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Professions.

To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on a Saturday night, 

Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and

nobody bossing you about.

From George Orwell in The road to Wigan Pier. 1937.

Introduction to Topic Eight:

Quality Management:
 

            This final topic brings you up to date with the latest initiatives in managing workers, particularly those who work in offices. Following the changes in technology, and the organisation of work on the factory floor in the 1980's, there was a growing concern for organising the workers themselves. This showed itself in the growth of the quality movement. This was an alliance of the Department of Trade and Industry, various organising and accrediting bodies, management consultants, and a mixture of American and Japanese ideas. Books on management became increasingly popular. There were a series of management 'gurus', who were frequently referred to including Crosby, Juran and Demming. Box One is a typical, and early, example.

            The movement started with Customer Care programmes. This involved training in how to address potential customers in a friendly manner, particularly on the telephone. Not everyone was so trained at first; so a different manner was presented once one got to the relevant department. So a need for quality in customer relations throughout the firm was seen to be needed. Firstly, new quality circles, where workers brainstormed new improvements to existing work practices were introduced. After the brainstorming meting they then returned to these existing practices, and awaited management acceptance, or rejection , of their ideas. This return to the old ways undermined the initial enthusiasm. Further, the most enthusiastic workers were often promoted to newly created roles for promoting quality. This caused some resentment, and further undermined enthusiasm.

            The next stage was to aim for Total Quality Management (TQM) within the firm, from the top to the bottom. Outside experts/consultants, came in and looked at individual manager's work, and suggested changes. These managers were then trained in various management forms of analysis, such as tracing problems back to their source; and then looked at their colleagues' work, until everyone in the firm had been analysed. To keep the enthusiasm going, the Japanese idea of Kaizen, or continuous improvement, was introduced so that every year or so one could report on changes/savings that had been achieved. Box Two gives on individual's response to these changes.

            Those, usually large, firms who embarked on this course gained a competitive advantage over other firms, who were not involved. The idea was that fewer rejects/complaints were received from the customers. This not only reduced costs but also demonstrated superior quality of product/service to the competition. One problem with this was that as more firms acquired the official badge of quality, and supplier firms had more stringent demands made on them by quality manufacturers, then the competitive advantage weakened. This results in more intense searches for both quality products and quality service from quality workers. Put differently, this creates the intensification of work life, and longer hours spent at work. British workers now spend longer at work than workers in continental Europe.

            The consequent increased productivity has helped to produce a new round of redundancy in  the 1990's, this time in the service sector, banks and building societies and insurance companies. So one important consequence of quality is increasing unemployment, and more recently,  insecurity of employment. However, this has been defended on the grounds that unnecessary layers of managerial fat have been reduced. The workers left in this delayered environment have more responsibility, work more in groups, and see senior managers less frequently.

    In order to understand how we have reached this type of unemployment we need to go back to the 1980's to fundamental research into management. There were more financial incentives for managers to perform productively, and more controls. This raises a question as to whether managers are not losing some of the prestige they had for most of the twentieth century. At an extreme, one can ask are they being proletarianised; becoming like the clerks and manual workers they once managed?

          In order to address this question it is necessary to ask firstly what is it that managers actually do? There has always been a populist scepticism that management is a residual activity, less important than actual production. Further that the clerks, or other producers, could potentially manage themselves. The need for management has rarely been doubted, the issue is who does it; one or many?  The examples of workers self management, of trade unions themselves managing their members, of workers co-operatives, all show the existence of alternatives to managers as a separate group.

          British, and some American, research has shown a scepticism about what managerial theorists have said that managers do. One study showed that managers were more like reactive socialisers, than rational long-term decision-makers. They solved problems, or "fought fires", with words through networks of colleagues and subordinates. Managers were seen as living in a whirl of activity. They flitted from topic to topic. They respond to the initiatives of others, rather than initiate themselves. This research has been criticised as misleading because of the research methods used. Various styles of participant observation, including time budgets,  may  make the manager seem to be without a rational strategy for the firm’s future. On the other hand, research using diaries and structured questionnaires, may produce a picture of the manager as the rational decision maker, and strategist. As Hales argues,

           "Diary studies inevitably focused upon contacts and time allocation, structured questionnaires generated work elements, whilst       participant observation studies made much of 'informal'  behaviour."

          (What do Managers do? A Critical Review of the Evidence. C. P. Hales, Journal of Management Studies 1986. pp.105). 

Two recent studies, one close grained and empirical, the other more theoretical, looked at the consequences of these initiatives for the work of managers. In his book “In Search of Management Tony Watson argues that ideally management should be about directing an organisation to long term viability through strategic action (Watson, 1994). This appears to mean that all managers should be clear about what current strategy is; what contribution they themselves have made to it, and what their local responsibility is to carry out the strategy. What the study found was that the strategy was created by directors of a holding company. The local directors appeared to make little contribution to this strategy, and the local managers made virtually no contribution.

          In this situation there was a clear hierarchy. Senior managers made strategy, and local managers and workers carried it out. Indeed local managers were more overtly critical of senior management, than they were of their own workers. Local managers felt themselves constrained, and not empowered through "owning" the quality message. Local managers were not strategists. They complained that they had to do things because management consultants said so; they were not sure themselves, and so could not persuade those below them. These managers become to resemble "men in the middle", as old style foremen were once called. Indeed in so far as the managers were men in the middle, they were closer to the proletariat than senior managers. They were also like the proletariat in that they feared losing their jobs, what they called

          “getting the brown envelope”!

          (Watson, 185: 1994)

          These were managers who repeatedly said that they loved their jobs; who were initially enthused by the quality message. They introduced radical changes in factory organisation. No one owned a job anymore. Instead there were various skill levels. One was allocated to one such level, and within that level one could do any work. This has also been called flexibility, and multi-tasking. Making these changes was enabling for these managers, because they accepted the quality values behind these changes. The workers were also supposed to have been exposed to these values in attempts to change cultures. However, as the workers were even further from senior management than the local managers, they may not have experienced this as empowering; rather it was more stress. This makes the point that the culture has to be accepted in the first place for these changes to be accepted, never mind work.

          Another aspect of the quality message was a belief in flatter structures. This was the need to remove bureaucratic fat, especially amongst managers. The belief was that with fewer levels of decision making there was more of a possibility that managers could have a say in what strategy was, and how to implement it. Indeed some researchers claim to have found instances where this has worked, albeit in smaller organisations (Dopson & Stewart, 1990). In these smaller organisations the managers felt that they had control over their working lives. Watson found that his managers felt that they too wanted this control, and were very much less concerned with control over their subordinates.

          Although Watson’s study is one of the abject failure of the quality message in making management more effective for the long-term viability of the firm, there is a belief that in other, perhaps smaller, organisations this might work. Despite this there is the problem that with flatter structures there is little chance of promotion up a long hierarchy. This requires a belief in quality, almost as a form of compensation for the lack of a possibility of  individual promotion. One works hard to improve the service/product, to delight the customer, etc. without the reward of promotion. Performance related pay is a recent solution to this problem.

    Basic Concept 

Performance Related Pay:

Through annual appraisal of individual work, and

 setting individual targets for next year, pay would

be related assessed performance. How much pay

is so related varies as between state employees,

with relatively little, and private sector employees

with much more variation.

 

          Performance related pay is meant to motivate young managers, who are no longer motivated by regular promotion through upward mobility within the organisation’s hierarchy. There are two obvious problems with this. One is how does one measure performance? Are there pre-set criteria? Are these agreed in advance or merely imposed by senior management? Even with agreed, and accepted criteria, there is the second problem of the application of criteria to individuals. This is seen most acutely where managers are engaged in similar, or broadly similar work, and in teams that meet regularly. The local and often detailed knowledge that one can have of one’s colleagues work over the year can be a basis for scepticism, when one performance is measured and rewarded differently from another. If this scepticism is then mixed with envy, the easy functioning of the work group will be adversely affected. The mechanisms by which this functioning was affected included passing on the performance indicators which  managers themselves  had received to the work group they  managed. One member of the work group called this ‘Pyramid Selling’. Box Five is an excellent example of this Pyramid.

          This line manager is clearly aware of a hierarchy, and his place within it. The resentment which he feels to the manager above him does not stop him behaving in the same way to those below him. The probability that those below will also feel resentment to this line manager is great. This will make team working more difficult. As will working in the  team with those above for this line manager. Yet managers all want to have team working which achieves the goals set for the team. There can be ‘Pyramid Selling’, the passing on of the individual manager's targets to the team, but in any case the general performance of the manager will be judged, in part,  by the performance of the team he also line manages. The achievements of the team can contribute to the career success of the line manager.

        The Watson study can be seen  as focussing on managers as rational strategic actors. But also, as frustrated in their attempts to behave as rational actors. They were reacting to the poorly understood initiatives of others in the holding company. Another implication of this study is the possibility of the "brown envelope" was correctly foreseen by these managers; and indeed seems to imply that here was yet another example of bureaucratic fat. This study correctly anticipates the coming rounds of redundancy for managers over the next 20 years in both Britain and America.

          The second, and much less sympathetic, study was “Making sense of Management (Alvesson & Willmott, 1996).   They continue Watson’s concern about the lack of co-operation within management with respect to strategic decision making. As they put it, the managers in Watson’s study were strategy takers, and not strategy makers. This was a manipulative use of power.  It was made to appear rational, partly because it was currently fashionable, and had been recommended by consultants. Other firms were also doing similar things, and those managers who had been on management training courses knew this.

          Alvesson and Willmott argue that employees come into an organisation bringing notions of fairness and justice with them. In a famous study of affluent workers in the 1960's it was similarly found that workers brought values from outside work (Goldthorpe et al., 38:1968). But these values were instrumentalism, that is work meant wages; and privatisation, which meant that the home was important. This made it quite plausible that values did come from outside work, but raises the question of which values. Indeed it may be that there are a variety of values coming from outside, and one needs to look at the early family life of workers, and the influence of religion, social class, and education on the family. Fairness and justice are abstract values and may well have different meanings for workers in different work contexts. Nonetheless these notions come into conflict with the new initiatives for redesign of managerial work. The new initiatives are often presented as rational. This presentation is seen as the trivialisation of reason, equating reason with making the right purchasing decision. In this study managers are seen as people who get things done through other people. In this process managers may require more flexibility, and possible redundancy from their subordinates. Managers may view this as the application of reason, and some did in the Watson study: or they may engage in some critical reflection. This critical reflection is all the more likely if these rational procedures are likely to produce their own redundancy. In fact Watson’s managers were keenly aware of this possibility.

         However, Alvesson and Willmott reserve their greatest scorn for the latest management initiative, called business process engineering.  Here teams are created with representatives from each of the main departments in the organisation.  Each team is responsible for a separate product or service. There are no longer separate functional departments staffed entirely by accountants, or engineers, etc.. This has the advantage that a customer enquiring about an order or sale no longer has to be transferred from one functional department to another. The team can handle all queries. The number of individuals in the team reflects the processes the organisation already works on, and the number of departments it already has. This style of organisation has large claims made for it. It reduces delivery times. It reduces the cost of sales. It reduces the size of the inventory of stocks and raw materials. This reduces need for space, and so reduces the cost of renting/buying/ maintaining space.

Basic Concept

Value Added:

As each stage in a work process is moved from one

internal customer to another, value should be added

to the end service or product for the external customer.

          But the main claim for business process engineering is that it creates a real need for the team to learn about other functional areas than the one in which they have been professionally trained. So, the accountant will learn about engineering, and each of the other functional departments, which exist in the team. Ideally, and in time, one member of the team can see the whole job through all the old functional departments. This reduces the need to supervise others, which supervision is not seen as adding value. When all this works then reengineering demands that employees deeply believe that they work for their customers, not their bosses. Put differently, this can be seen as getting closer to the customer. Further, each member of the team begins to themselves as related to one another as internal customers; rather than colleagues. This process introduces a market within the organisation: whereas before the only market was seen to be outside the organisation.

        There are two problems here. Firstly, the professional bodies may become concerned that their professionally qualified accountants may not be keeping up with developments within the profession. Regular updating of professional knowledge is seen as one of the features of a professional worker. These workers, in time, may even become deprofessionalised. Secondly, the dynamic in this engineering may produce less need for every member of the group when it was first set up. In other words, one may get the "brown envelope" informing one of one's redundancy.

This is the final topic.

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Professions.