Darren McCabe

'What Happens when the Phone goes Wild?': Staff, Stress and Spaces for Escape in a BPR Telephone Banking Work Regime

This paper explores the experiences of staff working under a business process re‐engineering (BPR) work regime. We examine the nature of work within a team‐based, multi‐skilled and empowered environment within financial services. Despite mixed responses our case study indicates that for those employees who remain in employment after ‘re‐engineering’, working conditions may become more stressful and intensive. Although some staff may welcome those elements of a BPR work regime that facilitate a more varied work experience, the possibilities for satisfaction are often curtailed due to management

'How would you measure something like that?': Quality in a Retail Bank

apos; preoccupation with productivity and ‘bottom line’ results. In practice BPR is neither as simple to implement nor as ‘rational’ in its content as the gurus would have us believe. Partly for these reasons it is also not as coercive in its control over labour as some critics fear. While managers may only want to encourage employee autonomy that is productive to its ends, we identify a number of occasions where autonomy is disruptive of corporate goals. The paper seeks to add to our understanding of ‘stress’, ‘resistance’ and management ‘control’ by considering the ways in which staff engage in the operation of BPR so as to maintain and reproduce these conditions. This dynamic cannot be understood, however, outside of the relations of power and inequality that characterize society and employment.

Strategy-as-Power: Ambiguity, Contradiction and the Exercise of Power in a UK Building Society

In this paper we explore a case study of total quality management (TQM) within the financial services sector. We demonstrate that a ‘conformance to requirements’ approach towards TQM is concerned with increasing management’s physical and financial control over procedures, documentation, systems and people. Such an approach only partially addresses quality because (a) there can never be a precise ‘conformance’ and (b) this approach neglects customers and employees. We illustrate that often management do not understand the flaws/problematics and underlying philosophy behind TQM. Thus they continue to adopt ‘inconsistent’ approaches, such as attempting to control costs and employees while espousing the importance of the customer and the need for a trust-based culture. Yet, whether or not they understand the rationale behind TQM and attempt to widen their focus by considering people and customers more directly, we argue that management cannot easily adopt a ‘consistent’ approach because a preoccupation with controlling costs is bound up with career-based identities and hierarchical power relations. Ultimately we argue that management cannot control ‘quality’ in any simple top down way, essentially because of the ‘indeterminacy’ of labour, the ‘intangibility’ of customer satisfaction, and the complexity of organizational power and identity relations.

'The rise and fall of TQM': the vision, meaning and operation of change

‘Strategy-as-practice’ (s-a-p) scholars have urged us to attend to the messy realities of strategy so as to increase the relevance of research for practititoners. This article, whilst recognizing the need to focus on what managers do, develops a critique of this literature. It argues that the s-a-p approach (Whittington, Jarzabkowski, Johnson, Balogun) and the earlier ‘Power School’ (Mintzberg, Pettigrew, Pfeffer) share much in common as both present power as the possession of management. This overstates the ability of managers to control others whilst understating the scope for resistance. Second, it asserts that both approaches would benefit from greater sensitivity towards the unequal context through which strategies emerge and that they serve, in part, to reproduce. Third, the article provides an empirical study of strategy in a UK Building Society. It attends to how power is exercised in ambiguous and contradictory ways that both supports and thwarts managerial endeavours. Through considering the uncertainty that results from this, the case reflects on the possibilities for resistance. The central argument is that if we explore practice only from management’s perspective, then we are in danger of not only reinforcing the status quo but also of being irrelevant to practitioners and wider constituents.

`A Different World': Shifting Masculinities in the Transition to Call Centres

The vision of TQM promises unity, teamworking, autonomy and empowerment. This article explores how this vision was contradicted by organisational restructuring and the hierarchical imposition of redundancies and contingent employment insecurity in a medium sized bank. As a result it was found that the meaning and legitimacy of TQM for both employees and many managers was called into question.

Individualization at Work?: Subjectivity, Teamworking and Anti-Unionism

This article explores how business process reengineering (BPR) is informed by a masculine discourse that emphasizes competition, control and conquest while simultaneously appealing to care, trust, nurturing, creativity and teamwork. We explore how this contradiction is reflected in the language and practice of management. We demonstrate some of the ways in which this contradiction infuses with, subverts and may ultimately undermine BPR. We locate the debate within a contextual consideration of how reengineering is displacing an earlier form of masculinity within financial services which we understand and describe as paternalism. It is apparent that the pre-eminence of masculinity was never questioned. Indeed, both paternalism and reengineering simply fought over which masculinity would predominate.

What is happening in "quality" in the financial services?

This article explores how power can individualize, rendering us isolated and fearful, but also how power can be wielded to challenge such conditions. It is argued that subjectivity should not be confused with individualism, for although we are all individualized, and understand ourselves as individuals, subjectivity is constituted through social relations, that give rise to collective meaning, sentiments and affiliations. These issues are considered in the context of an automobile manufacturing company, where there was an attempt to constitute individualistic employees through anti-unionism and, paradoxically, teamworking. The article elucidates the polarity within the Labour Process debate, arguing that much of the controversy and confusion stems from a dualistic reading of the issues involved.

Financial Services - Every which Way but Quality?

Questions whether “quality” is having as much impact in the financial services sector as the evidence of use of quality management techniques in the UK suggests. Explores the context within which “quality” is finding a place in financial services, and presents the findings of a postal questionnaire survey concerned with the extent of usage and the nature of the quality initiatives in the financial services sector.

‘The times they are a changin’? transformative organizational innovations in financial services in the UK

There have been many TQM initiaves in the financial services sector, but it seems that customers are not impressed.

Can a leopard change its spots? ‐ seeking quality in financial services

Much of the management guru-based literature emphasizes the transformational capacity of organizational innovations (OIs). The excellence, quality and reengineering literature purports to abandon hierarchy, bureaucracy and management control; to eradicate conflict and instil an new team and quality-based ethos. Yet much remains unknown about how these OIs are operationalized. Here we question both theoretically and empirically the validity of such transformational claims by reference to our research within financial services. We argue that despite considerable changes, OIs remain both a condition of, and location for, the exercise of organizational power relations. Bureaucratic and hierarchical structures continue to pervade organizations. Work-related pressures and tensions abound concerning issues such as control over the quality versus the quantity of work output, work intensification and job insecurity. All of which impinge upon the performance of OIs, and belie notions of a ‘transformation’ of organi...