Management Divided: Contradictions of Labor Management

Abstract

This richly evidenced study of American manufacturing documents how one of the central dynamics shaping organizations today is a contradiction managers face between ensuring workforce discipline and harnessing worker creativity. This contradiction has been intensifying over the last four decades as employee involvement has become increasingly important in response to rapid technical change, requirements for flexibility, and demands for continuous improvement. Global best practice in manufacturing includes lean production with substantive worker empowerment: cross training in enlarged tasks and inclusion in problem solving and decision making. Yet, facing conflicting pressures, many managers satisfice by training workers in narrow tasks and using them exclusively for manual labor. Vidal presents a synthetic theory called organizational political economy, integrating concepts from organization theory—institutional logics, organizational fields, managerial satisficing, and operational routines—into a classical marxist framework. Rather than theorizing managers as preoccupied with controlling labor to maximize exploitation, the theory emphasizes how contradictory developments—conflicting pressures and competing logics of labor management—lead management to be divided. Some managers adopt best practice by substantively empowering their workforce while others settle for good enough. Capitalist management is increasingly a source of organizational inefficiency. The argument is not limited to manufacturing or to lean production. Managers experience contradictory pressures—for standardization versus discretion, deskilling versus upskilling, and routine manual versus abstract cognitive labor—in a wide range of occupations, including social services, education, healthcare, office and administrative support, and software development.