Affirmation, games, and insecurity-Cultivating consent within a new workplace regime
Drawing on theoretical insights from work by Michael Burawoy on the `politics of production’ and `the game of “making out”‘ this article explores `manufacturing consent’ within increased insecurity at sites of a global chemical company. It explores the role of the European Works Council and kaizen as `rituals of affirmation’ to corporate control within this `hegemonic despotic’ regime securing consent through the precariousness of local site employment.
Introduction Recent years have seen a significant shift in capital formation and labour regulation. The increased dominance of financial rationale, `shareholder values’, and rationalisation through mergers and take-overs, reflect globalisation of corporate power. Locations and sites, with local employees, are thrown into competition for the patronage of corporate investment from distant centres . This sees management and workers drawn into `management-by-stress’ as performance targets and conformance to corporate strategy become remotely monitored by a remote management. European Community policy, stressing simultaneously flexible labour markets and regulation, can be seen as an illustration of an attempt to accommodate to globalization. Arguably there has been an emergence of a `European model’ of employment relations built around the potentially conflicting pillars of `flexible forms of regulation’, along with the establishment of the ‘Eurocompany’, which allows MNCS to transcend national boundaries within Europe . The European Works Council (EWC) Directive by the European Commission was introduced to establish an institution for `informing and consulting’ representatives of employees across multi-site plants within different member states. Importantly these institutions are grafted onto work regimes experiencing contemporary management initiatives to increase flexibility and incorporate worker initiative within different national settings. The extension of social regulation can be seen as a means of gaining consent to new corporate and market regimes at the trans-national and global level but we may explore how it occurs when one effect of market competition is the growing insecurity of employment.
Reflecting on his experience of working in a factory in the 1970s Burawoy argues that, `as we slaved away on our machines trying to make our quotas we manufactured not only parts of diesel engines, not only relations of cooperation and domination, but also consent to those activities and relations’. He further argues that, as monopoly capitalism displaced competitive capitalism, hegemonic regimes replaced earlier despotism in the workplace. He sees a combination of workplace and state regulation combining within particular `factory regimes’ emerging to buttress workers, dependent exclusively on the sale of their labour, against the more extreme excesses of the anarchy of the market-of `market despotism’. Until recently these have been constituted by social insurance schemes and employment regulation.
What we wish to explore is how capital’s hegemony is established and maintained in such a workplace regime given little evident resistance to this capital restructuring. This may be because, as would be the inference of much HRM discourse, that employees have `bought into’ these changes or that they have become fatalistic to the changes with the absence of means to mobilise collective resistance (Kelly 1998)’. We are viewing the introduction of specific working practices and new institutions that draw on representation from competing parties for patronage within this corporate globalisation. Given that Burawoy does not develop on the notion of `hegemonic despotism’ we are best able to approximate his method in that `every particularity contains a generality; each particular factory regime is the product of general forces operating at a societal or global level.’. This paper explores the particular case of Norsk Hydro2 a Norwegian based oil and energy, light metals, petro- and agricultural chemicals conglomerate. We focus principally on Norsk Hydro’s fertiliser divisions, which during the research was divided between Hydro-Agri Europe and Hydro-Agri International. Subsequently the company has reorganised to replace these with global production and marketing divisions. The company has become Europe’s leading fertilizers producer through the take-over of specialist producers or fertilizer divisions of more diverse companies. Examined in terms of a `subnational pattern’ (Locke 1995), a belief that changes at company level might indicate some form of convergence, the central features of workers’ experience within this company have been increased flexibility, job losses, and insecurity of employment. In addition to this insecurity management orthodoxy has demanded a greater ‘commitment’ on the part of labour. In contemporary management terms this is a very progressive company, thus an ideal model for exploring `hegemonic despotism’ where, we must remember, the despotism is that of the anarchic forces of the global market and not of management per se.