Manufacturing Rate Busters: Information Technology, Production Games, and Normative Control

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 11. Bureaucracy, Control, and Authority

Abstract

The potential for normative control of workers through information communication technology (ICT) remains a controversial topic. Some argue that, because ICT increases managerial power through more comprehensive technical control and surveillance, normative control of workers could be enhanced in unprecedented ways. Others dismiss these claims, pointing to the many ways workers resist managerial authority, despite clear gains in workplace control. To address these debates, we draw upon Richard Hall’s framework for specifying ICT’s design and deployment, managerial efforts to use ICT, and workers’ responses. We then apply this approach to data consisting of two years of covert participant observation in “Big Box,” a product distribution facility. In Big Box, management uses data produced by computer control to construct a ‘digital arena.’ Workers compete with one another in this arena, and erect informal status hierarchies that confer prestige based on the speed of work. The greater the speed of one’s production, the greater the prestige one can earn. Data, surveillance, and worker competition demonstrate ICT can enhance normative control of workers. This study shows that the effects of ICT may be more contingent on workplace and organizational characteristics, rather than abstractions such as technology or worker resistance.

Authors

• Christopher Shane Elliott, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Gary L. Long, University of Mississippi