Working in the machine

 
The best parody of industrial work is by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. He shows men working to a pace set by machines, and how the most ordinary human activities (scratching your armpits, swatting a fly which lands on your face) disrupt production. The factory has a time card for going to the toilet, and a big cinema screen inside the toilet so that the manager can threaten workers having a quiet smoke. The workers in the film are, as far as the management is concerned, a regrettable necessity - they are only valuable in as much as they themselves become machines. Humanity is an obstacle to efficiency.

This is a familiar picture of factory life, raised to a peak of supposed efficiency in firms which applied the principles of ‘scientific management’ developed by Frederick Taylor in the early part of the last century. Scientific management involved the careful measurement and evaluation of each human activity in the production process, which could then be defined precisely, so that workers could be set production targets and rewarded according to  degree of attainment (called ‘piecework’ in the UK). Scientific management essentially views an organisation as a machine with human components. It is hardly surprising that it became the standard way of organising repetitive industrial processes (most typically automobile manufacture) and was enthusiastically supported by Lenin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The shortcomings of scientific management have been recognised for many years. Workers rarely look with enthusiasm on any organisation which treats them as interchangeable and disposable components. Unless very closely supervised, they will take their revenge on the organisation by strikes or sabotage, or cut corners to meet targets at the expense of the quality of output. Even if workers do thoroughly internalise their job description, problems occur. The job description becomes the limit of their responsibility: workers no longer cover for each other or collaborate in solving problems, while they pursue the rules of the organisation to its detriment. When workers in the 1960s, wished to bring an organisation to its knees without going on strike, they ‘worked to rule’.

The alternative to seeing an organisation as a machine, is to see it as a society of varied individuals with diverse skills, who interact with each other to complete tasks and solve problems. They can be motivated to perform well and creatively not just by money but also by their loyalty to their colleagues, their sympathy with the aims of the organisation, their commitment to their customers, and their personal standards and self-respect. This view of the organisation was a key element in success of the Toyota Management System, described by James Womack and colleagues in their book The Machine that Changed the World.

You know that you work in an organisation as society when its workers celebrate each others’ birthdays, marriages, promotions and departures. There will also be a strong organisational culture, with a collective wisdom about what actions work and don’t work. At their best, organisations as societies can provide a strong sense of identity and meaning for peoples’ lives. There can, however, be problems. Organisations with strong social bonds can becme inward-looking and exclusive: the organisation comes to exist only for its workforce rather than to meet the needs of its customers, students, clients or patients.

Expressions of concern about this displacement of goals have been used to justify the ‘modernisation’ of public services over the last 20 years. It has been proposed that governments need to re-assert  strategic direction and the maintenance of quality by setting up a series of public and private agencies to take over many of the activities formerly provided by employees of national and local government departments. Output and quality targets are set for each agency by central government (or one of its nominated QANGOs), while quality of services is monitored by a further set of agencies. It is proposed thereby (in the words of Osborne and Gaebler in their book Re-Inventing Government) to separate ‘rowing’ from ‘steering’: leaders of individual agencies can use their skills to motivate their staff within a set of strategic objectives set by government.

This model has been extended throughout public services, even to organisations like universities which, in the UK at least, were never previously managed by national or local government. The effect has been catastrophic. Setting enforceable targets for agencies drives their managers to cascade these targets throughout the organisation, even to the extent of setting targets for individual members of staff. As the organisation as a whole becomes ‘mechanised’, co-operation between staff diminishes, which leads managers to promotes elaborate job descriptions and procedures manuals. These become quasi-legal documents within the organisation, and thus eliminate opportunities for creativity. Staff become demoralised, and the loss of quality familiar in traditional industrial work spreads to the professions and to public services.

Of course, the mechanisation of public services can be seen as part of a wider pattern in which the whole of society becomes regulated and monitored. We may not have television screens in our workplace toilets yet, but we have CCTV cameras almost everywhere else.