Overview

One of the central dynamics shaping organizations today is a contradiction managers face between ensuring workforce discipline and harnessing worker creativity. This contradiction has been intensifying over the last four decades as employee involvement has become increasingly important in response to rapid technological change, requirements for flexibility, and demands for continuous improvement. In manufacturing, global best practice includes lean production with substantive worker empowerment; cross-training in enlarged tasks and inclusion in problem solving and decision making. Yet, many managers instead face these conflicting pressures by training workers in narrow tasks and using them exclusively for manual labor. In this richly evidenced study of American manufacturing, Matt Vidal presents a synthetic theory called 'organizational political economy', integrating concepts from organization theory into a classical marxist framework. This theory emphasizes how contradictory developments - conflicting pressures and competing logics of labor management - lead management to be divided. Some managers adopt best practice by substantively empowering their workforce while others settle for good enough. Capitalist management is increasingly a source of organizational inefficiency. This argument is not limited to manufacturing. Managers experience contradictory pressures - for standardization versus discretion, deskilling versus upskilling - in a wide range of occupations including education, healthcare, software development, and many more.

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9780198795278

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Reviews

A superb piece of engaged scholarship, helping us make sense of the tensions and ambiguities of the capitalist workplace. Compelling material from the shop-floor, combined with deep, path-breaking theory. Sets a new standard for research on management and organizations. * Paul Adler, Harold Quinton Chair in Business Policy, University of Southern California; former President of the Academy of Management * A lucid and provocative intervention into the debates about 'lean' production, drawing on Marxist theory, organizational sociology, and rich empirical data from original fieldwork in dozens of U.S. factories. Management Divided is an important contribution to labor sociology and to critical management studies. * Ruth Milkman, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center; former President of the American Sociological Association * The major contribution of this book is to shift labour process analysis from the control/resistance/consent framework to a broader perspective, where managers are not just concerned with controlling labor, and workers are not just resistors, but seek meaning through work, while remaining suspicious of management. It lays bare the structural dilemma for management through the capitalist production of inefficiency - where managerial satisficing is a response to contradictory pressures to give workers more input into decision-making to enhance their creativity while needing to ensure workforce discipline. * Chris Smith, Professor of Comparative Management and Organisation Studies, Royal Holloway University of London * The logic of lean production has overwhelmed economic institutions, from industry to retail to health care and beyond. In this book, Matt Vidal has torn away the curtain of lean production, revealing its internal contradictions and opening up a vital discussion of the challenges workers and managers now face. A must read. * Steven Vallas, Professor of Sociology, Northeastern University *

Matt Vidal has written a book that reveals a new understanding on both workforce and supplier development. His research is impeccable. The managers and workers he interviewed opened up and provided detail that outlined the subtleties and dilemmas of human resource management and supply chain management. * Paul D. Ericksen, Supply Chain Advisor, IndustryWeek * A superb piece of engaged scholarship, helping us make sense of the tensions and ambiguities of the capitalist workplace. Compelling material from the shop-floor, combined with deep, path-breaking theory. Sets a new standard for research on management and organizations. * Paul Adler, Harold Quinton Chair in Business Policy, University of Southern California; former President of the Academy of Management * A lucid and provocative intervention into the debates about 'lean' production, drawing on Marxist theory, organizational sociology, and rich empirical data from original fieldwork in dozens of U.S. factories. Management Divided is an important contribution to labor sociology and to critical management studies. * Ruth Milkman, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center; former President of the American Sociological Association * The major contribution of this book is to shift labour process analysis from the control/resistance/consent framework to a broader perspective, where managers are not just concerned with controlling labor, and workers are not just resistors, but seek meaning through work, while remaining suspicious of management. It lays bare the structural dilemma for management through the capitalist production of inefficiency — where managerial satisficing is a response to contradictory pressures to give workers more input into decision-making to enhance their creativity while needing to ensure workforce discipline. * Chris Smith, Professor of Comparative Management and Organisation Studies, Royal Holloway University of London * The logic of lean production has overwhelmed economic institutions, from industry to retail to health care and beyond. In this book, Matt Vidal has torn away the curtain of lean production, revealing its internal contradictions and opening up a vital discussion of the challenges workers and managers now face. A must read. * Steven Vallas, Professor of Sociology, Northeastern University * Matt Vidal's book, which builds on a series of essays by the author, represents a thought-provoking contribution to critical management and labor process research. The starting point of Management Divided is the observation that the field of critical research on the labor process needs a management theory that it does not yet possess...Vidal's management theory is also a theory of lean production as a specific production regime. * Martin Krzywdzinski, Head of the Research Group on Globalization, Work, and Production at the WZB (Berlin Social Science Center) *

Author Information

Matt Vidal is Reader in Sociology and Political Economy in the Institute for International Management, Loughborough University London. He is author of Organizing Prosperity (with David Kusnet) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (with Paul Prew, Tomás Rotta and Tony Smith) and Comparative Political Economy of Work (with Marco Hauptmeier). He has published over twenty articles or book chapters on work, human resource management, employment relations, labor markets, comparative political economy, and social theory. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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