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Manufacturing empowerment? 'Employee involvement' in the labour process after Fordism

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-11-27, 10:57 authored by Matt VidalMatt Vidal
Advocates of lean production argue that a work system is truly lean only if a given bundle of practices, including worker empowerment, is implemented in the proper configuration. In contrast, my interviews and observations in six US manufacturing plants demonstrate that substantive empowerment is not a necessary condition for achieving a lean manufacturing system that yields considerable performance improvement. While many configurations I observe appear to be 'lean enough' for satisficing managers, one commonality among the cases observed here is that worker empowerment is limited in depth and breadth. Employee involvement may be limited in depth because substantive empowerment requires a change in organizational routine and authority structure not necessary to achieve the largely technical goals of management. Even when an employer embarks on major technical and social change, pushing beyond lean enough toward world-class organization, substantive empowerment is limited in extent due to the demands of standardization and managerial prerogative, as well as resistance and reticence among workers. © 2007 Oxford University Press.

Funding

The research for this paper was made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Advanced Manufacturing Project (AMP) research consortium.

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

Socio-Economic Review

Volume

5

Issue

2

Pages

197 - 232

Citation

VIDAL, M., 2007. Manufacturing empowerment? 'Employee involvement' in the labour process after Fordism. Socio-Economic Review, 5(2), pp. 197-232.

Publisher

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2007

Notes

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Socio-Economic Review following peer review. The version of record VIDAL, M., 2007. Manufacturing empowerment? 'Employee involvement' in the labour process after Fordism. Socio-Economic Review, 5(2), pp. 197-232. is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwl005

ISSN

1475-1461

eISSN

1475-147X

Language

  • en

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