I think AgResearch now thinks it stands for a global life sciences company, which is something that I’m not that rapt with. I’ve never worked for an organisation like that and I can’t identify with it and I think to a certain extent – to me – that would make us like the manufacturers of thalidomide or Round-up ready soya beans ... (Colin, scientist).
[AgResearch wants me to make] a transformational leap – [that] would be my ultimate answer ... to come up with something outside of where we are but relevant to science, to agriculture, which is very profitable. Umm, I guess that would be the ultimate but realistically I don’t see that as me. I guess I see me more as working on something once some of these have been identified (Angela, technical worker).
In the previous chapter I described the AgResearch organisational environment as workers were introduced to the strategic plan and changes in the organisation to support this strategy. As scientific workers on the Lincoln campus came to know about my research, I was frequently asked, “What is going on?”98 There was a feeling that I would have some overview that would help people understand the confusion they felt in reaction to the change in emphases of the purpose of their employing organisation. Those who were most confused were the ones outside the larger groups who were not protected by their group leaders. They were the people who went to the Team Briefs and other organisational communication events. Such a group was the W&S Group whose members saw meetings as a source of information to guide them on what they needed to do to continue working in the organisation. But they did not find what they were seeking.
There’s people standing by with hammers and saws waiting to do something – to tighten something up or cut something off. They just need someone to tell them what it is and where it is. Umm, everyone is keen to help but they don’t know quite how to go about it. I see quite a bit of confusion (Brent, technical worker).
My interviews with members of the W&S Group took place during the period (1999) when AgResearch was asking workers to come up with ideas for products which the company could develop (hence Brent’s reference to ‘hammers and saws’). Most of the group did not feel that this requirement fitted how they saw themselves, but one member of the group did come up with an idea for a product and was very
disillusioned when it received little support and was referred to WRONZ, the opposition. It appeared that the organisation could not cope with the volume of responses from members of staff with ideas for products. Many found their ideas disregarded or not taken seriously. Some found that if their ideas were thought to have potential they would need to do further work on them in their own time and out of other budgets. This gave further justification for disillusionment and cynicism.
There was also the prevailing feeling of not being valued and having to justify your existence all the time, as part of the accountability culture.
The biggest frustration … in the last 3 or 4 years is continually trying to defend our position to exist the way we are within AgResearch ... even though we’re successful we seem to be constantly trying to justify the way we are currently set up. For me, that is frustrating because while you’re trying to defend your existence you’re not out there trying to get business. So that’s for us, I’d say would be our [biggest frustration] – yeah, constant interference from the internal hierarchy (Ivor, business manager).
Many of those I spoke to on the Grasslands campus said they would not recommend becoming a scientist to their children because they felt a future in science would be too uncertain, and besides, it was not such fun anymore.
Many workers in AgResearch have been protected from organisational change over their employment lives. Promotion had been just a matter of ‘hanging in’. For example, Eve (technical worker) started work in AgResearch by grass grubbing for three months and then the job just continued – she never went for a job interview. Some scientists were ‘picked up’ while they were at university by DSIR or MAF, and they have just carried on. These workers may well be very good at their jobs but change put them on the line in a way they had not experienced before. This situation made them feel very insecure. Staff morale dropped to a very low point in 1999 as was demonstrated by a staff survey at that time (Hunt, 2000).
In 2000 the organisation decided to reposition workers to better fit FRST’s and the organisation’s changing strategy. By this time AgResearch had changed its focus from being a food and fibre, biotechnology company to a life sciences company. Workers were assigned ‘skills’ in order for the organisation to assess what
capabilities its workers possessed and what would be required for the future. This was done in such a rush99 that SPLs (with possibly some input from science group leaders) had to decide what categories of skills individual workers possessed, without consultation with them. The senior management then announced that about fifty workers were surplus to requirements. For example, it decided that it employed too many agronomists. Those who had trained in agronomy suddenly felt like second-
99 Management actions taken under urgency seemed to be such a regular occurrence that it must be considered to be either a strategy or an indication of lack of foresight and planning on behalf of management and HR.
class citizens and strived to think of other ways of naming their skills.100 This resulted in an exacerbation of the feeling of insecurity as rumours swept the organisation about possible redundancies.
The title ‘repositioning’, given to this exercise, implied that workers would have the opportunity to retrain into an area of potential use to the company. However, in the event, very few people were found to be eligible and very few were able to join the ‘capability bank’ of those the organisation thought it could support because their capabilities would be needed in the future. The cynicism grew about AgResearch being ‘the employer of choice’ (as espoused in the Strategic Plan), especially when there was a campaign to recruit scientists from overseas for a new plant genomics facility at Grasslands. To its surprise, Human Resources was so inundated by
overseas applications that the more expensive possibility of training existing workers into these skills was sidelined. It was assumed by HR that newcomers would not be carrying the baggage of past values and would therefore find it easier to align themselves with AgResearch’s strategic vision.101 The implication was that a person ‘was’ their skills. Workers were not given any individual help in deciding what they could do to upgrade their skills and the risk of this choice appeared to be have to be borne by the individual.
Organisational management may be aware that the organisation’s survival does not depend entirely on how well its staff work. Survival has more to do with the direction in which the organisation must head in order to ensure its own survival through maintaining its Government funding and developing IP for products in order to generate its own revenue. It could not continue to employ workers who had no
100 When something is measured and becomes part of the bureaucracy, the reaction is for people to fit the structure produced by this measurement (Liz Stanley, Stories, Lives and Feminist Research, seminar in Sociology Department, University of Canterbury, 27 August 1998).
101 Ironically, I was talking to Harry (scientist) on 25-9-01 and he said the new scientists in the plant genomics area were proving very difficult to deal with. He had been part of a group drawing up research proposals for the next year’s FRST programmes. These scientists had no definite aims for their research and no time-lines. He saw them as very ‘fuzzy’ and very much into ‘blue skies’ or basic research, which just does not fit the CRI or FRST environment. Most scientists in AgResearch have an applied orientation and their research has originated in trying to find solutions to practical
problems. These ‘new’ scientists, would have been employed to produce products within a short time frame, and would have been expected to identify with the organisation’s strategic direction more easily than ‘older’ staff. That this has turned out not to be so could be regarded as an unintended consequence of the AgResearch employment policy. It seems there are some past values the organisation may want!
funding, either commercial or public, and whose skills were not seen as being of use in the future, however good those workers were at their jobs. Most workers who leave the organisation do so through redundancy or enforced resignation. It is rare for someone to choose to leave except for those who are prepared to go overseas, or those who are young. This point was made at the retirement of one of the
interviewees when her boss said in his farewell speech, that Fiona (technical worker) was one of the few people who had ‘chosen’ to retire.
This was the scene in AgResearch from late 1997 to early 2001, and what follows (Part B) are my initial, less theoretically informed, and what could be described as sometimes naïve, reflections on the data. As Law described it in his ethnography of a physics laboratory, the researcher does not ‘discover’ what is going on. The process of interpreting the data is “slow and painful” and is one of simplification and translation (Law, 1994: 48-51). In Part C, and in keeping with the chronological pattern of events, I will provide a more informed interpretation of the data, one which responds to further reading.