Towards Collaborative Community

Essay: Paul S. Adler and Charles Heckscher. Towards Collaborative Community / (Book: The Corporation as a Collaborative Community)

URL = http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~padler/research/01-Heckscher-chap01%20copy-1.pdf

Description

This is an absolutely remarkable essay that charts the history of community within the capitalist form, from the earliest community oriented paternalism (the 'Gemeinshaft' model described by Tonnies), to the bureaucratic ('Gesellshaft') model described by Weber and Durkheim, culminating in the emergence of collaborative community, existing in tension and contradiction within the hierarchical and market environment of for-profit companies.

Excerpt

Researchers who have studied the evolution of the popularity of various management techniques in management journals have consistently identified periods that alternate between a focus on employee commitment and a focus on managerial control:

1. Commitment, 1870s–1890s: welfare work. 2. Control, 1890s–1910s: scientific management. 3. Commitment, 1920–1940s: human relations. 4. Control, 1940s–1960s: systems rationalization. 5. Commitment, 1970–1990: employee involvement. 6. Control, 1990– : business process re-engineering and outsourcing.

The surface pattern is one of alternation; but closer examination reveals an underlying progression. Starting from a situation of ‘competitive capitalism’ and ‘simple control,’96 the sequence of commitment approaches aims successively deeper; the sequence of control approaches aims successively broader; and the latter have become increasingly hospitable to the former. First, relative to the commitment approaches, there is a clear shift from the earlier reliance on paternalism, to relatively impersonal, bureaucratic norms of procedural justice, to an emphasis on empowerment and mutual commitment, targeting progressively deeper forms of subjective involvement of the individual worker. And this sequence engaged progressively deeper layers of work organization: welfare work did not seek to modify the core of work organization; human relations addressed mainly supervision; employee involvement brought concern for commitment into the heart of work organization.

Second, the sequence of control innovations—from scientific management to systems rationalism to re-engineering—aims at successively broader spans of the value chain. Scientific management focuses on tasks and the flow of materials in the workshop. Systems rationalism aimed at a more comprehensive optimization of production and distribution activities. Re-engineering and outsourcing aimed at the rationalization of flows across as well as within firms.

Third, the relation between the commitment and control approaches seems to have changed: the control approaches seem to have become increasingly hospitable to commitment. Within two or three years of publishing a text popularizing a rather brutally coercive method of business process re-engineering, both James Champy and Michael Hammer published new volumes stressing the importance of the human factor and the need for job redesigns that afford employees greater autonomy. The undeniably autocratic character of much early re-engineering rhetoric and its rapid ‘softening’ compares favorably with more unilateral and enduring forms of domination expressed in post-war systems rationalism. It compares even more favorably with the even more unilateral and rigid rhetoric in turn-of-the-century scientific management: scientific management only softened its relations with organized labor after nearly two decades of confrontation.

The zigzag path of development in management technique appears to trace a vector that corresponds well to Marx’s notion of ‘socialization’: conscious control, and in particular in the form of collaborative community, characterizes progressively broader spans of activity."