Manufacturing Control: Supervisory Systems on the `New' Shopfloor

TLDR

Industrial sociology has focused on workers’ implications of new manufacturing, yet the complex, contradictory pressures on supervisors and front‑line managers have been largely overlooked by recent research. The study examines how supervisors act as social actors in contemporary manufacturing, contrasting previous structural explanations. Using ethnographic research in two teams‑based firms that employ just‑in‑time and total quality management, the authors investigate supervisory systems. Supervisors balance managerial rules with operational flexibility, relying on informal practices to accommodate labor.

Abstract

Primary ethnographic research is drawn on in this paper so as to examine the nature of supervisory systems in two manufacturing organisations which have both, to varying degrees, implemented `new' manufacturing techniques such as just-in-time and total quality management and have organised around `teams'. Debates in industrial sociology and the labour process have understandably concentrated on the implications of such developments for workers; the important and problematic role of supervisors in realising managerial objectives has been largely neglected. This paper analyses the nature of supervision and the role of supervisors/first-line managers within contemporary manufacturing. In contrast to previous studies, which have sought to explain supervisory roles in terms of their link with structural factors such as technology, organisational size and formalisation (Perrow 1970; Woodward 1965), this paper highlights the importance of supervisors as social actors. The analysis demonstrates the dynamic and complex role of supervisors in implementing and adhering to managerial rules while needing to ensure a degree of operational flexibility that relies on informality, particularly in reaching accommodation with labour. These types of contradictory pressures have long been recognised in supervisory work (Roethlisberger 1945) but recent research into developments on the `new' shopfloor has failed adequately to report and conceptualise the increasingly complex position of supervisors and front-line managers.