David Knights

'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

Financial institutions and social transformations : international studies of a sector

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.

Selling Oneself: Subjectivity and the Labour Process in Selling Life Insurance

Acknowledgements - Notes on the Contributors - An Industry in Transition: Regulation, Restructuring and Renewal D.Knights - The Dialectic of the Value Form: The Social Evolution of Capital Markets in the US T.Tinker - Suburban Subjects: Financial Services and the New Rights C.Grey - The Acrobat of Desire: Consumer Credit and its Linkages to Modern Consumerism M.Shaoul - Bringing the Consumer in: Sales Networks in Retail Banking in New Zealand T.Austrin - Financial Services in Transition: An Examination of Market and Regulatory Forces in Denmark and the UK J.Sundbo - Stability or Transformation of Employment Relations in German Banking M.Muller - Marketing the Soul: From the Ideology of Consumption to Consumer Subjectivity D.Knights and A.Sturdy - The Japanese Main Bank Relationship: Governance or Competitive Strategy? M.J.Scher - Index

The politics of IT-enabled restructuring and the restructuring of politics through total quality management

Sales work in general but life insurance selling in particular has not been the subject of much research within the labour process literature. Along with other ‘unproductive’ parts of the economy, it is not clear that selling insurance can be seen as a labour process at all. Where is the product from which surplus value can be extracted? How can production be intensified let alone revolutionised when sales personnel are so free of direct or close supervision? In what way is the sales person exploited, given the ‘excessive’ earnings for work that requires little by way of formal qualifications? While not professing to answer all of these questions, and indeed not wanting to accept the assumptions underlying some of them, we argue in this chapter that life insurance sales staff are experiencing many of the pressures of labour intensification. But more importantly, we seek to show the way in which these pressures or controls are built into the very sense of what it is to be a salesman or saleswoman. In short, what we focus upon in this chapter is the extent to which selling is an occupation in which the identification with the material and symbolic rewards of success are so reinforced as to transform individuals into subjects who are guaranteed to discipline themselves to a far greater degree than could be established through more direct controls.

Resistance and power in organizations

A variety of innovations such as total quality management (TQM) have been introduced by management in recent years as a means to unite organizations and secure employee commitment. Yet TQM is as much a product of existing social relations as it is a method for transforming them. Consequently, while addressing some problems TQM reconstitutes organizational inequalities and existing power relations and in doing so (re)creates many of the problems it is intended to resolve. Inasmuch as TQM is a continuation of the past as well as a means to reshape the future, it contains the seeds of its own decay. We illustrate this argument through a case study of a medium-sized UK Bank. We consider how TQM has waxed and waned differentially within a single organization. Telecommunication and on-line customer data-based technology facilitated organizational restructuring within the Bank, resulting in both redundancies and areas of job creation which both undermined and created conditions wherein TQM could flourish. We examine how TQM may be used as a vehicle for addressing some of the tensions presented by the introduction of new technology, and the organizational politics that stem from organizational restructuring. However, it is argued that TQM can only ameliorate these tensions, which are bound up with organizational power relations and employment insecurities. It does not remove organizational politics, for as older tensions are resolved, new ones emerge.