Human Relations Theory and People Management, Lecture notes of Public Relations

Download Human Relations Theory and People Management and more Lecture notes Public Relations in PDF only on Docsity! 2 Human Relations Theory and People Management The minutiae of the human soul … emerged as a new domain for management Nikolas Rose Conventional textbooks often set up a simple story about organization theory which has a very appealing structure. In this story, there is a good guy and a bad guy. Who gets to play which role sometimes shifts, but most often the bad guy is the scientific management approach and the good guy is human relations theory. This is a flawed story in my view, and the way I will tell the story emphasizes the many connections and similarities between the two. But I suppose the fact that I am refer- ring to ‘the two’ implies that there must be some points of difference as well. Maybe so, but it is a different sort of difference to that which stan- dard commentaries identify. Human relations theory (HRT) is normally thought of as having its roots in the Hawthorne Studies conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at the Hawthorne works of the Western Electric Company, near Chicago in the United States. These studies have now taken on an almost mythological status within the study of organization, so that the details of what hap- pened there and even when they happened is reported differently in dif- ferent accounts. For example, different books give 1923, 1924 and 1927 as the date the studies started. Related to this mythology is a disjuncture between these precise details of what was done and what was written and the received version of what human relations theory is. Since human rela- tions theory was the work of many years and many people, it contains a huge amount of variation and nuance (some of it extremely interesting) 1 This same disjuncture is present in relation to Taylor’s work (and scholarly com- mentaries on it) and that of many other organizational theorists. It isn’t a matter of saying that the received version is deficient in detail or scholarship. They are different things for different purposes.Apart from anything else, received versions are simpler and more memorable. In many ways my purpose in this book is to put out another version of organization theory, no more scholarly than the received version but hopefully no less memorable. 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 43 which is not captured by the received version.1 Although it would certainly be worthwhile to look at the detail (if you fancy it, Schwartzman, 1993, is a nice place to start), it is perhaps more important to examine the received version, for it is this which figures most strongly both in text- books and, consequently, in the way that human relations theory is used to structure understandings of organizations, especially on the part of their managers. Indeed, as Nancy Harding (2003) observes of the con- ventional canon of management thinkers: … neither the writers themselves nor indeed what they wrote is important. What defines them as important … is what they signify, i.e. conventionality, continuity, the conservative way, or, in one word, patriarchy. (2003: 117) The basic suggestion of the received version of HRT is that through a series of experiments and interviews, the Hawthorne researchers and, most notably, the man who became their chief popularizer and canonical emblem, Elton Mayo, identified the importance of ‘the human factor’ in organizations. That meant that workers were now recognized as having social needs and interests such that they could no longer be regarded as the economically motivated automatons envisaged by Taylorism. Within these terms, two parts of the studies stand out as being espe- cially important: the ‘illumination experiment’ and the ‘bank wiring room experiment’. In the first of these, lighting levels were varied up and down within an experimental group of workers, whilst light levels were left unchanged within a control group. Almost all of the lighting changes led to an increase in productivity and, most interesting of all, productiv- ity also increased within the control group. What was going on? Apparently, it was the fact that something ‘unusual’ was happening and that the workers felt that they were part of it and that what they were doing was of interest and importance to the researchers. It was this which caused the increase in productivity and which demonstrated that the workers could not be regarded as mere parts in the organizational machine. Thus was born the notion of the ‘Hawthorne Effect’, a staple part not just of organization theory but of social science as a whole. The other study I want to mention was that conducted in the bank wiring room. Here, a small group of male workers were engaged in producing electrical components. It emerged that the group set infor- mal norms around production levels so that, rather than produce their maximum output (which would earn them a bonus) the workers per- formed sub-optimally. These norms were enforced by a mixture of peer pressure (including physical sanction) and an unofficial ‘gang leader’. This suggested that workers were not solely motivated by economic 44 Studying Organizations 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 44 Child: How do you mean? Dad: Well, you know, I dehumanize them by making them work as hard as I can for as little money as possible. Child: Oh. It was embarrassing stuff. A much better picture was offered by human relations theory. Now, management could be reconfigured as an alto- gether more humane undertaking which ameliorated rather than inflamed social conflict and, perhaps most important of all, was about ‘helping’ rather than exploiting the worker. This latter point came out of the tendency of Mayo, in particular, to conceptualize worker resistance as a psychological maladjustment rather than a rational response to conditions of employment. Famously, or infamously, Mayo went so far as to propose that membership of a trade union was a sign of mental illness. In fact, in this respect, Taylor’s writings show much more empathy with workers’ experiences than those of Mayo. Taylor after all had worked as a machine operator, and he did not find worker recalcitrance particularly objection- able at a personal level, albeit that he wanted to overcome it. But that overcoming presented management as, nakedly, being about power. Mayo’s less sympathetic account of worker resistance paradoxically cast the manager as assisting the worker to make a normal adjustment to factory life. So now a different conversation becomes possible: Child: What do you do all day, dad? Dad: Well, I, sort of, help people. Child: How do you mean? Dad: Well, you know, if they feel unhappy at work I make them see that I care about them and that it’s not so bad. Child: Oh, dad. That’s great. We probably shouldn’t discount the fact that being able to give a positive sounding account of one’s work to family and friends might persuade managers to embrace human relations theory. But, in any case, there were wider constituencies to whom, in a less naïve way, a similar account could helpfully be given. In a society2 racked by social and industrial con- flict, and extremely fearful that such conflict might lead to an emulation of the 1917 Russian Revolution, managers really needed to present a more humane and less confrontational face than they had hitherto been Human Relations Theory and People Management 47 2 I mean Britain, the US and other industrialized countries between the world wars. 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 47 able to do. And there was more at stake here than the manipulation of image. It was also the case that the scientific management system had indeed thrown up new problems – sabotage, poor quality, high staff turnover, absenteeism – to which the human relations approach might offer a solution. ‘Technical’ and ‘ideological’ factors are never separable: they reinforce each other. All of this is fairly easy to understand. What is perhaps less clear is the more general question of the place of humanism within western soci- eties, of which human relations theory management is but one, specific, manifestation. There is so much that could be said about this that I hesi- tate to plunge in, but it is necessary for me to do so, because it is not pos- sible to understand organization without seeing how it stands in this wider context.3 what is it to be human? Part of what has made modern societies modern is a move away from traditional belief systems in which the social order was simply pre- ordained by the will of God. The eighteenth century Enlightenment had broken down much of this reasoning – for example, the belief that kings ruled by divine right – and, as mentioned in the last chapter, had substi- tuted the idea that individuals could use their own reason, rather than rely upon the received authority of others. Clearly Weber’s charting of the rise of rational-legal, as against traditional, authority and of the develop- ment of the bureaucratic organization, was part of the same flow of thought. But if individuals, rather than God or his representatives in the Church or the Monarchy, were now at the centre of things – who were these individuals? There were many takes on this question, but they crys- tallized around the idea of autonomous human beings, complete and suf- ficient in themselves, capable of rationality, capable of choice, capable of moral conduct and, by virtue of all possessing these traits, all entitled to certain rights. So we find, from the Enlightenment onwards, the understanding that people had the right to be treated in certain ways. This led to all kinds of reforms, including the ideas that people could (with certain restrictions such as, until the twentieth century, being male) have a say in who gov- erned them; have a fair trial; speak their opinions without punishment; 48 Studying Organizations 3 In the pages which follow I am glossing a fairly freeform version of ‘post-structuralism’. It would disrupt my purposes to elaborate this but see, for example, Burrell (1988); Rose (1989); Hacking (1991) for some of the work which has informed my account. 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 48 own their own property; be equal in the eyes of the law and so on. These are all very familiar things. It is easy to see how central such ideas are to modern forms of organization. When we think of a worker agreeing to work in exchange for a certain sum of money, we are pre-supposing a whole series of choices and rights. It is a bizarre thought that, for someone of my age, some didn’t always apply to my grandmother and almost none to my great-great-great grandfather. This should alert us to the historical mutability of the idea of ‘personhood’ – or, what a human being is. Who knows what it will mean for our great-great-great grandchildren, or even for our children?4 This idea of personhood substantially deepened in the twentieth cen- tury. It moved from a philosophical, political or legal notion to a much more embodied or personalized one. If the nineteenth century had estab- lished some ideas about economic and political personhood (or at least, as I have suggested, manhood) then the twentieth century extended this into the psychological sphere. The intellectual revolution associated with Freud (but, as with Taylor, no less attributable to others) established human beings as no mere conscious decision making machines but as possessors of an unconscious and of all of the complexities of neurosis, motivation, desire and so on that map us out as human in our present day understanding of that term. The ‘I’ had been given depth, so that we learned to understand our real selves as a complex, multi-layered thing, understandable only partially to ourselves but perhaps accessible through the expertise of a psychoanalyst. ‘Sub-consciously,’ someone might say, ‘I think that what attracted me to my husband was the way he’s an author- ity figure, a bit like my father’. It is a surprising thought that almost no normal person would have said such a thing, or have been understood if they had said it, as little as 120 years ago. And, of course, at the same time that all this was going on, there was also a steady but sure erosion of the religious belief which had been the dominant way of understanding the self and its relationship with the wider world for several centuries, in its Christian form, and perhaps for all of history in one form or another. To be sure that change has happened slowly and, for a great many people, not at all. But, where it did, it placed the individual at the centre of the universe. It suggested that people – and perhaps society – were not just important but that they were all that there was. Life ended with death, and the authority of God was replaced either by the authority of society, most likely in the form of the State, or by no more than the individual pursuit of desire and pleasure. It Human Relations Theory and People Management 49 4 Consider, for example, the possible impact of developments in genetic science and technology for how we come to conceive of personhood in the future. 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 49 new set of concerns becomes manifest in organizations. Once HRT had entered the world of organizations and organization theorists, a whole edifice of knowledge about people at work was gradually elaborated. Such knowledge is the staple of the conventional study of organizations and includes such things as personality type, motivation and job satisfaction, group dynamics, leadership and much more. It is tempting to see these as more or less descriptive accounts of people at work, but this is wrong for two reasons. The first is an extension of what I have already tried to say. There is no ultimate description of people but rather ascriptions which, if believed and enforced, are taken as descriptions – they constitute or con- struct reality. For example, is the difference between a child and an adult a real difference, or is it rather that where we draw the line and enforce it (for example, by conferring certain rights at particular ages) takes on the appearance of a real difference? We could say that people divide into those that are right-handed and those who are left-handed and confer different rights to them, but we don’t. On the other hand, we can and do say that people divide into male and female and, in many societies, confer different rights accordingly. Or we divide people into different nationalities and confer different rights accordingly. These things are a matter of what is socially agreed and also of power – who has the power to draw the dis- tinctions and to enforce the effects of these distinctions. So when personality types are divided into, say, introvert and extrovert, or any of the many other variations on this theme in organization theory; and when on the basis of this ascription decisions are made about who to employ and who not to employ then exactly the same processes of dis- tinction making and enforcement are present. The legacy of HRT has been to multiply these schema for making distinctions between people, and you can see in any organization theory textbook an endless array of models, typologies, 2-by-2 matrices and so on which replicate these dis- tinctions but treat them as descriptions rather than ascriptions – as being rooted in a self-evident truth rather than being the outcome of a social process. In this way, organization theory is a part of making this social process happen. So, to take some well-known examples, the distinctions Maslow draws between different motivators; or Herzberg’s distinction of Motivators and Hygiene factors; or the distinction of task and role orientation in management style; or McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y – all these serve to constitute or construct the organizational world and do not simply describe it. Now, undoubtedly, the drawing of distinctions is almost unavoidable if we are to make any kind of sense of the world around us, including that of organizations (even to speak of ‘the world around us’ is to make a dis- tinction). And it is not the case that this began in organization theory with 52 Studying Organizations 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 52 HRT. After all, Scientific Management draws all kinds of distinctions between efficiency and inefficiency, for example. However, because HRT draws the ‘whole person’ into the organizational ambit, the impact of all of these supposedly descriptive distinctions is potentially much greater. The stakes are very high when we think about organizations, just because work is so central a part of society; but the stakes get even higher when work organizations and personhood become inextricably linked. And this means that those of us who study organizations, and the much larger number of us who work in them, need to be much more sceptical than organization theory normally encourages us to be. The constitutive or constructive nature of organization theory is one reason why we have to be cautious about the way we use its concepts to think about people in organizations. But there is a second issue, and this relates to the continuities between HRT and scientific management which I pointed to earlier. For not only does organization theory contribute to constituting what it claims to be describing but it does so in particular ways, for particular reasons. The impetus for HRT was that of organiza- tional control and, more particularly, the attempt by managers to gain control over organizational processes. So the kind of knowledge pro- duced and the uses to which it is put has to be read in the light of that aspiration for control. Organization theory is often, and certainly in the case of HRT, indistinguishable from theories of managing. Organization theorists have often been, to use Baritz’s (1960) evocative phrase ‘ser- vants of power’. That may or may not be a good thing (I think it is a bad thing) but it must mean that organization theory has to be read with an eye to the purposes it serves, which means giving more attention to man- agement than I have so far done. the rise and rise of management Management has been one of the great success stories of the modern world. As many writers have remarked – so many that it has almost become clichéd – the etymological origins of management lie in two terms – the French menager and the Italian maneggiare – the first denoting domestic or household organization, the second the handling of horses. The ultimate origin lies in the Latin word manus or hand. What this may be taken to point to (if you will forgive the pun) is the essentially humble and mundane meaning of management, the sense that it is something dis- persed, done by everyone. This sense is recalled when we say something like ‘I managed to catch the bus on time’ or ‘I managed to avoid arguing with him’. Human Relations Theory and People Management 53 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 53 But although we do use the word manage in that way, that isn’t what we usually think of when we talk about management, and it certainly isn’t the kind of thing with which ‘management schools’ and management studies are normally concerned. They configure management in an all together more grandiose way. But what is management? There is no straightforward answer to that question, and the problem is not one of def- inition. It is not that there is some ‘thing’ – management – to be described and, in being described, delineated from all sorts of other ‘things’. As with personhood, what is at stake is a social construction in which competing claims are made about management and, at different times and by differ- ent audiences, are accepted. A good illustration of this is found in a study of management which has received far less attention than it deserves: I was styled a ‘manager’ and my wife … was a ‘housewife’. I can remember well the blessed relief of leaving my house and its attendant chaos each morning to go off to my oh-so-demanding ‘management’ job. In what sense … was my wife not ‘managing’ and in what sense was my work … more essentially managerial than hers? At work I had another woman to make sure I managed properly … This one wasn’t styled a manager either, but the same essential question held good for her; in what sense is the work of a secretary not manager- ial? (Mant, 1977: 1) I think that Mant’s questions in this passage do two things. One is to remind us that management carries the embedded meaning of the daily accomplishment of life’s ‘business’. The other is that the way the line gets drawn between managers and others is an accomplishment of power. Some kinds of claims to be a manager don’t register, and if they are demanded the response is: ‘yeah, of course’. Other kinds of claims jar, and invite the response: ‘oh yeah?’. So it’s really no great surprise that the two people Mant identifies as being engaged in managerial roles without being awarded the title of manager are women – his wife and his secre- tary. Their kind of management is just boring old house management (‘oh yeah?’). Real management is what the guys do, with spreadsheets and strategies and meetings and budgets. It’s what managers do (‘yeah, of course’). So, sometimes, management seems to mean a group of people – managers. In this way we may talk about ‘the management’, and mean, usually, a group distinct from ‘the workers’. What makes them managers? Well one important answer might be just that they are called managers. I’ll come back to this, but one thing which is notable about present day organizations is how the title of manager has become something of a 54 Studying Organizations 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 54 and design of people. Social organization ceases to be pre-ordained but an arena for intervention and control. Control is perhaps a key term here. The emergence of experimental natural science and the growing body of theory that went with it, which quickened from the seventeenth century onwards yielded the possibility of control over the physical circumstances of life. In its wake came a huge array of new technologies – from medicine to energy generation which fun- damentally altered the relationship between human beings and nature. But if the physical world could be controlled in this way, then why should social organization be any different? It is from this basic question that, amongst other things, the positivism I discussed in the introduction emerged. For at heart, positivism is the attempt to apply the same reasoning to social phe- nomena as had been introduced to the physical realm. Obviously the attempt to control social organization was not con- fined to the modern world that emerged from the scientific revolution. Rulers of all kinds have always sought, and often achieved, control over people, territories, money and so on. What was different, though, was the idea that this could be done systematically through the development and application of the new bodies of knowledge which emerge in the modern era – statistics, economics and sociology being some of the more obvious examples. To design society as if it were a machine, running according to rules which were fully understood and demonstrated – that was the dream. And it is easy to see that this dovetails in with Weber’s observa- tions about the rise of the bureaucratic organization, for what was this other than a rule-based social machine? It should not be thought that this search for control was animated solely by a drive for power and again in this way it perhaps differs from other, pre-modern attempts at control. For along with the search for con- trol was a strong ideology of progress. Just as the natural world could be controlled for the better, for a healthier, more comfortable and richer life, so social life could be controlled so as to yield improvements. Society could become more educated, more knowledgeable, more civilized and cultured (even ‘society’ conceived of as an object of analysis and a defined arena of behaviour is part of this modern revolution). This of course did require control, for it meant purging ignorance and bad behaviour. Perhaps this too could be thought of as an intervention in nature. Human beings might be naturally corrupt and vicious, just as mountains were nat- urally difficult to cross. But if you could build roads to cross mountains then why couldn’t you build institutions to improve humanity? Management is interesting to me because it precisely traverses these twin tracks of modern thought – the systematic control of nature and the systematic control of society. For if the revolution in natural science made Human Relations Theory and People Management 57 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 57 possible the steam engines and precision engineering of the factory, then the revolution in social science lent itself to attempts to control the factory workers. Or, to put it differently and perhaps rather better, there is no sharp distinction to be drawn in the modern world between the natural and social domains. Both, as Ian Hacking (1983) has it, become arenas which can be ‘represented’ and ‘intervened’ in. What that distinc- tion points to goes beyond what I have said so far, and is worth pausing to consider. At one level, and I think it is the one that we normally think of, when we think of such things at all, the modern world represents no more than the discovery of ways of intervening. That is, the dumb world was just sitting there, ready and waiting to have things done to it once people got round to working out how to do it. When they did, modernity got going. But this misses a crucial part of what happened. Before intervention could really get going there needed to be a new way of thinking about, and knowing the world – a way of representing it. That wasn’t about discov- ering new things, so much as ‘re-presenting’ old things in a new way. Was poverty part of the ordained world of God? Or was it because poor people were lazy? Or was it because rich people had grabbed all the wealth? Represent it the first way and intervention is at best pointless and at worse sinful. Represent in one of the other ways, and intervention becomes possible. More than that, it calls forth a multiplication of repre- sentations, for example, drawing the boundary between rich and poor and collecting statistics on how many people are poor, where they live and how they live. So now representation is both a new way of thinking and a new way of knowing. And it is a ‘problem’ to be dealt with or inter- vened in – perhaps by punishing the poor for their laziness, perhaps by castigating the rich for their greed, depending upon how the representa- tion was effected. A similar example, which I talked about earlier, is the constitutive role of organization theory with its distinctions and categories. But now I am talking about something more fundamental than organization theory: the very basic parameters of how modern views of the world operate. Now it is of course the case that this can be discussed in much more sophisticated ways than I have done here, and a host of social theorists and philosophers have done just that but I am not going to do so. One reason is just my own ignorance. But this necessity can become a virtue for the following reason. The camp followers of modernity, which includes most of the readers of this book as well as myself, don’t operate with any very sophisticated grasp of their world, any more than medieval peasants were any great shakes at theology. But a received wisdom, a folk-wisdom, almost, informs our thoughts and actions and, in particular, 58 Studying Organizations 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 58 it informs the theory and practice of management. My concern is to show that this received wisdom is not just ‘the way things are’ but that it marks management as being embedded in a particular, historically bounded and philosophically informed, view of the world; the details of that history and philosophy I leave to those who are better qualified to discuss it. For it must be obvious that management is all of a piece with this representation and intervention which I have talked about. At the most basic level, management assumes manageability – that the world can be known and operated upon, and these terms are virtually interchange- able with representation and intervention. In this sense management is something which literally could not have existed, and does not exist, outside of modernity. But, beyond that, management consists of a dis- tinctive series of often extremely complex ways of effecting representa- tions and conducting interventions. For example, consider a workshop in which 10 people are making, I don’t know, tables. How can it be represented? We could make a literal representation by drawing a picture, but that wouldn’t be a distinctively ‘management’ representation because it wouldn’t (or at least not obviously) allow any kind of managerial intervention. However, if we represented it as a series of inputs and outputs; or an array of costs and incomes; or, as a series of bundles of wants and needs (of customers, workers, etc) then this would be a management representation. It might take the form of a flow chart, a set of accounts or a treatise on marketing or personnel psychology. These are all management representations and they all allow managerial interventions, such as re-design of resource flows; cutting of costs; advertising campaigns to customers or motivation programmes for workers. So, now, let’s go back to managers. If I am right (something which can no means be taken for granted) then there is something more funda- mental at stake than the technical, elite and political explanations for its emergence and functioning, even though it has a bearing upon these explanations. Managers are bearers of a particular kind of expertise – the capacity to represent and intervene in particular ways. But these ways are arbitrary and they are contested. They are arbitrary because it is impos- sible to say that representing the workshop as a balance sheet is more true to reality than painting the scene on a canvas. And because they are arbi- trary they must be contestable, in the sense that it is always possible to say that a different representation should be made. This contestability is evident both within management (for example, between an accounting or a human psychology representation) and from without. For, apart from the possibility of representing the workshop in different managerial ways, Human Relations Theory and People Management 59 3257-Grey-02.qxd 2/21/2005 12:33 PM Page 59