Abstract
This important book sees Matt Vidal bring a refreshingly rigorous application and synthesis of Marxist, institutional and organisational sociological theory to rich fieldwork on American lean production. The book is principally based upon interviews with over 100 people across 31 manufacturing companies in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, along with many months of direct observation of lean production at component supplier plants in Wisconsin. This empirical depth will render the book a definitive account of lean production – and one that displaces simplistic understandings of ‘lean as mean’ centred upon harsh discipline, insecurity, and quantitative work intensification.
The book begins by presenting what Vidal sees as a central problem faced by managers: ‘on the one hand they need to ensure that workers produce output . . . of sufficient quantity and quality . . . On the other hand, organisational success increasingly depends on the ability of managers to harness the creativity and initiative of workers’. According to Vidal, this problem creates a contradictory situation for managers as their principal means of ensuring output is discipline, work simplification, standardisation and automation, all of which contrast with the cross-training, empowerment, substantive involvement and job enrichment necessary to harness workers’ creativity and initiative. The following pages expertly demonstrate that this is a tension that lean production only serves to exacerbate. While the book’s focus is on lean practices, the introduction makes clear that this contradiction is a more general one common to ‘a wide range of occupations’ (p. 6). As such the theoretical contributions of Vidal’s research will be valuable to all critical sociologists of work and organisation. Throughout the book, Vidal details how the best practice for American lean production entails not only just-in-time practices (i.e. demand-driven production with low inventories) but also empowerment via cross-training, teamwork, and substantive involvement in problem-solving and decision-making. This is because worker empowerment is needed to overcome problems and continuously improve what is a fragile and bufferless system of production that can easily be derailed.
In the process of elucidating this contradiction and how it is heightened by lean production, Vidal articulates his approach of ‘organisational political economy’ and in doing so makes a number of important conceptual contributions to Marxist theories of work and organisation by synthesising Marxist and institutional/organisational theory. These major contributions are, as follows: first, building upon the work of Friedland and Alford (1991) and Thornton et al. (2012), Vidal identifies cornerstone institutional logics of the core capitalist world system: the capitalist market, capitalist firm, bureaucratic state, and political democracy. These ideological and hegemonic constructs are argued to be produced over time via social interaction but also to exist independently of individuals. Moreover, cornerstone logics are shown to be elaborated in distinct ways within different growth stages during which they influence the logic of a broad range of organisation fields and give rise to institutional settlements across production, competition, and state models. These insights regarding the influence of cornerstone logics are then combined with organisational field theory (e.g. Fligstein, 1990) in whereby fields are understood as shared meaning systems in which interactions between related organisations take place. Organisational fields are in turn conceived as becoming settled around particular notions of best practice (but also retaining influence from past dominant logics). This framework enables Vidal to articulate a Marxist theory of growth stages in which stages are constituted by unique formations of production, competition, and state institutional settlements and the emergence of a web of settled organisational fields. Growth stages are then mobilised as an analytical tool for delineating Fordism from post-Fordism. The former is argued to entail vertically integrated forecast-driven mass production, Taylorist labour management, partially decommodified labour and oligopolistic competition within domestic-orientated markets embedded within a Keynesian state. This clearly contrasts with post-Fordism and its vertically disintegrated, demand-driven financialised lean production operating within highly competitive international markets and embedded within the neo-liberal state. Providing a conceptual framework that enables the identification of Fordism and post-Fordism as distinct stages of capitalism is just one of the major contributions of the book.
Another important addition to critical research of management provided by the book is the identification of cultural satisficing as an important management dynamic. The basic idea is that faced with competing demands and workers’ resistance most managers with moderate aspiration levels aim for ‘good enough’ which invariably means the securing of sufficient output rather than trying to achieve best practice, that is, empowering workers – a far more challenging proposition. One reason that achieving empowerment is challenging is that workers tend to defend existing routines and ways of doing things. Vidal, in contrast to Burawoy, terms this workplace conflict the ‘routine politics of production’ and convincingly argues that it develops, not so much out of the ‘effort-bargain’ but from contrasting views among workers and managers regarding the best means to achieve efficiency and quality as well contrasting views on the proper division of labour between workers and managers. This is often due to managers being more aware of global logics of best practice, whereas workers are more influenced by former logics (i.e. what worked under Fordism) embedded in ‘local workplace culture, custom, and practice’ (p. 91). Moreover, workers distrust and often resist, or are at least reticent towards, managers’ attempts to empower them as a result of their previous experiences of bad management during which managers have not sought or responded to workers’ ideas and suggestions, and inflicted on them new fads and failed initiatives. This conflict is heightened by the alienation that workers experience under capitalist work organisation and their attempts to overcome it. An important distinction is made between objective and subjective alienation, with all workers being objectively alienated under capitalism, whereas subjective alienation is understood as a variable. This enables Vidal to argue that due to ‘a desire to creatively express oneself, realise a purpose, or feel pride . . . many workers to attempt to mitigate their alienation by embracing their work, becoming committed to doing high-quality, efficient work’ (p. 74). As a result, workers tend to embrace particular notions of efficiency and firm responsibilities which often conflict with managerial initiatives. A final important contribution of Vidal’s research is demonstrating that the typical factory is a relatively inefficient imitator rather than a highly efficient innovator and thus capitalism is marked by routine inefficiencies that permit variation in organisational forms by enabling managerial satisficing.
Before moving onto some areas of criticism it is necessary to first highlight that the complex theoretical framework outlined above is brought together in an elegant classical historical materialist manner by building on Adler’s (2007) arguments regarding the fetters that capitalist relations place on the progressive socialisation of the productive forces. In sum, Vidal argues that lean production provides a prism through which to view the failure of the relations of production to sufficiently empower workers and thus fully realise the potential of productive forces.
While accepting the conceptual and empirical value of this book, there are some criticisms that can be levelled against it. The first is that Vidal is too quick to dismiss Michael Burawoy and the potential for consent to nullify tension between discipline and empowerment. Buroway (1979, 1985) and his ‘politics of production’ are seen by Vidal as problematic for two related reasons regarding worker consent. First, in Burawoy’s approach consent is understood as the inevitable outcome of work in monopoly capitalism. Second, that consent is understood as produced in the workplace not the family, school, media, etc. However, a rejoinder to the first point is the obvious one that while Burawoy (1979: 194) argued ‘subordination of the market leads to hegemony in the factory’, the opposite is also true meaning that in the absence of monopoly capitalism, Burawoy’s theory predicts significant despotism and conflict (see e.g. Webster et al., 2008).
On the second point, it is certainly true that in Manufacturing Consent Burawoy (1979) took an extreme position in arguing ‘whatever consent is necessary for the obscuring and securing of surplus value is generated at the point of production rather than imported into the workplace from outside’ (p. 135). But it is a position that he has since revised so that consent can be understood more as an overdetermined outcome. For instance, Burawoy has explained that the aim of his extreme account in Manufacturing Consent was to act as a corrective to the mainstream 1970s Marxist view that emphasised the role of socialisation external to the workplace and that his point was rather that ‘family and school may be important but even if family and schools were very disruptive and tended to generate anti-capitalist struggles still [capitalism] would hold together because consent is being reproduced at the point of production’ (UCBerkeleySociology, 2013). It should also be noted that even under conditions of monopoly capitalism, Burawoy’s concept of the ‘politics of production’ is not so far away from Vidal’s own ‘routine politics of production’. For contention and conflict are not absent from Burawoy’s (1979) account and as in Vidal’s they take place over routines, piece rates, and custom and practice. However, what Burawoy shows is that this conflict can be contained, dispersed and transformed by workplace institutions into lateral competition between workers.
The lack of engagement with Burawoy is unfortunate as his work helps us problematise the question of control. Control for Vidal essentially means discipline, work simplification, standardisation, and automation. However, Paul Edwards (1986: 6) makes an important distinction between ‘Detailed Control’ (i.e. control over details of work tasks) vs ‘General Control’ (accommodation of workers to the overall aims of the enterprise). Once understood thus, Vidal’s criticism of Labour Process Theory as being too concerned with ‘control’, evaporates, for it may be true that managers are not focused on maximising detailed control, but they are always concerned to ensure the workforce is accommodated to the firm’s overall imperative of achieving profitability and accumulation. Indeed, as Thompson and Laaser (2021) point out, the starting principles of Thompson’s (1990) core Labour Process Theory are the existence of a logic of accumulation and that the labour process is one avenue by which this takes place. Moreover, once we understand control in these terms, it opens the possibility of what Burawoy (1979) refers to as ‘obscuring exploitation’ via legitimation and normative workplace institutions. For those working in the Burawoy-tradition (e.g. Leidner, 1993; Sallaz, 2009, 2015), the focus has tended to be on the continuing relevance of work games (similar to Burawoy’s (1979) own ‘making out’ game) in obscuring exploitation. However, my own research (Wood, 2018, 2020, 2021) has suggested that in workplaces where precariousness is the norm, the role of work games in creating consent has been superseded by ‘schedule gifts’. Alternatively, those working in the traditions of management and organisation studies have focused more on the role of normative controls such as organisational culture and rituals (e.g. Kunda, 2006) or teamwork (e.g. Sewell, 1998) in achieving the same ends.
General control can also be achieved via strategies of legitimation as in the ‘loyalty systems of control’ articulated by Granovetter and Tilly (1988) (see also, Granovetter (2005) in contrast to ‘surveillance systems of control’. ‘Loyalty systems’ are defined as ‘any system that builds worker commitment to the firm by means of positive incentives as well as symbolic devices and thus provides workers with trust and autonomy as opposed to systems of surveillance where the employer places little or no trust in the worker, allowing little or no autonomy and drives the worker through close time discipline (Granovetter and Tilly, 1988: 28). Indeed, one of the most influential concepts from labour process theory is that of Friedman’s (1977) ‘responsible autonomy’, whereby workers are provided ‘a wide measure of discretion over the direction of their work tasks and the maintenance of managerial authority by getting workers to identify with the competitive aims of the enterprise so that they will act ‘responsibly’ with a minimum of supervision’ (p. 48). Accordingly, while discipline and empowerment might appear as contradictory pressures, managers may actually find that they do not necessarily exist in opposition nor necessarily independently of each other (a necessary precondition for contradictions). For example, increasing empowerment might lessen the need for discipline (direct control) as doing so increases the potential for effective normative control, legitimation, and responsible autonomy and thus achieves a higher level of general control. Accepting the rich and detailed data presented in the book it could be argued instead that the tension between empowerment and control is specific to American lean production as in such work organisation attempts at normative control are not concretely underpinned by hegemonic institutions (indeed this is what I found in my study of US lean retail (Wood, 2020)) and thus, potentially, not a general tendency of late capitalism. In any case, the book would have been more convincing if the ideas developed from Burawoy-influenced research had been engaged with more fully. Especially as Vidal’s account of alienation is actually highly amenable to Burawoy’s view that workers invest in work games so as to make their work meaningful and avoid the tedium of capitalist work organisation (a point that Vidal recognised recently at the 41st International Labour Process Conference in Glasgow). In addition, as pointed out above, Vidal’s ‘routine politics or production’ is not as far removed from Burawoy’s ‘politics of production’ as he believes.
Even if one accepts that the tension between empowerment and control constitutes a contradiction between capitalist forces and relations of production it is not evident prima facie that it constitutes ‘one of the most fundamental contradictions’ (p. 75) of late capitalism. Indeed many neo-Marxists (of whom Vidal is clear in the preface that he has misgivings) highlight that the fundamental contradictions of late capitalism are located within the realms of realisation and reproduction, not production. For instance, Wallerstien (2010) highlights the issue of a lack of profitability since the 1970s and how this leads to ever greater and unsustainable financialisaton. Harvey (2014) highlights the problems that compounding growth presents to continued accumulation. Fraser (2022) warns us that ‘cannibal capitalism’ is destroying the environment (see also, Foster, 2022; Saito, 2017) and the democratic institutions upon which it depends.
In conclusion, ‘Management Divided’ offers a rich and possibly the definitive account of American lean production and an important rejoinder to existing critical ‘lean as mean’ accounts that one-sidedly stress discipline and quantitative work intensification. Moreover, the conceptual tools developed and deployed by Vidal will be valuable to all sociologists of work and organisations. In particular, his ‘organisational political economy’ approach is masterfully used to identify capitalist growth stages and analytically delineate the difference between Fordism and Post-Fordism. Likewise, the rigorous development and application of the concepts of alienation, routine politics of production, managerial satisficing, and routine capitalist inefficiency will be of great use to many. However, from a Burawoyian perspective greater engagement with the potential for legitimation and normative control to overcome the tensions identified in lean production would be welcome, and, I suspect, most neo-Marxists, faced as we are with ever-deepening crises of capital and climate will require greater evidence to persuade them of the central importance of the classical Marxist contradiction between forces and relations of production – encapsulated in this book by the control-empowerment tension.
