Re: AUT: horizontal corporations

[Peter van Heusden <pvh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, Sean Fenley wrote:

> This is pretty scary, eliminating hierarchy from the
> corporation; I wonder if anyone has seen a marxist
> interpretation of this phenomenon, i guess this is
> just an aspect of immaterial labor and postmodern
> means of production, or a function of the transition
> to societies of control...

What Chris has been muttering about in recent
posts is very relevant here - you're only a worker when they make you
work. At the moment, I'm sitting here in my office, and I'm meant to be
expanding the little pool of value that my boss exchanged for my labour
power. Instead, I'm writing emails to my fellow commies on
aut-op-sy. Hah! That'll show 'em.

As for a marxist interpretation of it - I haven't seen anything concrete,
but I'd be interested. How about re-interpreting Bill Watson's
'Counter-planning on the shop floor' in the context of the 'horizontal
organisation'? A 'horizontal organisation' is, in essense, one where
everyone is potentially a boss (or more accurately, everyone's a
supervisor) - the management trick is the attempt to make the plan
internal to the routine of every worker.

Where in the Fordist factory the plan (physically manifested as the
assembly line, or the typing pool) is clearly external to the worker,
where the worker is expected to do a particular job at a particular
interval, the flexibilisation bullshit is an attempt to enforce such a
(Fordist/Taylorist) scheme on a much more fluid and flexible kind of
job. I've never worked in a factory, so I'm not sure if the contrast here
is accurate.

For me a couple of questions arise:

1) How real is the 'flexible/horizontal organisation'? To what extent are
these models being used successfully, or are they simply a straight
Fordist scheme with a coat of paint? (My personal feeling is that in at
least some small sectors of the workforce - e.g. my job, jobs of a couple
of friends I know - there is a kind of 'flexible organisation' at work,
and it does to some extent work)

2) What are the mechanisms of control and resistance in these
organisations? E.g.: to work on a computer program, you need to spend some
time 'getting into' the program, adjusting your mind to its structure. If
this time is interrupted, you might as well start from scratch. The
reality of this time has in my workplace resulted in workers arguing that
they should work from home, with no interruptions. How much work is
*actually done* at home, and to what extent there is actually a
co-operative slacking off going on (a few of the workers arrived here as
friends, and might well be organising to cover each others back without my
knowledge) is not clear. Nothing quite as dramatic as a competition to see
who can blow enough motors, but still, a little data point.

In terms of control - I wonder to what extent the experience in the
'I.T. sweatshops' (the offices of the many software houses that produce
code on demand for various customers) has been generalised - to what
extent have 'time and motion' style studies succeeded / failed. My
impression from the literature about project failure in I.T. (which is
incredibly common) is that attempts at strict labour discipline haven't
been successful.

(With regards to 2, I wonder how the Kolinko / Undercurrent / etc. study
of call centres is going...)

Peter
--
Peter van Heusden <pvh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics
"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man
shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain
and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844
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