compliance in the face of adverse conditions for employees created by corporate
restructuring and change programs (Cooper 1995 ; Hope and Hendry 1995 ;
Korczynski et al. 1995 ; Rosenthal et al. 1997 ). We will return to the broader issue
of the sustainability of soft controls in the last section.
- 1 LPT: Key Propositions on Control
One of the key propositions of LPT with respect to contemporary trends in
managerial control isthe persistence of worker resistance, even to new normative
forms of control that focus on worker attitudes and emotions. In part this is an a
priori theoretical argument—given the indeterminacy of labor, control can never
be complete and is always contestable. But it is also derived from the evidence
discussed in the last section: of continued informal misbehavior by employees
(revealed in qualitative case studies) and of limited buy-in to managerial norms (as
revealed in surveys and case studies).
Three other propositions can be identiWed. First, there is a claim concerning
continuity, in combination. In other words, LPT research has sought to challenge the
displacement argument of HRM writers—that when new practices expand, others
by deWnition contract or disappear. It accepted that the normative sphere has
been an expanding area of managerial practice, without endorsing the view
that these have replaced or even marginalized the more traditional mechanisms
of bureaucratic rationalization, work intensiWcation, and aspects of scientiWc
management.
Much of the continuity evidence comes from European and North American
critiques of claims about lean production. The rhetoric of devolved decision-
making and ‘working smarter not harder’ was countered by qualitative research
showing work intensiWcation and multi-tasking under modiWed traditional
methods, dubbed variously democratic Taylorism or participative rationalization
(see for example Delbridge 2000 ; Parker and Slaughter 1995 ). At the same time, it
was recognized that under lean production regimes, management focuses more on
the normative sphere in order to bypass trade union representation and secure
worker identiWcation with broader organizational norms (Danford 1998 ).
New practices such as control through customers were identiWed by labor
process writers as ‘borrowing heavily from and extending traditional management
paradigms’ (Fuller and Smith 1991 ). A later generation of researchers have been in
the forefront of studies of the expanded realm of call center work, noting how
surveillance and monitoring is intended to create an ‘assembly line in the head’
(Taylor and Bain 1999 ). To gain competitive advantage through interactive service
work, companies frequently seek to generate high commitment and shared iden-
tity, but these interventions are built on top of traditional controls. Korczynski et al.
( 1995 ) refer to the continuing rationalizing logics that management seek to recon-
cile with service quality, producing a form of customer-oriented bureaucracy. Nor
are such tendencies conWned to routine work.
hrm: labor process perspectives 153