Understanding Industrial Organizations

Theoretical Perspectives in Industrial Sociology

Prof Richard Brown, Richard Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136098925
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Understanding Industrial Organizations critically reviews the approaches developed by industrial sociologists to analyze industrial organizations. It outlines four general perspectives on organizations - systems thinking, contingency approach, the action approach and labour process for a more adequate sociology of organizations. The book provides a clear, relevant and important contribution to the sociology of organizations.

Chapter 1

Introduction – sociologists and industry

ICL forced out of Europe

Over 3,000 jobs at risk as Lewis’s puts up shutters

Ford chief fears big drop in car sales

Murdoch set to seal deal

W.H. Smith puts squeeze on pay-outs as profits fall

Rolls Royce to shed 1,500 jobs

Virgin plan to appeal to Europe over BA tactics

TWA in plea to quit London

Industrial organisations dominate industrial societies. They are, indeed, one of the most distinctive features of such societies. Though large-scale industrial organisations did not figure to any great extent in the earliest stages of industrialisation in Europe and the United States of America, their importance was apparent well before the end of the nineteenth century; and during the present century their influence has become increasingly pervasive. Many small enterprises still exist, of course, but for most people in societies like our own paid work means employment as one of hundreds or thousands of others in a large industrial corporation, or – for a considerable minority – in an equally large or larger public sector organisation. For industrialisation and the urbanisation which accompanied it have seen not only the domination of the economy by large industrial and commercial organisations, but also the parallel growth of central and local government, and the development of organisations to provide mass education, mass communications, mass leisure and mass representation, all employing large numbers of people.

It should be no surprise then that the examination of a few issues of national newspapers at the end of January 1991 can produce a selection of headlines like those at the start of this chapter. The activities of industrial organisations are, rightly, seen as something in which readers will be interested and about which they should be informed. Whilst only a small minority may be directly affected by competition between airlines for shares of the transatlantic market, or by W.H. Smith’s freeze on dividend payments, and even fewer directly affected by threatened redundancies at Lewis’s or Rolls-Royce, the actions, and success or failure, of these and other enterprises will have consequences for the lives of many more people in Britain and abroad.

It is significant that the writers of such headlines could safely assume considerable familiarity with industry among their readership: readers could be expected to know that BA was British Airways and that ICL manufactured computers; that Virgin and TWA were also airlines (among other things in the case of Virgin), and that Rupert Murdoch was head of the transnational media group News International and engaged in refinancing the company’s borrowings. Much of this familiarity is deliberately fostered, of course, by the organisations themselves through advertising and public relations activities with such success that the identities of many large corporations, even those which do not sell direct to the public as (say) Ford do, are truly ‘household names’. It is significant too that the headlines record events with international ramifications such as the exclusion of ICL from a European advisory group of leading computer firms because of its takeover in 1989 by the Japanese Fujitsu group.

It should be no surprise, either, that sociologists have been concerned to investigate these developments. In this as in other areas of sociology the aim has been to go behind the headlines and common-sense understandings to identify underlying trends and patterns of cause and effect, both intended and unintended. An interest in industrialisation, and in the evolving patterns of work and employment in industrial enterprises, can be traced back to the first emergence of sociology as a distinct discipline, an emergence which represented a response to the industrial, and democratic, ‘revolutions’ in Europe. In the works of the ‘founding fathers’ of the subject there are insights and theoretical formulations which have continued to influence research to the present day: Marx’s analysis of wage labour, Durkheim’s discussion of the division of labour, and Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy are the most obvious examples. However, as we shall see, it is very much more recently that such an interest in industry and industrial organisations in general has come to be complemented by detailed research in particular industrial enterprises and the development of concepts and theoretical approaches which provide a more nearly adequate basis for understanding the variety of patterns of social relations and social processes within them.

The focus of this book is on these attempts to understand and account for the social characteristics of industrial organisations, the social relations and interaction within such organisations, and their interconnections with the wider society. It is therefore concerned with a central area within industrial sociology. In undertaking a critical review of sociological research and writing on industrial organisations, however, I have necessarily set certain limits to the materials I wish to consider. I am concerned primarily with research and writing in Britain in the period since the Second World War; and I have organised my discussion around certain influential theoretical perspectives concerned with understanding industrial organisations rather than attempting to review all the substantive topics on which industrial sociologists have had something to say. Let me discuss these limits in a bit more detail.

Industrial sociology in Britain scarcely existed as such before the Second World War. There was, however, a significant tradition of research on psychological and social problems in industry (Seear 1962). I have made no attempt to assess these bodies of work or their legacy (see Rose 1988, esp. Pt 2, for such an assessment). My attention is concentrated on the period after 1945 when explicitly sociological research on industrial organisations was being undertaken for the first time. The focus is deliberately, but not exclusively, on British research and writing. Partly this represents a pragmatic decision to limit the field to be covered. More importantly, however, it reflects the fact that the main debates to be reviewed have either been relatively self-contained within British sociology or had British protagonists for each of their main positions. Of course, there is no intention of ignoring the important influences on industrial sociology in Britain which have originated elsewhere, especially in the USA, and such work will be discussed as appropriate.

The focus is upon the attempts by industrial sociologists to provide conceptual frameworks with which to investigate, analyse and explain the structure of and processes within industrial organisations. This book is not intended to be a comprehensive text book on industrial sociology. In contrast to the situation even fifteen years ago there is now a good choice of such books, together with complementary volumes of readings. This book is more narrowly focused than a text book. There is no attempt to cover the whole heterogeneous range of empirical questions and materials which commonly feature in books and courses on industrial sociology. My focus, the study of industrial organisations, has always been a central concern of industrial sociology, but it does not comprise the whole of the subject as conventionally understood. We shall give relatively little attention to work on industrial conflict, for example, which has been the other major focus for theoretical developments in industrial sociology, though such issues will not be neglected altogether.

In this chapter I shall outline the ways in which industrial sociology has developed in Britain since 1945, referring both to the institutional setting and social and economic context within which research was conducted and to the intellectual background against which it grew. There were, of course, major changes in all these areas during the forty-five year period under review, and this provides an important context for the material discussed in the rest of the book. I shall indicate the major substantive concerns of industrial sociology, as embodied in text books and reviews of the field. During the whole of the period, but more especially since the 1960s, the question of the scope of a sociology of industry has been contentious and there have been at least latent boundary problems with other branches of the social sciences or other sub-disciplines within sociology. The final section of the chapter will identify and outline briefly the theoretical perspectives and debates to be considered in the body of the book.

In undertaking this brief review I have defined ‘industrial sociology’ in much the same way as have most of its practitioners: that is pragmatically as a somewhat disparate and unintegrated collection of topics and questions centred on social relations in work organisations (and in practice often limited to male employment in large-scale organisations in mining and manufacturing). Such a focus can include topics which go well beyond the individual industrial enterprise (for example, trade union organisation, industrial relations, and the ownership and control of industry). It has at times extended to a more general consideration of the nature of industrialism and industrial society, and – in addition to this tendency to merge with a sociology of industrial societies – there have been questions of overlap with other ‘sub-disciplines’.

Such a pragmatic definition is not particularly desirable or defensible. Indeed I shall argue both that greater coherence can be found for the study of many of the questions traditionally included in industrial sociology by taking the employment relationship as the analytical starting point; and that such a study ought in any case to be located within the wider framework of a sociology of work. For present purposes, however, it is sufficient to take the conventional view of the scope of industrial sociology as the starting point for the discussion.

The Growth and Development of Industrial Sociology in Britain Since 1945

The institutional context

Industrial sociology as such did not exist in Britain before the end of the Second World War. Indeed, with the exception of a very thin, though often distinguished, succession of scholars, sociology itself hardly existed as a distinct and recognised area of study and, with the possible exception of the London School of Economics, it had no secure institutional base in British universities. Seear has noted, in her review of social research in industry, that in the interwar period ‘sociology, as understood today, was not studied at all in the majority of British universities’ (1962, 171; see also Garrett 1987). Only thirty-three students graduated in 1938–9 in Britain in the group of social science subjects including sociology, social administration and anthropology (Heyworth Committee 1965, 9). The situation with regard to social research in general was perhaps slightly better; for example, there was the fifty-year-old tradition of studies of poverty and town life, and the work of bodies like Mass Observation in the late 1930s and the war years (see Kent 1981). Research in industry, however, was hampered not only by the weak position of the ‘human sciences’ in British academic life but also by the strongly practical orientations of most managers and industrialists, and the barriers of social class and intellectual training between them and the academic world (Seear 1962).

Psychological research in industry was established earlier. The first major impetus to research on behavioural problems in industry was provided by the First World War. The need for an increased output of munitions led to the setting up of the Health of Munitions Workers Committee in 1915 and the initiation of a series of psychological studies of working conditions, and of problems such as fatigue and monotony, which continued until the late 1940s. The Health of Munitions Workers Committee was succeeded by the Industrial Fatigue Research Board in 1917 (from 1921 financed through the Medical Research Council) and this became the Industrial Health Research Board in 1929. The parallel development of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP) from 1921 further strengthened this stream of applied psychological research in industry, though the NIIP’s reliance on consultancy work for funds led to an emphasis on employers’ problems such as selection and on individual services such as vocational guidance. As Rose has shown in his lively account of ‘human factor industrial psychology’, the investigators of questions about individual behaviour were more than once led to the consideration of social factors and, in a broad sense, of sociological explanations (Rose 1988, Pt 2; also 1975, Pt 2).

The Second World War stimulated renewed interest in the contribution psychological research could make to war production and indeed this included repetition of investigations of the relationship between hours of work and output which had been carried out in the First World War (Rose 1988, 80). Though there was scarcely any research in industry which could be labelled ‘sociological’ (for a possible exception in the armed forces see Paterson 1955) there were two innovations which had an important influence on later developments. Psychiatrists and psychologists played an important role in dealing with psychological problems among service personnel and in developing methods of officer selection; some of them went on to undertake social research in industry, notably as members of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Secondly, operational research in the RAF and elsewhere during the war demonstrated the value of systematic analysis of problems based on first-hand observation; some of those involved in or aware of this work went on to secure and administer government support for social research on industrial problems in the post-war period (see Stansfield 1981).

It was such government funding which was of vital importance in the subsequent establishment of social research in industry in Britain on at least a semi-secure footing. The post-war concern with the low levels of productivity in British industry, especially in comparison with the USA, led to the setting up of a Committee on Industrial Productivity in 1947; recognition that industry’s problems were social as well as technical meant that one of the Committee’s four panels was concerned with ‘human factors’. This panel made grants for research on the foreman (NIIP 1951), on joint consultation (NIIP 1952; Scott 1952; Jaques 1951), and for the support of research in mining and on the problems of the older worker, among other issues (see Seear 1962; Stansfield 1981).

The Human Factors Panel was disbanded in 1951, but succeeded two years later, so far as research funding was concerned, by two tri-partite (management, trade unions, universities) joint committees of the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) – ‘Human Relations in Industry’ and ‘Individual Efficiency in Industry’ respectively. A major part of their funds was provided from American Conditional Aid money, which came with the proviso that the research supported had ‘to be related directly to increasing productivity and industrial efficiency … and to show promise of producing applicable results in three years’. The Human Relations Committee concentrated its funding on projects on ‘management organisation, technical change, incentives, training and promotion, and the problems of special groups in industry’ (Seear 1962, 178; Stansfield 1981). Among those whose early work was supported by this Committee, and its successor from 1957, the DSIR Human Sciences Committee, were Scott and his colleagues in Liverpool, Woodward, Burns, Lupton, Cunnison and Klein. This array of names demonstrates the importance of the Committee’s contribution to establishing research in industrial sociology in Britain (DSIR/MRC 1958, 3).

Thus opportunities and support for university based social research in industry were very limited until the expansion of higher education in the 1960s. The Clapham Committee in 1946 had recommended increased support for social sciences and earmarked grants were provided between 1947 and 1952. As the Heyworth Committee discovered nearly two decades later the major part of this additional money had been used to establish additional teaching posts, and many of them were in economics (Heyworth Committee 1965, 5–8, 80–5). The University of Liverpool appears to have been an exception in channelling most of the money into research posts and this must have contributed to the successful establishment of an industrial sociology research group there.

The early 1960s marked a distinct watershed in the development of sociology and sociological research in Britain, and this change can be attributed to two main factors: the expansion of higher education in the wake of the Robbins Report (1963) and the establishment of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) following the recommendations of the Heyworth Committee (1965). The findings of the Heyworth Committee provide a useful summary of the situation for the ‘Sociology Group’ of subjects, which included social anthropology and social administration, at a time when the expansion of higher education, and of sociology, was just beginning. The Report records that in 1962–3 there were 259 teaching and 67 research staff in this Group, receiving a total of £300,000 in external research funds. In the same year 341 students graduated with first degrees (ten times as many as in 1938–9); 156 students were pursuing higher degrees by research and a further 88 by advanced courses.

It is not possible to apportion research staffing and expenditure between industrial and other areas of sociology, and some research in industrial sociology will have been carried out in other departments, for example of management, business studies or industrial relations. Some indication of the scale of sociological research on industry and work-related problems at the time can be gained from a survey of professional sociologists carried out in 1966–7. This showed that in each of the three periods considered – 1945–60, 1961–6 and 1966 – more than a fifth of all research ‘projects’ were in ‘industrial sociology and the sociology of work’ (Carter 1968, 18).

There has, unfortunately, been no comparable survey of professional sociologists since Carter’s. Some indication of the continuing high level of interest in work, industry and employment can, however, be gained from an analysis of information in the periodic registers of members of the British Sociological Association (BSA). This shows that during the considerable expansion of teaching and research in sociology during the past three decades the proportion of sociologists with involvement in research in the sociology of work and industry has remained relatively high (10 per cent on the most cautious estimate). The absolute amount of resources – personnel and financial – devoted to industrial sociological research must have grown considerably.

Nevertheless it has never been easy to find resources for research in industrial sociology in Britain. There have always been pressures to focus research on applied problems where there is likely to be some perceived benefit for practitioners, or for society at large. However, it is probably t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction – sociologists and industry
• 2. Systems thinking
• 3. Context, contingency and choice
• 4. Orientation and action
• 5. Labour power and the labour process
• 6. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index