Re: AUT: horizontal corporations

["Chris Wright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Heh heh.  Muttering?  Doh.  Serves me right for writing so damn much.
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter van Heusden" <pvh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2000 7:57 AM
Subject: Re: AUT: horizontal corporations


> 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
> OpenPGP key fingerprint: DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF  9295 6A26 6A92 0517
502B
>
>
>
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