Ideology plays a role in continuing the gap between hierarchical control by capital/management and workers’ democratic governance of their work. The ideology of managerialism legitimates the status quo. Gurus in "excellence" "TQM" and "BPR" have not changed the balance between manager control and democratic control of the labor process. The Tom Peters (and Waterman) excellence movement sets up a "strong culture" in which employees are persuaded and seduced to buy into managerially dominated labor process. Hammer and Champy reengineering sets up more managerialism by bringing in expert "science-imitators" to make designs more controlled by senior management. Imai’s and Deming’s TQM does not promote democratic worker control. Like Taylorism, TQM and BPR shifts worker knowledge to tec hnocratic expert managers (and overpaid consultants) who tweak the system as a whole into higher states of centrally controlled labor process.

Ideology is "masking specific interest (e.g. capital accumulation of labor surplus into senior management/owners hands) through general theories, demonstrating how bourgeois conceptions of justice or democracy (e.g. TQM, BPR, team management, Tayl orism) mystify capitalist hegemony (power manipulations that are too subtle to notice) over the working class" (Best, 1995: 248, editions mine, from Politics of Historical Vision - Guilford Press). By creating quality, customer visions as the genera l interest of workers, the particular greed interests of senior executives are masks by clever rhetoric. With Nike we get to see the hegemony of Phil Knights claims as they are dismantled and deconstructed and otherwise demystified to reveal the exploitation of whole races of Third World Women and un-knowledgeable First World consumers.

Managerialism Ideology – The viewpoint and voice of management is privileged above all other perspectives. The management function "is looked upon as clearly differentiated from organization work in general and is expressed as equally impor tant or more important than the organization in its entirety, i.e. the work carried out by 95-99% of the personnel who do not belong to the management" (Alvesson, 1987: 160). For more on manageri alist.

Elitist Ideology – The good boss, good leader, and the good executives work hard, are competent, and exhibit situated qualities necessar y to succeed. In both concentrated and diffuse spectacle, the elite view is that the they were born to power, and those out of power are where they belong. The executive (boss, leader) elite are segmented from people in general by their special education, training, and psychological nature. "Business leaders possess special personal qualities which make them more ‘holistic’ in their thinking, strength of will, capable of bringing out ‘the best’ in their subordinates or quite simply more ‘charismatic’ than people who do not reach higher management positions in their careers, all according to the elitist ideology" (Alvesson, 1987: 161).

Harmony Ideology Harmony is the idea that a complete integration between management and employee psychology is possible. Again, we see this in concentrated spectacles of job enrichment and empowerment programs of the formal organization and in the new cosmology of the global spectacle where labor is now set free from paternalism, to seek independence from full time employment (as t he story goes). We only have to find the right balance of "democratic leadership, personnel and group-oriented management, intrinsic motivation, involvement, personal development, self-realization, etc" (Alvesson, 1987: 161).

In short, I am proposing that the road beyond managerialist ideology lies in democratic governance of the work by workers. I favor local administration of overseas pla nts. Braverman (1974) points out that the antidote to managerialist labor process is granting workers democratic control over their own workplace and society (see p. 445-6 footnote). By democratic control he does not mean parliamentarian committees that elect directors and workers’ councils. This is the false, pseudo democracy that is the university. The "real" decisions never get to committee. Braverman means taking labor process control away from experts, committees, etc. and demystifying ps eudo-science claims and privileged ideologies (e.g. managers are the experts), and returning technical and system knowledge back to the workers. It is skilling-up instead of skilling down. It is broadening the unitary goal of profit maximizing schemes t o include worker-control of work, social accountability, and environmentally sustainable designs. It means an education system that educates wage-earners in self-governance, science, technology, ecology, and democracy.

Alvesson & Willmott. Their book Making Sense of Management (Sage, 1996) integrates Braverman’s labor process with Derrida’s poststructuralism (deconstruction), and Habermas’ modifications to Marxism and enlightenment (tenets of developing modes of dialogue to achieve social consensus). They (A&W) say the intent of Habermas’ Critical Theory (CT) "is to foster a rational, democratic development of modern institutions in which self-reflective, autonomous and responsible citizens become progressively less dependent upon received understandings of their needs, and are less entrance by the apparent naturalness or inevitability of the prevailing poli tical-economic order (A & W, 1996: 17). It all started with a division of labor between management and labor. The social division of "handlers" and (of horses) and the handled (the horses is the original metaphor for maneggiare (management) (A & W, 1996: 29).

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Labor Process Theory (LPT) explains the surplus value of top executives in the capitalist mode of production and the lowering of wages to support unproductive labor activities in an surplus-extractive division of labor. It is not ab out getting higher quality goods and services to customers. This is a fiction masking the labor process of extracting surplus values to bloat the top of the pyramid as more unproductive labor rides on the backs of productive labor as both labor divisions experience the tragedy of de-skilling, rationalization, and hierarchy. Extraction of surplus, not quality is the goal of corporations and higher education. We begin by looking at how Braverman does his own deconstruction of the productive-unproductive labor duality.

As science builds more mechanical systems of organization, the average worker understands little of the total process and is dependent upon a few experts who understand the system as a whole. To keep the fiction of progress alive, the labor statis ticians and sociologists cleverly redefined "unskilled, "semi-skilled," and "skilled" occupations – to make it appear that with more technology and science, that skills were being "upgraded." Part of the ruse was to ext end the number of years of education, as if more years meant more educated than before. What used to be craft mastery became the skill of tending, watching, oiling, or feeding a machine. Farmers skilled in animals, plants, soil and the like were classi fied as unskilled laborers, so that a story could be told that in their move to the factory to tend machines they moved from no skill to semi-skill. Absurd to think that years of apprenticeship to farm and ranch was less a skill than a day or week of trai ning in machine tending.

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As LPT does its magic transformation in every industry, every product and service, the jobs of the majority of citizens require less education, contain more monotony, less wages, less benefits, less advancement, and less skill. Mass education does its bit by keeping students stupid enough in 12 years of education to read and write at the 6^th grade levels required of most jobs. School systems are designed perfectly to produce the kinds of ignorant workers that can be paid McDonald’s wag es. As Braverman puts it "education is a liability to the employer" (p. 441). They might figure out what surplus accumulation actually means. More education would mean workers who would be dissatisfied with low wages, repetitive worker, auth oritarian hierarchy, ecological decay, and greed.

1. Labor Process. The capitalist purchases wage earners to accumulate more capital through surplus value extracted from the labor process via technology, fractionated tasks, placing knowledge of craft into the system, minute control, and substitut ions of cheap labor for more expensive labor. Once the labor process (how the work is planned and done) was the responsibility of the craftsperson, it is now the responsibility of the capitalist and his handmaiden or surrogate agent, the manager. In ear ly industrial capitalism, the capitalist just sub-contracted (p. 61) the highly skilled craftsperson (miller, blacksmith, printer, potters, tinsmiths, etc.) through the crafts guild to do the work. But, there was a way to extract more surplus and to dri ve wages down. Factories began in guild-less towns where their power over the labor process was unrestricted so capital could take control of the labor process (p. 60). Company towns, such as you see in Nike labor camps provide systems of total control o f labor and the labor process. In each industry there is a transformation as skilled crafts people and entrepreneurs become instruments in a systems of capital accumulation and substitute factors of production (p. 139). The labor process was dissolved f rom something conducted by the skilled worker and reborn as a mechanistic process conducted by management over dumbed-down workers (p. 170). As the labor process does its thing fewer workers are needed and more non-productive labor (accounting, finance, surveillance) and senior salaries rest upon their backs (p. 206-7). This can be seen in universities as fewer faculty teach larger class sizes, technical substitutes (distance learning, computer labs) go on line to displace faculty, graduate students do more teaching, and faculty carry more and more administrators, grant agencies, research institutes, athletic departments, assistant to assistant administrators, and other non-productive service providers are their backs. More resources are going into sur veillance of faculty time, while less resources go into classrooms. Over time university employment is becoming deskilled to further surplus labor extraction in the hands of those at the apex of the bloating pyramid. Finally, as Braverman says "the whole form of the movement of modern industry depends … upon the constant transformation of a part of the laboring population into unemployed or half-employed hands" (p. 383). The last two decades have seen more downsizing, de-skilling, and movemen t of workers into no-benefits, part-time and no employment, while the salary paid to those at the top has sky rocketed. Each downsize nets corporate 1000 CEOs millions in stock payoffs. Braverman says the Reserve Army of Labor is composed of floating wo rkers moving from job to job, latent surplus workers moving from agriculture (and other sectors) to displace higher paid workers, and stagnant surplus people who dwell in the world of the unemployed and poor.
2. Surplus Labor Value. This is the point of LPT: to accumulate surplus labor value from wage earners working the most hours, at the fastest speed at the lowest rates of pay in order to put those dollars into the pocket of senior management/owners . As Braverman says "it is money exchanged for labor with the purpose of appropriating that value which it creates over and above what is paid, the surplus value" (p. 413). Labor which can be transformed into accumulated surplus is destro yed. Misery accumulates in direct proportion to the accumulation of capital in the pockets of CEOs (p. 396). "The pyramids were built with the surplus labor of an enslaved population" (p. 64). Coercive methods were required to turn free craftsp eople into habituated cogs in the machine. Surplus labor is the difference between what a wage earner receives and what a capitalist sells the workers’ services for to a customer. The difference is accumulated into the budget of the CEO and the dividends of the owners (less actual costs of materials, tools, and physical plant). The absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is the greater the reserve army of part-time, under- and unemployed the more extensive the poverty, the more concentrated the w ealth, while the rest get misery (p. 388-9). The wealth and misery surplus is extracted by finding ways to reduce the wages of employees using the following items:
3. Division of Labor. Detailed division of labor destroys the skill and comprehension of craft occupations who could perform the entire production process. This lowers wages. One division of labor is between the fractionated productive labor an d the unproductive labor watching, tabulating, gazing, planning, advertising, and auditing the behavior of the productive labor (p. 417). In both forms, operations are separated from each other and assigned to different and cheaper workers. Destroying the craft as a process, it is reconstituted under the direct command and control of capital’s agent, management and his/her legions of unproductive clerks. Each productive worker only needs the requisite skill and wage to perform one routine operation which results in surplus value to the capitalist and each unproductive worker can be similarly de-skilled and de-waged. The division of labor systematically destroys all-around skills, only using the craftsmen where needed and eventually not at all (See Boje’s 1995 analysis of Disney and Ub Iwerks, the key man). A mass of simple, low-paid, de-skilled labor results from the division of labor which invests all knowledge in the system (Babbage’s general law of the capitalist division of labor, p. 83). In the university there is productive and much unproductive labor. Productive professors are more and more specialized, but also told what and how to do by unproductive labor who assigns them what to teach, what books to use, audits, and assesses etc. Where once upon a time the university was run by the faculty, the administrators and legions of unproductives have taken total control of the university. Divisions of lesser paid functionaries do the unproductive work while those at the top of the unproductiv e pyramids reap the perks and benefits (p. 417-8). In this games, there is no money left to train a professor to be cross-disciplinary, provide hands-on instruction, spend quality time with students, when most of the money is spent in inflated central adm inistration budgets to pay for the unproductive side of the university. While the number of faculty decreases the staff of administrators (along with salary and budgets) has increased in the past decade. Capital is appropriated from the productive side of the university to finance the accumulation of the unproductive side. As the labor process continues to work its way through the university system, the quality of education deteriorates as the skill and number of faculty decreases and the proportion of u nproductive work done to extract surplus value from faculty labor increases. The system continues to take on more importance than faculty and students, who are both cogs in the total machinery of the university now re-engineered to multiply capital to tho se at the top end (p. 419).
4. Wages. By lowering wages through supplements of technology and substitutions of cheaper genders, races, and lowering skill requirements, wages can be lowered to allow for more surplus labor capital to be put into the pocket of the senior execu tives/owners. Those who watch and micro-manage professors receive more money, get more housing, bigger offices, more support, than those who work in the classrooms. Wage increases are sucked into the top of the pyramid. Faculty-originated grants carry 4 0% overhead payoffs to central administration budgets. For Nike, the "minimum wage" is not a "living wage" necessary to support a working-class family (p. 397). As the great Army of Reserves grows, wages drop and wealth concentrates into fewer hands. Notice also how all training received outside the higher education orbit is deemed unacceptable (i.e. unproductive).
5. Technology. "The purpose of machinery is not to increase but to decrease the number of workers attached to it" (p. 384). This makes more money available to central administration to hire bigger entourages. Deans and administrators ar e great fans of technology. Mechanization displaces productive labor (p. 172) and subordinates them to the machine (p. 231) resulting in dehumanized prisons of labor (p. 233). With technological determinism, the only important things are those material s that come from mass production and mass consumption (p. 16). Technology is now used for the control of labor (e.g. surveillance, numerical control, guiding & pacing the process, computer key stroke counts, time clocks). Automation deskills to crea te "dead labor (p. 220, 225, 228). At Nike there is machine servitude (p. 194). There are many academically dead professors teaching at the university. The outcomes assessment movement in higher education is a way to subordinate faculty to the mach ine system of input (GMAT scores), throughput (how do you measure learning?), and now output measurement of faculty behavior. With deskilling of the profession, more micro measurement and surveillance is thought necessary.
6. Race. Capitalism subordinates one race over another as the labor reservoir of the unproductive (defined as those who are self-employed) is made productive (brought into the capital enterprise so surplus value can be accumulated at the top) to the accumulate of surplus capital for the master races. Those at the top of the pyramid may be a race apart from those at the bottom.
7. Gender. The female is brought into corporate enterprise to displace higher paid males in order to move surplus wages into the pockets of the capitalist, who is usually also male (p. 202, 392-3). In universities, few women attain rank of profe ssor. At that same rank, women faculty receive significantly less pay and benefit (estimates are 30 to 35% less).
8. Education. Millions are educated to willingly tolerate a public education arrangement that destroys happiness, de-skills, and renders much of the population unemployable and unable to fend for themselves. Braverman says high school is a place to baby-sit teens so that they will not add to unemployment (p. 436-9). The universality of public education devalues the earning power of the unproductive laborers hired to extract surplus from the productive workers, who are also devalued by an educat ion that takes 12 years to teach what was once taught in eight (p. 422). Too much education leads to imagination which results in work dissatisfaction with being a cog in a machine extracting labor surplus and injecting it into CEO stock and perks (p. 44 2). More education allows you to see through the illusory fiction of rhetorics of participation, empowerment, vision, and human relationships that m ask the labor process as usual. Education (especially liberal) may be a liability to employers (p. 441). What to do: go back to apprenticeship and let the faculty and students run the university. Use the unproductive money spent on administrative perks and surveillance to fix the chairs! Return the process of education to faculty and students. Give faculty and students democratic control of their own workplace and the university as a whole.
9. Science. Used to place control of ever-larger systems in the hands of fewer expert agents while the mass of people do not understand the processes they operate. Capitalism and the concentration of capital pays for labs and the results therein (p. 156). Science grew out of the industrial arts. Science spawned by corporate giants buys and sells science like a commodity (p. 166).
10. Scientific Management. Taylor was the first management guru. He is also an apologist for the labor process system, which extracts knowledge and skill from the craftsperson and nests it into the machine system of management. Scientific manag ement (SM) masquerades as a science (p. 86). In reality, working craftpersons attended training in mathematics, properties of materials, and physical sciences (p. 133-4). Work became less, not more scientific, but Taylor, like Tom Peters is an evangelical guru who tells a good story. In effect SM uses methods that the craftsperson used to plan and segment their own work (p. 88, 110). The real issue is control: control over the work through the control of decisions made in the process of work (p. 107).

Postmodernists also critique the increasing domination of administrative structures over work and social scenes (Best, 1995: 243). Habermas tries to resurrect an enlightenment thesis, the rescuing of workers from the domination of technocratic and man agerialist ideologies we see in labor process. But, in late capitalism, postmodernist see that instead of progress toward enlightenment, the domination has been expanded. Instead of linear progress, postmodernists see non-linearity and the interplay of power and resistance. Teleology is the theory that history moves toward a pre-ordained goal (e.g. enlightenment, progress, democracy, etc.). Nike, for example use propaganda by a rbitrarily selecting specific bits of information to tell a story of the linear development of Third World economies who have erected Nike factories. CT and postmodernism both point out facts left out of the story. Nike reduces history to a teleology t hat values one particular ideology (managerialist) over the particular stories of particular cultures. Both seek to overturn false ideologies and metaphysical guru theories, including Nike stories, in order to effect real changes in how corporations impl ement democratic rights. Habermas also poses transcendental values which can guide ideal speech toward social consensus. Postmodernists are skeptical. The more social voices, the more diversity, the more social heterogeneity, the more complexity, the l ess likely that social consensus is possible or advisable. Instead of an appeal to transcend ideals, ideal speech, or teleology, postmodernists privilege local stories, local implementation of democratic/pluralistic ideals, and see a dark age around them instead of an age of progress and reason.

Critical Postmodern Solutions to Labor Process. Critical postmodernists are accused of critiquing everything without posing any so lution. As a critical postmodernist I would like to cross that line in the sand. My books on postmodern management and OT (Boje and Dennehy, 1993 Managing in the Postmodern World - Kendall Hunt Press; Boje, Gephart and Thatchenkery, 1996 Postmodern Man agement and Organization Theory - Sage Press) have posed solutions.

I would like to resituate LPT and postmodern theory into a critical postmodern theory (CPT). CPT demystifies global capitalism by looking critically at social and ecological realities. I think it is possible to transform corporate structures of socia l and ecological domination by promoting democratic control of work and sustainable business conduct. It will require overthrowing managerialism and the reliance upon experts, a redistribution of capital accumulation in ways that balance social and ecolo gical interests. I do not believe that nihilism is the only result of postmodern theory. I think that proliferating discursive alternatives, plurality, and critique can contribute to de-centering managerialist and anthropocentric ideologies. But, then I am an affirmative optimist.

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