Dmo Lecture 2

Lecture 2 notes

1. During last quarter of the 20th century, a radical transformation, due to the emergence of forms of organizational innovation that are quantitatively and qualitatively different than those that existed at the beginning of century (Delbridge, 1998). This brought changes in business practices, management control methods and management-labour relations.

对于该现象 mainstream thinking: both business organizations and their employees are said to have benefited considerably from these changes. Eg: provide businesses with the means to operate more flexibly to improve productivity, product quality and reliability and thus customer satisfaction (Chid, 2005); the changes offer employees opportunities to be much more involved in the day-to-day planning a improved lived-experience of work that is based on “high-trust” employee involvement practices rather than direct management control.

Critical view: fundamentals have not changed. The gap between a wealthy elite and the mass of people is not narrowing (Sewell, 1998). Labour process theorists have shown innovative forms of organization, production mythologies comprise self-disciplinary managerial power, control and surveillance that lead to work intensification.

Fordism: defined as a system of mass production for mass consumption. Its principal feature is a moving production line, along which a highly detailed division of labour is governed by rigid hierarchical command and control structures, and low-trust inflexible management control methods based upon the principles of “scientific management”

2. Mainstream view: Womanck et al (1990): in contrast to traditional Fordist mass production arrangements, post-Fordist organizational forms, such as lean production, comprise of small dedicated multi-skilled and multi-functional teams of workers who operate high-tech multi-purpose machines and automated assembly operations that require less physical effort, less manufacturing and factory space, less...