Alan McKinlay

`Dead Selves': The Birth of the Modern Career

The rise of the modern career based on merit and open competition rather than connections or seniority was associated with the slow emergence of the managerial bureaucracy. These processes unfolded in Scottish banking in the 20 years before 1914. Inspection of local adherence to centrally specified procedures was critical to both processes. Inspectors developed and maintained central files that charted the individuals technical competence and conformity to the banks cultural expectations. The staff ledgers provided a continuous record of salary, promotion, and punishment over an individuals entire career. Although there was no formal categorization or quantification of performance or attitude, the staff ledgers did begin to open up the individual to scrutiny by the centre. For the bank, the career was a highly efficient form of supervision that relied heavily upon individuals self-regulation. For the individual, conformity resulted in promotion and career progression. The career was not simply an economic mechanism but also a moral project without end of hope of completion.

The politics of partnership? Innovation in employment relations in the Scottish Spirits Industry

Perspectives that emphasize links between workplace innovation and broader HR policies, particularly of a ‘mutual gains’ nature, have become increasingly influential. This paper analyses the links and tensions between workplace change and industrial relations systems in the context of attempts to create a shop-floor politics of partnership during a period of corporate restructuring in two spirits companies. We argue that interface tensions between the employment relationship, the labour process and organizational governance are inextricably linked to the outcomes of partnership initiatives. While there are positive outcomes to more integrated approaches to partnership, a range of industrial relations issues, notably the ambivalent position of shop-stewards, remains problematic.

In Search of Perfect People Teamwork and Team Players in the Scottish Spirits Industry

Much of the mainstream and critical literatures stress the potential of teamwork for normative integration through socialization and peer pressure. This article utilizes case studies in the large bottling halls of spirits producers in Scotland to explore the characteristics of and limits to such integration. A multi-dimensional model of team-work and an examination of both practices and attitudes enables the research to identify the variety of managerial objectives and out-comes across and within the plants. Though the extent of integration varies between the teams, the overall results lead to scepticism about whether team members can be considered as socially engineered individuals who have internalized company normative demands. These findings, it is argued, are compatible with the majority of comparable case study research.

Careering alone: Careers and social capital in the financial services and television industries

The relationship between career and social capital is an important but relatively unexplored research topic. In this article, we draw on the literatures on social capital and careers, and on empirical studies of the shifting nature of careers in financial services and television production firms, to argue that, in labour markets where key skills are in short supply, the concept of social capital constitutes a rich resource for understanding the implications of changing forms of organization. We argue that social capital has a particularly important impact on an organization’s ability to leverage knowledge and is, thus, of strategic significance. The ability to manage social capital might, therefore, prove to be a major management competence. Use of the social capital concept gives us an important insight into the changing nature of careers and organizations.

Managing Foucault: Genealogies of management

Abstract Business history has become an increasingly inter-disciplinary space, and has been rejuvenated by this inter-disciplinarity. Despite the theoretical openness of business history, and his influence elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities, Michel Foucault has had little or no impact outside the specialist niche of accounting history. Foucault’s central text for many historians is his study of the emergence of the modern penitentiary, Discipline and Punish (1977). Here we follow Foucault’s lead by examining the factories of the industrial revolution, focusing on the influence of Jeremy Bentham and Robert Owen’s New Lanark in the first and second sections of the paper respectively, using these cases as the basis for a discussion of Foucault’s implications for business history. In the third and final section, we draw attention to the centrality of the body in Foucault’s work.

Competitive Strategies and Organizational Change

The debates about organizational responses to economic crisis have focussed on the need for strategic and structural realignment. Work organization is rarely considered as an integral element of competitive strategy. Current shifts in the contours of previously stable mass markets and product and process innovation demand equally profound organizational change to maintain competitiveness. In this context maintaining or regaining competitive advantage is critically dependent upon striking an optimal balance between maximizing the productivity and versatility of work organization. We examine the impetus, dynamics and impact of pervasive change processes in three contrasting organizations, Pilkingtons, Rank Xerox and Ford U.K. While Pilkingtons relied entirely upon existing managerial expertise, the latter two companies were distinctive in that they drew vital conceptual elements of their change agendas from their organizational links with, respectively, a Japanese and American company. From these case studies we conclude that significant business turnarounds were achieved by these companies because strategic choice, work organization, company culture and organizational realignment were conceived of and operationalized as complementary elements of their competitive strategy.

Management, technology and work in commercial broadcasting, c. 1979-98

This article explores the relationship between management strategy, technological change and collective bargaining in the British commercial television industry. The demanning and deskilling potential of digital production technologies remained largely untapped until the second half of the 1980s. The termination of national collective bargaining that had regulated minimum crewing levels was the watershed in terms of work organisation.

Power without knowledge? Foucault and Fordism, c.1900–50

The Ford Motor Company underwent transition from workplace supervision based on a system of terror to one predicated on modern discipline. With what some contemporaries claimed was ‘the worlds largest private army’ and an enormous espionage network, Henry Ford resisted adoption of human relations approaches and the new foremanship ideas that captured rivals such as General Motors. This account explains how in the 1940s the Ford Motor Company eventually capitulated and modernized its supervisory regime.

Managing for Ford

In explaining the rationale for his classic account of working for Ford, Beynon (1973, 1984) argues that he was filling a gap in our knowledge of the experience of work. While the founders of corporate dynasties such as Henry Ford are public figures, at the time of Beynons book we knew little of the people who do the work that makes corporations such as Ford public names. Beynon set out to remedy this deficiency. This paper sets out to fill a gap that still exists in our knowledge - the managerial experience of work. It starts where Beynon finishes, at the beginning of the 1980s, and proposes that the 1980s constituted a watershed for Ford managers with the introduction of a new notion of management - Participative Management - which challenged many of Fords previous management assumptions.

Rethinking the assembly line: Organisation, performance and productivity in Ford Motor Company, c. 1908–27

Previous assessments of Fords assembly line have been based on a limited set of highly aggregated data. New, more detailed and extensive data allows a reconsideration of Fords operations and their effectiveness to confirm more fully some earlier understandings through extending the analyses to show the lines impact over a longer period and with more detail about its operational and organisational effects. The reconsideration also challenges some earlier ideas to show that the line was intensively exploited to yield productivity improvements, and that it was not so rigidly used as previously thought.