Matt Vidal

Lean Production, Worker Empowerment, and Job Satisfaction: A Qualitative Analysis and Critique:

Many argue that increased employee involvement in manufacturing is central to lean production. Increasing the responsibilities and abilities of front-line workers has been labeled empowerment. Such empowerment is said to increase job satisfaction. Yet, there is surprisingly little qualitative research directly addressing the relationship between participatory work arrangements and job satisfaction, and the quantitative evidence is much less clear than often presented. Qualitative data presented here show that workers can be satisfied under relatively traditional Fordist arrangements and that increasing employee involvement does not necessarily increase satisfaction. My research highlights the role of individual work orientations in mediating the effects of objective characteristics of job design — such as participatory work arrangements — on job satisfaction. Further, individual preferences for work arrangements are shown not to be consistent and invariable, but context-dependent and subject to reevaluation.

Postfordism as a dysfunctional accumulation regime: a comparative analysis of the USA, the UK and Germany

The article seeks to reanimate the early regulation theory project of building Marxist political economy through the development of mid-range institutional theory. The concept of a mode of regulation – central to the Parisian wing of regulation theory – is rejected in favour of a distinction between functional and dysfunctional accumulation regimes. The Fordist regime of accumulation provided a unique institutional context allowing an extraordinary combination of high profits, rising real wages and strong GDP growth. In contrast, the postfordist regime is shown to be inherently dysfunctional, characterized by manifest tendencies toward stagnation and associated regressive trends in work and employment relations. A comparative analysis of profit rates, wage shares, growth rates and debt in the USA, UK and Germany shows that the single model of postfordism as a dysfunctional accumulation regime fits all three countries, although with important differences in forms of dysfunctionality.

Temporary Employment and Strategic Staffing in the Manufacturing Sector

While prior research has identified different ways of using temporary workers to achieve numerical flexibility, quantitative analysis of temporary employment has been limited to a few key empirical indicators of demand variability that may confound important differences. Our analysis provides evidence that many manufacturers use temporary workers to achieve what we call planned and systematic numerical flexibility rather than simply in a reactive manner to deal with unexpected problems. Although temporary work may provide many benefits for employers, a key function appears to be the provision of numerical flexibility not to buffer core workers but to externalize certain jobs.

Low-autonomy work and bad jobs in postfordist capitalism

In this article I present a critical reconstruction of the concept of postfordism, arguing for a regulation-theoretic approach that views Fordism and postfordism not in terms of production models based on a particular labour process but as institutional regimes of competition, within which there are one of four types of generic labour process: high-autonomy, semiautonomous, tightly constrained and unrationalized labour-intensive. I show that over one-third of US employment is in low-autonomy jobs and sketch an analytical framework for analysing job quality. Contrasting the four labour processes with various measures of job quality produces 18 job types that reduce to one of three job quality categories: good jobs, bad jobs and decent jobs. The typology provides a framework for analysing upgrading or downgrading of four aspects of employment quality within and across the four generic labour processes.

On the Persistence of Labour Market Insecurity and Slow Growth in the US: Reckoning with the Waltonist Growth Regime

In this article I systematically incorporate empirical work on rising income inequality and wage stagnation into a regulation theoretic framework for analysing macroeconomic growth. The rise of job polarisation and income inequality coincides with a long period of macroeconomic stagnation, both continuing through to the present (with the exception of a brief period of strong growth and declining inequality in the second half of the 1990s). The corporate scramble to restore profit rates after the crisis of Fordism has transformed the institutional configuration of the political economy. In particular, institutions supporting upward mobility and middle-class incomes in the economy have been eroded by the twin forces of internationalisation (leading to the re-emergence of wage-based competition) and employment externalisation (outsourcing, downsizing, antiunionism, etc). The current growth regime, which may be characterised as Waltonist, based on the Wal-Mart model of buyer-driven global supply chains focused on cutthroat wage-based competition and deunionisation, is not transitional but rather embedded in apparently long-term institutional settlements that amount to a dysfunctional regime.

When Organization Studies Turns to Societal Problems: The Contribution of Marxist Grand Theory:

Marxist theory, we argue, can be a valuable resource as organization studies turns to the urgent societal problems of our times. In order to address these problems, organizational studies needs greater historical depth and interdisciplinarity. We argue that these imperatives necessitate a return to grand theory. Grand theories provide the frameworks needed for integrating in a systematic as opposed to an ad hoc manner both scholarship across disciplines and middle-range theories within disciplines. We show that marxism offers a particularly fruitful grand theory for organization studies and for the social sciences more broadly, because it affords a platform for integrating various social sciences and because it offers penetrating insight into both the longue durée of history and the political-economic dynamics of capitalism. In making our case, we present and defend the core ideas of marxism, including its theory of modes of production, its distinctive theory of “soft” technological and economic determinism, its labor theory of value, and its account of the key developmental tendencies of capitalism—concentration and centralization of capital, socialization, and recurrent crises. We illustrate the power of these ideas by showing how they can be used to enrich organizational research on the 2007-8 financial crisis. And we introduce the four articles in this Special Themed Section, which show the capacity of marxist concepts to reframe and enrich research on traditional and emerging topics in organization studies, including organizational learning and communities of practice, knowledge work, teamwork and collaboration, social media and digital capitalism, and organizational routines and path dependence.

Customer-driven management models for choiceless clientele? Business process reengineering in a California welfare agency

Business process reengineering and lean are increasingly used to restructure public sector work. This article presents a case study of reengineering in a California welfare agency. It finds extensive work intensification and reduced autonomy for the workforce, and deteriorating service for the clientele. Rather than attribute these outcomes as inherent to the business process reengineering model, this article emphasizes how cost cutting and quantitative efficiency were prioritized over worker empowerment and service quality because the organization is a government agency facing severe budgetary pressures under neoliberalism, and the clientele consists of indigent families and individuals who have no choice of an alternative provider.

Inequality and the Growth of Bad Jobs

The share of jobs that are low-skill declined by 15% from 1960 to 2005, yet low-wage jobs have made up an increasing share of total job growth over that period. Scholar Matt Vidal discusses how the manufacturing-based, nationally bound economy of the postwar years allowed employers to pay decent wages for low-skill jobs, but in today’s postindustrial, internationalized economy, wage-based competition has returned with a vengeance.

Routine inefficiency: operational satisficing and real-world markets

Purpose – This chapter presents a close examination of how manufacturing managers respond to environmental pressures by formulating and implementing operational strategy. Methodology – The analysis is based on interviews and observations in 31 manufacturing firms in the US Midwest. Findings – The study reveals that competitive market pressure is only so effective at penetrating the institutional layers of inter- and intra-firm relations. Even in the highly competitive manufacturing sector, operational strategy is consistently implemented in suboptimal ways. Relatively inefficient routines are commonly institutionalized and inefficient arrangements appear to be able to persist for an indefinite period of time. To the extent that firms with variable capabilities and internal socio-technical systems must process, interpret, and react to complex external pressures and often-ambiguous signals, the sociology of work provides essential insights for the sociology of markets. Originality – While the findings are subject to the standard caveats regarding nonrandom qualitative samples, the rich data produced and the in-depth analysis of real-world organizational pressures and managerial decision-making provide distinctive insights into how managers must balance external market pressures with internal labor process problems. Individual motivation appears to be at least as important in true organizational innovation as market discipline. While adaptation and learning certainly occur in organizations (and selection also operates through the death of extreme laggards) there exists sufficient institutional space within markets for a range of variation in organizational performance. The findings suggest that the analysis of internal organizational dynamics provides an essential part of a realistic theory of markets.

Book review symposium: Colin Crouch, Governing Social Risks in Post-Crisis Europe by Matt Vidal

Colin Crouch is a leading economic sociologist and political economist. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s he made important contributions to industrial relations theory and research. More recently, he has made equally important contributions to the broader comparative political economy of capitalism. Among many books one might cite, his Capitalist Diversity and Change (2005) offered an eloquent critique of and alternative to the highly influential theory of varieties of capitalism. In contrast to the latter’s vision of institutionally coherent and hermetically sealed national economies, Crouch rightly emphasized how economies are institutionalized in ways that are often incoherent. In Capitalist Diversity and Change, Crouch (2005: 27) wrote of the enduring tension comparative scholars face when attempting to make sense of capitalist diversity: to develop a typology of capitalism that is theoretically parsimonious yet realistic, ‘without lapsing into empiricism’. He concluded that rather than developing theoretical types based on empirical cases (of whole countries), comparativists should study empirical cases to see which theoretical types are found within them. In Governing Social Risks in Post-Crisis Europe, Crouch has ostensibly taken a step in the direction of empiricism, although this is surely a function of the nature of the research question he set for himself rather than a retreat from theory. Nonetheless, it makes Governing Social Risks something of a difficult book. The question Governing Social Risks asks is: how has the inherent tension between capital’s search for labour flexibility and workers’ search for security been managed across European countries? Because capital’s demands for labour flexibility generate economic insecurity and uncertainty, which in turn lower consumer confidence, various institutional arrangements may be needed to ensure effective demand (p. 2). During much of the 20th century, labour market uncertainty was seen as a market failure and public policy focused on providing protection against uncertainty: social insurance; unemployment legislation; institutionalization of trade unions and so on. But since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, employment protections have come ‘to be seen, like all other attempts to withstand market forces, as self-defeating’ (p. 8). Crouch begins with an interesting class analysis of social risks. Different groups have distinct abilities to turn uncertainty into risk (i.e. calculable uncertainty). The 682191WES0010.1177/0950017016682191Work, employment and societyBook review symposium book-review2016