Showing papers by "Hugh Willmott published in 2001"
TL;DR: This paper examined the experience of frustrated management efforts to re-engineer working practices, mainly at the point of production, in response to repeated corporate-driven initiatives designed to implement a range of "lean manufacturing" initiatives at the Northern Plant, a pseudonym.
Abstract: This paper contributes to a developing body of literature which questions the claim that the ‘factory of the future’ is a total institution in which self-subordination through ‘new wave management’ is virtually inescapable. It examines the experience of frustrated management efforts to re-engineer working practices, mainly at the point of production, in response to repeated corporate-driven initiatives designed to implement a range of ‘lean manufacturing’ initiatives at ‘Northern Plant’, a pseudonym. Our findings illustrate how workers can and do employ a variety of individual and collective forms of resistance involving dissembling co-operation with change initiatives whilst maintaining a distance from them. In accounting for resistance, we note the significance of market conditions but focus primarily upon the importance of workers’ identification with practices that had been established earlier when management were content to indulge self-managing patterns of work in return for securing required levels of output.
259 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the issue of trust as it currently appears in the newest of these distribution channels, online and Internet financial services, and smart cards, and attempt a more nuanced exploration by focusing on attempts to manage' trust, the problems such attempts encounter, the various techniques employed in their resolution and the power relations in which they are embedded.
Abstract: In recent years, the topic of trust has become the focus of renewed attention in organizational theory and research and, in particular, where electronic distribution and associated `virtual' forms of organizing are prevalent. The question of trust, always an issue in financial transactions, is exacerbated the more the physical element is removed. The paper focuses on the issue of trust as it currently appears in the newest of these distribution channels, online and Internet financial services, and smart cards. In both theory and practice, notions of trust are often opposed to concepts such as power or control, and are deployed as part of a dualistic either/or proposition. Drawing on ongoing research in the financial services sector, the paper attempts a more nuanced exploration by focusing on attempts to `manage' trust, the problems such attempts encounter, the various techniques employed in their resolution and the power relations in which they are embedded
224 citations
TL;DR: The authors locates labour process theory in broader sociological debates concerned with the action-structure dualism before examining three broad programs for research that have emerged in response to the question of subjectivity and agency.
Abstract: This paper locates labour process theory in broader sociological debates concerned with the action-structure dualism before examining three broad programmes for research that have emerged in response to the question of subjectivity and agency. Whereas the `orthodox' school tends to re-assert the structuralist and economistic features of Marx, the `anti-realist' or deconstructionist position invites the abandonment of analysis that has traditionally been orientated by the polarities of `structure' and `agency'. We identify and develop a third, `hybrid position', one that is informed by poststructuralist insights but does not neglect or reject established traditions of `modern' sociology and labour process research. Critical examinations of two recent studies of `subjectivity and the labour process' - Mike Sosteric's (1996) case study of a night club and Douglas Ezzy's (1997) paper on `good work' - are undertaken to show how poststructuralist insights may offer an instructive way of understanding how subjectivity is co-implicated in the accomplishment and reproduction of capitalist employment relations.
165 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors highlight and challenge the dominance of rationalist assumptions in business ethics that promote and legitimize a privileging of reason over emotion as a source of moral action.
Abstract: We highlight and challenge the dominance of rationalist assumptions in business ethics that promote and legitimize a privileging of reason over emotion as a source of moral action. We ask whether it is possible for business ethics not only to challenge this hierarchy but to avoid its reversal. We start by exploring some origins of reason-based ethics and relate these to ideas about organization. Here we hint at some popular examples of this kind of ethics and discuss two of its more important sources of inspiration: Kant and Weber. Next, we consider the relationship between bureaucracy and morality before evaluating Bauman’s ideas about morality in bureaucratic organizations. We argue that Bauman fails to challenge the dualism between reason and emotion as he inverts the hierarchical relationship between them. Contending that this hierarchization should be abandoned, we explore how the preceding discussion illuminates business ethics and address some consequences of our anti-dualist position.
107 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the threat of libel lawsuits to discipline or inhibit scholarly accounting research and its dissemination is examined and evidence is provided from three case studies in which the authors sought to disseminate alternative research and analysis.
58 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the contracting out of services by a major government department and a National Health Service hospital in the UK and conclude that accountability issues tend to be displaced by a focus upon changes in the management and delivery of public services.
Abstract: This paper considers private-public partnerships as a central feature of efforts to reinvent government and the delivery of public services in the UK. Specifically, it examines the contracting out of services by a major government department and a National Health Service hospital. Hoggett's (1996) discussion of new modes of control in the provision of public services is mobilised to illuminate dynamics and lines of tension where services are contracted out to the private sector. Critical awareness of these dynamics and tensions, it is concluded, should be directed to issues of accountability that tend to be displaced by a focus upon changes in the management and delivery of public services.
11 citations
10 citations