Frank Worthington

Power, Control and Resistance in 'The Factory That Time Forgot'

This paper contributes to a developing body of literature which questions the claim that the ‘factory of the future’ is a total institution in which self-subordination through ‘new wave management’ is virtually inescapable. It examines the experience of frustrated management efforts to re-engineer working practices, mainly at the point of production, in response to repeated corporate-driven initiatives designed to implement a range of ‘lean manufacturing’ initiatives at ‘Northern Plant’, a pseudonym. Our findings illustrate how workers can and do employ a variety of individual and collective forms of resistance involving dissembling co-operation with change initiatives whilst maintaining a distance from them. In accounting for resistance, we note the significance of market conditions but focus primarily upon the importance of workers’ identification with practices that had been established earlier when management were content to indulge self-managing patterns of work in return for securing required levels of output.

Accounting and management-labour relations: the politics of production in the 'factory with a problem'

This paper examines the role of accounting in management–labour relations within the context of contemporary moves to re-conceptualise and reorganise manufacturing processes. We explore how new manufacturing and accounting discourses are received by employees, and how their (more or less accommodating) responses to such initiatives shape the trajectory of their introduction. So doing we show why a more adequate understanding of accountings presence and significance in the workplace does not simply require a little more attention to the politics of the production process but, rather, its positioning at the centre of analysis. We develop our argument by drawing on material collected from an intensive and longitudinal case study of a manufacturing plant of a large multinational company based upon participant observation and extensive interviews. We show how, following shifts in market conditions and company ownership, pressures to enhance productivity and improve profits led to several attempts by senior management at the plant to introduce change initiatives in production methods, management style, and accounting techniques. We demonstrate how shopfloor workers interpreted these initiatives as intensifying labour by reducing head count, leading them to resist these initiatives over a period of 13 years. We argue that during this period the rhetoric of corporate governance was mediated by workers’ ability to create a space through which their own interests were defined, articulated and brought to bear on the discourses and rationalities advanced by senior management in support of ‘new’ accounting (and management) techniques. By appreciating the presence and significance of labour in the politics of production, additional ways of accounting for the rise and demise of ‘new’ or ‘excellent’ accounting techniques are contemplated.

Ethnographies of work and the work of ethnography

The articles comprising this special issue of Ethnography have been selected from papers presented at the Current Developments in Ethnographic Research in the Social and Management Sciences event held at the University of Liverpool Management School in September 2006. The symposium jointly organized by the host institution and Keele University Institute for Public Policy and Management is the first UK management school-based event (that we know of) to focus exclusively on ethnographic research and was specifically conceived of as a ‘space’ to bring together established and emerging scholars to explore current trends in qualitative research in the social and management sciences. We utilize this special issue to present work that seeks, in various ways, to explore the changing contours and character of the nature of work and the impact this has upon employers and employees. As the breadth and quality of the empirical and theoretical content of the papers presented at the Liverpool Symposium demonstrate, ethnography is a key focus in research for a growing number of organization and management theorists. Ethnography captures what Hodson calls ‘the emergent subtle life of organizations’ (2001: 52) in domains that can be captured by survey research only as shallow de-contextualized surface images. Our aim in selecting these articles has been to contribute to the reanimation of images of work. In this respect our authors respond directly graphy

Editorial for the Journal of Organizational Ethnography

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the new journal, its history, scope and ambitions.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews the current growth in interest in ethnographic research in organizational and management studies, reflected not least in the success of the Liverpool‐Keele Ethnography Symposium.Findings – Surveying the state of the field, this paper has identified a need for a natural home for organizational ethnographers. The continuing growth and development of the Symposium is also a reflection of the shared experience among would‐be ethnographers who find that, when presenting ethnographic work at other conferences, their choice of methodology is more often subject to contrarian rather than constructive discussion. It is only by debating the merits of the empirical and theoretical themes and perspectives that inform the subject in a constructive way with others, who are genuinely appreciative of the tradition, that it will develop.Originality/value – Th...