Making out and making do: how employees ... - Wiley Online Library

New Technology, Work and Employment 29:1 ISSN 0268-1072

Making out and making do: how employees resist and make organisational change work through consent in a UK bank Darren McCabe This article draws on fieldwork conducted in the back-office of a major retail UK bank and explores how, when introducing change, management drew on contradictory normative and rational discourses. Its primary concern is to explore how, in this context, employees engaged in contradictory acts that combined elements of both resistance (‘making out’) and consent (‘making do’) that are difficult to disentangle. It is argued that although both are moves within the game, they can be distinguished from each other because the former works against the grain of corporate intentions, whereas the latter works with them. Keywords: consent, power, resistance, normative, subjectivity, qualitative

Introduction In recent years, there has been a growing interest in workplace resistance (see, e.g. Jermier et al., 1994; McKinlay and Taylor, 1996; Knights and McCabe, 1998; Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Taylor and Bain, 1999; Symon, 2005), which has tended to displace ‘consent’ (see Burawoy, 1979; Edwards, 1990; Sturdy, 1992) as a focus for study. Earlier research that attended to consent explored how employees engage in activities that reproduce the status quo (e.g. Roy, 1969; Burawoy, 1979). This paper endeavours to contribute to this literature through elucidating how employees engage in activities that are a messy combination of resistance and consent. Nevertheless, the concern is not to simply highlight ambiguity because it is argued that there are important differences that need to be drawn out between acts/subjectivities that work with versus those that work against the grain of corporate intentions. Cressey and MacInnes’ (1980) posited that it is ‘only by controlling the means of production in the sense of subjecting them to its own physical and mental operations, its own will, does the workforce actually expend any labour’ (op cit: 14). This highlights the significance of consent for as they continue ‘the workers themselves actually control the detail of the performance of their tasks, and the importance of this, though it varies with the production process, never disappears altogether’ (ibid.). These insights suggest that while we need to consider resistance in terms of how workers say ‘no’ to power,

Darren McCabe ([email protected]) is Professor of Organisation Studies in the Department of Organisation and Technology, Lancaster University. He has a broad interest in the cultural conditions of work, including power, resistance, identity and subjectivity. He has conducted qualitative research in the financial services and manufacturing sectors and is the author of McCabe, D. (2007), Power at Work: How Employees Reproduce the Corporate Machine (London: Routledge). © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Making out and making do 57

we also need to understand consent because for the majority of the time the majority of us say ‘yes’. A focus on consent is useful because it can help to shed light on the disruptive power that employees could exercise simply by withdrawing their consent. Nevertheless, it has to be acknowledged that the economic threat that resistance poses to one’s career and livelihood plays a critical role in securing consent (see McCabe, 2011). This paper engages with these issues through presenting fieldwork conducted in the back-office of a UK bank. First, it considers consent or how employees ‘make do’ whereby they exercise power in ways that are consistent with ‘normative’ discourses (e.g. teamwork and customer service) and in this way help to make work regimes function. ‘Making do’ does not necessarily reflect the success of normative discourses or a ‘colonization of the self’ (Ezzy, 2001: 636). Nor should ‘making do’ be equated with commitment whereby ‘individuals “buy into” the system’ (Thompson and Smith, 2010: 18) and embrace managerial goals/intentions because employees can ‘make do’ despite management designs. In the following case study, employees exercised power independently of management but in ways that perhaps unintentionally supported the work regime. This reflected that employees are part of a workplace community and so they exercised power to help their colleagues, and this consent contributed to the reproduction of the status quo. Making do is complex and ambiguous because through it employees sought to change the work regime and so it is a minor form of resistance. Indeed, employees wielded normative discourses against management, which can be described as ‘consenting resistance’. Overall, this subjectivity and action is understood as ‘making do’ because through it employees worked with the grain of corporation intentions. Second, the paper considers instances of ‘making out’ (Roy, 1969; Burawoy, 1979) where employees exercised power through fiddling the system, identifying flaws or technological loopholes in the way of working that provided some respite from the daily grind. In contrast to Roy’s (1969) findings but in a way that is similar to Burawoy’s (1979), ‘making out’ was not so much an attempt to secure higher earnings but more of an endeavour to find some ‘space for escape’ (Knights and McCabe, 1998) from intense work demands. This employee recalcitrance is not separate from consent because it does not pose an obvious threat to management nor did it take workers ‘beyond capitalism, beyond the dictatorship of needs’ (Burawoy, 1979: 177). It elucidates ‘different creative “moves” ’ that do not necessarily threaten the extant order but illustrate ‘the potential for resistance within it’ (Hawkins, 2008: 433). It is also contradictory and ambiguous because employees acted in a way that was often consistent with ‘rational’ corporate discourses that prioritised individual output while they simultaneously resisted the ‘normative’ call for teamwork and customer service. In effect, these employees resisted management by finding ways to evade technological controls and at times their fellow employees by refusing to ‘make do’. Nevertheless, they also displayed consent because they increased their individual output through self-interested acts. Although contradictory, this is seen as ‘making out’ because through this subjectivity/action employees worked against the grain of corporate intentions. In line with earlier research, this paper draws theoretical inspiration from both Foucault and labour process theory (see Jermier et al., 1994; McKinlay and Taylor, 1996; Knights and McCabe, 1998; 2003). Labour process theory places ‘an emphasis on the dynamics of control, consent and resistance’ (Thompson and Smith, 2010: 11). The ‘core’ theory ‘recognizes that competitive relations compel capital to constantly revolutionize the labor process and within that framework, capital and labour will contest the character and consequences of such changes’ (Smith and Thompson, 1999: 211). How these dynamics are played out is explored in the following case study. The paper also draws on Foucault (1977), whose work encourages us to think about how ‘power’ is exercised in both productive and repressive ways as subjectivity is constituted and contested at work. Moreover, Foucault presented power as relational rather than the property of any individual or group and so rather than reflecting ‘pessimism’ (Thompson and van den Broek, 2010: 7) or a belief that ‘worker resistance’ 58

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is ‘diminished’ (Thompson and Smith, 2010: 19), his work fosters an interest in how power and resistance coexist (see McKinlay and Taylor, 1996). In combination, this leads to an interest in the disparate ways in which power is exercised at work. Hence managers may attempt to exercise power or ‘revolutionize the labour process’ through employing rational and/or normative discourses (Kunda and Ailon-Souday, 2005). In this context, employees may exercise power through a variety of forms of resistance (Jermier et al., 1994; Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999) and/or through consent in the sense that through their engagement workers make work regimes function (Cressey and MacInnes, 1980). As the explanation of ‘making out’ and ‘making do’ makes clear the concern of this paper is not to draw clear distinctions between control, resistance, power and consent but rather to understand how they merge and overlap. This is consistent with previous theorising; hence Ashcraft (2005) asserts that ‘resistance and control are both moves of power’ (op cit: 70), whereas Collinson (1994) posits that ‘resistance frequently contains elements of consent and consent often incorporates aspects of resistance’ (op cit: 29). This paper also highlights the ambiguous and contradictory nature of consent and resistance, but it draws a distinction on the basis that some endeavours work against the grain of corporate intentions whereas others work with them. The paper is organised as follows. The next section explores some of the literature that has considered ‘new’ forms of workplace control. This sets the scene for it is within the contradictory context of management employing both ‘rational’ and ‘normative’ discourses that employees engaged in ‘making do’ and ‘making out’. The research methods are then presented before introducing the case study. Finally, some overall insights are drawn out in a discussion and conclusion.

The exercise of power in the contemporary workplace There have been a number of theoretical papers (Storey, 1989; Gabriel, 1999; Collinson, 2005) that have called for a ‘more nuanced’ (Rosenthal, 2004: 602) account of management control and the ‘employee experience’ (ibid.) of it. Fineman and Gabriel (1996), for example, argued that ‘compliance and resistance are not either/or responses’ and can ‘coexist in the same form of behaviour’ (op cit: 87). Likewise, Collinson (2005) argued that we must ‘treat control/resistance as a dialectic rather than a dualism’ (op cit: 1422–1423). This echoes Gabriel’s (1999) theorising that urged us to consider ‘a struggling, interacting, feeling, thinking and suffering subject, one capable of obeying and disobeying, controlling and being controlled’ (op cit: 199). More recently, Ashcraft (2008) referred to the need to consider ‘the constant, slippery interplay of control and opposition’ (op cit: 382). This paper responds to the above concerns by attending to the complex ways in which power is exercised in the contemporary workplace by both managers and workers and yet it has to be recognised that a concern with complexity has been the subject of earlier debate. Hence Friedman (1977a) presented Responsible Autonomy (RA) and Direct Control (DC) as ‘alternative strategies’ (op cit, 1977a: 47) for the control of labour each with its own contradictions. Through strategies of RA, ‘Workers are given responsibility, status, light supervision, and their loyalty towards the firm is solicited’ (op cit, 1990: 178). By contrast, through DC, ‘top managers try to reduce each individual worker’s amount of responsibility by close supervision and by setting out in advance and in great detail the specific tasks individual workers are to do’ (ibid.). Friedman (1977b) considered these to be ‘two major types of strategies which top managers use to exercise authority’ (op cit: 78). He argues that ‘combinations of types of strategies may be found in the same company at the same time’ (op cit, 1987: 290) as when different strategies are used for core and peripheral workers. Yet, perhaps because they are contradictory, he did not envisage that they would be employed together for the same group of workers. By contrast, Storey (1989) offered a more ‘complex and multi-layered’ (op cit: 120) analysis, which anticipated what are now described as ‘hybrids’ (see Clegg and Courpasson, 2004; Cooke, 2006; Thompson and van den Broek, 2010), where a ‘combi© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd


nation of controls’ (Fleming and Sturdy, 2009: 572) exist. This reflects that managers often act in more fractured, contradictory and even confused ways than Friedman’s (1977a) analysis suggested. According to Friedman (1977a), ‘the “ideal” of RA “is to have workers behave as though they were participating in a process which reflected their own needs, abilities and wills” (op cit: 53; original italics). Similarly, Braverman (1974) argued that “Management is habituated to carrying on labour processes in a setting of social antagonism” (op cit: 25). These authors suggest that employee consent is bound up with the threat of economic desolation, but this does not entirely explain the complexity of consent or what is described here as “making-do”. Hence employees exercise power on a daily basis often to make flawed work regimes function in ways that are not simply conditioned by their contract of employment or fear of job loss. In a context of job insecurity and work intensification, the possibility of employee “consent and common interests” seem understandably “unlikely” (Thompson and Smith, 2010: 17) and yet the machine continues to turn, employees do consent and this paradox needs to be understood (see McCabe, 2011). Barley and Kunda (1992) and Kunda and Ailon-Souday (2005) identified cycles of “normative and rational ideologies” (Barley and Kunda, 1992: 384) that present “opposing solutions to the problem of control“ (op cit: 386). The Organizational Culture and Quality movement provides an example of a “normative” discourse, which views “the organization as a locus of shared values and moral involvement in which control rests on shaping workers“ identities, emotions, attitudes, and beliefs’ (Kunda and Ailon-Souday, 2005: 201). By contrast, ‘rational ideologies’ tend to ‘view the organization as a machine consisting of calculative actors in which control rests on managerial ability to manipulate systems’ (op cit: 201). Gabriel (2008) describes the former as ‘far subtler, yet deeper, controls, controls that are pervasive and invasive, that do not merely constrain but define a person’ (op cit: 319). Nevertheless, there is a need to avoid treating such categories dualistically because all interventions can be said to be normative and rational although they will vary in the priority given to each. McLoughlin et al. (2005) considered the use of ‘normative’ control in the steel industry; they argued that ‘Rather than achieving control through the imposition of rules and regulations . . . new cultures seek “alignment” by encouraging identification with the organization, its goals, and codes of behaviour’ (op cit: 69). These authors identified ‘substantial and persistent ambiguities that characterize culture change processes’ (op cit: 68), which are also evident in the following case study. Nevertheless, this paper seeks to go beyond previous studies that have focused on ‘normative’ discourses such as teamwork and culture change (Ezzy, 2001; McLoughlin et al., 2005; Hawkins, 2008) or ‘rational’ discourses such as technology (Symon, 2005) or business process reengineering (Knights and McCabe, 1998). This is because contemporary change programmes are often ‘hybrids’ that draw on multiple discourses (Clegg and Courpasson, 2004; Cooke, 2006; Fleming and Sturdy, 2009; Thompson and van den Broek, 2010). Indeed, Rosenthal (2004) has asserted that ‘Normative control has not obviated bureaucratic/technical control: both operate in often messy combination within service settings’ (op cit: 610). He argues that the ‘tensions inherent in the simultaneous operation of bureaucratic and normative control’ (op cit: 616) need to be explored and this is one of the contributions of this paper. The work of Vallas (2003) in the US paper industry is also useful because it explores the tensions between hybrid forms of control, and it shares some similarities with the findings of the following case study of a UK bank. In particular, the studies both reach the same conclusion which is that ‘managers tend to view the normative or cultural elements of the new working practices as holding only secondary importance’ (op cit: 223) compared with more rational interventions. Nevertheless, Vallas (2003) tends to neglect the control implications of normative discourses (see Hawkins, 2008; Fleming and Sturdy, 2009), for example, he implies that a normative discourse is more desirable or ‘moral’ than a rational discourse. Hence he asserts that the privileging of ‘technical rationality’ particularly through centralised controls ‘limited the firm’s ability to 60



provide an overarching normative or moral framework’ (op cit: 224–225). Second, he tends to assume that normative discourses can foster employee ‘commitment’ or, from a critical point of view, that they are able to reconstitute employee subjectivity along corporate lines. Hence he concludes that the company ‘generally exhibited little inclination to develop an overarching normative orientation that might elicit the commitment of its hourly employees’ (op cit: 243). Third, as the above extract indicates, Vallas (2003) assumes that normative discourses are necessary to secure employee ‘commitment’ or that consent is contingent upon them, which is questioned in the following study. Finally, it is believed that pursuing contradictory rational and normative discourses will have an entirely negative impact on employees in terms of ‘a pervasive sense of frustration and betrayal’ (op cit: 239). Yet, to draw such a conclusion neglects the multiple outcomes that can flow from change programmes and the ability of employees to exercise power in various ways. As a means to address some of these limitations, the following case study seeks to provide further insights into the complex tensions that can arise through employing multiple, often contradictory discourses, in the workplace.

Research methods The research sought to explore complex social processes along with the meaning and experience of work for social actors and so this necessitated the use of qualitative research methods. The goal of such research ‘is to expand and generalize theories (analytical generalization) and not to enumerate frequencies (statistical generalization)’ (Yin, 1989: 21). Research access was negotiated with senior managers of the bank and was granted on the basis of confidentiality. The names that are used in the case study are therefore pseudonyms. The research was conducted over a six-month period and included 10 visits to three branches; five visits to the Head Office and 10 visits to a back-office processing centre (PC). Empirical data were collected in three ways: first through 54, 45–60 minutes tape-recorded, semi-structured interviews, including individual and group interviews with 81 employees. This included interviews with 10 senior and middle managers, six back-office managers, six branch managers, six supervisors, five team leaders, 17 branch staff and 31 back-office staff. Open-ended questions were initially asked of senior and middle managers as a means to understand the structure and culture of the organisation along with recent changes/innovations. Copious notes were written during the interviews, and this led to the first stage of the analysis that involved identifying keywords, writing notes in the margin and expanded notes as ideas emerged and connections were made. The second method of data collection involved reading and re-reading corporate documents including strategy statements, training materials, staff briefings, minutes of meetings, change documents and watching corporate videos. First, there was an attempt to understand the strategy that informed the planned changes. Internal company documents and videos that presented the new strategy to employees were then analysed and through this analysis it was possible to identify several ‘normative’ discourses. Employees’ experiences were analysed using the tape-recorded interviews and the minutes of Service Excellence (SE) workshops. Documents and tape-recorded interviews were repeatedly played, read and analysed. This amounted to a ‘finegrained, line-by-line analysis’, which entails ‘building up and elaborating analytically interesting themes’ (Emerson et al., 1995: 160). The third method of data collection was through observation. During the 25 visits to the bank, field notes were written before, in-between and after interviews that recorded first impressions, details regarding the office layout, decor and the architecture of buildings. Throughout this analysis, the focus was on how power was exercised through both rational and normative discourses and the subjectivity that these discourses fostered. The analysis of the employee experience identified the complex and often contradictory way in which employees expressed or demonstrated consent and/or resistance towards the work regime. Interviews were important to this analysis but the minutes of SE workshops that were compiled by workshop facilitators also proved useful. The © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd


1,400 back-office staff who attended these workshops discussed and wrote up their work experiences on flip charts, and the workshop facilitators recorded these as minutes of each meeting.

The case study In common with other banks in the UK, Westland Bank (pseudonym) once provided secure employment, careers and paternalistic policies. In 1986, deregulation through the Financial Services Act, spawned a new era of intense competition between banks, building societies and insurance companies and this was heightened through competition from new entrants such as Marks and Spencer, First Direct and Virgin. This generated ‘new’ initiatives such as restructuring, culture change, teamwork, customer care and business process reengineering (see Knights and McCabe, 1998; 2003). The 2008 global financial crisis has further heightened competition with many banks being nationalised in all but name. At Westland Bank, this context gave rise to the centralisation and reengineering of branch processes. This began with the creation of Call Centres and Cheque Processing Centres, which was facilitated through innovations in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) such as Automatic Call Distribution systems (see Knights and McCabe, 1998; Taylor and Bain, 1999). According to strategic documents, the primary strategic objective of Westland Bank is to reduce its cost–income ratio and this has lead to cost-cutting measures. The creation of seven PCs resulted in 4,000 redundancies or a fifth of the 20,000 employees in the branch network. The 1,400 new jobs that were created in the PCs were largely filled by former branch staff. Document Image Processing technology was critical to this centralisation as it allows large volumes of documents to be scanned, stored and electronically manipulated. This centralisation strategy was imbued with a rational discourse, where the firm is seen ‘as a machine’ that can ‘be analyzed into its component parts, modified, and reassembled into a more effective whole’ (Barley and Kunda, 1992: 384). Creating the PCs involved a substantial investment of nearly £100 m, with a predicted saving of £30 m per annum largely through reduced staffing costs. As elsewhere, Westland Bank is engaged in ‘permanent restructuring’ (Howcroft and Richardson, 2012: 112) for as the head of IT commented ‘as technology allows us to do more and to do it smarter. There will continue to be reengineering of the branch network as more stuff get’s taken out.’ To achieve control over the workflow in the PCs, branch processes were broken down into simple tasks. The design of work in the PCs emphasised task repetition, specialisation and standardisation (see Carter et al., 2011: 84; Howcroft and Richardson, 2012: 117). Sue, the Planning, Control and Design Manager, who wrote the strategic Business Case Document for the centralisation, explained that the aim was: To give us better control and standardization over the service we were providing to customer and there was a drive that it would reduce costs by removing staff from the network.

The comments of Bob Miles, the Head of the seven PCs, endorse this view and they are revealing in relation to how PC workers are perceived: We now recruit off the street . . . ‘cause we’re arranged on processing lines rather than on case lines . . . the modern market place is for them (branches) to respond quickly, to get quotes to customers . . . We can enable them to do that by taking the drudgery of having to fill all the forms in, and write to solicitors, and do all the back office stuff, deceased accounts, all that crap can be done by somebody out of the way.

The notion that the bank now recruits ‘off the street’ is indicative of deskilling. The work in the PCs was depicted in a dismissive way as ‘drudgery’ or the ‘crap’ of form filling. Despite the concern to eliminate employee discretion, various ‘normative’ discourses were drawn upon during the implementation of the changes as an attempt to enrol employee subjectivity towards corporate ends. Hence the change programme was introduced to ‘the staff’ via a corporate video entitled ‘Being the Best’ and it 62



employed a unifying ‘normative’ discourse that stressed the importance of customer service and quality. As an illustration of this, in the video, a PC manager asserts that ‘I guess the real purpose of the PC is very much to work with our colleagues in the branches as one’. Criteria Based Interviews (CBIs) were used to establish whether the staff should remain in the branches, relocate to a PC or be made redundant. The CBI’s employed a normative discourse that conveyed the importance of ‘teamwork’, a ‘customer focus’ and staff who are able to use their ‘initiative’. A document was distributed to the staff, which articulated the subjectivity that management was looking for and the staff were required to provide evidence of this during their CBI. Hence ‘Customer Service’ refers to the individual who takes responsibility or who ‘inspires confidence and takes ownership of resulting actions’ (Corporate CBI document). The ‘teamwork and team leadership’ skill promoted ‘working co-operatively and sensitively with others to achieve team goals’ (ibid.). The individuals who display this subjectivity are required to demonstrate a ‘helpful manner when working with colleagues’ while sharing ‘knowledge and experience with others’ (ibid.). The ‘initiative’ criteria stressed the importance of an employee that ‘Questions the effectiveness of existing work practices’ (ibid.). Yet such initiative is to be exercised within narrow, job-related limits and so it is tightly circumscribed. It should not be thought that these were just words because the CBI’s threatened jobs for as a strategy document states the outcome ‘Will be based on redundancy for staff who least meet criteria for either branch or back office’. This has had an enduring impact hence the staff referred to the ‘stress’ of being ‘interviewed for the same job’ and ‘the threat of redundancy’. If one avoided redundancy then there was still the risk that branch staff who wanted to remain in the branches would be relocated to a back-office and vice versa. We can observe therefore that staff consent to these changes is bound up with the economic threat that the CBI’s posed. Nonetheless, the staff were not passive recipients of this discourse hence the staff who wanted to remain in the branches represented themselves as being eager to ‘sell’ while those who preferred back-office work presented themselves as ‘processors’. A document entitled ‘Staff Performance Management’ was also made available to the staff. It outlines the bank’s ‘core standards’, which mirror the skills examined during the CBIs. Sue, a back-office member of staff, explained how these core standards or skills are used as a disciplinary mechanism during monthly performance reviews and annual appraisals: Now you’ve got to achieve these core standards to keep your grade 3 . . . If not, if we’re falling below we’ll get an ‘Improvement Required’. This is annually but you’re working towards it every month. So every month they might just say ‘You’re not getting on with your team or you’re really arguing with that girl next to you’, you know, ‘This isn’t part of teamwork, you need to have a bit more patience with so an so’. Erm or initiative, ‘well don’t you think the other day when you were on the phone to that branch you should have said this?’ I mean they are listening.

Once the PCs were operational, teamwork was promoted through a series of Away Days under the heading of ‘The Winning Team’ and through an in-house magazine called ‘Talking Teams’. The Away Days promoted the idea that everyone in the bank is a member of the same team and this can be understood as a further normative attempt to foster consent. This normative discourse was not without effect hence Julie felt that teamwork has always been a part of working in the bank but: now it is so much ingrained into people that it isn’t really a problem anymore because it’s what you do, you know? And what you know that is what the bank expects

Two years after the first PC came on line, yet another ‘normative’ intervention was introduced entitled Service Excellence or SE. The staff from all seven PCs attended SE workshops to discuss customer service. These sessions promoted values including ‘trust’, ‘partnership’, ‘freedom’, ‘honesty’, ‘loyalty’ and ‘teamwork’. These multiple normative discourses can be understood as a managerial attempt to produce a consenting subject that chimes with managerially defined norms. Nevertheless, as has © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd


been found elsewhere, the ‘promise’ of a new way of working, enshrined in the normative discourses ‘was not realised’ (Carter et al., 2011: 90). Indeed, the ‘rational’ discourse that imbued the earlier strategising was far more evident. The next section introduces a back-office PC, which was visited during the research.

The Processing Centre The PC employs 240 staff and processes accounts for 130 branches in the North of England. Its hierarchical structure includes a PC manager, processing managers, section managers, supervisors, team leaders and team members. Each PC has seven sections that have between 15 and 35 staff. Individual staff productivity is closely monitored through an IT system and staff complete individual ‘time sheets’ on a daily basis. Although there is some variety between the sections, the work is repetitive hence the payments staff are required to process 41 standing orders, 17 changes of address or 85 direct debits an hour. The minutes of a Manchester SE workshop record the following staff experiences: ‘Tense atmosphere—clock watching’; ‘staff stressed due to constantly thinking of targets’, ‘unfriendliness’, and ‘boredom—rotation needed’. The PC is a large open-plan office, and staff are assigned to ‘individual’ work queues, where images of documents appear on their visual display unit (VDU) screens for processing. Internal quality checks are conducted if errors increase in a section, and quality checks may be initiated following customer complaints. There are monthly ‘individual’ performance reviews along with 12 monthly appraisals. According to the staff, quantitative measures including output and error rates take priority over the ‘normative’ core standards (i.e. customer service, teamwork and initiative). The staff are nonetheless required to collect qualitative evidence to demonstrate that they have achieved these core standards. To avoid repetitive stress injuries, the staff are allocated 30 minutes each day for exercises, coffee and toilet breaks. The PC manager sought to promote a friendly and open management approach; however, the staff referred to the back-office as a ‘factory’. On the Payment Audits Section, the staff expressed that there is teamwork ‘within’ their section but attributed this to work pressure as ‘you have to work as a team’ (Steve, processing clerk). Sitting ‘next to each other’ even when, according to Janet, an Enquiries clerk, teamwork ‘is hammered in’ appeared to be insufficient to generate a sense of being a team. There is limited scope for initiative and team-based interaction because as Paul, who works on the Enquiries section explained, the ‘work is so intensive you don’t get time to move around’. The work regime is a contradictory hybrid of normative and rational discourses that ‘combined authoritarian bureaucracy with an ostensible commitment to enterprise and empowerment’ (Cooke, 2006: 240), and this generated ambiguities and contradictions to which we now turn. The next two sections explore how employees both consented (‘Making Do’) and resisted (‘Making Out’). Together they elucidate the highly complex and contradictory experience of working on an electronic ‘assembly line’ (Taylor and Bain, 1999).

Making do In view of the Tayloristic work regime, it might be expected that the staff would display ‘resistance through distance’ (Collinson, 1994) and disengage with their work. Yet Sue, from the Fraud and Cheque Section, explained that ‘you all tend to [help] within your own section, even though you don’t class it’ as teamwork but ‘look on it as comradeship more than anything and pulling together’. Similarly Greg, from the same section, expressed that teamwork is something that people do rather than it being part of a management change initiative and Lorraine remarked that you ‘do all help each other, do muck in’. The minutes from a Liverpool SE workshop likewise state that the staff wanted to be ‘able to help each other, without worrying about process times’ and the staff at a Stratford workshop wanted ‘everyone to help one another’ and to be ‘approachable at 64



all times’. These comments suggest that despite the individualising work regime, the staff wanted to engage with their work and with each other perhaps to ameliorate or enrich their lives. At one level, these comments are indicative of a consenting subject but through appealing to ‘initiative’ and ‘teamwork’, it could be argued that the staff are resisting through turning the normative discourse back on management. Indeed some wielded the values espoused by management (e.g. freedom, loyalty) to call for ‘More freedom for team discussions’ (Stratford Workshop) and for ‘freedom to help others’ (Sheffield Workshop). John, from the Pre-authorised payments or PAPS section, remarked: ‘I feel like they don’t want the loyalty anymore’. The willingness to work as a team and to display loyalty and initiative, given the intensive, repetitive and individualising work demands could be seen as defiance. This falls far short of any revolutionary or even collective ideal, and it is bound up with consent but nevertheless it expresses resistance to the debilitating work regime. A willingness to ‘make do’ facilitated the work regime and resistance to secure this end can be described as consenting resistance. It is a means to cope with wretched working conditions and it both reflects and helps to forge collective bonds with others. Doing so served corporate interests but it appeared to arise despite rather than because of the work regime or the normative discourses. Hence the staff who work on the PAPS section explained that work demands restricted their ability to use their initiative. Janet described this as not being ‘allowed to think for yourself’ for if the staff investigated something, then their productivity suffered. Nevertheless some staff still ‘make do’: I can’t help myself. If you see something and you think ‘That’s not quite right’ I’ve got to do it. (Sue)

Through this consent, employees took responsibility and helped each other in ways that were not simply dictated to them by management. It appeared that some staff were willing to engage with their work to a far greater extent than they currently do. Dorothy described not being able to engage as ‘the hardest thing’ about working in the PC and John said that it is a matter of ‘trying to train yourself’ not ‘to get too deeply involved’ (both from PAPS section). These employees are working with the grain of management demands and are disciplining themselves. One cannot dismiss the impact on identity of the ‘normative’ discourse enshrined in the CBI ‘skills’, the ‘Winning Team’ Away Days and the SE workshops but, due to the individualising, repetitive and disempowering nature of the work, this discourse appeared to play a minor role in everyday life. Notwithstanding this, many staff acted as consenting subjects in a way that was consistent with these ‘normative’ discourses: Steve: Particularly on a Friday, it may well be that, say, for example, Robert might be inundated with payments coming in on his queues. So people will go in and help him. Jan: Other people, when they’ve got a spare five minutes, will log-in and even if they just move 10 payments off the queue, it’s a help. If you’ve got a spare few minutes (Payment Audit Section)

These employees identified with each other and acted in ways that confirmed their identity as friends or good work colleagues. They ‘made do’ and demonstrated empathy for colleagues who were ‘inundated’ with work. It seems that even when the design of work creates conditions that one might expect to create antagonism this may not always result. The staff made the system work through helping each other and curiously, the regime seemed bent on destroying this consent: Chris: in the branch, you used to think ‘Right you’re snowed under there I’ll do a bit of that’. Didn’t you? But here you don’t know what everybody’s got, so it’s only the supervisor who can say: ‘Well I’ll take some work off you and give it to them’. ‘Cause they know what’s there but you don’t. You just process whatever’s next. So you don’t feel as teamwork ‘cause you don’t know other people’s problems Lorraine: Well you wouldn’t be allowed to join in anyway Chris: No (Enquiries Section)

Despite the normative emphasis on teamwork and initiative, Chris felt that her ability to ‘make do’ in terms of helping others is constrained, which confirms findings elsewhere (Carter et al., 2011: 93). Chris expressed that even if she could help, she © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd


would not ‘be allowed to’ because of how the regime is policed. These insights are supported by the minutes of a Manchester SE workshop, which record that the staff ‘feel unable to pass the time of day with colleagues’. In terms of their consent, it is evident that these employees have imbibed the identity of an ‘employee’ but they still resisted through turning the normative discourse against management hence they called for: Regular meetings regardless of TASK to discuss problems and ways of improving things—teams will feel more valued if they can contribute with their ideas, training issues, problems, etc. (original capitals) (Sheffield Workshop).

The staff at this Sheffield workshop, lamented that there ‘seems to be a lack of trust by management if staff have to fill in timesheets’ and others remarked ‘currently too much paperwork to complete, customer service would improve if time not recorded’. These staff criticised the work regime through drawing on the ‘normative’ discourse of ‘trust’ and ‘customer service’ that management used to engage them. This could be described as ‘resistance as a counter-argument’ (Symon, 2005: 1,650), but it is also bound up with consent because through wielding this normative discourse, the staff highlighted how the PC could be better managed. This section has examined how employee consent within the PC helps to facilitate the work regime. Although it is impossible to untangle the complex set of events and subjectivities that accompanied this consent, it did not appear to reflect that employees unquestioningly embraced the normative discourse. Indeed, consent appeared to reflect a concern for fellow colleagues and a desire for a more humanistic work regime. To this end, employees engaged in consenting resistance and called for a regime that was more consistent with the normative discourse that managers extolled. In this sense, employees appeared to work with rather than against the grain of managerial intentions. The next section considers instances of resistance that are more defiant in that instead of simply propping up the regime, they sought to afford employees some escape from their work and so employees worked against the grain of managerial intentions.

Making out The minutes from a Manchester SE workshop indicate that some staff evaded control through ‘making out’. They state that the staff are ‘unwilling/unable to help team members because of the effect on your target’ while the minutes from a Welsh workshop record that ‘individuals do not always act as though they are part of a team’. Such actions resist the normative call for teamwork and this reflects, at least in part, the rational discourse embedded in the work regime that militates against teamwork. These contradictions combined with intense work pressures may help to explain why some staff employed their initiative and creativity against management. The comments of staff on the Account Maintenance section indicated that some staff are ‘making out’: Linda: if you get very high efficiency rates it doesn’t necessarily reflect what you’re doing or the quality of your work.

Linda explained that the staff with the highest efficiency often neglect quality or fiddle their time sheets. Some staff concentrated on their individual performance and refused to help others and, in this way, they increased their individual output and rewards. Although these staff demonstrated consent in the sense of meeting their individual efficiency targets they did so through resisting the normative call for teamwork. They used their ‘initiative’, which is a target of the normative discourse to resist. It was evident that staff friendship ties allowed some staff to collectively ‘make out’ hence staff articulated that errors are reported for some individuals but not for others. This highlights that irrespective of normative or rational discourses, people still find ways to resist: Linda: We probably operate at 150 per cent efficiency. That’s still not good enough because there’s other people operating at 200 per cent. The fact that maybe they don’t answer the phones or they don’t

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go and do other things. They are so focused and they won’t share their knowledge or they won’t like tell you anything so they become a ‘H’ [high grade] (Account Maintenance)

Linda distinguished between herself and employees who ‘make out’ and yet she also resisted in a minimal way by highlighting the regime’s flaws. Despite the outward appearance of compliance with targets, there is hidden dissent, for example, those with the highest efficiency rates, may be the greatest dissenters from the normative discourse. This is because they embrace individual output targets but reject the ‘normative’ call for teamwork [helping others], customer service [answering the phone] and knowledge sharing [won’t tell you anything]. It is apparent then that ‘having to hit hourly targets distorted’ the ‘priorities’ (Carter et al., 2011: 93) of the staff as other staff explained: Sue: You know people don’t you? So you wouldn’t say ‘Well I’m not doing it’. I’ll pass it on to someone else Nicky: You do get people like that Sue: Oh yes, you do get people like that (Account Maintenance)

In the above extract, Sue explained that she ‘makes do’ but she agreed with Nicky that other staff ‘make out’ by refusing to help. The staff confront contradictory work demands and so both conformers and dissenters can be seen as resisting or consenting depending on the measure against which they are judged. This ambiguity may legitimise resistance because it is not clear how one should act. Nevertheless, resistance such as fiddling time sheets or indeed maximising individual output in ways that contradict the normative discourse do not formally or collectively challenge the regime and so dissent and consent coexist. Although in practice management neglected the normative discourse, it was evident that tensions between the normative and the rational continued to play out. Hence the minutes of a Stratford workshop record the following employee observations of colleagues: ‘bad attitude when answering queries’, ‘not adaptable—negative attitude’ and ‘do not own problems’. These behaviours and subjectivities contradict the normative call for customer service, teamwork, initiative and responsibility. This may help to explain why managers employ ‘normative’ solutions ‘to control the subject from the inside as well as the outside’ (Gabriel, 1999: 197) and yet the intense workplace discipline contradicted normative demands. Rather than reflecting indifference to their work, Donald, a processing clerk, explained that the system conspires, in some instances, against normative control, such that the staff avoid ‘individual’ responsibility let alone ‘team’ responsibility. Thus stringent individual performance measures generate fear and this leads some staff to ‘make out’ or evade responsibility: I’ve seen the queries where people have gone on for weeks following this line [of thinking] and it’s been wrong. It’s been dead easy to sort it out but nobody has wanted to take the risk of changing it just in case they make a mistake . . . somebody sets something in motion. ‘Can you ring this? Oh they are not there’ and it goes on and on and on. And then, at the end of the day, they suddenly realise they didn’t need to ring them in the first place but people wouldn’t look into that.

Donald works on the Enquiries Section, which is the only section that has external customer contact. He explained that if a customer cannot be contacted the work is ‘diarised’, which means putting it back into the work queue for someone else to deal with. The staff are required to produce an electronic narrative to explain the issue to the next member of staff. If the next member of staff cannot contact the customer, the process continues as no single individual is responsible for resolving the issue. As each member of staff adds to the narrative, it becomes more convoluted and time consuming to read. It leads to a situation where no one is prepared to take the time or the responsibility for reading through the numerous messages. The job tends to be seen as a ‘difficult job’ and is ‘cast aside’ (Carter et al., 2011: 90) as the staff are afraid of making © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd


an error or being delayed. The staff can also ‘make out’ by claiming that they cannot contact the customer because if they are unsuccessful in doing so they are still allocated time for it: Lorraine: It’s very easy to phone somebody up and say ‘Customer not in’ and then you drop that piece of work and go to the next one, and certain people do it whereas other people just stay on the phone for ages trying to get through Chris: An yet it still counts as one item you see, even though you’ve done nothing to it

Lorraine’s comments indicate that some staff are ‘making out’ whereas others ‘make do’ by trying to contact customers for prolonged periods despite the negative impact that this has on their productivity. The staff are allocated 17 minutes to process an item of work on the ABC queue. If they are unable to process it, they must explain in four lines of text why this is the case. If the text goes over four lines, they are allocated an additional 17 minutes because it is classed as two jobs. It is therefore in the interests of the staff not to resolve the issue and instead to ‘make out’ by adding to the text. These jobs were described as a ‘War and Peace’ reflecting that the narrative can become extensive as the following extract reveals: Paul: You get four lines for a narrative. If you’ve got a bit of War and Peace to put on, then you fold one and you pick it up Janet: That would be classed as two items Paul: It’s listed as two items on your audit roll the following day so you can count that as two. So that’s an extra item straight away and if you’re working with ABC queue that’s another seventeen minutes. So hey I’m efficient straight away . . . you get four lines [to explain the job] and more often than not you might go over four lines (emphasis added)

The above technological anomaly has become a ‘worker resource’ (Rosenthal, 2004: 612) and employees used it to ‘make out’. It is evident that although this is an individual act of resistance both Dorothy and Paul know about it and openly discussed it and so it is part of the office-floor culture. Diarising work and gaining the time allowance for it has become a means to make out: You could every ten minutes, fifteen minutes, put it [a job] back into the system and then pick it up. So you could in effect if you wanted to, keep picking that same piece of work whilst you are still working on it. (Joyce, Account Maintenance)

Other staff openly discussed how they fiddled their time sheets, for example, staff are allocated 902 time, which is half an hour each day for exercises, coffee and toilet breaks. To meet their productivity targets, some staff use this time to manipulate their performance figures. According to Polly from the Account Maintenance section ‘you’re supposed to use’ 902 ‘for exercises but we don’t’. This improves staff performance but not taking breaks obviously intensifies their work and risk injury. Simon, from the PAPS section, explained that jobs can be moved around and time manipulated so as to create the appearance of a better performance: If you think you’ve done really bad on one queue that day, you can then take that thirty minutes off job A and if you think you have really done bad, you can take another 30 minutes of job B, that you’ve really done well at.

This resistance reflects consent because it does not overtly challenge management except in the most minimal of ways. Nevertheless, it works against the grain of corporate intentions because it aims to create space and manipulate output rather than simply facilitate or improve the work regime and so this is why it is described as ‘making out’.

Discussion and conclusion This paper has sought to contribute to an understanding of the contradictions and interrelationships between normative and rational discourses. These discourses were employed together as managers introduced organisational change. There was little evidence to suggest that employee subjectivity had been reconstituted through the 68



normative discourses in an unquestioning way because they were used against management as part of a limited endeavour to humanise the workplace. The normative discourse therefore became one of the means through which the employees resisted the intense and individualising ‘rational’ discourse that they confronted. This resistance is bound up with consent because it called for a work regime that was more consistent with the normative discourse that management extolled. It is understood as ‘making do’ because it works with the grain of management’s intentions. The case supports McLoughlin et al.’s (2005) argument regarding the ‘ambiguity’ of normative discourses (op cit: 84). These authors identified instances of managers occasionally veering between normative and rational discourses but, in the case of Westland Bank, these discourses coexisted and were a part of the continuous contradictory experience of everyday working life. The paper responds to McLoughlin et al.’s call for research into ‘the uncertain and unknown in programmes of culture change’ (op cit: 86) by highlighting that even when rational discourses contradict and/or are more evident than normative discourses as Vallas (2003) found, the complexity of workplace relations ensure that the tensions between them continues to be played out for ‘such regimes are never settled’ (Thompson and van den Broek, 2010: 3). In the case of Westland Bank, management employed normative discourses to generate employee consent that ‘rational’ discourses such as centralisation and reengineering, seemed likely to stifle. Yet the findings indicate that many employees were willing to consent and wanted to ‘make do’ or to help others but found that the intensive use of rational discourses undermined their ability to do so. In view of this, the staff turned the normative discourse back on management and urged the management to trust them. It seems therefore that managers may be attempting to forge consent where it already exists even as their contradictory endeavours risk undermining it. Nevertheless, other employees were ‘making out’ and such resistance seems likely to spawn further normative discourses to foster consent. Vallas (2003) suggested that normative discourses are needed to counter such tensions and yet, in this case, normative discourses are part of the contradiction, which management seems unable to resolve. Second, the paper considered the experience of work for back-office employees. Gouldner (1954) argued that bureaucratic regulation ‘does not enlist and discipline the soul of the individual’ (op cit: 176), and this leads to ‘instability’ and ‘distances’ employees from their work. Managers therefore employ normative discourses as a means to engage employees but, in Westland Bank, this implied that work would be organised in a certain way, which was contradicted on a daily basis. One might expect this to undermine employee consent but this was not always the case. Indeed, employees exercised power to facilitate the work regime not because they had been reconstituted through normative discourses or because of the intense bureaucratic regulation, but because employees wanted to ‘help’ each other and identified with each other and their work. Moreover, ‘helping’ one another seemed to be an important means through which to cope with the intensely rational way of working. Through ‘making do’, employees helped to make the work regime function. The ability to withdraw this consent is indicative of the disruptive power that employees could wield to resist rather than prop up corporate regimes. Other employees were ‘making out’ and therefore found ways to reduce the intense control over their working lives. Nevertheless, it is important not to romanticise this resistance. Indeed, when back-office workers resisted through ‘making out’ as Burawoy (1979) argued, they were still ‘playing the game’ and this ‘game becomes an end in itself, overshadowing, masking and even inverting the conditions out of which it emerges’ (op cit: 81–82). In short, it does not challenge the conditions that lead employees to ‘make-out’ in the first place. Other employees resisted through turning the normative discourse back on management, which was described as consenting resistance. This resistance is bound up with consent because through it employees urged management to act in ways that were consistent with the normative discourse they preached. ‘Making out’ and ‘making do’ are both contradictory for they contain elements of consent and resistance; nevertheless, it is possible to cut through this ambiguity so as to differentiate them. Hence © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd


employees engaged in ‘making out’ can be understood to be working against the grain of corporate intentions whereas employees who ‘make do’ work with them; further research is needed to establish whether these dynamics are relevant to employees in different contexts. To conclude, popular management writers who espouse normative discourses prescribe only limited freedom. Yet the managers who take up such discourses often fall short of even this modest call for change. This was not lost on the employees in Westland Bank who endeavoured to use such discourses to hold management to account, and it may help to explain why others sought to escape work demands through ‘making out’. It was evident that employees’ continually exercised power whether through ‘making out’ and/or ‘making do’ and both are a combination of resistance and consent. If our research only attends to resistance then there is a danger of perhaps missing or understating the complexity of workplace relations and the full extent of the power that employees exercise on a daily basis. Detailed research is needed that is sensitive to both resistance and consent so as to elucidate the enormous disruptive potential that can be realised simply by employees withdrawing consent. References Ackroyd, S. and P. Thompson (1999), Organizational Misbehaviour (London: Sage). Ashcraft, K.L. (2005), ‘Resistance through Consent?’, Management Communication Quarterly 19, 1, 67–90. Ashcraft, K.L. (2008), ‘Our Stake in Struggle (or Is Resistance Something Only Others Do?)’, Management Communication Quarterly 21, 3, 380–386. Barley, S.R. and G. Kunda (1992), ‘Design and Devotion: Surges of Rational and Normative Ideologies of Control in Managerial Discourse’, Administrative Science Quarterly 37, 363–399. Braverman, H. (1974), Labour and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Press Review). Burawoy, M. (1979), The Manufacture of Consent (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press). Carter, B., A. Danford, D. Howcroft, H. Richardson, A. Smith and P. Taylor (2011), ‘ “All They Lack Is a Chain”: Lean and the New Performance Management in the British Civil Service’, New Technology, Work and Employment 26, 3, 83–97. Clegg, S. and D. Courpasson (2004), ‘Political Hybrids: Tocquevillean Views on Project Organizations’, Journal of Management Studies 41, 4, 525–547. Collinson, D. (1994), ‘Strategies of Resistance: Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity in the Workplace’, in J.M. Jermier, D. Knights and W.R. Nord (eds), Resistance and Power in Organization (London: Routledge), pp. 125–168. Collinson, D. (2005), ‘Dialectics of Leadership’, Human Relations 58, 11, 1419–1442. Cooke, H. (2006), ‘Seagull Management and the Control of Nursing Work’, Work, Employment and Society 20, 2, 223–243. Cressey, P. and J. MacInnes (1980), ‘Voting for Ford: Industrial Democracy and the Control of Labour’, Capital and Class 11, 5–33. Edwards, P.K. (1990), ‘Understanding Conflict in the Labour Process: The Logic and Autonomy of Struggle’, in D. Knights and H. Willmott (eds), Labour Process Theory (London: Macmillan), pp. 125–152. Emerson, R.M., R.I. Fretz and L.L. Shaw (1995), Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (London: University of Chicago Press, Ltd). Ezzy, D. (2001), ‘A Simulacrum of Workplace Community: Individualism and Engineered Culture’, Sociology 55, 3, 631–650. Fineman, S. and Y. Gabriel (1996), Experiencing Organizations (London: Sage). Fleming, P. and A. Sturdy (2009), ‘ “Just Be Yourself!”: Towards Neo-Normative Control in Organisations?’, Employee Relations 31, 6, 569–583. Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane). Friedman, A. (1977a), ‘Responsible Autonomy Versus Direct Control over the Labour Process’, Capital and Class 1, Spring, 43–57. Friedman, A. (1977b), Industry and Labour (London: Macmillan). Friedman, A. (1987), ‘The Means of Management Control and Labour Process Theory: A Critical Note on Storey’, Sociology 21, 2, 287–294. Friedman, A. (1990), ‘Managerial Strategies, Activities, Techniques and Technology: Towards a Complex Theory of the Labour Process’, in D. Knights and H. Willmott (eds), Labour Process Theory (London: Macmillan), pp. 177–208.

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