Abstract
Workplace training offers a distinctly explicit and uniquely articulate site for the ethnography of the capital–labor relation as an ideological phenomenon, where the everyday work of hegemony is shown to be deeply grounded in the everyday hegemony of work. In this ethnographic account of a factory classroom devoted to introducing production workers to the precepts of Total Quality Management and training them in Statistical Process Control, the neoliberal reform of the labor process—which sought to accomplish a class decomposition of the company’s workforce in favor of an individualizing regime of workers’ personal responsibility and accountability for various quality control operations—repeatedly provoked the company’s Latino workers into angry and vociferous expressions of antagonism to management. Indeed, insofar as the management’s efforts to reform labor by decomposing the workforce as a class formation merely intensified the prevailing preconditions of their racial formation, they thereby only exacerbated anew the Latino workers’ antagonism as workers to the terms of their subordination. Thus, the generic (ostensibly race-neutral) reform of the labor process initiated under the aegis of “Total Quality Management” implicated the presumed management of “quality” in a concomitant reconfiguration of what was, effectively, a contemporary regime of racial management.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This crucial insight is, after all, the central (if often unrecognized) theme ultimately animating Marx’s discussion of the fetishism of the commodity-form, which acquires its special status as a “social hieroglyphic” (1867/1976:167) because of the systemic way that the social relations between people, as producers, are mediated by their respective practical relations to things (e.g. tools, machines, raw materials, money, commodities), and finally manifest only in the objectively “social” relations between the things produced by their labor, through exchange (165).
As Marx explains, because human beings realize our purposes in the materials of nature consciously, our work requires that we “subordinate [our] will” to such tasks: “a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of the work. This means close attention” (1867/1976:284). Thus, labor subordination—and also the ensuing (political) problems of social domination, more broadly—is inextricable from some elementary and rather prosaic technical problems that are especially acute in the context of estranged labor, but which notably arise from more ontological features of human creative capacities.
This company name as well as all personal names in the ensuing text are fictive. Due to the fact that some of the people who were my interlocutors in the larger research project are vulnerable to the punitive legal recriminations that could be brought to bear upon their undocumented immigration status, I have chosen to protect the anonymity of the people depicted here. Likewise, in the interests of protecting myself legally against any possible charges of breach of contract or confidentiality on the part of this company, where I was indirectly employed, I have opted to exclude or alter any extraneous details that could serve to identify this particular workplace.
The contradictions of workplace literacy that arise from the place of “training” in labor discipline had diverse ramifications for my own institutionally mediated social situation and practice, both as a workplace-based instructor and as an ethnographer (cf. De Genova 2005:147–166, 2006). Elsewhere, I have elaborated a more extended discussion of the politics of second-language learning in particular in the racialized context of Mexican (or Latino) migrant labor and workplace “training,” including a critical problematization of my own sociopolitical status as a US citizen and “native,” racialized as white (De Genova 2005:13–55).
Throughout the ensuing text, when the category migrant is deployed, it should not be confused with the more precise term migratory; rather, the term migrant is intended to do a certain epistemological work—i.e., to serve as a category of analysis that disrupts the implicit teleology of the more conventional term immigrant, which is posited always from the standpoint of the (migrant-“receiving”) US nation-state (cf. De Genova 2005). In this instance, where the term modifies Puerto Ricans—who are US citizens by colonial birthright and thus, in a juridical sense, precisely not “immigrants”—migrant may be understood to refer to persons who originally migrated to the US mainland from the island of Puerto Rico (as opposed to those born on the mainland).
Even within the academic literature concerned with organizational theory and methods in management and business administration, where the TQM concept originated, there is evidence of some notably critical skepticism about the exuberant promotion of TQM as a “fad” or “fashion” (Abrahamson 1991, 1996; Hackman and Wageman 1995) and its accession to the status of a de facto “social movement” (Hackman and Wageman 1995:309), leading to a marked divergences among rhetoric, technical discourse, and empirical realities (Astley and Zammuto 1992; Zbaracki 1998), and even to its partial disavowal by its originators (Senge 1992; Zbaracki 1998).
For a general discussion of post-Fordist regimes of “flexible accumulation,” see Harvey (1989).
Notably, based upon an extensive survey of workplace ethnographies, Hodson et al. (1993) concluded that enhanced worker autonomy on the job (as a consequence of post-Fordist flexibilization) and the team organization of work had no definitively detrimental effect on levels of worker solidarity, and further, Hodson et al. (1994a, b) judged that workers’ heightened participation in the organization and monitoring of the labor process actually increased worker solidarity and also enhanced workers’ concern over organizational injustice. However, based again on a survey of ethnographic work, Hodson (2002) concluded that heightened worker participation, e.g. in self-monitoring teams, appeared to reduce workplace conflict, at least inasmuch as it did not tend to manifest itself in strike actions. For a revealing account of less formalized but nonetheless stalwart modes of resistance to TQM-inspired reforms of the labor process in an automotive plant, including changes to “the social organization of production,” see Ezzamel et al. (2001).
For a related discussion of the inadequacies of managerial efforts to implement TQM, see Knights and McCabe (1997).
References
Abrahamson, Eric. 1991. Managerial fads and fashions: The diffusion and rejection of innovations. The Academy of Management Review 16(3): 586–612.
Abrahamson, Eric. 1996. Management fashion. The Academy of Management Review 21(1): 254–285.
Astley, W. Graham, and Raymond F. Zammuto. 1992. Organization science, managers, and language games. Organization Science 3(4): 443–460.
Barker, James R. 1993. Tightening the iron cage: Concertive control in self-managing teams. Administrative Science Quarterly 38: 408–437.
Bendix, Reinhard. 1956. [1974] Work and authority in industry. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bonefeld, Werner. 1995. Capital as subject and the existence of labour. In Emancipating Marx: Open Marxism 3, ed. Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, John Holloway, and Kosmas Psychopedis, 182–212. East Haven, CN: Pluto Press.
Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing consent: Changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Burawoy, Michael. 1985. The politics of production. New York: Verso.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1989. Rethinking working-class history: Bengal, 1890–1940. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
De Genova, Nicholas. 2005. Working the boundaries: Race, space, and “illegality” in Mexican Chicago. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
De Genova, Nicholas. 2006. The everyday civil war: Migrant working men, within and against capital. Ethnography 7(2): 179–203.
De Genova, Nicholas, and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas. 2003. Latino crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the politics of race and citizenship. New York and London: Routledge.
Edwards, Richard. 1979. Contested terrain: The transformation of the workplace in the twentieth century. New York: Basic Books.
Ezzamel, Mahmoud, Hugh Willmott, and Frank Worthington. 2001. Power, control, and resistance in the factory that time forgot. Journal of Management Studies 38(8): 1053–1080.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Random House.
Garrahan, Phillip, and Paul Stewart. 1992. Management control and a new regime of subordination. In Fordism and flexibility: Divisions and change, ed. Nigel Gilbert, Roger Burrows, and Anna Pollert, 107–117. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1929–35. [1971] Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers.
Grenier, Guillermo J. 1988. Inhuman relations: Quality circles and anti-unionism in American industry. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hackman, J.Richard, and Ruth Wageman. 1995. Total Quality Management: Empirical, conceptual, and practical issues. Administrative Science Quarterly 40(2): 309–342.
Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Hodson, Randy. 1999. Organizational anomie and worker consent. Work and Occupations 26(3): 292–323.
Hodson, Randy. 2002. Worker participation and teams: New evidence from analyzing organizational ethnographies. Economic and Industrial Democracy 23(4): 491–528.
Hodson, Randy, Sean Creighton, Cheryl Sorenson Jamison, Sabine Rieble, and Sandy Welsh. 1994a. Loyalty to whom? Workplace participation and the development of consent. Human Relations 47(8): 895–909.
Hodson, Randy, Gregory Hooks, and Sabine Rieble. 1994b. Training in the workplace: Continuity and change. Sociological Perspectives 37(1): 97–118.
Hodson, Randy, Sandy Welsh, Sabine Rieble, Cheryl Sorenson Jamison, and Sean Creighton. 1993. Is worker solidarity undermined by autonomy and participation? Patterns from the ethnographic literature. American Sociological Review 58(3): 398–416.
Holloway, John. 1995. From scream of refusal to scream of power: The centrality of work. In Emancipating Marx: Open Marxism 3, ed. Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, John Holloway, and Kosmas Psychopedis, 155–181. East Haven, CN: Pluto Press.
Juran, Joseph M. 1974. The quality control handbook, 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kirschenman, Joleen, and Katherine M. Neckerman. 1991. ‘We’d love to hire them, but’…: The meaning of race for employers. In The urban underclass, ed. Christopher Jenks, and Paul E. Peterson, 203–234. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute.
Knights, David, and Darren McCabe. 1997. ‘How would you measure something like that?’: Quality in a retail bank. Journal of Management Studies 34(3): 371–388.
Knights, David, and Darren McCabe. 1998a. Dreams and designs on strategy: A critical analysis of TQM and management control. Work, Employment & Society 12(30): 433–456.
Knights, David, and Darren McCabe. 1998b. When ‘life is but a dream’: Obliterating politics through business process reengineering? Human Relations 51(6): 761–798.
Knights, David, and Darren McCabe. 1999. ‘Are there no limits to authority?’: TQM and organizational power”. Organization Studies 20(2): 197–224.
Knights, David, and Darren McCabe. 2000a. ‘Ain’t misbehaving’? Opportunities for resistance under new forms of ‘quality’ management. Sociology 34(3): 421–436.
Knights, David, and Darren McCabe. 2000b. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered: The meaning and experience of teamworking for employees in an automobile company. Human Relations 53(11): 1481–1517.
Knights, David, and Darren McCabe. 2002. A road less travelled: Beyond managerialist, critical, and processual approaches to Total Quality Management. Journal of Organizational Change Management 15(3): 235–254.
Knights, David, and Darren McCabe. 2003. Governing through teamwork: Reconstituting subjectivity in a call centre. Journal of Management Studies 40(7): 1587–1619.
Lemke, Thomas. 2001. ‘The birth of biopolitics’: Michel Foucault’s lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality. Economy and Society 30(2): 190–207.
Marx, Karl. 1867. [1976] Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1848. [1967] The communist manifesto. New York: Penguin Books.
Moody, Kim. 1988. An injury to all: The decline of American unionism. New York: Verso.
Neckerman, Katherine M., and Joleen Kirschenman. 1991. Hiring strategies, racial bias, and inner-city workers. Social Problems 38(4): 433–447.
Peña, Devon G. 1997. The terror of the machine: Technology, work, gender, and ecology on the U.S.—Mexico border. Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies/University of Texas Press.
Ray, Carol Axtell. 1986. Corporate culture: The last frontier of control. Journal of Management Studies 23: 287–297.
Roediger, David R. 2008. How race survived US history: From settlement and slavery to the Obama phenomenon. New York: Verso.
Senge, Peter. 1990. The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday/Currency.
Senge, Peter. 1992. The real message of the quality movement: Building learning organizations. Journal for Quality and Participation 15(2): 30–38.
Sewell, Graham, and Barry Wilkinson. 1992. ‘Someone to watch over me’: Surveillance, discipline, and just-in-time labour process. Sociology 26(2): 271–289.
Willmott, Hugh. 1993. Strength is ignorance, slavery is freedom: Managing culture in modern organizations. Journal of Management Studies 30(4): 515–552.
Willmott, Hugh. 2003. Renewing strength: Corporate culture revisited. Management 6(3): 73–87.
Zbaracki, Mark J. 1998. The rhetoric and reality of Total Quality Management. Administrative Science Quarterly 43(3): 602–636.
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the conference “Toward a Transformative Agenda around Race,” sponsored by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Ohio State University (1 December 2007), for a session devoted to the theme of race and management, and to the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London (6 February 2008). I am particularly grateful to Dave Roediger for inviting me to participate in the earlier event, which proved to be instrumental for my efforts to conceptualize what was finally at stake in the ethnographic material presented here. I likewise owe a note of appreciation to Roger Sansi-Roca and David Graeber for the latter invitation. I am also grateful to Sophie Day, Betsy Esch, Mao Mollona, and Howie Winant for their critical insights on these occasions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
De Genova, N. The management of “quality”: class decomposition and racial formation in a Chicago factory. Dialect Anthropol 34, 249–272 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9145-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9145-2