From pkraft@bingsuns.cc.binghamton.eduTue Dec 13 09:24:38 1994 Social Control and Social Contract in NetWORKing: Total Quality Management and the Control of Work in the United States* H. K. Klein(a) and Philip Kraft(b) a) School of Management, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, New York, USA, 13902-6000 b) Department of Sociology and School of Management, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, New York, USA 13902-6000 Keywords: TQM; communications; social contract; empowerment; control; teams ABSTRACT Networks can be understood as organizational control strategies. As an example, we present two case studies of team-based networking strategies associated ____________________ * We thank Sal Agnihothri, Andrew Clement, Peter Meiksins, Gary Roodman and Ina Wagner, as well as members of the SUNY-Binghamton School of Management Information Systems Seminar for their criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper. We are grateful to Suzanne Iacono and Nancy Zimmet for especially close and helpful readings. Katherine Karlson helped tremendously in locating sources. The opinions expressed here are our own. All the usual warnings about generalizing from culturally-specific cases apply. The authors are listed alphabetically. _____________________ with the Total Quality Management movement in the United States. TQM's implied social contract requires some form of power sharing. In practice TQM team organization can also become another form of labor intensification. Similarly, TQM appeals to democratic values by emphasizing participation, communication, cooperation and team work. Such claims can also serve to legitimize major organizational changes, some of which follow familiar Taylorist patterns. Two cases illustrate how the technical components of communications systems help redefine control systems in TQM- based work reorganization experiments. In the manufacturing setting, communications took the form of web-and-hub networks, centralizing off-site engineering control of production workers. In the design and engineering workplace, peer-to-peer communications implemented by self-managed teams reduced intellectual "slack time." In both cases the communications systems provided means to intensify labor. 1. INTRODUCTION This paper has two purposes: (1) to explain the range of ideas and approaches which U.S. management literature subsumes under the label of Total Quality Management and (2) to examine the organizational implications of TQM-based teams for networking. TQM is an eclectic organizational strategy which managers use to improve quality and productivity. It is used chiefly to compress hierarchies and command and control systems in the work place. Because it seeks to regulate both symbolic interactions between individuals and the technical systems used to gather, organize and transmit data, TQM seeks organizational as well as technical realignments. TQM is thus, in the United States, an implicit social contract governing industrial relations. Specifically, TQM promises to equitably organize and regulate work place relationships. Our principal contention is that in the United States TQM also rationalizes communications in order to impose new and more precise forms of work measurement and management control. It is therefore appropriate to raise the cui bono question: who benefits from TQM and who loses in specific instances? In this context, our focus is less on the technological components of networking than on the social transformations which accompany computer-based work reorganization. Thus, "networking" must be understood to mean more than implementing technical infrastructures to support communications, such as LANs, client server software, GDSS or other groupware. In the following discussion we use "networking" to refer to broadly defined social communication patterns among people in groups and organizations. 2. TQM THEORY IN THE UNITED STATES 2.1 Background Under great competitive pressure, U.S. manufacturers are in the process of transforming their organizations to be adaptable, flexible and responsive to constant change. American managers are now aware that the brief dominance of U.S. industry after World War Two was due at least as much to the temporary absence of competition as it was to the superior technology and organization of U.S. firms. European and especially Asian competitors have forced U.S. manufacturers to undertake major and sometimes drastic reorganizations in order to compete in global markets often dominated by foreign producers. In particular, senior U.S. managers are now convinced that conceptual and coordination delays, not restrictive work practices on the shop floor, are the remaining obstacles to timely production of competitive products. For management theorists and practitioners, the most difficult problem facing U.S. industry is not simply the hostility of production workers. It is the unreliable and sporadic nature of value-adding activities in general. Value-adding workers directly contribute to the process of transforming partially complete products into deliverable commodities. Those who do not add value, in contrast, only police and bookkeep goods-in-process.1 U.S. managers, therefore, have critically reexamined traditional organizational and work place relationships. Their criticisms have focused on rigid hierarchies, linear product development cycles and the hidden organizational costs of employees who do not "add value," particularly middle managers. Although they may not cite Perrow or Gouldner, management and engineering literatures reflect a keen awareness of the contradictions of trying to control and inspire at the same time (Cf. Kraft and Truex). 2.2 The Goals of Total Quality Management Often justly criticized for their susceptibility to "theories of the month," U.S. senior managers have at last settled on a comprehensive and long-term solution to the competitive inadequacies of their firms. In the last decade U.S. industry at all levels and in all sectors has embraced some form of Total Quality Management (TQM).2 Appropriated and packaged by many consultancies, TQM is based on the following principle: continuously improved product quality (including customer service) and faster product development cycle times will produce substantial long term cost savings and increased market share, chiefly by garnering the loyalty of "delighted customers." 2.2.1 The Origins of TQM The person most often cited as the founder of the Total Quality Management movement, W. Edwards Deming, has consistently refused to formally define a theory of TQM, or for that matter, TQM itself. Instead, Deming has stressed in his writings and public pronouncements that continuously improving "quality" is the basis for successfully competing in a global market: quality of the product, quality of the process and the quality of the people. Deming's approach emphasizes (1) the systematic quantification and measurement of product and process variations and (2) using the intelligence and experience of all workers -- design and production workers as well as managers -- engaged in the design and making of a product (Deming).3 2.2.2 TQM Today: Engineering and Normative Strategies Deming's preference for codifying "total quality" principles rather than constructing a formal theory of Total Quality Management has not deterred others from turning TQM into a full- blown management theory of competitiveness.4 As a comprehensive and long-term solution to the competitive inadequacies of U.S. firms, nearly all formal TQM theories embrace the following essential goals: (1) reduce product and process variation (2) exceed customer expectations for price, quality and delivery time (3) reduce the "slack time" in design, production and administration These are the first principles of TQM. Based on our review of the TQM literature, we can distinguish three major implementation strategies: 1. An emphasis on quantitative engineering tools, including statistical process control and a wide range of process and product simulation. Typically, the goal is to operationalize, measure and predict "outcomes." Outcomes can include manufacturing defects, product development cycle times, the reading scores of school children and the number of rings before a service representative answers a customer call. The widely copied six sigma campaign initiated by Motorola is an example of such an engineering- based TQM system. 2. An emphasis on flexible organizational structure. TQM is a strategy to restructure social relations in the work place. Increasingly, the goal is to manage managers. In practice, managing managers means to push their traditional policing, coordination and reporting functions down the production and process chains of command. Operationally, the goal is to reduce communications distortions and delays, primarily through the creation of teams of various kinds. TQM teams, in turn, are made up of multifunctional workers. 3. A way to alter the beliefs and behavior (the "corporate culture"), chiefly of middle managers and design specialists, with regard to the concept of "customer" and the functions of middle management. The notion of customer is broadened to include transformational workers in the value chain. The identity of middle managers is altered from police and supervisors to "coaches," "leaders" and "facilitators" who inspire rather than flog. In particular, insofar as they are actually not superfluous, managers and technologists must be convinced that their purpose is to serve and facilitate the work of teams, not to command and control armies of mindless "hands." This is the most explicitly ideological component of TQM theory. TQM thus has two related parts: (1) a "hard" engineering component which has as its goal the reduction of product and process variation through technical tools like statistical process control, continuous feedback loops, design of experiments and other techniques associated with Deming, Juran and Taguchi; and (2) a "soft" organizational component which seeks the reduction of product cycle and delivery times through collapsing long-standing social distinctions between design, production and service work, on the one hand, and management, coordination and communication on the other. As we shall see, these two goals may conflict with each other in practice and lead to unresolvable ambiguities in the application of TQM principles. 2.2.3 TQM and the Social Contract Like all social arrangements, Total Quality Management contains an implicit -- and often explicit -- social contract. The words most often associated with TQM's implied social contract are teams and empowerment, which strongly appeal to emancipatory values. "Teams" imply equality and solidarity. "Empowerment" implies communal decision-making and liberation from authoritarian control ("self-management"), thereby realizing the goal of self-determination. Deming and Juran, the two major U.S. TQM proponents, stress the need to involve every member of an enterprise in at least some decision-making processes. TQM thus is both an engineering and a normative strategy. It is an engineering strategy because it is a system for establishing behavioral guidelines and measurable outcomes. Social control is effected through "reengineering" production processes (including services), restructuring organizations and remaking organizational culture, chiefly by stressing new forms of team composition and function. TQM is also a normative strategy because its implied social contract promises to equitably regulate relationships in the work place by formalizing rewards as well as behavioral expectations. In organizational terms, TQM's multifunctional teams offer to replace the institutionalized coercion and conflict of traditional work places with some form of cooperative work. By institutionalized coercion and conflict we do not mean only the traditional adversarial nature of formal labor-management negotiations in the United States. We mean also the coercion and conflict which are embedded in conventional command and control systems, that is, in rigid hierarchies, highly structured lines of communication and detailed divisions of labor, responsibility and authority. Operationally, the goal of the new team-based TQM systems is to push decision making down to the lowest possible level of the enterprise, including clerical and production workers. The need to reduce product and process variations and to shorten product development cycle and delivery times has coincided with the current corporate preoccupation with getting "lean and mean." Producing more goods faster and with fewer people has required major organizational restructurings and these structural changes make networking and communications issues critical. We address these issues in the following sections. 3. THE REALITY OF TQM: TWO U.S. CASE STUDIES In this section we draw on case studies of network implementation in two enterprises heavily committed to TQM. Our cases are both U.S.-based multinational manufacturers, one of computers, the other of aerospace components. Our data come from field research consisting of interviews and participant observation by one of the authors. The computer company case involves multiple sites. We have conducted off-site interviews with current and former production workers, technical specialists and managers of the aerospace company. In addition, we have used information in the public domain, such as regulatory agency and company reports and newspaper stories. 3.1 Background Both companies used to be market leaders and both now face aggressive competition, especially from the Japanese. The computer company has suffered because market demand has shifted away from its traditional product lines. Both the computer company and the aerospace firm have also lost much business because of cutbacks in the U.S. military budget. Both are in the process of major and painful reorganizations, including unprecedented layoffs of engineers and managers as well as production workers. None of the sites we studied has a union, although some other sites in both companies do.5 Both companies have responded to their competitive problems by experimenting with many new forms of work organization. Both organizations have attempted to make themselves flexible, adaptable and responsive to customers who demand high quality products and service. In particular, they have attempted to systematically implement customized versions of Total Quality Management. Both have also introduced extensive computer-based communications systems to facilitate this process. The teams studied here differ significantly in their organization and goals. In the aerospace components plant, work teams produced small-batch quantities of physical products designed by technologists who were at other company sites. In the computer company, teams of managers, engineers and other specialists designed products and production systems to be built locally or at other company sites. In both cases the formal objectives were to "empower" work teams in order to improve product quality and reduce product development and manufacturing cycle times. These are the goals. What is the practice? We turn first to the aerospace company. 3.2 The Aerospace Components Plant The plant, hereafter called Aerospace, was part of a U.S.-based integrated manufacturer of electronics and aerospace equipment for the U.S. Department of Defense. The plant was recently constructed to detailed company specifications -- and paid for -- by state and county government agencies. The local agencies also provided a subsidized lease as an incentive for the firm to bring new jobs to the area. Physically, the facility was designed on an open-plan model. This permitted easy and fast physical interaction for most of the production work force and many of the technical and management staff. It also accommodated state-of-the-art computer systems, including production control systems which monitored the activities of all workers in real time. The plant was connected through various advanced communications systems, including minicomputer-based EMAIL, to other company and customer sites. The plant was not responsible for any fundamental product or process design work. Instead, the site received from off-site design and engineering facilities general specifications for the manufacture of electronics components and subassemblies. At its peak employment of about 350 people, approximately 260 were production workers, whose official job title was "Production Associate" (PA's). Eighty were engineers, computer specialists, other technical workers of various kinds (for example, health and occupational safety specialists, as well as TQM specialists), marketers and human resource specialists, called "Support Associates" or SA's. Another six were clerical workers and related support staff ("Business Associates" or BA's). Twelve managers and other workers accounted for the rest.6 3.2.1 Team Composition Prospective production workers were initially screened for basic literacy and numeracy skills by the local office of the State labor department. Successful candidates -- fewer than 400 of over 3000 applicants were hired -- were subjected to extensive further screening by the company. These additional tests, according to both company managers and workers who took the tests, chiefly examined attitudes towards teams and cooperation, as well as communications skills and other personality characteristics rather than specific mechanical aptitudes such as soldering. Newly hired workers were trained in groups of twenty and were encouraged to think of themselves as a "class" and each other as "classmates." They received four weeks of training in team organization, communications skills, interpreting computer-generated reports, safety procedures, as well as in specific manufacturing skills. At the end of their training they were assigned to production teams. As in most non-union firms, the training and team placements were entirely the prerogative of company management. In this case, the company relied heavily on external consultants for testing, training, team structure and placement of individual workers. Once placed in teams, team members elected their own team leaders, typically for a period of six months. The technical specialists --the SA's -- and managers were recruited differently. They were hired from the parent company's other sites throughout the country. Their training was conducted separately, but, like their production counterparts, work and team assignments were made by site managers. SA's were loosely associated with production teams and often floated on an as-needed basis. 3.2.2 The Multifunctional Worker As indicated in Section 2.2.2, one of the explicit goals of TQM-based team organization is to facilitate the development of the so-called multifunctional worker. Production team workers -- the PA's -- were in fact responsible for a wider range of activities than those normally associated with U.S. manufacturing jobs. Production workers were trained to look up detailed manufacturing and materials specifications from databases on networked desktop computers in their work areas. They inspected their own products, eliminating the need for traditional supervisory workers and quality control departments. In an even more radical departure from most U.S. manufacturing practices, they were also encouraged -- in the formal language of the company, "empowered" -- to offer suggestions for improving production procedures when prototypes revealed defects or manufacturing inefficiencies. U.S. firms as a rule do not actively involve production workers in product or process design. Workers also had considerably more variety in their work tasks than in conventionally organized factories. They had authority to divide production tasks in TQM teams and, within limits, to schedule work, including voluntary overtime, to complete projects. There was little direct physical supervision by foremen or managers. Work tasks were rotated, typically on a monthly basis. In this sense production workers were "multifunctional." On the other hand, production teams made no independent decisions about basic product designs or processes. If prototype "builds" revealed functional or design flaws or suggested revisions to the manufacturing process, approval had to be obtained from the product and design engineers off-site. Formal approval from the off-site customers could be obtained only through the local Support Associates, not by Production Associates. In this sense, the production teams were "serviced" by "Support Associates," that is, by the site's engineers, computer specialists and managers. These technical specialists, not the PA teams, communicated with their technical counterparts in the originating design sites. Ultimately, the design and process engineers at the off-site engineering locations retained the authority to approve any design or process changes which the PA teams might propose during prototype manufacturing. In short, the TQM production teams were empowered to propose design and production changes, but not to implement them. Finally, the physical activities of production workers -- indeed, in this state-of-the-art facility, of all workers -- were monitored in real-time through the teams' minicomputer-based workstations. Every PA and SA entered the beginning, end and outcome of every activity during a shift. In effect, the networked workstations were sophisticated time clocks. Every employee could locate and determine the current activity of any other employee as well as tabulate individual, team and site "value-adding" and "non-value-adding" work. Officially, these tabulations were used to bookkeep customer billings; in practice they were also used by senior managers to set and evaluate performance benchmarks for individual workers and teams. 3.2.3 The End of the Experiment Two years after the plant opened, the site was acquired by another company and hiring stopped. Within months of the acquisition, the new parent company announced the plant would be closed and it scheduled layoffs of production workers. According to our respondents, the remaining teams have been "reorganized" and production relations now resemble conventional manufacturing work places. There is closer direct supervision and teams no longer make as many decisions about scheduling and internal divisions of labor. As pressures mount to finish existing contracts before the shutdown, overtime has increased dramatically: some PA's are working 55-60 hours per week. As one PA told us, "Job rotation has stopped to improve efficiency. As we close down, we are becoming very product-driven. We are getting back to having managers. We are now updating with our [managers] every day." 3.3 The Computer Company We studied three teams at different computer company sites. All three TQM teams were in combined product and process7 development projects and were intended to closely coordinate their design work with their respective manufacturing groups. One team was responsible for modifying an existing computer system to widen its applications base. The second was responsible for designing simultaneously a new circuit board and its production system. The third was responsible for designing an integrated circuit carrier (the housing of an integrated circuit) and its production system. In the absence of unions, team membership and the teams' broad operating procedures and objectives were entirely the decisions of senior site managers. Management's goals for the new TQM teams were to shorten product development cycle times and improve manufacturablity. A subsidiary goal was to reduce costs through the reduction of field service of defective products and the elimination of "non-value-adding" middle managers and other workers. 3.3.1 Team Composition The computer company had energetically and with much publicity committed itself to a total quality campaign. It had repeatedly summoned site managers to special meetings with senior corporate executives to stress the point and to provide leadership workshops. Applying the new policy, local site managers authorized project managers to select members of the pilot TQM teams. This was done by informally consulting with subordinate managers. Teams were composed of marketers, engineers of various specializations, production line managers, human resource specialists and representatives of suppliers and subcontractors. One team included the product manager's administrative assistant. Team leaders were appointed by senior site managers. All three teams were deliberately constructed as a departure from earlier company versions of teams. Traditionally, these had been representative committees whose members reported back to their respective departments, which in turn formed links in a conventional serial product development ("design/build") system. Their collective activities were coordinated by both product and group managers. The new TQM teams, by contrast, were entirely product-based and removed from the direct control of group managers. Each team was given the responsibility of specifying, designing and overseeing the physical production of its new product from product conception to initial field service of the finished product. If the old teams were made up of delegates who reported back to the departmental troops, these new teams were the troops.8 By virtue of this composition, whole layers of "non-value-adding" supervisory workers were eliminated from the teams. The teams got a great deal of high tech equipment and support. Within broad limits, they chose and got what technological infrastructure they thought they needed. They had sophisticated mainframe-based Email and other communications systems. One team designed and implemented its own manufacturing process monitoring system. A full array of pc-based support systems, from CAD systems to desktop publishing to project scheduling, was also available, if not always used. What these teams did not have, however, was a line worker or skilled craftsman, even though each of the teams was engaged in product and process design and development. 3.3.2 The Multifunctional Worker (?) The computer company teams did not produce -- nor did they seek to produce -- multifunctional workers. Management's goal was clear and explicit: reduce product development cycle time and produce high quality products. The goal of each team was to coordinate and speed up the communications between the principal designers and supervisors of new products and processes, whose work would have otherwise been carried out seriatim. The construction of these teams explicitly meant constructing working parties of specialists whose activities were now product-based rather than functional, i.e., the marketer was engaged in marketing the new computer, not in marketing all the company's computers, the chemical engineers were concerned with achieving six sigma reliability for the new circuit boards and chip packages, not designing new photoresist technologies for circuit boards and packages in general, and so on. Operationally, delays, defects and thus costs were to be reduced because TQM teams, supported by extensive networking capabilities, would speed communications while reducing information distortions. Email and close physical proximity helped facilitate better and faster communications, as did extensive use of desktop word-processing and publishing by the team members themselves. These not only eliminated many communications delays, they eliminated the need for clerical staff as well. In short, teams in the computer case were organized to facilitate communications between an elite group of technical and administrative workers who were peers in an occupational as well as organizational sense. While all sought to learn about the concerns and goals of other team members, no one tried to become competent in or even knowledgeable about other specializations. The teams might be multifunctional, as most teams are, but the team members were not. 3.3.3 The Outcome of the Experiment Site management generally regarded the teams as successes. The product/process development cycles were shorter than similar but conventionally organized projects. Manufacturing defects and field failures were significantly reduced. Team members judged that the final products were better functionally and in their ability to be efficiently manufactured to a high quality standard. In our interviews and in our reviews of the teams' internal self- evaluations, the engineers, marketers, managers and technologists expressed a cautious approval of the new freedom to make decisions without the usual multilayered management reviews for which the company was famous. For example, many expressed satisfaction at being able to initiate direct contact with potential customers, both internal and external, at early stages of the design process. Such communication had usually been the responsibility of separate marketing teams, which were not directly involved in specific product and process design. Normally, designers were not permitted to initiate such contacts and many TQM team members felt their early and regular communications with potential vendors and customers generated products better suited to potential customers. In general, team members said they liked working on a common project without being diverted to temporary assignments elsewhere. Reporting requirements were fewer. On the other hand, many team members were concerned with how their individual work appraisals, and hence their promotions and pay, would be affected by membership in the isolated and experimental team projects. Finally, none of the internal self-evaluations mentioned the desirability of including production workers, who would eventually make the products the TQM teams designed, in future teams. At the completion of the projects, the teams disbanded and their members returned to traditional work groups. 3.4 Comparison of the Cases We find it striking that in the two enterprises we studied, the "hard" components of TQM, that is, engineering systems intended to reduce process and product variations and to speed up communications, were broadly and systematically applied, while the "soft" components of TQM -- the organizational and ideological restructurings -- were not. The most obvious comparisons between the two cases are the differences in the composition of the teams. The aerospace plant teams were the mirror images of the computer company teams. The computer company teams included managers, marketers, engineers and designers of various specializations, even representatives of subcontractors and suppliers, but no production workers. On the Aerospace teams there were "multifunctional" production workers, but engineers, designers or managers were not full-time members. Instead, the SA'a were associated with multiple teams and often "floated." In other words, while production workers were restricted to making, inspecting and evaluating a single product at a time, the technical specialists were not. Design work was outside the purview of the production teams. Organizationally, then, neither type of team structure reflected TQM's formal commitment to involve everyone engaged in a production process on empowered teams. Similarly, the type and purpose of the communications systems differed radically. In the computer company case, the technologists and managers had a wide assortment of computer- based support systems to help them design and manage their work, including genuine peer-to-peer communications systems. Many of these systems they chose and operated, within broad limits, themselves. The result was to make design workers "think faster," that is, to remove the intellectual equivalent of "slack time" caused by technologically inadequate or slow peer-to-peer communications systems. Some teams even used desktop publishing systems to produce their own project manuals and presentation materials, that is, they performed work normally assigned to clerical workers, further reducing communications "slack time." In Aerospace, peer-to-peer communications meant calling to a team member across an open manufacturing area. Otherwise, communications were still hierarchically organized in a traditional, if compressed, top-down system which permitted managers to review data on individual and team activity in real and historical time. Like the computer company, TQM-based teams at Aerospace were established by management to speed up production. Here the target was not inefficient intellectual production, but slow manufacturing. Although there were sophisticated, indeed, state-of-the-art, computer-based communications systems in the Aerospace teams, these were designed to relay information up and to convey orders down. The orders were primarily design specification changes from engineers who were, moreover, frequently off-site. The sophisticated communications systems remained under the control of managers and technologists. The latter, who were not permanent members of the team, used the data generated by the manufacturing teams to control the behavior of production workers. The computer company sought to speed up intellectual production by speeding up communication among peers. By contrast, Aerospace managers sought to increase output by reducing delays in the way orders were passed down and reports were passed up a command-and-control hierarchy. In both our cases, TQM systems and associated technologies were initiated, designed, implemented and effectively controlled by managers. In the computer company the "soft" components of TQM were directed at encouraging managers, technologists and production managers to accept the new work arrangements mandated by the demand for shorter development cycles and fewer defects. The job tasks in the Aerospace TQM teams were substantially more fragmented than those in the computer company teams. Empowerment was the ability to rotate and coordinate the fragments. In the computer company, intellectual activities, rather than physical movements, were more tightly coordinated by real-time peer-to-peer systems among designers and managers who were peers in a social as well as technical sense. In both cases communications were enhanced. But they were not enhanced in the same ways, nor for the same reasons or with similar outcomes. Both companies defined high quality and short cycle times as largely technical issues. They therefore adopted engineering and manufacturing techniques that almost always required some form of continuous feedback system between designers, managers, production supervisors and line workers. In the case of Aerospace, the solution was a team of "all purpose" production workers whose management by traditional forms of direct supervision was replaced by "self-management" supplemented by computer-based continuous feedback loops and reporting systems. The continuous monitoring facilitated control of production workers by managers and engineers, even if the managers and technologists were not physically present. The peer-to-peer communications within teams was chiefly face-to-face ("sneakernet") and not mediated by computer-based network systems. In the case of the computer company, team structures were more complex. They allowed designers, engineers and managers to compress the time gaps caused by the queuing associated with serially organized development projects. They also compressed delays from subsidiary activities such as clerical work and communications with customers and suppliers. Although the intent in both enterprises was to reduce the communications delays between design and production functions, in neither case were changes in communications aimed at breaking down traditional barriers between design and production workers. Nor were the communications systems always intended to improve the quality of democratic information sharing. If anything, because Aerospace produced a material product, the work was easier to quantify and measure, and thus presented more possibilities for close, although long-distance, control. In sum, in both cases the new communications technologies were combined with radically different work organizations which were imposed on technologists and production workers by senior managers. The organizational outcome, apart from specific technological innovations, was to achieve greater management flexibility in the Aerospace plant and to more intensely focus the design efforts of technologists in the computer company. 4. DISCUSSION As described earlier, the advocates of TQM believe that Total Quality Management will not only improve productivity and competitiveness, but create more competent and empowered employees as well. This sounds much like the ethical ideals and productivity claims of earlier participation programs such as Quality Circles, Sociotechnical Design and other employee involvement schemes. The ways in which TQM has been practiced in our cases give reason to pause and reflect on these optimistic claims. Obviously, from the perspective of formal TQM theory, there were many flaws in the way the two companies implemented their versions of TQM. It is possible to argue that because of imperfect implementation these are not adequate tests of the TQM approach. In our opinion, however, no TQM implementation is ever likely to realize the ideal of simultaneously increasing quality and output on the one hand and empowering workers on the other. The shortcomings we observed are the result of unresolved incompatibilities between the needs of managers to maintain control and the claims of employee empowerment. 4.1 Ambiguities in TQM The ambiguities which surround the desirability of TQM as a socially beneficial strategy begin with its dual goal of undoing the coercive effects of bureaucratic structures while at the same time improving productivity and quality. The first goal requires reversing authoritarian control strategies which U.S. managers have practiced successfully for several decades. These are therefore deeply ingrained in the psyche of American managers and workers. It is doubtful how quickly any approach to undo this tradition can succeed. Because U.S. managers have employed TQM as a way to change the social relations between manager and managed, TQM requires at least the appearance of power sharing. But it proceeds by applying scientific management in a new way (e.g. statistical quality control) and by deploying unobtrusive forms of power to achieve compliance with organizational norms which are defined outside -- and outside the purview of -- the newly "empowered" teams. To achieve the productivity goal, these "empowered" teams must become devices to intensify the labor of workers at all levels. Total Quality Management thus distorts social communications in organizations because the potential for democratic work place relations inherent in team organization is contradicted by the second imperative of meeting intensifying global competition (cf. Habermas). The ambiguity of TQM, in other words, results from the intrinsic conflict between higher productivity and more responsiveness to human needs and social satisfaction. In the rush to get the products out, human needs tend to suffer. In the TQM literature this basic conflict is denied by assuming without evidence that the two are synergistic. Of course, TQM was not "done right" in either of our cases. TQM, like other social inventions, can never be "done right," if only because of the continuous social learning which it requires. But the argument from "wrong implementation," even if partially true, fails to address the central issue: whether empowerment and control can be mutually compatible. Both empowerment and control effects are visible in our cases. 4.2 Empowering Effects: Who Won What? We take it that empowerment means the creation of social conditions which are conducive for realizing human potentials, in particular intellectual and social capacities. Typically this requires the elimination of unnecessary uses of power. In this sense there is an essential similarity between empowerment and emancipation (cf. Alvesson and Willmott). There were some obvious empowering effects in both our cases. The computer company teams were freed from traditional multilevel direct control. The teams could pick their own tools, including design tools. The networking technologies permitted democratic communications between team members. There were no direct mechanisms which imposed a work speed-up. Hence the teams "won" because their quality of work relations improved and the computer company "won" because it got shorter cycle times and better products. (It is important to note, however, this was in comparison to the unusually long lead times in the old work organization. Once this "slack time" is removed, any further speed-up will increase work intensity, and with it stress. For an example, see Section 4.3). Similarly, the manufacturing workers at Aerospace "won" because, in the words of one PA, "you don't have a foreman breathing down your back." Internally, teams were democratically organized, elected their own leaders and decided the details of the internal division of labor for a given manufacturing job. There was some degree of scheduling flexibility, both for teams and individual team members. As in the computer company, there was little direct management supervision of team members. The firm "won" because both product quality and worker flexibility were high. Like the computer company teams, Aerospace managers were able to dispense with many layers of non-value-adding employees, i.e., supervisors and clerks. 4.3 Control Effects: Who Lost? In our discussion of slack time and the substitution of indirect for direct uses of power, we have suggested that Total Quality Management is a form of social control which redefines traditional management structures. This is accomplished in three ways: (1) the rationalization of communication (2) the use of new and more precise modes of measurement and (3) the transfer of the responsibility for reacting to these measurements from supervisors to the teams themselves. Both rationalization and measurement depend on the availability of the new networking technologies to create the prerequisites for implementing self-management. The three processes manifest themselves differently in the cases. In Aerospace, communication was controlled through a web-and-hub networking technology. Accounting for output and measuring deviations from product and process specifications became the responsibility of the teams. In effect, they policed themselves via a computerized production control system. This added to the teams' responsibilities, but teams did not have formal authority to make major design or process changes which could affect their work. Instead, engineers and technicians were needed to translate a team's practical observations into technical descriptions which were submitted in a form acceptable to the original design teams. The off- site design teams in turn would communicate their solutions back along the same communications channel, that is, via the engineers. In this sense, there was little communal decision-making or emancipation from authoritarian control. Multifunctionality meant rotation between repetitive manual tasks, scheduling of team tasks and quality control. It did not mean design. Control of the production teams at Aerospace was not exercised by low-level supervisory workers. Instead, it was embedded in highly automated production systems. These were also used to inform managers of the activities and the location of all workers at all times. The networking system, in other words, was designed to provide a continuous feedback loop which permitted greater surveillance of production workers by senior managers. Engineering control was supplemented by ideological control. A form of social reprogramming took place in which an ideology of "team effort" encouraged workers to view even job-related physical and emotional damage as the outcomes of personal failings, not work conditions. Consider the following: one PA, whose work involved lifting components onto benches for inspection, had developed a severe repetitive motion injury. She reported working an average of sixty-eight hours per week during the previous year. She did not attribute her injury to the shortage of workers on the team -- a condition completely under the control of site management -- and the consequent need for continuous overtime. Instead, she praised the company physician for urging her to work fewer hours. She blamed herself for the injury, saying that it was "in my nature to work hard in order to get a job done. That's just me." There were losers in the computer case as well. While we were studying the TQM teams in the computer company, the firm officially confirmed long rumored shutdowns, layoffs and retirement buyouts of technical specialists and managers as well as production workers. Remaining employees were told that everyone was going to have to produce more with less. In particular, technologists and middle managers would have to prove their value to the company, apart from mere seniority. In the computer company as well as the aerospace plant, employees had come under explicit pressure to intensify their labor, not merely improve "quality." In this case, as well as in Aerospace, how are employees supposed to react to exhortations to be part of a team when employers no longer feel obliged to offer any sort of job security? 5. CONCLUSION: ARE THERE GENERAL LESSONS? On the basis of our analysis, we draw the following conclusions which extend beyond the limits of our two cases: 1. A team is not a team is not a team. In the U.S. a team is what employers say it is. If managers in both our cases understood that traditional divisions of labor can be counterproductive and inefficient, it does not mean that they then chose to implement a genuinely cooperative and multiskilled work organization. In the computer firm TQM-based team projects were designed to squeeze greater productivity out of design and administrative workers. Senior managers did not feel the need to incorporate production workers in these multifunctional teams, perhaps because the company's non-union production workers remains relentlessly Taylorized. In this company, designers and other technologists, not production workers, are considered both the chief source of value-added labor and the major productive bottleneck. It does not surprise us, therefore, that when we asked why multifunctional teams were not extended to production work, we were told it was because of a lack of resources. At Aerospace, production work was organized into self- managed teams, but design work was still effectively restricted to technical specialists; the PA's were "empowered" only to make suggestions. Managers, in short, constructed teams according to the nature of the productivity gains to be made, not according to some abstract commitment to empower all workers. 2. TQM does not address the sharing of costs, risks and benefits. All control strategies carry with them a rational justification or an implied social contract. For example, under Taylorism the implicit contract was that increased productivity generated by work fragmentation would be shared with production workers in the form of higher wages. This was the basis of the so-called American model, which both European employers and unions promoted as a way of raising the standard of living of European workers by increasing their output to American levels. The new social contract implied by empowerment and team work takes fundamentally different forms for different kinds of value-adding workers. All workers are expected to intensify their own labor. In exchange, some team members will regain some of the autonomy taken away earlier under conventional Taylorist forms of work organization. This is the basis of the claim that such reorganized teams are "empowered." In practice, empowerment means constructing teams which combine the functions of lower level management with an expanded range of "value-adding" workers. However, changing the social relations between middle managers, design and manufacturing workers often means eliminating middle managers and even some of the quality control/policing functions of technical workers. In other words, "empowering" some members of these new teams means disempowering some others -- or getting rid of them altogether. Thus, the social contract implied by the creation of TQM-based teams will be contested by those who see their autonomy threatened by the empowerment of others. The beneficiaries of TQM are likely to be value-adding design workers and senior managers who enter coalitions with production workers in order to save their jobs by jettisoning middle managers. TQM does not directly and forthrightly address this zero-sum aspect of "multifunctional" team work. 3. The "ambiguities" of TQM may reflect an unresolvable conflict. Managers and technical workers are exhorted to "work smarter." Their "cultures" are being examined, decomposed and reassembled. Revolutions of all kinds are being threatened from above. Disregarding whatever substantive content there may be in the endless seminars, workshops, retreats and brainstorming sessions provided to managers and engineers,9 the purpose of this reeducation campaign is to convince managers and technical workers of the need to work in teams and the urgency of doing so. The implication is that technical and other knowledge workers will constantly have their work intensified as economies become more global and competition increases. Those who cannot adjust, even high value-adding design workers and technologists, will be forced out. For production workers, the result is less a rejection of Taylorist work place organization than an extension of Taylorist fragmentation and control to new realms: self-policing is to be considered "empowerment," not a form of indirect control. Similarly, for management and design workers, work is also extended and intensified through collective self-management, i.e., self-surveillance. Peer-to-peer communication is, after all, also a form of peer pressure, particularly in the context of the uncertainties of corporate "downsizing." In summary, we should be careful about celebrating the emancipatory and empowering potential of hardware and software "solutions" to the issues of empowerment and democratic decision-making in the work place. In the United States, the goal of both engineering and management remains delineating the range of workers' choices and behaviors in pursuit of management-defined goals. It is our position that TQM, with its strong components of product and behavioral measurement and team-based normative control, is an attempt to redefine, not reject, this traditional goal. REFERENCES Alvesson, M. and H. Willmott. "On the Idea of Emancipation in Management and Organization Studies, Academy of Management Review, 17:3 (1992), 432-464. Barley, S. and G. Kunda. "Design and Devotion: Surges of Rational and Normative Ideologies of Control in Managerial Discourse," Administrative Science Quarterly, 37 (1992), 363-399. Berry, T. Managing the Total Quality Transformation. McGraw-Hill (New York: 1991). Clark, J. P. and W. O. Troxell (eds.). Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Technology Management 1993: Design for Competitiveness. Manufacturing Excellence Center, Colorado State University (Boulder, CO: 1993). Deming, W. Edwards. Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position. MIT Press (Cambridge, MA: 1983). Gouldner, A. Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Free Press (New York: 1964). Habermas, J. The Theory of Communicative Action. Beacon Press (Boston: 1984). Juran, J. M. and F. M. Gryna, Jr. Quality Planning and Analysis. McGraw-Hill (New York: 1980). Kraft, P. and D. Truex. "'Postmodern' Management and the Modern Industrial Corporation," paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, August, 1992, Pittsburgh, USA. Kunda, G. Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation. Temple University Press (Philadelphia: 1992). March, J. and H. Simon. Organizations. John Wiley and Sons (New York: 1958). Naisbitt, J. Megatrends. Warner Books (New York: 1986). Perrow, C. Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay. McGraw-Hill (New York: 1986). Peters, T. and R. Waterman. In Search of Excellence. Harper and Row (New York: 1982). Stalk, G. "Time - The Next Source of Competitive Advantage," Harvard Business Review, 41-51 (July-August 1988). Stalk, G., and T. Hout. Competing Against Time. Free Press (New York: 1990). Toffler, A. The Adaptive Corporation. McGraw-Hill (New York: 1985). Walton, M. The Deming Management Method. Dodd, Mead, & Co. (New York: 1986). Wood, S. "The Lean Production Model." Background paper prepared for the Lean Workplace Conference, September 30, 1993, Port Elgin, Ontario, Canada. 1 Cf. the flood of complaints about design, engineering and marketing bottlenecks which fill the pages of the Harvard Business Review and the Sloan Management Review, as well as Fortune, Forbes and Businessweek. An excellent representative analysis is Stalk and Hout, whose Competing Against Time emerged from a widely cited article by Stalk in HBR. Popular (and more fun to read) entreaties were published about the same time by Peters, Naisbitt, and Toffler. Toffler in particular deserves to be more widely read by academics. In contrast, by the mid-1980's there was much less discussion of how to overcome work place resistance by U.S. production workers, who were by 1990 almost entirely non-union. 2 We may date the start of the general American rush to quality with the decision in 1985 by Florida Power and Light Company, an electric utility, to compete for the Deming Award, presented annually by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers. It won the award in 1989. (Cf. Berry; Walton suggests that a 1980 television documentary, "If Japan Can ...Why Can't We?" was influential among senior managers. Our advice is to be skeptical of all periodizations, including ours). 3 Stephen Wood provides a useful history of the origins of the terms "TQM" and its siblings (Wood). 4 Two recent typical examples, Berry and Walton, are both Deming disciples. Other leading TQM gurus, notably Juran and Taguchi, have been less reluctant to embrace Total Quality Management as a comprehensive management system of organizing work in the manner of, for example, the Human Relations school or Scientific Management. Cf. also the papers collected in Clark and Troxell. 5 Neither case is "authorized" by the firms. For the computer firm, we obtained information from a variety of sources in the course of doing an unrelated company sponsored project. These initial interviews and observations were undertaken for an entirely different purpose than that of the present paper. We feel obliged, therefore, to present them anonymously and to disguise the name of the company. In the case of the aerospace components manufacturer, we used personal contacts to find present and former plant employees. Local management would not formally cooperate but did not object to our contacting current employees. 6 Production Associate, Support Associate and Business Associate are our terms. The job titles actually employed at Aerospace are widely associated with the site and make it easily identifiable. 7 "Process development" means designing the production system of a product rather than the product itself. In TQM teams, the idea is to combine both the product and process development processes in order to improve quality and facilitate efficient production. This approach is sometimes called Design for Manufacturablity (DFM). 8 The metaphor was suggested by our colleague, Richard Reeves-Ellington. 9 We learn from Elaine Bernard, Director of the Harvard Trade Union Program, that the majority of expenditures on higher education in the U.S. are now made by the private sector: by corporations which spend money -- perhaps not wisely or well, but lots of it -- to train their white collar employees (personal communication from Elaine Bernard).