreed with the statement that peer reviews ‘help to develop the confidence of the team,’ and the percentage who strongly disagreed had risen from 27% to 44%. Differences over peer review were most pronounced amongst the group who had helped translate the philosophy of teamworking into practices—the elect. For them, using the formal interrogative peer review process in newly formed teams was premature and damaging to the complex process of instilling the necessary parameters of freedom and discipline. Where teams sustained the interrogatory purpose of peer review, this proved deeply divisive. ‘People came back from peer review meetings with red eyes from crying.’59 Confirmatory reviews involved the entire team, but confrontations were intensely personal: ‘They all say what they think and you have to sit there and stay silent—character assassination.’ For another MA, the risk of peer review deteriorating into ‘mob rule’ was sufficient for her to question the team’s capacity for decision making in general. At extremes, challenging poor performance jeopardised the personal authority of the elect and even risked being called an informant, ‘a grass.’ Indeed, argued Wilma, one of the elect, peer review could undermine the natural discipline of the team: You have to watch that you don’t stand out and make yourself unpopular. We all know each other well in the team and you don’t want to fall out. You can give folk bad marks in the peer review but then they keep that in their heads forever. It just creates bad feeling. Also, because the peer review scores go towards your pay you don’t want to affect that. You don’t want to make things tougher financially for people. I don’t think that it’s right that peer review scores count towards your wages. Let’s face it, you don’t work here for the love of the job; you work here for the money.60 Peer review was a public space and so immediate that the elect were unable to exercise the necessary personal authority to build acceptable norms as the common sense of the new teams. For the elect, team performance and behavioural norms were much more readily developed through a series of informal exchanges around immediate, concrete issues. More fundamentally, there was a crucial fault line among the elect between those for whom an individual should be judged solely on work performance and others prepared to scrutinise behaviour as a proxy for an individual’s psyche. This difference weakened the cohesion of the elect still further.

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Peer review was neutralised by passive resistance. If the individual did not ask questions after their evaluation, then the process stopped without dialogue. The tone of the confessant in reply was almost always protective of self and others, seldom accusatory. Just enough was said to convey a sense of authenticity. The process involved self-preservation more than self-discovery. The most common form of passive resistance was that each successive speaker would simply repeat the comments of their predecessor. Attempts by facilitators to inject a critical edge into the team’s observations either proved vain or were interpreted as an illegitimate attempt to ‘act like a manager.’ For plant management, the greatest abuse was to neutralise the process. Of course, silence could not simply be attributed to resistance. Silence could—and often did—signify the failure of the confessant and the team to imagine something worth confessing. Just as the move to the private confession placed the onus on individuals to articulate their weaknesses, so peer review implied that attitudes could not be easily or reliably read from behaviour: such judgements involved considerable and sophisticated labour of interpretation by confessant and confessor. Few MAs felt that they had secrets to reveal about themselves or others. Again, for management, this was interpreted as a failing of the MAs to ‘give themselves’ to peer review. No act, however mundane, was innocent of meaning. The confessional form seeks to uncover motive and guilt in even the simplest act. One HR facilitator, frustrated by one team’s refusal ‘to really interrogate each other’s performance,’ intervened to challenge the men in one team that they were ‘acting too much like mothers’ by refusing to use their scores to discriminate performance across their team. Teams that simply allocated the same scores to all denuded the process not just of its disciplinary intent but also of the system’s development dynamic. In other words, reciprocal scoring was a failure to act on the individual and the collective disciplinary and development elements of teamworking. The alternative to reciprocal scoring was collective retaliation against anyone who continued to use the scale to discriminate among individuals. Where teams sustained the interrogatory purpose of peer review, this proved deeply divisive. Individuals who continued to use the scoring system to discriminate amongst their peers soon drew retaliatory scoring from the team as a whole. As one self-styled Motorolan put it, his readiness to apply discriminatory scoring rigorously when he transferred to a new team had been ‘tamed’: ‘If you come in here and start giving people 2’s, which is saying that there’s room for improvement, people will stop talking to you. So you change and start giving people higher scores. The minimum you give is a 3.’61 The prospect of retaliatory scoring generally proved sufficient to tame MAs who remained faithful to the original confessional logic of peer review.62 In an attempt to restore the critical purpose of peer review, management withdrew experienced MAs for short refresher courses in peer review’s purpose and procedures. Ross reflected on how his friend Raz returned from the refresher session ‘and started to give people 1’s and 2’s and become a bit more critical. After a while he settled back into

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giving people 3’s and 4’s.’ Passive resistance, bordering on a boycott, undermined the authority not just of individuals who adhered to differential scoring but of peer review as a practice and as a concept. By losing its resonance as part of the public language of the factory, peer review became something considered legitimate by only part of the leadership team.63 Peer review was stripped first of its authority, then of its efficacy. Peer review shifted from being a vehicle that produced self-reflection and team discipline to a process that threatened to diminish the legitimacy of teamworking in general. For Foucault, confessional technologies achieve their maximum power only when their authority is completely accepted by all participants: ‘The penitent must not only accept the penalty, but also recognise its usefulness and indeed its necessity.’64 Any discontent about another team member or a factory-level decision had to be transformed into a discontent about themselves. Discontent had to be turned inwards, not projected outwards. When asked whether peer review prompted soul-searching at night, one MA replied, ‘too busy to think about it during the day; too exhausted to worry about it at night. [pause] You had to do it. The trick was doing it without really doing it.’ A failure to engage with the peer review process was read by the management team as testimony to the depth of repression, a clinging to outmoded versions of authority invested in an external manager. In short, far from dislodging management’s belief in peer review, each setback simply confirmed the need for the process. The obstacles to peer review and its operational difficulties were read by factory management as testimony to its psychological—and so organisational—value. The failings of the crucial governmentalist technology were read as symptomatic of the need for further refinement, not that they were fundamentally flawed. The peer review format left no space for the silent confessant to challenge, qualify, far less reject, the team’s verdict. One MA described her experience of sitting silently while her team reviewed her performance, productive and moral: ‘it’s like you’re there but not there. It’s like you’re outside yourself looking at yourself in the centre of the circle being discussed.’65 In the confessional box, silence was symbolic of the penitent’s deference in the face of the priest, the Church, and God. Silence in Easter Inch, by contrast, did not necessarily symbolise deference but could be a form of resistance. Silence or a cursory repetition of the previous comment was a failure to judge. This was read as a failure of the refusing individuals, rather than a systemic flaw of peer review. This was resistance through repetition, each repetition representing a collective and public parody of peer review. Such subversion of peer review was interpreted by management as selfish, immature, and self-defeating: it was to deprive oneself—and rob others—of the means for greater self-knowledge. The developmental potential of the process was thwarted and its disciplinary effect neutralised. This subversion of peer review allowed, or rather insisted, that the individual retained their privacy. The private self remained unexamined by the team. Resistance should have been expected, even welcomed, as inevitable. Resistance could

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have been read as a sign of learning and development. Equally, there was no mechanism for a dissatisfied MA to challenge the verdict outside the team. Afterwards, this left many with a complex, lingering sense of embarrassment, guilt, anger, and frustration. Many reported a visceral response to the psychological process. For a SAM (mobile phone) line MA, ‘it made my flesh crawl’—‘it stuck with you; a nagging pain like a sore back,’ as another MA put it. There was no sense of resolution. Here, the design of peer review was flawed or, rather, incomplete. The noninterventionist role of the facilitator left little scope for direct influence over the process. Indeed, such an intervention would have jeopardised the integrity of the process as entirely organic, spontaneous, and bottom-up. However, there were no attempts to deploy exercises that would allow individuals and teams to recognise their failings and achievements more accurately, nor practices that individuals could use to improve themselves. In turn, this would have deepened the reach of peer review. What was left was peer review as censure, not as a tool for self- and collective improvement. Self-improvement could begin only once transgressors had acknowledged their flaws, as identified by their peers. Remember, only in the most extreme cases, was peer review imagined to be a moment in a disciplinary process. The rationale for peer review was that its purpose was to develop virtues, not to chastise or shame or compel obedience. The final collapse of the original peer review was prefigured by a series of set piece management attempts to restore the system’s credibility. These events proved to be the final act of peer review in its original interrogatory form. The crisis meetings were led by facilitators who led the process, rather than watching from the sidelines: there was no veneer of team-led discussion. In one team, it took the facilitator—Emma—only a few minutes to establish that 21 of the 23 participants in the meeting were utterly opposed to peer review in theory and in practice. Even the minority of two added only minor qualifications to the majority’s outright hostility, leaving no space for Emma to change the direction of the discussion. Linda then tried asking what the team found objectionable about peer review, to be met with a barrage of voices. Again, she asked each participant in turn what they valued about peer review in an effort to prise open some differences among team members in order to start a debate. All participants repeated their deep misgivings about ranking each other, especially when this was linked to pay awards. After two hours, Emma was forced to concede that they had reached stalemate. From this moment, the original peer review system was effectively suspended throughout the factory. CONCLUSION Just as confession represents an attempt to sanctify everyday life, so peer review was an attempt to produce ‘ideal people working in an ideal factory.’66

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Confession and absolution became instruments of control of the faithful much more than their consolation. For Foucault, the auricular confession represents a double move. First, it created the possibility of a new kind of autonomous individual, answerable to himself and to God. Second, the private confession was a crucial part of catholic reform movement, which elevated pastoral intervention in society over the veneration of piety derived from the seclusion of monasticism. Confession was, in part, about civilising the Church, as well as expanding the reach and depth of its discipline over the priesthood and the laity. Peer review becomes just a local example of a confessional mode that is a commonplace of modernity. Unlike the Church, however, the original peer review was not designed to produce centralised, cumulative, and comparative knowledge. Peer review, more than any other Easter Inch practice, explicitly represented a will to empower. Peer review exemplified the type of indirect governance of individuals and the social that Foucault alluded to with his notion of ‘conduct of conduct,’ a management style that sought to produce responsible self-governing subjects. There is a paradox here. Foucault suggests that we are all too ready to confess, that we are familiar with the rituals and requirements of a seemingly infinite variety of confessions. But peer review was far from popular. Peer review was an intense metaphor for the factory’s organisation: transparent, reflective, demanding, and, above all, productive. Peer review remained something that caused anxiety and was very quickly treated with scepticism, if not absolute distrust. Peer review was welcomed only by a small minority and then only for a short while. The habit of confession was, contrary to Foucault, not so easily acquired. After all, the aim was that the confessant would revel in their candour, be appreciative of his peers’ identification of weaknesses, and, most important of all, be improved. Peer review was, then, a porous and fragile technology: porous in that individuals can escape the governance effect by paying lip service to it, at least for a while; fragile in that peer review or, indeed, any governmentalist system is utterly reliant upon the active participation of the population or at least a significant and committed minority. If, on the other hand, there is a large-scale withdrawal of active consent, then the wider governmentalist system is placed in jeopardy. Peer review required active consent to be productive but became instead a site of contest. The experience of the flaws of peer review, especially MA resistance, did not generate a typology or scale of individual failings comparable to the minute particularisation of sin that followed the privatisation of confession. Peer review became a parody of confession: a ritual of disclosure and discomfort became one of silence and refusal. The haste of each speaker’s contribution told of a rejection of the form, a denial of judgment. The ritualised pressure of the will to truth was refused. For Foucault, power both produces too much and too little. For, in peer review as in any other interrogatory system, each transgression identified by the team was also a measure of the individual’s autonomy. Where the transgression is known but not identified, discussed, and assessed, then there can be no disciplinary effect.

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NOTES 1. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1989), 7. 2. Barbara Townley, ‘Performance Management and the Emergence of Management,’ Journal of Management Studies 30 (1993): 228. 3. Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self,’ in Michel Foucault: The Essential Works, Vol. 1: Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1994), 225. 4. Stewart Elden, ‘The Problem of Confession: The Productive Failure of Foucault’s History of Sexuality,’ Journal for Cultural Research 9 (2005): 26. 5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality I: The Will to Knowledge (Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane, 1979): 82–3. 6. Michel Foucault, ‘The Dangerous Individual,’ in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988), 126. 7. Jeremy Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000), 38–9. 8. Michel Foucault, ‘Confessions of the Flesh,’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1988), 209, 215–6. 9. Michel Foucault, ‘Christianity and Confession,’ in Michel Foucault: The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvie Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 171. 10. Foucault, Sexuality, 59; Chloe Taylor, The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’ (London: Routledge, 2009), 77–9. 11. Michel Foucault, ‘On the Government of the Living,’ in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy Carrette (London: Routledge, 1999), 154. 12. Andreas Fejes and Magnus Dahlstedt, The Confessing Society: Foucault and Practices of Lifelong Learning (London: Routledge, 2013), 40–5. 13. Michel Foucault, Du Gouvernement des Vivants (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2012), 100. 14. Michel Foucault, ‘About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,’ Political Theory 21 (1993): 211. 15. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ in The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. II: Power, ed. James Faubion (London: Penguin, 2002), 131. 16. Michel Foucault, ‘Questions of Method,‘ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 79. 17. Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ 132. 18. John O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 19. John Bossy, ‘The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (1975): 30. 20. David Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 19–20. 21. Jeremy Tambling, Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990), 38–9. 22. Tadhg Ó Hannracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini 1645–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 60. 23. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 96, 118–21.

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24. Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profane (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 205; Michael Haren, Sin and Society in Fourteenth-Century England: A Study of the Memoriale Presbiterorum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40–6. 25. Joseph Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 1580–1730 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 267–8. 26. Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 30–3. 27. Henry C. Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church: Vol. 1: Confession and Absolution (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1896), 360. 28. John Bossy, ‘Moral Arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments,’ in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 219; Alois Hahn, ‘Contribution a la Sociologie de la Confession et Autres Formes Institionalisees D’Aveu,’ Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales (1986): 54–68. 29. Louis Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 41–2. 30. Mary Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in ThirteenthCentury France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 90–102. 31. Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter-Reformation (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999), 99. 32. Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 222. 33. Jennifer Selwyn, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 47, 135. 34. Nicole Lemaitre, ‘Confession Privee et Confession Publique dans les Paroisses du XVIe Siecle,’ Revue d’Histoire de L’Eglise de France 69.183 (1983): 190. 35. Henry Phillips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12–13. 36. Wietse De Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden, NV: Brill, 2001), 138–40. 37. Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 337–8. 38. Jean Delumeau and Jeremy Moiser, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation (London: Burns & Oates, 1977), 139–40. 39. David Myers, ‘Poor, Sinning Folk’: Confession and Conscience in CounterReformation Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 298. 40. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Penguin, 1991), 183–4. 41. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982 (London: Palgrave, 2001), 364. 42. Peter Von Moos, ‘Occulta Cordis: Controle de Soi et Confession au Moyen Age,’ Medievales 29 (1995): 136. 43. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–75 (London: Verso, 2003), 174–5. 44. Jean-Michel Landy, ‘Confession, Obedience, and Subjectivity: Michel Foucault’s Unpublished Lectures On the Government of the Living,’ Telos 146 (2009): 122. 45. Tambling, Confession, 85.

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46. Tentler, Sin and Confession, 347. 47. Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self,’ in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988a), 17–8. 48. Motorola, Easter Inch, ‘Peer Review,’ Internal Briefing Document, May 1993. 49. Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, The Wisdom of Teams. Creating the High-Performance Organization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), 187. 50. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, December 1992. 51. Motorola, Easter Inch, ‘Peer Review: A User’s Guide,’ 17. 52. Interview, HR Associate, November 2009. 53. Motorola, Easter Inch, ‘Peer Review: Reference,’ 17–21. 54. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, November 2009. 55. John Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 100–9. 56. Interview, Easter Inch, General Manager, October 2010. 57. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, November 2009. 58. Motorola, Easter Inch, ‘Peer Review—Standard Operating Procedure,’ 1992, 24, 31. 59. Interview, MA, June 1993. 60. Interview, MA, May 1993. 61. Interview, MA, April 1993. 62. Alan McKinlay and Philip Taylor, ‘Power, Surveillance and Resistance: Inside the “Factory of the Future,” ’ in The New Workplace and Trade Unionism, ed. Peter Ackers, Chris Smith, and Paul Smith (London: Routledge, 1996), 279–300; Alan McKinlay and Philip Taylor, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Foucault and the Politics of Production,’ in Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self, ed. Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey (London: Sage, 1998), 173–90. 63. Mark Haugaard, ‘Power and Truth,’ European Journal of Social Theory 15 (2012): 82. 64. Foucault, Abnormal, 182. 65. Interview, MA, April 1993. 66. Interview, HR Vice President, June 2011.

6

‘Just Like Any Other Factory’

INTRODUCTION Easter Inch was a practical experiment in implementing radical ways of organising and supervising work in teams. Equally, Easter Inch was a practical expression, not just of the ways that a particularly volatile, globalised market was developing but also of what Motorola understood as a coherent, corporate philosophy. The Motorola philosophy articulated a way of governing and a way of being governed that spoke of expanding individual freedom as crucial to organisational innovation and competitiveness. The Motorola philosophy was both of its time and part of much larger neoliberal project. Power, as conceived by Motorola, was most effective when it was utterly self-effacing: powerful individuals thrive—their very existence is validated—by how quickly and thoroughly they can empower others, even as they disempower themselves. This was the logic that was expressed in Easter Inch’s flat organisational structure and how the plant’s leadership team conducted themselves. In this chapter, we focus on three moments that altered the politics of production in Easter Inch. First, we examine the insertion of a layer of middle managers, at the insistence of a corporate Motorola increasingly restive with a plant they perceived as unable to make its targets and out of control. Second, we look at the relationship between Manufacturing Associates (MAs) and temporary workers hired through agencies to meet sharp rises in production. Being a temp signified much more than one’s contractual status. Finally, we turn to the experience of the Easter Inch leadership team when confronted by corporate Motorola’s instruction that the original team-based organisation had to be brought into line with the insertion of more familiar hierarchies and reporting processes. THE ‘TALKING TIES’ This was the requiem for a dream. They thought they were creating the factory of the future, a kind of utopia. Motorola never shared that

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dream: for ‘Big M’ this was a factory that made phones, nothing more. Numbers made Chicago happy.1 The introduction of Production Managers and Team Leaders was at the insistence of corporate Motorola. This was, as the plant management team recognised, ‘hugely significant.’ The plant’s organisational development manager, a crucial figure in developing and articulating the concepts and practices of the factory of the future, acknowledged that some compromises were inevitable, given corporate perceptions that the experiment had gone too far: ‘Motorola reclaimed the factory.’ Indeed, some trade-off with corporate Motorola would end their siege mentality and might open up new spaces for plant-led organisational innovation. For corporate Motorola, the loss of market share, despite volume growth, made increased production control vital. In the early days knowledge was conveyed through word of mouth, almost by tribal elders. But this kind of transmission was problematic: it had not been systematised through repeated telling or reaffirmed through repeated personal experience. And that’s where we ran into trouble about a year ago. We had no knowledge mechanisms to deal with growth. Now we’ve some of the process controls to deal with that. But we’ve institutionalised control rather than knowledge building. We have stronger understanding of control than knowledge building. The organisation depends more on drive, control and adrenaline than it does on knowledge.2 The introduction of Line Leaders and production control offered the prospect of a restoration of a pragmatic balance between business imperatives and corporate pressure, on the one hand, and adherence to a somewhat idealistic adherence to the values of teamworking, on the other. For the plant’s HR team, the objective was ‘how to maintain the ethos in a new managed environment: can we find a Trojan Horse, can we smuggle the team ethos back in? We thought that the real kernel was the quality of our relationships rather than the structural design.’ The priority in hiring Line Leaders was their empathy with the plant’s values. In practice, there was an influx of managers, engineers, and team leaders from Compaq, a company perceived as sharing a similar team-based culture but with much stronger production control. Some of them embraced the team culture with a passion . . . we just gave them skills so that they could manage in the culture with more ease. Others were fine when things were going well but reverted instinctively to direction when things got difficult. This was very confusing for people on the line and they were very open about who they thought were the ‘good’ EI managers and the other, tough managers. Team leaders just can’t flip between ‘good time’ facilitators and ‘bad time’ taskmasters.3

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Note that the skills were to allow management within the culture, not to manage the culture. Perhaps the most problematic group of team leaders were those promoted from within: [I]t was if they thought that to be a team leader they had to become directive to establish to themselves that this was a different job; that they had more authority; a different kind of power. It was as if they had chosen to forget everything they had learned—or experienced—about leadership or being led. ‘Walter,’ an incoming production director, had been attracted by the promise of an empowerment culture and how to translate that into costeffectiveness. His initial impressions were of a ‘very empowered culture that’s grown too quickly’ without robust structures and processes. The shallow structure, however, also offered the opportunity to transform the plant very quickly: there were no vested interests to dislodge. [I]n traditional environments many middle managers and production folks suffer from claustrophobia. But there are as many people who suffer from agoraphobia as claustrophobia. Easter Inch . . . has been a very agoraphobic environment in that there are no boundaries to bounce off. Irrespective of the maturity and aptitude of the MAs they do need some train tracks to go on. My role is to give them the boundaries, to give them the processes to enable them to move on.4 Easter Inch was, for Walter, an ‘inexperienced overgrown adolescent’ who required structural boundaries and the disciplines of processes. Walter was one of a group of production managers who saw themselves as a professional cadre, quite distinct from the initial plant leadership team, the so-called sky pilots. Quite apart from anything else, this group looked and acted like managers: ready to interrupt a conversation between MAs, for instance, or to issue an instruction to an individual, not a team. This group rarely wore the eggshell blue that had once been universal but that was now increasingly reserved for MAs. At most, this group understood management as an essential complement to teamworking and something that had been absent at Easter Inch. The arrival of supervisors and managers was preceded by the covert construction of systems that conformed to Motorola’s corporate procedures. This was without the knowledge of the plant’s leadership team. In HR, for example, this involved preparing a budget that could be communicated and negotiated with corporate headquarters. I had to have a shadow system because there were going to be no grades and so no pay rises. I couldn’t get the budget at the end of the year unless I demonstrated what the salary ranges were, what the market

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was, what was the need for new grades. I had to do that: I couldn’t just wish Motorola away. I had to have a shadow system that wasn’t advertised in Easter Inch, could not be discussed by the very managers responsible for the salary bill for the factory.5 Similar shadow systems were established in Easter Inch’s distribution and material functions, which reported directly to corporate Motorola. These functions also established their own offices, separate from the plant’s established spaces for support functions. These major changes were also signalled in small, everyday symbols, such as wearing suits and ties and insisting that the HR Manager controlled his time through appointments. The leadership team became more divided as it became circumvented by emerging ‘mini factories’ that distanced themselves from the original team philosophy. Such subterfuge was necessary, argued the advocates of anticipating corporate demands by accelerating and deepening the control systems being installed. The realists carefully avoided any overt questioning of the plant’s culture: ‘[y]ou couldn’t survive if you challenged what they thought were principles but were really only the things they detested about Stotfold turned upside down. The purpose of the factory wasn’t to make phones, it was to make teams. The only thing that registered was teams, not phones, teams.’6 In practice, far from being a failure of imagination, the incoming managers immediately understood their role to work around the restrictions of the ‘managerless organisation.’ For one incomer, his priority was simply ‘to make the numbers. All manufacturing managers—everywhere, at any time—are judged by their ability to meet targets.’ ‘The smart thing,’ remarked one openly ambitious Team Leader, was ‘never to argue with the philosophers about “values” but just to get the phones out the door. Numbers always beat words; output always beat values. So, it was important to avoid any philosophical confrontations: JDI is my philosophy—Just do It.’ For another Manufacturing Manager, avowedly ‘attracted’ by the Easter Inch culture, ‘his leadership challenge’ was to synthesise real, very real targets with building an organisation and a culture that can last. We’ve outgrown the original organisation, and the teams’ culture wasn’t enough to cope with the new volumes. We’ve got to build an organisation that appreciates what the culture meant and what it can contribute in the future. But the priorities were 50/50—50% making the targets and 50% enabling, facilitating, counselling. We’re now shifting that targets/culture balance to 90/10, but I would still like to think that 10% has value and is worth thinking about.7 The transition registered by this Manufacturing Manager also captures the conditionality of teams and culture to targets; in that building the team culture had at least an equivalent importance to targets, this was no longer

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the case. On the lines, the most obvious sign of this transition was the rapid introduction of a whole series of forms and integrated systems to centralise production information that centralised and rendered calculable not just overall team performance but, for the first time, individual processes: ‘Establish central standards for efficiency and quality for each work station and line. Only after the complete line had exceeded these thresholds would a team be permitted to alter task definitions or workflows.’ Crucially, the incoming production managers explained this centralisation and increased granularity of production information in terms of improving team performance and culture. Transparency, not control, was the watchword: We think of the factory control system (FCS) as a sponge which soaks up data. . . . We want to increase the visibility of the whole system from any vantage point: every Associate can assess their performance compared to a similar task on another line. We allow the operatives to ask more of the system itself, the get the teams inside the FCS. FCS allows continuous, dispersed monitoring of individual performance, checking for the number of MA interventions, machine and manual characteristics. We produce the stats centrally on how often individual operatives access comparative data. . . . we concentrate on the macro picture; we leave the comparisons of micro data to the teams.8 Sweeping his arm over the shop floor, the new systems engineer explained that ‘my job is to capture all the brains, all the ingenuity out there.’ The shift to Team Leaders ended the original practice of each team’s having a facilitator seconded from the plant’s leadership team for daily meetings, troubleshooting, and key events, such as Peer Review meetings. Not only did seconded members of the Leadership Team have more general information about the plant as a whole, they were also responsible for embedding the culture of teamworking. Team Leaders, on the other hand, had no comparable plant-wide knowledge or similar cultural responsibilities: ‘The Line Leaders are here to do a specific job and that’s it.’ Team Leaders play a very important role. The Team Leader is not unlike the supervisor in a traditional, empowered organisation. He/she is somebody who gets things done through the team, not against their wishes, but because the team sees the value in doing it. We should be very interested in the results and the less mature a team is, the more the Team Leader may need to move to the control end of the spectrum. That’s an area where we’ve really struggled: we created a eunuch concept of the TPD in that they had no influence over the team other than persuasion.9 The most obvious change symptomatic of the deterioration of the original teamworking regime was the sharp reduction in the duration of team

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meetings. ‘If the meeting lasts longer than ten minutes you’ve got someone on your back pushing you back onto the line.’ Generally, at the start of each shift, an MA from each section of the labour process would go offline to meet the Line Leader, before returning to convene a short meeting to relay that day’s targets and any other practical issues such as any overtime requirements or temporary moves necessary to cover for absence. With up to 60 MAs and temps present, even the targets were often inaudible at the back of the group. These short meetings left little or no scope for the team to exercise an individual or collective voice: ‘When I started in here we used to have team meetings where you got the chance to air your views. Everybody had the right to an opinion and you were listened to, no matter what you said. I thought it was great. I enjoyed it because you felt part of something. That’s all gone.’10 The new format for the morning meetings signified a loss of control by the team, conceived of as the whole line. Splitting the line into functional areas also fragmented the team’s control over the labour process: only the Line Leader had an overview of the complete line. There was no shared knowledge of material or labour shortages across the line, precisely the sorts of practical problems that the teams formerly addressed collectively. Similarly, for longer serving MAs, the rare occasions on which one of the new Production Managers took part in a morning team briefing simply confirmed the cultural distance travelled: ‘If he does come on the line he shouts about housekeeping and then buggers off. It’s all numbers and targets now; there’s no time for anything else. We used to have meetings on topics—scrap, quality, special projects—but not any longer.’ The changes are definitely not for the better. . . . the biggest change has been with Team Leaders. They are supervisors. I don’t know why they don’t just call them supervisors. Here’s the difference: when we had [our seconded facilitator from the Leadership Team] he would come and ask you what you thought. It was the soft approach to win your consent. Now it’s, “Do you think you could do this or that?” In six months’ time it will be, ‘Do this, do that.’11 On ‘Jim’s’ line, the Team Leaders had all come from outside firms. Pointing over his shoulder, he commented: This one hasn’t a clue. He’s up and down the line all the time looking over your shoulder, telling you to make targets. Two weeks he’s been here and he thinks he knows it all. He thinks we are not working hard enough. The whole thing looks like a move to supervisors. I said to this Team Leader that we should have a meeting to discuss the role of the Team Leader and he said, ‘No way, there’s no time’. I told him that we had a right to call meetings whenever we wanted because that’s the way things happen at Motorola, but he wasn’t having any of it. We’re losing that sense of control that we had.

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Equally, new Team Leaders were ready to upbraid MAs who arrived late or who were sharing a joke offline. A few times, an experienced MA would reply that they were answerable only to their team, not to Team Leaders, whose personal authority remained unclear. Such moments suggest, first, the deep attachment that some MAs, especially those with long service, had to the plant’s founding values. Indeed, at team level, the major recruitment ramp-up had diluted the authority of the ‘veterans’ and diminished their role in socialising new staff. Second, attempts by individual MAs to protect or restore something of the original teamworking practices had little traction, with no mechanism to give collective voice to such concerns at the team level, much less as a workforce as a whole. One veteran prefaced her comments on the introduction of Team Leaders by saying that she found the early days were ‘like walking into heaven’: I don’t care what they say or what they call themselves, Team Leaders are like supervisors. They get away with it, if you let them get away with it. It’s actually not too bad on this line. We stand up to them and stop them acting like supervisors. That’s because we’ve got experienced people on this line. On other lines where it’s all new people it’s very different. [Team Leaders] are saying, ‘Do this, do that!’, and they’re getting away with it. It’s becoming like any other factory.12 Quality control deteriorated sharply. Any batch that was not inspected within one hour was shipped. This was a fundamental challenge to the ethic that placed production at the core of the plant’s design: QC was no longer a defining ethos of the organisation but took a back seat to shipping value. This was no longer about putting production at the centre of the organisation, no longer about ’total customer satisfaction’. This was just capitalism without any idealism, without any values. This was a failure of ‘Big M’ that you experienced in lots of small ways, not just organisational design. You now saw executives pointing fingers—literally screaming at individuals in meetings. Motorola was always a demanding organisation in terms of performance, but it had been a respectful place, polite. That was no longer the case.13 The self-effacing manner expected of the plant’s leadership was openly ridiculed by Big M executives and incoming managers, notably one senior recruit from Digital who insisted on a corner office and that liquorice be on the table at any meeting he attended. The arrival of the not-supervisor supervisors was little more than the formalisation of the emerging relationship between the TPDs and the teams discussed in Chapter 4. But, on the other hand, the arrival of Team Leaders marked the end of the TPD’s broad sociotechnical responsibility for the line and labour. Team Leaders were solely responsible for managing labour. The

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team were now unambiguously subordinate to the Team Leader, replacing the more complex relationship between the team and the TPD. Where production—and so the teams—had been the centre of the organisation: now production and teams were driven explicitly from the outside. Teams were now answerable to supervisors and production management systems. Producing self-directed, self-disciplining teams was replaced by external supervision. This was a fundamental shift in the politics of production. Above all, the arrival of supervisors entailed a shift in the identity of the MA from the hub of the organisation to that of that of worker to be supervised, rather than part of a team to be developed. ‘The arrival of managers created the need for management,’ commented one of the architects of the factory of the future’s organisation.14 ‘Associates had themselves; now managers had to manage, so the Associates lost the need for—just lost—self-discipline.’ The loss of the centrality of the team to the organisation, the erosion of the MA’s organisational citizenship, and the end of the rough-and-ready participatory democracy around production priorities and problem solving all signalled the end of the factory of the future model. ‘GET ME WARM BODIES’ Recall that the elaborate selection process for MA status was to identify individuals most likely to have—or to be able to develop—both the capacity for self-discipline and self-improvement and to recognise and contribute to that potential and capacities in others. Selection was a five-stage process: failure at any stage precluded recruitment. Central to selection was a psychometric test designed to identify the individuals most receptive to teamworking and most able to cope with the uncertainty inherent in Easter Inch’s radically flat organisation. The MA as an autonomous, emancipated, and responsible individual was invoked both as the objective of teamworking and its prerequisite. Central to this project was that it was all MAs’ responsibility not just to make themselves freer but to help others do the same. Put another way, by successfully navigating the selection process, individuals gained access to— and became the objects of—discourses and practices intended to construct the very organisation they purported to describe. To be selected as an MA was, for the Easter Inch managers, a vital sign to all that an individual bore a particular set of personal and collective responsibilities. Only an MA, in other words, was defined as someone capable of making judgements—and entitled to do so—on themselves and others. To be a temp, on the other hand, was to be exposed to the discipline of teams as an object but not to play a legitimate part in their decision making as a full organisational citizen. The extent to which temps played a part in teams, including Peer Review, was at the discretion of the MAs, a conditional privilege rather than a right. There was a ceiling placed on the involvement of temps, along with a sense that their judgement required the endorsement of an MA to be valid.

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Initially, plant management were reluctant to hire temporary labour, which they regarded as an expedient, ‘a necessary evil,’ to cope with booming production. Temps were employed by an agency and ‘leased’ to Motorola. For management, the temp was the mirror image of the idealised image of the empowered Manufacturing Associate. MAs had passed through the fivestage selection process and proven themselves to be psychologically suitable for empowerment and teamworking. By definition, individuals who had not passed through the selection grid, especially the psychometric test, were suspect. For the plant’s HR manager, ‘you could tell at a distance who was and who was not a temporary worker from their behaviour, from their appearance, . . . even the way they stood.’ At the plant’s peak employment of 4,000, one in four was a temp. We outgrew our capacity to manage the sociality of the factory. We were struggling to develop a new language of work at Easter Inch. The original group of MAs developed a kind of vocabulary—almost as their second language—but the temps didn’t even understand the grammar. The temps literally did not speak the same language; the same words maybe, but without the deep meaning that had been developing.15 To minimise the possible disruption through the rapid assimilation of large numbers of temps onto the lines, the MA teams were made responsible for acting as their collective supervisor. Of course, in practice, management had little alternative but to entrust managerial responsibilities to the MA teams: there was literally no other mechanisms for supervising, assessing, and disciplining temps. And any attempt to construct even a temporary management structure to deal exclusively with contract labour, according to Easter Inch’s design logic, would have incurred extra cost and speak of a lack of confidence in the MAs to discharge this responsibility. The MAs were no longer responsible simply for managing and improving themselves and each other but for disciplining the temps. The key disciplinary mechanism was a cycle of monthly of Temporary Reviews, an echo of the Peer Review system discussed in the last chapter. The crucial difference was that whereas Peer Review was inclusive of all—the gaze was multidirectional— the temps were exposed to the process only as objects, never as subjects. That is, the temps were scrutinised but never scrutinised others. After all, the temps had not proven themselves to be psychologically capable of exercising such judgement. As one temp put it, ‘everyone is a would-be supervisor, nobody is my workmate.’16 Initially, temps were permitted to apply for permanent jobs only if the ratings received from their MA ‘supervisors’ were above satisfactory. There were no second chances: to fail any stage was to fail completely. Importantly, any temps who failed any stage of the selection process had their temporary contracts terminated immediately. For one temp:

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I’m worried about applying because if you do and you fail then that’s you out of a job. I’ve got a kid, a [motor] bike and a mortgage to pay for. I’m not going to try for a permanent job unless they put pressure on me to do so. I’ve seen twenty of my mates go out of the door. It’s true that some of them went for bad time-keeping but others were after a permanent job and failed one of the interviews. It puts you under a lot of pressure: You are walking around with a hangman’s noose around your neck.17 ‘Kenny,’ an experienced temp with more than a year’s experience in Easter Inch and who—unusually for a temp—worked in the test bay, remarked, I’ve been here for a year and I’m still a temp. Look at all the new faces in here, but every time I’ve put myself forward for a permanent job they say they haven’t got time to deal with it. Did you see what happened to Sammy? I think it was disgusting how they treated him. The guy worked here for nine months as a temp; never put a foot wrong; did his job well. He put in for a permanent job and failed one of the stages. But the way that they do it is terrible. He’d just finished a shift, went home and then the agency called him to tell him he hadn’t got the job and he wasn’t to come in today. Guy’s in bits. For management, a temp with no prospect of permanent employment would lack motivation and could become disruptive. What was a risk for management entailed exclusion with no hope of reprieve or return for an unsuccessful temp. Maintaining the integrity of the selection process was a strategic decision by plant management, not least because it confirmed the exclusivity of the MA. There was also a pragmatic reason for maintaining the five-stage selection process, despite increasing corporate pressure for output. The plant had such a flat structure and so few fixed organisational touchstones, that each one—each Peer Review team—bore enormous symbolic importance. Temps experienced insecure employment, were excluded from the factory institutions promoting empowerment, and were concentrated in the most routinized labour-intensive work areas. Temps were concentrated on manual assembly jobs, almost entirely without the use of machinery. Temps were largely confined to back-end tasks that were driven by the more capitalintensive front end: ‘you are basically working as a robot.’ Inevitably, any interruptions to production, often caused by sporadic material deliveries, fell most heavily on the back end. MAs, on the other hand, were responsible for expensive capital equipment such as surface mount, as well as test and analysis. Temps seldom experienced the job rotation common among MAs. Nor, of course, did temps perform any of the secondary tasks of planning, coordination, and team building that defined the MA. The temps’ exclusion

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from the team’s extensive external communication channels meant that they were twice as likely to consider gossip and rumour as their main sources of information about the line, plant, or company. Almost three times as many temps as MAs reported that speed of work was important or very important to their job performance. Similarly, temps consistently ranked technical knowledge and knowledge of work processes as much less important than did permanent MAs on the same lines. By virtue of their location in the labour process, the temps had little opportunity to display the traits— initiative, problem solving, communication—so valued by Easter Inch’s team culture. To do the work of a temp, then, overwhelmingly confirmed them as different from, and inferior to, the ideal of the empowered MA. The MAs and the temps developed a complex, fluid relationship. It was common enough to hear MAs criticising temps for, amongst other things, not being committed to the task, the team, or the corporation; that they were poor workers; that their frivolous antics disrupted the line and the team; that they refused to ‘join in.’ At the extreme, a readiness to work long hours, which would have been interpreted positively in the case of an MA, became symptomatic of the personal failings of temps as a category. One MA, ‘Tommy,’ remarked: We had a bit of a problem last week with the temps. They’re mercenaries. They’ll work all the overtime they can grab. Some of them were working double shifts last week. They were starting at seven in the morning, going through to eleven at night, and then coming in at seven the next morning. You can’t work properly like that. Our quality was suffering. In turn, this meant that temps were a category of labour that had to be treated differently from other permanent team members. ‘Sally’ candidly reported that she had ‘been on their backs all the time, saying: “for ****’s sake, work a bit harder, get your finger out.” They’d stick together at breaks and talk to each other.’ Sally’s identity was confirmed by her supervision of the temps whose alterity was defined not just by their need to be supervised but also by their choice to stick together informally. Ironically, the main attraction of a temporary contract at Motorola was the prospect of a permanent job. Initially, temps viewed their contracts as a kind of probation: precisely what plant management decided against. Very quickly, however, as the prospect of permanence became increasingly unrealistic, the temps’ sense of insecurity grew. Whereas over 95% of MAs viewed their jobs as more secure than their previous employment, within 18 months, almost half of all temps, including a small minority who had left permanent contracts for their temporary jobs at Easter Inch, regarded their prospects as precarious. For temps on the receiving end, ‘Most temps would leave as soon as they get a taste of being treated as second class workers, especially by team members—divide and rule.’

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Some of the complex dynamics inside the teams became clear to management, mainly through some MA advocacy for the permanent employment of particular temps. For the plant’s HR manager, ‘Teams were concerned to get their guys on permanent contracts. They would speak to me in glowing terms about individual temporary workers, something they would never do if it was a permanent worker they were talking about. They would play down their faults.’ Plant management argued that the very strength of this advocacy, as well as the lack of self- and peer criticism it betrayed, undermined its credibility and exposed the risks of allowing hiring—although not firing—decisions to be made by the teams. Something of a moral panic lay behind an HR briefing read out to the teams: Team recruitment is unusual and many people outwith [outside] the company question whether it is a good thing. To become acceptable in the community we must make sure that we are professional at all times. Recently members of the recruitment team have reported that they are being asked, and sometimes harassed, about the results of interviews by Motorola colleagues. This is totally unacceptable and puts the future of team recruitment at risk. Recruitment team members will not give any information about candidates or their interview results. Please do not make life difficult for them by asking.18 Hiring a permanent worker was regarded as a 25-year decision, but firing a temp entailed no such cost or risk. Paradoxically, the team’s partial, ad hoc advocacy reaffirmed management’s determination not to relax the selection process or to allow second chances. For management, this was a moment that could easily derail their project if immediate production needs drew a tactical response. The decision to retain the teams as managers and to maintain the integrity of the selection process represented a principled and strategic response, a response that confirmed their own collective sense of leadership and their adherence to the plant’s founding philosophy: None of this was a given. There were significant figures in the leadership team that always wanted to introduce more conventional structures, especially in HR. But—and this was a huge but—they were always outnumbered, outgunned, . . . reminded that this would be a backward step that would feed on itself and endanger the whole project. Everything we did had to remain consistent with teamworking, making people more responsible, not just for themselves, more aware that our fate was in their hands, not the other way around. We did not want to be managers; we were not managers; and we could not allow ourselves to become managers by accident. . . . these debates were always in-house, there was no corporate intervention at this stage, although we could sense

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The temp review process brought these contrasting dynamics into sharp relief. For a group of the most experienced MAs, veterans of the period of experimentation in team building, the temps should be rated solely as team members. Even within a few days, temps would be reviewed by the team. Judgements proved not only premature but harsh. The quality orientation of a temp could be assessed within one week of their arrival. On one line, the MAs met separately from the temps to decide who should be proposed for a permanent contract and who should be dismissed. The reasons given for one dismissal was ‘an attitude problem.’ Another temp was dismissed for being ‘very strange’; two forfeited their jobs for being ‘just the wrong sort of people’ and one for being ‘sullen.’ Unsurprisingly, two-thirds of temps preferred conventional supervision and management hierarchy to Easter Inch’s team regime. By contrast, two-thirds of MA’s consistently endorsed the self-discipline of teams over conventional supervision. One temp with extensive experience in the microelectronics sector commented on the ‘stigma’ attached to being a temp. Although positive about Motorola’s culture of openness, she noted that should ‘a temp speak out this is classed as insubordination by a “lesser” worker,’ and the temp risked ‘being sent down the road.’ The cumulative impact of such judgements was significant in that it moved some MAs from being unsettled by particular verdicts to questioning the legitimacy of the Temp Review in general. More than this, it also raised questions of who was to judge. For some MAs, to judge temps in terms of their attitude, not work performance, was wrong. However appropriate such judgements were when made by MAs about another MA, at least there were opportunities to improve. More importantly, for some MAs, such as ‘Karen,’ it raised more fundamental issues: We had a meeting yesterday. I came back from it feeling awful. It was about the temps. The whole line went and discussed which of the temps should be put forward to become permanent workers. I really didn’t like it. It’s just not fair. There’s some of them who say, “He shouldn’t get it”, and that’s that—they’re out. The other shift got two temps sacked. It’s that “Iris.” She runs the show, and it’s all about personalities. It’s so wrong. The problem was we couldn’t say anything because we don’t work with them. Mind you, I said, “What’s wrong with him, he seems alright to me” when they started on about one boy. I got told, “He’s got an attitude problem”. That’s not fair: he’s not getting judged on his work but on his personality. I think it’s completely wrong for one worker to say whether another worker should have a job.20 Karen’s description speaks of power, authority, fairness, and the blurring of class identities caused by working in and being defined by teams.

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Power in teams was no less unevenly distributed for being informal: ‘Iris’ was perceived as both the carrier and usurper of teamworking. Iris’s harsh judgement drew what authority it had due to her personal observation of the temps at work, a judgement denied to others on the line. Equally, it was impossible for Karen to challenge Iris’s right to observe and assess the temps since this was what was expected of all MAs. Finally, through articulating her discomfort, Karen concluded that, although Peer Review was possible, for an MA to use such techniques to decide who worked and who did not, was completely illegitimate. This was one of the very few times we encountered the category ‘worker’ used by anyone in Easter Inch, a space in which the preferred term was the much more ambiguous, site-specific ‘associate.’ Since the temps who were to be dismissed were told that this was a team decision, this meant all MAs were at least complicit in a decision that they might regard as unfair, harsh, or simply not their prerogative. The most potent accusation that an MA could level at another team member— that they had ‘behaved like a supervisor’—was invoked against advocates of dismissal. On the other hand, other MAs responded to this definition of the temp as an outsider, whose exclusion could be rationalised as expressing the responsibility central to the plant’s philosophy, with growing sympathy for the temp. Inside the teams, rival camps emerged who regarded the treatment of temps as a litmus test for the plant philosophy. Sometimes the sympathy for the temps was expressed in black humour. One temp, ‘Bootsie,’ added: I don’t know how much longer I’ve got. If you’re on day shift, they can call you in and tell you you’re finished just like that. The team have organised a sweep for when I get the bullet and all of them have lost so far, apart from me and Karen. If I stay for two more weeks I’ve won because Karen’s got me down for a week on Friday.21 To be an MA, insisted management, was to accept the responsibilities of one’s status and that temps were the other side of this identity. To be an MA entailed the simultaneous making of an identity and alterity. In other words, it was the existence—and partial exclusion—of the temp that made the privileges and responsibilities of the MA possible. To understand, accept, and act upon one’s identity as an MA involved an equivalent understanding and acceptance of the lesser status, in the fullest sense, of the temp. Conversely, the MA’s failure to understand, accept, and act out this identity/ alterity spoke of an incomplete or immature MA. The MA could be considered incomplete in the sense that empowerment demanded an acceptance of the commercial realities as well as the indivisibility of the corporate philosophy that insisted upon the integrity of all its technologies, including the selection process. The relationship between the team and the temp was a fluid mix of solidaristic, agonistic, and alienating practices: the team’s sympathy for the

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temps—their lesser pay and status, the risk to their employment if they attempted to switch to a full MA contract; the tension with the temp as someone less rooted, less reliable, and less responsible than the MA; the team’s agonistic relationship, given their supervisory responsibility for the temps. This category was particularly difficult to sustain because it was not unusual for an experienced temp to train a new permanent MA and then be subjected to a Temp Review in which the new arrival passed judgement on the trainer: ‘You’ve got temps who have been here for over a year, longer than many permanent workers. Look at Caroline. She’s been here for nine months and she’s trained six people up and now they’re the ones who are giving her a Temp Review. Unbelievable!’ And, though rarely used, but always possible, the power of the teams to expel any temp through a comment to management, without the rigorous disciplinary process required to exclude an MA. This complex issue proved extremely difficult for management to understand. After all, the MA was permanent where the temp, to state a truism, was, or should be treated as, a passing stranger. Temps may have been ineligible for full membership of the team, but they were not aliens, to be treated as threatening outsiders. Perhaps the temp is best regarded as a stranger who was allowed to interact with the team, an interaction that produced the possibility of solidarities that cut across what management maintained was a binary divide. The question of the temp represented, amongst several other things, a contradiction between the governmentalist dream of the impossible factory, the ideal MA, and the reality of the intense symbolic work required of the teams. To classify someone as an MA did not lessen the intensity or relentlessness of this symbolic work. Indeed, quite the opposite: sustaining the ideal MA identity was made more difficult due to the arrival of the temps, especially when some stayed for lengthy periods. The hypothetical MA was supposed to make the distinction between themselves and the temps real through their language and practices. Even to qualify what management regarded as a binary divide was to erode the ideal identity of the MA. There were also two compelling reasons why management could not intervene directly, one practical and the other philosophical. Practically, the management team was just too small and so overwhelmed by successive production ramp-ups. Philosophically, any intervention, however oblique or justifiable in terms of production, risked being accused of running counter to the plant’s team philosophy. Indeed, one of the plant’s managers spoke of their ‘frustration . . . a burden of self-restraint’ that was greatest during crises that called for immediate, decisive management action. The teams defence of the temps was a rejection of a managerial imaginary that elevated the integrity of the selection process over the lived solidarities of teamworking. Rare indeed were MAs who defined their privileged status as an expression of their own virtues, which were lacking the temp. The temps constituted a political question precisely because their very presence called into question the personal and collective qualities of MAs and

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teams. The qualities that made an individual capable of self-surveillance and self-improvement could no longer simply be taken for granted or derived with absolute certainty from the category of MA. If the selection process could not be regarded as a neutral technical device that revealed these innate qualities but somewhat arbitrarily and unfairly, then what of the plant’s other technologies of empowerment? Remember, one of the hallmarks of a governmentalist project is the complex, protracted attempt to define issues of superiority and subordination as apolitical and entirely technical. The temp punctured the avowed neutrality of the plant’s empowerment technologies. In a plant that had consistently stressed the singularity of the workforce as a team, these neutral technologies were revealed as difference machines in which the MAs were the motive force. Far from stabilising the identity of the MA, as management hoped, the temp proved to be a destabilising presence. The exposure of the temps to the risks inherent in the selection process and their exclusion from full team membership underpinned this sympathy. The temp was a figure whose imperilled employment was written into the fabric of everyday life and raised new questions and doubts about the language and practices of Easter Inch. The temp, in other words, was a living, inescapable question about teams, empowerment, and responsibility. The temps’ position, far from confirming the MA’s empowerment, produced nagging doubts about the validity of the identity/alterity construction central to the Easter Inch project. Every act that constituted the MA identity at the same time confirmed the temp as someone being treated as an outsider while inside the team. Isin Engin suggests: Becoming political is that moment when a rank established between the superior versus inferior, high versus low, black versus white, noble versus base, good versus evil, is reversed, transvalued, and redefined, and the ways of being political are rethought. Becoming political is that moment when freedom becomes responsibility and obligation becomes a right, and involves arduous work upon oneself and others, building solidarity and alterity simultaneously. All domination is arbitrary and its success depends on its ability to conceal its arbitrariness.22 The questions posed by the temps did not open up a political space as broad and demanding as Isin suggests, but it did provide MAs with a glimpse of a different kind of politics of empowerment based on lived solidarities rather than the thin abstractions of corporate philosophies, no matter how vaulting the language used, or of securing competitive advantage. The experience of managing the temps introduced a new openness to the plant’s production politics: from defence of the team as manager qua manager through to a questioning empathy with the temps that carried with it the first significant doubts about the limits of teamworking in theory and practice.

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THE ‘STRIKE’ The new Performance Review system was designed to replace the Peer Review system that had been rendered ineffective, in large part due to the creative subversion of the line workers. The new system was introduced through team briefings, but there was no consultation with the teams. Nor had a timescale been announced for the introduction of the new system. Individual performance reviews were based on the same metrics as Peer Review, but the scores were allocated exclusively by the newly appointed Line Leaders and Manufacturing Managers. MAs were informed of their scores in private based on a rating from the highest A to lowest E. There was no detailed feedback about the composition of each individual’s grade or whether there was any differential weighting to certain elements. Further, each grade represented a certain percentage of the workforce, from the top 10% rated A, to the next 15% as B, to the bottom 15% rated as E. MAs rated as E were those whose performance was considered to merit no pay raise. The combination of empowerment and team provided the rationale and means of extremely devolved shop floor government. Empowered teams were not devised as methods of blunting dissent or collective protest but did so profoundly delegitimise them as to make them virtually unthinkable. The most extreme reaction to the new Performance Review system was that of the back shift on the SAM production line. The line simply stopped completely for somewhere between three hours and an entire shift. Everybody’s unhappy at the moment because of the band people have been given. They’ve marked the Sam line lower than any of the other lines. We’ve been hammered and I’ve seen the figures. We’re the highest earners [in terms of margin per unit] in here. We always made our targets last year. People are very pissed off. The other shift went on strike. Not one board came off the line. ‘Alex’ was the Line Leader. Everybody was standing about so he went up to the people and asked them, ‘Aren’t you working?’ And people replied, ‘Yes, we’re working.’ We’re on a go-slow at the moment and so is the other shift. There’s no way we’re going to hit our targets. We grafted hard last year and we got a slap in the face as thanks for all the hard work we put in. Why should we be motivated? The only shift on the SAM line that isn’t on a go-slow is the night shift because they all got A’s and B’s. We mostly got C’s and D’s.23 The following day saw the start of ‘a sort of go-slow’ that persisted for around three weeks, signifying the moment when individual appeals acquired something of the sense of a collective protest because they were all lodged at the same time: We’re making about 80% of our targets. I’m not saying that we’re now working. If you’re not doing anything it’s really boring but you can only work at the speed the boards are coming through. The night shift

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aren’t happy either. All of the Sam lines are pissed off. Altogether across the SAM lines there’s something like ninety people who have put in for an appeal. But there’s been an atmosphere created on the lines which I don’t like. There’s some of the As who others are not talking to. They wouldn’t give them the time of day.24 The shop floor response was a mixture of frustration and anger, not just at the rankings but at the way they were allocated and the exclusion of the teams from the process. All of this was a highly public process, despite a contractual obligation that employees do not share details about their salaries or pay raises. The Team Leaders had been in place for around three months and were widely regarded as incapable of knowing enough about individuals’ performances to provide a fair assessment. How could novice Team Leaders even know who their teams were? One disappointed MA was told that he was ‘too laid back, too easy going.’ For this MA, the issue was not so much that his personality was being judged so much as the Team Leader was unable to discriminate between the team in terms of their productivity, much less how the individual’s ‘personality’ accorded with the requirements of the plant’s team culture. One D-rated MA reversed his badge to hide his picture and name and asked his Line Leader to justify his low ranking. When told that it was due to his poor absence record, the MA pointed out that his attendance had been perfect for 18 months and that the Line Leader had confused him with another MA. Such stories spread quickly throughout the factory, each one feeding a general discontent. For teams that had developed and deployed solidaristic tactics that had blunted, if not completely eliminated the disciplinary capacity of the Peer Review process, the new supervisor-led system was intentionally individualistic. All the trust that existed between Facilitators, Team Leaders—call them what you want—has broken down now. Our Team Leader wasn’t popular before all this happened but now [shakes his head] . . . He nearly got a going over on the day the bands were given out. What they did was take you into the glass office one by one. I saw one girl who got a D who couldn’t face coming back onto the line. She spent the whole day in the toilet crying her eyes out. I was so angry I wanted to put him through the window.25 For the Team Leader informing the MAs of their grade, a process that began as specific to each individual, deteriorated into an opportunity for MAs to make clear their disdain for the process and that their protest was as collective as it was individual. I knew there were problems as soon as I started to give out the bands. I’d be saying to somebody, ‘Your performance was good; your attendance was good; you’ve done everything that was expected of you,

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Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization you haven’t done more than this, but you have done everything we ask of you’. Then you’d say, ‘You got a D.’ You could see it in their face— the anger, the disappointment. Later in the day, when I was pretending not to know the outcome, I’d go through it, ‘performance good, etc, etc’ then I’d shuffle through the papers to make it look as if I had to check to see what band they were, but before I could get it out, they would say, ‘D’.26

Each band would receive a pay raise at the next month’s annual pay award, but even the absolute and percentage values of the raise varied widely within bands. Appeals were individual, but there was no guidance about what grounds were likely to succeed. The decision to allow some appeals was a tactical response by management to defuse the crisis in the factory. However, this did nothing to halt the comparisons between individuals and lines all looking for patterns across the factory. The legitimacy of the opaque appeal process was diminished further when the MAs were warned that very few appeals would trigger an upgrade. On the other shift they’ve divided into two groups, those at the front of the line and those at the back. They’re not talking to each other. The way they’ve given out the bands is dividing people up. You ought to have seen the arguments between people after they gave out the bands: ‘Why did you get that and I only got that?’ As far as I can see, that’s it— there’s nothing left of the teams. They don’t decide anything any more and they’re putting worker against worker. It’s alright for the bosses: they just sit there and play people off against each other. On this shift it’s different because we’ve decided to take them on together.27 The vital surface mount machinery that the most experienced workers operated was at the front of the line. The front end was immediately next to the pathway that led from the leadership area through the factory. The spaces occupied by veteran workers, who had often been involved in the selection, induction, and training of new hires, made them known and visible to everyone who passed, not just members of the plant leadership team but, perhaps most importantly in this context, the newly arrived Team Leaders and Manufacturing Managers. Given the sharp reduction in the duration and the shift in the nature of team meetings, the MAs next to the passageway became the main communications conduit between Team Leaders and the teams. In some cases, the secondary jobs, such as scrap coordinator, that made individuals visible to the Team Leaders were not allocated by rotation as in the original team model. Rather, such jobs were either allocated by the Line Leader or, in at least one case, chosen by the MAs’ drawing lots. In both cases, ranking by visibility was regarded as arbitrary and illegitimate. The front/back division also emerged as a direct result of the arrival of Team Leaders and the fact that bottlenecks and

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backed-up work were inherently ascribed to the long-run failure of back-end workers to cope with problems inherent to this labour process: If you’re at the back then they don’t see you so you’re going to get lower scores. Some people did do better—they were the ones who helped out with a serious scrap problem, so the Line Leaders could see them performing. It was only by accident that some people ended up reworking the scrap; so it’s an accident that they got better bands.28 One of the veterans of the plant’s start-up phase—a member of the group labelled by management as ‘the matriarchs’—publicly expressed her unhappiness on the line with a scoring system skewed towards the visibility of certain workers and, conversely, the invisibility of others. What do I think of the new pay system? A load of shite [echoes of ‘shite’ from the women working on the line around her]. I got a B but I still think it’s a load of shite. It’s not fair at all. Take me: I get a B because I do secondary jobs which means that the bosses see me doing them. The girls who cover me on the line got a D and an E. That’s not right at all. There’s loads of who have put in for an appeal. In total, I think it’s ninety off the SAM line. I don’t think it’s going to mean that they’ll get made up, but if you’ve got a queue of people going for an appeal then it’s got to make them think. It might get them to change a bit.29 For A-ranked workers, differentiated supervisory rankings inside the same area could be interpreted as legitimate, even though the process itself was flawed: I think some of the people who have got complaints about their bands are justified. I would be unhappy if I was in their shoes. But it’s a joke for some of the others to complain. Take ‘Georgie.’ He got a D. Out of all the surface mount machinemen he’s the worst at his job. When the machine runs out of a part he’ll take ages to put on a new reel. If the machine breaks down he doesn’t do anything about it. Sometimes he’ll wait until me or ‘Jaz’ see that the machine’s down and we go and find out what’s wrong. And he’s complaining about his band. Others perceived a different pattern in terms of how Line Leaders had ranked MAs. Where back-end workers saw themselves as disadvantaged by their relatively hidden location in the labour process, some experienced frontend veteran MAs considered their disappointing scores to be retribution for their defence of the teamworking regime: ‘I think there was a deliberate policy to be hard on those people who have been here for a while and are more committed to the old Motorola ways of doing things.’ This criticism

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was heard time and again: ‘Some of the old-style MAs have been badly treated. There’s ‘Lynne.’ She’s been given a C by people who don’t know her. She was the one that really got the second Excalibur line up and running and she’s not happy about it. ‘Jean’ was given a C which is incredible: OK, she’s quiet but she’s been here for a while and a really good worker.’ A small minority of veteran MAs distinguished between different forms of visibility. Where the Line Leaders recognised and rewarded individuals who sought their approval for a specific technical decision, such as scrap rework or a minor rebalancing of the line, these veterans regarded this type of interaction as a category that confirmed the authority of the new supervisors and the dependence of the MAs. Through such exchanges, minor adjustments that were previously the prerogative of the team became an element confirming supervisory authority as it nullified the teams’ autonomy: If you want to do well in here you’ve got to be in and out of the office. They make themselves seen, but they don’t challenge any of the Line Leaders. It used to be encouraged to challenge how things were done and challenge each other. There’s none of that now. These are pushy people that don’t challenge anything or anybody. They just go to the office a lot. Another veteran MA added, ‘When we came in it was very difficult to learn to say no when you were told to do things. You had to really learn to be independent. People coming in now just don’t get that at all. I think if you’ve been around for a while you’re less likely to accept orders.’30 There were workers who resented the fact that supervisors were assessing MAs without the experience or any real insight into how effective the individual was or how they contributed to the team as a whole. Equally, there was widespread recognition that visibility was rewarded, irrespective of the merit of the individual, either because of the individual’s location in the labour process or the type of secondary jobs they performed on behalf of their team. So, while some A rankings were regarded as legitimate, this was as much by accident as design. There was universal condemnation of the way in which rankings had been announced to individuals, which was not countered by any equivalent management response. For some MAs, especially veterans of the plant’s formative period, the pay review was symptomatic of the collapse of the plant’s original teamworking regime. For such MAs, the practical difficulties of relatively new Line Leaders rating their teams was secondary to the fact that such judgements were no longer the sole responsibility of the team. Only the team had the detailed knowledge of the individual’s skill, effort, and contribution to the team. There was, however, no sense in which the MAs objected to pay differentials in the abstract, only that workers performing the same task should be rewarded equally. Given the near total collapse in the Peer Review process and the creation of a layer of supervisors and production managers, the Easter Inch leadership had no option but to develop some alternative mechanism for grading and rewarding MAs. Not only were the Line Leaders the obvious means of

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delivering this assessment, the process would also confirm their authority on the shop floor. The opposition to this pay award took several forms. This protest was limited in scope, language, and duration. Only one line stopped completely, although production slowed to a crawl on several others. Nor did the MAs call their protest a ‘strike’ or ‘go-slow’ to anyone outside their immediate workgroup. When challenged by management, the team drew on their residual autonomy and the sociality that was a feature of work in the plant in order to deny that they had halted work. However, the strike was unprecedented in the plant and, until that moment, inconceivable. No less striking was the decision of around 90 MAs from one line to lodge what was effectively a collective appeal against their individual rankings and the ranking system itself. There was no language of solidarity that the MAs could draw upon except the language of teamworking, trust, and transparency integral to the Easter Inch philosophy. This language—combined with the shared experience that the collective nature of team decision making was being eroded rapidly—was the most important resource used by the MAs. The concept and original practices of teamworking became contested, with the MAs constantly probing the depth of managerial commitment to the practice and of the devolved decision making. For plant management, the pay award debacle was a watershed moment. Paradoxically, the use of Team Leaders had backfired so spectacularly that it permitted the restoration of an extended form of Peer Review. Peer Review was no longer primarily regarded as a key mechanism for personal and team development. Rather, Peer Review was to be an integral part of the annual pay award system. The new Peer Review system was quarterly, not monthly; meetings would report scores, not involve public feedback; each MA had a fixed number of points to allocate, thus preventing tacit collusion and collective regression to the mean; and reporting to a central repository was automated, permitting real-time, centralised scrutiny of the system in operation. The new reporting system would eliminate the need for direct managerial intervention while increasing the organisation’s capacity to compare Peer Review across teams and by different demographic categories. For the plant’s Organisation Development Manager, the revisions to Peer Review were made explicitly to enhance the system’s disciplinary effect: ‘to make sure that minds are calibrated into a way of thinking about quality, leadership, criticism, improvement.’31 Additionally, individual scores were multiplied by a factor allocated by management to reflect overall team performance. In practice, even this truncated form of Peer Review proved impossible to sustain across the factory. THE IMPOSSIBLE FACTORY For a key member of the plant’s founding Leadership Team, the new middle managers were ‘operational assets but cultural liabilities.’ Team Leaders echoed the way that Big M executives ‘swaggered in like John Wayne,’ demanding answers, dominating discussions, denying even the plausibility

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of team-based organisation. Nor did the newly arrived managerial cadres use the language of teamworking necessarily signifying an understanding of, much less a personal identification with, its principles: It’s all about rites of passage and membership. American electronics companies have a very strong sense of culture and corporateness. And there are badges you have to wear and buzz words you have to memorise. . . . That doesn’t mean knowledge or understanding, it simply means that you have the basic vocabulary to engage in the conversation.32 The plant’s Director, Gwyn Pugh, had acted as a ‘human shield’ for teamworking. Gwyn self-consciously embodied Easter Inch values, from the modest car he drove to his low-key, unassuming personality. Gwyn didn’t preach good housekeeping, he didn’t need to say anything. All he did was pick up the odd sweetie paper and drop it in a bin. He didn’t say a word, he didn’t have to: everyone saw how he behaved and spread the word. He used to say, ‘my job is everybody’s job’ and everybody knew what he meant and believed him. It was his factory. Inside the leadership team, Gwyn’s personal defence of the original factory philosophy drew admiration and criticism in equal measure: Gwyn’s stance attracted corporate hostility like a fucking magnet. Instead of polarising debate, instead of giving ‘Big M’ a target, compromise would have left something of Easter Inch intact . . . you have to understand if you want to be understood. . . . By painting corporate as the devils and Easter Inch as saints, this left no room for survival. I can see the attraction, you’re left pure, like a martyr. But in the interests of the Easter Inch people was that really the best way to act?33 ‘Easter Inch was under siege,’ the model of the factory of the future was being eroded from below; from inside, an increasingly divided leadership team was being challenged by corporate headquarters, anxious to increase production to maintain market share. ‘Our team, our culture was now held hostage by corporate Motorola.’ We knew it was coming. We got lots of US engineering visits; lots of static; noise that something was coming our way. US engineers were hugely disconcerted when MAs got involved in discussions about the installations of new technologies. Completely incongruent for US engineers because their Libertyville world was hugely hierarchical. The US engineers didn’t know how to talk to MAs who didn’t have masters degrees. But it was these people who had to work with this kit, cope with any eccentricities. The engineers didn’t understand that the people on the ground encountered all sorts of malfunctions—and devised all

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sorts of ways or working—that were not in the textbooks. The more the engineers spoke to the MAs, the more the engineers found the idea of teams unprofessional, distasteful even. That was the message that was going back to Chicago.34 The realist position was personal disappointment that ‘the purity of the teams’ had to be sacrificed, tempered by an acceptance that it was unsustainable given ‘the deluge of expectations landing on us.’ For individuals with a deep personal investment in the project, the advantage of this position was that this shift was triggered by external demands and forces and did not undermine either the concept or early experience of Easter Inch. The meaning of teams was left intact. Motorola’s corporate structure—particularly that HR remained a corporate function embedded within, but distinct from, the plant’s line management—was important in Easter Inch’s managerial politics. If external corporate pressure was placed on plant management to ramp up volume, then the HR function became an internal carrier of corporate demands. Big M moved against Easter Inch: This ‘experiment’, as they called it—it was as if they spat the words out. All the problems—of a new factory, of poor product design, broken material flows—were laid at the door of this new team philosophy. Teams bore the burden of all these expectations, all these shortcomings. All the failures were hung on this ‘social experiment.35 For the plant’s philosopher, ‘Robert,’ his role changed from defining the practices to delivering teamworking ‘to inject pragmatism. We had to understand that it wasn’t about defending a pure model. No point in retaining a pure model if we all got fired.’ For another member of the HR team, ‘Big M told us to put in structure, not quite unravel everything, everything we’d done, but change it in a fundamental way. We were told to set aside innovation, imagination. Devastating.’ There was no orderly retreat organised by the divided management team—a story full of personal fall from grace. ‘All that imagination, emotion, hope. Devastating, utterly devastating,’ recalled one HR Associate of the moment that the plant’s general manager, Gwyn, resigned. For one senior HR figure, the intensity of the Easter Inch leadership’s attachment to the original team-based organisational concept was based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of Motorola as a benign, tolerant regime: The Galvin’s philosophy, the ‘Motorola Way,’ all of it, was predicated upon numbers. The corporate philosophy was real enough but it was secondary to numbers. I don’t think that the Easter Inch management team really understood where they fitted in the Motorola structure. . . . For most of the managers, Easter Inch was their first experience of

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CODA: THE END OF THE IMPOSSIBLE FACTORY The various techniques used to govern teams were to render individuals not just calculable but also autonomous and responsible. These were neither static nor permanent states but were understood as complex, dynamic, and processual: individuals could be measured not according to abstract ideals but to norms established by their measurement of themselves and each other. Norms were not established by others, elsewhere, but had a legitimacy rooted in daily production routines. Similarly, comparisons were not against an abstract benchmark but against one’s own score over time and against people with whom one worked every day. Interventions could range from being so gentle that, to an outsider, they would barely register as a reprimand to more conventional forms of organisational discipline. In the language of Easter Inch, this was known as ‘corrective action’ which was, in fact, a form of governing individuals through individuals and for those individuals: governing through peers and for peers. This was the government of each and all. For all the key figures in the Easter Inch leadership team, their experience did not alter their sense of how to manage, how to be a competitive factory or organisation. Far from it: for almost all of the plant’s leadership team, the managerial rationality based on empowerment and personal responsibility remained intact. Managing through teams was a technology both to expand individual freedom and to meet the challenges of efficiency, flexibility, and innovation that confront all global factories. Even a decade and more after the plant closed, time and again, Easter Inch managers spoke of their pride in how individuals had improved themselves as a result of their factory experience. Such changed selves were testimonies to the ways that empowerment had worked—had served its moral, reforming promise. The ways in which the Easter Inch leadership team imagined the technologies of leadership and empowerment also remained largely intact. The factory of the future was not fundamentally flawed but derailed by an impatient corporate Motorola driven by short-term sales objectives that displaced the Galvin philosophy. In just one year, Motorola lost three-quarters of its value. The spectacular collapse in share value in 2000–01 was ascribed by corporate insiders and commentators to ‘arrogance,’ a moral failing the resulted in economic loss.37 The turn away from the Galvin philosophy was a moral choice that produced economic failure. The closure of the Easter Inch plant was announced on 24 April 2001; production ceased in December 2001.

‘Just Like Any Other Factory’

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Foucault is often misleadingly caricatured as the prophet of a monochrome world of pitiless surveillance. The central theme of Foucault’s historical writings is the necessary connections between power and knowledge in specific institutional settings. Discipline requires the deployment of specific technologies of power and knowledge. Although Foucault insists on the institutional and temporal specificity of such technologies, he does point to their generic features: enclosure, partitioning, rank, individualization, exercise. Individuals are brought together—enclosed—in the same place to form a population that can then be spatially and categorically subdivided. This double act combines specific functions—medical, penal, productive—with administrative and political regulation. This division allows the ranking and comparison of individuals with the population’s mean and over time. Individuals are ranked and reordered not just by function or task but also by hierarchical classification. Spatial ordering is critical to the subjection of individuals. Combining spatial and temporal ordering allows individual behaviours to be monitored, regulated, and amended. ‘The chief function of discipline,’ notes Foucault, ‘is to “train”.’ Discipline renders institutions machine-like in their capacities to regulate and control their inhabitants, whether they be pupils, workers, or citizens.38 Perpetual surveillance—or the presumption of constant watchfulness—underpins disciplinary power. We would add a further necessary condition of surveillant systems: durability, that is, not that systems and their categories remain entirely unchanged, simply that their underlying logic remains consistent over an extended period. Otherwise there can be no systematic alteration to behaviours much less their attitudinal bases. Given the stringent conditions that Foucault insists are necessary for a surveillant system, one is left wondering what institution could possibly satisfy this definition. Surely his point is not so much to identify the impossible prison or some dystopian, fictitious factory. Rather, his theoretical point of deploying such an unattainable definition is that discipline is necessarily a failing project. The interesting historical question then becomes not the charting of the perfection of disciplinary institutions but the manner of their failing. One of the analytical gains of focusing on the rationalities and techniques of management is that it takes seriously the technical literatures of, say, operations management and the guru books on leadership or empowerment. These expert knowledges, however banal or however glibly packaged, then become archives to be read closely for what they tell us about the changing ways that the management of organisations is imagined and performed and the—impossible—standards they are measured against. By thinking about such disparate managerial technologies, we can avoid the facile trap of evaluating the success or failure of this or that management strategy or executive team. Governmentality is empowering in that it demands that new questions be asked about the how’s of power and discounts, even if the why’s of power, the motives of the powerful, are ignored. Conversely, the very real danger is that governmentality

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attends only to the archives of the powerful and neglects alternative visions of the world and subaltern expertise and experience. Ironically, the danger is that governmentalist studies themselves become hollowed-out technical accounts, devoid of political content or purpose. Equally, the coherence of a given governmentalist project can easily be overstated if one only interviews executives or reads their homespun philosophies. The contingency and temporality of managerial thinking are almost always forgotten by executives. Where temporality is registered at all, it is likely that contemporary initiatives are counterposed against a fictive and almost entirely benighted past of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and command and control. In other words, the manifold failings of the past were the antithesis of the future being created by a rational morality predicated upon managerial selflessness. Easter Inch was a laboratory in the art of managing after management. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Interview, HR Vice President, July 2010. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, October 1993. Interview, HR Associate, May 2010. Interview, Production Engineer, May 1993. Interview, HR Manager, May 2009. Interview, HR Manager, May 2009. Interview, Production Director, June 1993. Interview, Production Manager, May 1994. Interview, Production Director, July 1994. Interview, MA, Fieldwork Notes, June 1994. Interview, MA, Fieldwork Notes, April 1994. Interview MA, December 1993. Interview, Logistics Manager, May 2010. Interview, HR Vice President, November 2009. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, November 2009. Manufacturing Associates Survey 3/52, Comments page. Manufacturing Associates Survey 3/21, Comments page; Interview, MA, December 1993. Motorola, Easter Inch, HR, ‘Memo re Recruitment,’ August 1993. Interview, HR Manager, May 2009. Interview, MA, February 1993. Interview, Temp, February 1993. Isin Engin, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 276. Fieldwork Notes, December 1993. Fieldwork Notes, December 1993. Fieldwork Notes, February 1994. Fieldwork Notes, January 1994. Fieldwork Notes, January 1994. Interview, Excalibur MA, February 1994. Interview, SAM II MA, February 1994. Fieldwork Notes, February–March 1994. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, October 1993. Interview, Organisation Development Manager, November 2009.

‘Just Like Any Other Factory’ 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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Interview, HR Vice President, November 2009. Interview, HR Manager, May 2009. Interview, HR Manager, May 2009. Interview, HR Manager, May 2009. Jagdish Sheth, The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies: And How to Break Them (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2007), 67. 38. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane, 1977), 143–8.

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Index

Althusser, L. 13 Barthes, R. 2, 3 Belbin, M. 68 Bevir, M. 18 Bossy, J. 107 Cruickshank, B. 24 discipline 1, 3 Easter Inch (Motorola): philosophy and design 66 – 7, 82 – 3; design and values 64; recruits 85 – 6 East Kilbride (Motorola): corporate culture 45 – 8; employment 27, 31 – 3; gender 32 – 3; HR practices 41 – 4; labour processes 37 – 41; trade unions 33 – 5; HR philosophy, 22, 54; Stotfold 63 – 4 Eugin, I. 143 Foucault, M.: confession 105; power 2, 81; private confession 107 – 9; public confession 106; selfknowledge 111; technologies 5, 153 Galvin, C.: corporate philosopher 11, 56, 151; organisational transformation 55 – 7; power 58 – 61; Six Sigma 57 Goldstein, N. 83 governmentality: autonomous individual 7 – 8; confession 4 – 5; discipline 8 – 9; freedom

10; labour processes of 7; methodology 14 – 16; state 4; theoretical weaknesses 17 – 19 Huhtala, H. 23 IBM, 28, 30 – 1 Joyce, P. 6 Landy, J.-M. 110 liberalism 6 Machiavelli, 6 management, 10 – 13 Miller, P. 13, 14, 22 Motorola see Easter Inch; East Kilbride Nealon, J. 2 NCR 28 – 9 O’Leary, T. 22 peer review: and confession 115 – 17; design 113 – 14; in practice 119 – 20; philosophy 112 – 13, 118; resistance 121 – 2 power: disciplinary 3 – 4; pastoral 4; sovereign 4; state 5 Rabinow, P. 16 recruitment 73 – 5 Rose, N. 13 – 17, 23, 81, 102 supervisors: Easter Inch 129 – 30; 133 – 4; and teams 136

168

Index

Taylor, C. 19 – 21 teams: autonomy 94 – 6; Belbin 68; mutual surveillance 84, 88; resistance 144 – 6 temporary workers: discipline 140 – 1; experience 136 – 7; teams 138

Timex 27, 29 – 30 Townley, B. 7 – 8 Veyne, P. 3 Walters, W. 17, 18 – 19