A conflict between ensuring managerial control and harnessing worker creativity is one of the central dynamics shaping organizations today. On the one hand, managers discipline the workforce to ensure sufficient output, using work simplification and standardization, automation and machine-paced work, rules and procedures, threats and rewards. On the other hand, organizational success increasingly depends on the ability of managers to harness the creativity and initiative of workers via upskilling, cross-training, and asking workers to engage in problem solving and decision making. This paper argues that as employee involvement has become increasingly important in response to demands for flexibility and organizational learning over the last four decades, this contradiction between discipline and empowerment has been deepening.
 

About Matt Vidal

Matt Vidal is Reader in Sociology and Political Economy in the Institute for International Management, Loughborough University London. He has two primary research streams – one on work, management, and employment relations, another on the political economy of capitalist growth. Matt is author of Management Divided (Oxford) and Organizing Prosperity (with David Kusnet; EPI) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (with Paul Prew, Tomás Rotta and Tony Smith; Oxford) and Comparative Political Economy of Work (with Marco Hauptmeier; Palgrave). He has published over 20 journal articles or book chapters, over 20 short academic pieces, and dozens of short popular pieces.



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