Tablas

We have already noted how mass redundancies coupled with the threat of further job cuts served to remove intransigent employees, including managers, and weaken opposition to change. For those who remained, there was an expectation that their full support would be given to the new agenda.

Despite this, the new inscriptions were not endorsed fully by the shopfloor: many employees expressed strong resentment and frustration with them, casting doubt as to their relevance to Britech’s activities and aspirations. However, as we argue below, there was also a sense of fatalism on the shopfloor about these new measures.

In the case of the motorway metaphor, initial steps to operationalize it by painting the factory floor to reflect its essence were treated with sarcasm by operators:

The first thing we painted was a big blue patch on the flooring and people [that is, shopfloor employees]

put cardboard cut outs of ducks swimming around in it, drowning men and ships and all that, you know.

That provoked a laugh!” (Employee Relations Manager)

While seemingly embracing the terminology associated with the motorway metaphor, some fitters undermined it by claiming that its translation into operations terms was based on an ideal world scenario. One fitter commented on how times allowed by management for doing specific jobs to keep the different lanes of the motorway running smoothly were unrealistic :

“[They say] it will take you x amount of time to do that job, now that assumption is made by somebody who has never done the job and is never likely to do the job and it is never takeninto consideration the problems that occur within this place with regards to parts not turning up, everything is an idealworld scenario. They say well it takes 12,000 hours to build [the product]. I can guarantee it will take at least 14,000 because you have got to calculate in an extra 2,000 for the problems along the line. But they say it is not acceptable, but it is the old problem you see.”

Other fitters sought to undermine the motorway metaphor and its chief proponent, the Production Director, by lampooning the irrelevance of his previous work experience in the car industry to the production technology at the site: “the problem is that you have got to talk to a man that was car-organized and you cannot put [our product] out like cars. Cos [our product] does not have a wheel at each corner, right? And also on top of that, there’s no lay-bys either.”

Claims by management that ‘mini-business’ communications, ‘cascade briefs’, ‘video presentations’, etc. ensured that employees became ‘educated’ in what the ‘new commercial agenda’ meant were not necessarily shared by the shopfloor. The intention of Britech management was to educate and thereby control the workforce by using inscriptions to communicate the new agenda, realize new practices and, indeed, construct new employees. However, at least for some, the message didn’t seem to be quite hitting home, partly because the fitters had problems understanding the new performance measures and partly because their concern was more focused on their pay:

“When you go on these presentations you get shopfloor and you get finance people. You get a mixture.

Some understand it and some don’t. We go in as a mass, we have the same presentation. Sometimes it’s easy, but in a lot of cases it’s in a language of the financiers. [And] there’s quite a lot of them [fitters]

just want to know how much is in their wage packet at the end of the week.” (Fitter)

There was, therefore, resistance to managers’ use of inscriptions to focus their attention on issues of competitiveness, cost and profitability, and to develop and hone their skills in order to maintain their

(external) marketability (see Watson, 1994). As the above quote indicates, there was often a failure to connect, or a refusal to make the connection, between the commercially-driven language of the capital and product markets, and the domestically-driven concerns of shopfloor employees with families to support and mortgages to pay. The tension was evident in managers’ use of inscriptions to alert employees to the cost of scrapped parts. One fitter who observed: “If you scrap a piece, you usually find out how much it costs. It comes up on the screen”, later added: “The actual day to day, they [managers] never say ‘You’re costing so much or that costs so much’”. If managers had hoped that the flashing of component cost on computer screens would internalise cost-consciousness into operators, this fitter’s account suggests otherwise.

Despite managers’ efforts to ensure that the new written performance measures reached the shopfloor, some operators developed different interpretations of these initiatives:

“They tried this with us once, you know, going to these bar chart meetings but it was a bit of a waste of time really. You know, we are more effective on here [the track]. Those [the charts] I think you’ll find are mainly for visitors and people like yourself. When they bring visitors round they always lead them to the bar chart. Whether they’re impressed or not I’ve no idea.” (Fitter)

There was also talk of teams and empowered responsibility as management sought to change the organization of work in a way that engendered a more disciplined and participative shopfloor (see also Ezzamel and Willmott, 1998). This presented some paradoxes for the new agenda and its demands for individualized visibilities. Management attempted to square such circles through the seductive policing notion of ‘peer pressure’ combined with practices of work intensification.

According to one Human Relations Manager:

“We can’t force a man to do something but if he’s part of a team and he’s not pulling his we ight within that team then they’re the people who’ll sort that out. The days of the scallywag who used to come to work and go and hide in the toilet for eight hours [have gone], it used to happen, it was a symptom of British industry. It doesn’t happen anymore because the teams are so small the man is missed.”

However, this claimed ‘dose’ of ‘empowerment’ was interpreted differently, at least by some operators; one Fitter said: “The job I’m doing hasn’t changed. I’m still doing the same job I was doing five and a half years ago.”

These dismissive comments by shopfloor employees regarding changes in manufacturing methods, including the introduction of written measures, are not necessarily in contradiction to management’s accounts of their relatively smooth introduction and reception. Perhaps the fitters were simply refusing to acknowledge the impact of teamworking on their work. Such denials can be interpreted as expressions of self-assurance. It is also possible that “craft pride” or “bravado” accounted for the defensive reaction by fitters to management’s attempts to impose a stricter disciplinary and monitoring regime on the shopfloor; the response being “nothing has changed”. Alternatively, by focusing upon the tasks performed, it was possible to disregard the changed context of their execution. Yet, even if what they did had not changed per se, because the product and assembly work had not significantly changed, the way their work was now planned and monitored was, arguably, subject to a new and more strict discipline underpinned by intensive inscribed measures.

When performance was reported to have fallen below targets constituted by the new accounting inscriptions, operators had to provide explanations to cell leaders and middle managers in meeting rooms located at the shopfloor. The existence of such sessions might suggest that their purpose was to find fault with, and discipline individual workers or teams. However, evidence from the workers themselves and their union representatives as well as from cell leaders and managers indicates that the focus of such discussions was upon diagnosing and remedying processes that had failed to deliver expected levels of performance, rather than upon the operators who, by and large, worked diligently, pressurised by the surveillance of their activities and the lack of managerial inhibition about substituting contract for permanent labour.

When introducing and enforcing these methods, managers could appeal to the craft/professional pride when introducing self-managing methods; hence their claims of internalizing control into employees, such as “Quality is now the individual”, or “they know what the milestone is and they’re very good, almost to a man, very very keen to get it”. This interpretation suggests that the operators responded to, or interpreted, the new measures in ways that were broadly consistent with what management required. But this does not deny or exclude their expressions of resentment and frustration. While there was a measure of skepticism about the prospect of implementing the new agenda to achieve the long-term objectives, the response of employees was generally muted and fatalistic. Britech workers had little confidence in the capacity of the new measures to deliver the projected improvements in profitability, but they could identify no viable alternative – a resignation

that was fuelled by their recognition of the cyclical and volatile nature of the markets in which the company operated.

In addition to the recent history of redundancies and uncertainties about career prospects, the potency of labour resistance in Britech may have been blunted by two factors that worked in tandem. First, the new inscriptions and accounting measures reached much deeper into the shopfloor, in great detail and at more frequent temporal intervals. There were fewer possibilities for labour to “get away with” managerially unacceptable work practices by being able to show the supervisor “anything that he wanted to know”, as was claimed to have been the case in the ‘old days’ of embodied technical knowledge and oral communication. As a union convenor commented:

“Our lads know that they're checked and he [a fitter] is accountable and if he doesn't do a good job, then he's going to have someone on his back”. Secondly, the use of written measures to facilitate the new managerial rhetoric at Britech seemingly enjoyed some support at lower levels in the hierarchy as they became interpreted -either optimistically as an unequivocal expression of trust or as a denial of their likely, restrictive impact - as simply extending the scope for the exercise of productive discretion by shopfloor workers: “There is nobody to control us, there are no under-supervisors.

We could be doing nothing all day, but we don’t” (employee). Similarly, an Employee Relations Manager claimed: “We don’t discipline anyone for poor workmanship or lack of effort anymore…It just doesn’t happen.” The newly constituted “commercial” discipline demanded that employees took the appropriate “commercial” decision themselves, as the aim was for the new measures to be internalized into the subject: “They wouldn’t be told, they would know themselves. There wouldn’t be anybody around to tell them” (Senior Production Manager). Management claims that many of the new measures were internalized by operators may therefore be partly credible although, as we have suggested, this might be more appropriately characterized as a form of resigned accommodation, prompted by fear of further job losses, rather than evidence of a committed faith in the new measures.

CONCLUSION

This paper has drawn attention to the neglected issue of the power of inscriptions in endeavours to regulate and transform organizational practices. Specifically it has focussed upon the roles and significance of accounting inscriptions and writing in the context of a high tech case study of strategic

change (Britech). Our emphasis has been upon new, and changes in the form of, written performance measures aimed at the construction and implementation of a ‘new commercial agenda’.

The use of diverse forms of inscription is significant, we have suggested, because in certain settings/contexts written communications – chapters and diagrams as well as documents – are attributed greater weight and permanency compared to oral modes of communication. The construction of agents, structures, processes and metaphors, and the codification of technical and business knowledge through writing, in contrast to being kept in an oral form, provides an indelible record that “enables one to lay side by side different accounts emanating from different times and different places, and so perceive contradictions which in the oral mode would be virtually impossible to spot” (Goody, 1987, p. 220). It also facilitates the substitutability of labour as knowledge becomes disembodied in inscriptions whereas in the absence of writing it would be invested in the oral culture of long-serving personnel. Unlike oral information, inscribed measures are more mobile, both spatially and temporally, less amenable to interpretive manipulation, and susceptible to more sophisticated disaggregation and analysis; all such characteristics allow greater visibility of agents, processes, activities and structures and facilitate the exercise of power in the form of action at a distance (Latour, 1987; Robson, 1992; Ezzamel and Hoskin, 2002).

In assessing the impact of inscribed measures on the functioning of Britech, it is important to appreciate the difficulty of isolating the effects of writing from changes in industry and market conditions. The introduction and influence of inscriptions have to be located within the wider politico-economic and institutional contexts of their application. Notwithstanding these caveats, our analysis of Britech suggests three specific implications of the intervention of new inscribed measures in organiztions.

First, the power of new inscriptions can become manifest in the construction of new agents and new organizational methods. The introduction of the inscriptions could, in certain respects, be interpreted as a Tayloristic effort to deskill and degrade labour by codifying shopfloor knowledge and thereby asserting managerial control over the production process. Certainly, the new measures brought a degree of transparency and accountability that facilitated the removal of porosities and wasted effort, thereby raising employee productivity. However, the intention and effect of the new accounting

representations was not just to subjugate employees by demanding their compliance with new practices (e.g. recording and communicating information in managerially proscribed ways), but also to subjectify employees by encouraging their identification with, if not internalization of, the new regime so that they could become co-producers of its future development and refinement (see Foucault, 1982, especially p. 212 et seq). We noted earlier how fitters were invited to participate in developing an understanding with their supervisors regarding how the product should be constructed, what it is made of, and how shopfloor work should be planned, organized and monitored. Knowledge was not simply disembodied and monopolised by management but was to be shared and even ‘owned’ by the shopfloor. Workers were required to log the information publicly and were invited to be individually as well as collectively responsible and accountable for slippages and deviations from production targets that incorporated an anticipated gain from the discipline of continuous improvement. Through inscriptions the new managerial team at Britech sought to release the potential of ‘empowered’ employees through individualized responsibilization, internalization of inscribed measures, and depersonalization of engineering skills through the disembodiment of knowledge.

Second, inscribed measures facilitate the development and enactment of new powerful metaphors that have the capacity to underpin new organizational ‘vision’. In the case of Britech, the motorway metaphor, for example, was promoted and mobilized with the aim of promoting and implementing the new vision of ‘commercialism’. Not only was this metaphor articulated in writing, but it was also expressly linked to a host of inscriptions: process maps, motorway signs and measures reflecting such things as throughput, speed, efficiency of time usage, and quality that were calculated to be consistent with the new commercial agenda.

Third, written measures are at the centre of power/knowledge relations (Ezzamel and Hoskin, 2002). In Britech, it was through such written measures that the new ‘evangelical’ accountants and managers sought to shift the balance of power away from a complex dominated by engineering towards a financially centred complex that offered an ostensibly more ‘credible’ representation of Britech and its technology, and promoted greater cost awareness by evolving new measures that underpinned the finance-based new commercial agenda.

Through the deployment of new or different forms of written performance measures in Britech, a new organization, made up of (among other “things”) new employee agents, was to be constituted.

Old methods were indicted and rejected because they were judged to have generated inappropriate (out of touch with modern commercial needs) agents carrying out inappropriate actions in a disabling, functionally-based, and “disjointed organization”. Against these, the new “motorway”-based representations were commended as progressive, process-driven, entrepreneurial and productive. Through its use, management was able to both construct and emphasize several key elements of the new manufacturing vision that employees were enjoined to share (by appealing to the characteristics that competent drivers on the motorway have to exhibit). Improved vision and clarity of direction to the desired destination (transformation towards Britech’s tangible objectives) were to be engendered; and as on a motorway, navigation from point A to point B was to be enhanced in a manner that parallels drivers’ acquisition of the knowledge comprising the Highway code. Such literacy was evident, inter alia in employees’ ability to read factory signs (shadow boards, plastic brains) correctly and to assess the speed of production flow and critical bottlenecks, just as a competent motorway driver is able to assess the speed of traffic, recognise signs foe speed limits, junctions and service stations. Awareness of interdependence and the speed of flow of other activities, was fostered to appreciate the interconnectedness of the activities on the site, and recognise how a delay in any of the processes (a slowing down on the motorway) would have detrimental effects that cascade throughout Britech. This was accompanied by an urgency in exploiting the “opportune” and Mafia-like ruthlessness in obliterating the “non-opportune”. A final element involved capitalizing on ownership of the motorway attributed to employees and its proximity to their locations (by constructing the ‘motorway’ in their “back gardens”) so as to exploit intimate knowledge of their work situations in order to develop better future work situations (or routes to commercial salvation). The aim was that “operator” and “supervisor” would be (re)created as “commercial” operator and “commercial” manager through their interaction with the written plans and performance measures.

At the centre of these initiatives were the new managers, and notably the (evangelical) accountants who decomposed Britech into new centres of calculation through segmental reporting and working capital allocations; benchmarking targets and the use of EFQM, EVA, EVM, NPV, revenue and quality enhancement metrics. The new managers contrived to introduce on the shopfloor new

accounting inscriptions that were far more intensive, detailed, frequent, far reaching and penetrative than previously in the hope that this would result in better discipline and improved financial performance for Britech. To the extent that some old measures were retained, they were being used differently and linked to company-wide measures. Rather than a focus exclusively on tracking time in the form of man hours, the emphasis shifted to ensuring an efficient use of time and to inventory as this was what drove the ‘big numbers’. Efficient use of man hours was linked to the NPV for the whole site.

Yet, as Said (1995, p. 272) has persuasively pointed out, “a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth”, which is itself

Yet, as Said (1995, p. 272) has persuasively pointed out, “a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth”, which is itself