Consequently mass production prevents communication between managers and workers and thus leads to a lack of co-operation and harmony, without which the basic principles of management cannot be sustained.
2. The problem of Maslow’s self-actualisation being denied to workers:
Repetition of work through division of labour leads to deskilling which means that worker’s responsibilities are reduced to such an extent that it reduces the satisfaction workers receive from working and therefore reduces their self-esteem. The importance of this need is reinforced by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; a theory claiming that human beings are subjected to five types of needs: physiological, safety, love, self-esteem and self-actualisation. Once one need is fulfilled, a person’s focus moves on to the next. Money may satisfy the physiological and safety needs, but it ignores the higher order needs. Workers’ lack of responsibility exacerbates the lack of self-esteem and limits self-actualisation. This theory has been regarded as misleading and limited. However, Wren supported this:
“Maslow paved the way for the humanist psychologists who argued for better employee mental health through improved organisational practices”.
It nevertheless starkly exposes the fact that workers within a mass production environment are forced to lose their skills, their role, their identity and as a result their self-esteem and possibility of self-actualisation. These factors thus greatly influence the worker’s productivity, leaving the worker to feel purposeless, anonymous and weak:
“Satisfaction of the self-esteem needs leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability and adequacy of being useful and necessary in the world. But thwarting of these needs produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness and of helplessness”.
Therefore, mass production ignores the workers’ higher needs which as a result de-motivates them and decreases their productivity, the consequences of which are highly detrimental to the organisation.
3. The problem of deskilling:
As explained above, the main elements of mass production require the use of division of labour, assembly lines, mechanisation and automation. A worker will therefore be asked to perform one single repetitive task. Over a period of time, the worker will gradually lose his other skills and as a result suffer from ‘de-skilling’. This does not only directly affect the worker’s life, as shown below, but it also poses a problem for management thinkers such as Handy who said that “education is the single most important investment any person can make in their destiny”. He suggests that educating and training would give ordinary workers the possibility of choice which they had so far been denied in the confines of organisational life.
The rigid company procedures and ruled based activities involved in mass production, may result in the organisation suffering from inability to adapt to change. This can become a fundamental problem in today’s business world where change is predominant. If workers, instead of being deskilled, continue to be educated and trained, the organisation would benefit in the way that worker’s education would not only make them more interchangeable but it would also make them more adept to question what they are producing and conceptualise possible improvements. This would in turn give a new element to the organisation, one that would be much more flexible and adaptable to change and innovation. Because mass production involves the deskilling of workers it is therefore a curse to management thinking because it prevents an organisation from adapting to constant external changes.
4. The problem of assembly lines preventing teamwork:
Mass Production assembly lines do not allow the manager to create a team atmosphere for which to work within. This is clearly a problem as it is obvious that people work better within a team.
When Elton Mayo conducted the Hawthorne Experiments in the 1920’s he used assembly work of a similar fashion to that found on a mass production assembly line in order to make inferences about the efficiency of workers. He used relay assembly work because it involved a repetitive type of work leading to fatigue. The results appeared to be that baring extreme conditions the women’s efficiency of production was always increased within the test room:
“…privileged status and a modicum of control over work days brought about a strong identification with the test room among the workers. At their own initiative they requested prints of a photograph taken at the test room and its occupants…”
This was, for the working women, a break from the assembly line norm. They were also working closely together in a fashion, which perhaps may be thought of a small unit or team. Other management thinkers such as Fritz Schumacher also commented on the problems associated with large organisations and how they create an environment of anonymity, by saying that the ‘fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation’. Although he was not specifically applying his work to mass production and was not directly considering assembly operations, his work is still relevant to the anonymity caused by the mass productions system. Assembly line operations do make it difficult for small units or teams to exist.
Mass production assembly lines forbid teamwork, which as a result affects the worker’s productivity; leading to management becoming counterproductive to the organisation.
5. The problem of not answering consumers’ needs and creating production costs:
Mass production is limited in the way that it restricts the diversity of the company’s range of products. Mass production usually involves maintaining a constant high level of production. This requires a constant level of resources such as staff, basic materials and a large inventory and is in danger of not taking into account the level of demand for the product. This creates two problems.
Mass production does not always give customers what they really want. Ford stagnated in a puddle of his own causing due to his stubborn insistence on “customers can have it in any colour they want as long as it is black”. His inability to adapt to change paved the way for Sloan’s General Motors simply because General Motors had understood the importance of marketing management developing a diverse product range.
Large wastes and unnecessary stock only create superfluous costs for the organisation. Japanese management thinkers such as Taguchi condemned waste suggesting that it was always detrimental to the organisation. In addition, this focus on waste became a primary concern for firms such as Toyota who have been using a new method called “lean production” which not only involves tailoring products to consumer demand but which also ensures minimal stock, waste and overall production costs.
Mass production can therefore indirectly ignore real consumer’s demands, produce too much waste and as a result create too many unnecessary costs for the organisation.
How has mass production affected worker’s lives?
- Workers are reduced to automatons and non-thinking slaves:
In the drive for efficiency, the tight job design dehumanises employees to become merely sleepwalkers and corporate puppets. Arthur Herbeaux, who worked at a Renault plant outside Paris expressed the frustration he felt when mass-producing cars:
“ We had a certain number of parts we had to assemble each hour. […] The worker was just like a machine… At one time we were assembling 100 parts an hour. Then management decided to up the pace and we had to do 110. Then
120. Inevitably things snapped. We’d had enough. We weren’t machines.”
Division of labour together with assembly lines didn’t just put workers under extreme pressure but it affected their lives indirectly as well. Firstly, it gradually deskilled them. Before the introduction of mass production those workers would have been using their specific skills, whatever they were; and those skills had been handed down from their fathers and grandfathers, giving them a role within an organisation but also a role within society. Deskilling them would mean ridding them of their role and in the end of a part of their identity. This had such an impact on Ford’s workers, particularly, that a large proportion of them went on strike on 10th of January 1914. The Machinists’ Monthly Journal noted at the time:
“The strike is one in support of skilled labour against unskilled labour… A mechanic’s skill is to him what the capitalist’s money is to the capitalist.”
Mass production was a curse to worker’s lives because it rid them off their role and therefore a part of their identity.
- No responsibilities means no role:
As already emphasised by Maslow’s theory on the need for self-esteem and self-actualisation, workers need a role to build their identity on. Although some workers might quip “the only reason a man works is to make a living”, others disagreed replying “you felt a complete frustration and isolation”. Large stores, factories and warehouses nowadays will provide new workers with induction and training days during which employees will be made to feel special and meaningful to the company. Marks and Spencer’s departmental managers will organise a meeting everyday with their checkout employees to determine what the daily target is and how well they did the day before. The Royal Mail operates info screens showing each department’s performance and target numbers of letters to sort. Although it may seem that many different techniques are used nowadays to maintain the worker’s self-esteem and role within the organisation these are still scarce, which means that mass production will always be a system that ignores people’s higher needs, consequently ignoring them as human beings altogether.
3. The problem of communication between managers and workers:
As already mentioned, mass production requires a strict hierarchical and formal structure which means that communication between managers and workers is very poor leading to increasing antagonism between the two parties. A man who worked in one of Ford’s plants says that:
“[…]you had nobody to fight for you. That was it. They were management – that was it… some of the workers used to take their general foremen home with them and feed like kings just so they wouldn’t bother them at the job.”
Mass production was a curse to worker’s lives because it lead to a hierarchical structure which allowed managers to disrespect and blackmail workers which ultimately made them feel under severe pressure.
4. Workers have no rights:
The effect of mass production on worker’s lives can be regarded as generally negative as illustrated by the following quotes:
- Workers were put under a tremendous amount of pressure:
“On the job we worked, how we’d work! You couldn’t go for a smoke. Even when a man went to the toilet they’d check to see if he was genuine.”
- They weren’t allowed to talk to one another:
“They didn’t have a chance to talk to anyone. You [couldn’t] sit down and be social to the next person. No, you didn’t have a chance. You were far enough away…”
- They weren’t looked after:
“There’s all kind of safety hazards in a big place like this, with different chemicals and acids and all that which you are breathing.”
- They were treated like animals. Ford’s executives described the employment policy as:
“Hiring men at the back door for as little as we could get them, putting them in the shop and making them work as long as they would stick, and not giving them an advance until we had to.”
Workers were put under tremendous pressure, they weren’t looked after, they were treated like animals and if any of them didn’t accept it they were fired. How could anyone think that mass production had a good effect on worker’s lives?
Conclusion:
Mass production is a curse to management thinking and workers’ lives. It is a curse to management thinking because, as shown above, many of its aspects constantly jeopardise the sustenance of basic management principles; principles without which the future of any organisation cannot be guaranteed. The hierarchical structure that it creates breaks down communication between managers and workers and thus prevents efficient co-operation. The ‘machine metaphor’ that it implies denies its workforce self-esteem which makes them feel alienated, depressed, thus less productive. The division of labour that it requires deskills the workers to a point where the organisation, as a result, becomes rigid, unable to innovate and lacking the dynamism to adapt to change. Its assembly lines forbid teamwork which reduces worker’s motivation and thus productivity. And finally, as well as producing unnecessary costs, it doesn’t consistently answer to consumer needs.
From a worker’s point of view, it has also been exposed as a curse to their lives in the way that it often fails to recognise workers as human beings who have feelings, principles and needs. Instead it tends to treat them like simple objects of production. It reduces human beings to automatons and non-thinking slaves. The needs of the workers in their various forms are not addressed which rids them of their role, self-esteem and parts of their identity. It destroys their relationship and trust in their managers, thus turning them into victims of blackmail and severe pressure and finally it creates a working environment and conditions that may often ignore workers’ basic rights.
Today’s society is fast moving, impatient, imaginative and very demanding. It is demanding because we live in a world where the ordinary has become fatuous and unfashionable. Mass production may well have been an essential stepping stone to industrialisation and civilisation as we know it now but it was also a stepping stone to humans inevitably becoming obsessed with efficiency, speed and low costs. What we wear, eat, and sometimes think have all been affected by mass production. However, as established above, the “machine metaphor” that mass production implies leads to a uniformity that makes us bored. To compensate for this ordinary boredom, people take refuge in superficial shelters such as fashion, materialism and fame seeking. However, this superficial compensation does not work as a long-term solution. The desires of humans to progress, achieve and actualise are nowadays central to everyone’s lives. So central that for the sake of both management thinking and workers’ lives, organisations who are forced to use mass production will have to start approaching management completely differently. This new approach will have to come face to face with a dilemma: having to choose between a world where people will not have to suffer from being “a perpetual wanting animal” anymore or a world where equality, efficiency and cost competition reign. This dilemma is a curse that both management thinkers and workers will have to live with.
Barnard in The Functions of the Executive, p224; Sheldrake in Theory of Management, p121.
Fayol in General and Administrative Management, pp104-5; Sheldrake in Theory of Management, p54.
Wren in The Evolution of Management Thought, p371; Sheldrake in Theory of Management, p141.
Maslow in A Theory of Human Motivation, Pshychological Review 50, pp370-96; Sheldrake in The Theory of Management, p138.
Charles Handy in The Age of Unreason, p168; Sheldrake in Theory of Management, p204.
Gillespie in Manufacturing Knoweldge, p59; Sheldrake in Theory of Management, p109
Schumaker in Small is beautiful, p48; Sheldrake in Theory of Management, p166.
Arthur Herbeaux in One the Line, People’s century by Kathleen Couril (full programme description).
A worker’s statement in Robert Blauner’s The Auto Worker, p119-120.
Paul Boatin in One in the Line, People’s century, by Kathleen Couril (full programme description).
John DeAngelo in One the Line, People’s century, by Kathleen Couril (full programme description).
Porter, H.F in Growing your own executive, Handling men, pp257-303.