Charles Heckscher

White-collar blues : management loyalties in an age of corporate restructuring

Downsizing. Layoffs. Restructuring. These are the new realities of corporate America. Heckscher has interviewed some 250 middle managers from a wide array of firms to explain why its happening and what it means to millions of employees as well as the companies themselves.

The new unionism : employee involvement in the changing corporation

This important, provocative, and highly readable book defies most traditionial ideological pigeonholes. In it Charles Heckscher raises issues in such a way as to make both liberals and conservatives rethink what they believe about unions and their place in the American economic and social system. Heckschers basic thesis is that the decline of American unions results in large part from New Deal labor law the Wagner Act and the logic of industrial unionism and contrived scarcity upon which it is based. He argues that the Wagner Act framework maintains a rigid, increasingly artificial boundary between workers and management. This boundary accounts for union commitment to adversarial tactics, the importance of the strike as a weapon in bilateral bargaining, and organized labors insistence that benefits be based upon seniority rather than performance. Of course, this line can also be drawn by management, which is all too often willing to violate standards of fair dealing and tacit agreements for short-term gain and to make adjustments at labors expense using layoffs to adapt to market fluctuations, increasing worker discipline, and cutting wages and benefits to meet increased price competition. Heckscher acknowledges that workers are capable of solidarity and even militance, of striking and picketing in the traditional fashion, when they are treated as an inferior mass. But he insists that given the choice, they gravitate to less adversarial, more participatory modes of interaction. Heckscher observes that managers have increasingly come to recognize the folly of treating employees as an inferior mass. To win their trust and cooperation and thereby to mobilize their intelligence and creativity, many firms now offer strong guarantees of fair treatment and employment security, and their top managers have established effective mechanisms for employee participation in the direction of the firm. Because such firms can generate an unusual degree of commitment from employees at all levels of the organization, they are often far more successful than their competitors in meeting the challenges of economic change. Heckscher concludes that unions are declining because they have failed to meet the challenge of management reform: to adapt to participatory modes of interaction in which workers share work and allocate their own tasks and in which there is close cooperation among all the members of the organization and a strong sense of team spirit. Unions have failed to adapt because of barriers to worker participation established by New Deal labor law; under the Wagner Act worker participation is not encouraged and may even be illegal. The paradox Heckscher sees in this development is that by displacing unions participatory modes of interaction have tended to concentrate power in the hands of management. Hence, the positive commitment, increased productivity, and higher real incomes that are the goals of management reform remain vulnerable to myopic abuse and deception. Heckscher notes, for example, that many managers are satisfied with the appearance of employee participation rather than the reality. Clearly, any ongoing cooperative endeavor requires a system of formal governance

Looking Back, Moving Forward Toward Collaborative Universities

Research universities and faculty face challenges to the very foundations of their legitimacy. Although many factors contribute to these strains, we focus on the organization and culture of universities to suggest that academicians need to rethink their age-old organizing norms to avoid outside pressures for more bureaucratic control that ostensibly seeks to improve institutional efficiency and responsiveness. We contend that these pressures, which are not beneficial for scholars, can only be avoided by opening universities to a wider range of stakeholders and by adopting more collaborative organizational practices. We offer a few reasonable suggestions for such changes.

Transient Solidarities: Commitment and Collective Action in Post‐Industrial Societies

Solidarity has long been considered essential to labour, but many fear that it has declined. There has been relatively little scholarly investigation of it because of both theoretical and empirical difficulties. This article argues that solidarity has not declined but has changed in form, which has an impact on what kinds of mobilization are effective. We first develop a theory of solidarity general enough to compare different forms. We then trace the evolution of solidarity through craft and industrial versions, to the emergence of collaborative solidarity from the increasingly fluid ‘friending’ relations of recent decades. Finally, we examine the question of whether these new solidarities can be mobilized into effective collective action, and suggest mechanisms, rather different from traditional union mobilizations, that have shown some power in drawing on friending relations: the development of member platforms, the use of purposive campaigns and the co-ordination of ‘swarming’ actions. In the best cases, these can create collective actions that make a virtue of diversity, openness and participative engagement, by co-ordinating groups with different foci and skills.

Unfurling Organizational Innovation in Public Services: The Case of a Public Research Organization

This paper uses a longitudinal case study of an internally driven organizational innovation and redesign process at a scientific or public research organization (PRO) as a way of illustrating innovation dynamics that result from the need to formulate a new strategic mission for the organization as a response to wider environmental and institutional pressure. Based on in-depth interviews with key participants, supplemented by a review of project reports, contract archives, publications and press coverage, this paper illustrates that organizational renewal is a complex phenomenon in PROs and that innovations in essential elements of the formal structure, work practices and values can serve as important enablers of change in highly rigid work environments; it also shows that the introduction of certain management principles borrowed from private organizations may accelerate change by providing a strong basis for developing a shared collaborative organization in public research.

The Mutations of Professional Responsibility: Toward Collaborative Community

Professionals are distinctive insofar as in their primary activities they are oriented by what Max Weber called “value-rationality”—by their responsibility to ultimate values such as education or health or justice. But it is difficult to organize large-scale collectivities in such a way as to sustain value-rationality. Historically, the professions relied on guild-like traditionalistic structures based on status and loyalty to ensure their cohesion and solidarity; but this often came at the expense of those ultimate values. Under performance and accountability pressures to overcome this shortfall, many professional occupations have been shifting from the guild form toward bureaucratic and market forms of organization, thereby replacing traditionalistic ties with instrumental-rationality. But these latter organizational forms afford professionals little relief from growing pressure to improve efficiency, quality, and responsiveness. We argue that over the past few decades, a cluster of innovative organizing techniques have arisen that allow professionals to respond more effectively to these pressures by giving value-rationality much-needed organizational robustness and resilience. Deploying these new techniques, numerous professional collectivities have begun to reshaping themselves into what we call “collaborative communities.” We illustrate the distinctive features of value-rational collaborative community with examples drawn from prior research on medicine and we show some of its promise with results from a survey of teachers in one public school district.

Worker Ownership and Collaborative Production

Abstract Purpose To explore the challenges of worker ownership in complex and distributed collaborative production systems. Design/methodology/approach Review of emerging developments in the organization of economic production and conceptual exploration of their implications for the ownership regime, and for worker ownership. Findings Worker ownership research and advocacy usually take for granted what is to be owned: a factory or firm, exchanging on open markets. But this form of production, analyzed in the markets-hierarchy literature, is increasingly in question as more value is generated through flexible cross-boundary collaborations. As a result, the nature of ownership rights are contested from both within and without the business community. Practical implications This paper explores some implications of these developments on employee ownership as a practical ideal: what are the main possibilities for the evolution of “ownership” rights in collaborative processes? Worker owners need to consider their relation to, and distribution of rights among, other collaborative partners, including knowledge contributors and interdependent stakeholders. Social implications Implies a need to move beyond markets-hierarchies frameworks, in which concern is focused on the governance of firms, to building a set of mechanisms for the organization and governance of production networks. Originality/value Poses a set of problems for the worker ownership field emerging from the changing nature of production and organization.

Partnering for Organizational Performance: Collaboration and Culture in the Global Workplace

Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved