This is such a huge topic (set of inter-linked, inter-discplinary topics) that I find it difficult to know where to start. I explored ‘employee empowerment’ in my doctoral thesis in the mid 90s and much of the currently overblown rhetoric, in my view, about a shift of power in favour of employees / workforce participants resonates with what was being written about then. This was in the context of lean manufacturing and the need to appropriate or harness the tacit knowledge of shopflor operators. I concluded that ‘empowerment’ was a shift in power towards those with valuable skills, and the outcome of having to treat people with respect and recognise the value / bargaining power inherent in their tacit knowlege. Hardly earth-shattering.

Did workplace relations radically change? Nah.

Two things you might find interesting.

Firstly, a paper by James R. Barker, in the Administrative Quartely, vol. 38 in 1993, called ‘Tightening The Iron Cage: Concertice Control In Self-managing teams. This is from the abstract:

“The study investigates how the organization’s members developed a system of value-based normative rules that controlled their actions more powerfully and completely than the former system. I describe the organization and its members and provide a detailed account of the dynamics that emerged as concertive control became manifest through the members’ interactions. This account depicts how concertive control evolved from the value consensus of the company’s team workers to a system of normative rules that became increasingly rationalized. Contrary to some proponents of such systems, concertive control did not free these workers from Weber’s iron cage of rational control. Instead, the concertive system, as it became manifest in this case, appeared to draw the iron cage tighter and to constrain the organization’s members more powerfully.”

In other words, group dynamics can evolve and reinforce tighter control and compliance than any formal management system ever could.

Which brings me to my second point. One of my heros is Karl Weick. His ‘Social Psychology of Organising” is a masterpiece. He says there is no such thing as an organisation; it is not a tangible entity. All you have at any given time are flows of people and information linked by inter-dependent relationships. He also says that adopting a minimalist approach to understanding organisational dynamics is a productive place to start. He claims that if you can understand how 9 people interact, you can understand how thousands interact.

Anyway, my conclusion is this: even if organisations, for want of a better word, do re-structure and reform away from a supposedly dominant hierarchical form to more networked eco-systems (”hierarchical and insular characteristics are being destabilised and displaced”), human behaviour does not change. I have experienced this in online groups, where conflict, power, manipulation (real or perceived) has been as much in evidence as in any formal organisation I have ever worked in.

Whatever the structures end up loking like (fragmented across time, geography and culture) people will communicate, miscommunicate, seek power, collaborate, etc exactly as they always have done. IMHO.

I am not sure if any of this makes sense to anyone else.

What interests me is the vehicle for that organisation. Is it a limited company? A Joint Venture? A network of companies, joint ventures. How do you harness people’s individual and joint needs for making a living, learning, networking….??

http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/forums/showthread.php?p=33026&posted=1#post33026