Stephen Ackroyd

All Quiet on the Workplace Front? A Critique of Recent Trends in British Industrial Sociology

Though perspectives underpinning research may have differed sharply, industrial sociology at its best has been able to uncover the variety of workplace resistance and misbehaviour that lies beneath the surface of the formal and consensual. The paper argues that this legacy is in danger of being lost as labour is taken out of the process and replaced by management as the active and successful agency. While there are a number of practical and theoretical forces shaping this trend, the paper identifies the growing influence of Foucauldian perspectives. It goes on to develop a critique of the way in which such theory and research overstates the extent and effectiveness of new management practices, while marginalising the potential for resistance.

The new managerialism and public service professions : change in health, social services, and housing

Introduction Professions and Professional Organisation in UK Public Services Dismantling the Organisational Settlement: Towards a New Public Management The National Health Service The Personal Social Services Social Housing Conclusion: Taking Stock of the New Public Management

Archetype Theory and the Changing Professional Organization: A Critique and Alternative:

In recent years there has been growing interest in analysing processes of change in professional service organizations drawing on the concepts of archetype theory. In this article, our primary goal is to question the validity of these ideas. A key weakness, we argue, stems from the continued legacy of functionalism in this approach and the limited role given to human agency. A further problem is the uncritical generalization of assumptions about professional organization and change, especially in the context of public services. These difficulties, we suggest, bring into question the usefulness of archetype theory as a general model for understanding change. They also point to the need to develop alternative approaches to these issues. In this article such an alternative is outlined, combining recent advances in the social theory dealing with the relationship between agency and structure with ideas from the sociology of professions.

The Reconstructed Professional Firm: Explaining Change in English Legal Practices

The paper provides a structural analysis of change in the English and Welsh legal profession over the last 25 years, using concepts drawn from Weberian sociology of the professions and more recent theory connecting agency and structure. Through a consideration of data returned to the Law Society, and other data, this paper outlines changes in the internal division of labour in English law firms. It is argued that, in response to external threats, especially the growth in the numbers of qualified recruits, the elite of the profession has reworked professional closure. From controlling access to training places (i.e. labour market closure), legal firms have shifted towards controlling conditions of work and promotion (identified as internal organizational closure). This has produced recognizable effects: it has sustained the remuneration and status of the professional elite of partners, but has also allowed the assimilation of large numbers of recruits to the profession, and the expansion in the size of legal firms, as well as supporting their continued profitability. However, the changes have also involved deterioration in the conditions of work and the promotion prospects of employed solicitors, and produced other effects considered in the paper. The argument is concluded with some critical comments on the work of the archetype theorists whose research into the organization of the professions is widely taken as authoritative. These authors suggest that the introduction of management is a defining characteristic of current reorganization of the legal profession among others, as is indicated by their notion of the managed professional business (MPB). It is suggested, instead, that engagement with management by the professional elite of legal firms in this study is at best rhetorical, and contemporary change in English law firms is better understood as the emergence of a reconstructed professional firm (RPF) based on a new professional closure regime.

Transforming the professional archetype

The aim of this article is to question the idea that all professional service organizations are undergoing a process of inter-archetype transformation. This idea, originating in organizational archetype theory, is now being used to interpret contemporary processes of change in British and other public sector services. Drawing on an example of management UK restructuring in social services during the 1990s – that of local authority social services in the UK – two main problems with this thesis are identified. First, this service demonstrates that ‘radical’ change has not occurred and that older professional values and working practices persist. Second, it reveals how, in at least one part of the public sector in the UK, management reforms have been partly undermined by a specific constellation of institutions and practices. These observations call for questioning the proposition that inter-archetype change is what has occurred and that current reforms will inevitably have this sort of transformational effect.

British Manufacturing Organization and Workplace Industrial Relations: Some Attributes of the New Flexible Firm

AbstractThe characteristics of the largest British manufacturing firms are analysed inorder to argue that the form of organization adopted at corporate and plantlevel by such firms is distinctive. The first part of the paper looks at thecharacteristic kinds and types of productive activities that the largest Britishfirms undertake. It is then suggested that there is a distinctive pattern oforganization for production at plant level, described as the ‘new flexible firm’,the features of which are formally set out. The new flexible firm has some keyfeatures which help to make sense of an emerging pattern of workplaceindustrial relations in manufacturing. The way this new form of organizationat plant level utilizes labour contradicts rather than supports the expectationsof some analysts about the importance of human resource management.1. IntroductionBy the mid-1990s, it wasbecomingmoreandmoreobviousthatsincethelate1970s industrial relations in the UK had been transformed. Until the end ofthe 1980s, the view that emphasis should be placed on continuity rather thanchange had retained considerable appeal (Batstone 1988; Gospel andPalmer 1993; MacInnes 1987; Marchington and Parker 1990). As interpreta-tions of the evidence from the 1984 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey(WIRS) gave way to work on its 1990 counterpart, however, the oppositeviewpoint began toassert itself. That important changes hadtakenplace wascertainly the position taken by the WIRS researchers themselves (Millwardet al. 1992). Other interpretations based on their data went along with thisview (Brown 1993). Purcell (1993: 10) argued that what we were seeing was

It is not Taylorism: Mechanisms of Work Intensification in the Provision of Gynaecological Services in a NHS Hospital

The development of a managed National Health Service (NHS) has been a central element of government policy for a substantial part of the last two decades. Within months of taking office in 1979, the first Thatcher administration repudiated the idea of a centrally planned and administered NHS in favour of a declared policy of managed localism (Klein 1995: 124–26; Pollitt 1993: 68–9). However, a somewhat more considered process of policy formation was soon set in train with the commissioning of the Griffiths enquiry and, following the acceptance of its conclusions in 1983, with the introduction of what was called ‘general management’. Since the middle of the 1980s, the management which Griffiths recommended (which allocates considerable decision-making independence to managers within a framework of prescribed budgets) has been consolidated and developed.

Problems of university governance in Britain

University governance has been in flux for some time. Examines the current situation, the legal framework and how power is distributed. Discusses the problems and concludes that effective goverance is most likely to be achieved when the constituent parts of the organization exist in creative tension, which could mean the need for less external control and not more.

From public administration to public sector management

Offers a general historical analysis of the development of public service provision in Britain. First discusses the slow emergence of industrialism in Britain, then discusses the development of social services in this context. Suggests that there are three significant stages in development: local public administration, 1870‐1950; central Welfare State, 1950‐1980; and decentralized provision, 1980‐1995. Goes on to argue that, in order to understand this sequence, and especially the emergence of centralized public provision, it is necessary to discuss modes of delivery of services within these institutional frameworks of provision. Examines different stages in patterns of organization for delivery of services which overlap with stages of provision. Suggests that the recent re‐emergence of decentralized provision has a certain inevitability, but that it is important that this takes an appropriate form. Identifies this form as a participative management

Understanding the recruitment and retention of overseas nurses: realist case study research in National Health Service Hospitals in the UK

This paper illustrates one of the possible applications of critical realist ideas to the analysis of health services, in the use of comparative case study research design, to elucidate the causal social processes underlying events. In the research reported here, a comparative research design was used as a basis for improving our understanding of the processes involved in the assimilation of overseas nurses (OSN) into the salient long-term workforce of the National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in the UK. The work brought to light the salient experiences of overseas nurses during their initial work in the NHS hospitals, and these were used as a basis for developing an account of the general mechanisms typically underlying the recruitment and assimilation at work. The authors conclude that successful assimilation is often hindered by the presence of occupational closure mechanisms, by which home nurses effectively excluded recruits from participation and promotion; these mechanisms, which articulate with everyday racism, threaten successful assimilation for obvious reasons. If the treatment recruits receive does not lead to withdrawal, it is because they typically have very strong economic motives to continue despite unfavourable and sometimes inhumane treatment. Thus, the research offered substantial reasons why recruitment policies should be reviewed by policy-makers.