Thompson Work Organisations A Critical Introduction (3rd ed)

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mechanism. There may not be a definitive authentic culture in organisations, but there clearly are ‘official’ ones which power holders can at least attempt to impose on others. Having questioned the largely managerial evidence about companies and culture, the rest of the chapter looks at alternative and more critical explanations of what is happening inside organisations.

Culture: commitment or control?

Corporate culture writers like to present their prescriptions as an alternative to control (Naisbitt and Aburdene, 1985: 53; Kelly and Brannick, 1987: 8). But the perspective is riddled with glaring contradictions. We are told that ‘in institutions in which culture is so dominant, the highest levels of autonomy occur’ (Peters and Waterman, 1982: 105); while Deal and Kennedy assure us that companies with strong cultures can tolerate differences (1982: 153) and that outlaws and heretics are encouraged in companies such as IBM (1982: 50–1). At the same time the latter authors tell us that managers do not tolerate deviance from company values and standards (1982: 14), and that middle managers as well as blue-collar workers should be told exactly what to do (1982: 78). The books are so anxious to convince us that these are antiauthoritarian, ‘no-boss’ set-ups, that we are expected to accept that calling workers cast members (Disney) or crew members (McDonald’s) in itself banishes hierarchy and class divisions. In Silver’s (1987) brilliant demolition of the excellence genre, he reminds us of the reality of McDonald’s ‘people-orientation’: ‘Behind the hoopla and razzle-dazzle of competitive games and prizes lies the dull monotony of speed-up, deskilled Taylorised work – at McFactory. And McFactory’s fuel is cheap labour – part-time, teenage, minimum wage, non-union workers’ (1987: 110).

Reconceptualising the process in terms of new forms of management control is not entirely foreign to the more academic of the culture literature, which openly describes the process as a form of organisational control (Ouchi and Johnson, 1978; Martin and Siehl, 1983). Nor is it inconsistent with many of the statements from the more popular works, such as, ‘Strong culture companies go into the trouble of spelling out, often in copious detail, the routine behavioural rituals they expect from their employees’ (Deal and Kennedy, 1988: 15). Cultural or normative control is essentially concerned with the development of an appropriate social order that provides the basis for desired behaviour (Kelly and Brannick, 1987: 8). Indeed, in order to let people loose to be ‘autonomous’ they have to be programmed centrally first, with a central role played by more intensive selection and training (Weick, 1987). Tandem Corporation’s exhaustive selection process is likened to an ‘inquisition’ by Deal and Kennedy (1988: 12). One of the offshoots is that those who are chosen are likely to have a much more positive image of themselves and the company. It is not surprising, given such developments, that some management writers have begun to worry that corporate culture produces conformist thinking inimical to creative organisational development (Weick, 1987; Coopey and Hartley, 1991).

Cultural controls also operate through expanding the sphere of social activities in the organisation. Communicating company goals can take place outside the workplace. Part of GM’s Hydra-matic Division’s QWL program includes week-long ‘Family Awareness Training’ sessions at education centres (Mike Parker, 1985: 17–19). This does not refer to the employee’s nearest and dearest, but to the notion of company as family. Once outside the normal environment and in circumstances

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where everyone is individualised, psychological exercises and techniques are used to break down old identities. GM questionnaires rate those with limited scores on loyalty to the company as having a low quality of work life. Breaking down the boundaries between economic and social activities is something that is often characteristic of Japanese corporations’ methods of using the peer group as a means of integrating both shop floor and managerial employees. Broad (1987: 11) notes that ‘Social gatherings organised by team leaders and foremen are regularly held amongst all male employees’. The link to Japan is also made in Goldsmith and Clutterbuck’s jolly account of management japes at Asda’s social events: ‘The schoolboy activities in these companies [are] strongly reminiscent of Japanese companies, whose evening carousals have traditionally been part of the cementing of the managerial team’ (1985: 82). Many of the other books are similarly full of accounts of cultural extravaganzas that function to develop a sense of community through a form of compulsory sociability.

How should we understand the significance of this trend? Some radical theorists go further than simply analysing culture in terms of control by arguing that corporate culture represents an alternative and dominant mode. The key theoretical influence is the work of Ray (1986), who utilises a Durkheimean framework discussed earlier. She points out that bureaucratic control, though an attempt to integrate employees positively through internal labour markets and the reward system, is still control by incentive. This may generate contradictions around the struggles of the workforce to establish work rules and job guarantees. In addition, ‘while bureaucratic control may prompt individuals to act as if the company is a source of meaning and commitment, that is an entirely different matter from seriously believing it. In other words control remains externalised rather than internalised’ (1986: 292–3). Even humanistic controls deriving from the various branches of the human relations tradition do not possess the real tools to generate sentiment or emotion. The difference is that normative control works less through formal structures and mechanisms than through informal processes, value systems and management of the emotions.

Ray’s analysis is complemented by like-minded empirical studies such as Alvesson’s (1988, 1991) account of a medium-sized computer consultancy firm in Sweden. The founders established an open and charismatic managerial style capable of generating strong emotional ties among the consultants employed. A particular problem for the management was that the work was by its very nature variable and flexible, and therefore could not be controlled by conventional means. It was also largely carried out at the client’s workplace, potentially undermining the consultant’s sense of identity with his or her own firm. This is compensated for by a large number of social and leisure-time activities with the emphasis on fun, body contact, informality and personnel support; which in turn build social and emotional ties and a sense of company as community. Some of these are consciously linked to presentations of corporate performance to enhance favourable perceptions.

Further support comes from research on the retailing sector. Employees have to be subjected to engineering the soul so that they can automatically deliver the quality service required by the new, more enterprising customer (du Gay, 1991a). Ogbonna and Wilkinson (1988) and Ogbonna (1992b) detail that engineering in a supermarket where management have initiated a substantially expanded staff training and development programme that ranges from the recruitment of ‘like-minded’ people to a ‘smile campaign’. Supervisors claim that ‘We are able to detect when a check-out

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operator is not smiling or even when she is putting on a false smile . . . we call her into a room and have a chat with her’ (Ogbonna, 1992b: 85).

Not only does this perspective counterpoise control through conventional rules and regulations to changing the way that employees think and feel, the latter is seen as ‘considerably extending’ the scope and penetration of managerial domination (Willmott, 1993a: 522). Willmott makes a forceful case that in combining normative rules with the erosion of alternative sources of identity:

Corporate culturism extends the terrain of instrumentally rational action by developing monocultures in which conditions for the development of valuerational action, where individuals struggle to assess the meaning and worth of a range of competing value-standpoints, are systematically eroded. (Willmott, 1993: 3)

Monocultures are designed to avoid contamination by rival ends or values and, to the extent that they succeed, become the vehicle of nascent totalitarianism, accompanied by classic 1984-style doublethink of ‘respect for the individual’ in organisations where employees are seduced into giving up any autonomy. This analysis is wrapped up in the kind of Foucauldian terminology discussed in Chapter 9, where corporate culture programmes exert self-disciplining powers that trap people within the promise of secure identities and personal development. Similar Foucauldian themes of cultural ‘seduction’ and discursive colonisation of self are pursued in Casey’s US case study of the Hephaestus corporation. Put more simply, through team practices and family rhetoric, the company produces ‘designer employees’, who buy into the secure identity offered by the simulated community.

The limits to cultural influence

In criticising culture purists, Willmott persuasively argued that we should take corporate culture seriously. But perhaps he has taken its significance and effectiveness too seriously. In arguing that the ‘governance of the employee’s soul’ (1993a: 517) is a key ideological element of a new global regime of flexible accumulation, he is in danger of over-extending the concept and maintaining a separation from traditional forms of control associated with Fordism, Taylorism and bureaucracy. Corporate culture should not be isolated as the defining feature of contemporary forms of control. While Willmott rightly says that management is trying to extend the sphere of instrumental action to rules governing emotions and the affective sphere, traditional controls, as we have seen in recent chapters, remain important in a number of ways.

Even within those organisations that do implement cultural controls, they are intended to complement not eliminate the need for bureaucratic, technical or other systems. In the supermarkets described earlier, employees are subject to the surveillance of TV cameras in the manager’s office looking for deviations from the desired behaviour, as well as controls through new technology that can record productivity such as the EPOS (electronic point of sale) system. In Kunda’s excellent ethnography of ‘Tech’ we are given examples of both normative and technical controls. With reference to the former, managers evaluate subordinates on personality criteria: ‘Jim has a people problem. He is gruff and angry with people and says exactly what is on his mind. . . . I want him to control himself. Next year he is going to be evaluated on that.

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I’m watching him. He knows it’ (manager quoted in Kunda, 1992: 187). But employees are also aware that managers check up commitment by looking at who is logged onto the computer after hours. Though he sees a shift in focus from bureaucratic to normative controls at Tech, Kunda rightly acknowledges that systems of cultural control, ‘build on, rather than replace one another’ (1992: 220).

This continuity can be ignored or misunderstood by making culture into an overarching concept. For example, Wright talks of the ‘culture’ of Fordism, which ‘is converted from a mission statement into detailed practices, dividing each task into tiny details and specifying how each should be done’ (1994: 2). In contrast, the culture of flexible organisations relies on empowered, self-disciplined workers. Culture in this sense, however, should not be seen as everything, but rather as managerial attempts to mobilise values and emotions to support corporate goals. An expanded array of often-traditional rules and sanctions is then used to enforce the new moral order and extend levels of identification between employee and organisation. Academic confusion about how far to extend the use of culture reflects similar trends among managers. In their studies of the Scottish spirits industry, Marks et al. (1997) noted the deployment of two rhetorics: the first signified culture as a vision or set of shared values intended to guide the change process; the latter as a much more diffuse way of describing ‘the way that we do things round here’. The problem with the latter usage is that almost any change in practices can then be subsumed under the ‘culture’ label. The other thing worth noting is that the practice-led usage can exist independently of any explicit attempt to change values.

Additionally, we only have to return to previous examples of IBM and Hewlett Packard to see that their respective ‘Ways’ are sustained by careful structuring of the employment relationship around individualistic means and ends. Like the studies referred to earlier, Harrison and Marchington (1992) also examine the growth of customer care programmes in retailing, but argue that ‘The preoccupation with culture may blind us to the enduring importance of promotion structures, remuneration incentives, and working hours in shaping employees’ acceptance of managerial initiatives’ (1992: 18).

What about the second element, the effectiveness of corporate culture as social engineering? We should keep in mind that Ray (1986), the inspiration for many extravagant claims about culture as the ultimate control, distinguished between intent and outcome, and was very circumspect about the extent to which it would work outside the US and independently of other managerial techniques. Beyond the ranks of post-structuralism, there is a large degree of scepticism in case studies and surveys on the limits to culture, or at least to the extent to which commitment has been internalised (Guest, 1992; Ogbonna, 1992b; Scott, 1994; O’Donnell, 1996; McKinlay and Taylor, 1996; Wilkinson, Godfrey and Marchington, 1997; B. Jones, 1997). Take the British Airway’s manager quoted in Höpfl (1992: 10): ‘We know it’s hype – they know its hype. It’s okay. It’s reassuring. It makes you feel good. But do I believe in it – well that’s a totally different question.’ Employees may be conceptualised as empty vessels in which to locate corporate values, but that is not how it works in practice.

Employees may comply with demands for adherence to the language of mission statements, appearance and demeanour in the sales process, or participation in quality circles without internalising the values and therefore generating the ‘real’ commitment. Though studies record a diversity and unevenness of responses, the prominent themes are distancing behaviour, cynicism, deep acting, and resigned behavioural

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compliance rather than value internalisation. Employees may go through the motions of cultural conformity while remaining sceptical that, for example, supposedly distinctive ‘Ways’ are any different from the methods used by rival international hotel chains (Thompson et al., 1993). The dramaturgical theme is continued through employees developing a variety of means of disengagement or distancing from corporate values through cynicism, parody and irony. Advocates such as trainers for Body Shop may claim that cynicism cannot survive the participative culture, but that is belied by interviews with staff: ‘They want you to feel part of a team, but you’re not. They want you to feel important when you’re just a shop assistant. If you want to stay there, you do better as a Roddick clone’ (quoted in The Times, 28 September 1991). Considerable evidence of cynicism and distancing was also observed by Kunda. Many employees used an alternative language to describe the culture – ‘the song and dance’, ‘pissing contests’, ‘Tech strokes’, ‘burnout’, ‘doing rah-rah-stuff’ – or rival slogans – ‘I’d rather be dead than excellent’, ‘There is unlimited opportunity at Tech, for inflicting and receiving pain’.

All this is not to imply that attempts at culture change have no effect or are viewed in an unambiguously hostile manner. As Rosenthal et al.’s (1997) supermarket case study shows, systematic exposure to change discourses may impact on attitudes, particularly when employees identify with some of the aims of quality, or customer care programmes. However, the authors make clear that this is a long way from total acceptance or control. What comes over in this and many other studies is that, far from seduction, employees are highly aware of the complex aims and outcomes of managerial action. They may be aware that they are acting as a form of coping strategy (Ogbonna and Wilkinson, 1988; S. Taylor, 1998), or staff may use the rhetoric to try and bring management into line with what they have been told about the way that customers and employees should be treated (Rosenthal et al., 1997; Callaghan and Thompson, 2002 forthcoming). These examples take us back to the idea that culture cannot be treated as the property of management. If it is embedded in social interaction, employees produce as well as absorb meanings, transforming culture in the process (Meek, 1988).

As these studies and earlier ones such as Kunda (1992) illustrate, much of this ambivalence is directed towards maintaining a private self, or showing that they understood the real politics and status processes underneath the official surface; a process that Collinson (1994) refers to as ‘resistance through distance’. Employee awareness of the nature of the dominant culture will vary, for example, by position in the organisational hierarchy. As our discussions of gender demonstrated in Chapter 10, women managers could ‘see’ the informal masculinity of values and practices, whereas men largely took them for granted.

Even more controversially, we can ask whether the predominance of behavioural compliance without commitment actually matters. Supporters may point to a time lag whereby behavioural precedes attitudinal change (Schein, 1985). But in the light of serious research, this seems optimistic. Are we back full circle to Perrow’s view that to change individual behaviour, you do not have to change individuals? Some critics would appear to agree. Drawing on their research customer care programmes, Harrison and Marchington argue that, ‘management does not actually have to achieve value change among the workforce to successfully implement customer care’ (1992: 18). The conventional armoury of management control and remuneration measures, or indeed the coercive effects of fear of job loss, may be sufficient. While there is evidence that initiatives focusing on changing behaviour have been far more successful

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than those on transforming values (Hope and Hendry, 1995; Marks et al., 1997), there is no need to question the distinctiveness of ‘hearts and minds’ programmes. Our disagreement with theorists such as Willmott is not about whether some firms try to develop monocultures, but with the extent to which they can ever be successful. Willmott (1993a: 538–40) argues that the very process of role-playing and cynical disengagement entraps employees in the insidious controls of the culture and confirms the appearance of tolerance and openness.

Such interpretations risk underestimating both the fragility of corporate culture and the creative appropriation, modification and resistance to such programmes. Corporate culture cannot eliminate the powerful informal group norms that are the bedrock of organisational life. Work groups are just one of a number of sources of competing claims on commitment and loyalty. Attempts to prioritise an aggressive corporate identity may disrupt the delicate balance between these specific and superordinate allegiances. This is particularly the case in the public sector where traditions of professional autonomy and an ethic of service are increasingly at odds with a new managerialism bent on central direction and enforcement of the bottom line (Anthony, 1990; Harrison and Marchington, 1992). Increasingly bitter conflict between general managers and staff in the NHS, universities and the BBC is indicative of the tensions arising from attempts by senior managers to impose a ‘strong culture’ and a web of rules to enforce it. In any organisational context, but particularly where competing professional, commercial and personal goals are present, employees will face difficult value conflicts and behavioural choices.

Resistance may also be generated by the selective or partial nature of participation in the culture and its attendant reward systems. Such programmes are aimed often only at the ‘core’ workforce, as Kunda’s case study demonstrates. Class 2 workers, mainly clerical and temporary, received inferior benefits and were treated as non-persons, ‘just not techies’ as one manager put it (1992: 209). Unsurprisingly they only gave a minimal self back. This example reinforces the point that culture is sustained by material, institutional supports. Senior management may be taking greater risks with such initiatives because employees are being asked to invest more of their public and private selves, thereby raising the possibility of enhanced resentment when the promises of large-scale culture change programmes prove difficult to deliver, as at British Airways (Höpfl, Smith and Spencer, 1992). This is but one of the trends in corporate development which are working against the stability of cultures of company loyalty and commitment. Contradictions are raised by the clash between concerns for individual development in organisations and the continuous pressure for rationalisation of resources and for more effort. In addition, what the management pundits are calling ‘downsizing’ – the cutting out of middle layers of the company discussed in Chapters 11 and 12 – is hurting most the ‘organisation men, conditioned to look to large corporations as the fountainhead of security’ (Thackray, 1988: 80). Hope and Hendry (1995) argue that in this context research into imposed culture-change programmes does not demonstrate they have been effective as change mechanisms or control devices.

Loyalty, obedience and goal identification are not easy to sustain when companies are scrutinising their policy manuals to remove implied promises of job security or even termination benefits:

How the hell can you preach this flexibility, this personal and business development at the same time as you are getting rid? As someone said to me yesterday,

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an operator,‘Why am I in here now doing the best I can getting this product out when tomorrow morning you are going to give me a brown envelope?’ I had no answer. (Manager quoted in Watson, 1994: 209)

In essence this is no different to the tensions identified between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ versions of HRM, where workers are expected to be both dependable and disposable (Legge, 1989). Ackers and Black raise the question of whether it is possible that new forms of corporate paternalism can ever reproduce the depth of social relationships fostered by firms embedded in local communities and stable markets: ‘The impersonal, footloose multinational, with its mobile, diffuse, high-turnover workforce, and even more transient management team, appears ill-equipped to fashion an emotional nexus with its workforce’ (1991: 56). This may be exaggerating the difficulty, but current trends at the very least expose the highly contingent nature of any culture–commitment link.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have tried to set out both the significance and the limits to attempts to reinvent ‘organisation man’. Given the theoretical faults and practical constraints, it is sometimes difficult to see why the product has been so influential. Undoubtedly, it fitted the mood of a certain period. Silver (1987) adds a wider ideological and political dimension to the explanation. He describes the excellence genre as ‘Reaganism writ small’, a glorification of entrepreneuralism and the capacity of America to stand tall again. It is certainly true that a clear subtext of Peters and Waterman and Deal and Kennedy is that the discovery of excellent companies in the West means that all good things do not come from Japan. It is also the case that the ideological content of most of the books often shows a sharp break with the old ‘liberal’ consensus. Deal and Kennedy say that the society suffers from too much uncertainty about values and that managers should have the conviction to set standards and not undermine them by being humane (1988: 22, 56, 76). In Britain, similar links existed between the rise of corporate culture and a broader ideology celebrating the market and the spirit of enterprise (du Gay, 1991b).

But it is not simply a sign of a particular time. Cultural differences between organisations do matter, and culture strategies have become deeply embedded in the corporate consciousness. The contemporary management of meaning has become inextricably linked with culture as the language of change, though, perversely, survival is likely to be aided by the previously-discussed confusion of culture as changing values and practices (Thompson and Findlay, 1999: 183). Within this complexity, managers will be able to find benchmarks for progress or a rationale for ‘another go’ at changing employee attitudes. Indeed, there is evidence that managers are the group who invest most in change programmes and have most to lose if they go wrong (Watson, 1994; Hope and Hendry, 1995; Webb, 1996; Mulholland, 1998).

Moreover, for all the absurdities of content and presentation, the corporate-culture literature has touched on genuine issues that, as we argued at the start of this chapter, were partly neglected in the past. These need looking at in a context free from the merchandising process. The tragedy is that we have a lot to learn from studying organisational cultures (Frost et al., 1985; Pheysey, 1993), particularly as culture mediates all change processes. Creating a culture resonant with overall goals is relevant to any organisation, whether it be a trade union, voluntary group or producer co-operative. Indeed it is more important in such consensual groupings. Co-operatives,

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for example, can degenerate organisationally because they fail to develop adequate mechanisms for transmitting the original ideals from founders to new members and sustaining them through shared experiences.

Examples of this kind indicate that there may be more promising settings for the development of strong cultures. This may even be the case in a business context. As Biggart (1989) demonstrates, direct selling organisations (DSO) such as Amway and Tupperware are unique in their combination of commercial imperative and non-bureaucratic mode of operation, though the kind of corporate culture involved has recently been described as a mirror of the Communist conformism officially feared in the US (Horwell, 1999). As we saw in Chapter 1, DSOs work through informal social networks, affective bonds between members and a degree of operational autonomy: ‘Even the most upbeat corporate culture of traditional American business, however, pales beside the daily round of direct sales distributors. Relations in most DSOs are not just friendly, but highly personal. Distributors become involved in each other’s private lives and often describe themselves as “family”’ (Biggart, 1989: 4).

Such an emphasis by no means rules out studying specifically corporate cultures as management strategies. But this has to be within the plurality of cultures and interest groups in the workplace. Luckily, as well as the case studies referred to in this chapter such as Kunda, there have always been rich sources to draw on such as Salaman’s (1986) study of the occupational culture of the London Fire Brigade; accounts of making-out on the shop floor (Nichols and Beynon: 1977; Burawoy: 1979; Delbridge, Lowe and Oliver, 2000); and gender at work (Willis: 1977; Pollert: 1981; Westwood, 1984; Kondo, 1990). Organisation ‘man’ may be back on the agenda, but the cultural agenda cannot only be set in the boardroom.

Part II