Type One: From Mills & Simmons Book COA Method

1. Comprehension. Every theory is just a way of looking at the world. Most management, OB, and OT texts adopt a "managerialist/pro-labor-process" theory, a perspective that takes the defined needs of those "in charge" as the starting point (M&S, p. 11; Braverman, p. 62-8). How is labor process theory comprehended by this firm?
1. Know the Labor Process Theory (Braverman Book pp. 52-3). Labor-process is the process by which fat cats accumulate surplus capital by by extracting capital from labor savings and environmental abuse. LPT is the way in which surplus value (profit for those on top) of worker's work is purchased and sold to accumulate capital, while labor is de-skilled, so that lower and lower wages are paid out. LPT includes creation of unproductive and producive labor, lowering pay, expert-dependency, de-skilling, substituting cheaper labor for skilled labor, creating a reserver army, technology substitutes, a division of labor, and flourishes where education systems are weak. In sum, capital seeks to de-skill, division of labor, automate, etc. to minimize wage-outlay and maximize what owners and CEOs put in their pockets. Labor process is the tendency of capitalist economies to convert all other forms of labor (e.g. entrepreneurs, sub-contractor, coops, indigenous craft) into hired labor (i.e. productive labor that makes capital for someone else), and then to degrade/deskill labor to lower and lower wage conditions, by extracting skilled labor knowledge and implanting it into management knowledge (division of labor) and/or technical (machine) systems (automation and routinization). Downsizing/reengineering, can be viewed, as the latest step in labor process conversion, where semi-skilled workers, once again become sub-contractors, and deskilled workers operate in "putting-out" systems of piece rate, pay your own benefits, temporary, part-time employment.

Can workers control and sell their own labor power (e.g. become entrepreneurs, sub-contractors -- with access to permits, patents, tools, machines, and materials)?

How is the worker/middle manager, sub-contractor, a unit (or cog), making surplus value for the capitalist in the bureaucratic machine, and in the global division of labor?

1. Reading. To "read" OT, is to look at organizations as "texts." A "text" is not only what is written, but what people say (and what they are silent about), their symbolism, and their body language. To "read" an organization as a "text" is to pay attention to how organizations, identities, roles, relationships, stories, rituals, and labor processes are constructed. To read is to "deconstruct" the taken for granted constructions, the asides, the marginalized, and the silences.
1. Taken-for-granted assumptions. One managerialist assumption is that effectiveness and efficiency is all there is to organizational life. Another way to read OT as a text is to look at how labor-process, gender, race, and ecology is treated in the text-constructions.
2. Silences, Exclusions, and Deletions. Most OT texts are silent about labor exploitation, race, ethnicity, and sustainability. Look at what is not talked about. Examples, Asides, Illustrations. Oftentimes OT texts put the gender and race stuff into the margins, into footnotes, illustrations, photos, and not in the main (stream) of the text.
2. Acting: The Praxis of OT. Praxis translates experience into ideas, that are tested and reflected upon in new experiences (M&S, p. 20-21). Managerialist texts look at everything from the viewpoint and praxis of the most powerful players, the owners or the CEO as they monopolize the labor process. CT looks at the praxis of the less powerful as they are dominated, marginalized, exploited by those in power. The less powerful can be employees, customers, communities, taxpayers, and the environment.
3. (Re)Writing: Reaching Out and (Re)Authoring. What are the practical alternatives, options, innovative ways of moving on? We are the authors of our behavior. We can re-author, re-write, re-story, or even invent new texts and new praxis that goes beyond managerialism and exploitative labor process. This is our objective as a class. We can rewrite from the vantage of employees, customers, feminists, radicals, and environmentalists. In this way we can work to create conversations with those in power, so that new forms and processes of organization will get author-ized. Reauthoring is a way to question the claims to truth that gird managerialist, labor-process authors.

Four Steps to Deconstructing Dualities.

1. Find the Dualities. Look for the propaganda. Look at the fictions. Look at the haves and have nots. Where is the text selling you a vision, dream, progress-myth, essentialist concept, transcendent principle, etc.? Review the text to isolate the most problematic dualities. Centered texts spawn binary opposites: male-female, organization-environment, white-black, quantitative-qualitative. Mills and Simmons (1994) refer to this is a search for assumptions, silences, exclusions, deletions, asides, and illustrations that contain hierarchies. It is not always easy to find hierarchy because a text may be pretending to be its opposite. If you only read the propaganda, you can be seduced into assuming that white is black, dictators are democrats, and chauvinists are feminists. Finding the dualities means lifting the veil of propaganda to let the "constructions" (moves to make you think what you think and act what you act and believe what you celebrate).
2. Articulate the Hierarchy. This is a search for "how a text means," not what a text means. The proof is to show how a text is able to accomplish the little propaganda steps that gets you to buy into what it is selling you. The hierarchy lives in a system that you are trying to articulate. Where to begin? Trace where the rhetoric does not live up to its own expectations or is even the opposite of what it says it does. Show how the text constructs a hierarchy by privileging one term over the other. One term may be vocal while the other is absent, silent or a supplement to the primary term. Labor can be in the discourse used, a "supplement" to management. In French, supplement has a double meaning û to add on to a thing already complete in itself, or to complete the thing by adding on to it. In managerialism, labor is corrupting, perverse, lazy, undependable û an expensive item that needs to be abandoned. "Organizations would be great places if it were not for employees," says the managerialist. Sometimes the marginal term is not in the text at all. In technological progress discourse, for example, the term "environment" may not be mentioned at all. In Boje and DennehyÆs (1993) terms, it is reading "between the lines" of the text (an implied term conspicuous by its absence). Articulating the hierarchy is what Mills & Simmons refer to as Comprehension. In much of Organization Theory (OT) the comprehension is "managerialist," "male-centered," with "white" and "anglo" assumptions. Mills and Simmons (1994) also look at acting, how instutition set up rules, regulations, and controls on peoples actions and behaviors.
1. Central :/:Marginal
2. Organization :/: Environment
3. Management:/: Labor
4. Capital :/:Labor
5. Male :/: Female
6. U.S. :/: Other
3. Reverse the Dualities. Once you can state the relationship between the two terms in a hierarchy, it is time to describe the play of differences common to both. E.g. managers are also employees. Or, a bureaucracy can take many forms (corrupt, red tape, protector of the weak, predictable processes, due process, restraint of power). Reversing means to look at the ways in which the other term is sometimes and in some ways the more dominant term. For example, reengineering may say it "bashes" and "smashes" bureaucracy, but it also creates bureaucracy, mechanical processes, and destroys the flexibility that is its claim. There are subtle and complex variations in each term of the duality. Subvert the original hierarchy between the central and marginal term of the duality by listing the variations and subtle differences and manifestations of the term. For example, show how the dominant term is a special case of the marginal term. This leads you to begin to see reversals in the dominant hierarchy. You can usually show how the author's text deconstructs itself. The author will provide clues and traces of the hierarchy and its reversals. For example, if you look at phallologocentric management texts, many of the preferred qualities of a leader such as social, team-oriented, nurturing, communicator û are ideal qualities of the female. Female begins to dominate male. At this stage, we have only replaced one dominant relationship with its opposite. In Mills & Simmons, this can mean substituting a feminist, ethnic, non-white, non-European, or non-managerialist assumption set for the hierarchies in the text. Boje and Dennehy (1993) call it "rebel voices:" giving voice to the marginal perspectives.
4. Resituate the Duality. Show how the text can become or sometimes is, a free play of the binary opposites. The task is to remove the domination of the hierarchy of the duality in the text. When there is no central configuration the text is nonhierarchical. The problem is how to do this without replacing one center for another center (one hierarchy for another). The resituation of the text is what Mills & Simmons (1994) mean by "re-Writing the Text to create new "praxis." Praxis means reperimenting and testing out new actions and relationships. Boje and Dennehy (1993) call this writing a new plot or restorying the dominant hierarchies. What is it like to behave in a new praxis, a new pattern of behaviors without hierarchy. What could it look like? Be creative.

Braverman, in Chapter 17, gives a concise treatment of the four stages of deconstruction (see my last lecture notes).

1. Find the Dualities. Braverman says that Capital and Labor constitute a giant duality (p. 377). Braverman views managers as agents who while sharing in "subjugation and oppression" that characterize the lives of workers (p. 418), occupy positions of comparative privilege. As agents of capital, managers are hired to pump surplus value" out of labor (Wilmott, 1997). Managers control the labor process to maximize capitalist profit and accumulation rather than increasing the self-determination, skill, and wage condition of workers (Wilmott, 1997)
2. Articulate the Hierarchy. Capital dominates labor, or as Braverman puts it:" "Capital is labor." This means that labor produces the surplus value (over wage value) that becomes profit. Explore the hierarchy: Capital appropriates labor (knowledge of labor become systemic knowledge) in its acts of greedy accumulation of more and more capital as labor is squeezed into poverty and dependency. Labor becomes more a more marginal as it is displaced by automation, de-skilled, and substituted for cheaper labor (agricultural labor and females employed at lower wages). This is where the labor process theory (the question I asked of you) gets articulated concisely.

The industrial reserve army has three parts:

1. the floating employees who move from job to job,
2. the latent workers found in agricultural areas (e.g. Nike's recruitment in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia), and
3. the stagnant surplus of workers who no longer can find work and get to live as paupers (p. 386-7). The first and second are the "concealed: proportion of the population who do not show up in the unemployment statistic. Males, particularly Black males in the U.S. have been moved, more and more into the stagnant sector, while lower-paid women and exported jobs increase (p. 391-393).

In sum, this is the labor process theory, the movement of mass numbers of higher paid and highly skilled males into the industrial reserve army, while the rulers of industry take out larger and larger pay and stock options for themselves. With more information technology the ranks and pay of middle management continues to decline.

1. Reverse the Duality. Braverman deconstructs his own duality. He notes that "Labor is Capital" p. 377). Capital depends upon labor to extract its capital surplus. Not only workers, but managers (especially middle ones) are subjugated and oppressed. Another reversal: the individual entrepreneur, says Max Weber, is indeed a capitalist. The capitalist in building a business chooses between adopting a feudal and a bureaucratic structure. Capital in the dysfunctional side of bureaucracy pays labor subsistence wages, substitutes de-skilled labor for skilled labor, puts people in a hierarchy of specialized ranks and functions --- and overtime moves wages below the poverty line. Marx wrote about the need to exorcise Marxism from Capitalism. This could be our Western inability to look at underemployment, homelessness, child labor, racism, de-skilling, sexism, environmental deterioration as a cost of business that is shunted onto tax payers. The ghost of Marxism goes beyond the totalitarian repression that fell (we hope) with the Berlin Wall. Derrida sees deconstruction as a more radical form of Marxism. To reverse the duality would make labor more important than capital. There are systems of enterprise, such as coops and worker-owned firms where labor is capital. There are also firms such as Body Shop, Ben & JerryÆs, Toms of Maine, etc. that put social and environmental responsibility ahead of CEO-greed.
2. Resituate the Duality. In resituation we look at the larger context in which the end term interplay. The two forces, capital and labor are in interplay in the global economy. There are examples of greed and non-greed in business formation. Labor can and does resist the greed form of capitalism. Capital is dependent on labor and therefor labor can be radical, democratic in its reversal of human and ecological destruction (Wilmott, 1997). A resituation looks at how managers are manipulated and encouraged to suspend their personal values and pursue surplus-value maximizing strategies that are exploitative. Managers are seduced and controlled by elaborate bonus, profit sharing, stock schemes to keep extracting surplus value from labor. Senior managers elevate the profit maximizing goal above all else (do the bidding of capital to the detriment of the work force). But, is managerial work wholly structured by capital? The manager speaks a discourse about profit-only, but also engages in family and community discourse. Labor protests and submits, rebels or is integrated into this system (p. 378) which puts the system ahead of the individuals. To move beyond the duality is to see that labor can have interest in corporate success and that management can experience a multiplicity of selfhoods, only one of which is being capital's surplus-maximizing agent.

1. Duality - Productive and Unproductive Labor
2. Explore the Hierarchy. Productive labor dominates unproductive labor. Productive labor in LPT produces surplus value for capital. Unproductive labor are the self-employed farmers, artisans, craftsmen and professionals. Capital accumulation requires all self-employment become wage employment under capitalism. Else there is no surplus value for capitalists to gather unto themselves. Nike capitalism, for example allows Phil Knight to accumulate billions in personal capital by destroying unproductive labor in third world countries and transforming it into productive labor in Nike Inc. factories. A second form of unproductive labor is the occupations in the firm that do not directly engage in production, such as accounting, finance, marketing, sales, etc. While unproductive labor has declined outside the grasp of capital, it has increased within its ambit (P. 415).
3. Reverse the Hierarchy. The duality deconstructs itself in Braverman's chapter. As unproductive labor was put inside the corporation and put to work to keep overhead down and otherwise aid in the capital accumulation made possible by productive labor, unproductive "white collar" labor gained status over productive "blue collar" labor. They also gained privileges, security, and status over blue collars.
4. Resituation of the Hierarchy. As the number of unproductive wage earners inside the firm multiplied a labor process took effect in which only the heads of departments had major privileges and status. The lowly white collar and the lowly blue collar employee became subject to the same misfortunes. The commercial (surplus value extending) side of the house employed its wage-workers, just as the production side of the house. Both productive and unproductive wage-earners became rationalized in the division of labor, de-skilled, and performed repetitive tasks for lower and lower wages. Except for the color of the collar, they lost the characteristics that made them a duality in the first place.

The Seven Step Process of Deconstruction

While a variety of deconstruction techniques can be used in evaluating the Nike Labor story, we chose to use a seven-step deconstruction process found in Boje's text, Managing in the Postmodern World. The seven components of this deconstruction are as follows.

1. Define the Dualities - Who or what is at opposite ends in the story?
2. Reinterpret - What is the alternative interpretation to the story?
3. Rebel voices - Deny the authority of the one voice. Who's not being represented or is under represented?
4. Other side of the story - What is the silent or under-represented story.
5. Deny the plot - What is the plot? Turn it around.
6. Find the exception - What is the exception that breaks the rule?
7. What is between the lines - What is not said? What is the writing on the wall? (Boje & Dennehy, 1994, p.340)

Dualities: In exploring the Dualities within the Nike story, we found some relationships that were more outspoken and others that were more subtle in nature. We tried to focus on relationships defined by Phil Knight's own words or those relationships outlined by Nike's advertising. Here are a few of the dualities more prevalent within the Nike story. First, Nike ads establish a duality between fit and healthy athletes and poverty stricken Asian workers. There is a perversity in the difference of wages paid to endorsement athletes vs. what the average Asian worker gains. It is hard to justify Knight's comments "Endorsement athletes are compensated at levels commensurate with their unique skills" when third world laborers are subjected to life threating work conditions and pittance wages. The next duality that came to mind was U.S. working conditions vs. Asian working conditions. American employees at Nike are privilege to plush working facilities and a variety of perks while Southeast Asian workers are subject to abhorrent work conditions. Two dualities hidden in Phil Knight's comments about third world economies are the benevolent corporation vs. the Asian labor pool and Phil Knight's god complex vs. the Asian worker. Knight plays on our sense of entitlement as Americans. America is the best and we should be entitled to enjoy the best without regard to other nations. Is Nike really good for developing nations? Is it okay for a few thousand Asians to suffer so we can enjoy the best tennis shoe?

Reinterpretations: The Reinterpretation looks at alternative interpretations of the story. While some of the following reinterpretations are taken from text or ads put out by Nike, other reinterpretations look at some hidden possibilities for alternate story lines. Nike is good about supplying the general public with alternative stories to the labor issue. We have incorporated several of Phil Knight's own interpretations while adding some of our own. The first three alternatives are based on quotes from Phil Knight.

1. Nike is not exploiting workers in Vietnam.
2. The boycott effort is really a fanatical group with no real data on labor abuses in foreign countries.
3. Nike really is good for developing nations.
4. It's okay for a few thousand Asian workers to suffer or die while their country gains an economic foothold and finally
5. Southeast Asia deserves to be exploited.

Other side of the story: Other side of the story is easy to identify since it is the Asian Workers who have the least voice in the story. How can Asian workers compete against Nike's marketing budget and huge market presence. Nike's annual gross profit exceeds the GDP of many developing nations.

Deny the plot: The next step in deconstructing the plot of the story is denying the plot. What is the plot in the Nike story? Phil Knight believes the Boycott effort has singled out Nike in the labor abuse issue and there is no truth to the labor issues. Have grassroots organizations been hoodwinked into boycotting the wrong corporation?

Find the exception: There are a few exceptions in the story. Nike has made an effort to correct the labor abuse problem by printing "workers rights" on wallet sized cards and not renewing contracts with suppliers that fail to meet "code of conduct" criteria.

What is between the lines: Here's what I hear in Phil Knight's speeches. When Phil Knight says "Plants making clothes and shoes for foreign markets are an essential first step toward modern prosperity in developing countries" I hear "large uneducated poverty stricken labor pools are good for Nike". When Phil Knight says "Everyone must work to better their economic situation and some might have to work hard than others" I hear Phil playing on our cultural value of work. In America, we believe that hard work pays off. Phil would have use believe that Nike's exploitation of Asian workers is good for them by giving them the chance to work. It might be good for them if the adhesive fumes, heat and lack of adequate ventilation do not ruin their health first. When Phil says Nike prints a "Code of Conduct" on wallet sized cards I see another marketing tool to sidestep the problem.

Conclusions

Nike continues to sell products even in the shadow of the boycott effort due to its impressive marketing machine. The use of propaganda techniques has help develop Nike's market presence. Media saturation and clever ad campaigns filled with emotion continue to sway the consumer market into purchasing Nike products. The boycott effort has met with little success only because they underestimate the power of Nike's marketing machine. Nike is the stronger voice and effect use of marketing techniques (propaganda) keeps consumers informed of Nike's side of the story.

References

Boje, David M. & Dennehy, Robert F. (1994). Managing in a Postmodern World. Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. p.340.