Power, Control and Resistance in ‘The Factory That Time Forgot’

Abstract

This paper contributes to a developing body of literature which questions the claim that the ‘factory of the future’ is a total institution in which self‐subordination through ‘new wave management’ is virtually inescapable. It examines the experience of frustrated management efforts to re‐engineer working practices, mainly at the point of production, in response to repeated corporate‐driven initiatives designed to implement a range of ‘lean manufacturing’ initiatives at ‘Northern Plant’, a pseudonym. Our findings illustrate how workers can and do employ a variety of individual and collective forms of resistance involving dissembling co‐operation with change initiatives whilst maintaining a distance from them. In accounting for resistance, we note the significance of market conditions but focus primarily upon the importance of workers’ identification with practices that had been established earlier when management were content to indulge self‐managing patterns of work in return for securing required levels of output.