Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management

(Steven Felgate) #1



    1. 1 Manufacturing Knowledge?




Our review of the evidence on contemporary manufacturing suggests expectations
of highly skilled and autonomous workers populating ‘learning factories’ has been
overly optimistic. It seems that the dynamic of continuous improvement and the
re-harnessing of job design and execution anticipated by advocates of post-Fordist
production systems have at best had partial eVects on the nature of shopXoor
decision-making and organizational control. Consequently, numerous studies have
concluded that contemporary manufacturing carries forward many of the charac-
teristics associated with Fordist production (Delbridge 1998 ; Danford 1998 ). The
question of whether this is better understood as being through managerial design
or failure is one we will consider below. Nevertheless, the strategic desire (necessity)
for increasing levels of innovation maintains the pertinence of the challenge for
manufacturing organizations to be sites of knowledge creation and application.
BrieXy in this section, we consider the value of the concept of ‘communities
of practice’ and its implications in considering how HRM might address such
challenges.
Commentators are increasingly recognizing the hybrid nature of organization,
with stark contrasts between market and hierarchy (or mass and lean for that
matter) giving way to subtler distinctions and mixed patterns of management
organizational processes and control mechanisms. For instance, Adler ( 2001 )
summarizes the modes of coordination and control associated with hierarchy
(authority), market (price), and community (trust) before arguing that the
pressures of competition, the need for innovation, and the drive to extract and
mobilize knowledge are resulting in managers adopting forms of ‘soft control’
with trust the key mechanism in eliciting the active consent of knowledgeable
workers. Such arguments have generally been seen as pertaining to ‘know-
ledge workers’ in information technology or creative industries, but the challenges
for higher creativity, innovativeness, and value added increasingly make these
relevant forWrms operating in mature economies in at least some manufacturing
sectors.
The idea of ‘community’ has become a powerful one in characterizing the sense
of collective social endeavor, especially in reXecting upon the importance of the
hidden or tacit knowledge of workers even in highly routinized work settings
(Brown and Duguid 1991 , 2001 ; Lave and Wenger 1991 ). The concept draws upon
anthropological concerns with the liminal spaces at the edges of formal procedures
and at the intersections of organizational structures (McKinlay 2005 ). Such
communities are only partially visible and knowable to those who are not actually
members and thus they remain at the edge of management. At the same time, they
are the settings for the creation and development of knowledge which lies outside
the formal systems and routines but upon which the formal systems rely in order to
operate eYciently.


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