Description
This paper examines the role of accounting in management–labour relations within the context of contemporary
moves to re-conceptualise and reorganise manufacturing processes. We explore how new manufacturing and accounting
discourses are received by employees, and how their (more or less accommodating) responses to such initiatives
shape the trajectory of their introduction. So doing we show why a more adequate understanding of accounting’s
presence and significance in the workplace does not simply require a little more attention to the politics of the production
process but, rather, its positioning at the centre of analysis. We develop our argument by drawing on material
collected from an intensive and longitudinal case study of a manufacturing plant of a large multinational company
based upon participant observation and extensive interviews. We show how, following shifts in market conditions and
company ownership, pressures to enhance productivity and improve profits led to several attempts by senior management
at the plant to introduce change initiatives in production methods, management style, and accounting techniques.
We demonstrate how shopfloor workers interpreted these initiatives as intensifying labour by reducing head count,
leading them to resist these initiatives over a period of 13 years.
Accounting and management–labour relations: the politics
of production in the ‘factory with a problem’
§
Mahmoud Ezzamel
a,
*, Hugh Willmott
b
, Frank Worthington
c
a
Cardi? Business School, Cardi? University, Cardi?, CF10 3EU, Wales, UK
b
Judge Institute of Management Studies, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK
c
Liverpool Institute of Public Administration and Management, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
Abstract
This paper examines the role of accounting in management–labour relations within the context of contemporary
moves to re-conceptualise and reorganise manufacturing processes. We explore how new manufacturing and account-
ing discourses are received by employees, and how their (more or less accommodating) responses to such initiatives
shape the trajectory of their introduction. So doing we show why a more adequate understanding of accounting’s
presence and signi?cance in the workplace does not simply require a little more attention to the politics of the pro-
duction process but, rather, its positioning at the centre of analysis. We develop our argument by drawing on material
collected from an intensive and longitudinal case study of a manufacturing plant of a large multinational company
based upon participant observation and extensive interviews. We show how, following shifts in market conditions and
company ownership, pressures to enhance productivity and improve pro?ts led to several attempts by senior manage-
ment at the plant to introduce change initiatives in production methods, management style, and accounting techniques.
We demonstrate how shop?oor workers interpreted these initiatives as intensifying labour by reducing head count,
leading them to resist these initiatives over a period of 13 years. We argue that during this period the rhetoric of cor-
porate governance was mediated by workers’ ability to create a space through which their own interests were de?ned,
articulated and brought to bear on the discourses and rationalities advanced by senior management in support of ‘new’
accounting (and management) techniques. By appreciating the presence and signi?cance of labour in the politics of
production, additional ways of accounting for the rise and demise of ‘new’ or ‘excellent’ accounting techniques are
contemplated.
#2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Over the last decade, researchers have examined
changes that purport to engender ‘new’, progressive
forms of work organization in manufacturing
including initiatives to promote teamworking, ?ex-
ibility, and multiskilling. (e.g. Ezzamel, Lilley, &
Willmott, 1997; Storey, 1994; Whittaker, 1992).
Celebrated developments include cellular manu-
facturing (see Alford, 1994) and just-in-time manu-
facturing (Schonberger, 1986). Corresponding
changes in work organization encompass forms of
0361-3682/03/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0361-3682(03)00014-X
Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
§
This paper is part of a larger research project funded by
the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Fifth Inter-
disciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Conference, University
of Manchester, Manchester, July 1997 and at the Manufactur-
ing Accounting Workshop, Copenhagen, March 1999. We are
grateful for the many constructive comments made by Chris-
tine Cooper and other delegates at these meetings and by the
two anonymous reviewers.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Ezzamel).
empowerment and job-enlargement that are often
portrayed as a new dawn of participative, co-opera-
tive management-labour relations. In parallel with
these developments, changes in management
accounting techniques have been commended,
including Activity-Based-Costing (ABC), Through-
put Accounting (TA), Cellular Accounting, Back-
?ush Accounting, Economic Value Added and
Strategic Management Accounting (Kaplan, 1994).
We seek to contribute to an emergent literature
that locates such accounting changes within wider
debates that have included inter alia issues of
national competitiveness, shifts in modes of cor-
porate governance, reforms in manufacturing and
management practice and demands for new forms
of accountability commensurate with the aims and
objectives of the ‘brave newworkplace’ (e.g. Kenney
& Florida, 1993; Miller & O’Leary, 1993, 1994).
The role of accounting techniques in organizations
is, however, mediated by workers’ willingness to
embrace, or at least support, their operation. In
the absence of their co-operation, production is
halted and services are not delivered. Previous
research has explored the role of accounting in
wage negotiations and collective bargaining (e.g.
Amernic, 1985; Croft, 1981; Foley & Maunders,
1977; Ogden & Bougen, 1985; Owen & Lloyd,
1985). Most studies (but see Amernic, 1985),
however, have either focused upon the normative,
in contrast to the empirical, roles of accounting,
and/or have abstracted their analyses from the
specificities of the organizational settings of man-
agement-labour relations. It is not an exaggeration
to observe that nothing much has changed since
Bougen (1989, p. 205) noted that ‘‘There has been,
unfortunately, a lamentable paucity of research in
the accounting-industrial relations ?eld.’’
Of the few studies that have sought to inter-
rogate context-speci?c practices of accounting as
they interact with industrial relations, Bougen
(1989) examined the introduction of a pro?t shar-
ing scheme in a historically-based case study.
Other accounting research has explored the roles
of accounting in the re-ordering of manufacture
(Carmona, Ezzamel, & Guttierrez, 2002; Jones &
Dugdale, 1995; Miller & O’Leary, 1993, 1994), but
these studies o?er scant empirical illumination of
the relationship between accounting and the
everyday practices through which labour articu-
lates its diverse priorities and interests. Notably,
Miller and O’Leary’s ‘politics of the product’ fra-
mework, as Arnold (1998) points out, omits the
voice of labour. By concentrating almost entirely
on (North American management) exhortations to
the e?cacy of new forms of accounting and fac-
tory organization, Miller and O’Leary ignore the
politics of production (Burawoy, 1985).
Outside the accounting ?eld, sociologists of
work, industry and organization have routinely
disregarded the presence and signi?cance of
accounting in promoting, justifying and impeding
the (re)organization of work practises, including
those involved in new manufacturing processes. In
e?ect, accounting is invisible within such studies,
perhaps because it is regarded as esoteric or
merely re?ective (i.e. score-keeping) rather than
constitutive and reproductive of change initiatives
and their problematical implementation. Yet, as
we seek to show, the development and use of ‘new’
accounting techniques to re-organize work, is of
central importance. Work practices are quanti?ed,
assessed and reported through forms of account-
ing that are consequential and contested.
Accounting operates as a key signi?er that is
enacted through management–labour relations in
ways which enable and constrain how managerial
prerogative and worker discretion are negotiated.
Accounting-based measures indicate performance
Nomenclature
ABC activity-based-costing
ABM activity based management
JIT just-in-time
LP lean production
LPT labour process theory
MBF management by fact
NDM non-discretionary management
OPT optimal production technology
SPC statistical process control
TA throughput accounting
TOC theory of constraints
TQM total quality management
VF visual factory
270 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
and are frequently coupled to reward. Their pre-
sence and operation is signi?cant for the experi-
ence of work as well as the symbolic and material
value that is placed upon it. As we shall show, in
our case study accounting measures were deployed
by managers in an e?ort to (re)draw the bound-
aries of relations with labour that are precarious,
subject to revision and open to interpretation,
scrutiny and challenge by managers as well as
workers.
This paper addresses the relationship between
accounting and the politics of production by
examining the translation of ‘new’ accounting
knowledge into manufacturing practices, and the
actions of labour, management and shop stewards
at Northern Plant (a pseudonym). Northern Plant,
in the North West of England, is the primary
European manufacturing site of MotorCo (a
pseudonym), a North American owned multi-
national company that acquired the plant from
N-Gineering (a pseudonym) in the early 1980s. Our
involvement at Northern Plant included partici-
pant observation and intensive, semi-structured
interviews. One of the authors worked at the plant
between 1979 and 1995 in a variety of shop?oor
jobs including machine operator, assembly worker,
and storeman. This experience was documented in
?eld notes and, together with internal documents
as well as over eighty recorded and transcribed
interviews, each lasting between one and one and a
half hours, with senior and middle managers,
supervisors, shop stewards and shop?oor workers
conducted between 1995 and 1998, forms the
backbone of our analysis of the plant’s history and
our accounts of the various change initiatives,
including workers’ experience of these initiatives.
Speci?cally, we place accounting-based change
initiatives in the context of management–labour
relations, with a focus upon the dynamics of
worker resistance to planned organizational
‘change’. ‘New’ manufacturing and accounting
methods, we contend, are devised and enacted
within an ensemble of relations and traditions
forged inter alia by pressures to provide an ade-
quate rate of return for investors (or risk the ?ight
of capital); to establish markets for the goods or
services produced; and to transform hired labour
into a pro?table activity. The transformation of
labour power into productive labour is a condition
of the manufacture of the goods and provision of
services from which a viable return on capital can
be secured. The articulation and elucidation of
this process of transformation and accumulation,
we contend, is most fully developed in labour
process theory (Knights & Willmott, 1989). How-
ever, while this theory discloses the operation of
the capital–labour relationship at the heart of
work organization, it is inclined to conceive of
labour as an economic resource to be harnessed by
strategies of management control without attend-
ing to labour as subjectivity that struggles to
de?ne and secure itself in a (precarious) sense of
identity. Accordingly, the interests imputed to
labour privilege their resistance to exploitative
and/or degrading conditions of work, often to the
exclusion of other concerns and associated lines of
action that are dismissed as symptoms of ‘false
consciousness’ (e.g. Thompson, 1989).
We begin with a consideration of the impor-
tance and relevant means of addressing the
dynamics of work organization, including the
introduction of new accounting and management
practices. We then sketch a brief history of
Northern Plant—dubbed by MotorCo’s corporate
management as ‘a factory with a problem’. Our
focus is upon a series of change initiatives promp-
ted initially by what management considered as
‘poor’ manufacturing performance and shop?oor
discipline, which culminated in the launching of
TA. When TA was perceived to fail to deliver its
claimed bene?ts it was replaced by ABC/ABM.
We explore forms of resistance that rendered these
and other measures ine?ective if not inoperable,
and we account for this resistance in terms of the
identity formation of employees
1
at the plant- a
sense of identity that was disrupted by the
demands of the new practices and con?rmed
through employee opposition to them. While this
formation occurred within an employment rela-
tionship conditioned by a ‘structured antagonism’
(Edwards, 1986) between capital and labour, we
argue that this framework of interpretation is
necessary but insu?cient to provide an adequate
1
Our use of the word ‘employees’ refers to ‘workers’
whereas we treat ‘managers’ as equated to ‘employers’.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 271
account of the actions of workers at Northern
Plant. In the ?nal section, we connect our analysis
to critiques of Miller and O’Leary’s (1993, 1994)
in?uential discussion of ‘the politics of the pro-
duct’. This provides us with a further opportunity
to reiterate the central importance of manage-
ment-labour relations, and in particular the sub-
jectivity of labour, for understanding practices
and processes of innovation in manufacturing and
accounting.
Worker resistance and labour process theory
Our analysis explores the dynamics of manage-
ment control and worker resistance to new forms
of accounting and accountability at Northern
Plant, in contrast to other studies that restrict
analysis to the narrower terrain of management–
trade union relations. This is not least because,
as we show later, worker resistance at Northern
Plant was by no means always instigated or led
by shop stewards at the site but often took its
own course in a context where shop stewards
accommodated as well as opposed manage-
ment’s pressures for change—an ambivalent and
shifting stance that acted to exacerbate worker
resistance.
Worker resistance and labour process analysis
How are the dynamics of workplace con?icts to
be interpreted? To address the relevance of man-
agement-labour relations for understanding the
introduction of new manufacturing and account-
ing practices, we commend but also propose a
reconstruction (O’Doherty & Willmott, 2001) of a
tradition of analysis, in the form of labour process
theory (LPT) (Marx, 1867/1976; Braverman,
1974), that places these relations at its centre. In
his revival of LPT, Braverman develops a sharp
critique of established traditions of industrial
sociology, exempli?ed at its best in the UK by
Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s (1968) study of
a?uent car workers, for its failure to connect
adequately responses given by workers and man-
agers to the social relations of production within
which such views are incubated. More speci?cally,
LPT seeks to locate the agendas and actions of
owners and managers of capitalist enterprises in a
contradictory structure of class relations. The
structure is understood to be contradictory
because, while the relationship between the buyers
(capitalists or their managerial agents) and sellers
of labour is not necessarily zero-sum in terms of
(re)organization of production and the distribu-
tion of surpluses (notably when growth and/or
process improvement permits gains for both par-
ties), it is systematically underpinned by capital’s
institutionalised capacity to treat labour as a dis-
posable commodity that is ‘freely’ traded in the
market. This capacity is exercised, LPT contends,
in capital’s struggles to seize and extend control
over the hiring and translation of labour power
into productive, pro?table activity and, ultimately,
in the ?ring of labour to restore an acceptable rate
of return on capital invested.
Orthodox LPT conceptualises ‘individuals’ (e.g.
workers, managers, stewards) as ‘the personi?ca-
tions of economic categories’ (Marx, 1976: p.92).
The merit of this formulation is that it avoids the
psychologising of workplace behaviour wherein
the actions of ‘individuals’ are abstracted from
their embeddedness in history and political econ-
omy. Notably, instead of addressing the reality of
managers’ actions or shop?oor work by attending
directly to their beliefs (or ‘consciousness’)—such
as managers’ belief in their professionalism and
neutrality or workers’ expressions of satisfaction
or fairness with their jobs—such ‘realities’ are
situated within the historical conditions of their
formation. Instead of regarding their accounts of
work as re?ective of its realities, they are analysed
as articulations of their respective positionings
with a mode of production where managers and
workers exist, fundamentally, as economic cate-
gories—as agents of capital and/or as suppliers of
labour. A limitation of orthodox LPT follows
directly from its treatment of management and
labour as economic categories as the signi?cance of
self-identity—of managers as well as workers—in
the negotiation and practical operation of man-
agement–labour relations is disregarded (Knights
& Willmott, 1989). Insisting that such concerns are
constitutive of these social relations, rather than
simply shaped by them, can be interpreted as a
272 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
return to the terrain of ‘cow sociology’ occupied
by those engaged with the measurement of worker
attitudes and their expressed levels of job satisfac-
tion. However, this disregards the continuities with
the radical tradition of labour process analysis in
which the focus is upon subordination and exploi-
tation, and which understands satisfaction and
compliance to be symptomatic of the complexities
and contradictions of management–labour rela-
tions rather than indicative of a new consensus or,
more grandly, an end of history.
It may be that, in some circumstances, workers
and managers are minded to embrace without
reservation the economic categories to which
orthodox LPT contrives to assign them. Accord-
ingly, the worker may become a passive, commo-
di?ed slave of managerial instruction or may
struggle against the subordination through collec-
tive revolutionary action; and the manager may
slavishly pursue the agendas of investors without
regard for his/her career prospects or s/he may
recognise the commodi?cation of managerial
labour and join in the struggles to overthrow
capitalism. However these and other (less extreme)
possibilities are contingent rather than necessary;
and they are emergent through participation in
diverse social relations (outside as well as inside
the hours of employment) through which a sense
of self identity (or indeed multiple identities) is
forged and secured. Self-identity may ultimately
be an illusion in the sense of being the product
of contingent and arbitrary processes of histor-
ical and cultural formation (Willmott, 1986,
1994). But it is an important illusion that
employers and employees are routinely inclined
to nurture and defend; and it is therefore a sig-
ni?cant element in the negotiation of manage-
ment–labour relations. Both parties to such
negotiations seek to preserve or expand a space
in which their respective narratives of self can be
maintained rather than undermined. The chal-
lenge, then, is to recognise the presence and
in?uence of self-identity formation, reproduction
and transformation but without reverting to a
form of bourgeois analysis that psychologises
management–labour relations.
When positioned in this context, a key ‘driver’
of managerial work is the recurrent search for
means of re-organizing business operations (from
production to marketing and after-sales securing
service) that will sustain the means of securing
surplus value (pro?ts/personal wealth) from
labour for example, by developing accounting
calculations that provide more relevant or useful
measures of labour’s productivity and cost. Meth-
ods of management control may be overtly econ-
omistic and coercive, in which case labour is
treated as an expendable commodity tout court
(e.g. ‘‘produce more or risk dismissal’’). However,
since the cooperation of ‘responsible’ labour is
routinely sought, methods of managing may be
favoured that strive to gain or harness its ‘consent’
(e.g. allowing labour to work ‘with the minimum
of direct supervision’ so long as targets are met).
Frequently, practices of management control con-
tain a volatile and shifting mixture of both ele-
ments. Deploying LPT brings (narrow)
managerial accounts of the impact of accounting
on management-labour relations in the new
workplace, such as Miller and O’Leary’s (1993,
1994), into sharp relief. It shows how labour’s
(apparent) willingness to engage with management
in ‘joint proprietorship’ of a ‘brave new work-
place’ involves processes of negotiation—pro-
cesses that are conditioned less by the dawn of a
‘new economic citizenship’ that heralds coopera-
tive management–labour relations than by on-
going con?icts and accommodations (Edwards,
1986, 1990).
LPT understands con?icts in management-
labour relations to be endemic, if suppressed,
because when ‘managers buy workers capacity to
work (labour power), they buy a peculiar sort of
commodity’ (Friedman, 1990: p. 178). Unlike
other resources available to capital, this ‘com-
modity’ is unusually indeterminate, extremely
malleable and wilful. Its malleability provides
capital with the creative potential it needs in order
to accumulate private wealth from the productive
activity of labour. But the means of harnessing
this potential are routinely found to be imper-
fectly compatible with the preferences and prio-
rities of labour with respect inter alia to job
security, job-satisfaction, promotion prospects
and ?nancial reward. The existence of established
preferences over which management can exert
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 273
limited in?uence suggests that its control over the
organization of the labour process is never exer-
cised exclusively on its own terms. As Friedman
points out, the expenditure of labour power
cannot be speci?ed in advance of the sale of
labour, nor guaranteed once sold to capital.
Productive e?ort is realised only by capital soli-
citing labour’s acceptance of the conditions
under which it is bought and sold in a market
economy and rewarded, symbolically and mate-
rially, thereafter.
One potential shortcoming of discussions of
management control that focus upon ‘the manu-
facture of consent’ (Burawoy, 1979), or ‘concerted
control’ (Barker, 1999), is that they pay minimal
attention to labour’s capacity to resist and disrupt
such initiatives (e.g. Delbridge, 1995; Sewell &
Wilkinson, 1992). There is a tendency to overlook
how employees enter into co-operation with man-
agement with certain expectations of their own
and anticipated outcomes in mind (see Ackroyd &
Thompson, 1999; Gouldner, 1954; Roy, 1952;
Thompson & Bannon, 1985). For some commen-
tators, e.g. Miller and O’Leary, the language and
ideology of the ‘new workplace’ appears to be so
powerful that workers not only lose their ability to
express any e?ective opposition to new forms of
accountability and control, but ‘even any sense or
awareness of their own self exploitation’ (McKin-
ley & Taylor, 1998: p. 175). Intensive case studies
of lean manufacturing that focus directly upon
workers ‘lived experience’ of JIT and TQM pro-
duction methods (e.g. Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998a;
McKinley & Taylor, 1996) have demonstrated
the danger of assuming the omnipotence of new
forms of management control and of exaggerating
their capacity to exclude or remove forms of
employee resistance. Even under conditions that
could hardly be more favourable for a ‘corporate
ideology to colonize the psyche’ of a work-
force (McKinley & Taylor, 1998: p. 189), e?ective
resistance is not only still possible, but also takes
place. A considerable number of case studies
support this view (e.g. Graham, 1994; Pollert,
1996; Rinehart, Robertson, Huxley, & Wareham,
1994; Stephenson, 1996), and even those studies
that proclaim the ‘end of worker resistance as we
know it’ often contain evidence to the contrary
that is either ignored or rendered irrelevant to the
basis of their analysis (e.g. Miller & O’Leary,
1993, 1994).
Understanding worker resistance
The message from these studies is that employee
resistance to new forms of accounting and
accountability in contemporary manufacturing is
both formally and informally organized, sometimes
planned, overt and systematic (e.g. Beynon, 1984)
but often spontaneous, disparate and covert, orga-
nized by agents acting collectively or as individuals
motivated by clearly de?ned aims and objectives,
or by contingent or expedient considerations in
speci?c personal situations or local circumstances
(see Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994). These
studies also suggest that much of what we call
resistance in organization cannot be understood
as, or reduced to, an outcome of the objective
conditions of capitalist employment relations.
Additionally, analysis of the experience of man-
agement-labour relations requires an appreciation
of how subjectivity and identity is implicated in
acts of resistance in organizations (Jermier et al.,
1994).
From an orthodox industrial relations and LPT
perspective, the conduits ?xing power relations are
clear and unidirectional: ‘The ?ow is always from
capital to labour, [and] the subjectivities appro-
priated to each are ?xed objectively, through class
position; that is, by relations to the means of pro-
duction’ (Clegg, 1994: p. 276). To ascribe to capi-
tal or management the supreme sovereign status of
the conduit of power is, however, problematical,
given the range and complexity of identity forma-
tions in organizations beyond those determined by
class relations. These include not only the embo-
diment of aspects of occupational identity, but
also gender, ethnicity or sexuality, along with
marital, community or consumer status, etc. In
our case study di?erences of occupational identity
and associated aspirations are counterposed to
comparatively homogeneous gender and ethnic
identities, and especially a sense of identity, as
independent, self-organizing subjects that had
been forged during the early years of the plant’s
operation.
274 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
Conventional industrial relations theories of
con?ict, including LPT, are inclined to look for
‘generalizable principles’ that account for how
collective action is possible, how it is mobilized
and how it is played out in various contexts, but
not how it is organized subjectively (see Kelly,
2000). In the case of Northern Plant, such analyses
of con?ict at work do not provide a plausible
account of resistance. Workers contested only
certain conditions of exploitation (i.e. lean pro-
duction), not exploitation per se, but sought to
preserve other conditions (i.e. a system of un-plan-
ned responsible autonomy, see below) under which
they had developed a sense of themselves as inde-
pendent subjects, seemingly and deservedly ‘free’
from direct management control. As we will show,
under the management control system that pre-
vailed at the plant prior to e?orts to introduce
lean production workers enjoyed a considerable
measure of autonomy that went far beyond even
the most relaxed forms of control in manufactur-
ing to which workers are usually willing to consent
(see Burawoy, 1979; Gouldner, 1954; Thompson
& Bannon, 1985). A distinctive symbolic space
opened up in which workers struggled to develop,
extend and defend a sense of themselves as inde-
pendent self-managing and resourceful agents who
were better able to work productively in the
absence of management control. Subsequent
e?orts of management to introduce lean produc-
tion were not simply perceived as something that
would breach existing frontiers of control and
established e?ort-bargaining mechanisms that
existed between management and labour at the
plant. Instead they were viewed as something that
would degrade their self-identity by usurping their
self-organization. This anticipated degradation of
self, we will suggest, not only fuelled worker’s
resistance to lean production and associated
accounting practices, but also gave it potency and
e?ectiveness that management was unable to con-
front with any real or lasting e?ect. Resistance
was so di?cult to manage precisely because it was
discursive, largely unorganized, distancing in nat-
ure (see Collinson, 1992, 1994), ‘misbehaviour-
based’ (Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999) and lacking
in any apparent overall aim or objectives. Indeed,
resistance at Northern Plant (eventually) came to
resemble what Foucault has called ‘hyper and
pessimistic activity’
2
.
Northern Plant: manufacturing and accounting in
transition
From the early 1970s to the mid 1990s Northern
Plant went through a number of major changes in
respect of demand for its main products, the
organization of its manufacturing arrangements,
management control strategies and accounting
practices (see Table 1). When N-Gineering opened
the Plant in 1971, it employed 70 people who
manufactured and supplied a very limited range of
high-tech automotive products to two major Eur-
opean-based vehicle manufacturers. Within less than
ten years the plant was established as the ?agship of
N-Gineering’s European operations. By the late
1980s it was employing almost 700 people and gen-
erating an annual sales turnover of around $70 m. In
this section, we present an overviewof these stages of
Northern Plant’s development before focusing upon
the use of newaccounting measures. We pay detailed
attention to the early phases because, we subse-
quently argue, the formation of workers experience
and knowledge during this period is of key impor-
tance for understanding the nature of their response
and the e?ectiveness of their resistance to ‘new’
manufacturing and accounting initiatives.
Unplanned responsible autonomy
The expansion of manufacturing operations at
Northern Plant has been built upon high-tech
2
As Simons (1994) points out, Foucault consistently refused
to commit himself to explaining what he saw as the meaning and
purpose, and moreover, any concrete examples of what in real
terms the lasting e?ects of the conditions of possibility of resis-
tance to power/knowledge might be. In Foucault’s view, in seek-
ing to de?ne what resistance is, what it means, what its purpose
and potential possibilities are, we face the danger of then seeking
to limit what ought to be achieved by it. He suggested that subjects
need no clear goals as a rationale for resistance, other than to feel
compelled to take issue with, and therefore (permanently) protest
against, the oppressive forms of power/knowledge that govern the
administration of their daily lives. But Foucault also recognized
that protest against (perceived) injustices is no guarantee of lib-
eration from oppression but may actually reinforce it (ibid.).
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 275
R&D expertise pioneered in the aviation industry
where N-Gineering had originally operated. Prior
to the mid-1980s, N-Gineering pursued an arms-
length policy towards managing its overseas oper-
ations, a policy that enabled Northern Plant to
develop on-site R&D and manufacturing expertise
that, in less than a decade, had become the
benchmark for the industry. From the early 1970s,
Northern Plant pursued a customer relations pol-
icy that actively sought inter-company co-oper-
ation on issues of product development, price,
quality and delivery performance. This earned the
plant a reputation for high quality product design,
development and manufacture.
Throughout the 1970s N-Gineering remained at
the forefront of a rapidly expanding global market.
In the early 1980s, it enjoyed approaching a 90%
market share world-wide. Given this market posi-
tion and its reputation for product quality, there
was little pressure on N-Gineering to extend its
sporadic ad hoc experimentation with Japanese
style quality control methods and production
techniques (e.g. quality circles and JIT) that
occurred from the 1970s until the mid-1980s. It
was during this period that a series of informal
management-labour agreements had been reached.
Workers would ‘‘deliver the numbers’’ to meet
constantly pressing output requirements in return
for having discretion over how work was orga-
nized. The combination of high wages, paid to
attract skilled employees, labour control over the
production process and lack of comparable
employment opportunities created a disincentive
to ?nd work elsewhere. Hence, there was an
extended shop?oor memory: most of the workers
who were at the plant in the 1990s had been
employed there since the 1970s.
Until the mid-1980s, management willingly sur-
rendered the organization of work practice to
labour so long as production levels were maintained.
Demand for the product was strong and unremit-
ting so that the costs of imposing controls were per-
ceived to be greater, and certainly more hassle, than
simply allowing employees to organize their work
in whatever ways would deliver output targets:
[Northern Plant] was simply expected to pro-
duce, pro rata, what it had always pro-
duced—a ?gure that was based upon, and
e?ectively capped by, the use of time and
motion studies to determine what levels of
output could be expected (Senior Manager).
Table 1
Management control/managerial accounting at Northern Plant 1971–1998
Product
demand
Manufacturing arrangements Management control strategy Managerial accounting
techniques
1971–1975 Emergent but
Increasing
Group technology Unplanned responsible autonomy Conventional standard
costing based
1975–1986 High Group technology with some use of
JIT/TQM production methods
Unplanned responsible autonomy Conventional standard
costing based
1986–1991 High group technology with more strategic
use of JIT/TQM production methods
JIT/TQM-based teamworking system
Programmed responsible autonomy
Consideration of (ABC)
but continuing with
standard costing
1991–1995 High Process-based cellular manufacturing JIT/TQM-based self-managing
teamworking methods
Programmed responsible autonomy
(TA) throughput
accounting with (TOC)
theory of constraints
1995–1998 High Product-focused cellular manufacturing Self-managing cellular based
autonomous production teams
Programmed responsible autonomy
(ABC) with (ABM)
activity based
management and (VF)
visual factory and
(MBF) management by
fact
276 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
Output targets were o?cially determined by a
measured day rate system. This required operators
to hand in a performance (job) card to their fore-
man at the end of each shift, thereby supplying the
relevant information to satisfy N-Gineering that
the plant was operating e?ciently. Yet, in prac-
tice, the measured day rate system had become
little more than a ceremonial undertaking that
permitted a negotiated order where formal proce-
dures bore little relation to shop?oor practice:
in those days, we’d just throw anything we
had at a problem to get round it. . .money,
men, overtime, whatever. This was what kept
everybody happy so it didn’t seem to matter
how you got the parts out so long as the cus-
tomer got them. That’s what this place was
built on getting the parts done, getting them
out the door, working together, just dealing
with things (cell leader, our emphases)
Our ethnographic evidence indicates that, as
soon as workers had ful?lled the agreed level of
output, a range of pursuits ?lled the remaining
hours before the job cards were completed and
returned to the foremen at the end of the shift.
These pursuits—which were known about and
tolerated by managers—included card schools,
darts, chess, table tennis competitions, sleeping
areas, drinking dens, etc. There were also regular
excursions to the pub, not infrequently with fore-
men participating. Workers would cover for oth-
ers to allow them to go home or ‘disappear’ for
lengthy periods during working hours. They were
able to ‘make the numbers’ in what, in some cases,
was only a fraction of the time allowed by the
time-and-motion calculations. If the goods pro-
duced failed to satisfy quality standards, workers
took responsibility for re-working them in their
‘free time’. When managers faced particularly
pressing delivery requirements, workers co-oper-
ated by guaranteeing output requirements in the
quickest time possible, even if these reached
beyond the o?cial output levels of the measured
day rate. However, workers co-operation and
‘?exibility’ was conditional upon management’s
willingness to preserve shop?oor discretion over
work organization.
In sum, a highly indulgent (Gouldner, 1954)
‘?exible’ set of working practices emerged that we
characterise as unplanned ‘responsible autonomy’.
The concept of ‘responsible autonomy’ is drawn
from Friedman (1977) who argues that, when
faced by the wilfulness of labour upon which
managers depend for goods to be produced, they
negotiate a position between two, ideal-typical
possibilities: ‘direct control’ involving the aspira-
tion to eliminate discretion through close super-
vision, or ‘responsible autonomy’ which involves
managers in shaping rather than suppressing
employees’ capacity to exercise discretion (e.g.
through selection, training and organizational
development programs) by educating them to be
responsive and ‘responsible’ to employer prio-
rities. During the early years of Northern Plant,
workers willingly exercised their discretion to
‘‘make the numbers’’ in a way that involved
minimum managerial intervention in ‘shaping’
this capacity. Their ‘empowerment’ was not
‘planned’ or signi?cantly conditioned by formal
programs initiated by management. Instead, it
articulated, and served to maintain, workers’
sense of identity as men who (predominantly)
took pride in outwitting and marginalising man-
agers in order to subordinate them to the work-
ers’ priority of labouring for as short a period as
possible to receive the available material
rewards.
Management endorsed this arrangement
because it served to eliminate much uncertainly
about whether delivery commitments to customers
would be met. The ‘‘self–managing’’, negotiated
order of management-labour relations was equally
important to the workforce. It allowed them to
exercise a considerable measure of control over
when and how their labour power was deployed.
This was subsequently re?ected in their rose-tinted
recollections of this period as a ‘golden past’ (see
Gabriel, 1993; Gouldner, 1954)—a time when it
was ‘‘a laugh’’ and when ‘‘everyone [both workers
and managers] got stuck in together’’. This period
was also signi?cant, we will argue, because it allo-
wedworkers to gain insights into what they could
expect, some years later, from management’s plans
to introduce team-based ‘lean’ manufacturing and
production arrangements.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 277
During this formative era in the history of
Northern Plant, accounting calculations were not
particularly obtrusive or plentiful, yet they both
underpinned and masked the social organization
of production by providing the basis for deter-
mining what were deemed by both parties to be
acceptable production targets, based on measured
day rates. Similarly, the use of standard costing
provided the basis for de?ning what were accep-
table levels of production costs. To be clear, all
waste and ine?ciency were not driven out in set-
ting these standards and targets. Rather, slack was
built into time-and-motion calculations in order to
draw the boundaries of the feasible region defen-
sible to the parent within which workers and
managers could reach consensus about organizing
work. By emphasizing standard costs and mea-
sured day rates as the production targets on the
shop?oor, the accounting system projected an
external view of Northern Plant as an e?cient and
well-run unit in a way that placated the parent
company. The accounting system also masked the
social organization of ‘unplanned responsible
autonomy’ as an informally negotiated order
between plant workers and managers. As long as
workers ‘‘made the numbers’’ by delivering to
output targets, their discretion over the organiza-
tion of their work remained unchallenged by
management who were complicit in this unde-
clared bargain. If, on occasion, some recalcitrant
workers pushed plant managers into a corner,
however, they would retaliate by withholding
bene?ts, such as overtime, or the supply of parts
that would ensure the early ?nish of the ‘less co-
operative’ workers. In this way, managerial pre-
rogative was invoked but not in a way that posed
any signi?cant threat to the reproduction of
unplanned responsible autonomy.
Towards programmed responsible autonomy
To better understand the dynamics of manage-
ment-worker-steward relations during the late
1980s and 1990s, which we explore in some detail
below, it is relevant to appreciate that, up to the mid
1980s, N-Gineering enjoyed a strong market posi-
tion. This was well recognised by a workforce who
were on the receiving end of recurrent pressures to
respond to demand, and it o?ered little incentive
for headquarters to exert pressure upon Northern
Plant managers to secure the extension and suc-
cess of sporadic experimentation with variants of
quality circles, SPC, and JIT. The unspoken
agreement between plant management and work-
ers was for the production quota to be delivered in
return for workers exercising daily control over
the organization of production. N-Gineering’s
hands-o? policy towards Northern Plant manage-
ment meant that managers had little incentive to
change their undeclared bargain with the work-
force. At the time of N-Gineering’s acquisition by
Motor-Co in the mid 1980s, new competitors
entering the ?eld were increasingly challenging
N-Gineering’s domination so that its market share,
albeit of an expanding market, fell to 55% by the
end of the decade. The expansion of ‘lean’ manu-
facturing methods throughout the industry added
pressures for ‘change’ as N-Gineering’s major
automotive customers called for new quality stan-
dards and JIT delivery discipline.
Following its acquisition by Motor-Co,
N-Gineering underwent a major strategic re-orga-
nization of its activities, involving the introduction
of ?exible manufacturing methods. This re-orga-
nization resulted in Northern Plant losing to its
sister European plants a large proportion of what
had previously been its most pro?table business.
Northern Plant was allocated responsibility for
manufacturing only a limited number of products
in a highly competitive segment of the market. Very
quickly, virtually all production became what the
plant called ‘ex-works’, which meant taking pro-
ducts straight from the end of production lines in
an e?ort to meet delivery schedules. By mid-1989
frequently missed deliveries were resulting in costly
air-freighting of products to customers around the
world.
3
Increasing competition, changing product
3
Deliveries had always been late, but when the plant had the
lion’s share of the market customers had no alternative sources
of supply without sacri?cing quality, and hence they tended to
wait for the late deliveries from Northern Plant. From 1989
onwards, however, competition became much stronger and the
plant’s market dominance was eroded signi?cantly, with new,
high quality, competitors being able to deliver the product more
quickly. This problem was made more acute after the change in
product mix to the high volume, low margin type B product.
278 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
mix, price and delivery requirements from major
customers, and mounting demand for increased
performance and pro?t levels from its parent
company also pushed Northern Plant into crisis.
The plant’s ?nancial controller’s recollection of
this period was that:
We were introducing a new scheduling sys-
tem, which was quite complex, and we were
also losing a lot of money because we’d
moved out of passenger car [type A] business
and we were doing predominantly commercial
diesel [type B] business instead. So, suddenly,
almost over night, for reasons which were
determined by a [new] European management
group, when [Northern Plant] entered 1989 we
had a horrible sales mix in a plant that was
su?ering some industrial relations problems,
and we were losing money—up to £300,000
per month because our delivery performance
was in crisis.
These problems were construed to have resulted
in a signi?cant loss of credibility with both major
customers and the parent company. There was a
threat that remaining production at the plant
would be moved elsewhere if immediate improve-
ments were not forthcoming. Motor-Co’s solution
to the plant’s poor performance was to press for
an ABC overhead recovery approach to measur-
ing the plant’s performance that was coupled with
head-count reductions:
Every time we produced an additional bad
result, although I didn’t share this with a
lot of the people in the organization at that
time, North America’s [Motor-Co’s] reac-
tion was ‘reduce the head count’. Then
we’d have another bad result the next
month, because we weren’t making any-
thing on time in ‘89, and we’d get ‘have
you reduced the head count, when are you
going to reduce it further?’ (Financial
Controller)
In the wake of the crisis, productivity gains
associated with ?exible manufacturing methods,
teamworking and co-operative management–
labour relations were considered vital for reviving
the plant’s competitiveness and pro?tability.
Motor-Co.’s manufacturing initiatives articulated
a strategically-focused change programme, spear-
headed by a drive to establish cellular manu-
facturing throughout its operations world-wide.
At Northern Plant, management introduced a
whole series of changes in production and
accounting methods which are discussed in the
following section. These initiatives were construed
as technologies that would generate new measures
to remedy past de?ciencies and act as the plant’s
‘driving force’ for change. Managers sought to
consolidate these initiatives by re-engineering
‘process based’ manufacturing into ‘product
focused’ cellular manufacturing (Alford, 1994) as
the means that would ?nally establish the plant as
a ‘truly’ lean manufacturing facility. However, a
refusal of the workforce to cooperate with these
schemes (see below) meant that the advent of cel-
lular manufacturing was restricted to changes in
the technical, but not the social, organization of
production.
Optimised production technology and throughput
accounting
In this section, we track management’s e?orts
to introduce a series of programs at Northern
Plant in response to intensi?ed competitive pres-
sures and change in product type. More speci?-
cally, we explore how these programmes were
launched in an attempt to introduce new working
methods including more disciplinary accounting
techniques.
ABC, TA and cellular manufacturing
In the early 1990s, consultants had com-
mended the contribution of ABC to Northern
Plant’s needs, and especially to manage the shift
from Type A (passenger car parts) to Type B
(commercial diesel parts) product. However,
while conceding that ABC could be helpful in
reducing the unit cost of commercial-diesel pro-
duction, they argued that its cost allocations
were inaccurate:
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 279
My argument about ABC is that however
carefully you try to allocate costs to a part or a
product, you’re never going to get it a hundred
percent right, so why bother trying to allocate
these costs. Why not say to yourself ‘Oh, well
we know how much the material costs and
that’s a hundred percent [accurate], then we
have this pool of other costs that we don’t
have to allocate. . .’ Okay, you have to take
your counter bills costs, but however you try
and spread them back to the parts there’s
always going to be a guess [involved] (Finan-
cial Controller)
The newly formed cellular accounting team was
concerned that ABC’s focus upon cutting costs,
instead of maximising plant utilisation, would
exacerbate growing industrial unrest at the plant.
It was argued that to emphasise cost reduction as
a strategic priority would only serve to deepen
the growing gulf between management and the
shop?oor:
O.K. you can tell people ‘‘we’ve got a hor-
rible sales mix, that its costing us say $2m a
year in pro?t’’. But once you’ve said this
once or twice or three times everybody gets
bored with the story. . . everyone was aware
of this anyway, that we had a bloody big
sales mix problem because out on the shop-
?oor they were trying to cope with it every-
day, with more set-ups, with smaller batch
sizes, etc. So what we wanted to do was
drag people’s mind o? just head count
reduction and to emphasise the most wealth
producing aspects of [the] business. Cos [by
then] we’d already devoted eighteen months
to trying to get rid of people and literally
every management meeting hinged on ‘‘have
you got rid of so and so yet ? (Financial
Controller)
Plant management’s choice of technique was
thus directly informed by an assessment of the
anticipated e?ect of its adoption upon the workers.
By problematizing and discrediting what was
deemed by its parent and the consultants as ‘excel-
lent accounting’, in the form of ABC, discourses
were promoted by senior managers at the plant to
pave the way for throughput accounting (TA) and
the theory of constraints (TOC). Not only was
the problematization of ABC at Northern Plant
inseparable from the discourses that were mar-
shalled in support of the introduction of TA, but
the merits of each were evaluated in terms of
their anticipated e?ects upon management–labour
relations.
Given the continuing buoyant demand for this
type of product in an expanding market (even
though N-Gineering had been experiencing a sharp
decline in its own market share after the mid 1980s
because of intense competition), the bene?ts to be
derived from squeezing operating expenses were
seen to be comparatively limited in relation to the
potential of TA which, in principle, would enable
the removal of bottlenecks that impeded
‘throughput’, and thereby recapture some lost
market share.
4
Experimentation with TA and
OPT (Optimal Production Technology) coin-
cided with a [new] cellular manufacturing strat-
egy that was introduced to the workforce
through a series of in-house training seminars
held in 1990/1991. These seminars had ?ve
relatively distinct, but inter-related objectives;
(1) to (re)introduce the concepts of JIT and
TQM, teamworking and ?exibility to employees,
within the context of the proposed cellular
manufacturing plans; (2) to explain the impor-
tance of the role of TA and TOC within this
system of production; (3) to promote the con-
cept of ‘continuous improvement’, by introdu-
cing workers to the idea of understanding their
role in production in ‘value-adding’ and ‘non-
value-adding’ terms; (4) to promote the role of
a range of new corporate driven HRM, initia-
tives to facilitate employee ‘involvement’ and
‘empowerment’; and (5) to explain the internal
4
Our positioning of worker resistance to managerial control
in relation to changing product markets and product mixes
(e.g. the change from Type A to Type B products) parallels
Froud et al.’s (1998) attentiveness to ‘external’ conditions, and
especially exchange rate movements between the dollar and the
yen, to account for Caterpillar’s problems and, relatedly, to
challenge the adequacy of management’s diagnosis of the com-
pany’s di?culties and the relevance of its PWAF (or, in our
case, ABC) programme as a remedy for them.
280 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
organization of each manufacturing cell which
was to involve a number of autonomous self-
managing ‘teams’ comprising managers, R&D
technicians, supervisors, and skilled and semi-
skilled production workers.
The techniques associated with the ?ve inter-
related objectives were presented by management
as a means of enabling workers to gain a greater
understanding of the ‘?nancial realities’ of their
involvement in production, and not just as more
convenient accounting devices for measuring their
performance. Management were su?ciently aware
of worker sensitivities about the use of accounting
to extract increased productivity to make e?orts to
‘sell’ the techniques in a way that emphasised the
bene?ts, as managers construed them, of workers
gaining a more informed appreciation of the
activities that added value. Accordingly, plant
management acted against corporate advice by
refusing to introduce ABC because of its perceived
emphasis on headcount reduction, with its antici-
pated detrimental e?ect on management–labour
relations. Managers emphasised that TA/TOC,
with their wealth creating emphasis, o?ered an
important catalyst for ‘change’ that had been
absent in previous e?orts to operationalize ‘new
wave’ manufacturing and production methods.
When combined with HRM initiatives, managers
claimed that TA would make it possible for
workers in each ‘cell’ to take ‘ownership’ of cell
costs and become more responsible and com-
mitted to the parent’s new manufacturing philo-
sophy. In this way, as Jones and Dugdale (1995:
p. 319) have suggested, it was anticipated that
workers would willingly constitute themselves as
‘producers of pro?t rather than [simply] pro-
ducts’. To suggest that this emphasis formed
part of a cynical campaign by management to
deceive workers about the new techniques
would be to exaggerate the extent to which
managers were ‘organized’ and had a well
formed plan of action, whilst simultaneously
understating their recognition of the di?culty,
verging on impossibility, of successfully mis-
leading this particular workforce. Managers
were anxious to construe the proposed changes
in ways that they thought would not unne-
cessarily upset the workforce, but this was done
in a pragmatic, rather than carefully calculated
or Machiavellian, manner
5
.
Cell managers and supervisors claimed to wel-
come cellular manufacturing in principle but, at
the same time, had little faith in it ever being
fully operationalised on two accounts. First,
despite its focus upon improving throughput, the
new cellular strategy was perceived to be largely
irrelevant to the market pressures that it sought
to exploit: low-volume short-batch production
runs, and frequent changeovers and set-ups to
cater for di?erent, and more often competing,
customer requirements. Second, cell managers
and team leaders anticipated that these initia-
tives would encounter determined shop?oor
resistance.
5
It is important to recognize that prior to the introduction
of lean production, ?rst-line managers at Northern Plant had
operated in conditions, as they saw it, that were relatively
‘con?ict free’, and like shop?oor workers, enjoyed a ‘good liv-
ing’ from the plant ($25,000 and $17,000 basic-pay respectively
in 1995, in addition to which they earned anything up to 40%
of this ?gure in overtime payments). It is also important to
recognize that they enjoyed the same bene?ts as shop?oor
workers by ensuring the latter were able to ‘make the numbers’.
Once production quotas were reached, especially on the night
and afternoon-shifts, foremen retired to relax in their o?ce, in
full view of shop?oor workers, and often with workers them-
selves. This usually involved reading, playing cards, chess,
computer games or simply chatting to ‘kill time’ until the end
of the shift—and, as we have noted, on occasions accom-
modated excursions to the local pub. However, unlike shop-
?oor workers, foremen at Northern Plant readily accepted that
the ‘‘the gravy train’’, as they referred to it, ‘‘was over’’. They
understood that workers refused to accept this; that workers’
commitment to ‘making the numbers’ had not been uncondi-
tional; and that workers regarded lean production and ‘cellular
accounting’ as an assault on established frontiers of control,
including the opportunity to earn overtime pay, which they had
no intentions of surrendering without a struggle. It was for
these reasons that attempts by foremen to instil into workers
the ‘?nancial realities’ of their involvement in production
amounted to little more than appeals to them to accept the
inevitability of ‘change’, and to recognize that they would still
enjoy a ‘good living’ from the plant. So, rather than trying to
deceive workers with ‘cellular accounting’ rhetoric, the typical
argument used was that lean production when combined with
‘cellular accounting’ techniques guaranteed the plant’s future.
While this might well eventually necessitate less overtime, the
foremen argued that any reduction in earnings capacity would
be compensated by the opportunity for greater leisure time
and/or more time spent with their families.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 281
Market pressures
Cell managers and team leaders noted how pro-
duction schedules were still ‘‘regularly altered‘‘ or
‘‘broken into’’ without warning or at short notice;
or, as one cell manager put it, in response to
‘‘which customer complained the loudest’’. It was
argued that production control failed to plan or
program the OPT system e?ectively enough to
provide accurate or up-to-date information on
schedule requirements, shortages or arrears that
were to be given priority. So, despite senior man-
agement’s [apparent] commitment to the OPT
system as the core component of its cellular man-
ufacturing strategy, it was claimed that little, if
anything, changed:
On night shift, it’s Production Control’s job
to decide what kits [products] need to be
built, when they need to be built, where the
parts [components] are and, because we have
so many arrears, to prioritise all this. . .what
happens in reality, is that I get information
from production control, I get information
from the afternoon [shift] supervisor and I get
information left in the dispatch area from the
sales department, but in the majority of times,
the three bits of information don’t match up.
(Night-Shift Superintendent)
Sharing these frustrations, cell leaders and
supervisors stressed that the OPT system remained
‘‘a major headache’’; further, they claimed that
they received neither useful information from the
cellular accounting system, nor the support for
improving productivity that was intended to come
from the cellular accounting team. One cell man-
ager observed that the accounting information
received remained ‘‘very much historical’’ and of
‘‘little, if any, use’’:
Things change hour by hour and so we’d need
information on a day to day basis, as a mini-
mum, to be able to manage as well as we
should do. But even so, everything runs so
fast that even if you did get the amount of
information you’re supposed to get, on a daily
basis, you wouldn’t have time to go through it
or sort it out. So you just try to keep ahead.
You set your plan and just go at it. (our
emphases)
Our informants suggested that pressures to
placate customers meant that attempts to oper-
ationalise the new cellular manufacturing pro-
grammes were repeatedly subverted and that the
new accounting system o?ered no remedy for this
recurrent problem.
Workforce interpretations and resistance
On the shop?oor, TA was interpreted as a
means of concealing increases in e?ciency that
would otherwise put pressure on management to
improve wages and/or conditions of service.
Workers interpreted the real purpose of TA,
Kaizen costing and TQM to be manipulative.
Their introduction was assumed to be motivated
by a desire to get workers to work harder and to
reduce headcount:
TQM and Kaizen are just another form of
time and motion study. They say that [it] tells
them that they can make thirty or forty percent
savings on production and the wage bill, but
that’s because they’ll have less men doing more
work. So why should we accept doing more
when we know there’ll be job losses. (Operator)
With Kaizen they’ve moved machines round
into U-shaped cells, so they can have con-
tinuous [one piece] ?ow. They’re saying they
need to cut the space down between machines
to cut the walking time for operators so we
can be more e?cient. What they’re really
saying is that they want you stuck on a
machine and never getting a break. . .working
like battery hens. (Operator)
Yet another operator pointed out that in each
balancing U-shaped cell, each man would do three
parts then pass them on to the next man so that at
the end of the day a man ‘‘can’t leave the cell
unless there’s someone else to take his place. . . So
this [one piece ?ow] is like going back in time to
when people had to put their hands up to leave the
job.’’ A Material Handler suggested that most
operators perceived bene?ts in ‘‘teamwork, quality
282 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
and problem solving, and Kaizen’’, but still saw
these changes as the manifestation of management’s
concerted e?ort to intensify labour: ‘‘what they
[management] want is to take away from people
not giving them more. You can see that there’s
only one way it [lean production] can go, and that’s
to a reduction in manning levels and [an] intensi?-
cation of the production process.’’ Given this strong
reaction by the shop?oor to TA, Kaizen and lean
manufacturing, it was no surprise that the Financial
Controller pointed out that the introduction of TA
‘‘caused bedlam’’, and one Maintenance Manager
said ‘‘I think the days of Throughput Accounting
are numbered’’. Cell managers and supervisors, not
just operators, preferred to see a return to the pre-
vious standard costing system.
The ‘cellular accounting’ team made sense of this
resistance by claiming that standard costing e?-
ciency reports were ‘‘what managers understood’’.
Having ‘‘grown up’’ with standard costing, they
alleged that managers had learned how to
‘‘manipulate e?ciency’’; and in the view of one
cell accountant, cell managers ‘‘probably got their
job simply by being good at doing this’’. Cell
accountants claimed that cell managers had an
irrational fear of the new system. Cell managers
and supervisors countered that this was a ‘poor’ if
not naive evaluation of the situation, as it dis-
regarded the strength of worker resistance to ‘new’
working practices. Attempts to make this clear to
senior management resulted in the latter re-
emphasising the role of cell managers and super-
visors as ‘change agents’ within the plant. Cell
managers were urged by senior managers to
demonstrate their commitment to the values and
philosophy of lean production by empowering
rather than controlling workers. Cell managers
and supervisors perceived themselves to be caught
in a ‘‘no win’’ situation, between demands to
achieve productivity gains under what they saw as
‘‘impossible conditions’’, and the requirement to
achieve these gains by managing the shop?oor
only at a distance (see Ezzamel & Willmott,
1998a). The battles surrounding the TA initiative,
advocated by senior management and spear-
headed by the specialist cellular accounting team,
are symptomatic of the complexity of relations
where inter alia, cell managers are resistant to the
change as it threatened their established routines
and expertise, and workers were able to exploit
divisions between senior and supervisory tiers of
management in a way that acted to discredit the
claims of both. A regular tactic employed by
workers was repeatedly to point out to supervisors
that it had become obvious to them that it was cell
managers who gained all credit for ‘changes’ made
in the technical organization of production, and
had enhanced their career prospects with the
company in doing so
6
, whilst leaving supervisors
to take all blame for the corresponding lack of
progress made in attempts to advance planned
changes in the social organization of production.
To drive this point home, workers constantly
exploited the contention that ‘‘the days of the old-
style foreman in manufacturing are over’’, an
assessment that was di?cult to refute because new
mangers and supervisor recruited to Northern
Plant since it was acquired by MotorCo were
‘‘degree merchants’’
7
.
In response to these contradictions, supervisors
in particular found themselves drawn back to a
6
Certain cell managers, some of whom had been promoted
from the position of supervisor, had gone on to ?ll more senior
positions, and/or joined a number of project teams working on
change, quality, training and preferred buyer-supplier relations
initiatives at the plant in the UK and at other MotorCo sites in
Europe and the USA. Those who remained, regardless of whe-
ther they had considered and/or applied for these posts, were
then taunted for not having ‘‘what it takes to make it’’ under
lean production—in the guise of education, personal know-
how, expertise and/or man-management skills.
7
From 1990s onwards, MotorCo insisted that all new man-
agers and supervisors recruited to Northern Plant must be
quali?ed to degree level. We do not know whether they had
been briefed to do so, but it was clear to shop?oor workers and
existing supervisors that these recruits adopted a ‘professional
distance’ from both workers and existing supervisors. Workers
used this observation to exploit existing supervisors’ fear of
dismissal, by claiming that the new cell-managers and super-
visors had been brought in to spy on them, to monitor their
behaviour and man-management skills and performance, and
then to report this back to senior management so that they
would eventually replace existing sta? once they had learned
their job. This possibility was taken seriously by supervisors
who regularly voiced this concern to senior management. In
response, they received the assurance that this was not the case.
But, at the same time, they were told that only some of the
supervisors were willing and able to make the transition from
traditional ‘old-style foremanship’ to the skills and attitudes
deemed necessary to a regime of lean production.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 283
policy of simply ‘‘making the numbers’’ as a way
of demonstrating their e?ciency to senior man-
agers. Instead of managing the new scheduling
adherence system as intended, supervisors
endeavoured to meet the most urgent output
requirements in the fastest way possible, just as
they had done prior to the introduction of cel-
lular manufacturing at the plant, arguing that
had they not done this they ‘‘wouldn’t have sur-
vived’’. To this end, they were obliged to ‘bend
rules’ and ‘indulge’ the workforce in order to
secure their cooperation. This tactic produced
the desired e?ect for senior managers who, ulti-
mately, were more concerned with keeping cus-
tomers happy by despatching orders on time
than with policing their own programs. How-
ever, as we have stressed, the tactic rendered
middle and junior managers more vulnerable to
the demands of shop?oor workers who were
quick to exploit the situation as a means of
continuing to resist the introduction of ‘new’
working practices.
Operators urged supervisors to remember that
so long as output targets were met regularly on
time for delivery ‘‘no one [really] cared whether
‘TQ’ is in or not’’. It was ‘‘only common sense’’
that all that ‘‘really mattered’’ was whether or not
the plant was pro?table for the parent, and that
‘‘it must be’’, otherwise it would have been closed-
down. Workers also repeatedly taunted managers
by refusing to interpret managers’[apparent]
commitment to ‘change’ as anything other than
a strategy of ‘self-interest’, designed to enable
them to ‘‘get on’’ at the expense of workers who
would be demanded to work more intensively or
possibly lose their jobs. The advice of the shop-
?oor to these managers was ‘‘not to rock the
boat’’, but, instead to ‘‘keep the lads happy’’,
otherwise they would be left with no choice but
to ‘‘screw them’’. Reassurances were given by
workers that, contingent upon the ‘attitude’ of
cell managers and supervisors, components
would continue to be produced in su?cient
number to ensure that there were no come-backs
from senior management.
By pursuing ‘distancing’ strategies of resistance
(Collinson, 1992, 1994) workers ‘out?anked’
(Clegg, 1989) attempts to introduce new lean
production practices. By ostensibly acquiescing to
management’s call for their active involvement in
planning and facilitating ‘change’, the shop stew-
ards at the plant blocked moves in the direction of
teamworking and ‘empowerment’ through a pro-
cess of ‘resistance through negotiation’. The stew-
ards formally welcomed the ‘empowerment’
bestowed upon workers by teamworking, but
demanded that managers take this commitment to
greater involvement seriously by recognizing and
addressing shop?oor concerns about its practi-
calities and consequences.
To summarise, OPT, TA and TOC were the
preferred vehicles of the cellular accounting team
for improving manufacturing performance at
Northern Plant. These techniques were favoured
because, in contrast to ABC, they would not add
additional fuel to the simmering ?re of industrial
unrest at Northern Plant. What senior managers
failed to anticipate was, ?rstly, the di?culty of con-
sistently applying these techniques in the face of
delivery schedule pressures; and, secondly, resis-
tance from cell managers and supervisors who,
feeling themselves to be in a ‘‘no win’’ situation,
became easy targets for criticism by shop?oor
workers. Resistance to OPT and TA, promoted
and guided by discourses which articulated the
lessons learned during the earlier phase of
‘unplanned responsible autonomy’, problematized
the assessment of senior managers that OPT and
TA would improve the performance of the plant.
The mechanisms of governance and the politics of
the product (Miller & O’Leary, 1993, 1994) were
thus embroiled in a process of continuous nego-
tiation and re-con?guration through the politics
of production.
Another strategic response and the role of accounting
The lack of progress from these initiatives, in
terms of the introduction of ‘lean’ production
based upon cellular manufacturing techniques,
resulted in MotorCo labelling Northern Plant a
‘factory with a problem’. Following a series of vis-
its by MotorCo directors, which included crisis
meetings with workers and shop stewards as well as
plant managers, their evaluation concluded that
284 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
the plant su?ered from a serious lack of discipline
8
.
Production cost was identi?ed as unacceptably
high, and this was traced to operations ine?ciency,
over-indulgence in overtime shifts, and the absence
of an adequate cost structure to guide decisions.
[The plant has] huge premium costs to sup-
port the increase in demand for the pro-
duct. . .penalty costs for late deliveries. . .costs
to ship the materials in and airfreight the
product out, large subcontracting costs, and
horrendous amounts of overtime costs.
(Financial Controller)
Managers saw the gaming by operators to pro-
duce below their capabilities during normal time
to earn ?nancially lucrative overtime pay as the
major problem. One HR Manager said: ‘‘The
problem is that if operators are supposed to pro-
duce say 500 [units] in a week and they only produce
300, the consequence is that they’ll get overtime on
Saturday and Sunday’’, consequently, as another
Manager said ‘‘horrendous costs are [being] incur-
red.’’ Managers also lamented the failures of
accounting practices used to cost activities properly:
Some of our ?nance people have a great deal
of di?culty costing some of the activities
because of the way we’ve been educated to
cost them. They will not recognise the value
of a man being taken out of a production line
unless they see a tomb stone in the car park.
(Operations Excellence Manager)
Unless the man is made redundant, the cost of
his wages continued to be included in production
cost even if he was moved out of production. This
frustration with costing procedures and their fail-
ure to visualise operations and activities was
widely shared. As one Manager stated:
What we’ve got to do is get a proper cost
structure of all of what we do, of the product,
production, the supply chain we have to deal
with. We’ve got to create a vision of what the
Plant will be like when it is properly costed. . .
Until we’ve got a proper model of the pro?t-
ability of the site we can’t get where we want
to be.
These factors together contributed to a percep-
tion at higher levels that plant managers were not
doing a good job, which was blamed on lack of
competence or fear of militant operators: ‘‘The
problem is that I don’t think management have
been allowed to manage, or they haven’t been able
to manage this Plant, because either they’re not
capable of it or they are afraid to manage it.
Maybe it’s beyond their capabilities’’ (Senior
Finance Director). The preferred remedy was the
replacement of plant managers right down to the
level of supervisors
9
. It was announced that the
8
At these meetings, MotorCo’s announced that levels of
attainment of ‘world-class’ manufacturing standards at all of its
manufacturing facilities were being gauged against ‘bench-
marked’ performance levels in output, quality, ?exibility,
teamworking and overall ?nancial performance. These bench-
marks were allegedly drawn from its model’ lean production
facilities in southern France and South Carolina, USA. Few
performance ?gures or speci?c details of the ‘excellent’ HRM
initiatives were ever presented to workers at Northern Plant,
although visits to the French plant by shop stewards and a
selected number of workers were arranged to demonstrate ?rst-
hand what lean production can achieve. This initiative was
abandoned after the ?rst visit, principally because the French
plant’s production mix was nothing compared to Northern
Plant—a di?erence upon which workers and their shop stew-
ards immediately seized to discredit the exercise and those
responsible for initiating it. Given the comparative complexity
of the Northern Plant’s production mix, the high-tech nature of
its manufacturing requirements, including the high number of
change-overs required to manufacturing a wider-range of pro-
ducts than those produced by its French sister plant, they con-
cluded that Northern Plant was performing ‘‘surprisingly well’’.
9
Some longstanding supervisors were released from the
plant as early as the late 1980s, following MotorCo’s demand to
see a reduction in headcount due the ?nancial crisis at the
plant, following the decision to dedicate the plant to the pro-
duction of predominantly Type B products (see 10th, 11th and
12th pages of this article). By the mid 1990s, senior managers at
the plant, and/or MotorCo, had lost all faith in all remaining
longstanding supervisors, all of whom, despite being unionised,
were over the next few years unceremoniously ?red. By 1999,
none of the plant’s original shop?oor supervisors, who were
employed prior to the introduction of LP, remained. Several
senior managers su?ered the same fate. In all cases, without
exception, supervisors were given one minute’s notice to clear
their desks before being escorted from the plant, gripped at the
back of the upper-arm by a senior personnel manager charged
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 285
task of these replacements, supported by a senior
management task-force drawn from MotorCo
plants, was to evolve a ‘‘no-nonsense’’ approach
to managing the plant. These developments
immediately resulted in a major revision of the
plant’s change strategy, including the role played
by TA which was now considered totally at odds
with MotorCo’s overall manufacturing strategy:
At the time throughput accounting was
probably the right decision, because if you’ve
got the business, you can work at improving on
price providing that you can make the product.
But the problem with throughput accounting is
that as long as you’re growing and so you have
high volume, it’s good news, volume eliminates
?xed costs and all sorts of things. But you pla-
teau out and the business doesn’t grow any
more, then you have to change to something
di?erent, something like ABM. I don’t know
because I’m not an accountant, but it seems
that you just can’t do throughput accounting
when you’re in a ?xed volume situation, you
have to be growing. (Senior Manager)
TA/TOC and Cellular Accounting were to be
replaced by a number of new ABC-driven account-
ing initiatives. These included the ‘visual factory
(VF)’ (Grief, 1991), Activity-Based Management
(ABM), and Management By Fact (MBF).
‘Management by Fact’ and ABM
The new concepts were launched through a ser-
ies of in-house training seminars/workshops by a
‘Strategic Accounting Group’ (SAG). They were
introduced to the workforce as a ‘‘tool-box’’ of data
gathering techniques that would help reinforce the
importance of cost control whilst identifying and
removing the under-utilisation of resources within
the plant. SAG claimed that the role of these tools
was to support the plant’s existing TQM and HRM
initiatives, and that the metrics of the visual factory
‘VF’ (Grief, 1991) and MBF, would render all
manufacturing and production processes more
‘visible’ and, therefore, subject to corrective inter-
vention to achieve continuous improvement:
Key objectives are laid down for us, but we
have a lot of other metrics to work from to
give us the scope to look at what improve-
ments can be achieved in reality, such as
internal quality performance, inventory costs,
scrap levels, PPM (parts per million), product
defects, customer satisfaction, delivery per-
formance. (Business Manager)
An ex-Machine Operator who became one of six
shop?oor employees recruited to an ‘Operational
Excellence Change Team’ commented:
In theory ABM and MBF are part of TQM.
But the data you can get from MBF can tell
you everything. It allows you to look at an
entire cell or a single machine and pull out
how much down-time there’s been on any
shift on a given day and why.
The message was drummed up throughout
Northern Plant that MBF had to be made to work:
MBF is not allowed to fail, it’s come from
America [the parent] so it’s high pro?le stu?
as far as they [plant managers] are concerned.
They’ve got to do it and got to make it work.
It’s not like when TQ ?rst came in, when you
with gently guiding them out of the plant via a long walk past
certain manufacturing cells on the shop?oor for all to see. This
always took place on Friday mornings. Shop?oor workers
learned to await the event with the morbid fascination of the
‘mob’ at the medieval ‘burning stake’ and ‘execution sca?old’
so vividly described, inter alia, by Foucault (1977). Alternative
routes out of the plant, well beyond the ‘gaze’ of the shop?oor,
which would have saved these ‘victims’ of lean production this
apparent humiliation, were available. No explanation was
given to us, or to shop?oor workers who constantly badgered
managers to shed light on why this particular route was pre-
ferred. Workers consequently gave their own ‘explanation’,
which clearly echo’s what Foucault/ Foucauldian theorists
would contend, arguing that this ritual was intended to intimi-
date existing managers; to remind them of what was in store for
them if ‘‘they got it wrong’’, as workers put it to them. They
were always quick to remind managers of this, and to add
weight to their contention, by cruelly inviting them to observe
for themselves the extent of senior managers malevolence
towards ‘‘those who fail’’, in how heartily they seemed to
devour their lunch in the plant’s canteen on Friday’s as
opposed to other days!
286 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
could duck and dive and tell them [managers]
to sod o?, because it ropes you into it.
(Shop?oor Member of the Change Team)
The implementation of MBF involved the use of
time and motion study to measure the manu-
facturing capability of individual machines and
assembly operation within each U-shape cell, and
also the ‘manufacturing capability’ of the cell itself.
This data was then used to determine optimum cell
output targets. The underlying premise of MBF
was to ‘‘let the facts speak for themselves’’ as a
basis from which to identify and apply appropriate
corrective measures for remedying an under-utili-
sation of the plant’s material and human resources.
Despite the rhetoric emphasizing the importance
of these new concepts/techniques, for managers
they were all secondary to ?nancial performance.
One Business Unit Manager said:
We talk a lot about the voice of the customer,
customer focus and TQM, and have done for a
number of years now, but I would say this still
remains secondary to ?nancial targets as far as
headquarters are concerned. . .We are still getting
the strong message saying that if we missed the
sales we’re still expected to achieve the margin.
Day-to-day output and performance levels were
monitored and displayed in bar-charts etc. on a
series of highly visual performance indicators
located in each cell (see also Dohse, Ulrich, &
Walsch, 1991; Delbridge & Turnbull, 1992). Yet,
despite this proliferation of ?nancial measures, a
number of managers were concerned at the failure
to communicate their importance to the shop?oor.
One Middle Manager suggested: ‘‘I don’t think we
do a very good job of communicating the impor-
tance of reduced production costs, or taking time
out to make it more visible line by line.’’ Another
Production Manager noted some improvements,
but then pointed to the resistance to these new
measures as operators refused to ?ll in charts:
It’s very hard work simply getting people to
?ll in charts all the time. They don’t see the
value of it and it’s not part of the culture
here. People know they are being measured
and will be held accountable for what they do.
They don’t like it, so they don’t ?ll them in.
MBF was interpreted by the shop?oor as a
dangerous development in the parent’s new dis-
ciplinary ‘change strategy’:
MBF doesn’t entertain the idea of the shop?oor
just coming into work, getting on with things, and
going home without getting involved. . . It’s worse
than TQ and SPC because it’s a measurement of
everything at the same time, and it’s di?cult to
deal with as well because if you’ve got a machine
that isn’t producing the amount it’s capable of
producing it gets ‘time studied’ in a particular
way. What [managers] do is they get the machine
set up exactly as it should be set then you can’t
argue why it can’t do its score and if you do
[argue] they’ll say ‘okay, let’s get MBF back on
the job to see why.’ (Assembly-Cell Operator)
Thus MBF was particularly resented by the
shop?oor because it resulted in managers inter-
vening in their work practices and, given its tight
disciplinary focus, signi?cantly reduced the scope
for the shop?oor to control the work pace or carve
out break times.
10
MBF was widely viewed by the
10
These possibilities had been a normal feature of established
working arrangements through which a narrative of self-identity
had been articulated and reproduced. We can shed some light on
why workers were concerned about a machine being ‘‘set up
exactly as it should be’’. Skilled setters, when setting machines
(e.g. tooling them) often slow down or speed up machining
cycle-times in order to save wear and tear on tooling and there-
fore time and space for themselves and/or operators. Altering
cycle times cuts down on the number of tool changes or tool
adjustments that may have to be made to correct defective parts,
thereby creating the opportunity to book none-existent ‘down-
time’, and therefore increases in free time for leisurely pursuits.
Put simply, altering cycle-times enables operators to meet esti-
mated output targets earlier than o?cial machining capabilities
suggest they can. One example would be booking ‘?ctitious’
machine break-downs, tool changes and/or down time caused by
the ‘need’ to apparently check or correct manufacturing or
quality speci?cations, or wait for a setter to do these jobs. This
kind of informal control, based upon tacit knowledge of ‘‘what a
machine can actually do and how it runs’’ (Manwaring & Wood,
1985) rather than the speci?cations of manufacturing engineers,
is of mutual bene?t for those involved. MBF presented a ‘cause
for concern’ for workers because it prevented such practices
from remaining hidden or undetected.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 287
operators as a hostile disciplinary technique that
sought to measure and visualize their activities to
make them amenable to the immediate intervention
of managers. One Fork-Truck Driver commented:
MBF made workers genuinely angry, because
you could see straight away that it was about
surveillance, about keeping you on the job,
about constantly measuring everything you
do to get more and more parts out of less and
less people. . .. MBF doesn’t pretend not to be
about what it’s designed to do, which is put
people on the dole, and so basically it pro-
voked a really heavy reaction from people.
Given this understanding of MBF by workers,
managers found it di?cult to secure meaningful
co-operation from the shop?oor:
There’s very little co-operation from the
shop?oor though. Management has had to
try to force operators to co-operate. They
won’t [co-operate] because they see it [MBF]
can reduce manning levels. . . to get the data
the cell leaders have to go around and actu-
ally ask the operators for it and then ?ll in the
charts themselves. Then when a member of
the Change Team tries to feed it back to the
lads on the shop?oor they won’t talk to him,
they just say ‘fuck-o?’. (Machine Operator)
ABM was introduced as a human resource
planning and budgeting system that was also
designed to support MBF (Berry, Broadbent, &
Otley, 1995). As a derivative of ABC, the intended
role of ABM was to enable employees to con-
ceptualise di?erent manufacturing and production
processes as activity pools. Activity pools are pre-
mised upon ABC’s analysis of the role that activ-
ities play in ‘causing’ costs to be incurred in
production processes. The intent was that, by
appreciating this connection, workers would
understand in ?nancial terms the interdependence
between di?erent ‘essentially task-based’ manu-
facturing and production processes. While ABC
was assumed to present a more critical view of the
relationship between the use of resources and the
allocation of costs to those resources, ABM—
through the notion of ‘activity pools’—was seen to
provide the basis for a more critical appreciation
of human resource activity in essentially value-
adding and non-value-adding terms:
It’s not really ABC so much that’s driving the
change but ABM. The di?erence between
them is that ABC is where you just work your
costs out, whereas ABM is where you can do
something with the information you get to
run your business. (Financial Controller)
To illustrate this distinction, the Strategic
Accounting Group produced a selected number
of activity pro?les of workers from each of the
manufacturing cells.
11
These activity pro?les were
presented by the SAG as a ‘‘true and accurate’’
representation of how much time workers actually
spent daily in ‘‘real’’ ‘value-adding activity’ in
production. Representing data to workers in this
way was intended to demonstrate the amount of
spare labour capacity SAG claimed to have
remained ‘untapped’ in the day-to-day running of
production, and the potential productivity gains
to be made from utilising this ‘capacity’. However,
some managers expressed concern that ABM was
just a fad that, like its predecessors, was not likely
to last all that long, because ‘‘It’s all about opi-
nion and about nothing else. I think it’s better
than standard costs but I don’t think it’s the ‘be-
all-and-end-all’.’’ Yet, ABM gathered momentum
and quickly displaced TA:
ABM is being driven by the CEO [of MotorCo].
So while our [Northern Plant] Finance Director
was doing his Throughput Accounting on a
11
The pro?les were drawn from a series of interviews
between these personnel and members of the SAG and a newly
trained in-house ABM and MBF ‘change team’. Data was col-
lected from questions related to a speci?c range of ‘everyday’
tasks and responsibilities performed by workers at the point of
production in relation to: (1) the frequency and duration of
manufacturing set-up times, waiting time, breakdown times,
the responsiveness of machine-setters and/or maintenance per-
sonnel to these ‘problems’; (2) the nature and regularity of any
[other] interruptions to, or delays in, manufacturing processes
or the ?ow of production, supply of parts or material to and
from required locations within and between cells; and (3) qual-
ity control ‘problems’.
288 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
small scale in the plant, that’s now getting
washed away by the tide of ABM. (Manager)
Workers resistance and the war of attrition: ‘keeping
the narrative going’
Rather than refuse any dialogue with managers
and risk total alienation, the shop?oor chose to
pursue a strategy of keeping the ‘narrative’ going
in which a willingness to embrace change was
espoused but without surrendering any ground:
What you have got to do is watch what you say,
and watch what you get drawn into discussing
with them [managers]. Because if you show
them that you accept what they say, all
you’ve done is set yourself up for a regular
pasting [from managers] all day everyday for
not doing enough because you can’t do
enough, because with the activity based thing
[ABC] and MBF they’ll want more. Most of
us won’t talk [to managers] when it’s to do
with TQ or this Activity Based thing because
they’re designed to get inside your head. . .
once you’ve accepted that there are problems
with the way things are done and they can be
improved by so-called facts, then you’ve
accepted the fact that the time you have now
to get ‘your score in’ or to have a break will
be gone. (Cell Machine Operator)
‘Keeping the narrative going’ helped workers to
drag things out over a longer time scale, thereby
delaying the ‘evil’ of the new changes. It also
o?ered workers a respite from the boredom and
intensity of work, so that attending meetings
became an end in itself. One Truck Driver said:
They [workers] were happy to go to meetings
because basically ‘it gets them o? the
machines for an hour or so.’ Also, when they
were there, the questions that were asked
were about nonsense. Things were challenged,
not because they were that bothered about
them, but because it dragged things out as
much as possible. . . this always led to wind-
ups, to piss-taking, and basically making a
mockery out of it all to get a laugh out of it.
Going to the meetings basically involved strol-
ling down to personnel, getting a co?ee on the
way, having a chat to your mates, doing the
same coming back, eventually getting back to
the job and then counting it all as down time.
During cell brie?ngs, training workshops, and
other meetings the technique of ABM and the
data produced by it were challenged by the shop-
?oor in much the same way as in previous
accounting initiatives. In one ABM training
workshop that we attended, one Machine Opera-
tor remonstrated to the SAG Team training per-
sonnel present:
You people can measure this and that and
whatever you like but it doesn’t mean anything,
it doesn’t show what you’ve got to deal with
when you have a problem, it doesn’t show how
long it takes to get a setter, a newtool sorted, or
a fault or whatever. So what we’re here to listen
to is crap that has nothing to do with reality.
During the same workshop, other workers
endorsed this view by adding that it was both
‘‘ridiculous’’ and ‘‘insulting’’ to be involved in
training programmes that were designed to tell
workers, who in many cases had 20 years’ ?rst-
hand experience of manufacturing in Northern
Plant, how to improve production processes.
Workers either refused to accept the validity of the
data, claiming that it was beyond their under-
standing; or the data was dismissed as ‘‘just more
management bullshit’’ aimed at work intensi?ca-
tion. Alternatively, workers argued that ABM
o?ered only an abstract account of ‘‘what workers
do’’, rather than what they ‘‘actually do in rea-
lity’’. The activities were discredited on the
grounds that inadequate account was taken of a
wide range of short-batch production runs. These
required workers to address the complexity of
day-to-day problems that de?ed measurement in
this simplistic way. In response, SAG argued that
ABM had been speci?cally designed to measure
such ‘activity’, but only in value-adding and non-
value-adding terms. This response only served to
fuel workers’ suspicion that ABM was designed
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 289
for work intensi?cation; to render the shop?oor
accountable for poor performance, down-time, or
any other stoppages or interruptions to produc-
tion, irrespective of their causes. In another work-
shop, the argument reached its climax when one
worker became irate, claiming that the SAG had
no respect for the fact that:
It’s the lads on the shop?oor working toge-
ther and not the idea of getting rid of what
they do that had made [Northern Plant] a
success well before the SAG even knew the
plant existed. (Operator)
The irony of this incident was that, at the time,
this Operator had worked at the Plant (unknown to
the SAG) for only 18 months. After this meeting he
told us that exploiting this much vaunted view of
the more long term employees in this way had:
Left management knackered, because they
can’t handle it. They don’t know what to say
when you say ‘it’s us and not them who built
the plant up’. The best thing though is that
they’re not sure whether you’re winding them
up, and they can’t say you are because we’ll
walk out [of the workshop] with a cob-on.
(Operator)
It is important to note that shop?oor hostility
towards MBF/ABM was not simply a consequence
of perceived limitations of these techniques. It was
also because the techniques were seen as part of an
ongoing ‘onslaught’ by management determined to
discipline the shop?oor. Operators were getting
frustrated and angered by managers’ claims that
operators were a problem because of the latter’s
reluctance to embrace change initiatives:
This new management are saying we’re a
problem because we’re not ?exible, because
we won’t accept change. We are saying, we
are ?exible; we can run any machine you
like. . . But what they mean by ‘?exibility’ and
what we mean are not the same [thing]. They
think it’s me wanting to do my job, the set-
ter’s job, maintenance job, and jump on a
machine in between. (Materials Handler)
Operators presented themselves as being pre-
pared to embrace ‘change’ willingly—so long as
what change meant complied with their own
expectations, rather than management’s. Opera-
tors were quick to point out that their work prac-
tices had undergone signi?cant change, and that
they have taken on a lot, but they were not pre-
pared to be manipulated by managers to accept
changes that were aimed at exploiting their labour
and future careers for the purposes of short-term
gains in the form of a reduced wage bill. Further
attempts by SAG to explain that the VF ‘concept’,
MBF or ABM, which were designed to introduce
workers to the concept of working smarter rather
than harder, faced intractable arguments and unco-
operative behaviour from workers. The VF concept,
for example, was condemned as a management plan
eventually to introduce a systemof total surveillance
over the shop?oor, and its MBF initiative was sub-
sequently relabelled ‘‘management by fear’’:
This [MBF] is a bad one. If they [manage-
ment] get this in you won’t get a minute to
yourself, you’ll be ‘screwed down’, and that’s
what they’re after, to be able to make you
account for everything you do for a full shift
and if you can’t, they’ve got you haven’t they,
and that’s it, that’s all, this [MBF] is about
nailing you down. (Machine Operator)
The attitude of the shop?oor towards this per-
ceived continuous tightening up of discipline by
management was to pour scorn on management’s
authority, claiming that they see through manage-
ment rhetoric as nothing more than squeezing
more pro?t out of labour:
We’re being told [at cell meetings] either you
perform, do the work [MotorCo] want in the
numbers they want and the quality they want,
or they’ll simply go somewhere else or sub-
contract it because they’re not making
money. They must be. Last year we had
seventeen people on this section, we now have
seven. Ten men have gone, ten men’s wages,
and they’re saying they’re not making money
. . .They must think we’re fuckin thick.
(Operator)
290 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
Given their ability to debunk and discredit
management’s disciplinary measures, operators
were intent on taking on management on the
assumption that, without securing full co-oper-
ation from the shop?oor, managerial initiatives
were doomed:
At the end of the day, they [managers] know
they need people’s co-operation. So they can
try and get total surveillance in as much as
they like, but they can’t be everywhere and on
everyone’s case at the same time. They can’t
stand at the side of people’s machines like a
permanent ?xture, watching them, seeing how
they do the job, if they’re doing it their way.
(Materials Handler)
The patience of operators was wearing thin as
managers kept pushing for more surveillance and
disciplinary measures. Operators experienced a
gradual withdrawal of much of the discretion they
enjoyed previously over the organization of their
work activities and the use of their work time:
We’re [the shop?oor] sick of being warned for
anything they want to warn us about. Silly
little things that they think they can get away
with to keep on at you to do things exactly
the way they want: stopping for a co?ee, a
smoke, reading the papers, and having a chat.
So the men are angry. They’re angry with
seeing people being pulled and warned con-
stantly by bully boys. (Machine Operator)
Given this anger, and operators’ belief that
managers, no matter how hard they tried, cannot
e?ectively monitor everything at the same time, a
war of attrition developed as operators sought to
frustrate and humiliate managers:
[We want] to make the bastards [managers]
claw at everything they get, to make it as hard
and as horrible as possible at every stage, so
that they hate you and hate the thought of
actually having to deal with you in the ?rst
place. If you’re prepared to keep putting
things in their way, anything, just to ware
them down, to piss them o?, even though
you’ve actually agreed to accept to go with
what they want. . . What I’m saying is that
you’ve got to get them so pissed o? that in the
end you get them to stop short of what they
want.’’ (Machine Operator)
Operators undermined the authority of man-
agers either genuinely or sarcastically—for exam-
ple, by presenting themselves to the directors of
the parent as more caring about cost savings than
managers. Following the introduction of ABM,
MBF and the VF, e?orts were made to reduce and
eventually eliminate the role played by quality
control inspectors by transferring their responsi-
bilities to machine operators and assembly work-
ers. The Plant Convenor summed up the shop?oor
views of this development, which was introduced
by the Quality Department Manager, by present-
ing it as short-sighted and damaging to Northern
Plant in the long term:
This put the onus for quality on the people
who make the parts, people who are not
trained to do it and don’t have the time to do
it anyway. When we had [quality control]
inspectors on the lines and viewers on assem-
bly we had good quality all the time and we
were winning all kinds of awards. Then they
took the viewers o?. All they were doing
though was saving on the wage bill, but
without thinking about the consequences; he
lost the company a fortune because of the
problems he caused.
Tightening surveillance through accounting and
provoking more resistance
By late 1995 the struggle over the introduction
of these [new] accounting practices had intensi?ed.
Senior management announced that the data
gathered and processed from the activity pro?les
indicated that the plant was operating at forty
percent below its manufacturing capacity. In the
spring of 1996, workers were given a management
ultimatum that they must ‘‘produce more or risk
the sack’’. In a series of crisis meetings that fol-
lowed this ultimatum, workers were informed that
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 291
MotorCo will no longer ‘‘tolerate the plant’s con-
tinued resistance’’ to change. Corporate manage-
ment introduced a series of new disciplinary
measures speci?cally designed to gain much closer
managerial control and surveillance over the
shop?oor. These included ‘non-discretion man-
agement’ (NDM), a new time and attendance pol-
icy and a new disciplinary code of conduct.
NDM required all supervisors to adhere to a
uniform and consistent approach to managing and
disciplining the shop?oor. Each of the U-shaped
cells was to be patrolled at 2-hourly intervals and,
without exception, workers were to be disciplined
if their performance, without adequate reason, fell
short of targets determined by MBF. This dis-
cipline took the form of automatically issuing
o?enders with a written letter of concern that was
registered with their cell manager and the HRM
Department. Letters of concern were issued for
what management deemed poor work perfor-
mance(s); poor house-keeping; bad attitude;
unnecessary, or un-accounted for absence(s) from
work stations; poor time-keeping or absenteeism;
or any other o?ence thought to warrant concern.
NDM was widely viewed by the shop?oor as a
major restriction:
NDM doesn’t allow you to make any deci-
sions, you just adhere to it. You can’t use
your discretion because you are just a ‘tool’.
[It’s there] to discipline people (Supervisor)
These new disciplinary measures precipitated a
period of increasing tension. One Operator sug-
gested that through NDM corporate management
was simply ‘‘sending the message [to the shop-
?oor]’’ that ‘‘they’re going to discipline people ‘out
of the door’’’ (i.e. by sacking them) as a means of
‘‘breaking’’ shop?oor resistance. Workers initially
resorted to contriving forms of ‘down-time’ that
enabled them to account for lost production or
poor performance ?gures. They achieved this by
booking breakdowns, waiting time, or any stop-
pages or interruptions to the ?ow of production
that had either never occurred, or recorded more
time than it actually took for themselves, machine
setters or maintenance personnel to ?x these pro-
blems. In certain cases, workers avoided or
refused to record output ?gures or stoppages, sar-
castically claiming that they had either forgotten
or had been ‘‘too busy’’. Stalling and/or dragging-
out the process of recording output or perfor-
mance levels was intended to wear management
down and thereby ‘‘force them to back-o?’’, as
one worker put it. Workers reinforced the message
that plant management could expect at best mini-
mum compliance to the rules and procedures of
the new disciplinary regime. Workers also sig-
nalled their intent to consume as much of man-
agement’s time as possible in routine progress
chasing and to make management expend time
and e?ort in re-asserting and enforcing the rules
and procedures of the new disciplinary regime. As
one Operator said ‘‘[NDM] works both ways; if
this is the way they want to ‘manage’ then that’s
?ne, but it’s up to them to get it right, not us’’. The
attitude of the shop?oor was:
We had no choice but to take them [manage-
ment] on over these things. What things like
MBF amount to is lean manufacturing in all
its glory. Which is about screwing people and
getting rid of as many jobs as possible in the
process, so you can’t a?ord to ignore it.
(Shop Steward)
In January 1997 workers almost unanimously
voted to take strike action. Their main grievances
were focused upon the new time and attendance
policy. This, they protested, had been imposed
upon them without prior negotiation between the
plant management and elected trade union repre-
sentatives. As one worker indicated, ‘‘[NDM] is a
sacker’s charter’’. It was widely viewed by workers
as designed not only to impose totally unrestricted
managerial power, control and surveillance over
the nature and organization of production, but
also to usher in a regime of ‘‘management by fear’’
that functioned by arbitrarily targeting workers
for dismissal as a means of applying pressure to
others to conform to the entire NDM measures
package. In March 1997 workers implemented
their earlier decision to take strike action by
beginning what was intended to be a series of
random 1-day strikes and an over-time ban. If this
action failed to win concessions, the threat was to
292 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
follow it with an inde?nite all-out strike. Legally,
the shop stewards were required to give only 24
hours’ notice before each 1-day strike took place.
They therefore adopted a strategy of ‘‘hitting them
[management] randomly and at short notice’’, as
one Shop Steward claimed. This involved choos-
ing a di?erent day each week on which the strike
would take place, but informing management of
this as late as [legally] possible in order to in?ict
maximum disruption to production schedules and
output targets in ways that management could
least easily control. After only two 1-day strikes,
management conceded to the workers’ demands
and abandoned NDM.
The shop stewards informed management that
they would not be prepared to discontinue indus-
trial action without the latter’s agreement that its
time and attendance and disciplinary policies were
appropriately revised, following ‘‘proper’’ con-
sultation between the HRM Department and the
shop stewards. In less than a week, the outcome of
this was a (new) policy agreeable to both the
plant’s new senior management and the shop
stewards. Withdrawal of NDM, however, did not
inhibit corporate management’s search for greater
control and surveillance over the shop?oor. There
have been renewed, albeit more cautious, attempts
to operationalise fully ‘new’ disciplinary account-
ing measures in the plant. In response, further
strike action has been threatened but not carried
out. The ‘new’ accounting measures continue to be
contested and fought over as the politics of pro-
duction unravel new dynamics that are mediated
by the nature and history of the plant’s manage-
ment–labour relations.
Discussion
In order to provide a broad overview of worker–
management–steward relations at Northern Plant,
we have described its constituent groups as if they
were fairly uni?ed and pursuing consistent objec-
tives. It is of course possible to disaggregate their
respective orientations and priorities to highlight
divisions and fractures. Con?icts over lean pro-
duction and novel accounting practices at the
plant occurred not only between management and
labour, but also ensued within and between dif-
ferent shop?oor groups including shop stewards.
To be sure, shop stewards at the plant did chal-
lenge lean production and new accounting meth-
ods, and on occasion, actively enticed workers to
oppose their introduction by threatening industrial
action. Yet, compared to the majority of the
membership, the stewards were decidedly less
‘militant’ or ‘intransigent’. Following o?cial
AUEW Trade Union policy (since the mid-1980s:
see Ackers, Smith, & Smith, 1996), the stewards
largely accepted, and to some extent welcomed, the
prospect of new wave manufacturing and working
practices as these were expected to involve train-
ing, education and multi-skilling that were claimed
to be of bene?t to their membership. The stew-
ards’ later aversion to, but not total rejection of,
lean production, only arose from a belated
appraisal of its ‘meanness’ — an awareness that
developed during long and protracted negotiation
with management over the terms and conditions
of its introduction. Their view of how this appar-
ent ‘meanness’ of lean production should be chal-
lenged, however, di?ered from that of their
membership. As we have shown elsewhere (Ezza-
mel, Willmott, & Worthington, 2001), the shop
stewards sought to avoid what they saw as the
potentially negative implications of lean produc-
tion, ‘by negotiating it in as a damage-limitation
exercise’. Their membership, in contrast, adopted
a stance designed to distance themselves as far as
possible from the prospect of ever working under
these conditions
12
.
At the outset, workers did not totally reject lean
production. Changes in the social organization at
the plant, resulting from the introduction of new
technology or the application of innovations in
?exible production systems were commonplace at
Northern Plant. The plant’s rapid expansion in the
1970s was a consequence of an enthusiasm for
innovation in both the design and manufacture of
its product, and its experimentation with group-
12
As this account showed, shop stewards at Northern Plant
were prepared to talk endlessly about their willingness to accept
new (team) working practices, providing management remained
responsible for making such arrangements work, but remained
unwilling to walk even one step in management’s direction to
enable them to achieve this.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 293
technology (Alford, 1994, see below) that they
shared. Since it increased employment and job
security at the plant, which is located in an area
that has traditionally su?ered relatively high
unemployment, such innovations had tradition-
ally been well received by workers. In any case,
established industrial relations agreements meant
that the introduction of new working practices at
the plant was automatically subject to collective
bargaining—usually only at annual pay negotia-
tions. As with previous major innovations, work-
ers were attentive to the possible implications of
lean production for existing frontiers of control
and their potential e?ect upon job security. But
they were not automatically opposed to its intro-
duction. The subsequent strength of worker
opposition to lean production, as opposed to the
more accommodating stance of their stewards,
was not simply the result of recognising the
potential ‘meanness’ of this mode of production
but a combination of a number of factors, includ-
ing, ironically, the promise of polyvalence.
13
Workers at Northern Plant were sceptical of pro-
mises of high-levels of training, education or skill-
enhancement that management claimed would
accompany introduction of lean production. It
was considered implausible that all workers at the
plant would, or indeed could, be a?orded the
opportunity of skill-enhancement, let alone a
mature apprenticeship- assuming that all of them
would want to take this opportunity if it was pre-
sented to them. Indeed, some workers were indif-
ferent and many resistant to the prospect of skill-
enhancement from the outset. Many declared to
management and their stewards that they had no
interest in becoming a ‘skilled-man’. For these
workers, given what they saw as the commodi?ed
nature of all work in manufacturing, ‘skilled-work’
was only marginally ‘better’ than non/semi-skilled
work. Others argued, as labour process theorists
contend (e.g. Bratton, 1992; Dohse et al., 1991),
that ‘skill-enhancement’ under lean production is a
misnomer; a tactic used by management to ‘blur
the lines’ between craft and semi-skilled work in a
way that results in de-skilling not en-skilling and
promotes work intensi?cation, eventually leading
to job-losses.
Many workers at the plant accepted and indeed
supported craft workers’ defence of craft demar-
cation-lines. In their view, having served an
apprenticeship, craft workers had a right to pro-
tect the privileged status and position they held in
the labour process, not least of all to preserve the
integrity of craft work for future entrants. Like
Collinson’s (1992) workers, many workers at
Northern Plant believed they had ‘missed their
opportunity of apprentices on leaving school at
age 15, and to enter into a mature apprenticeship
now as an adult would amount to taking the
opportunity of an apprenticeship away from the
current generation of school-leavers. Others, how-
ever, were less sympathetic, believing craft work-
ers to be arrogant and contemptuous of the plant’s
non-craft workers, who they saw as ‘lesser [shop-
?oor] beings’, and who they were preventing from
‘getting on’. However, in general all workers, irre-
spective of their views of new wave manufacturing
initiatives, and each other, remained cautious as
they sought to avoid being drawn into accepting
lean production without formally negotiated
agreements reached by their stewards that speci?-
cally guaranteed: (1) equal opportunity to in-
house skill training and education for all workers
through to a mature apprenticeship; (2) job-secur-
ity for those who did not wish to take this oppor-
tunity; (3) a no-compulsory redundancy policy,
and; (4) trade union involvement in the planning,
organization and administration of multi-skilling
and mature apprenticeship training schemes.
Lengthy negotiation failed to produce a
mutually agreeable training policy acceptable to
both management and the shop?oor. This led
workers to question management intentions and
13
The promise of becoming more ‘skilled’ was a highly attrac-
tive proposition for many machine operators at the plant. Many
of them already uno?cially performed certain aspects of skilled
work that they had acquired by assisting skilled men to re-tool
and re-programme during machine changeovers. They also
acquired minor CNC (Computerised numerical Control) tooling
and product quality control programming skills, which setters
taught then, to save down-time during production runs. The pro-
spect of working with manufacturing engineers, and the promise
of the opportunity to progress to the position of manufacturing
engineer, was similarly attractive to many skilled workers. Skilled
workers could however, realise this aspiration whether or not lean
production was introduced, whereas semi-skilled workers, could
achieve skilled status only by its introduction.
294 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
to lose faith in the shop stewards’ ability to protect
their interests by securing from management the
introduction of a genuine multi-skilling pro-
gramme, rather than simply a ‘multi-tasking’ (see
Sharpe, 1996) agreement that, they believed,
would lead to work intensi?cation as manage-
ment’s primary aim. The major obstacle to the
introduction of lean production at Northern Plant
that emerged from these negotiations, however,
was the craft-workers’ response to multi-skilling.
This was a more intractable problem. Semi-skilled
shop?oor worker had rightly anticipated that the
plant’s time served skilled/craft workers would not
accept a multi-skilling that allowed ‘dilutees’ (i.e.
non-time-served workers) into their ranks
14
.
When, as expected, the skilled workforce refused
to agree to multi-skilling, and, moreover, rejected
management’s proposals for a mature apprentice-
ship scheme, talks not only broke down but also
were stalled inde?nitely. There were also divisions
within management. In addition to obvious di?er-
ences in seniority and functional responsibility
amongst managers, some managers were more
sympathetic to worker concerns, believing that
senior management initiatives could be counter-
productive for securing the degree of employee co-
operation necessary to implement forms of lean
production. Other managers were either blind to, or
dismissive of, such concerns and their implications,
and viewed forms of worker resistance as irrational,
disruptive behaviour that required tougher action.
Recognition of this diversity within the ranks of
workers, shop-stewards, and managers with regard
to workers’ levels of skill, as well as length of ser-
vice and the strength of their identi?cation with the
values and practices that fuelled worker resistance
to management initiatives should not, however,
de?ect attention from examination of the principal
dynamics and prominent features of the relation-
ship between workers and managers at Northern
Plant. Central to this relationship was the sustained
resistance of the workforce to management’s
e?orts to introduce lean manufacturing during the
late 1980s and 1990s. It might be concluded that
the managers at Northern Plant simply lost the
initiative for change during the early stages of
negotiations, never regained it, and that this fail-
ure accounts for the strength of opposition to new
working practices they subsequently faced. By the
same token, it could be said that the ‘uncompro-
mising’ determination of the stewards to secure a
bene?cial outcome to change for their membership
was a key factor in explaining the resistance
encountered by management to its lean produc-
tion initiatives. A sophisticated labour process
model of con?ict at work (Edwards, 1986) would
identify these two factors, perhaps orchestrated by
stewards’ tacit support for worker ‘misbehaviour’
that served to subvert management’s authority
and unity, as broadly su?cient to account for the
situation. Indeed, how else could one explain how
machine operators develop the understanding that
TQM means ‘less men doing more work’, and then
act on this insight to confront management? This
model of industrial relations, we suggest, positions
the ordinary shop?oor worker as a bit player
in industrial con?ict, preyed on by management
on the one hand, and protected on the other by
dedicated shop stewards’, totally committed to
protecting worker interests (see Beynon, 1984;
Darlington, 1994).
In the case of Northern Plant, however, worker
resistance was not motivated solely, and perhaps
not even primarily, by a concern to protect mate-
rial conditions of employment (i.e. pay, conditions
and job-security), or established ‘frontiers of con-
trol’ (Edwards, 1979). Other important considera-
tions, which we characterise as ‘identity concerns’,
fuelled their resistance to change. A determination
to preserve social spaces at work that would
enable them to con?rm a sense of identity shaped
during an earlier period of the plant’s history gen-
erated con?ict not only between managers and
workers but also between workers and their shop
stewards. Determined to preserve established
working practices in the face of their threatened
erosion by e?orts to introduce lean production, the
workers accused the stewards of lacking the same
commitment or determination. Shop stewards
regarded their shop?oor membership not so much
14
As Penn (1986) shows, craft-workers in manufacturing
have traditionally defended craft-knowledge from management
and non-skilled workers and ‘dilutees—non-time-served ’ skil-
led workers, and the internal demarcation lines that exist
between speci?c craft workers (i.e. electricians, ?tters, tool-
makers, setters, grinders) to protect their interests.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 295
as straying beyond control, but as ‘beyond (their)
contempt’, interested only in short-term ?nancial
‘self interests’. The stewards perception, which our
own analysis questions and relates to an exces-
sively materialistic and patronising unionist dis-
course, was that their members were too readily
prepared to accept ‘‘any shit’, or strike any deal
(with their foremen) to acquire the ‘gravy jobs’
(see Burawoy, 1979); to gain ‘excessive’ over-time
as payment for ‘score-busting’ (i.e. making the
numbers in record times, to which they might one
day be held to account as their o?cial output tar-
gets), or, as it was put more contemptuously by an
ex-trade union convenor at the plant, simply
because ‘‘some of them just like grovelling’’. To
explain this, and following Clegg (1994), a scene
from a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western perhaps
more accurately portrays the nature of resistance
at the plant in the wake of its planned investment
in lean production than the classic Western Movie
industrial relations scenario. That is, it took the
form of a screenplay comprising ‘transitory, ?eet-
ing, ambivalent and semiotically insecure sub-
jectivities’ (Clegg, 1994: p. 275) constituted by a
wider sense of insecurity borne of perpetual suspi-
cion, mistrust and the constant fear of betrayal
from each of the di?erent dyads within the triad of
the individual agencies ultimately commited to ‘no
cause but their own’ (ibid.).
15
A ‘stand-o?’ ensued between managers who
were reluctant to attempt the imposition of new
working practices on the shop?oor for fear of
provoking industrial dispute; workers who were
resistant to o?ering the slightest concession to
management for fear of work intensi?cation; and
shop stewards caught between the two. The stew-
ards were unprepared to (openly) support work-
er’s intransigence towards change, for fear of
being led into an industrial dispute over lean pro-
duction by their membership, which they believed
they would not win. Yet the stewards were equally
unprepared to acquiesce to management demands
for them to cultivate a more reasonable response
to change amongst the workforce, which they
believed they could not deliver even if they wanted
to, and which risked provoking wild cat industrial
action (Gouldner, 1955) that they could not con-
trol. Either outcome, as the stewards protested,
would probably have resulted in the defeat of the
union, which they believed neither they nor their
membership could a?ord. The stewards therefore
contrived to parry pressures from management for
change by communication of what would, or
would not, be acceptable to their membership
while, at the same time, side-stepping membership
pressure for a ?rmer stance, including occasional
shop?oor calls for industrial action, by skilfully
de?ecting these demands.
16
15
During the research it was di?cult to ?nd respondents
amongst the shop?oor protagonists of resistance, the shop
stewards or managers themselves who were not somewhat
bewildered by how the resistance to lean production had con-
tinued for such a lengthy period. The search for a plausible
explanation was in fact a regular topic of conversation not only
between shop?oor workers themselves, but also between work-
ers and managers. These exchanges—typically between foremen
and workers—often caused production to be lost. Indeed, such
matters were often discussed for quite lengthy periods, with the
former conveniently perched on the side of a machine or
workstation or while workers were on ‘walk-a-bout’ as they
skived o? from their designated workstations in a whole host of
ingenious ways without any genuine reason or permission.
Such day-to-day activities were conducted openly with impu-
nity, without fear of reprimand or disciplinary action from
management. These social practices were in fact so deeply
ingrained in the collective thought of both workers and man-
gers at the plant that not only were they simply accepted
norms, but totally ‘taken-for-granted’ as part and parcel of the
culture of management-labour relations at Northern Plant.
16
The shop stewards themselves called for industrial action
only when they deemed the strength and legitimacy of their
position with management to be under threat, or when they
found pressures from the shop?oor became over-barring.
Threats of industrial action, however, rarely if ever came close
to being carried out. More often, shop stewards used the threat
to impress upon management that they had the full support of
their membership if action was deemed necessary. Threats of
industrial action were therefore used mainly to check occa-
sional attempts to impose new working practices at the plant
outside of established management-trade union negotiation
procedures, or to counter moves to undermine their rights as
the legitimate representatives of the shop?oor, for example, by
attempting to circumvent them to deal with workers directly to
promote new working practices. This had the e?ect of render-
ing the shop stewards militant in the eyes of management, and
corrupt in the eyes of their membership. The stewards defended
their actions by claiming that they were necessary to protect the
position of the trade union at the plant as the gatekeepers of
industrial action.
296 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
We have set our examination of how, at North-
ern Plant, new accounting techniques introduced
to secure leaner production were resisted by a
workforce that interpreted them as measures
designed to weaken, manipulate, or restrict their
exercise of discretion in the context of an estab-
lished and entrenched pattern of management–
labour relations. Although the stewards played a
part in mediating between ‘unruly’ shop?oor
workers and ‘overbearing’ managers, we have
stressed that forms of con?ict and processes of
resistance at Northern Plant cannot adequately be
understood in terms of classical management-
union battles and skirmishes over pay and condi-
tions. Pay and conditions were undoubtedly sig-
ni?cant and often became an overt, mutually
recognisable focus of disputes. But recurrent
struggles, we have suggested, were provoked and
fuelled principally by innovations that posed a
threat to established forms of identi?cation and
means of reproducing narratives of self identity.
The articulation of workers’ concerns occurred
through interactions on the shop?oor between
workers, with supervisors and at meetings where
politically astute, but not necessarily militantly
leftist or unionist, workers would be active in
pushing issues, often in humorous ways, so that
other, less politically attuned workers, would be
schooled about the signi?cance and implications
of management’s e?orts to introduce change. Dis-
content would be harnessed and support mobilised
by demonstrating how management demands
could be lampooned, subverted, parried and
de?ected in ways that drew those in who enjoyed a
‘la?’ and a release from boredom occasioned by
scraps and confrontations with management. In
this precarious way, ‘solidarity’ amongst diverse
and fractious members of the shop?oor was man-
ufactured as di?erent orientations—comprising
politically aware workers who were disa?ected
with the union; traditionally ‘militant’ workers
and others who were ardent and unquestioning
union supporters, as well as a residual number of
politically disinterested or ‘naive’ workers who
simply enjoyed the spectacle of watching super-
visors and managers being knocked o? their per-
ches—were brought together to frustrate and
impede managerial change initiatives.
Resistance might otherwise be interpreted sim-
ply as workers’ opposition to measures that
threatened the material basis of their relationship
to capital as sellers of labour power. In contrast,
we have argued that it was not just, or even prin-
cipally, the threat of the loss of their jobs that
galvanised resistance to management’s repeated
e?orts to change work practices but, rather,
workers’ immersion in a narrative that prized a
culture of what we have termed ‘unplanned
responsible autonomy’. Prior to Motor-Co’s quest
to modernise the plant, workers had negotiated
high levels of overtime and considerable ‘free time’
in exchange for their e?ort and co-operation in
managing production. Workers’ involvement in
self-managing practices, informal organization
and co-operative management-labour relations,
underpinned by the standard costing system, pro-
vided them with knowledge of the practical mean-
ing of concepts such as ?exibility, quality
consciousness, empowerment, employee involve-
ment and Kaizen. When management subse-
quently sought to introduce ‘new wave’
manufacturing and production methods and new
accounting techniques, these initiatives were inter-
preted by workers as attempts to incorporate their
involvement and co-operation into a new, non-
negotiable, or at least more tightly circumscribed,
social organization of production. These develop-
ments, it was anticipated, would restrict their
involvement and in?uence over the social organi-
zation of production. It would also narrow
opportunities for con?rming and reproducing
their self-identity as knowledgeable agents of pro-
duction, as contrasted to becoming docile servants
of the new production methods and accounting
techniques—techniques that workers perceived to
impose managerially programmed forms of dis-
cretion upon them. This made workers determined
to preserve practices in which their sense of
knowledgeability and identity could be articulated
and maintained. Having exercised considerable
discretion over the organization of work during
the era of unplanned responsible autonomy, which
provided a (nostalgic) benchmark for interrogat-
ing the signi?cance and likely consequences of
each new initiative, workers could readily antici-
pate what the ‘new’ practices (e.g. teamworking)
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 297
would mean in terms of work intensi?cation and
the squeezing of both ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ time.
The experience of unplanned responsible auton-
omy informed their understanding of subsequent
management initiatives and ?red their resistance
to the exercise of programmed discretion deman-
ded by the ‘new’ accounting measures. The pro-
spect of working within what was construed, in
the light of workers’ previous experience, as a non-
negotiable and uncompromising system of produc-
tion was readily discerned and collectively resisted.
Workers’ retention of a substantial measure of
discretion, or exemption from managerially
designed control, coupled with their capacity to
engage in diverse forms of ‘misbehaviour’ and
resistance, enabled them ‘to keep a particular nar-
rative [of self] going’ (Giddens, 1991; p. 54), a
narrative resting on a celebration of their superior
knowledge and understanding of high-tech manu-
facturing and ability to ‘manage’ complex pro-
duction mixes. By preserving this narrative,
workers contrived to outwit and outsmart man-
agement’s e?orts to control the sphere of action
within which they developed and exercised their
control over the labour process. Worker resistance
also drew a measure of support from local man-
agers in so far as they assessed ‘new’ organizing
and accounting initiatives to unsettle established
management–labour relations and/or have self
defeating consequences for raising output. Shop
stewards shared workers’ suspicion of manage-
ment’s claims about lean production but were
more inclined to accept the union view that it
would be possible to negotiate an up-skilling
agreement, and were therefore reluctant to sup-
port workers’ unquali?ed resistance to the new
initiatives.
Conclusions
This paper has presented an intensive case study
of Northern Plant in an e?ort to shed further light
on the introduction of ‘new’ accounting practices
in contemporary work organizations, and to link
these initiatives to the context of management-
labour relations. By examining the history of
developments at Northern Plant over more than
twenty years, we have connected e?orts to intro-
duce new manufacturing and accounting practices
to changes in ownership and market conditions.
We noted how, for example, following a change of
ownership, new initiatives including ?exibility,
teamworking, and cellular manufacturing were
launched, and with these came a demand for ‘new’
accounting practices.
We began by summarising brie?y the sequence
of events. Initially the parent favoured ABC, but
senior management at Northern Plant viewed this
as counter-productive for its market and labour
conditions. Aware of the history of management-
labour relations at Northern Plant, its managers
sought to avoid ABC because they anticipated
that employees would perceive its e?ects as
degrading their conditions of employment and
limiting traditional opportunities and scope for
self-organizion. Accordingly, the Plant managers
introduced TA, but this was interpreted and resis-
ted by workers and middle and ?rst-line managers
who viewed it as a device for labour intensi?cation
and concealing e?ciency improvements that could
provide a basis for negotiating better pay and
conditions. Subsequently, TA (and TOC) was dis-
banded in favour of a package comprising ABM
and Management By Fact (MBF), which then met
with the same fate as TA. This resistance even-
tually prompted a highly coercive response from
corporate management as managers at all levels in
Northern Plant were replaced. At the same time,
the focus of accounting techniques shifted with the
withdrawal of delegated authority to middle man-
agement who were to be brought under the con-
stant gaze of senior management. Greater, and
more direct, accountability measures were
imposed on them. In the face of entrenched resis-
tance, corporate management intervened by
applying a variety of direct controls, such as Non-
Discretionary Management (NDM) coupled to
MBF. In response to e?ective and damaging
industrial action, management conceded to shop-
?oor demands by withdrawing NDM.
To understand such shifts and counter-shifts, we
have argued, does not simply require giving a little
more attention to the politics of the production pro-
cess, but rather positioning it at the centre of analy-
sis. For it is these management-labour relations, we
298 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
contend, that facilitate or frustrate, and smooth or
disrupt, the practicalities of accounting for factory
production. More speci?cally, a fuller apprecia-
tion and exploration of senior managers’ depen-
dence upon middle and ?rst-line managers as well
as workers’ co-operation—and the latter’s capa-
city to develop more or less e?ective forms of
covert and overt resistance—is required. By tra-
cing the dynamics of management control and
employee resistance, and indeed workers’ control
and management resistance, we have sought to
provide one illustration of how the introduction
and abandonment of a series of ‘new’ management
and accounting initiatives was conditioned by the
politics of production.
We do not claim that the case of Northern Plant
is typical or representative. But neither are we in a
position to concede that the dynamics explored in
this paper are unparalleled, even if they are dra-
matically articulated. We have been at pains to
emphasise the particularities of the history of
Northern Plant in terms of workers’ specialist
skills, its benign product market conditions and
the ethos of ‘unplanned responsible autonomy’
that was negotiated in its early years. In this
respect, Northern Plant illustrates the obverse of
dynamics observed in a sister study where a very
di?erent pattern of management-labour relations
at StitchCo, forged within a distinctive complex of
product and labour markets, mediated employees’
receptiveness to the introduction and implemen-
tation of new manufacturing practices and asso-
ciated accounting methods (Ezzamel & Willmott,
1998a). So, while it is impossible to draw out any
generalisations about the introduction or con-
sequences of lean production from a single case
study, we believe that insights into the dynamics
of its implementation are of more general rele-
vance. In particular, we have commended atten-
tiveness to the signi?cance of processes of identity
formation and reproduction in assessing and
accommodating change initiatives, including
e?orts to implement lean production.
We conclude with a consideration of how our
analysis compares to, and serves as a corrective
for, the analysis of new management and
accounting initiatives advanced by Miller and
O’Leary (1993, 1994). We concur with Miller and
O’Leary’s concern to shift the terms of reference
of the debate on accounting change from the
purely economic (e.g. transaction cost theory) to
the realm of the political—that is, the realm
where debates occur, interpretations are made,
negotiations are entered, deals are struck and
coalitions are formed. Their analysis also valu-
ably acknowledges how, for example, the dis-
crediting of certain accounting techniques is
inseparable from the strategies used to promote
the authority and ‘value’ of those commending
alternative accounting techniques. The emergence
of accounting is usefully linked to competing and
negotiated conceptions of the product, the factory,
and emerging modes of governance. Our analysis,
however, indicates that the ‘politics of production’
is a crucial omission from their analysis.
Miller and O’Leary’s analysis of Caterpillar
implies that management’s intentions are actua-
lised in the formation of ‘economic citizens’, with-
out dealing with whether, or how, this process is
accomplished (see Froud et al., 1998). Miller and
O’Leary (1994; p. 38) identify and elaborate
dimensions of the process, noting that it opened
up a domain of ‘‘empowerment, discretion and
negotiation. . . traversed by tensions and potential
con?icts’’. But they do not show how these ten-
sions shaped, enabled or constrained the ‘actuali-
zation’ of cell proprietorship, nor do they
incorporate an examination of these dynamics
within their account. It is noted that new demands
were continually arising—for example, with
regard to the challenge of aligning working
arrangements with the ideal of customer-driven
manufacturing—and it is reported that e?orts ‘to
re-make the identities of the workers’ in response
to these demands were ‘fragile and temporary’
(ibid: 40). Yet, Miller and O’Leary o?er no investi-
gation or discussion of the practical operation and
e?ects of these e?orts in organizing the introduction
and development of Caterpillar’s Plant with a
Future (PWAF) programme through which ‘‘new
economic citizenship [was] given form and content’’
(ibid). In their analysis, the voice of labour is con-
spicuous by its absence as its cooperation is tacitly
implied. In e?ect, labour is presented as passively
accepting the changes introduced by management
at the Caterpillar’s Decatur Plant.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 299
In her commentary upon Miller and O’Leary’s
work, Arnold (1998: p. 666) similarly calls atten-
tion to ‘the absence of all traces of class con?ict. . .
in the very domain where Marxian analytical con-
cepts are most powerful, the domain of produc-
tion’. To counteract the silence within Miller and
O’Leary’s analysis, Arnold points to union acti-
vists’ accounts of Caterpillar’s attempt to enrol
workers into a new economic citizenship that are at
least suggestive of the contradictory consequences
of this policy for management credibility and
employee morale.
17
In our examination of man-
agement and accounting initiatives at Northern
Plant, we too have sought to recognise worker
resistance but without substituting the determin-
ism of historical materialism for the alleged inde-
terminacy
18
of ‘postmodern’ readings of the role
of accounting in organizations and society
(Arnold, 1998: p. 665). We accept the importance
of appreciating how the experiences and dis-
courses of workers are conditioned, though by no
means exclusively or exhaustively, by what Arnold
characterises as ‘the logic and internal contra-
dictions of capitalism’ (ibid, p. 680). In our ana-
lyses, we have sought to move beyond orthodox
Marxian conceptualisations of management con-
trol and worker resistance, which tend to read them
unproblematically as articulations of class interests
that allegedly drive rational strategies for their
pursuit or defence. Instead of examining these
conditions as forces or mechanisms that exist inde-
pendently of agents whose actions are governed by
them, we have sought to show how ‘conditions’
are enacted through discursive practices that are
articulations of speci?c complexes of manage-
ment-labour relations. These complexes are
embedded in the capital-labour relationship but
are irreducible to it. More concretely, when
examining initiatives to introduce ‘new’ account-
ing techniques to Northern Plant, we have shown
how a regime of ‘unplanned responsible auton-
omy’, negotiated between management and shop-
?oor workers in an earlier era, returned to haunt
management. An expedient negotiation of coop-
eration during the 1970s and early 1980s e?ec-
tively ‘produced’ workers who proved to be
virtually unmanageable when management sought
to introduce new methods of control.
We have argued that the ‘the politics of the
product’ at Northern Plant were shaped and re-
shaped by employees’ determination to resist and
subvert initiatives that threatened to reduce the
sphere of action in which they were able to con-
?rm and embellish a sense of self-identity as highly
knowledgeable agents of the production process.
This narrative was articulated and brought to
bear on e?orts to introduce the ‘new’ accounting
measures. The subjectivity of labour, whether
‘organized’ or not (Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998a),
is a medium as well as an object of change. It is
centrally implicated in the politics of product and
production (Knights & Willmott, 1989). It is
therefore relevant, contra Miller and O’Leary, to
appreciate how manufacturing is contingent upon
workers’ willingness to behave in particular ways,
and their perceptions of the relevance of ‘new’
manufacturing and accounting techniques for
protecting and defending social spaces in which
narratives of self can be con?rmed and main-
tained. Our analysis shows how the warrant for,
and implementation of, the ‘new’ accounting
techniques is mediated by the politics of produc-
tion as the subjects and objects of these techniques
articulate, negotiate and pursue their interests in
the turmoil of the ‘new’ workplace (Ezzamel &
Willmott, 1998a, 1998b). This applies with equal
measure to workplaces where the constitution of
employees’ subjectivity within di?erent social for-
mations and production processes renders them
more receptive, or at least less resistant, to change,
17
Arnold (1998) notes that workers in the Caterpillar factory
were cautioned by union representatives to guard against the
‘‘false sense of security’’ (our emphases) of believing that ‘team-
working’ and concepts such as ‘self-management’, ‘empower-
ment’ and ‘employee involvement’ might in practice mean any-
thing other than work intensi?cation (see the response by
Miller and O’Leary, 1998). Northern Plant workers, in con-
trast, had experienced forms of ‘teamworking’, ‘self-manage-
ment’, and ‘employee involvement’ during the period prior to
the Motor-Co take-over—and had subsequently jealously
defended this pattern of management–labour relations. They
did not need to be cautioned about the ‘false sense of security’
invoked by the buzz words relating to ‘new’ manufacturing
practices. Their past experience led them, rightly or wrongly, to
regard intensi?cation as an inherent feature of ‘lean’ manu-
facturing.
18
What Arnold describes as ‘a seemingly coincidental con-
junctive of discursive practices’ (Arnold, 1998; p. 670).
300 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
including the introduction of new manufacturing
and accounting methods. Only by appreciating the
presence and signi?cance of labour in the politics
of production, can a less partial way of interpret-
ing the practical application of ‘new’ or ‘higher
performance’ techniques be advanced.
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302 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
doc_643829591.pdf
This paper examines the role of accounting in management–labour relations within the context of contemporary
moves to re-conceptualise and reorganise manufacturing processes. We explore how new manufacturing and accounting
discourses are received by employees, and how their (more or less accommodating) responses to such initiatives
shape the trajectory of their introduction. So doing we show why a more adequate understanding of accounting’s
presence and significance in the workplace does not simply require a little more attention to the politics of the production
process but, rather, its positioning at the centre of analysis. We develop our argument by drawing on material
collected from an intensive and longitudinal case study of a manufacturing plant of a large multinational company
based upon participant observation and extensive interviews. We show how, following shifts in market conditions and
company ownership, pressures to enhance productivity and improve profits led to several attempts by senior management
at the plant to introduce change initiatives in production methods, management style, and accounting techniques.
We demonstrate how shopfloor workers interpreted these initiatives as intensifying labour by reducing head count,
leading them to resist these initiatives over a period of 13 years.
Accounting and management–labour relations: the politics
of production in the ‘factory with a problem’
§
Mahmoud Ezzamel
a,
*, Hugh Willmott
b
, Frank Worthington
c
a
Cardi? Business School, Cardi? University, Cardi?, CF10 3EU, Wales, UK
b
Judge Institute of Management Studies, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK
c
Liverpool Institute of Public Administration and Management, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
Abstract
This paper examines the role of accounting in management–labour relations within the context of contemporary
moves to re-conceptualise and reorganise manufacturing processes. We explore how new manufacturing and account-
ing discourses are received by employees, and how their (more or less accommodating) responses to such initiatives
shape the trajectory of their introduction. So doing we show why a more adequate understanding of accounting’s
presence and signi?cance in the workplace does not simply require a little more attention to the politics of the pro-
duction process but, rather, its positioning at the centre of analysis. We develop our argument by drawing on material
collected from an intensive and longitudinal case study of a manufacturing plant of a large multinational company
based upon participant observation and extensive interviews. We show how, following shifts in market conditions and
company ownership, pressures to enhance productivity and improve pro?ts led to several attempts by senior manage-
ment at the plant to introduce change initiatives in production methods, management style, and accounting techniques.
We demonstrate how shop?oor workers interpreted these initiatives as intensifying labour by reducing head count,
leading them to resist these initiatives over a period of 13 years. We argue that during this period the rhetoric of cor-
porate governance was mediated by workers’ ability to create a space through which their own interests were de?ned,
articulated and brought to bear on the discourses and rationalities advanced by senior management in support of ‘new’
accounting (and management) techniques. By appreciating the presence and signi?cance of labour in the politics of
production, additional ways of accounting for the rise and demise of ‘new’ or ‘excellent’ accounting techniques are
contemplated.
#2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Over the last decade, researchers have examined
changes that purport to engender ‘new’, progressive
forms of work organization in manufacturing
including initiatives to promote teamworking, ?ex-
ibility, and multiskilling. (e.g. Ezzamel, Lilley, &
Willmott, 1997; Storey, 1994; Whittaker, 1992).
Celebrated developments include cellular manu-
facturing (see Alford, 1994) and just-in-time manu-
facturing (Schonberger, 1986). Corresponding
changes in work organization encompass forms of
0361-3682/03/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0361-3682(03)00014-X
Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
§
This paper is part of a larger research project funded by
the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Fifth Inter-
disciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Conference, University
of Manchester, Manchester, July 1997 and at the Manufactur-
ing Accounting Workshop, Copenhagen, March 1999. We are
grateful for the many constructive comments made by Chris-
tine Cooper and other delegates at these meetings and by the
two anonymous reviewers.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Ezzamel).
empowerment and job-enlargement that are often
portrayed as a new dawn of participative, co-opera-
tive management-labour relations. In parallel with
these developments, changes in management
accounting techniques have been commended,
including Activity-Based-Costing (ABC), Through-
put Accounting (TA), Cellular Accounting, Back-
?ush Accounting, Economic Value Added and
Strategic Management Accounting (Kaplan, 1994).
We seek to contribute to an emergent literature
that locates such accounting changes within wider
debates that have included inter alia issues of
national competitiveness, shifts in modes of cor-
porate governance, reforms in manufacturing and
management practice and demands for new forms
of accountability commensurate with the aims and
objectives of the ‘brave newworkplace’ (e.g. Kenney
& Florida, 1993; Miller & O’Leary, 1993, 1994).
The role of accounting techniques in organizations
is, however, mediated by workers’ willingness to
embrace, or at least support, their operation. In
the absence of their co-operation, production is
halted and services are not delivered. Previous
research has explored the role of accounting in
wage negotiations and collective bargaining (e.g.
Amernic, 1985; Croft, 1981; Foley & Maunders,
1977; Ogden & Bougen, 1985; Owen & Lloyd,
1985). Most studies (but see Amernic, 1985),
however, have either focused upon the normative,
in contrast to the empirical, roles of accounting,
and/or have abstracted their analyses from the
specificities of the organizational settings of man-
agement-labour relations. It is not an exaggeration
to observe that nothing much has changed since
Bougen (1989, p. 205) noted that ‘‘There has been,
unfortunately, a lamentable paucity of research in
the accounting-industrial relations ?eld.’’
Of the few studies that have sought to inter-
rogate context-speci?c practices of accounting as
they interact with industrial relations, Bougen
(1989) examined the introduction of a pro?t shar-
ing scheme in a historically-based case study.
Other accounting research has explored the roles
of accounting in the re-ordering of manufacture
(Carmona, Ezzamel, & Guttierrez, 2002; Jones &
Dugdale, 1995; Miller & O’Leary, 1993, 1994), but
these studies o?er scant empirical illumination of
the relationship between accounting and the
everyday practices through which labour articu-
lates its diverse priorities and interests. Notably,
Miller and O’Leary’s ‘politics of the product’ fra-
mework, as Arnold (1998) points out, omits the
voice of labour. By concentrating almost entirely
on (North American management) exhortations to
the e?cacy of new forms of accounting and fac-
tory organization, Miller and O’Leary ignore the
politics of production (Burawoy, 1985).
Outside the accounting ?eld, sociologists of
work, industry and organization have routinely
disregarded the presence and signi?cance of
accounting in promoting, justifying and impeding
the (re)organization of work practises, including
those involved in new manufacturing processes. In
e?ect, accounting is invisible within such studies,
perhaps because it is regarded as esoteric or
merely re?ective (i.e. score-keeping) rather than
constitutive and reproductive of change initiatives
and their problematical implementation. Yet, as
we seek to show, the development and use of ‘new’
accounting techniques to re-organize work, is of
central importance. Work practices are quanti?ed,
assessed and reported through forms of account-
ing that are consequential and contested.
Accounting operates as a key signi?er that is
enacted through management–labour relations in
ways which enable and constrain how managerial
prerogative and worker discretion are negotiated.
Accounting-based measures indicate performance
Nomenclature
ABC activity-based-costing
ABM activity based management
JIT just-in-time
LP lean production
LPT labour process theory
MBF management by fact
NDM non-discretionary management
OPT optimal production technology
SPC statistical process control
TA throughput accounting
TOC theory of constraints
TQM total quality management
VF visual factory
270 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
and are frequently coupled to reward. Their pre-
sence and operation is signi?cant for the experi-
ence of work as well as the symbolic and material
value that is placed upon it. As we shall show, in
our case study accounting measures were deployed
by managers in an e?ort to (re)draw the bound-
aries of relations with labour that are precarious,
subject to revision and open to interpretation,
scrutiny and challenge by managers as well as
workers.
This paper addresses the relationship between
accounting and the politics of production by
examining the translation of ‘new’ accounting
knowledge into manufacturing practices, and the
actions of labour, management and shop stewards
at Northern Plant (a pseudonym). Northern Plant,
in the North West of England, is the primary
European manufacturing site of MotorCo (a
pseudonym), a North American owned multi-
national company that acquired the plant from
N-Gineering (a pseudonym) in the early 1980s. Our
involvement at Northern Plant included partici-
pant observation and intensive, semi-structured
interviews. One of the authors worked at the plant
between 1979 and 1995 in a variety of shop?oor
jobs including machine operator, assembly worker,
and storeman. This experience was documented in
?eld notes and, together with internal documents
as well as over eighty recorded and transcribed
interviews, each lasting between one and one and a
half hours, with senior and middle managers,
supervisors, shop stewards and shop?oor workers
conducted between 1995 and 1998, forms the
backbone of our analysis of the plant’s history and
our accounts of the various change initiatives,
including workers’ experience of these initiatives.
Speci?cally, we place accounting-based change
initiatives in the context of management–labour
relations, with a focus upon the dynamics of
worker resistance to planned organizational
‘change’. ‘New’ manufacturing and accounting
methods, we contend, are devised and enacted
within an ensemble of relations and traditions
forged inter alia by pressures to provide an ade-
quate rate of return for investors (or risk the ?ight
of capital); to establish markets for the goods or
services produced; and to transform hired labour
into a pro?table activity. The transformation of
labour power into productive labour is a condition
of the manufacture of the goods and provision of
services from which a viable return on capital can
be secured. The articulation and elucidation of
this process of transformation and accumulation,
we contend, is most fully developed in labour
process theory (Knights & Willmott, 1989). How-
ever, while this theory discloses the operation of
the capital–labour relationship at the heart of
work organization, it is inclined to conceive of
labour as an economic resource to be harnessed by
strategies of management control without attend-
ing to labour as subjectivity that struggles to
de?ne and secure itself in a (precarious) sense of
identity. Accordingly, the interests imputed to
labour privilege their resistance to exploitative
and/or degrading conditions of work, often to the
exclusion of other concerns and associated lines of
action that are dismissed as symptoms of ‘false
consciousness’ (e.g. Thompson, 1989).
We begin with a consideration of the impor-
tance and relevant means of addressing the
dynamics of work organization, including the
introduction of new accounting and management
practices. We then sketch a brief history of
Northern Plant—dubbed by MotorCo’s corporate
management as ‘a factory with a problem’. Our
focus is upon a series of change initiatives promp-
ted initially by what management considered as
‘poor’ manufacturing performance and shop?oor
discipline, which culminated in the launching of
TA. When TA was perceived to fail to deliver its
claimed bene?ts it was replaced by ABC/ABM.
We explore forms of resistance that rendered these
and other measures ine?ective if not inoperable,
and we account for this resistance in terms of the
identity formation of employees
1
at the plant- a
sense of identity that was disrupted by the
demands of the new practices and con?rmed
through employee opposition to them. While this
formation occurred within an employment rela-
tionship conditioned by a ‘structured antagonism’
(Edwards, 1986) between capital and labour, we
argue that this framework of interpretation is
necessary but insu?cient to provide an adequate
1
Our use of the word ‘employees’ refers to ‘workers’
whereas we treat ‘managers’ as equated to ‘employers’.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 271
account of the actions of workers at Northern
Plant. In the ?nal section, we connect our analysis
to critiques of Miller and O’Leary’s (1993, 1994)
in?uential discussion of ‘the politics of the pro-
duct’. This provides us with a further opportunity
to reiterate the central importance of manage-
ment-labour relations, and in particular the sub-
jectivity of labour, for understanding practices
and processes of innovation in manufacturing and
accounting.
Worker resistance and labour process theory
Our analysis explores the dynamics of manage-
ment control and worker resistance to new forms
of accounting and accountability at Northern
Plant, in contrast to other studies that restrict
analysis to the narrower terrain of management–
trade union relations. This is not least because,
as we show later, worker resistance at Northern
Plant was by no means always instigated or led
by shop stewards at the site but often took its
own course in a context where shop stewards
accommodated as well as opposed manage-
ment’s pressures for change—an ambivalent and
shifting stance that acted to exacerbate worker
resistance.
Worker resistance and labour process analysis
How are the dynamics of workplace con?icts to
be interpreted? To address the relevance of man-
agement-labour relations for understanding the
introduction of new manufacturing and account-
ing practices, we commend but also propose a
reconstruction (O’Doherty & Willmott, 2001) of a
tradition of analysis, in the form of labour process
theory (LPT) (Marx, 1867/1976; Braverman,
1974), that places these relations at its centre. In
his revival of LPT, Braverman develops a sharp
critique of established traditions of industrial
sociology, exempli?ed at its best in the UK by
Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s (1968) study of
a?uent car workers, for its failure to connect
adequately responses given by workers and man-
agers to the social relations of production within
which such views are incubated. More speci?cally,
LPT seeks to locate the agendas and actions of
owners and managers of capitalist enterprises in a
contradictory structure of class relations. The
structure is understood to be contradictory
because, while the relationship between the buyers
(capitalists or their managerial agents) and sellers
of labour is not necessarily zero-sum in terms of
(re)organization of production and the distribu-
tion of surpluses (notably when growth and/or
process improvement permits gains for both par-
ties), it is systematically underpinned by capital’s
institutionalised capacity to treat labour as a dis-
posable commodity that is ‘freely’ traded in the
market. This capacity is exercised, LPT contends,
in capital’s struggles to seize and extend control
over the hiring and translation of labour power
into productive, pro?table activity and, ultimately,
in the ?ring of labour to restore an acceptable rate
of return on capital invested.
Orthodox LPT conceptualises ‘individuals’ (e.g.
workers, managers, stewards) as ‘the personi?ca-
tions of economic categories’ (Marx, 1976: p.92).
The merit of this formulation is that it avoids the
psychologising of workplace behaviour wherein
the actions of ‘individuals’ are abstracted from
their embeddedness in history and political econ-
omy. Notably, instead of addressing the reality of
managers’ actions or shop?oor work by attending
directly to their beliefs (or ‘consciousness’)—such
as managers’ belief in their professionalism and
neutrality or workers’ expressions of satisfaction
or fairness with their jobs—such ‘realities’ are
situated within the historical conditions of their
formation. Instead of regarding their accounts of
work as re?ective of its realities, they are analysed
as articulations of their respective positionings
with a mode of production where managers and
workers exist, fundamentally, as economic cate-
gories—as agents of capital and/or as suppliers of
labour. A limitation of orthodox LPT follows
directly from its treatment of management and
labour as economic categories as the signi?cance of
self-identity—of managers as well as workers—in
the negotiation and practical operation of man-
agement–labour relations is disregarded (Knights
& Willmott, 1989). Insisting that such concerns are
constitutive of these social relations, rather than
simply shaped by them, can be interpreted as a
272 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
return to the terrain of ‘cow sociology’ occupied
by those engaged with the measurement of worker
attitudes and their expressed levels of job satisfac-
tion. However, this disregards the continuities with
the radical tradition of labour process analysis in
which the focus is upon subordination and exploi-
tation, and which understands satisfaction and
compliance to be symptomatic of the complexities
and contradictions of management–labour rela-
tions rather than indicative of a new consensus or,
more grandly, an end of history.
It may be that, in some circumstances, workers
and managers are minded to embrace without
reservation the economic categories to which
orthodox LPT contrives to assign them. Accord-
ingly, the worker may become a passive, commo-
di?ed slave of managerial instruction or may
struggle against the subordination through collec-
tive revolutionary action; and the manager may
slavishly pursue the agendas of investors without
regard for his/her career prospects or s/he may
recognise the commodi?cation of managerial
labour and join in the struggles to overthrow
capitalism. However these and other (less extreme)
possibilities are contingent rather than necessary;
and they are emergent through participation in
diverse social relations (outside as well as inside
the hours of employment) through which a sense
of self identity (or indeed multiple identities) is
forged and secured. Self-identity may ultimately
be an illusion in the sense of being the product
of contingent and arbitrary processes of histor-
ical and cultural formation (Willmott, 1986,
1994). But it is an important illusion that
employers and employees are routinely inclined
to nurture and defend; and it is therefore a sig-
ni?cant element in the negotiation of manage-
ment–labour relations. Both parties to such
negotiations seek to preserve or expand a space
in which their respective narratives of self can be
maintained rather than undermined. The chal-
lenge, then, is to recognise the presence and
in?uence of self-identity formation, reproduction
and transformation but without reverting to a
form of bourgeois analysis that psychologises
management–labour relations.
When positioned in this context, a key ‘driver’
of managerial work is the recurrent search for
means of re-organizing business operations (from
production to marketing and after-sales securing
service) that will sustain the means of securing
surplus value (pro?ts/personal wealth) from
labour for example, by developing accounting
calculations that provide more relevant or useful
measures of labour’s productivity and cost. Meth-
ods of management control may be overtly econ-
omistic and coercive, in which case labour is
treated as an expendable commodity tout court
(e.g. ‘‘produce more or risk dismissal’’). However,
since the cooperation of ‘responsible’ labour is
routinely sought, methods of managing may be
favoured that strive to gain or harness its ‘consent’
(e.g. allowing labour to work ‘with the minimum
of direct supervision’ so long as targets are met).
Frequently, practices of management control con-
tain a volatile and shifting mixture of both ele-
ments. Deploying LPT brings (narrow)
managerial accounts of the impact of accounting
on management-labour relations in the new
workplace, such as Miller and O’Leary’s (1993,
1994), into sharp relief. It shows how labour’s
(apparent) willingness to engage with management
in ‘joint proprietorship’ of a ‘brave new work-
place’ involves processes of negotiation—pro-
cesses that are conditioned less by the dawn of a
‘new economic citizenship’ that heralds coopera-
tive management–labour relations than by on-
going con?icts and accommodations (Edwards,
1986, 1990).
LPT understands con?icts in management-
labour relations to be endemic, if suppressed,
because when ‘managers buy workers capacity to
work (labour power), they buy a peculiar sort of
commodity’ (Friedman, 1990: p. 178). Unlike
other resources available to capital, this ‘com-
modity’ is unusually indeterminate, extremely
malleable and wilful. Its malleability provides
capital with the creative potential it needs in order
to accumulate private wealth from the productive
activity of labour. But the means of harnessing
this potential are routinely found to be imper-
fectly compatible with the preferences and prio-
rities of labour with respect inter alia to job
security, job-satisfaction, promotion prospects
and ?nancial reward. The existence of established
preferences over which management can exert
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 273
limited in?uence suggests that its control over the
organization of the labour process is never exer-
cised exclusively on its own terms. As Friedman
points out, the expenditure of labour power
cannot be speci?ed in advance of the sale of
labour, nor guaranteed once sold to capital.
Productive e?ort is realised only by capital soli-
citing labour’s acceptance of the conditions
under which it is bought and sold in a market
economy and rewarded, symbolically and mate-
rially, thereafter.
One potential shortcoming of discussions of
management control that focus upon ‘the manu-
facture of consent’ (Burawoy, 1979), or ‘concerted
control’ (Barker, 1999), is that they pay minimal
attention to labour’s capacity to resist and disrupt
such initiatives (e.g. Delbridge, 1995; Sewell &
Wilkinson, 1992). There is a tendency to overlook
how employees enter into co-operation with man-
agement with certain expectations of their own
and anticipated outcomes in mind (see Ackroyd &
Thompson, 1999; Gouldner, 1954; Roy, 1952;
Thompson & Bannon, 1985). For some commen-
tators, e.g. Miller and O’Leary, the language and
ideology of the ‘new workplace’ appears to be so
powerful that workers not only lose their ability to
express any e?ective opposition to new forms of
accountability and control, but ‘even any sense or
awareness of their own self exploitation’ (McKin-
ley & Taylor, 1998: p. 175). Intensive case studies
of lean manufacturing that focus directly upon
workers ‘lived experience’ of JIT and TQM pro-
duction methods (e.g. Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998a;
McKinley & Taylor, 1996) have demonstrated
the danger of assuming the omnipotence of new
forms of management control and of exaggerating
their capacity to exclude or remove forms of
employee resistance. Even under conditions that
could hardly be more favourable for a ‘corporate
ideology to colonize the psyche’ of a work-
force (McKinley & Taylor, 1998: p. 189), e?ective
resistance is not only still possible, but also takes
place. A considerable number of case studies
support this view (e.g. Graham, 1994; Pollert,
1996; Rinehart, Robertson, Huxley, & Wareham,
1994; Stephenson, 1996), and even those studies
that proclaim the ‘end of worker resistance as we
know it’ often contain evidence to the contrary
that is either ignored or rendered irrelevant to the
basis of their analysis (e.g. Miller & O’Leary,
1993, 1994).
Understanding worker resistance
The message from these studies is that employee
resistance to new forms of accounting and
accountability in contemporary manufacturing is
both formally and informally organized, sometimes
planned, overt and systematic (e.g. Beynon, 1984)
but often spontaneous, disparate and covert, orga-
nized by agents acting collectively or as individuals
motivated by clearly de?ned aims and objectives,
or by contingent or expedient considerations in
speci?c personal situations or local circumstances
(see Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994). These
studies also suggest that much of what we call
resistance in organization cannot be understood
as, or reduced to, an outcome of the objective
conditions of capitalist employment relations.
Additionally, analysis of the experience of man-
agement-labour relations requires an appreciation
of how subjectivity and identity is implicated in
acts of resistance in organizations (Jermier et al.,
1994).
From an orthodox industrial relations and LPT
perspective, the conduits ?xing power relations are
clear and unidirectional: ‘The ?ow is always from
capital to labour, [and] the subjectivities appro-
priated to each are ?xed objectively, through class
position; that is, by relations to the means of pro-
duction’ (Clegg, 1994: p. 276). To ascribe to capi-
tal or management the supreme sovereign status of
the conduit of power is, however, problematical,
given the range and complexity of identity forma-
tions in organizations beyond those determined by
class relations. These include not only the embo-
diment of aspects of occupational identity, but
also gender, ethnicity or sexuality, along with
marital, community or consumer status, etc. In
our case study di?erences of occupational identity
and associated aspirations are counterposed to
comparatively homogeneous gender and ethnic
identities, and especially a sense of identity, as
independent, self-organizing subjects that had
been forged during the early years of the plant’s
operation.
274 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
Conventional industrial relations theories of
con?ict, including LPT, are inclined to look for
‘generalizable principles’ that account for how
collective action is possible, how it is mobilized
and how it is played out in various contexts, but
not how it is organized subjectively (see Kelly,
2000). In the case of Northern Plant, such analyses
of con?ict at work do not provide a plausible
account of resistance. Workers contested only
certain conditions of exploitation (i.e. lean pro-
duction), not exploitation per se, but sought to
preserve other conditions (i.e. a system of un-plan-
ned responsible autonomy, see below) under which
they had developed a sense of themselves as inde-
pendent subjects, seemingly and deservedly ‘free’
from direct management control. As we will show,
under the management control system that pre-
vailed at the plant prior to e?orts to introduce
lean production workers enjoyed a considerable
measure of autonomy that went far beyond even
the most relaxed forms of control in manufactur-
ing to which workers are usually willing to consent
(see Burawoy, 1979; Gouldner, 1954; Thompson
& Bannon, 1985). A distinctive symbolic space
opened up in which workers struggled to develop,
extend and defend a sense of themselves as inde-
pendent self-managing and resourceful agents who
were better able to work productively in the
absence of management control. Subsequent
e?orts of management to introduce lean produc-
tion were not simply perceived as something that
would breach existing frontiers of control and
established e?ort-bargaining mechanisms that
existed between management and labour at the
plant. Instead they were viewed as something that
would degrade their self-identity by usurping their
self-organization. This anticipated degradation of
self, we will suggest, not only fuelled worker’s
resistance to lean production and associated
accounting practices, but also gave it potency and
e?ectiveness that management was unable to con-
front with any real or lasting e?ect. Resistance
was so di?cult to manage precisely because it was
discursive, largely unorganized, distancing in nat-
ure (see Collinson, 1992, 1994), ‘misbehaviour-
based’ (Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999) and lacking
in any apparent overall aim or objectives. Indeed,
resistance at Northern Plant (eventually) came to
resemble what Foucault has called ‘hyper and
pessimistic activity’
2
.
Northern Plant: manufacturing and accounting in
transition
From the early 1970s to the mid 1990s Northern
Plant went through a number of major changes in
respect of demand for its main products, the
organization of its manufacturing arrangements,
management control strategies and accounting
practices (see Table 1). When N-Gineering opened
the Plant in 1971, it employed 70 people who
manufactured and supplied a very limited range of
high-tech automotive products to two major Eur-
opean-based vehicle manufacturers. Within less than
ten years the plant was established as the ?agship of
N-Gineering’s European operations. By the late
1980s it was employing almost 700 people and gen-
erating an annual sales turnover of around $70 m. In
this section, we present an overviewof these stages of
Northern Plant’s development before focusing upon
the use of newaccounting measures. We pay detailed
attention to the early phases because, we subse-
quently argue, the formation of workers experience
and knowledge during this period is of key impor-
tance for understanding the nature of their response
and the e?ectiveness of their resistance to ‘new’
manufacturing and accounting initiatives.
Unplanned responsible autonomy
The expansion of manufacturing operations at
Northern Plant has been built upon high-tech
2
As Simons (1994) points out, Foucault consistently refused
to commit himself to explaining what he saw as the meaning and
purpose, and moreover, any concrete examples of what in real
terms the lasting e?ects of the conditions of possibility of resis-
tance to power/knowledge might be. In Foucault’s view, in seek-
ing to de?ne what resistance is, what it means, what its purpose
and potential possibilities are, we face the danger of then seeking
to limit what ought to be achieved by it. He suggested that subjects
need no clear goals as a rationale for resistance, other than to feel
compelled to take issue with, and therefore (permanently) protest
against, the oppressive forms of power/knowledge that govern the
administration of their daily lives. But Foucault also recognized
that protest against (perceived) injustices is no guarantee of lib-
eration from oppression but may actually reinforce it (ibid.).
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 275
R&D expertise pioneered in the aviation industry
where N-Gineering had originally operated. Prior
to the mid-1980s, N-Gineering pursued an arms-
length policy towards managing its overseas oper-
ations, a policy that enabled Northern Plant to
develop on-site R&D and manufacturing expertise
that, in less than a decade, had become the
benchmark for the industry. From the early 1970s,
Northern Plant pursued a customer relations pol-
icy that actively sought inter-company co-oper-
ation on issues of product development, price,
quality and delivery performance. This earned the
plant a reputation for high quality product design,
development and manufacture.
Throughout the 1970s N-Gineering remained at
the forefront of a rapidly expanding global market.
In the early 1980s, it enjoyed approaching a 90%
market share world-wide. Given this market posi-
tion and its reputation for product quality, there
was little pressure on N-Gineering to extend its
sporadic ad hoc experimentation with Japanese
style quality control methods and production
techniques (e.g. quality circles and JIT) that
occurred from the 1970s until the mid-1980s. It
was during this period that a series of informal
management-labour agreements had been reached.
Workers would ‘‘deliver the numbers’’ to meet
constantly pressing output requirements in return
for having discretion over how work was orga-
nized. The combination of high wages, paid to
attract skilled employees, labour control over the
production process and lack of comparable
employment opportunities created a disincentive
to ?nd work elsewhere. Hence, there was an
extended shop?oor memory: most of the workers
who were at the plant in the 1990s had been
employed there since the 1970s.
Until the mid-1980s, management willingly sur-
rendered the organization of work practice to
labour so long as production levels were maintained.
Demand for the product was strong and unremit-
ting so that the costs of imposing controls were per-
ceived to be greater, and certainly more hassle, than
simply allowing employees to organize their work
in whatever ways would deliver output targets:
[Northern Plant] was simply expected to pro-
duce, pro rata, what it had always pro-
duced—a ?gure that was based upon, and
e?ectively capped by, the use of time and
motion studies to determine what levels of
output could be expected (Senior Manager).
Table 1
Management control/managerial accounting at Northern Plant 1971–1998
Product
demand
Manufacturing arrangements Management control strategy Managerial accounting
techniques
1971–1975 Emergent but
Increasing
Group technology Unplanned responsible autonomy Conventional standard
costing based
1975–1986 High Group technology with some use of
JIT/TQM production methods
Unplanned responsible autonomy Conventional standard
costing based
1986–1991 High group technology with more strategic
use of JIT/TQM production methods
JIT/TQM-based teamworking system
Programmed responsible autonomy
Consideration of (ABC)
but continuing with
standard costing
1991–1995 High Process-based cellular manufacturing JIT/TQM-based self-managing
teamworking methods
Programmed responsible autonomy
(TA) throughput
accounting with (TOC)
theory of constraints
1995–1998 High Product-focused cellular manufacturing Self-managing cellular based
autonomous production teams
Programmed responsible autonomy
(ABC) with (ABM)
activity based
management and (VF)
visual factory and
(MBF) management by
fact
276 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
Output targets were o?cially determined by a
measured day rate system. This required operators
to hand in a performance (job) card to their fore-
man at the end of each shift, thereby supplying the
relevant information to satisfy N-Gineering that
the plant was operating e?ciently. Yet, in prac-
tice, the measured day rate system had become
little more than a ceremonial undertaking that
permitted a negotiated order where formal proce-
dures bore little relation to shop?oor practice:
in those days, we’d just throw anything we
had at a problem to get round it. . .money,
men, overtime, whatever. This was what kept
everybody happy so it didn’t seem to matter
how you got the parts out so long as the cus-
tomer got them. That’s what this place was
built on getting the parts done, getting them
out the door, working together, just dealing
with things (cell leader, our emphases)
Our ethnographic evidence indicates that, as
soon as workers had ful?lled the agreed level of
output, a range of pursuits ?lled the remaining
hours before the job cards were completed and
returned to the foremen at the end of the shift.
These pursuits—which were known about and
tolerated by managers—included card schools,
darts, chess, table tennis competitions, sleeping
areas, drinking dens, etc. There were also regular
excursions to the pub, not infrequently with fore-
men participating. Workers would cover for oth-
ers to allow them to go home or ‘disappear’ for
lengthy periods during working hours. They were
able to ‘make the numbers’ in what, in some cases,
was only a fraction of the time allowed by the
time-and-motion calculations. If the goods pro-
duced failed to satisfy quality standards, workers
took responsibility for re-working them in their
‘free time’. When managers faced particularly
pressing delivery requirements, workers co-oper-
ated by guaranteeing output requirements in the
quickest time possible, even if these reached
beyond the o?cial output levels of the measured
day rate. However, workers co-operation and
‘?exibility’ was conditional upon management’s
willingness to preserve shop?oor discretion over
work organization.
In sum, a highly indulgent (Gouldner, 1954)
‘?exible’ set of working practices emerged that we
characterise as unplanned ‘responsible autonomy’.
The concept of ‘responsible autonomy’ is drawn
from Friedman (1977) who argues that, when
faced by the wilfulness of labour upon which
managers depend for goods to be produced, they
negotiate a position between two, ideal-typical
possibilities: ‘direct control’ involving the aspira-
tion to eliminate discretion through close super-
vision, or ‘responsible autonomy’ which involves
managers in shaping rather than suppressing
employees’ capacity to exercise discretion (e.g.
through selection, training and organizational
development programs) by educating them to be
responsive and ‘responsible’ to employer prio-
rities. During the early years of Northern Plant,
workers willingly exercised their discretion to
‘‘make the numbers’’ in a way that involved
minimum managerial intervention in ‘shaping’
this capacity. Their ‘empowerment’ was not
‘planned’ or signi?cantly conditioned by formal
programs initiated by management. Instead, it
articulated, and served to maintain, workers’
sense of identity as men who (predominantly)
took pride in outwitting and marginalising man-
agers in order to subordinate them to the work-
ers’ priority of labouring for as short a period as
possible to receive the available material
rewards.
Management endorsed this arrangement
because it served to eliminate much uncertainly
about whether delivery commitments to customers
would be met. The ‘‘self–managing’’, negotiated
order of management-labour relations was equally
important to the workforce. It allowed them to
exercise a considerable measure of control over
when and how their labour power was deployed.
This was subsequently re?ected in their rose-tinted
recollections of this period as a ‘golden past’ (see
Gabriel, 1993; Gouldner, 1954)—a time when it
was ‘‘a laugh’’ and when ‘‘everyone [both workers
and managers] got stuck in together’’. This period
was also signi?cant, we will argue, because it allo-
wedworkers to gain insights into what they could
expect, some years later, from management’s plans
to introduce team-based ‘lean’ manufacturing and
production arrangements.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 277
During this formative era in the history of
Northern Plant, accounting calculations were not
particularly obtrusive or plentiful, yet they both
underpinned and masked the social organization
of production by providing the basis for deter-
mining what were deemed by both parties to be
acceptable production targets, based on measured
day rates. Similarly, the use of standard costing
provided the basis for de?ning what were accep-
table levels of production costs. To be clear, all
waste and ine?ciency were not driven out in set-
ting these standards and targets. Rather, slack was
built into time-and-motion calculations in order to
draw the boundaries of the feasible region defen-
sible to the parent within which workers and
managers could reach consensus about organizing
work. By emphasizing standard costs and mea-
sured day rates as the production targets on the
shop?oor, the accounting system projected an
external view of Northern Plant as an e?cient and
well-run unit in a way that placated the parent
company. The accounting system also masked the
social organization of ‘unplanned responsible
autonomy’ as an informally negotiated order
between plant workers and managers. As long as
workers ‘‘made the numbers’’ by delivering to
output targets, their discretion over the organiza-
tion of their work remained unchallenged by
management who were complicit in this unde-
clared bargain. If, on occasion, some recalcitrant
workers pushed plant managers into a corner,
however, they would retaliate by withholding
bene?ts, such as overtime, or the supply of parts
that would ensure the early ?nish of the ‘less co-
operative’ workers. In this way, managerial pre-
rogative was invoked but not in a way that posed
any signi?cant threat to the reproduction of
unplanned responsible autonomy.
Towards programmed responsible autonomy
To better understand the dynamics of manage-
ment-worker-steward relations during the late
1980s and 1990s, which we explore in some detail
below, it is relevant to appreciate that, up to the mid
1980s, N-Gineering enjoyed a strong market posi-
tion. This was well recognised by a workforce who
were on the receiving end of recurrent pressures to
respond to demand, and it o?ered little incentive
for headquarters to exert pressure upon Northern
Plant managers to secure the extension and suc-
cess of sporadic experimentation with variants of
quality circles, SPC, and JIT. The unspoken
agreement between plant management and work-
ers was for the production quota to be delivered in
return for workers exercising daily control over
the organization of production. N-Gineering’s
hands-o? policy towards Northern Plant manage-
ment meant that managers had little incentive to
change their undeclared bargain with the work-
force. At the time of N-Gineering’s acquisition by
Motor-Co in the mid 1980s, new competitors
entering the ?eld were increasingly challenging
N-Gineering’s domination so that its market share,
albeit of an expanding market, fell to 55% by the
end of the decade. The expansion of ‘lean’ manu-
facturing methods throughout the industry added
pressures for ‘change’ as N-Gineering’s major
automotive customers called for new quality stan-
dards and JIT delivery discipline.
Following its acquisition by Motor-Co,
N-Gineering underwent a major strategic re-orga-
nization of its activities, involving the introduction
of ?exible manufacturing methods. This re-orga-
nization resulted in Northern Plant losing to its
sister European plants a large proportion of what
had previously been its most pro?table business.
Northern Plant was allocated responsibility for
manufacturing only a limited number of products
in a highly competitive segment of the market. Very
quickly, virtually all production became what the
plant called ‘ex-works’, which meant taking pro-
ducts straight from the end of production lines in
an e?ort to meet delivery schedules. By mid-1989
frequently missed deliveries were resulting in costly
air-freighting of products to customers around the
world.
3
Increasing competition, changing product
3
Deliveries had always been late, but when the plant had the
lion’s share of the market customers had no alternative sources
of supply without sacri?cing quality, and hence they tended to
wait for the late deliveries from Northern Plant. From 1989
onwards, however, competition became much stronger and the
plant’s market dominance was eroded signi?cantly, with new,
high quality, competitors being able to deliver the product more
quickly. This problem was made more acute after the change in
product mix to the high volume, low margin type B product.
278 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
mix, price and delivery requirements from major
customers, and mounting demand for increased
performance and pro?t levels from its parent
company also pushed Northern Plant into crisis.
The plant’s ?nancial controller’s recollection of
this period was that:
We were introducing a new scheduling sys-
tem, which was quite complex, and we were
also losing a lot of money because we’d
moved out of passenger car [type A] business
and we were doing predominantly commercial
diesel [type B] business instead. So, suddenly,
almost over night, for reasons which were
determined by a [new] European management
group, when [Northern Plant] entered 1989 we
had a horrible sales mix in a plant that was
su?ering some industrial relations problems,
and we were losing money—up to £300,000
per month because our delivery performance
was in crisis.
These problems were construed to have resulted
in a signi?cant loss of credibility with both major
customers and the parent company. There was a
threat that remaining production at the plant
would be moved elsewhere if immediate improve-
ments were not forthcoming. Motor-Co’s solution
to the plant’s poor performance was to press for
an ABC overhead recovery approach to measur-
ing the plant’s performance that was coupled with
head-count reductions:
Every time we produced an additional bad
result, although I didn’t share this with a
lot of the people in the organization at that
time, North America’s [Motor-Co’s] reac-
tion was ‘reduce the head count’. Then
we’d have another bad result the next
month, because we weren’t making any-
thing on time in ‘89, and we’d get ‘have
you reduced the head count, when are you
going to reduce it further?’ (Financial
Controller)
In the wake of the crisis, productivity gains
associated with ?exible manufacturing methods,
teamworking and co-operative management–
labour relations were considered vital for reviving
the plant’s competitiveness and pro?tability.
Motor-Co.’s manufacturing initiatives articulated
a strategically-focused change programme, spear-
headed by a drive to establish cellular manu-
facturing throughout its operations world-wide.
At Northern Plant, management introduced a
whole series of changes in production and
accounting methods which are discussed in the
following section. These initiatives were construed
as technologies that would generate new measures
to remedy past de?ciencies and act as the plant’s
‘driving force’ for change. Managers sought to
consolidate these initiatives by re-engineering
‘process based’ manufacturing into ‘product
focused’ cellular manufacturing (Alford, 1994) as
the means that would ?nally establish the plant as
a ‘truly’ lean manufacturing facility. However, a
refusal of the workforce to cooperate with these
schemes (see below) meant that the advent of cel-
lular manufacturing was restricted to changes in
the technical, but not the social, organization of
production.
Optimised production technology and throughput
accounting
In this section, we track management’s e?orts
to introduce a series of programs at Northern
Plant in response to intensi?ed competitive pres-
sures and change in product type. More speci?-
cally, we explore how these programmes were
launched in an attempt to introduce new working
methods including more disciplinary accounting
techniques.
ABC, TA and cellular manufacturing
In the early 1990s, consultants had com-
mended the contribution of ABC to Northern
Plant’s needs, and especially to manage the shift
from Type A (passenger car parts) to Type B
(commercial diesel parts) product. However,
while conceding that ABC could be helpful in
reducing the unit cost of commercial-diesel pro-
duction, they argued that its cost allocations
were inaccurate:
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 279
My argument about ABC is that however
carefully you try to allocate costs to a part or a
product, you’re never going to get it a hundred
percent right, so why bother trying to allocate
these costs. Why not say to yourself ‘Oh, well
we know how much the material costs and
that’s a hundred percent [accurate], then we
have this pool of other costs that we don’t
have to allocate. . .’ Okay, you have to take
your counter bills costs, but however you try
and spread them back to the parts there’s
always going to be a guess [involved] (Finan-
cial Controller)
The newly formed cellular accounting team was
concerned that ABC’s focus upon cutting costs,
instead of maximising plant utilisation, would
exacerbate growing industrial unrest at the plant.
It was argued that to emphasise cost reduction as
a strategic priority would only serve to deepen
the growing gulf between management and the
shop?oor:
O.K. you can tell people ‘‘we’ve got a hor-
rible sales mix, that its costing us say $2m a
year in pro?t’’. But once you’ve said this
once or twice or three times everybody gets
bored with the story. . . everyone was aware
of this anyway, that we had a bloody big
sales mix problem because out on the shop-
?oor they were trying to cope with it every-
day, with more set-ups, with smaller batch
sizes, etc. So what we wanted to do was
drag people’s mind o? just head count
reduction and to emphasise the most wealth
producing aspects of [the] business. Cos [by
then] we’d already devoted eighteen months
to trying to get rid of people and literally
every management meeting hinged on ‘‘have
you got rid of so and so yet ? (Financial
Controller)
Plant management’s choice of technique was
thus directly informed by an assessment of the
anticipated e?ect of its adoption upon the workers.
By problematizing and discrediting what was
deemed by its parent and the consultants as ‘excel-
lent accounting’, in the form of ABC, discourses
were promoted by senior managers at the plant to
pave the way for throughput accounting (TA) and
the theory of constraints (TOC). Not only was
the problematization of ABC at Northern Plant
inseparable from the discourses that were mar-
shalled in support of the introduction of TA, but
the merits of each were evaluated in terms of
their anticipated e?ects upon management–labour
relations.
Given the continuing buoyant demand for this
type of product in an expanding market (even
though N-Gineering had been experiencing a sharp
decline in its own market share after the mid 1980s
because of intense competition), the bene?ts to be
derived from squeezing operating expenses were
seen to be comparatively limited in relation to the
potential of TA which, in principle, would enable
the removal of bottlenecks that impeded
‘throughput’, and thereby recapture some lost
market share.
4
Experimentation with TA and
OPT (Optimal Production Technology) coin-
cided with a [new] cellular manufacturing strat-
egy that was introduced to the workforce
through a series of in-house training seminars
held in 1990/1991. These seminars had ?ve
relatively distinct, but inter-related objectives;
(1) to (re)introduce the concepts of JIT and
TQM, teamworking and ?exibility to employees,
within the context of the proposed cellular
manufacturing plans; (2) to explain the impor-
tance of the role of TA and TOC within this
system of production; (3) to promote the con-
cept of ‘continuous improvement’, by introdu-
cing workers to the idea of understanding their
role in production in ‘value-adding’ and ‘non-
value-adding’ terms; (4) to promote the role of
a range of new corporate driven HRM, initia-
tives to facilitate employee ‘involvement’ and
‘empowerment’; and (5) to explain the internal
4
Our positioning of worker resistance to managerial control
in relation to changing product markets and product mixes
(e.g. the change from Type A to Type B products) parallels
Froud et al.’s (1998) attentiveness to ‘external’ conditions, and
especially exchange rate movements between the dollar and the
yen, to account for Caterpillar’s problems and, relatedly, to
challenge the adequacy of management’s diagnosis of the com-
pany’s di?culties and the relevance of its PWAF (or, in our
case, ABC) programme as a remedy for them.
280 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
organization of each manufacturing cell which
was to involve a number of autonomous self-
managing ‘teams’ comprising managers, R&D
technicians, supervisors, and skilled and semi-
skilled production workers.
The techniques associated with the ?ve inter-
related objectives were presented by management
as a means of enabling workers to gain a greater
understanding of the ‘?nancial realities’ of their
involvement in production, and not just as more
convenient accounting devices for measuring their
performance. Management were su?ciently aware
of worker sensitivities about the use of accounting
to extract increased productivity to make e?orts to
‘sell’ the techniques in a way that emphasised the
bene?ts, as managers construed them, of workers
gaining a more informed appreciation of the
activities that added value. Accordingly, plant
management acted against corporate advice by
refusing to introduce ABC because of its perceived
emphasis on headcount reduction, with its antici-
pated detrimental e?ect on management–labour
relations. Managers emphasised that TA/TOC,
with their wealth creating emphasis, o?ered an
important catalyst for ‘change’ that had been
absent in previous e?orts to operationalize ‘new
wave’ manufacturing and production methods.
When combined with HRM initiatives, managers
claimed that TA would make it possible for
workers in each ‘cell’ to take ‘ownership’ of cell
costs and become more responsible and com-
mitted to the parent’s new manufacturing philo-
sophy. In this way, as Jones and Dugdale (1995:
p. 319) have suggested, it was anticipated that
workers would willingly constitute themselves as
‘producers of pro?t rather than [simply] pro-
ducts’. To suggest that this emphasis formed
part of a cynical campaign by management to
deceive workers about the new techniques
would be to exaggerate the extent to which
managers were ‘organized’ and had a well
formed plan of action, whilst simultaneously
understating their recognition of the di?culty,
verging on impossibility, of successfully mis-
leading this particular workforce. Managers
were anxious to construe the proposed changes
in ways that they thought would not unne-
cessarily upset the workforce, but this was done
in a pragmatic, rather than carefully calculated
or Machiavellian, manner
5
.
Cell managers and supervisors claimed to wel-
come cellular manufacturing in principle but, at
the same time, had little faith in it ever being
fully operationalised on two accounts. First,
despite its focus upon improving throughput, the
new cellular strategy was perceived to be largely
irrelevant to the market pressures that it sought
to exploit: low-volume short-batch production
runs, and frequent changeovers and set-ups to
cater for di?erent, and more often competing,
customer requirements. Second, cell managers
and team leaders anticipated that these initia-
tives would encounter determined shop?oor
resistance.
5
It is important to recognize that prior to the introduction
of lean production, ?rst-line managers at Northern Plant had
operated in conditions, as they saw it, that were relatively
‘con?ict free’, and like shop?oor workers, enjoyed a ‘good liv-
ing’ from the plant ($25,000 and $17,000 basic-pay respectively
in 1995, in addition to which they earned anything up to 40%
of this ?gure in overtime payments). It is also important to
recognize that they enjoyed the same bene?ts as shop?oor
workers by ensuring the latter were able to ‘make the numbers’.
Once production quotas were reached, especially on the night
and afternoon-shifts, foremen retired to relax in their o?ce, in
full view of shop?oor workers, and often with workers them-
selves. This usually involved reading, playing cards, chess,
computer games or simply chatting to ‘kill time’ until the end
of the shift—and, as we have noted, on occasions accom-
modated excursions to the local pub. However, unlike shop-
?oor workers, foremen at Northern Plant readily accepted that
the ‘‘the gravy train’’, as they referred to it, ‘‘was over’’. They
understood that workers refused to accept this; that workers’
commitment to ‘making the numbers’ had not been uncondi-
tional; and that workers regarded lean production and ‘cellular
accounting’ as an assault on established frontiers of control,
including the opportunity to earn overtime pay, which they had
no intentions of surrendering without a struggle. It was for
these reasons that attempts by foremen to instil into workers
the ‘?nancial realities’ of their involvement in production
amounted to little more than appeals to them to accept the
inevitability of ‘change’, and to recognize that they would still
enjoy a ‘good living’ from the plant. So, rather than trying to
deceive workers with ‘cellular accounting’ rhetoric, the typical
argument used was that lean production when combined with
‘cellular accounting’ techniques guaranteed the plant’s future.
While this might well eventually necessitate less overtime, the
foremen argued that any reduction in earnings capacity would
be compensated by the opportunity for greater leisure time
and/or more time spent with their families.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 281
Market pressures
Cell managers and team leaders noted how pro-
duction schedules were still ‘‘regularly altered‘‘ or
‘‘broken into’’ without warning or at short notice;
or, as one cell manager put it, in response to
‘‘which customer complained the loudest’’. It was
argued that production control failed to plan or
program the OPT system e?ectively enough to
provide accurate or up-to-date information on
schedule requirements, shortages or arrears that
were to be given priority. So, despite senior man-
agement’s [apparent] commitment to the OPT
system as the core component of its cellular man-
ufacturing strategy, it was claimed that little, if
anything, changed:
On night shift, it’s Production Control’s job
to decide what kits [products] need to be
built, when they need to be built, where the
parts [components] are and, because we have
so many arrears, to prioritise all this. . .what
happens in reality, is that I get information
from production control, I get information
from the afternoon [shift] supervisor and I get
information left in the dispatch area from the
sales department, but in the majority of times,
the three bits of information don’t match up.
(Night-Shift Superintendent)
Sharing these frustrations, cell leaders and
supervisors stressed that the OPT system remained
‘‘a major headache’’; further, they claimed that
they received neither useful information from the
cellular accounting system, nor the support for
improving productivity that was intended to come
from the cellular accounting team. One cell man-
ager observed that the accounting information
received remained ‘‘very much historical’’ and of
‘‘little, if any, use’’:
Things change hour by hour and so we’d need
information on a day to day basis, as a mini-
mum, to be able to manage as well as we
should do. But even so, everything runs so
fast that even if you did get the amount of
information you’re supposed to get, on a daily
basis, you wouldn’t have time to go through it
or sort it out. So you just try to keep ahead.
You set your plan and just go at it. (our
emphases)
Our informants suggested that pressures to
placate customers meant that attempts to oper-
ationalise the new cellular manufacturing pro-
grammes were repeatedly subverted and that the
new accounting system o?ered no remedy for this
recurrent problem.
Workforce interpretations and resistance
On the shop?oor, TA was interpreted as a
means of concealing increases in e?ciency that
would otherwise put pressure on management to
improve wages and/or conditions of service.
Workers interpreted the real purpose of TA,
Kaizen costing and TQM to be manipulative.
Their introduction was assumed to be motivated
by a desire to get workers to work harder and to
reduce headcount:
TQM and Kaizen are just another form of
time and motion study. They say that [it] tells
them that they can make thirty or forty percent
savings on production and the wage bill, but
that’s because they’ll have less men doing more
work. So why should we accept doing more
when we know there’ll be job losses. (Operator)
With Kaizen they’ve moved machines round
into U-shaped cells, so they can have con-
tinuous [one piece] ?ow. They’re saying they
need to cut the space down between machines
to cut the walking time for operators so we
can be more e?cient. What they’re really
saying is that they want you stuck on a
machine and never getting a break. . .working
like battery hens. (Operator)
Yet another operator pointed out that in each
balancing U-shaped cell, each man would do three
parts then pass them on to the next man so that at
the end of the day a man ‘‘can’t leave the cell
unless there’s someone else to take his place. . . So
this [one piece ?ow] is like going back in time to
when people had to put their hands up to leave the
job.’’ A Material Handler suggested that most
operators perceived bene?ts in ‘‘teamwork, quality
282 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
and problem solving, and Kaizen’’, but still saw
these changes as the manifestation of management’s
concerted e?ort to intensify labour: ‘‘what they
[management] want is to take away from people
not giving them more. You can see that there’s
only one way it [lean production] can go, and that’s
to a reduction in manning levels and [an] intensi?-
cation of the production process.’’ Given this strong
reaction by the shop?oor to TA, Kaizen and lean
manufacturing, it was no surprise that the Financial
Controller pointed out that the introduction of TA
‘‘caused bedlam’’, and one Maintenance Manager
said ‘‘I think the days of Throughput Accounting
are numbered’’. Cell managers and supervisors, not
just operators, preferred to see a return to the pre-
vious standard costing system.
The ‘cellular accounting’ team made sense of this
resistance by claiming that standard costing e?-
ciency reports were ‘‘what managers understood’’.
Having ‘‘grown up’’ with standard costing, they
alleged that managers had learned how to
‘‘manipulate e?ciency’’; and in the view of one
cell accountant, cell managers ‘‘probably got their
job simply by being good at doing this’’. Cell
accountants claimed that cell managers had an
irrational fear of the new system. Cell managers
and supervisors countered that this was a ‘poor’ if
not naive evaluation of the situation, as it dis-
regarded the strength of worker resistance to ‘new’
working practices. Attempts to make this clear to
senior management resulted in the latter re-
emphasising the role of cell managers and super-
visors as ‘change agents’ within the plant. Cell
managers were urged by senior managers to
demonstrate their commitment to the values and
philosophy of lean production by empowering
rather than controlling workers. Cell managers
and supervisors perceived themselves to be caught
in a ‘‘no win’’ situation, between demands to
achieve productivity gains under what they saw as
‘‘impossible conditions’’, and the requirement to
achieve these gains by managing the shop?oor
only at a distance (see Ezzamel & Willmott,
1998a). The battles surrounding the TA initiative,
advocated by senior management and spear-
headed by the specialist cellular accounting team,
are symptomatic of the complexity of relations
where inter alia, cell managers are resistant to the
change as it threatened their established routines
and expertise, and workers were able to exploit
divisions between senior and supervisory tiers of
management in a way that acted to discredit the
claims of both. A regular tactic employed by
workers was repeatedly to point out to supervisors
that it had become obvious to them that it was cell
managers who gained all credit for ‘changes’ made
in the technical organization of production, and
had enhanced their career prospects with the
company in doing so
6
, whilst leaving supervisors
to take all blame for the corresponding lack of
progress made in attempts to advance planned
changes in the social organization of production.
To drive this point home, workers constantly
exploited the contention that ‘‘the days of the old-
style foreman in manufacturing are over’’, an
assessment that was di?cult to refute because new
mangers and supervisor recruited to Northern
Plant since it was acquired by MotorCo were
‘‘degree merchants’’
7
.
In response to these contradictions, supervisors
in particular found themselves drawn back to a
6
Certain cell managers, some of whom had been promoted
from the position of supervisor, had gone on to ?ll more senior
positions, and/or joined a number of project teams working on
change, quality, training and preferred buyer-supplier relations
initiatives at the plant in the UK and at other MotorCo sites in
Europe and the USA. Those who remained, regardless of whe-
ther they had considered and/or applied for these posts, were
then taunted for not having ‘‘what it takes to make it’’ under
lean production—in the guise of education, personal know-
how, expertise and/or man-management skills.
7
From 1990s onwards, MotorCo insisted that all new man-
agers and supervisors recruited to Northern Plant must be
quali?ed to degree level. We do not know whether they had
been briefed to do so, but it was clear to shop?oor workers and
existing supervisors that these recruits adopted a ‘professional
distance’ from both workers and existing supervisors. Workers
used this observation to exploit existing supervisors’ fear of
dismissal, by claiming that the new cell-managers and super-
visors had been brought in to spy on them, to monitor their
behaviour and man-management skills and performance, and
then to report this back to senior management so that they
would eventually replace existing sta? once they had learned
their job. This possibility was taken seriously by supervisors
who regularly voiced this concern to senior management. In
response, they received the assurance that this was not the case.
But, at the same time, they were told that only some of the
supervisors were willing and able to make the transition from
traditional ‘old-style foremanship’ to the skills and attitudes
deemed necessary to a regime of lean production.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 283
policy of simply ‘‘making the numbers’’ as a way
of demonstrating their e?ciency to senior man-
agers. Instead of managing the new scheduling
adherence system as intended, supervisors
endeavoured to meet the most urgent output
requirements in the fastest way possible, just as
they had done prior to the introduction of cel-
lular manufacturing at the plant, arguing that
had they not done this they ‘‘wouldn’t have sur-
vived’’. To this end, they were obliged to ‘bend
rules’ and ‘indulge’ the workforce in order to
secure their cooperation. This tactic produced
the desired e?ect for senior managers who, ulti-
mately, were more concerned with keeping cus-
tomers happy by despatching orders on time
than with policing their own programs. How-
ever, as we have stressed, the tactic rendered
middle and junior managers more vulnerable to
the demands of shop?oor workers who were
quick to exploit the situation as a means of
continuing to resist the introduction of ‘new’
working practices.
Operators urged supervisors to remember that
so long as output targets were met regularly on
time for delivery ‘‘no one [really] cared whether
‘TQ’ is in or not’’. It was ‘‘only common sense’’
that all that ‘‘really mattered’’ was whether or not
the plant was pro?table for the parent, and that
‘‘it must be’’, otherwise it would have been closed-
down. Workers also repeatedly taunted managers
by refusing to interpret managers’[apparent]
commitment to ‘change’ as anything other than
a strategy of ‘self-interest’, designed to enable
them to ‘‘get on’’ at the expense of workers who
would be demanded to work more intensively or
possibly lose their jobs. The advice of the shop-
?oor to these managers was ‘‘not to rock the
boat’’, but, instead to ‘‘keep the lads happy’’,
otherwise they would be left with no choice but
to ‘‘screw them’’. Reassurances were given by
workers that, contingent upon the ‘attitude’ of
cell managers and supervisors, components
would continue to be produced in su?cient
number to ensure that there were no come-backs
from senior management.
By pursuing ‘distancing’ strategies of resistance
(Collinson, 1992, 1994) workers ‘out?anked’
(Clegg, 1989) attempts to introduce new lean
production practices. By ostensibly acquiescing to
management’s call for their active involvement in
planning and facilitating ‘change’, the shop stew-
ards at the plant blocked moves in the direction of
teamworking and ‘empowerment’ through a pro-
cess of ‘resistance through negotiation’. The stew-
ards formally welcomed the ‘empowerment’
bestowed upon workers by teamworking, but
demanded that managers take this commitment to
greater involvement seriously by recognizing and
addressing shop?oor concerns about its practi-
calities and consequences.
To summarise, OPT, TA and TOC were the
preferred vehicles of the cellular accounting team
for improving manufacturing performance at
Northern Plant. These techniques were favoured
because, in contrast to ABC, they would not add
additional fuel to the simmering ?re of industrial
unrest at Northern Plant. What senior managers
failed to anticipate was, ?rstly, the di?culty of con-
sistently applying these techniques in the face of
delivery schedule pressures; and, secondly, resis-
tance from cell managers and supervisors who,
feeling themselves to be in a ‘‘no win’’ situation,
became easy targets for criticism by shop?oor
workers. Resistance to OPT and TA, promoted
and guided by discourses which articulated the
lessons learned during the earlier phase of
‘unplanned responsible autonomy’, problematized
the assessment of senior managers that OPT and
TA would improve the performance of the plant.
The mechanisms of governance and the politics of
the product (Miller & O’Leary, 1993, 1994) were
thus embroiled in a process of continuous nego-
tiation and re-con?guration through the politics
of production.
Another strategic response and the role of accounting
The lack of progress from these initiatives, in
terms of the introduction of ‘lean’ production
based upon cellular manufacturing techniques,
resulted in MotorCo labelling Northern Plant a
‘factory with a problem’. Following a series of vis-
its by MotorCo directors, which included crisis
meetings with workers and shop stewards as well as
plant managers, their evaluation concluded that
284 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
the plant su?ered from a serious lack of discipline
8
.
Production cost was identi?ed as unacceptably
high, and this was traced to operations ine?ciency,
over-indulgence in overtime shifts, and the absence
of an adequate cost structure to guide decisions.
[The plant has] huge premium costs to sup-
port the increase in demand for the pro-
duct. . .penalty costs for late deliveries. . .costs
to ship the materials in and airfreight the
product out, large subcontracting costs, and
horrendous amounts of overtime costs.
(Financial Controller)
Managers saw the gaming by operators to pro-
duce below their capabilities during normal time
to earn ?nancially lucrative overtime pay as the
major problem. One HR Manager said: ‘‘The
problem is that if operators are supposed to pro-
duce say 500 [units] in a week and they only produce
300, the consequence is that they’ll get overtime on
Saturday and Sunday’’, consequently, as another
Manager said ‘‘horrendous costs are [being] incur-
red.’’ Managers also lamented the failures of
accounting practices used to cost activities properly:
Some of our ?nance people have a great deal
of di?culty costing some of the activities
because of the way we’ve been educated to
cost them. They will not recognise the value
of a man being taken out of a production line
unless they see a tomb stone in the car park.
(Operations Excellence Manager)
Unless the man is made redundant, the cost of
his wages continued to be included in production
cost even if he was moved out of production. This
frustration with costing procedures and their fail-
ure to visualise operations and activities was
widely shared. As one Manager stated:
What we’ve got to do is get a proper cost
structure of all of what we do, of the product,
production, the supply chain we have to deal
with. We’ve got to create a vision of what the
Plant will be like when it is properly costed. . .
Until we’ve got a proper model of the pro?t-
ability of the site we can’t get where we want
to be.
These factors together contributed to a percep-
tion at higher levels that plant managers were not
doing a good job, which was blamed on lack of
competence or fear of militant operators: ‘‘The
problem is that I don’t think management have
been allowed to manage, or they haven’t been able
to manage this Plant, because either they’re not
capable of it or they are afraid to manage it.
Maybe it’s beyond their capabilities’’ (Senior
Finance Director). The preferred remedy was the
replacement of plant managers right down to the
level of supervisors
9
. It was announced that the
8
At these meetings, MotorCo’s announced that levels of
attainment of ‘world-class’ manufacturing standards at all of its
manufacturing facilities were being gauged against ‘bench-
marked’ performance levels in output, quality, ?exibility,
teamworking and overall ?nancial performance. These bench-
marks were allegedly drawn from its model’ lean production
facilities in southern France and South Carolina, USA. Few
performance ?gures or speci?c details of the ‘excellent’ HRM
initiatives were ever presented to workers at Northern Plant,
although visits to the French plant by shop stewards and a
selected number of workers were arranged to demonstrate ?rst-
hand what lean production can achieve. This initiative was
abandoned after the ?rst visit, principally because the French
plant’s production mix was nothing compared to Northern
Plant—a di?erence upon which workers and their shop stew-
ards immediately seized to discredit the exercise and those
responsible for initiating it. Given the comparative complexity
of the Northern Plant’s production mix, the high-tech nature of
its manufacturing requirements, including the high number of
change-overs required to manufacturing a wider-range of pro-
ducts than those produced by its French sister plant, they con-
cluded that Northern Plant was performing ‘‘surprisingly well’’.
9
Some longstanding supervisors were released from the
plant as early as the late 1980s, following MotorCo’s demand to
see a reduction in headcount due the ?nancial crisis at the
plant, following the decision to dedicate the plant to the pro-
duction of predominantly Type B products (see 10th, 11th and
12th pages of this article). By the mid 1990s, senior managers at
the plant, and/or MotorCo, had lost all faith in all remaining
longstanding supervisors, all of whom, despite being unionised,
were over the next few years unceremoniously ?red. By 1999,
none of the plant’s original shop?oor supervisors, who were
employed prior to the introduction of LP, remained. Several
senior managers su?ered the same fate. In all cases, without
exception, supervisors were given one minute’s notice to clear
their desks before being escorted from the plant, gripped at the
back of the upper-arm by a senior personnel manager charged
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 285
task of these replacements, supported by a senior
management task-force drawn from MotorCo
plants, was to evolve a ‘‘no-nonsense’’ approach
to managing the plant. These developments
immediately resulted in a major revision of the
plant’s change strategy, including the role played
by TA which was now considered totally at odds
with MotorCo’s overall manufacturing strategy:
At the time throughput accounting was
probably the right decision, because if you’ve
got the business, you can work at improving on
price providing that you can make the product.
But the problem with throughput accounting is
that as long as you’re growing and so you have
high volume, it’s good news, volume eliminates
?xed costs and all sorts of things. But you pla-
teau out and the business doesn’t grow any
more, then you have to change to something
di?erent, something like ABM. I don’t know
because I’m not an accountant, but it seems
that you just can’t do throughput accounting
when you’re in a ?xed volume situation, you
have to be growing. (Senior Manager)
TA/TOC and Cellular Accounting were to be
replaced by a number of new ABC-driven account-
ing initiatives. These included the ‘visual factory
(VF)’ (Grief, 1991), Activity-Based Management
(ABM), and Management By Fact (MBF).
‘Management by Fact’ and ABM
The new concepts were launched through a ser-
ies of in-house training seminars/workshops by a
‘Strategic Accounting Group’ (SAG). They were
introduced to the workforce as a ‘‘tool-box’’ of data
gathering techniques that would help reinforce the
importance of cost control whilst identifying and
removing the under-utilisation of resources within
the plant. SAG claimed that the role of these tools
was to support the plant’s existing TQM and HRM
initiatives, and that the metrics of the visual factory
‘VF’ (Grief, 1991) and MBF, would render all
manufacturing and production processes more
‘visible’ and, therefore, subject to corrective inter-
vention to achieve continuous improvement:
Key objectives are laid down for us, but we
have a lot of other metrics to work from to
give us the scope to look at what improve-
ments can be achieved in reality, such as
internal quality performance, inventory costs,
scrap levels, PPM (parts per million), product
defects, customer satisfaction, delivery per-
formance. (Business Manager)
An ex-Machine Operator who became one of six
shop?oor employees recruited to an ‘Operational
Excellence Change Team’ commented:
In theory ABM and MBF are part of TQM.
But the data you can get from MBF can tell
you everything. It allows you to look at an
entire cell or a single machine and pull out
how much down-time there’s been on any
shift on a given day and why.
The message was drummed up throughout
Northern Plant that MBF had to be made to work:
MBF is not allowed to fail, it’s come from
America [the parent] so it’s high pro?le stu?
as far as they [plant managers] are concerned.
They’ve got to do it and got to make it work.
It’s not like when TQ ?rst came in, when you
with gently guiding them out of the plant via a long walk past
certain manufacturing cells on the shop?oor for all to see. This
always took place on Friday mornings. Shop?oor workers
learned to await the event with the morbid fascination of the
‘mob’ at the medieval ‘burning stake’ and ‘execution sca?old’
so vividly described, inter alia, by Foucault (1977). Alternative
routes out of the plant, well beyond the ‘gaze’ of the shop?oor,
which would have saved these ‘victims’ of lean production this
apparent humiliation, were available. No explanation was
given to us, or to shop?oor workers who constantly badgered
managers to shed light on why this particular route was pre-
ferred. Workers consequently gave their own ‘explanation’,
which clearly echo’s what Foucault/ Foucauldian theorists
would contend, arguing that this ritual was intended to intimi-
date existing managers; to remind them of what was in store for
them if ‘‘they got it wrong’’, as workers put it to them. They
were always quick to remind managers of this, and to add
weight to their contention, by cruelly inviting them to observe
for themselves the extent of senior managers malevolence
towards ‘‘those who fail’’, in how heartily they seemed to
devour their lunch in the plant’s canteen on Friday’s as
opposed to other days!
286 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
could duck and dive and tell them [managers]
to sod o?, because it ropes you into it.
(Shop?oor Member of the Change Team)
The implementation of MBF involved the use of
time and motion study to measure the manu-
facturing capability of individual machines and
assembly operation within each U-shape cell, and
also the ‘manufacturing capability’ of the cell itself.
This data was then used to determine optimum cell
output targets. The underlying premise of MBF
was to ‘‘let the facts speak for themselves’’ as a
basis from which to identify and apply appropriate
corrective measures for remedying an under-utili-
sation of the plant’s material and human resources.
Despite the rhetoric emphasizing the importance
of these new concepts/techniques, for managers
they were all secondary to ?nancial performance.
One Business Unit Manager said:
We talk a lot about the voice of the customer,
customer focus and TQM, and have done for a
number of years now, but I would say this still
remains secondary to ?nancial targets as far as
headquarters are concerned. . .We are still getting
the strong message saying that if we missed the
sales we’re still expected to achieve the margin.
Day-to-day output and performance levels were
monitored and displayed in bar-charts etc. on a
series of highly visual performance indicators
located in each cell (see also Dohse, Ulrich, &
Walsch, 1991; Delbridge & Turnbull, 1992). Yet,
despite this proliferation of ?nancial measures, a
number of managers were concerned at the failure
to communicate their importance to the shop?oor.
One Middle Manager suggested: ‘‘I don’t think we
do a very good job of communicating the impor-
tance of reduced production costs, or taking time
out to make it more visible line by line.’’ Another
Production Manager noted some improvements,
but then pointed to the resistance to these new
measures as operators refused to ?ll in charts:
It’s very hard work simply getting people to
?ll in charts all the time. They don’t see the
value of it and it’s not part of the culture
here. People know they are being measured
and will be held accountable for what they do.
They don’t like it, so they don’t ?ll them in.
MBF was interpreted by the shop?oor as a
dangerous development in the parent’s new dis-
ciplinary ‘change strategy’:
MBF doesn’t entertain the idea of the shop?oor
just coming into work, getting on with things, and
going home without getting involved. . . It’s worse
than TQ and SPC because it’s a measurement of
everything at the same time, and it’s di?cult to
deal with as well because if you’ve got a machine
that isn’t producing the amount it’s capable of
producing it gets ‘time studied’ in a particular
way. What [managers] do is they get the machine
set up exactly as it should be set then you can’t
argue why it can’t do its score and if you do
[argue] they’ll say ‘okay, let’s get MBF back on
the job to see why.’ (Assembly-Cell Operator)
Thus MBF was particularly resented by the
shop?oor because it resulted in managers inter-
vening in their work practices and, given its tight
disciplinary focus, signi?cantly reduced the scope
for the shop?oor to control the work pace or carve
out break times.
10
MBF was widely viewed by the
10
These possibilities had been a normal feature of established
working arrangements through which a narrative of self-identity
had been articulated and reproduced. We can shed some light on
why workers were concerned about a machine being ‘‘set up
exactly as it should be’’. Skilled setters, when setting machines
(e.g. tooling them) often slow down or speed up machining
cycle-times in order to save wear and tear on tooling and there-
fore time and space for themselves and/or operators. Altering
cycle times cuts down on the number of tool changes or tool
adjustments that may have to be made to correct defective parts,
thereby creating the opportunity to book none-existent ‘down-
time’, and therefore increases in free time for leisurely pursuits.
Put simply, altering cycle-times enables operators to meet esti-
mated output targets earlier than o?cial machining capabilities
suggest they can. One example would be booking ‘?ctitious’
machine break-downs, tool changes and/or down time caused by
the ‘need’ to apparently check or correct manufacturing or
quality speci?cations, or wait for a setter to do these jobs. This
kind of informal control, based upon tacit knowledge of ‘‘what a
machine can actually do and how it runs’’ (Manwaring & Wood,
1985) rather than the speci?cations of manufacturing engineers,
is of mutual bene?t for those involved. MBF presented a ‘cause
for concern’ for workers because it prevented such practices
from remaining hidden or undetected.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 287
operators as a hostile disciplinary technique that
sought to measure and visualize their activities to
make them amenable to the immediate intervention
of managers. One Fork-Truck Driver commented:
MBF made workers genuinely angry, because
you could see straight away that it was about
surveillance, about keeping you on the job,
about constantly measuring everything you
do to get more and more parts out of less and
less people. . .. MBF doesn’t pretend not to be
about what it’s designed to do, which is put
people on the dole, and so basically it pro-
voked a really heavy reaction from people.
Given this understanding of MBF by workers,
managers found it di?cult to secure meaningful
co-operation from the shop?oor:
There’s very little co-operation from the
shop?oor though. Management has had to
try to force operators to co-operate. They
won’t [co-operate] because they see it [MBF]
can reduce manning levels. . . to get the data
the cell leaders have to go around and actu-
ally ask the operators for it and then ?ll in the
charts themselves. Then when a member of
the Change Team tries to feed it back to the
lads on the shop?oor they won’t talk to him,
they just say ‘fuck-o?’. (Machine Operator)
ABM was introduced as a human resource
planning and budgeting system that was also
designed to support MBF (Berry, Broadbent, &
Otley, 1995). As a derivative of ABC, the intended
role of ABM was to enable employees to con-
ceptualise di?erent manufacturing and production
processes as activity pools. Activity pools are pre-
mised upon ABC’s analysis of the role that activ-
ities play in ‘causing’ costs to be incurred in
production processes. The intent was that, by
appreciating this connection, workers would
understand in ?nancial terms the interdependence
between di?erent ‘essentially task-based’ manu-
facturing and production processes. While ABC
was assumed to present a more critical view of the
relationship between the use of resources and the
allocation of costs to those resources, ABM—
through the notion of ‘activity pools’—was seen to
provide the basis for a more critical appreciation
of human resource activity in essentially value-
adding and non-value-adding terms:
It’s not really ABC so much that’s driving the
change but ABM. The di?erence between
them is that ABC is where you just work your
costs out, whereas ABM is where you can do
something with the information you get to
run your business. (Financial Controller)
To illustrate this distinction, the Strategic
Accounting Group produced a selected number
of activity pro?les of workers from each of the
manufacturing cells.
11
These activity pro?les were
presented by the SAG as a ‘‘true and accurate’’
representation of how much time workers actually
spent daily in ‘‘real’’ ‘value-adding activity’ in
production. Representing data to workers in this
way was intended to demonstrate the amount of
spare labour capacity SAG claimed to have
remained ‘untapped’ in the day-to-day running of
production, and the potential productivity gains
to be made from utilising this ‘capacity’. However,
some managers expressed concern that ABM was
just a fad that, like its predecessors, was not likely
to last all that long, because ‘‘It’s all about opi-
nion and about nothing else. I think it’s better
than standard costs but I don’t think it’s the ‘be-
all-and-end-all’.’’ Yet, ABM gathered momentum
and quickly displaced TA:
ABM is being driven by the CEO [of MotorCo].
So while our [Northern Plant] Finance Director
was doing his Throughput Accounting on a
11
The pro?les were drawn from a series of interviews
between these personnel and members of the SAG and a newly
trained in-house ABM and MBF ‘change team’. Data was col-
lected from questions related to a speci?c range of ‘everyday’
tasks and responsibilities performed by workers at the point of
production in relation to: (1) the frequency and duration of
manufacturing set-up times, waiting time, breakdown times,
the responsiveness of machine-setters and/or maintenance per-
sonnel to these ‘problems’; (2) the nature and regularity of any
[other] interruptions to, or delays in, manufacturing processes
or the ?ow of production, supply of parts or material to and
from required locations within and between cells; and (3) qual-
ity control ‘problems’.
288 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
small scale in the plant, that’s now getting
washed away by the tide of ABM. (Manager)
Workers resistance and the war of attrition: ‘keeping
the narrative going’
Rather than refuse any dialogue with managers
and risk total alienation, the shop?oor chose to
pursue a strategy of keeping the ‘narrative’ going
in which a willingness to embrace change was
espoused but without surrendering any ground:
What you have got to do is watch what you say,
and watch what you get drawn into discussing
with them [managers]. Because if you show
them that you accept what they say, all
you’ve done is set yourself up for a regular
pasting [from managers] all day everyday for
not doing enough because you can’t do
enough, because with the activity based thing
[ABC] and MBF they’ll want more. Most of
us won’t talk [to managers] when it’s to do
with TQ or this Activity Based thing because
they’re designed to get inside your head. . .
once you’ve accepted that there are problems
with the way things are done and they can be
improved by so-called facts, then you’ve
accepted the fact that the time you have now
to get ‘your score in’ or to have a break will
be gone. (Cell Machine Operator)
‘Keeping the narrative going’ helped workers to
drag things out over a longer time scale, thereby
delaying the ‘evil’ of the new changes. It also
o?ered workers a respite from the boredom and
intensity of work, so that attending meetings
became an end in itself. One Truck Driver said:
They [workers] were happy to go to meetings
because basically ‘it gets them o? the
machines for an hour or so.’ Also, when they
were there, the questions that were asked
were about nonsense. Things were challenged,
not because they were that bothered about
them, but because it dragged things out as
much as possible. . . this always led to wind-
ups, to piss-taking, and basically making a
mockery out of it all to get a laugh out of it.
Going to the meetings basically involved strol-
ling down to personnel, getting a co?ee on the
way, having a chat to your mates, doing the
same coming back, eventually getting back to
the job and then counting it all as down time.
During cell brie?ngs, training workshops, and
other meetings the technique of ABM and the
data produced by it were challenged by the shop-
?oor in much the same way as in previous
accounting initiatives. In one ABM training
workshop that we attended, one Machine Opera-
tor remonstrated to the SAG Team training per-
sonnel present:
You people can measure this and that and
whatever you like but it doesn’t mean anything,
it doesn’t show what you’ve got to deal with
when you have a problem, it doesn’t show how
long it takes to get a setter, a newtool sorted, or
a fault or whatever. So what we’re here to listen
to is crap that has nothing to do with reality.
During the same workshop, other workers
endorsed this view by adding that it was both
‘‘ridiculous’’ and ‘‘insulting’’ to be involved in
training programmes that were designed to tell
workers, who in many cases had 20 years’ ?rst-
hand experience of manufacturing in Northern
Plant, how to improve production processes.
Workers either refused to accept the validity of the
data, claiming that it was beyond their under-
standing; or the data was dismissed as ‘‘just more
management bullshit’’ aimed at work intensi?ca-
tion. Alternatively, workers argued that ABM
o?ered only an abstract account of ‘‘what workers
do’’, rather than what they ‘‘actually do in rea-
lity’’. The activities were discredited on the
grounds that inadequate account was taken of a
wide range of short-batch production runs. These
required workers to address the complexity of
day-to-day problems that de?ed measurement in
this simplistic way. In response, SAG argued that
ABM had been speci?cally designed to measure
such ‘activity’, but only in value-adding and non-
value-adding terms. This response only served to
fuel workers’ suspicion that ABM was designed
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 289
for work intensi?cation; to render the shop?oor
accountable for poor performance, down-time, or
any other stoppages or interruptions to produc-
tion, irrespective of their causes. In another work-
shop, the argument reached its climax when one
worker became irate, claiming that the SAG had
no respect for the fact that:
It’s the lads on the shop?oor working toge-
ther and not the idea of getting rid of what
they do that had made [Northern Plant] a
success well before the SAG even knew the
plant existed. (Operator)
The irony of this incident was that, at the time,
this Operator had worked at the Plant (unknown to
the SAG) for only 18 months. After this meeting he
told us that exploiting this much vaunted view of
the more long term employees in this way had:
Left management knackered, because they
can’t handle it. They don’t know what to say
when you say ‘it’s us and not them who built
the plant up’. The best thing though is that
they’re not sure whether you’re winding them
up, and they can’t say you are because we’ll
walk out [of the workshop] with a cob-on.
(Operator)
It is important to note that shop?oor hostility
towards MBF/ABM was not simply a consequence
of perceived limitations of these techniques. It was
also because the techniques were seen as part of an
ongoing ‘onslaught’ by management determined to
discipline the shop?oor. Operators were getting
frustrated and angered by managers’ claims that
operators were a problem because of the latter’s
reluctance to embrace change initiatives:
This new management are saying we’re a
problem because we’re not ?exible, because
we won’t accept change. We are saying, we
are ?exible; we can run any machine you
like. . . But what they mean by ‘?exibility’ and
what we mean are not the same [thing]. They
think it’s me wanting to do my job, the set-
ter’s job, maintenance job, and jump on a
machine in between. (Materials Handler)
Operators presented themselves as being pre-
pared to embrace ‘change’ willingly—so long as
what change meant complied with their own
expectations, rather than management’s. Opera-
tors were quick to point out that their work prac-
tices had undergone signi?cant change, and that
they have taken on a lot, but they were not pre-
pared to be manipulated by managers to accept
changes that were aimed at exploiting their labour
and future careers for the purposes of short-term
gains in the form of a reduced wage bill. Further
attempts by SAG to explain that the VF ‘concept’,
MBF or ABM, which were designed to introduce
workers to the concept of working smarter rather
than harder, faced intractable arguments and unco-
operative behaviour from workers. The VF concept,
for example, was condemned as a management plan
eventually to introduce a systemof total surveillance
over the shop?oor, and its MBF initiative was sub-
sequently relabelled ‘‘management by fear’’:
This [MBF] is a bad one. If they [manage-
ment] get this in you won’t get a minute to
yourself, you’ll be ‘screwed down’, and that’s
what they’re after, to be able to make you
account for everything you do for a full shift
and if you can’t, they’ve got you haven’t they,
and that’s it, that’s all, this [MBF] is about
nailing you down. (Machine Operator)
The attitude of the shop?oor towards this per-
ceived continuous tightening up of discipline by
management was to pour scorn on management’s
authority, claiming that they see through manage-
ment rhetoric as nothing more than squeezing
more pro?t out of labour:
We’re being told [at cell meetings] either you
perform, do the work [MotorCo] want in the
numbers they want and the quality they want,
or they’ll simply go somewhere else or sub-
contract it because they’re not making
money. They must be. Last year we had
seventeen people on this section, we now have
seven. Ten men have gone, ten men’s wages,
and they’re saying they’re not making money
. . .They must think we’re fuckin thick.
(Operator)
290 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
Given their ability to debunk and discredit
management’s disciplinary measures, operators
were intent on taking on management on the
assumption that, without securing full co-oper-
ation from the shop?oor, managerial initiatives
were doomed:
At the end of the day, they [managers] know
they need people’s co-operation. So they can
try and get total surveillance in as much as
they like, but they can’t be everywhere and on
everyone’s case at the same time. They can’t
stand at the side of people’s machines like a
permanent ?xture, watching them, seeing how
they do the job, if they’re doing it their way.
(Materials Handler)
The patience of operators was wearing thin as
managers kept pushing for more surveillance and
disciplinary measures. Operators experienced a
gradual withdrawal of much of the discretion they
enjoyed previously over the organization of their
work activities and the use of their work time:
We’re [the shop?oor] sick of being warned for
anything they want to warn us about. Silly
little things that they think they can get away
with to keep on at you to do things exactly
the way they want: stopping for a co?ee, a
smoke, reading the papers, and having a chat.
So the men are angry. They’re angry with
seeing people being pulled and warned con-
stantly by bully boys. (Machine Operator)
Given this anger, and operators’ belief that
managers, no matter how hard they tried, cannot
e?ectively monitor everything at the same time, a
war of attrition developed as operators sought to
frustrate and humiliate managers:
[We want] to make the bastards [managers]
claw at everything they get, to make it as hard
and as horrible as possible at every stage, so
that they hate you and hate the thought of
actually having to deal with you in the ?rst
place. If you’re prepared to keep putting
things in their way, anything, just to ware
them down, to piss them o?, even though
you’ve actually agreed to accept to go with
what they want. . . What I’m saying is that
you’ve got to get them so pissed o? that in the
end you get them to stop short of what they
want.’’ (Machine Operator)
Operators undermined the authority of man-
agers either genuinely or sarcastically—for exam-
ple, by presenting themselves to the directors of
the parent as more caring about cost savings than
managers. Following the introduction of ABM,
MBF and the VF, e?orts were made to reduce and
eventually eliminate the role played by quality
control inspectors by transferring their responsi-
bilities to machine operators and assembly work-
ers. The Plant Convenor summed up the shop?oor
views of this development, which was introduced
by the Quality Department Manager, by present-
ing it as short-sighted and damaging to Northern
Plant in the long term:
This put the onus for quality on the people
who make the parts, people who are not
trained to do it and don’t have the time to do
it anyway. When we had [quality control]
inspectors on the lines and viewers on assem-
bly we had good quality all the time and we
were winning all kinds of awards. Then they
took the viewers o?. All they were doing
though was saving on the wage bill, but
without thinking about the consequences; he
lost the company a fortune because of the
problems he caused.
Tightening surveillance through accounting and
provoking more resistance
By late 1995 the struggle over the introduction
of these [new] accounting practices had intensi?ed.
Senior management announced that the data
gathered and processed from the activity pro?les
indicated that the plant was operating at forty
percent below its manufacturing capacity. In the
spring of 1996, workers were given a management
ultimatum that they must ‘‘produce more or risk
the sack’’. In a series of crisis meetings that fol-
lowed this ultimatum, workers were informed that
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 291
MotorCo will no longer ‘‘tolerate the plant’s con-
tinued resistance’’ to change. Corporate manage-
ment introduced a series of new disciplinary
measures speci?cally designed to gain much closer
managerial control and surveillance over the
shop?oor. These included ‘non-discretion man-
agement’ (NDM), a new time and attendance pol-
icy and a new disciplinary code of conduct.
NDM required all supervisors to adhere to a
uniform and consistent approach to managing and
disciplining the shop?oor. Each of the U-shaped
cells was to be patrolled at 2-hourly intervals and,
without exception, workers were to be disciplined
if their performance, without adequate reason, fell
short of targets determined by MBF. This dis-
cipline took the form of automatically issuing
o?enders with a written letter of concern that was
registered with their cell manager and the HRM
Department. Letters of concern were issued for
what management deemed poor work perfor-
mance(s); poor house-keeping; bad attitude;
unnecessary, or un-accounted for absence(s) from
work stations; poor time-keeping or absenteeism;
or any other o?ence thought to warrant concern.
NDM was widely viewed by the shop?oor as a
major restriction:
NDM doesn’t allow you to make any deci-
sions, you just adhere to it. You can’t use
your discretion because you are just a ‘tool’.
[It’s there] to discipline people (Supervisor)
These new disciplinary measures precipitated a
period of increasing tension. One Operator sug-
gested that through NDM corporate management
was simply ‘‘sending the message [to the shop-
?oor]’’ that ‘‘they’re going to discipline people ‘out
of the door’’’ (i.e. by sacking them) as a means of
‘‘breaking’’ shop?oor resistance. Workers initially
resorted to contriving forms of ‘down-time’ that
enabled them to account for lost production or
poor performance ?gures. They achieved this by
booking breakdowns, waiting time, or any stop-
pages or interruptions to the ?ow of production
that had either never occurred, or recorded more
time than it actually took for themselves, machine
setters or maintenance personnel to ?x these pro-
blems. In certain cases, workers avoided or
refused to record output ?gures or stoppages, sar-
castically claiming that they had either forgotten
or had been ‘‘too busy’’. Stalling and/or dragging-
out the process of recording output or perfor-
mance levels was intended to wear management
down and thereby ‘‘force them to back-o?’’, as
one worker put it. Workers reinforced the message
that plant management could expect at best mini-
mum compliance to the rules and procedures of
the new disciplinary regime. Workers also sig-
nalled their intent to consume as much of man-
agement’s time as possible in routine progress
chasing and to make management expend time
and e?ort in re-asserting and enforcing the rules
and procedures of the new disciplinary regime. As
one Operator said ‘‘[NDM] works both ways; if
this is the way they want to ‘manage’ then that’s
?ne, but it’s up to them to get it right, not us’’. The
attitude of the shop?oor was:
We had no choice but to take them [manage-
ment] on over these things. What things like
MBF amount to is lean manufacturing in all
its glory. Which is about screwing people and
getting rid of as many jobs as possible in the
process, so you can’t a?ord to ignore it.
(Shop Steward)
In January 1997 workers almost unanimously
voted to take strike action. Their main grievances
were focused upon the new time and attendance
policy. This, they protested, had been imposed
upon them without prior negotiation between the
plant management and elected trade union repre-
sentatives. As one worker indicated, ‘‘[NDM] is a
sacker’s charter’’. It was widely viewed by workers
as designed not only to impose totally unrestricted
managerial power, control and surveillance over
the nature and organization of production, but
also to usher in a regime of ‘‘management by fear’’
that functioned by arbitrarily targeting workers
for dismissal as a means of applying pressure to
others to conform to the entire NDM measures
package. In March 1997 workers implemented
their earlier decision to take strike action by
beginning what was intended to be a series of
random 1-day strikes and an over-time ban. If this
action failed to win concessions, the threat was to
292 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
follow it with an inde?nite all-out strike. Legally,
the shop stewards were required to give only 24
hours’ notice before each 1-day strike took place.
They therefore adopted a strategy of ‘‘hitting them
[management] randomly and at short notice’’, as
one Shop Steward claimed. This involved choos-
ing a di?erent day each week on which the strike
would take place, but informing management of
this as late as [legally] possible in order to in?ict
maximum disruption to production schedules and
output targets in ways that management could
least easily control. After only two 1-day strikes,
management conceded to the workers’ demands
and abandoned NDM.
The shop stewards informed management that
they would not be prepared to discontinue indus-
trial action without the latter’s agreement that its
time and attendance and disciplinary policies were
appropriately revised, following ‘‘proper’’ con-
sultation between the HRM Department and the
shop stewards. In less than a week, the outcome of
this was a (new) policy agreeable to both the
plant’s new senior management and the shop
stewards. Withdrawal of NDM, however, did not
inhibit corporate management’s search for greater
control and surveillance over the shop?oor. There
have been renewed, albeit more cautious, attempts
to operationalise fully ‘new’ disciplinary account-
ing measures in the plant. In response, further
strike action has been threatened but not carried
out. The ‘new’ accounting measures continue to be
contested and fought over as the politics of pro-
duction unravel new dynamics that are mediated
by the nature and history of the plant’s manage-
ment–labour relations.
Discussion
In order to provide a broad overview of worker–
management–steward relations at Northern Plant,
we have described its constituent groups as if they
were fairly uni?ed and pursuing consistent objec-
tives. It is of course possible to disaggregate their
respective orientations and priorities to highlight
divisions and fractures. Con?icts over lean pro-
duction and novel accounting practices at the
plant occurred not only between management and
labour, but also ensued within and between dif-
ferent shop?oor groups including shop stewards.
To be sure, shop stewards at the plant did chal-
lenge lean production and new accounting meth-
ods, and on occasion, actively enticed workers to
oppose their introduction by threatening industrial
action. Yet, compared to the majority of the
membership, the stewards were decidedly less
‘militant’ or ‘intransigent’. Following o?cial
AUEW Trade Union policy (since the mid-1980s:
see Ackers, Smith, & Smith, 1996), the stewards
largely accepted, and to some extent welcomed, the
prospect of new wave manufacturing and working
practices as these were expected to involve train-
ing, education and multi-skilling that were claimed
to be of bene?t to their membership. The stew-
ards’ later aversion to, but not total rejection of,
lean production, only arose from a belated
appraisal of its ‘meanness’ — an awareness that
developed during long and protracted negotiation
with management over the terms and conditions
of its introduction. Their view of how this appar-
ent ‘meanness’ of lean production should be chal-
lenged, however, di?ered from that of their
membership. As we have shown elsewhere (Ezza-
mel, Willmott, & Worthington, 2001), the shop
stewards sought to avoid what they saw as the
potentially negative implications of lean produc-
tion, ‘by negotiating it in as a damage-limitation
exercise’. Their membership, in contrast, adopted
a stance designed to distance themselves as far as
possible from the prospect of ever working under
these conditions
12
.
At the outset, workers did not totally reject lean
production. Changes in the social organization at
the plant, resulting from the introduction of new
technology or the application of innovations in
?exible production systems were commonplace at
Northern Plant. The plant’s rapid expansion in the
1970s was a consequence of an enthusiasm for
innovation in both the design and manufacture of
its product, and its experimentation with group-
12
As this account showed, shop stewards at Northern Plant
were prepared to talk endlessly about their willingness to accept
new (team) working practices, providing management remained
responsible for making such arrangements work, but remained
unwilling to walk even one step in management’s direction to
enable them to achieve this.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 293
technology (Alford, 1994, see below) that they
shared. Since it increased employment and job
security at the plant, which is located in an area
that has traditionally su?ered relatively high
unemployment, such innovations had tradition-
ally been well received by workers. In any case,
established industrial relations agreements meant
that the introduction of new working practices at
the plant was automatically subject to collective
bargaining—usually only at annual pay negotia-
tions. As with previous major innovations, work-
ers were attentive to the possible implications of
lean production for existing frontiers of control
and their potential e?ect upon job security. But
they were not automatically opposed to its intro-
duction. The subsequent strength of worker
opposition to lean production, as opposed to the
more accommodating stance of their stewards,
was not simply the result of recognising the
potential ‘meanness’ of this mode of production
but a combination of a number of factors, includ-
ing, ironically, the promise of polyvalence.
13
Workers at Northern Plant were sceptical of pro-
mises of high-levels of training, education or skill-
enhancement that management claimed would
accompany introduction of lean production. It
was considered implausible that all workers at the
plant would, or indeed could, be a?orded the
opportunity of skill-enhancement, let alone a
mature apprenticeship- assuming that all of them
would want to take this opportunity if it was pre-
sented to them. Indeed, some workers were indif-
ferent and many resistant to the prospect of skill-
enhancement from the outset. Many declared to
management and their stewards that they had no
interest in becoming a ‘skilled-man’. For these
workers, given what they saw as the commodi?ed
nature of all work in manufacturing, ‘skilled-work’
was only marginally ‘better’ than non/semi-skilled
work. Others argued, as labour process theorists
contend (e.g. Bratton, 1992; Dohse et al., 1991),
that ‘skill-enhancement’ under lean production is a
misnomer; a tactic used by management to ‘blur
the lines’ between craft and semi-skilled work in a
way that results in de-skilling not en-skilling and
promotes work intensi?cation, eventually leading
to job-losses.
Many workers at the plant accepted and indeed
supported craft workers’ defence of craft demar-
cation-lines. In their view, having served an
apprenticeship, craft workers had a right to pro-
tect the privileged status and position they held in
the labour process, not least of all to preserve the
integrity of craft work for future entrants. Like
Collinson’s (1992) workers, many workers at
Northern Plant believed they had ‘missed their
opportunity of apprentices on leaving school at
age 15, and to enter into a mature apprenticeship
now as an adult would amount to taking the
opportunity of an apprenticeship away from the
current generation of school-leavers. Others, how-
ever, were less sympathetic, believing craft work-
ers to be arrogant and contemptuous of the plant’s
non-craft workers, who they saw as ‘lesser [shop-
?oor] beings’, and who they were preventing from
‘getting on’. However, in general all workers, irre-
spective of their views of new wave manufacturing
initiatives, and each other, remained cautious as
they sought to avoid being drawn into accepting
lean production without formally negotiated
agreements reached by their stewards that speci?-
cally guaranteed: (1) equal opportunity to in-
house skill training and education for all workers
through to a mature apprenticeship; (2) job-secur-
ity for those who did not wish to take this oppor-
tunity; (3) a no-compulsory redundancy policy,
and; (4) trade union involvement in the planning,
organization and administration of multi-skilling
and mature apprenticeship training schemes.
Lengthy negotiation failed to produce a
mutually agreeable training policy acceptable to
both management and the shop?oor. This led
workers to question management intentions and
13
The promise of becoming more ‘skilled’ was a highly attrac-
tive proposition for many machine operators at the plant. Many
of them already uno?cially performed certain aspects of skilled
work that they had acquired by assisting skilled men to re-tool
and re-programme during machine changeovers. They also
acquired minor CNC (Computerised numerical Control) tooling
and product quality control programming skills, which setters
taught then, to save down-time during production runs. The pro-
spect of working with manufacturing engineers, and the promise
of the opportunity to progress to the position of manufacturing
engineer, was similarly attractive to many skilled workers. Skilled
workers could however, realise this aspiration whether or not lean
production was introduced, whereas semi-skilled workers, could
achieve skilled status only by its introduction.
294 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
to lose faith in the shop stewards’ ability to protect
their interests by securing from management the
introduction of a genuine multi-skilling pro-
gramme, rather than simply a ‘multi-tasking’ (see
Sharpe, 1996) agreement that, they believed,
would lead to work intensi?cation as manage-
ment’s primary aim. The major obstacle to the
introduction of lean production at Northern Plant
that emerged from these negotiations, however,
was the craft-workers’ response to multi-skilling.
This was a more intractable problem. Semi-skilled
shop?oor worker had rightly anticipated that the
plant’s time served skilled/craft workers would not
accept a multi-skilling that allowed ‘dilutees’ (i.e.
non-time-served workers) into their ranks
14
.
When, as expected, the skilled workforce refused
to agree to multi-skilling, and, moreover, rejected
management’s proposals for a mature apprentice-
ship scheme, talks not only broke down but also
were stalled inde?nitely. There were also divisions
within management. In addition to obvious di?er-
ences in seniority and functional responsibility
amongst managers, some managers were more
sympathetic to worker concerns, believing that
senior management initiatives could be counter-
productive for securing the degree of employee co-
operation necessary to implement forms of lean
production. Other managers were either blind to, or
dismissive of, such concerns and their implications,
and viewed forms of worker resistance as irrational,
disruptive behaviour that required tougher action.
Recognition of this diversity within the ranks of
workers, shop-stewards, and managers with regard
to workers’ levels of skill, as well as length of ser-
vice and the strength of their identi?cation with the
values and practices that fuelled worker resistance
to management initiatives should not, however,
de?ect attention from examination of the principal
dynamics and prominent features of the relation-
ship between workers and managers at Northern
Plant. Central to this relationship was the sustained
resistance of the workforce to management’s
e?orts to introduce lean manufacturing during the
late 1980s and 1990s. It might be concluded that
the managers at Northern Plant simply lost the
initiative for change during the early stages of
negotiations, never regained it, and that this fail-
ure accounts for the strength of opposition to new
working practices they subsequently faced. By the
same token, it could be said that the ‘uncompro-
mising’ determination of the stewards to secure a
bene?cial outcome to change for their membership
was a key factor in explaining the resistance
encountered by management to its lean produc-
tion initiatives. A sophisticated labour process
model of con?ict at work (Edwards, 1986) would
identify these two factors, perhaps orchestrated by
stewards’ tacit support for worker ‘misbehaviour’
that served to subvert management’s authority
and unity, as broadly su?cient to account for the
situation. Indeed, how else could one explain how
machine operators develop the understanding that
TQM means ‘less men doing more work’, and then
act on this insight to confront management? This
model of industrial relations, we suggest, positions
the ordinary shop?oor worker as a bit player
in industrial con?ict, preyed on by management
on the one hand, and protected on the other by
dedicated shop stewards’, totally committed to
protecting worker interests (see Beynon, 1984;
Darlington, 1994).
In the case of Northern Plant, however, worker
resistance was not motivated solely, and perhaps
not even primarily, by a concern to protect mate-
rial conditions of employment (i.e. pay, conditions
and job-security), or established ‘frontiers of con-
trol’ (Edwards, 1979). Other important considera-
tions, which we characterise as ‘identity concerns’,
fuelled their resistance to change. A determination
to preserve social spaces at work that would
enable them to con?rm a sense of identity shaped
during an earlier period of the plant’s history gen-
erated con?ict not only between managers and
workers but also between workers and their shop
stewards. Determined to preserve established
working practices in the face of their threatened
erosion by e?orts to introduce lean production, the
workers accused the stewards of lacking the same
commitment or determination. Shop stewards
regarded their shop?oor membership not so much
14
As Penn (1986) shows, craft-workers in manufacturing
have traditionally defended craft-knowledge from management
and non-skilled workers and ‘dilutees—non-time-served ’ skil-
led workers, and the internal demarcation lines that exist
between speci?c craft workers (i.e. electricians, ?tters, tool-
makers, setters, grinders) to protect their interests.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 295
as straying beyond control, but as ‘beyond (their)
contempt’, interested only in short-term ?nancial
‘self interests’. The stewards perception, which our
own analysis questions and relates to an exces-
sively materialistic and patronising unionist dis-
course, was that their members were too readily
prepared to accept ‘‘any shit’, or strike any deal
(with their foremen) to acquire the ‘gravy jobs’
(see Burawoy, 1979); to gain ‘excessive’ over-time
as payment for ‘score-busting’ (i.e. making the
numbers in record times, to which they might one
day be held to account as their o?cial output tar-
gets), or, as it was put more contemptuously by an
ex-trade union convenor at the plant, simply
because ‘‘some of them just like grovelling’’. To
explain this, and following Clegg (1994), a scene
from a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western perhaps
more accurately portrays the nature of resistance
at the plant in the wake of its planned investment
in lean production than the classic Western Movie
industrial relations scenario. That is, it took the
form of a screenplay comprising ‘transitory, ?eet-
ing, ambivalent and semiotically insecure sub-
jectivities’ (Clegg, 1994: p. 275) constituted by a
wider sense of insecurity borne of perpetual suspi-
cion, mistrust and the constant fear of betrayal
from each of the di?erent dyads within the triad of
the individual agencies ultimately commited to ‘no
cause but their own’ (ibid.).
15
A ‘stand-o?’ ensued between managers who
were reluctant to attempt the imposition of new
working practices on the shop?oor for fear of
provoking industrial dispute; workers who were
resistant to o?ering the slightest concession to
management for fear of work intensi?cation; and
shop stewards caught between the two. The stew-
ards were unprepared to (openly) support work-
er’s intransigence towards change, for fear of
being led into an industrial dispute over lean pro-
duction by their membership, which they believed
they would not win. Yet the stewards were equally
unprepared to acquiesce to management demands
for them to cultivate a more reasonable response
to change amongst the workforce, which they
believed they could not deliver even if they wanted
to, and which risked provoking wild cat industrial
action (Gouldner, 1955) that they could not con-
trol. Either outcome, as the stewards protested,
would probably have resulted in the defeat of the
union, which they believed neither they nor their
membership could a?ord. The stewards therefore
contrived to parry pressures from management for
change by communication of what would, or
would not, be acceptable to their membership
while, at the same time, side-stepping membership
pressure for a ?rmer stance, including occasional
shop?oor calls for industrial action, by skilfully
de?ecting these demands.
16
15
During the research it was di?cult to ?nd respondents
amongst the shop?oor protagonists of resistance, the shop
stewards or managers themselves who were not somewhat
bewildered by how the resistance to lean production had con-
tinued for such a lengthy period. The search for a plausible
explanation was in fact a regular topic of conversation not only
between shop?oor workers themselves, but also between work-
ers and managers. These exchanges—typically between foremen
and workers—often caused production to be lost. Indeed, such
matters were often discussed for quite lengthy periods, with the
former conveniently perched on the side of a machine or
workstation or while workers were on ‘walk-a-bout’ as they
skived o? from their designated workstations in a whole host of
ingenious ways without any genuine reason or permission.
Such day-to-day activities were conducted openly with impu-
nity, without fear of reprimand or disciplinary action from
management. These social practices were in fact so deeply
ingrained in the collective thought of both workers and man-
gers at the plant that not only were they simply accepted
norms, but totally ‘taken-for-granted’ as part and parcel of the
culture of management-labour relations at Northern Plant.
16
The shop stewards themselves called for industrial action
only when they deemed the strength and legitimacy of their
position with management to be under threat, or when they
found pressures from the shop?oor became over-barring.
Threats of industrial action, however, rarely if ever came close
to being carried out. More often, shop stewards used the threat
to impress upon management that they had the full support of
their membership if action was deemed necessary. Threats of
industrial action were therefore used mainly to check occa-
sional attempts to impose new working practices at the plant
outside of established management-trade union negotiation
procedures, or to counter moves to undermine their rights as
the legitimate representatives of the shop?oor, for example, by
attempting to circumvent them to deal with workers directly to
promote new working practices. This had the e?ect of render-
ing the shop stewards militant in the eyes of management, and
corrupt in the eyes of their membership. The stewards defended
their actions by claiming that they were necessary to protect the
position of the trade union at the plant as the gatekeepers of
industrial action.
296 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
We have set our examination of how, at North-
ern Plant, new accounting techniques introduced
to secure leaner production were resisted by a
workforce that interpreted them as measures
designed to weaken, manipulate, or restrict their
exercise of discretion in the context of an estab-
lished and entrenched pattern of management–
labour relations. Although the stewards played a
part in mediating between ‘unruly’ shop?oor
workers and ‘overbearing’ managers, we have
stressed that forms of con?ict and processes of
resistance at Northern Plant cannot adequately be
understood in terms of classical management-
union battles and skirmishes over pay and condi-
tions. Pay and conditions were undoubtedly sig-
ni?cant and often became an overt, mutually
recognisable focus of disputes. But recurrent
struggles, we have suggested, were provoked and
fuelled principally by innovations that posed a
threat to established forms of identi?cation and
means of reproducing narratives of self identity.
The articulation of workers’ concerns occurred
through interactions on the shop?oor between
workers, with supervisors and at meetings where
politically astute, but not necessarily militantly
leftist or unionist, workers would be active in
pushing issues, often in humorous ways, so that
other, less politically attuned workers, would be
schooled about the signi?cance and implications
of management’s e?orts to introduce change. Dis-
content would be harnessed and support mobilised
by demonstrating how management demands
could be lampooned, subverted, parried and
de?ected in ways that drew those in who enjoyed a
‘la?’ and a release from boredom occasioned by
scraps and confrontations with management. In
this precarious way, ‘solidarity’ amongst diverse
and fractious members of the shop?oor was man-
ufactured as di?erent orientations—comprising
politically aware workers who were disa?ected
with the union; traditionally ‘militant’ workers
and others who were ardent and unquestioning
union supporters, as well as a residual number of
politically disinterested or ‘naive’ workers who
simply enjoyed the spectacle of watching super-
visors and managers being knocked o? their per-
ches—were brought together to frustrate and
impede managerial change initiatives.
Resistance might otherwise be interpreted sim-
ply as workers’ opposition to measures that
threatened the material basis of their relationship
to capital as sellers of labour power. In contrast,
we have argued that it was not just, or even prin-
cipally, the threat of the loss of their jobs that
galvanised resistance to management’s repeated
e?orts to change work practices but, rather,
workers’ immersion in a narrative that prized a
culture of what we have termed ‘unplanned
responsible autonomy’. Prior to Motor-Co’s quest
to modernise the plant, workers had negotiated
high levels of overtime and considerable ‘free time’
in exchange for their e?ort and co-operation in
managing production. Workers’ involvement in
self-managing practices, informal organization
and co-operative management-labour relations,
underpinned by the standard costing system, pro-
vided them with knowledge of the practical mean-
ing of concepts such as ?exibility, quality
consciousness, empowerment, employee involve-
ment and Kaizen. When management subse-
quently sought to introduce ‘new wave’
manufacturing and production methods and new
accounting techniques, these initiatives were inter-
preted by workers as attempts to incorporate their
involvement and co-operation into a new, non-
negotiable, or at least more tightly circumscribed,
social organization of production. These develop-
ments, it was anticipated, would restrict their
involvement and in?uence over the social organi-
zation of production. It would also narrow
opportunities for con?rming and reproducing
their self-identity as knowledgeable agents of pro-
duction, as contrasted to becoming docile servants
of the new production methods and accounting
techniques—techniques that workers perceived to
impose managerially programmed forms of dis-
cretion upon them. This made workers determined
to preserve practices in which their sense of
knowledgeability and identity could be articulated
and maintained. Having exercised considerable
discretion over the organization of work during
the era of unplanned responsible autonomy, which
provided a (nostalgic) benchmark for interrogat-
ing the signi?cance and likely consequences of
each new initiative, workers could readily antici-
pate what the ‘new’ practices (e.g. teamworking)
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 297
would mean in terms of work intensi?cation and
the squeezing of both ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ time.
The experience of unplanned responsible auton-
omy informed their understanding of subsequent
management initiatives and ?red their resistance
to the exercise of programmed discretion deman-
ded by the ‘new’ accounting measures. The pro-
spect of working within what was construed, in
the light of workers’ previous experience, as a non-
negotiable and uncompromising system of produc-
tion was readily discerned and collectively resisted.
Workers’ retention of a substantial measure of
discretion, or exemption from managerially
designed control, coupled with their capacity to
engage in diverse forms of ‘misbehaviour’ and
resistance, enabled them ‘to keep a particular nar-
rative [of self] going’ (Giddens, 1991; p. 54), a
narrative resting on a celebration of their superior
knowledge and understanding of high-tech manu-
facturing and ability to ‘manage’ complex pro-
duction mixes. By preserving this narrative,
workers contrived to outwit and outsmart man-
agement’s e?orts to control the sphere of action
within which they developed and exercised their
control over the labour process. Worker resistance
also drew a measure of support from local man-
agers in so far as they assessed ‘new’ organizing
and accounting initiatives to unsettle established
management–labour relations and/or have self
defeating consequences for raising output. Shop
stewards shared workers’ suspicion of manage-
ment’s claims about lean production but were
more inclined to accept the union view that it
would be possible to negotiate an up-skilling
agreement, and were therefore reluctant to sup-
port workers’ unquali?ed resistance to the new
initiatives.
Conclusions
This paper has presented an intensive case study
of Northern Plant in an e?ort to shed further light
on the introduction of ‘new’ accounting practices
in contemporary work organizations, and to link
these initiatives to the context of management-
labour relations. By examining the history of
developments at Northern Plant over more than
twenty years, we have connected e?orts to intro-
duce new manufacturing and accounting practices
to changes in ownership and market conditions.
We noted how, for example, following a change of
ownership, new initiatives including ?exibility,
teamworking, and cellular manufacturing were
launched, and with these came a demand for ‘new’
accounting practices.
We began by summarising brie?y the sequence
of events. Initially the parent favoured ABC, but
senior management at Northern Plant viewed this
as counter-productive for its market and labour
conditions. Aware of the history of management-
labour relations at Northern Plant, its managers
sought to avoid ABC because they anticipated
that employees would perceive its e?ects as
degrading their conditions of employment and
limiting traditional opportunities and scope for
self-organizion. Accordingly, the Plant managers
introduced TA, but this was interpreted and resis-
ted by workers and middle and ?rst-line managers
who viewed it as a device for labour intensi?cation
and concealing e?ciency improvements that could
provide a basis for negotiating better pay and
conditions. Subsequently, TA (and TOC) was dis-
banded in favour of a package comprising ABM
and Management By Fact (MBF), which then met
with the same fate as TA. This resistance even-
tually prompted a highly coercive response from
corporate management as managers at all levels in
Northern Plant were replaced. At the same time,
the focus of accounting techniques shifted with the
withdrawal of delegated authority to middle man-
agement who were to be brought under the con-
stant gaze of senior management. Greater, and
more direct, accountability measures were
imposed on them. In the face of entrenched resis-
tance, corporate management intervened by
applying a variety of direct controls, such as Non-
Discretionary Management (NDM) coupled to
MBF. In response to e?ective and damaging
industrial action, management conceded to shop-
?oor demands by withdrawing NDM.
To understand such shifts and counter-shifts, we
have argued, does not simply require giving a little
more attention to the politics of the production pro-
cess, but rather positioning it at the centre of analy-
sis. For it is these management-labour relations, we
298 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
contend, that facilitate or frustrate, and smooth or
disrupt, the practicalities of accounting for factory
production. More speci?cally, a fuller apprecia-
tion and exploration of senior managers’ depen-
dence upon middle and ?rst-line managers as well
as workers’ co-operation—and the latter’s capa-
city to develop more or less e?ective forms of
covert and overt resistance—is required. By tra-
cing the dynamics of management control and
employee resistance, and indeed workers’ control
and management resistance, we have sought to
provide one illustration of how the introduction
and abandonment of a series of ‘new’ management
and accounting initiatives was conditioned by the
politics of production.
We do not claim that the case of Northern Plant
is typical or representative. But neither are we in a
position to concede that the dynamics explored in
this paper are unparalleled, even if they are dra-
matically articulated. We have been at pains to
emphasise the particularities of the history of
Northern Plant in terms of workers’ specialist
skills, its benign product market conditions and
the ethos of ‘unplanned responsible autonomy’
that was negotiated in its early years. In this
respect, Northern Plant illustrates the obverse of
dynamics observed in a sister study where a very
di?erent pattern of management-labour relations
at StitchCo, forged within a distinctive complex of
product and labour markets, mediated employees’
receptiveness to the introduction and implemen-
tation of new manufacturing practices and asso-
ciated accounting methods (Ezzamel & Willmott,
1998a). So, while it is impossible to draw out any
generalisations about the introduction or con-
sequences of lean production from a single case
study, we believe that insights into the dynamics
of its implementation are of more general rele-
vance. In particular, we have commended atten-
tiveness to the signi?cance of processes of identity
formation and reproduction in assessing and
accommodating change initiatives, including
e?orts to implement lean production.
We conclude with a consideration of how our
analysis compares to, and serves as a corrective
for, the analysis of new management and
accounting initiatives advanced by Miller and
O’Leary (1993, 1994). We concur with Miller and
O’Leary’s concern to shift the terms of reference
of the debate on accounting change from the
purely economic (e.g. transaction cost theory) to
the realm of the political—that is, the realm
where debates occur, interpretations are made,
negotiations are entered, deals are struck and
coalitions are formed. Their analysis also valu-
ably acknowledges how, for example, the dis-
crediting of certain accounting techniques is
inseparable from the strategies used to promote
the authority and ‘value’ of those commending
alternative accounting techniques. The emergence
of accounting is usefully linked to competing and
negotiated conceptions of the product, the factory,
and emerging modes of governance. Our analysis,
however, indicates that the ‘politics of production’
is a crucial omission from their analysis.
Miller and O’Leary’s analysis of Caterpillar
implies that management’s intentions are actua-
lised in the formation of ‘economic citizens’, with-
out dealing with whether, or how, this process is
accomplished (see Froud et al., 1998). Miller and
O’Leary (1994; p. 38) identify and elaborate
dimensions of the process, noting that it opened
up a domain of ‘‘empowerment, discretion and
negotiation. . . traversed by tensions and potential
con?icts’’. But they do not show how these ten-
sions shaped, enabled or constrained the ‘actuali-
zation’ of cell proprietorship, nor do they
incorporate an examination of these dynamics
within their account. It is noted that new demands
were continually arising—for example, with
regard to the challenge of aligning working
arrangements with the ideal of customer-driven
manufacturing—and it is reported that e?orts ‘to
re-make the identities of the workers’ in response
to these demands were ‘fragile and temporary’
(ibid: 40). Yet, Miller and O’Leary o?er no investi-
gation or discussion of the practical operation and
e?ects of these e?orts in organizing the introduction
and development of Caterpillar’s Plant with a
Future (PWAF) programme through which ‘‘new
economic citizenship [was] given form and content’’
(ibid). In their analysis, the voice of labour is con-
spicuous by its absence as its cooperation is tacitly
implied. In e?ect, labour is presented as passively
accepting the changes introduced by management
at the Caterpillar’s Decatur Plant.
M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302 299
In her commentary upon Miller and O’Leary’s
work, Arnold (1998: p. 666) similarly calls atten-
tion to ‘the absence of all traces of class con?ict. . .
in the very domain where Marxian analytical con-
cepts are most powerful, the domain of produc-
tion’. To counteract the silence within Miller and
O’Leary’s analysis, Arnold points to union acti-
vists’ accounts of Caterpillar’s attempt to enrol
workers into a new economic citizenship that are at
least suggestive of the contradictory consequences
of this policy for management credibility and
employee morale.
17
In our examination of man-
agement and accounting initiatives at Northern
Plant, we too have sought to recognise worker
resistance but without substituting the determin-
ism of historical materialism for the alleged inde-
terminacy
18
of ‘postmodern’ readings of the role
of accounting in organizations and society
(Arnold, 1998: p. 665). We accept the importance
of appreciating how the experiences and dis-
courses of workers are conditioned, though by no
means exclusively or exhaustively, by what Arnold
characterises as ‘the logic and internal contra-
dictions of capitalism’ (ibid, p. 680). In our ana-
lyses, we have sought to move beyond orthodox
Marxian conceptualisations of management con-
trol and worker resistance, which tend to read them
unproblematically as articulations of class interests
that allegedly drive rational strategies for their
pursuit or defence. Instead of examining these
conditions as forces or mechanisms that exist inde-
pendently of agents whose actions are governed by
them, we have sought to show how ‘conditions’
are enacted through discursive practices that are
articulations of speci?c complexes of manage-
ment-labour relations. These complexes are
embedded in the capital-labour relationship but
are irreducible to it. More concretely, when
examining initiatives to introduce ‘new’ account-
ing techniques to Northern Plant, we have shown
how a regime of ‘unplanned responsible auton-
omy’, negotiated between management and shop-
?oor workers in an earlier era, returned to haunt
management. An expedient negotiation of coop-
eration during the 1970s and early 1980s e?ec-
tively ‘produced’ workers who proved to be
virtually unmanageable when management sought
to introduce new methods of control.
We have argued that the ‘the politics of the
product’ at Northern Plant were shaped and re-
shaped by employees’ determination to resist and
subvert initiatives that threatened to reduce the
sphere of action in which they were able to con-
?rm and embellish a sense of self-identity as highly
knowledgeable agents of the production process.
This narrative was articulated and brought to
bear on e?orts to introduce the ‘new’ accounting
measures. The subjectivity of labour, whether
‘organized’ or not (Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998a),
is a medium as well as an object of change. It is
centrally implicated in the politics of product and
production (Knights & Willmott, 1989). It is
therefore relevant, contra Miller and O’Leary, to
appreciate how manufacturing is contingent upon
workers’ willingness to behave in particular ways,
and their perceptions of the relevance of ‘new’
manufacturing and accounting techniques for
protecting and defending social spaces in which
narratives of self can be con?rmed and main-
tained. Our analysis shows how the warrant for,
and implementation of, the ‘new’ accounting
techniques is mediated by the politics of produc-
tion as the subjects and objects of these techniques
articulate, negotiate and pursue their interests in
the turmoil of the ‘new’ workplace (Ezzamel &
Willmott, 1998a, 1998b). This applies with equal
measure to workplaces where the constitution of
employees’ subjectivity within di?erent social for-
mations and production processes renders them
more receptive, or at least less resistant, to change,
17
Arnold (1998) notes that workers in the Caterpillar factory
were cautioned by union representatives to guard against the
‘‘false sense of security’’ (our emphases) of believing that ‘team-
working’ and concepts such as ‘self-management’, ‘empower-
ment’ and ‘employee involvement’ might in practice mean any-
thing other than work intensi?cation (see the response by
Miller and O’Leary, 1998). Northern Plant workers, in con-
trast, had experienced forms of ‘teamworking’, ‘self-manage-
ment’, and ‘employee involvement’ during the period prior to
the Motor-Co take-over—and had subsequently jealously
defended this pattern of management–labour relations. They
did not need to be cautioned about the ‘false sense of security’
invoked by the buzz words relating to ‘new’ manufacturing
practices. Their past experience led them, rightly or wrongly, to
regard intensi?cation as an inherent feature of ‘lean’ manu-
facturing.
18
What Arnold describes as ‘a seemingly coincidental con-
junctive of discursive practices’ (Arnold, 1998; p. 670).
300 M. Ezzamel et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 29 (2004) 269–302
including the introduction of new manufacturing
and accounting methods. Only by appreciating the
presence and signi?cance of labour in the politics
of production, can a less partial way of interpret-
ing the practical application of ‘new’ or ‘higher
performance’ techniques be advanced.
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