Compare and contrast the different ways in which organisations seek to control individual employees - Can an individual ever be fully controlled?

MG1051 – Organisational Behaviour & Analysis

Assignment 1

Compare and contrast the different ways in which organisations seek to control individual employees. Can an individual ever be fully controlled?

In order to examine such a fundamental topic as the control methods employed by organisations, we must first understand what we mean by control and why it is such an important area of study. According to the Oxford Paperback Dictionary, control is “the power to give orders or to restrain something.” Control and power are two topics which are inherently related to one another. It is rare that you find mention of one without the presence of the other. It is impossible to study organisations without at some point encountering theories of power and control. In fact, some protagonists argue that power and control are intrinsically linked to organisational structure and management:

Central organisational processes thus involve the control of activities. (Fincham & Rhodes, 1999)

However, there is another more basic reason for the study of control and power. This second reason is the nature of organisations and their aims. Every organisation strives to achieve certain specified goals. To do this they employ a workforce to carry out tasks which contribute to the realization of these goals. Without exerting power in the form of control, the workforce may not achieve these goals or even carry out their assigned tasks. This point of view is summed up by the following:

In order to achieve the maximum amount of profit, employers need to control their labour force to make them as productive as possible. (Haralambros and Holborn, 2000)

There have been many different viewpoints developed on power. One of the most dominant models of recent times is that put forward by Steven Lukes (1974). In his model, Lukes stated that there were three dimensions – ‘faces’ – of power. He started by using two existing ideas put forward by Robert Dahl and Bachrach & Baratz (1962). Dahl’s view was that a form of power was present when:

A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would otherwise not do. (1957)

This view, however, raised the issues of resistance and conflict. B would obviously resist A since his views are being overruled, this would result in a conflict between the two. The view put forward by Bachrach & Baratz, was that A had the power to exclude B from the decision making process altogether. This view was an expansion on that of Dahl who looked at a process where an individual was simply overruled, but still took part in the process. Bachrach & Baratz’s view posed the question of a person being removed from the process. Lukes then added a third ‘face’ to the argument, he proposed that:

The third, or radical, dimension referred to groups under power never being able to formulate their real interests. (Fincham & Rhodes, 1999)

Lukes’ model was based on the notion of power being held by an individual. Although this is true in some cases today it is rare and we often find that it is organisations that hold the power. Of course, they may disperse some limited amount of it to higher employees, but they will always be under the control of the organisation.

Another influential power model is Etzioni’s Compliance Theory. Etzioni expanded on Max Weber’s formulation of legitimate authority, in order to match it to the organisations of the modern day. He started by classifying both power and involvement into three groups as follows:

Power

Coercive: The application of physical threats.
Remunerative: The allocation of salaries.
Normative: The manipulation of symbols.

Involvement

Alienative: Intense negative orientation.
Calculative: Low intensity +ve or –ve orientation.
Moral: High intensity positive orientation.

Etzioni then combined these two three dimensional sets together into tabular, assigning each resulting pair a number from one to nine. The resulting ...

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Power

Coercive: The application of physical threats.
Remunerative: The allocation of salaries.
Normative: The manipulation of symbols.

Involvement

Alienative: Intense negative orientation.
Calculative: Low intensity +ve or –ve orientation.
Moral: High intensity positive orientation.

Etzioni then combined these two three dimensional sets together into tabular, assigning each resulting pair a number from one to nine. The resulting table can be seen below:

Etzioni then made a distinction between three congruent types, these being 1, 5 & 9. By matching up the most appropriate power to the most appropriate level of involvement, he came to the conclusion that for authority to be seen as legitimate and have some value there needed to be a respective level of involvement.

Foucault was another writer who put forward a key model of power:

This is the diabolical aspect of the idea…One doesn’t have here a power which is wholly in the hands of one person who can exercise it alone and totally over others…It is a machine in which everyone is caught, a machinery that no one owns… (from Gordon, C., 1980)

Foucault was of the belief that power is invested in architecture, for example the layout of classrooms, prisons, hospitals, etc, and in the complexes of knowledge. It was from this belief and the work of Jeremy Bentham (1786), that Foucault promoted the idea of the panopticon. The logic behind the idea was quite simple. The masses could not see their observers, who inspected them from a central hub. This meant that the masses did not know whether or not they being watched, which in turn caused them to act as if they were. Bentham’s original design was presented as a model for hospitals, prisons, schools, etc, but it did not catch on during the 18th or 19th centuries. However, there has been an increasing trend of turning to the panopticon design in contemporary organisations. The use ranges from US prisons to Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) to a Safeway store at which I worked a few years ago. In the store in question the manager’s office was situated above, and at the end of, the row of cash tills. There was a large window which looked out of the office and onto the tills. However, the glass was of the one way variety, so that a person might look out of the office but not into it. This caused the till operators and customers to act as if the manager was constantly watching them.

Although fundamentally different, Lukes’ and Etzioni’s models have one similar trait. They both have an element of coercive power, i.e. the ability to force another person into doing something against their will. However, Lukes’ model links power to absence, thereby causing resentment and conflict. At work this may equate to excluding women from positions of seniority or winning definitional privileges. On the other hand Etzioni argues that power has to be seen as legitimate by those being subjected to it. Foucault’s model comes from an altogether different perspective. He disagrees with the idea of individuals holding power, instead arguing that power reflects masses of knowledge which get rooted in practices that ‘identify us’.

The foundations on which the majority of modern theorists base their work are Alienation, Rationalisation and Taylorism. These were the works of three pioneers of organisational behaviour and sociology: Karl Marx, F. W. Taylor and Max Weber. The Alienation theory put forward by Marx and Weber’s Rationalisation can be looked at together as they both concern the individual and have some similarities.

Alienation was defined by Marx as the following:

What constitutes the alienation of labour?

Firstly the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e. …that he does not confirm himself to his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy …His labour is therefore…forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists it is shunned like the plague. (from Livingstone, R. & Benton, G., 1975)

Alienation is therefore a gradual process which isolates the individual both from the product of his work and also the process of production. It removed any thought of ingenuity or free will in the workplace. Both the product and the process used to produce it were entirely controlled by the employer due to his ownership of the capital involved. This then led to the workers becoming alienated from themselves, reducing them to working from instinct or producing for a direct need, basically, to the level of an animal.

In Rationalisation, Weber argued that a ‘spirit of rationality existed which found its way into all walks of life, especially economic and social life. It was most evident in the ways that work was administered and organised. He claimed that for operations to be calculable there needed to be a provision for formal administration. But he also contrasted this formal rationality with what he called a ‘substantive rationality’. This referred to the constant involvement of human ends and values. However these two rationales were constantly conflicting due to the nature of humanity. It is a fact that humans can be irrational and therefore their needs cannot always be met by rational calculation. For Weber, rationalisation in the modern world meant that the spontaneity of human nature was given up as organisations focused on the means of achieving economic goals. It is here that the similarity between Rationalisation and Marx’s Alienation theory becomes apparent. Namely the separation of individuals from their tasks:

It was Max Weber in his classical analysis of bureaucracy who expanded Marx’s concept of the individual worker’s separation from the means of production to modern large-scale organisations. Civil servants are separated from their means of administration; soldiers from the means of violence and scientists from the means of enquiry. (Gerth, H. & Mills, C. W., 1946)

The third ground-breaking theory was put forward by F. W. Taylor, beginning his work around the 1890s. Theory was known by a number of names including Taylorism, Scientific Management and ‘Time & Motion’ study. The first part of Taylorism concerned labour itself. He recommended splitting it up as far as possible: so that each tasks was broken into the highest number of sub-tasks possible. Once this had been achieved, all the skills that the workforce had built up through experience, knowledge, practice, etc, should be scrutinised by management in order to produce prescribed procedures. In effect management should assume:

the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae. (quoted in Braverman, 1974)

Under Taylorism, the worker became the modern ‘operator’, devoid of the freedom and need to think about his work. All forms of ‘thinking’ work were to be carried out by specialist staff. The advantages of Taylorism to employers were immense. By deskilling the workforce, labour was made cheaper. The monotony of carrying out a single basic task speeded up production and allowed labour to be more flexible. Organisations implementing Taylorism noted increased output and productivity, with a general rise in the efficiency of the workforce.

The three theories discussed above deal with the control on industrial workforces. However, organisations have been changing over time, with their clerical sectors growing a great deal:

… managerial control systems developed differently for clerical and managerial staff than for manual employees: the former were governed by bureaucratic principles and the latter by those of scientific management. (Hill, S., 1981)

The modern thinking behind Bureaucracy has been attributed to Max Weber. Its defining feature is that its only concern is the task of administration. It is unlike other forms of work in that no specified task is carried out. Conversely it maintains a set of records which are the basis for the direction and control of other work. The Bureaucracy is based on a workforce which, like the one in Taylorism, is divided to work on specific tasks. However, there is also a hierarchy present. This divides the power of the Bureaucracy into clear lines of command. In addition to these elements, Weber also included ‘competence’ and ‘objectivity’ in his model of bureaucracy. The Bureaucratic model is visible in all modern day organisations; all of them have perpendicular divisions of power and tasks.

Can an individual ever be fully controlled? I believe that the answer to this question depends on the context it is asked in. Due to the variety of situations, backgrounds, histories, etc that are associated with an individual, there is no simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. However, following the theme of this discussion, let us separate the individuals in terms of the organisations that they belong to.

I do not believe that an employee can ever be fully controlled, however, neither am I saying that the control methods discussed do not work. The theories of Marx, Taylor and Weber all achieve a measure of success, especially when implemented well. The problem with total control, which they themselves state, arises from resistance and conflict. It is in human nature to resent and resist situations which are uncomfortable, depressing or unfair. And the more the situation is compounded, or the longer it remains unresolved, the worse the resentment and conflict will get. Total control would be possible if an individual had no other choice, but this situation never arises. There is no organisation in the world that has a complete monopoly over one task or required skill. Thus the individual always has the option of leaving the position they occupy and taking up another one within a different organisation. This is more so the case in the modern era, where regulations guiding working conditions are becoming enforced all over the world.

On the other hand, I believe that there are instances where an individual can be fully controlled. Probably the best example of this would be a prison. It is the inmates of a prison that I believe can be fully controlled. The difference between an individual in a prison and an employee is the environment in which they ‘operate’. Due to the nature of a prison, the inmates lack complete free will. They cannot do as they wish, nor can they simply walk out if they do not like it. This lack of free will means that one can completely reduce an inmate’s actions to a rational routine. Once this has been achieved constraints can be put on that routine to control the individual. With a lack of free will the individual may still resent the situation, but will comply with it.