Paul S. Adler

Managing Flexible Automation

Management techniques are faced with the challenge of keeping up with the greater manufacturing flexibility made possible by the development of programmable automation systems. These challenges arise in 5 areas: 1. strategy, 2. project evaluation, 3. managing change, 4. implementation of automated capabilities, and 5. labor force considerations. In the first case, dynamic rather than static perspectives on process technology are required, with strategy being the foundation of excellence in all functions, not just at the general manager level. Project evaluation should focus on the costs of failing to pursue an investment opportunity, not just on the costs of pursuing such opportunities. Management must be able to identify the kinds of organizational changes needed for making use of the full technological potential of flexibility. Implementation requires an organizational culture with a commitment to learning. The labor force must become more proactive since the main task is problem solving.

New Technologies, New Skills:

Although managers tend to assume that the introduction of new technologies will result in a reduction of skill requirements, this is not always the case. In fact, there is often an upgrading effect. An examination is made of bank computerization to help identify useful generalizations about the new types of skills that will be required for effective automation. It is demonstrated that a careful assessment of the type of responsibility, degree of abstractness, and nature of interdependence will prove valuable for the manager. If, however, the assessment is clouded by uncertainty, then a guiding assumption is needed. The most useful guiding assumption is that optimal performance demands more responsibility for results, more intellectual mastery and abstract skills, and more carefully nurtured interdependence.

Technology and the future of work

The essays in this volume contradict the conventional assumption that automation will not only reduce the number of workers required to produce a given product but also require less skilled workers to produce it.

3 Critical Management Studies

Abstract Critical management studies (CMS) offers a range of alternatives to mainstream management theory with a view to radically transforming management practice. The common core is deep skepticism regarding the moral defensibility and the social and ecological sustainability of prevailing conceptions and forms of management and organization. CMSs motivating concern is neither the personal failures of individual managers nor the poor management of specific firms, but the social injustice and environmental destructiveness of the broader social and economic systems that these managers and firms serve and reproduce. This chapter reviews CMSs progress, main themes, theoretical and epistemological premises, and main projects; we also identify some problems and make some proposals. Our aim is to provide an accessible overview of a growing movement in management studies.

Ergonomics, employee involvement, and the Toyota production system: A case study of NUMMI's 1993 model introduction

New United Motors Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) is a GM-Toyota joint venture that has been lauded by some for achieving performance based on high employee involvement, and criticized by others for intensifying work and harming workers. In 1993, OSHA cited NUMMI for paying insufficient attention to ergonomic issues during the introduction of a new car model. The authors analyze the origins of NUMMIs ergonomic problems and the responses of the company, union, and regulators. They also discuss a more ergonomically successful model introduction two years later. This case suggests that although employee involvement does not eliminate all divergence of interests between management and workers, it can change the terms of that divergence. When management reliance on employee involvement is complemented by strong employee voice and strong regulators, managers may find it in their interest to improve safety as a means of maintaining high employee commitment and thereby improving business performance.

Antecedents of intergroup conflict in multifunctional product development teams: a conceptual model

Multifunctional teams are an increasingly popular way of organizing product development. While a considerable body of research has addressed process-related challenges facing teams in general, there is a relative lack of clarity on the specific challenges confronting multifunctional product development teams. This paper therefore elaborates on the challenge of intergroup conflict in multifunctional product development teams, proposing a model that explains how functional diversity within such teams can lead to task and emotional intergroup conflict. The model is developed through a synthesis of organizational behavior and social psychology literature, and illustrative examples are drawn from interviews with members of five teams in three manufacturing firms. >

The Evolving Object of Software Development

This paper contributes to an ongoing debate on the effects of bureaucratic rationalization on relatively non-routine, knowledge-work activities. It focuses on the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM®) for software development. In particular, it explores how the CMM affects the object of software developers’ work and thereby affects organization structure. Empirical evidence is drawn from interviews in four units of a large software consulting firm. First, using contingency theory, I address the technical dimensions of the development object. Here CMM implementation reduced task uncertainty and helped master task complexity and interdependence. Second, using institutional theory, I broaden the focus to include the symbolic dimensions of the object. Adherence to the CMM involved the sampled organizations in efforts to ensure certification, and these symbolic conformance tasks interacted in both disruptive and productive ways with technical improvement tasks. Finally, using cultural-historical activity theory, I deepen the focus to include the social-structural dimensions of the object. Through these lenses, the software development task appears as basically contradictory, aiming simultaneously at use value, in the form of great code, and at exchange value, in the form of high fees and profits: the CMM deepened rather than resolved this contradiction. The form of organization associated with these mutations of the object of work is a form of bureaucracy that is simultaneously mock, coercive, and enabling.

The Chief Technology Officer

This paper explores the role of the chief technical officer (CTO) in orchestrating the large manufacturing corporations product, process and information technologies. The data comes from a mail questionnaire survey of the 25 CTOs we identified among the ranks of Fortune 100 companies, and telephone interviews with 22 of these 25 executives. We discuss reporting relationships, personal backgrounds, the motivations for the formation of new corporate role.

Critical in the Name of Whom and What

Mayer Zald’s article poses an important challenge to the field of Critical Management Studies. It is based on a presentation to the Critical Management Studies Workshop (CMSW) at the 2001 Academy of Management meeting. I respond to it as someone who has helped organize the Critical Management Studies Workshop within the Academy of Management. I write here, however, not to represent the group’s views but to advance the debate about its future. When we decided to call our group the ‘Critical Management Studies Workshop’, the meaning of the term ‘critical’ was left rather vague. Our ‘mission statement’ (http://aom.pace.edu/cms/) reads:

PERSPECTIVE—The Sociological Ambivalence of Bureaucracy: From Weber via Gouldner to Marx

Reports of the demise of the bureaucratic form of organization are greatly exaggerated, and debates about bureaucracys functions and effects therefore persist. For many years, a broad current of organizational scholarship has taken inspiration from Max Webers image of bureaucracy as an “iron cage” and has seen bureaucracy as profoundly ambivalent—imposing alienation as the price of efficiency. Following a path originally sketched by Alvin Gouldner [Gouldner, A. W. 1954. Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Free Press, Glencoe, IL], some recent research has challenged this view as overly pessimistic, arguing that bureaucracy need not always be coercive but can sometimes take a form that is experienced as enabling. The present article challenges both Webers and Gouldners accounts, arguing that although bureaucracys enabling role may sometimes be salient to employees, even when it is, bureaucracy typically appears to them as ambivalent—simultaneously enabling and coercive. I offer an unconventional reading of Marx as a way to make sense of this ambivalence.