Proceso IGARCH

Ever since Henry Ford coupled the assembly line with exclusive manage- ment control on the shopfloor, and thereby increased productivity (and thus wages), car factories all over the world have moved to adopt both these tech-

nical and social systems. ‘Fordism’ also gave us a particular mode of work

organization and firm governance that divided car-building (and in its path many other industries as well) into two distinct sets of activities, separated by an impenetrable wall. Managers, according to that model, conceived of investment, products, process and tasks, while workers executed tasks and, at most, bargained over wage levels through their unions. (Dankbaar 1992; Jürgens et al. 1989; Katz 1985).

Especially after World War II, therefore, firm governance in mass car production has followed a relatively simple, straightforward and universal

path in Europe, the US and to a lesser extent Japan: management, ‘the verb’, was also really a task for management, ‘the people’, not because

of technology or some inherent natural division of labor, but as a result of the way the knowledge to produce a car was divided between workers and managers. Management, on the shop-floor embodied in the person of the industrial engineer, designed the tasks to balance the line – that is, they di-

vided assembly up in small tasks in such a way that neither line nor workers would stand idle when the conveyor belt made its way through the factory and supervisors directed the workforce in order to efficiently coordinate those disparate tasks. Workers followed those orders, and that was where their responsibility stopped. World-wide, this was the predominant social organization of car manufacturing.

It was not until Japanese cars appeared on Western markets, first in the low-end segment and recently also in the luxury car segment, that the idea of alternatives to the Fordist division of authority was taken seriously for the first time. Whatever the particular form the argument took, they all built on different notions of the relationship between workers and managers (and of their responsibilities) than had prevailed in postwar mass-production. In- stead of dividing the construction of a car into two different worlds – one of strategy, centered around conception and symbolized by control over invest- ment – and the other of execution – with assembly tasks and wage-bargaining at its core – the Japanese tried to fuse the two by systematically integrating

workers in production and design decisions. And instead of accentuating

the social distance between workers and managers, the Japanese did just the opposite (Womack et al. 1990). Growing international competition has thrown into question the nature of authority structures under mass produc- tion regimes. Workers – and in many cases unions as well – have suddenly come to be perceived as strategic assets in global competition, and those countries where they have been – as in German and Japanese industry – are suddenly regarded as models, if not to emulate, then at least to borrow from freely (Dertouzos et al. 1989; Turner 1991; Streeck 1992).

Yet for the most part, the empowerment of workers has, even in this new system – definite limits and, despite the tighter integration of workers’

knowledge into each step of the design and production process, manage- ment still manages without too much interference from workers or unions. In fact, judging from most accounts of industrial reorganization, these authority structures remain intact, with the traditional lines of demarcation in the workplace easily accommodating changes in workplace organization such as teams or quality programs that push part of the responsibility down

to the shopfloor. Workers’ participation has, in this new world, become an

instrumental goal, and therefore limited to what is economically efficient. We take issue with precisely this argument. Our primary aim in this contribution is to point out that serious alternatives to that traditional divi- sion of authority exist. Uddevalla and Saturn provide such alternatives far beyond what is limited by a purely economic rationale, since they deal with power-sharing in decision-making and are part of a broader social agenda. Furthermore, the two cases we discuss here point out that such alternatives to the conventional social organization of car manufacturing exist under both

line and stationary manual assembly, and that it is viable for both relatively inexpensive, standardized smaller and up-scale customized larger cars. We depart from the dominant views, however, in our point that the existence and survival of such alternative efficient modes of organization cannot be accounted for solely in economic terms; in order to understand their evolu- tion, politics has to be taken into account explicitly (Kochan et al. 1986;

Sabel 1982; Piore & Sabel 1984).

Both organizations embody – or at least have the potential to embody – a sharp break with the logic of management prerogatives and union domains that has dominated all Western political economies for most of this century, but especially since World War II. In Uddevalla, that break is a logical consequence of a production system that turns the conventional logic of assembly-lines on its head by reintegrating small tasks in long cycles. In Saturn, it is a result of the involvement of the union in both organizational governance and the day-to-day management of operations. The salience of the comparative treatment in this paper resides exactly in the way both organizations differ from their corporate and union environments. We will discuss that point in the next section and then move on to a detailed analysis of the two cases.