The Re-engineering Revolution. Critical Studies of Corporate Change. - Review - book review

Organization Studies, March, 2001 by Finn Borum

In Chapter 8, Mihaela Keleman, Paul Forrester and John Hassard makes a comparative examination of BPR and TQM on thirteen dimensions. On the basis of this examination, they argue that, contrary to its claims, BPR does not represent a fundamentally new philosophy, but that the two approaches to change are complementary. This is further supported by a case study of a UK service organization in which BPR represents a continuation of TQM and is carried out in an incremental way. In the case, the political nature of BPR and TQM surfaces in terms of employees' discontent and their differing evaluations of the BPS results on different hierarchical layers.

From a Marxist/labour process perspective, Gregor Gall, in Chapter 7, understands BPR as the last link in a chain of worker exploitation. He analyzes what BPR means on the shop floor, its implications for workers, trade unions and their members, drawing upon cases and statistics. For the workers, the issues of redundancies, flexibility and teamwork, and performance-related pay are discussed. The trade union responses are characterized as being divided between conflict and cooperation. A UK case shows how BPR can reconfigure industrial relations and break down the workers' basis for collective ideas and resistance via the introduction of new structures of control and new cultural values. However, Gall argues that the attack of BPR on workers' interests and unions, may result in a union renewal if the unions can exploit the concept to mobilize workers.

Chapter 5 by Jennifer Frances and Elizabeth Garns, in contrast to the other contributions, does not focus on BPR as such, but on the re-engineering that has been taking place within UK food chains. It is argued that this shares key features with BPR, and that the appropriate unit of analysis for evaluating the effects of re-enginering might not be the firm, but larger integrated networks. BPR is not only planned organizational change, but interfirm processes, where not only the invisible hand of the market, but also the visible hands of large corporations operate.

Matthew Jones and Richard Thwaites' Chapter 3 is based on a citation analysis and concludes that BRP is a fad, sharing features with previous management fads; that it seems to have peaked, but that there is a time lag in the public sector's adoption of the concept. A life-cycle model is developed which, in line with other authors' views, incorporates the failures of preceding fads to deliver the promised increases in performance as the premise for diffusing BPR. But what is it that actually diffuses? The article ends by arguing that it is primarily the label rather than a substantive approach -- cf. Hasselbladh and Kallinikosi (2000: 711) argument that '... management models with low or modest codification, such as BPR or TQM, are relatively easily communicable, though definitely more perishable and not easily reproducible ... models of this kind become fashionable, diffuse quickly ... but also fade and change relatively rapidly'.