Rooting For Empowerment

Introduction

Rooting for empowerment?

The buzzword “empowerment” has become a strategic concern for managers, human resource professionals and consultants alike. Perhaps because of this, much of the literature is highly prescriptive. In their attempts to “empower” workers, therefore, managers have been encouraged to view empowerment in rather simplistic terms, and as a relatively unproblematic solution to a range of strategic management and labor management problems. Further to this, there is also the implication that the process of empowerment will lead to clear and desirable gains for both managers and workers. It seems then that the definition of empowerment which underscores empowering initiatives is accepted as being both self-evident and held in common by all groups in industry. This article will argue that this notion of empowerment is framed too narrowly. The article will argue that authors tend to shy away from defining empowerment in any meaningful, or contextual, way. It will argue that, when analyzed within the context of work, the definition of empowerment and the descriptions of states of empowerment offered seem strangely passive. Undue stress seems to be placed on the managerial role of “empowerer” at the expense of those who are to be empowered. Thus, a passive definition of empowerment is developed and passive roles are ascribed to those supposedly empowered. This raises key questions over the status and aims of empowering initiatives which this article will attempt to address. To this end the article is structured as follows: first, the business aims of empowerment and the forces promoting interest in empowerment will be analyzed; second, empowerment as defined in the literature on managerial empowerment will be analyzed in comparison with the variety of ways in which the term may be interpreted. Here attention will be drawn to active, or perhaps more properly “activist”, models of empowerment; third, based on this analysis a case will be made for activist models as representing a fruitful approach by which to

David Collins

The author David Collins is Lecturer in Human Resource Management, the University of Sunderland, UK. Abstract Quality, flexibility, and commitment are the buzzwords of management strategy and reflect many of the goals currently sought in business. In order to contribute to these business goals, human resource professionals have had to rethink the contributions they make. This has led to the creation of yet more buzzwords – including the buzzword “empowerment”. Argues that interest in empowerment is not matched by a wider reflection on the factors which have promoted and facilitated these goals, nor is it matched by any wider reflection on the nature of organizations. Argues that these oversights have led to an implicit and passive definition of empowerment being used. To redress this balance, analyzes the forces which have promoted innovation in management, and have made empowerment “thinkable”. Makes a case for viewing empowerment as an ideological construct, and from here offers an alternative, activist model of empowerment.

The author is grateful to Keith Horton of Napier Business School, Edinburgh, Scotland, for his help and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Empowerment in Organizations Volume 3 · Number 2 · 1995 · pp. 25–33 © MCB University Press · ISSN 0968-4891

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re-examine, and rethink, the dynamics of empowerment.

He tells us that profit, efficiency and ideas of competitiveness underpinned changes in technology and formed the momentum of innovation in this period as opposed to the Keynesian policies previously applied. Thus, whereas in the 1960s and 1970s managers were attracted to ideas of participation in order to humanize the work setting, solicit worker suggestions and so reduce employee turnover and militancy[5], from the 1980s onwards the aims of managerial innovations in work organization and in working practices have been reinterpreted. They have also been stated with a greater self-confidence in the rights of management. In comparison with the 1960s and 1970s, when participatory schemes and schemes promoting industrial democracy were sold to employees and trade unions on the basis that such innovations allowed workers a clear representative voice in the formation of a range of policies within the organization, the 1980s and 1990s signify an altogether different era. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, ideas of worker participation have undergone a transformation. The focus of these initiatives has been redirected, squarely, at the problem of competitiveness and this has called for a different form of input from workers[6]. Thus, worker involvement has been redirected away from joint regulation and policy-making activities and remodeled so that managers now think of involvement as a means of communicating directly with workers. Worker proactivity, instead of participation, has been stressed, and the gains accruing to workers and their representatives from an enhanced role in the processes of decision making have been downplayed, if not wholly removed from the agenda. Yet describing the changing contours of management thought does not explain why such changes occur. What follows, therefore, is a brief attempt to account for such changes. This will entail an examination of management ideology.

The push for empowerment Empowerment stands at the front of a long line of managerial initiatives developed to address both the contemporary and the perennial problems which beset organizations. In order to understand the growing interest in empowerment we have to be aware of the nature of these problems and how they impact on organizations. In previous periods management initiatives and innovations focussed on approaches to management such as Taylorism and its associated practices of scientific management. Following scientific management, or sometimes in tandem with it, managers and workers have endured further developments such as the human relations movement, socio-technical systems approaches and so on. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s further refinements to management thought and practice took place as Britain, for example, struggled to cope with unofficial strikes and a range of macroeconomic problems[1,2]. This led managers to concentrate on a range of labor management problems and in the late 1960s, for example, managers sought formalization in, and control over, labor management issues. Later, innovations such as worker participation schemes, the development of autonomous work groups and a range of other techniques, designed to allow for the collaborative redesign of work, came to the fore. As we entered the 1980s, managers were forced to confront a new range of business problems and opportunities in a changed political environment. Considered together, these factors called previous innovations into question. In response managers became more assertive. McIlroy[3] notes that in some organizations this reassertion took on a rather violent, perhaps even a vengeful tone. He quotes Ian McGregor, the chairman of the National Coal Board in Britain, who was noted as saying: People are now discovering the price of insubordination and insurrection. And boy are we going to make it stick[3, p. 190].

Ideologies of management In mainstream discussion ideology is almost a dirty word. It is difficult to use the term without seeming a little “cranky”. This is unfortunate

This is perhaps an extreme example. Gill[4] probably captures the more typically held view. 26

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since the concept is powerful and expresses well the conflicts and problems attendant on attempts to manage organizations, or to bring about organizational changes, such as those associated with empowerment. An ideology is different from a theory. Central to the concept of ideology is the notion of interest. Ideologies serve particular interest groups. Thus Anthony[7, p. 1], quoting Bendix, notes that ideologies of management are: “those ideas which are espoused by or for those who exercise authority in economic enterprises”. Anthony tells us that an ideology of management is vital. Quoting Terkel[7], he reminds us of the reality of work experiences for the majority of the population. Even those of us who truly enjoy our work would have to acknowledge the stresses and pressures which work requirements place on us, and those around us. As Terkel states, work is “about violence to the spirit as well as to the body”[7, p. 4]. Ideologies of management exist to rationalize or disguise these costs. Ideologies are the creations of actors and can be expected to change and adapt to a range of pressures which build up within or impact on business concerns. With reference to the preceding section it seems clear that throughout the 1980s and 1990s these management ideologies have undergone some fairly radical changes[8]. These ideologies have become more self-confident and have been expressed less in terms of reducing violence to body and spirit, and more in terms of promoting business success, while accepting certain “realities” and costs. One way to understand this change is based on an analysis of the various forces, both internal and external to business concerns, which emerged over this period.

Thus, while managers and commentators speak of the “need” for change and the “need” for empowerment, we must acknowledge that needs, and the innovations which address these needs, are not so much discovered as created. We must acknowledge that new ideas in a field such as management do not appear “from the ether”, nor are they simple discoveries as in scientific or archaeological research. Instead the “need” for proactivity and the “need” for empowerment are the active creations of management and a number of business academics who seek to serve management[9,10]. These needs, therefore, are ideological constructs. A key test for empowerment, therefore, rests not on the confirmation of changed competitive conditions – that competition is now more intense is plain to see. Instead this article will argue that the acid test for empowerment, as an ideological construct, must be the extent to which it can address these new business problems while reconciling the perennial conflicts within organizations. However, before attention is turned to this issue, it is necessary to trace the nature of these competitive forces. The factors which have informed management thinking are outlined below. These factors relate to changes in the nature of competition and the consequent need to secure competitive advantage.

IT and changes in competition A change in the nature of competition is often associated with the growing use of and sophistication of IT systems. For some the growing use of IT is viewed as being at the root of competitive discontinuity. For example, attention has been drawn to a range of changes to the processes of business which IT will bring about. Porter[11] has drawn attention to the increased market permeability which can come about as IT is used to reduce barriers to market entry. Others[12] have drawn attention to the reductions in product development time which IT use facilitates, while others have drawn attention to the new business areas which IT use may spawn[13]. In line with these, Kanter[13] has promoted the idea that competition will force corporations to increase the pace at which they launch new products and product innovations. In this way

The “need” for change A variety of external concerns has served to focus management thinking over the last decade or so. Over time a consideration of these factors has led to the consensus that there is a need for a change in management. Most often a case is made for change based on some notion of the need to address competitive pressures. However, this does not explain how new mechanisms and innovations are conceived and emerge to address these factors. 27

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the use of IT represents a new era in business since it demands a rethink of the whole competitive process. This discontinuity, we are told, comes about since IT use threatens to alter barriers to competition in a quite fundamental way. Kanter tells us that this competitive discontinuity is such that corporations can no longer predict the future by extrapolating from the past. Size, she warns, will be no protection as market permeability increases. Instead managers have been warned of the need to innovate and think more creatively. While the finer points of these changes are left to the managers, the development of proactivity, among subordinates, has been offered as the overall mechanism by which to address these competitive challenges. Reacting to previous ideologies of management she tells us that this will require managers to empower their workers to innovate and take risks. This requirement for proactivity, and so empowerment, is also shown clearly in an article entitled “Rattling SABRE”[14]. SABRE, as most people are aware, is a highly successful, IT-based, flight reservation system. One of a few systems heralded as bringing competitive advantage to their operators. However, as a reaction to the simple, technological focus of other accounts of IT systems, Hopper’s article attempts to place those who actually use these systems at the centre of the analysis. We are told that as IT becomes cheaper and more flexible, future competitiveness will be based more on the quality of service which operators deliver than on the technological set-up alone. We are reminded then that competitiveness will hinge on the skills and motivation of staff and that managers will ultimately be judged on their ability to harness this potential. The consensus seems to be, therefore, that empowerment is a prerequisite for competitiveness where IT facilitates business operations.

gies and ideologies of national identity and patriotism coincide. In particular the ascendant competitive position of economies such as that of Japan has been a key influence on key commentators in the area. As Fukuda[15] notes the rise of the Japanese economy, at the expense of the USA, led those in the West to look for answers. The answer found was managerial. The consensus developed that Japanese corporations were successful because they managed to secure the commitment of their workers by involving them, directly, in the process of managing and designing small-scale and incremental work improvements. Pascale and Athos[16] also took up this mantle. Japanese corporations, they agreed, were successful but not thanks to some cultural peculiarity. Instead Japanese success was deemed to be due to nothing more startling than good management. If the USA was failing this failure was not a cultural problem, but a simple case of US managers failing to manage US workers and resources appropriately. US managers, like their British and European counterparts have been exhorted to reconsider their managerial style and free the potential latent in their organizations. As was noted earlier the key means to do this has come to be described as empowerment. However, before we move on to examine the definition, and so the nature of empowerment sought, there is one final set of factors which should be mentioned as facilitating this drive for management-led empowerment.

Retreating from joint regulation While it is true that the forces of competition and the powerful voices of key managerial figures have focussed attention on the need for and potential of empowerment, the sketch of how and why empowerment has emerged as a strategic concern will remain incomplete until we look directly at the forces operating within organizations themselves. Until we consider the forces internal to these organizations we cannot account fully for the rise of empowerment. It seems clear that for empowerment to emerge as a potential solution certain changes within organizations would be required.

A global challenge A further development informing the quest for empowerment relates to the perceived competitive ranking of, in particular, the USA and its slide in the world economic order. This has been an extremely potent influence on management thinking, since here management ideolo28

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Ideologies cannot stand alone and must at least point toward some facilitative factors. Empowerment could only become a viable solution to these competitive problems when managers were presented with new opportunities to retreat from joint regulatory approaches and make more direct appeals to workers, in the name of competition and the challenges of technological change. Any number of organizational developments might be listed here. For brevity I will do little more than sketch the changes in broad terms, while acknowledging that this will simplify the picture to some degree.

consultative committees between management and trade unions. He tells us that research indicates that working conditions seem to be discussed less frequently at these meetings. This would appear to suggest that managers are exercising unilateral decision-making powers where once some form of joint decision making took place. Thus, while it is true that there have been changes in the workplace, it is not entirely clear that these changes have empowered. The surveys also point out that, as joint consultation has contracted, new forms of communication designed to bypass trade unions have developed. The Industrial Relations Review and Report (IRRR)[19] notes that:

A sketch of change During the 1980s a range of issues, political, legislative, economic and technological, have coincided to reduce or remove many of the internal pressures which managers faced in the previous decades. In Britain a succession of Conservative governments throughout the 1980s set about dismantling the mechanisms and assumptions of the industrial relations system which emerged after the Second World War. Notably the government has reversed policies which sought to promote a model of good employment practices. This idea of a model employer was based on a concern to develop procedural mechanisms which would promote collective bargaining and joint regulation. Likewise, during the 1970s, trade unions in Britain and elsewhere were granted an enlarged role in national economic planning. At national and at industry level initiatives such as the development of joint management-worker director schemes in industries such as the Post Office and British Steel were put in place[17]. Over the 1980s, however, these schemes have been scrapped and trade unions have been removed from the processes of economic planning. As a consequence worker involvement has been altered to concentrate on direct forms of participation. Probably the most reliable source of information on this subject is to be found in the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS). These surveys are largely structural in nature, but they do point towards changes in the nature of workplace decision making. Beaumont[18], for example, notes changes in the nature of joint

Employers have a new authority and confidence on the shopfloor and many feel less constrained in the way they organise work, in contrast to the 1970s and 1960s when unions were able to exert a greater influence.

This would seem to imply that managers, far from ceding control, were taking steps to regain it. So just how is it that managers can claim to empower while the evidence points to them retaking control? To answer this it is necessary to consider what is actually meant by the term empowerment.

Defining empowerment According to Pateman’s[20] line of analysis, participation and empowerment are natural corollaries. Effective participation is born of a feeling of political efficacy or, if you will, a sense of empowerment. Thus, if workers are to participate fully within their organizations, empowerment will be required. This much is clear from the general management literature. What is less clear, for it is less explicit in the literature, is what is actually meant by empowerment. In fact writers on empowerment seem to be quite coy when examining the concept. One way to duck the definitional issue is to attempt to ignore it. Instead of defining empowerment some writers seem to prefer to describe its outcomes. Here, there seems to be a taste for homespun examples. Fox[21], for example, characterizes the dynamics of empowerment in terms of a child embarking on an unsupervised shopping trip. Empowerment, she tells us, occurs when the child is briefed to buy a certain 29

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article of clothing, say trousers, and trusted to make the right choice about which style and brand of trousers to buy without further adult supervision. However, the sanctions attendant on the child who decides to buy, say, shoes instead are never discussed. Nor does she tell us how this relationship between parent and child helps to illustrate the situation between adults in a work environment. This is a key issue which homespun examples are really not very good at investigating, since they cannot hope to grasp the complex dynamics of empowering initiatives in employment situations. No matter how badly the child screws up on the shopping trip, the family will probably not be bankrupted, or sued, the child will not be sacked, will not damage its career prospects within the family, or risk defaulting on a mortgage! Martin and Nicholls[22] do examine what might be broadly termed empowerment at work. However, in discussing commitment, they also fail to define their area of interest with sufficient clarity. In this way they also fail to capture the complexities and subtleties of what may be conveyed by the apparently simple term; empowerment. In a sense Martin and Nicholls prefer to sell empowerment, rather than attempt to define it. Thus, they focus on the supposed outcomes of a state of commitment at work. Commitment for Martin and Nicholls refers to giving all of yourself at work and is contrasted with compliance. The implication is that commitment-seeking policies make complianceensuring policies redundant. But, as others have argued, this form of thinking fails to capture the complex dynamics of management[23] and so fails to capture the dynamics of empowering initiatives. In order to capture the dynamics of this process we have to be awake to the range of possible meanings and implications conveyed by the term. Now, while small single volume dictionaries tend to yield definitions such as giving official authority or legal power, we have to realize that in a political and ideologically imbued setting this bland definition will tend to disguise a considerable degree of semantic elasticity. And so, just as the term participation might be thought of as conveying a whole continuum of meaning, ranging from minimal levels of consultation through to extensive forms

of democratic decision making or workers’ control, the term empowerment might also be thought of as representing a continuum of possible definitions and outcomes. This continuum might be envisaged as being bounded at one extreme by highly passive connotations of the term and by active or activist connotations of the term at the other extreme. The continuum is also useful in explaining the dissent and conflict which tend to bubble up between those who promote empowering solutions to organizational problems, and those who are critical of these innovations. In short the conflict develops because, although everyone is ostensibly using the same term, each side tends to focus on connotations of the term which inhabit different extremes of the continuum.

Give and take in empowerment Those who promote empowerment as a means to address business problems tend to mobilize a definition of empowerment based on passive connotations of the term. Thus, the role of managers in the process of empowering and enabling subordinates is stressed, as managers are encouraged to relinquish their authority and enable others to meet new challenges. To be fair this modeling of empowerment stems from a reaction to the perceived pitfalls of Taylorism and/or Fordism. Here, Taylorism is regarded as a system which compartmentalizes, and so alienates, people by disallowing their participation in other elements of the labor process. The solution to this, which empowerment has pinpointed, is to allow workers to play a more active role which was previously denied to them. If workers are allowed to offer ways to enhance products or improve quality, tasks which were previously the domain of managers or technical specialists, then surely they have been empowered? To some extent this is true. However, we must also acknowledge that this definition of empowerment hinges more on some notion of accountability than on any wider change in the processes of work and decision making which might be implied by a more active modeling of empowerment. Thus, workers are empowered only in the sense that they have a greater responsibility to act within a narrow sphere directly related to production, and then 30

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held to be accountable for their action or indeed their inaction. Clement[24] echoes this. He tells us that this passive version of empowerment is oriented to improving the performance of the organization and assumes that goals throughout the organization are held in common and unproblematically. Clement chooses to call this the “functional concept of empowerment” (p.54) and contrasts this with the “democratic concept”. Clement’s democratic concept is a much more active, or activist, modeling of empowerment. Thus, democratic or activist empowerment is representative of a process whereby workers gain or assume power and represents a process in which workers “act with a greater grasp and sense of their own powers” (p.54). In this sense the Lucas Plan for Industry represents a prime example of active empowerment. Wainwright and Elliot[25] discuss the attempts of Lucas workers to protect their jobs and advance useful and socialized forms of production. The plan was set against a backdrop of redundancy and reductions in military spending. For Lucas Industries this represented a crisis period since the group was a major supplier of components which had, as their final destination, the military. Workers at Lucas, however, refused to accept that this downturn in military spending should lead to their redundancy. Quite simply they refused to accept that society could afford to dispense with their skills when military technologies and the skills which built them could so easily be adapted for peaceful and useful ends. When government and management refused to accept this viewpoint Lucas workers set about developing a new plan for the industry. Wainwright and Elliot[25, p. 1] note:

take the initiative and attempt to wrest control from managers. In this sense the 1960s and 1970s can be regarded as decades of empowerment since workers actively pursued policies of job control and joint regulation in this period. The 1980s and 1990s, marked by new managerial self-confidence, are, according to this line of thinking, decades of disempowerment marked by retreating worker power. This would be borne out by the Lucas experience. During the 1980s the worker attempts to change Lucas industries ran up against the policies of Mrs Thatcher’s first government and were reversed by a program of redundancies and restructuring. So which is the case? Are we in an era of empowerment or disempowerment? I would argue that the continuum illustrates that both sides of the argument are correct in so far as they define empowerment quite differently – one rooted in the needs of business and some notion of accountability – the other based on the advance of worker control in matters of policy. The question which remains is: how does this change the picture? This question takes us back to our discussion of ideologies of management. Arguing over the existence or non-existence of empowerment within organizations will not tend to advance the debate. Instead each side of the argument will tend to become entrenched while letting off the odd salvo from the safety of their own paradigmatic bunker. Here I believe we can break this deadlock by analyzing empowerment in ideological terms. With empowerment examined in ideological terms, the focus of debate can shift from squabbles over the appropriate definition of empowerment to be applied. Instead, the key issue in discussing empowerment, however we choose to define it, must turn on the extent to which managers can secure the ideological appeal of empowerment in the face of other competing ideas and experiences. Since, while it is true that ideologies serve dominant groups, it is also true that these ideologies must be constructed in such a fashion that they both serve dominant groups while appealing to subordinate groupings. Here, as the next section will discuss, the ideology of empowerment, construed as accountability, seems to be running at odds with worker experience.

In 1975 and 1976 … shop stewards working at Lucas Aerospace, a company heavily involved in arms production, drew up a detailed plan for socially useful products and new forms of employee development. They put forward this plan as an alternative to redundancies and to arms production. In doing so they demonstrated in a most practical way how people without any official power might reverse both the drive towards militarism and the growth of unemployment (author’s emphasis).

From this we can see that for Clement[24], and indeed for Wainwright and Elliot[25], empowerment only truly occurs when workers actively 31

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Experiencing empowerment

Despite Mazda’s orientation promise to involve workers in management decisions, team members were given no real voice in running the Flat Rock plant. Team members had expected to design their own jobs, but the programmed worksheets, which rigidly spelled out every job, had already been written by Mazda engineers before the workers were even hired[26, p. 134].

Despite the interest in empowerment there are few empirical studies of any substance which examine empowerment in any real detail. This may be due to competing claims for management attention, such that managers may be unable to spare the resources in order to collaborate with academics. Equally, however, it may be the case that managers are reticent about allowing academics to conduct critical research on empowerment, since they are only too aware of the fragility of their ideological claims in the face of worker experience. This is speculation, but what does seem clear is that managers court conflict when either deliberately or by accident they clothe themselves in the rhetoric of activist empowerment, while allowing only for functional or passive forms. As noted earlier, empowerment has emerged as an idea and focus for organizational change thanks to the dovetailing of a range of issues and problems. Management success in empowering initiatives must be contingent on managing the ideology of empowerment over time. This is demonstrated in the Fucini and Fucini[26] account of Mazda’s plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. Fucini and Fucini[26] spell out a story of growing disillusionment as the actual experience of Mazda’s employees came to contradict the expectations which Mazda managers had nurtured. The employees at Flat Rock were, no doubt, attracted to the prospect of stable and reliable earnings. However, as the selection process made clear, Mazda were looking for something special from their employees. Mazda, the recruiters claimed, were looking for employees who could take initiative, work as part of a team, and cope with an environment which promised multi-skilling and task discretion. Workers were sold the image of a work situation which promised empowerment and an end to the detailed supervision and timing of normal factory production. Yet, before long, worker experience came to clash with the ideology of management, which empowerment was supposed to support. As a consequence, workers began to react as their hopes of a new world of work were dashed. Fucini and Fucini note:

They remind us that these worksheets had to be followed exactly. In comparison with the US “big three” which planned on the basis of having workers in motion for 45 seconds per minute, Mazda based its just-in-time work flow at a rate of 57 seconds per minute. In a system this tight, Mazda could not allow for any meaningful worker discretion or innovation. In spite of their claims, Mazda could offer only accountability when advertising some more active model of empowerment: If the sheet said [as it did for the finishing shop], Put down your spatula before you pick up your brush, the worker had to put down his or her spatula...The worker who did not adhere to the sequence of steps...could receive a written reprimand at the unit leader’s discretion[26, p. 150].

Experience of “empowerment” at Mazda, therefore, soon led to discontent and worker agitation as workers rebelled against the simple ideological appeals which were held out before them. Thus, while empowerment is properly viewed as an ideological construct, the Mazda experience demonstrates that these ideologies cannot simply be conjured anew or without reference to competing ideas or experiences. The Mazda experience exposes both the ideological nature of empowerment and the limited appeal of empowerment in its passive formation.

Conclusions This article has argued that management practices and innovations in management thinking are ideological. In this way empowerment is properly viewed as an ideological construct. In order to demonstrate this, the article has traced changes in management thinking and has attempted to account for these changes by analyzing the changing forces and opportunities which confront management and allow ideas such as empowerment to become “thinkable”. 32

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Since ideologies represent interests, an ideological view of empowerment has allowed us to investigate the particular vision of empowerment which has been promoted. Further to this, an ideological account of empowerment has also allowed us to examine those other visions which have been excluded and allows us to account for the exclusion of these visions. Finally, a case is made for considering the dynamics of empowerment in terms of the gap between management ideologies of empowerment and employee experience of work. It is argued that the conflicts and dynamics of empowering processes should be understood from the standpoint that managers have only incomplete and conditional ideological control. From this perspective it seems clear that more fieldwork on empowering initiatives within organizations will be required. However, with empowerment as a contested concept, it is also clear that a particular type of fieldwork approach will be required. It is time to drop the homespun examples and instead concentrate on studying empowerment in the real world. Instead of wishing away the conflictual and ideological aspects of management, it is necessary to make use of methodological approaches which can commit to viewing conflict and control as key dynamics of organizations. Only then will we be able to make sense of ideology, and only then will we be able to trace and understand the processes and pitfalls of empowering initiatives in the workplace.

7 Anthony, P.D., The Ideology of Work, Tavistock Publications, London, 1977. 8 Keat, R. and Abercrombie, N. (Eds), Enterprise Culture, Routledge, London, 1991. 9 The desire of academics to be practical is clear in the orientations and statements of their publications. For example Carnall[10] is so keen to make a contribution to management that he seems to eschew theory. He tells us (p. 2) that “ the reader will find no elaborate propositions, hypotheses or theories. Rather the author has attempted to synthesize what he takes to be the most useful approaches to the problems of managing change in organizations”. The ideological nature of this process, however, is ignored. 10 Carnall, C.A., Managing Change in Organizations, Prentice-Hall, London, 1990. 11 Porter, M.E. and Miller, V.E., “How information gives you a competitive advantage”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 1985, pp. 149-60. 12 The Economist, “A survey of information technology”, June 16 1990. 13 Kanter, R.M., When Giants Learn to Dance, Simon & Schuster, London, 1989. 14 Hopper, M.D., “Rattling SABRE: new ways to compete on information”, Harvard Business Review, May-June 1990, pp. 118-25. 15 Fukuda, J., Japanese-Style Management Transferred: The Experience of East Asia, Routledge, London, 1988. 16 Pascale, R.T. and Athos, A.G., The Art of Japanese Management, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1986. 17 Batstone, E., Ferner, A. and Terry, M., “Unions on the post office board”, in McCarthy, W.E.J. (Ed.), Trade Unions, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1987, pp. 109-23. 18 Beaumont, P.B., Change in Industrial Relations, Routledge, London, 1990. 19 Industrial Relations Review and Report, No. 475, Industrial Relations Services, November 1990.

Notes and references

20 Pateman, C., Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970.

1 Sisson, K. and Brown, W., “Industrial relations in the private sector: Donovan revisited”, in Bain, G.S. (Ed.), Industrial Relations in Britain, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984, pp. 137-54.

21 Fox, N., Empowering People at Work, Gower, Aldershot, 1994. 22 Martin, P. and Nicholls, J., Creating a Committed Workforce, IPM, London, 1987.

2 Hyman, R., “Pluralism, procedural consensus and collective bargaining”, in Hyman, R., The Political Economy of Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice in a Cold Climate, Macmillan, London, 1989, pp. 54-95.

23 Hill, S., “Why quality circles failed but total quality management might just succeed”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 29 No. 4, 1991, pp. 541-6.

3 McIlroy, J., Trade Unions in Britain Today, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988.

24 Clement, A., “Computing at work: empowering action by ‘low-level users’”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 37 No. 1, 1994, pp. 53-63.

4 Gill, C., Work, Unemployment and the New Technology, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985. 5 Ramsay, H., “Cycles of control”, Sociology, Vol. 11 No. 3, 1977, pp. 481-506.

25 Wainwright, H. and Elliot, D., The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in the Making?, Allison and Busby, London, 1982.

6 Storey, J., Developments in the Management of Human Resources: An Analytical Review, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1992.

26 Fucini, J.J. and Fucini, S., Working for the Japanese: Inside Mazda’s American Auto Plant, Macmillan, New York, NY, 1990.

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