condition of labour--A retrospect, The

Capital & Class, Autumn 2001 by Nichols, Theo

The publication of the first issue of Capital & Class belongs to much the same period that saw the publication of Living with Capitalism, which was written by Huw Beynon and myself (Nichols and Beynon 1977) and which was the product of a research team that also included Peter Armstrong and Martyn Nightingale. I recently re-read the book, 30 years after the fieldwork began.

TODAY, the early 1970s, when the fieldwork took place, is commonly seen as the end of the long postwar boom. Amongst other things these years saw the crash of Rolls Royce; the (then) highest unemployment since the war; and strikes by the miners in 1972 and again in 1973-74. It was in the face of this that Bernard Levin was to write in The Times on February is 1973: "The breakdown of ordered society in Britain.. would have been lunatic less than ten years ago. It does not seem lunatic today. Given such events and even a strike at the paternalist Pilkington's company at St Helens at the beginning of the decade (there was later to be the ucs sit-in), we were drawn to 'ChemCo' not to celebrate militancy but to examine the lack of it. In a dozey part of the world, on a green field site, militancy was not to be found, at least among the process workers. But for ChemCo's managers the problem of motivation remained. It was management's pursuit of this which marked the company as a progressive one-not the presence of Blauner's (1964) hi tech work which we went to check out but couldn't find.

ChemCo managers hoped in the long term to be trusted; `to reach a situation where men spontaneously and voluntarily co-operated with them and each other. They wanted men to put their ability to produce unreservedly at their disposal' (Nichols and Beynon 1977: 174) Apart from the reference to 'men' (though the ChemCo workforce was overwhelmingly male) this has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it? In fact there are several similarities between the management practice of ChemCo and the supposedly new management of today.

Today's new management is often thought to characterise a new post-Fordist, post-industrial age. Not the least of the difficulty with the Fordism versus Post Fordism dichotomy is that some whole industries and parts of industrieschemicals included-never were Fordist in the first place. An additional problem is that of establishing Fordism historically in Ford's own operations. As Williams et al make clear in their account of Ford's own mass production practice with respect to the production of the modelT at the Highland Park factory between 1909 and 1919 (Williams et al 1992), Ford himself put considerable emphasis on what today goes by the name of `continuous improvement'-something that is associated by many with Japan (kaizen) and with lean production, not with the United States early in the last century. Similar points to those about Post-Fordism arise about the relation between Fordism and Toyotaism. Dohse et al (1985) claim, for example, that Toyotaism is not a basic alternative to Fordism; it is `simply the practice of the organisational principles of Fordism under conditions in which management prerogatives are largely unlimited'. In their view, the precondition for this in Japan was not the presence of some quasi-feudal culture of acceptance but the defeat of militant trade unionism that was effected afterWorld War Two and the subsequent channelling of unionism into plant or company unions. Wood's view of Toyotaism (Wood 1993) is in line with this interpretation. Preferring the term `neo-Fordism' to capture some now not so recent developments, Wood nicely points out that the notion of Toyotaism as characterised by worker autonomy fails to recognise certain important features of the Japanese context and the retention of power by management.Wood also makes the obvious point-but a highly effective one-that it does not follow that workers' tasks are no longer Taylorist simply because they are involved in quality circles, using Pareto charts or brainstorming techniques:

Because Toyotaism has attempted to overcome problems associated with Fordism without necessarily making changes in the fundamental work process, workers can indeed go to quality circles and then return to their Taylorised jobs-or even return to jobs more successfully Taylorised as a consequence of their work in the quality circle.

Very similar points can be made about the relation between Fordism and Total Quality Management (TQM). TQM is a feature of Japanisation in the West, and increasingly in developing countries (Humphrey 1994, 1995; Nichols et al 2001). But it by no means has to take a 'soft' rather than 'hard' form (Wilkinson et al 1997). And in the case of at least one developing country, Turkey, it has been argued that TQM is very well suited to that country's management precisely because of-not despite-its authoritarian tradition (Wasti 1998). Indeed, those who readily counterpose hard and soft techniques, as if they were absolute alternatives, might do well to remember that FW Taylor himself spoke of the necessity for a `mental revolution' on the part of the worker before his methods could be fully implemented (Bendix 1956: 276).