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devices were wound down after they had achieved their initial aim as change catalysts, leaving behind a workforce cynical and hostile to any similar initiative in future. Such initiatives at Rover, Ford, Lucas, Reckitt and Colman and other plants engendered little enthusiasm from supervisors or workers, given the limited content and lack of genuine two-way communication. Programme failures partly reflect the difficulty of grafting high-trust practices onto low-trust cultures and environments.

In a broader sense, what happened with Japanisation and flexible working arguably had more to do with a reappropriation of the language of participation, job redesign and even humanisation. Wood rightly notes that though QWL practices signalled a move away from low-trust, low-knowledge systems, they do not signal a transition to any form of industrial democracy. This would be to demean the concept and to detach it from any conception of power relations. Whatever participation was created tended to exist within a management decision-making process concerning issues of cost, efficiency and product quality (Giordano, 1985: 31). Though Meyer refers to real powers invested in work groups at Saturn, this is qualified by the comment that these ‘represent actions which have already been routinised to the point at which machines could execute the functions’ (1986: 84).

With respect to TQM, recent evidence shows that while workers do respond positively to attempts to draw on their expertise and reductions in close supervision, existing hierarchies still constrain attempts to delegate power and expand involvement for employees (Dawson and Webb, 1989; McArdle et al., 1994; Kerfoot and Knights, 1994; Wilkinson, Godfrey and Marchington, 1997) and even managers (Munro, 1994). Both TQM and BPR involve substantial continuity with Taylorist and bureaucratic traditions through the use of technology as an instrument of change and the separation of system design from execution (Grey and Mitev, 1995; Blair et al., 1998; Knights and Willmott, 2000), and the accompanying techniques of work process measurement and codification tend to counter any emphasis on enhancing employee discretion (Adler and Borys, 1996: 61).

Patterns do not necessarily repeat, and it has been argued that current forms of teamworking represent a more fundamental change. For example, using her own case study, Batt (1999) argues that TQM had no discernible effects on performance, whereas self-managed teams significantly increased impact. There are a number of ‘textbook’ cases of self-managing teams, such as the two US sites investigated by Cutcher-Gershenfeld et al. (1994). They are not, however, representative. Critics have from the inception outlined a familiar range of criticisms that stress the relatively limited nature of delegation of authority (Wood, 1989; Boreham, 1992). Other case studies and small-scale surveys of the amount of autonomy across key decision rights in teams shows that the empowerment rhetoric is often empty and managerial prerogative largely intact, with, for example, only a small minority of teams electing their team leader (Fucini and Fucini, 1990; Turner and Auer, 1994; Murakami, 1997; Danford, 1997). Significantly, this judgement is supported by larger studies. A survey of over 5 000 European workplaces revealed that only 4 per cent corresponded to standard definitions of strong, high autonomy teams (Benders and Huigen, 1999). These limits on team autonomy have been confirmed in other studies. The latest WIRS survey showed that only 5 per cent of the 65 per cent of workplaces that had teams were self-managing based on appointment of team leader, task responsibility and co-decision over how work was done, (Cully et al., 1998); while a cross-national survey in the autocomponents industry demonstrated that the role of operators in

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many decisions was minimal, whether in lean or traditional work environments (Delbridge, Lowe and Oliver, 2000).

It is important, however, that such evidence is about limits to, not absence of, change. One of the major sources of dissension between supporters and critics of a lean production model is the extent to which modern work systems can be efficient with extensive team autonomy, as well as more holistic jobs and long task cycles (see Sandberg, 1995). The critics prefer a more European socio-technical systems model, such as that practised at Volvo. For the supporters, the closure of the flagship Kalmar and Udevalla plants is proof that such arrangements are inimical to efficiency. Adler admits that at lean production plants such as NUMMI in the US, ‘the emphasis on standardised methods meant that workers had no autonomy whatsoever in how they performed their tasks’ (1995: 213–14). Lean production teams, inside and outside Japan, are about participation and continuous improvement, not autonomy. Beyond national differences, even within industries such as motors, there are significant differences between companies. Mueller’s (1994b) comparison of Ford and GM showed that teamworking had been superimposed on Ford’s tradition of controls over the shop floor, which meant that they had developed more hierarchical arrangements which allowed for little autonomy, while GM had moved more genuinely away from traditional supervisory structures. In addition, much of the research, even that of the harshest critics (for example, Robertson et al., 1992; Danford, 1997), demonstrates that employees prefer working in teams and welcome the chance to exercise greater discretion, and are disappointed when promises of increased participation and responsibility prove empty (Milkman, 1997; Wilkinson, Godfrey and Marchington, 1997).

Other critics of teamwork tend to be those influenced by Foucauldian frameworks, who see the new arrangements as opportunities for management to extend control through electronic surveillance and peer pressure (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992; Barker, 1993, 1999; Sewell, 1998). The argument rests on the assumption of extensive self-governance, which, in turn becomes self-policing. We have already critically evaluated such views in Chapter 8, but it is appropriate to add three further points here. First, if we take the overwhelming weight of evidence considered above about constraints on autonomy, it is difficult to see how such claims can be sustained, or at least generalised very far. Second, peer pressure in teams is not necessarily linked to self-governance. Small workplace groups in Japan have long had a strong element of compulsion, yet we know that teams have little or no autonomy. Itoh’s (1984) account of Matsushita brings out a common theme that ‘voluntary’ activity in quality circles is founded on being forced to give suggestions: in this case, three a month ranked on a scale of one to nine. Loyalty is also cemented not only through peer group pressures, but also through cheap loans to buy houses and other financial inducements related to the process of creating company man (Briggs, 1987). Third, surveillance is not necessarily linked to teamwork, self-governing or otherwise. Ironically, the workplace sites where surveillance does appear to be most strongly entrenched are call centres, yet teams are largely formalistic in character given the individualistic nature of the tasks.

The discussion so far has been about various types of routine work. Surely the argument, promoted particularly by knowledge work theorists, that professional and technical labour is governed increasingly by collegial and horizontal forms of coordination, is nearer the mark? In some senses, the answer is yes. It is true that

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knowledge-intensive organisations, among others, require much higher levels of autonomy and trust from particular groups of employees. Whether this is new, increasing, or consistent is another matter. A tension between creativity and control has always been at the heart of expert labour, a fact often forgotten in recasting discussion through the language of ‘knowledge flows’ and ‘stocks of knowledge (Hull, 2000). Current market and organisational conditions are, if anything, exacerbating those tensions. We have already noted earlier in the chapter the negative effects of increased bureaucratic and managerial control in the work of public-sector professionals.

Where quasi-markets are impacting on groups such as teachers, direct market pressures are increasingly constraining the time for creative experimentation among technical workers in the pharmaceutical industry (Randle, 1995). McKinlay’s (2000) case study of knowledge management at Worldrug shows that the major corporate goal in the industry is to reduce the life cycle of molecule-to-market projects from 14 to eight years. This requires an attempt to facilitate the creative process as a learning resource and exerting greater control in development and documentation. Time is, in fact, at the heart of the management of knowledge work. As recent studies of software developers (Greenbaum, 1979; Beirne et al., 1998; Ó Riain, 1998; Sharpe, 1998; Kraft, 1999) demonstrate, project teams, experimentation, trust and creativity are essential preconditions of the creative phase. But as projects move beyond the development phase, managerial control is reasserted through targets and deadlines. In addition, control is exercised through performance metrics, project monitoring procedures, packaged software products and automation. If all else fails, software production can be ‘exported’ to another part of the global production chain. The software technology parks of India not only provide cheaper expert labour, but a standardised software production pattern (Sharpe, 1998: 370). Taking these elements together, Ó Riain (1998: 289) refers to ‘a system of time–space intensification’ in the global workplace.

Skills, tasks and rules

Earlier we argued that, while there is an increasing proportion of knowledge-intensive work, most employment growth is in low-skill, service work. However, many of the most interesting developments are taking place in between these two ends of the spectrum, and if some of the more inflated claims are set aside, a reasonable degree of consensus can be established about trends in manufacturing and white collar work. While there is considerable continuity with past patterns, there are new elements, notably in utilising increased employee knowledgeability.

While skill variety or functional flexibility is necessary to exploit arrangements such as JIT and modular production, variations or new responsibilities such as selfmaintenance may be small and it is more accurate to speak of an enlarged number of interchangeable tasks carried out by substitutable labour (Elger, 1990; Pollert, 1991; Delbridge, Turnbull and Wilkinson, 1992; Geary, 1995). This emphasis on continuity with the past is given partial endorsement by more realistic management writers, such as Peter Wickens, formerly of Nissan. He admits that ‘lean production retains many Taylorist elements’ (1992: 84), and notes that the work of line operators is still 95 per cent prescription and 5 per cent discretion. While multiskilling and multiactivity jobs are a significant change, it is much harder to argue that they constitute the end of Taylorism. Putting these together, adding on further deskilled tasks (NEDO, 1986),

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or extra ancillary duties such as inspection, does not normally make a substantial difference to their content. As a worker at Lucas Electrical commented: ‘The jobs are just the same, you just do more of ’em’ (quoted in Turnbull, 1987: 17). Studies by Shaiken et al. (1986) and Jones (1998) refute the flexible specialisation thesis by showing that, in a small minority of cases of firms using FMS and numerical control machinery, management did grant workers a central role in innovation and debugging. Within teamwork, the capacity to rotate workers across tasks is predicated on their prior fragmentation, rather than combining them into something more holistic (Findlay et al., 2000).

Obviously, manufacturing environments vary considerably in their patterns of skill utilisation and not all practices are based on ‘taking complexity out of jobs’ (Biewener, 1997: 13). Among higher-level technical employees a detailed division of labour can be an obstacle to creativity and flexible response, and managerial strategies, for example in the computer industry, have ebbed and flowed between various ways of dividing and combing labour, supporting both deskilled and upskilled jobs (Greenbaum, 1998; Beirne et al., 1998). An alternative way of addressing the problem is to fragment the work into new hierarchies of labour, as is shown by studies of computer programmers (Kraft and Dubnoff, 1986) and software developers (Sharpe, 1998).

There has been confusion about the discussion that increased flexibility means fewer rules. In fact it means the reduction of one type of rule, demarcation between tasks. Rules still govern organisational life. American surveys show that ‘the vast majority of employees work in establishments with extensive formal procedures’ (Adler and Borys, 1996: 61). Tasks themselves, at least in routine jobs, are still subject to high degrees of standardisation. What is more, the techniques for ensuring this – worksheets, performance codes and job evaluation – are classically Taylorist (Williams et al., 1992a; Thompson et al., 1995). Slaughter (1987) shows that teamworking at NUMMI involved specifying, measuring and timing every move in greater detail. Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal (18 May 1999), a plant manager admitted that standardisation poses problems for workers who thrive on developing their own personal style: ‘To be true to these ideas, you’re really supposed to dictate everything’, from which knee to kneel on, to how far an arm should be moved to carry out a task. Nor is this confined to factories. Warehousing increasingly uses computer-based systems to produce ‘engineered work standards’ that can specify tasks and maintain ‘real-time’ control over workers (Wright and Lund, 1998). As we have noted earlier, the benchmarking systems underpinning TQM and BPR require a concern for standardised procedures and uniform, dependable practices (Wilkinson and Willmott, 1994; Tuckman, 1994).

Such instances would not surprise some supporters of lean production. In an influential Harvard Business Review article defending Taylorist time-and-motion discipline and bureaucratic structures as essential for efficiency and quality, Adler notes that ‘[NUMMI] is obsessive about standardised work procedures. It sees what one NUMMI manager has called “the intelligent interpretation of Taylor’s time and motion studies” as the principal key to success’ (1993: 103). Would it be justified, then, to describe lean production, teamwork and TQM as a form of ‘superTaylorism’? (Slaughter, 1987). We do not think so. Whether Taylorism and bureaucracy are ‘necessary’ or not, Adler’s description of the arrangements at NUMMI and other advanced manufacturing plants as learning bureaucracies is useful. Though standardisation and

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rules are central and workers’ knowledge continues to be appropriated by management, the move away from narrow specialisation toward devolved responsibilities, problem solving and continuous improvement, however limited, marks a significant break from those parts of Taylorism based on a clear separation of conception and execution. More generally, the conception of skill needs rethinking in circumstances where the relation between a person and a machine is being replaced by the relation between a team and an integrated production system.

Research into changes in the commercial vehicle industry illustrates the point (Thompson et al., 1995). Many of the individual tasks continue to be further deskilled under the impact of standardised procedures and uses of new technology. This is allowing management in the UK to dispense with expensive and ‘inflexible’ craft workers. But the collective labour of the group involves expanded cognitive abilities and extra-functional skills, for example in the form of greater need for problemsolving and decision-making powers, or qualities such as communication and co-operation. However, the situation with respect to ‘new production concepts’ is never static. Even in Germany, where ‘participative rationalisation’ was based on some degree of consensus between capital and labour and progressive forms of autonomy and job enlargement, commentators are noting a re-emergence of more traditional forms of Taylorism. Planning and optimisation are once gain the property of rationalisation experts inside and outside the plant, with ‘forced standardisation’ and short job cycle times (Springer, 1999; Schumann, 2000).

Manufacturing is not the only terrain on which change in the form and content of bureaucracy has been taking place. Despite the dubious association in NEO perspectives between the spread of the service sector and the rise of the knowledge economy, it is widely recognised that task rules have been spreading into the service sector. Evidence for the bureaucratisation of service is associated primarily with Ritzer’s (1993) ‘McDonaldisation of society’ thesis. He marshals a considerable array of evidence to argue persuasively that fast food chains are the tip of an iceberg that has extended Weber’s principles of rationalisation in the form of calculable, predictable, quantified processes to an increased range of retail, leisure and media services. This echoes earlier research such as Gabriel’s (1988) study of a variety of catering jobs. He demonstrates that the industry has shifted from reliance on the social and technical skills of the workforce to an industrial model that rests on standardised organisation of tasks and a technologically determined work pace. While not all jobs in the sector are as routine as fast food, the standardisation of the service encounter is widespread, including in upmarket hotel chains (Jones, Nickson and Taylor, 1997). A prime reason for this is that many retail and service outlets believe that to maintain a competitive edge, a friendly, high-quality service encounter must be produced over and over again. Consistency of product is ensured by training, monitoring through report cards, and surveys on employee attitudes and behaviour through real and company-employed ‘shoppers’. Service can also be bureaucratised by increased monitoring of employees, either through information technology such as the EPOS system in supermarkets or through ‘control by customers’ (Fuller and Smith, 1991).

The tendency identified by Fuller and Smith approximates to a further and more radical development in the bureaucratisation of service – feeling rules. This term draws on the work of Hochschild on flight attendants and other employees involved in emotional labour, briefly discussed in Chapter 10. From fast food and insurance work

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1Customer greeted at reception.

2 Customer accompanied to table and given menu and special cards.

3Waitress asks for drinks/wine order.

Glasses for wine put on to table.

4Drinks/wine dispensed.

5 Waitress takes food order (and wine) acknowledging specials.

6Waitress offers:

–choice of jacket potatoes or chips

–degree of cooking for steaks.

7 Waitress reads order back to customer.

8 Waitress takes order for pitta bread.

9 Glasses for wine and wine to table.

10Starter cutlery to table.

11Starters taken.

12Appropriate starter accompaniments.

13All starters cleared.

14Main course served.

15Appropriate main course accompaniments.

16During main course:

–‘Is everything alright?’

–‘Would you like more wine/drinks?’

17Main course cleared.

18Customer invited to go to sweet display or given details.

19Sweet and coffee orders taken.

20Liqueurs offered with coffee.

21Bill to customer – invite to pay at reception.

22Customer pays.

23‘Goodnight’ – acknowledge.

(Leidner, 1993), to supermarkets (Ogbonna and Wilkinson, 1988) and call centres (S. Taylor, 1998), service increasingly requires scripted interactions and standardised displays of feelings through smiles, forced niceness and other forms of verbal interplay and body posture. Putnam and Mumby note, ‘When emotions are incorporated into organisations, they are treated as commodities’ (1993: 43).

Though this tendency is not as pronounced in manufacturing, new normative controls have been introduced whereby management ask for and reward conformity to behavioural rules, particularly governing attitudes and action inside the team. An increased emphasis on selecting and training ‘the appropriate worker’ shows that a traditionally neglected part of Taylor’s agenda is being renewed (Wood, 1989b: 11). To return to the service sector, it is also worth noting that there is a parallel to the attempt to tap into employees’ tacit knowledge to improve competitiveness. However, interactive service work, such as call centres, ‘draws on capacities and attributes located (often unconsciously) within each worker. These workers draw on limited technical knowledge during their work, but they do have to develop a consciousness

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of their social skills and awareness of when and how to deploy these’ (Thompson, Warhurst, and Callaghan, 2000: 128).

The effort bargain and work intensification

NEO perspectives, and the lean production variant in particular, have promoted the idea of ‘working smarter not harder’, and this has received some support from extensive plant studies such as those carried out by Applebaum et al. (2000). However, this has to be set against a substantial body of research that identifies a rising tide of labour intensification associated with new forms of work organisation and management. This is certainly the message from a variety of critics of lean production, some associated with trade unions (Turnbull, 1988; Parker and Slaughter, 1988; Elger, 1991; Garrahan and Stewart, 1993; Fucini and Fucini, 1990). Intensification has been associated particularly with advanced work arrangements such as JIT, which rely on continual and controlled pressure (Turnbull, 1987: 13), internalising disciplinary pressure within the group (Sayer, 1986: 66), and conforming to new behavioural rules. In one of the most influential contributions, Slaughter gives a vivid account of ‘management by stress’ at NUMMI, where the goal is to stretch the system like a rubber band. Breakdowns and stoppages of the line are encouraged as this can indicate where weak points are and how they can be corrected, fine-tuned and further stressed. Workers who fall behind may have video cameras trained on them to ‘help’ in this process. TQM is also partly geared towards eliminating slack and waste in the system, and workers have reported that ‘empowerment’ involved considerably harder work (McArdle et al., 1994). Flexibility itself has always involved employees bearing extra burdens. When Business Week (1983) discussed job flexibility, most of the examples were simply of enlarging jobs by adding extra duties, cutting the size of work teams, or eliminating breaks. Many employees feel that management ‘abuse’ the extra flexibility and efficiency gained through teamwork by cutting the size of teams or by applying extraordinary performance pressures (Springer, 1999; Findlay et al., 2000).

Task restructuring is, however, not the only source of work intensification, nor are manufacturing workers the only recipient of its effects. Customer service representatives suffer intense stress and emotional exhaustion as they try to balance the twin pressures of demands for quality and quantity in high surveillance environments (P. Taylor and Bain, 1998; Batt, 1999; Deery et al., 2000). Rising stress levels and work intensification as a result of re-engineered jobs, staff cuts, internal markets, and greater external assessment have also been reported by public sector professionals (Willmott, 1993b; Dent, 1993; Leverment et al., 1998). Institute of Management (1995) surveys and qualitative case studies in the UK (Collinson and Collinson, 1997) provide confirmation of increased time pressures and workloads. Intense work demands may also arise from trying to take advantage of co-ordination of projects across time zones in increasingly globalised industries such as software production (Ó Riain, 1998). This is one example of the way in which at particular times in the production cycle, highly autonomous teams in more ‘virtual’ conditions can find themselves under external and self-imposed pressures to meet deadlines. It is also an indication of the way in which, contrary to futuristic visions of automation and leisure, the amount of time that employees of all kinds spend at work has been rising steadily; ‘overwork’ appears to be a basic condition of modern economic life (Schor, 1993).

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As a leading British survey has noted, taken overall, the combined effects of work reorganisation and downsizing have led to ‘an extraordinary intensification of work pressures’ that, in turn, ‘are strongly associated with tension in the home’ (Burchell et al., 1999: 60, 51). This should come as no surprise given that UK statistics show that ‘people at both ends of the employment hierarchy work excessively long hours’ (Perrons, 2000: 284). Contrary to the flexible firm model, a key part of burden of securing extra performance has fallen on the core workforce. This is confirmed in some US studies: ‘By downsizing, the company is not just trimming the so-called “fat” from the organisation, it is making deep cuts in its regular workforce, and then bringing people back into the organisation under new employment arrangements’ (Biewener, 1997: 18). Those that are left bear the burden of such changes in extra workload, often under the heading of ‘empowerment’. This is damaging the basic effort bargain – employees’ perception of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay – as well as the broader psychological contract (Burchell et al., 1999: 31).

Conclusion

The message of this chapter has been that there remains a massive gap between the rhetorical claims for the end of bureaucracy and the realities of organisational life. Bureaucratic forms are certainly not confined to a few residual institutional niches such as the public sector (Heydebrand, 1989: 324), and where change has taken place it is often in the direction of more rules, hierarchy and centralisation. Yet we are under no illusions that the hype of the anti-bureaucratic revolution is going to go away. Bureaucracy has few friends, and some of its enemies have a vested interest in proclaiming the virtues of the new and the necessities of permanent revolution. We are referring here particularly to popular management discourse which, in order to sell the latest formula for firms, has continually proclaimed new forms of organisation in new turbulent environments, back at least to the 1950s (see Eccles and Nohria, 1992; Thompson and O’Connell Davidson, 1994).

Though it is sometimes difficult to distinguish pop management and academic writings on management and organisation (see Clarke and Clegg, 1998), it would be unfair to tar some of the academic critics with the same brush. Debates about flexibility and new production concepts are more serious and substantial. Nevertheless the evidence concerning contemporary developments in organisational design does not justify a new paradigm or general theory of work organisation. Nor does change at firm level warrant the term ‘post-bureaucratic’. Even among serious scholars there is a blurring of the boundaries of description, prescription and prediction, sometimes for ostensibly good reasons. For example progressive management writers and social scientists, particularly in the US, want to promote positive messages about change and the benefits of ‘high-road’ strategies; and flexible specialisation theorists often advised left-of-centre administrations. Nevertheless, too much has been invested in flagship or exceptional cases and paradigm breaks, with the result that the examples and concepts cannot bear the conceptual and empirical weight placed upon them. Continuity in organisational structure, work and employment might not be as exciting a message, but it is often a more accurate one.

This is not to deny that very important changes, for example in the areas of decentralisation and disaggregation, are taking place, but their character is either misinterpreted or the significance exaggerated. With respect to the first tendency, horizontal, network-type relations can coexist with vertical hierarchies. Indeed, as Warhurst and Thompson argue, we are increasingly seeing the emergence of a ‘dual structure which combines the search for innovation with enhanced

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financial and operational accountability’ (1998: 17). While the subsequent tensions can be creative, as we have seen they can also involve substantial conflicts of interest between senior management and various groups of professional, clerical and routine employees.

With respect to the second, too many contributors to the debate have taken bureaucracy to be a static ideal type, instead of a living, changing and diverse set of practices. This is often as true of defenders of the abstract and unchanging benefits of hierarchy such as Elliot Jacques (1990) as of the paradigm breakers. We need to restore some of the features of past debates, discussed in Chapter 3, where researchers identified some of the variations in bureaucratic form and content, as organisations engaged with new environments and influences. A good modern example of this is Considine’s (1996) account of how a new organisational form, market bureaucracy, has developed in the public sector to deal with changing conditions of risk and taste. Yet it still coexists and competes with other administrative regimes such as procedural, corporate and network bureaucracies.

Whatever the constraints to change, while new organisational arrangements may not live up to the rhetoric of management and management theorists, they have no essence; the form and content remain open to influence by the major organisational actors. Such factors are one of the driving forces behind the continued organisational diversity, allied to traditional factors such as product and labour markets, and institutional context. This brings us back to our main theme of the balance of continuity and change.

Debates about the shifting conceptions of competitive advantage and corporate restructuring have become polarised: Fordism or flexibility, mass production or flexible specialisation. There is little sense of the contrasting experiences of sectors or firms, of the importance of administrative heritages in shaping contemporary strategic choices and structural options (McKinlay, 1999: 149).

We will return in the final part of the book to issues of the theoretical understanding of bureaucracy and rationality.

13 Corporations and Culture: Reinventing

Organisation Man?

Culture, as we have seen throughout the book, is a high-profile issue in managerial thought and practice. Nor is this confined to the workplace. Commentators (Sayer and Ray, 1999) refer to a more general ‘cultural turn’ away from a concern with the economy and structure. It was not always like this. In 1956, William H. Whyte wrote the influential The Organisation Man, a vituperative attack on the ‘social ethic’ shaping the values of those in the middle ranks of private and public corporations. This oddly-named ethic was a collectivist nightmare that morally legitimated the powers of society against the individual. Among those blamed were Mayo and his obsessive concern for belongingness and group adjustment. Whyte’s solution was for the individual to fight a rearguard battle against the organisation, with the aid of some useful advice such as ‘how to cheat at personality tests’. As Peters and Waterman note (1982: 105), the association with grey conformity made corporate culture a taboo topic. Culture was only acceptable as an issue when it was associated with the necessity for managers to be sensitive towards national diversities in the ‘collective programming of the mind’ (Hofstede, 1980).

But by the end of the 1980s, organisation man was back in fashion. Though some continue to doubt the idea of people ‘belonging’ to the company (Lessem, 1985), IBM’s ‘corporate fascists’ with their historic emphasis on conformity and commitment could get their overdue kudos as well as smile politely on the way to the bank (Pascale and Athos, 1982: 186). Despite all the hymns of praise to corporations, the credit for reviving the issue largely goes to American academics and management consultants, notably the two mentioned above, plus Ouchi (1981) and Deal and Kennedy (1988)

– all except Ouchi connected to the McKinsey consultancy company. However, it was filtered, as we began to discuss in Chapter 11, through a reading of the Japanese experience that located their success in the existence of strong cultures and ‘turned-on workforces’. In other words, cross-national competitive advantage was seen to be linked to cultural factors (Dahler-Larsen, 1994).

Corporate culture was put on the agenda. This can be defined as the way in which management mobilise combinations of values, language, rituals and myths, and is seen as the key factor in unlocking the commitment and enthusiasm of employees. To the extent that it can make people feel that they are working for something worthwhile, it is projected as part of the solution to the historic search for meaning or the holy grail of commitment in the study of organisations. For work humanisation theorists such as Herzberg and Maslow, that search was connected to the provision of intrinsically satisfying tasks through job redesign. The ground shifted to the psychosocial benefits from identification with the company and its superordinate goals. There may be characteristics that make companies successful, as in the famous lists of Peters and Waterman or Goldsmith and Clutterbuck – autonomy, zero-basing, productivity through people – but corporate culture is the