WORKER PARTICIPATION IN TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE: INTERESTS, INFLUENCE, AND SCOPE
Robert Howard
Leslie Schneider
The concerns of this paper lie at the intersection of two highly visible trends in working life. The first is the technological transformation of work associated with the spread of computer-based systems throughout industry. The second is the proliferation of new organizational mechanisms for employee participation, designed to expand the scope of worker involvement in a variety of issues affecting the organization and performance of work.
During the past decade the idea of worker participation has attracted both increased attention and a multiplicity of meanings. In the early 1970s participation was championed as a way to counter what was perceived as a wave of increasing worker dissatisfaction in industrial societies and to improve the overall “quality of worklife.” By the end of the 1970s, as industrial economies faced growing international competition and declining productivity, participation became a means to improve productivity and product quality along the lines of the “quality circles” first popularized in Japan (Hayashi, 1983). More recently, some observers have begun to redefine participation once again—as a response to the unique demands of the computerized workplace and a useful (indeed, necessary) mechanism for effectively managing rapid workplace technological change (Walton and Vittori, 1983).
Thus, what began as a concept to improve the quality of work-life and increase equity in the workplace has evolved into a technique to fulfill crucial business interests for efficiency—in particular, the effective exploitation of new workplace technology. A common assumption in much of the recent literature on worker participation in technological change is that participation offers managers and workers the best of both worlds: both a more equitable and a more efficient work environment.
The perspective of this paper is somewhat different. Although increased worker participation in technological change certainly has the potential to improve both job quality and efficiency, the precise path to these goals is rarely as simple or straightforward as some proponents of participation tend to suggest. Worker participation, like any innovation process, has its costs; the interests and goals that various social groups bring to the workplace can, and often do, conflict. Participation that is not only successful for the work organization but also meaningful for participants themselves may have to allow both for the possibility (indeed, the likelihood) of such conflicts and for the representation of conflicting interests in the participation process (Ciborra, 1985).
Put another way, worker participation in technological change may need to extend beyond the business interests of the individual firm to the myriad social interests at play in any technological change process: issues concerning technology and employment, technology and the organization of work, technology and the sexual division of labor—in short, the overall distribution of technology’s social costs and benefits in the workplace and in society as a whole.
This paper describes a spectrum of approaches to managing workplace technological change and their implications for worker participation: The “technocentric” model conceives technological change as primarily a technical issue; participation is generally avoided as a potentially disruptive element. The “organization-centered” model conceives technological change, first and foremost, as an organizational issue; it sees participation as an effective mechanism for furthering business interests of increased efficiency and improved organizational effectiveness. Finally, the “negotiation” model conceives technological change as a social issue; and participation is the process by which the various social groups of the workplace negotiate tradeoffs, reconcile social interests and business goals, and equitably distribute the costs and benefits of technology in the work organization.
In the course of this discussion we shall also examine a few experiments at worker participation in technological change from the United States and Europe. Finally, we shall explore some of the most common obstacles to such participation and suggest a few ideas for overcoming them.
The Legacy of Traditional Industrial Organization: The Technocentric Model
British scientist Arnold Pacey (1983:4) has emphasized the importance of understanding technology “Not only as comprising machines, techniques, and crisply precise knowledge, but also as involving characteristic patterns of organization and imprecise values.” What we think of as technological change is, in fact, a complex social process. And its impacts are the outcome of specific social choices and values.
Obviously, the capabilities of technology itself set the limits of the technically possible in any particular case. Within those limits, however, business firms can pursue a variety of organizational options that reflect everything from the markets in which they operate and the firms with which they compete to the prevailing ideas, traditions, and models of industrial organization that shape how business managers conceive of their responsibilities and their tasks.
The most important managerial model shaping the early stages of the computerization of work we call, following Peter Keen (1982), the “technocentric” approach. According to this model, the exploitation of new computer technology in the workplace is conceived primarily as a technical issue. The goal of workplace technological change is to increase efficiency by mechanizing production and reducing labor costs. And the design and implementation of new technical systems is the special responsibility of technical specialists, experts in “systems design” and often grouped in special electronic data processing (EDP) or information resources management (IRM) departments. (Mathaissen, 1981; Lanzara, 1983).
This description is something of a caricature, but anyone with experience in contemporary work organizations will recognize it, for the roots of the technocentric approach run deep in the traditions of scientific management, the dominant form of work organization in industrial societies throughout much of the twentieth century. Scientific management defines a set of principles for managing mass production industrial work: the functional separation of execution and design; the systematic standardization, fragmentation, and mechanization of work tasks; and the imperative of increased managerial control. The principles of scientific management, particularly as embodied in the discipline of industrial engineering, provided a handy model for the first attempts at the computerization of work (Strassmann, 1985).
The technocentric approach also closely corresponded to the early limitations of computer technology. As long as computer systems were relatively complicated to use and difficult to apply to work tasks, computerization reinforced the dominance of technical personnel. The technical problems associated with getting the system in and functioning smoothly became the predominant concern of most managers, not only the engineers who designed the new workplace computer systems but the line managers who had to use them.
Implicit to the technocentric approach is the traditional concept of the industrial work organization as a kind of military hierarchy with clear-cut lines of authority and a top-down decision-making structure. For this reason, the idea of worker participation in technological change is the antithesis of sound management, something to be avoided rather than encouraged. Participation threatens to dilute lines of authority and disrupt managerial control. To the degree that workers and their points of view are taken into account at all, it is usually as a problem of human engineering—how to minimize human intervention in new systems and thus avoid human error.
Recently, there has been extensive business literature criticizing this technocentric model. Nevertheless, the overly technical approach to workplace technological change is anything but a relic of our industrial past. Substantial recent literature has amply demonstrated the remarkable persistence of technocentric managerial attitudes about computer technology in American industry—even in the face of substantial costs to social equity and organizational efficiency alike (Noble, 1984; Shaiken, 1984; Howard, 1985b). Nor are such attitudes found solely among technical personnel. Line managers and workers themselves often share many of the assumptions of the technocentric approach. These assumptions constitute a kind of unrecognized and unexamined professional common sense about how to use computer technology in the workplace today.
Participation in the Service of Business Interests: The Organization-Centered Model
The recent managerial critique of the technocentric model is founded on a practical management problem: the tendency of early uses of computer technology in the workplace to create what Richard Walton and Wendy Vittori (1983) have called “unrealized gains” and “unanticipated costs.” As computerization has spread to new industries and tasks (in particular, those of the rapidly expanding service sector), as computer technology itself has decreased in price and increased in versatility, managers have found that the assumptions of the technocentric model, far from ensuring the effective use of new technology, have become an obstacle to the successful implementation of the new technology itself.
For example, Paul Strassmann (1985:163) of the Xerox Corporation has recently estimated that, in the banking and insurance industry, where major investment in computerization has taken place, computerization has had “no discernible effect on labor productivity.” Managers like Strassmann have located the source of this failure in the tendency of managers schooled in the technocentric approach to systematically underestimate the organizational dimensions of workplace technological change. This had led to a series of managerial misconceptions about work and technology that constitute a serious barrier to the efficient exploitation of workplace computer systems.
The words of one prominent management consultant capture the flavor of this, by now, quite common point of view: “The systems development Fiasco Hall of Fame,” he writes, “is packed with examples of costly mistakes, costly in terms of disruption and morale, not just money, caused by the tenacious ignorance regarding users and their world. . . . The technocentric tradition has largely led to a naive view of the user, simplistic concepts of work, overmechanized and inflexible models of organizational and social processes, and, above all, a definition of ‘productivity’ in terms of the ethos of efficiency” (Keen, 1982).
Like the more general interest in employee participation during the past decade, the simplest versions of this critique of the technocentric approach have emphasized its human resources and labor relations costs—in particular, how ignoring the user can spark employee resistance to workplace technological change.
A more complex version emphasizes how industrial concepts of efficiency misunderstand both the nature of information work and the unique demands placed on workers by computer technology. On the one hand, much of the work done in offices is informal and unstructured, not amenable to conventional strategies of mechanization and standardization. Thus, the technocentric approach can end up creating rigid computer systems that violate the very logic of the work to be automated (Strassmann, 1985).
On the other hand, work with the new technology makes qualitatively new demands on workers. Work becomes more conceptual and abstract. Responsibilities are expanded and broadened. Workers become more interdependent, their individual tasks connected in a seamless web of integrated information systems (Zuboff, 1982; Adler, 1983; Hirschhorn, 1984). In such a work environment the fragmentation of work common to the technocentric approach tends to ensure that workers do not develop the requisite attitudes and skills for the effective use of the new technology.
Finally, some observers have argued that the transformation of world markets and the ongoing restructuring of the global economy have rendered increasingly obsolete the traditional model of efficiency on which the technocentric approach is based (Sabel, 1982; Piore and Sabel, 1984). In the new circumstances of the world economy market success is founded, not on mass production, but on “flexible specialization.” And successful work organizations are those that dismantle rigid hierarchies and build flexible organizations based on a broad distribution of skill, decentralization of decision making, and increased worker initiative. In other words, sustained worker participation in work—including both the tasks at hand and the development of organization structures that are consistent with the demands of the new technology—becomes a key to efficiency in today’s corporation.
For example, Japanese business school professor Masaki Hayashi (1983) has argued that Japanese quality circles, far from reflecting some intangible cultural predisposition toward collective decision making and consensus, are best understood as a managerial technique allowing Japanese manufacturers to meet the special challenges posed by work in a highly automated, computerized environment. The development of highly integrated computer-aided manufacturing systems, writes Hayashi, “has increased the necessity for cooperation between workers both in the plant and in the office as well as between engineers and management at their place of work and between the various departments of the firm.” (1983:2). The idea of worker participation, embodied in quality circles and other forms of “small group activity” in the Japanese workplace, “has been introduced to cope with the demands coming from the [automation] of the production process.” (1983:13).
All these arguments have contributed to the development of an emerging alternative model of technology management. Since it emphasizes the organizational dimensions of technological change, it can be called the “organization-centered” approach. If the model of industrial organization implicit in the technocentric approach is the military, the model of the information organization is, in Peter Drucker’s apt metaphor, the orchestra, where each player has a different part to play, but where everyone plays the same score.
According to this perspective, technological change is one part of a much broader organizational change process. Its ultimate goal is not so much discrete gains in individual efficiency as the improvement of overall organizational effectiveness (Strassmann, 1985). And the role of the technology manager is not that of the technical specialist but of a “change agent” who knows how to address the complex organizational issues that new technology implementation can create and on which the successful use of the new technology depends (Keen, 1982).
Because the users of technology play such a central role in the organization-centered approach, both as a source of expertise and information about the work organization and as the ultimate arbiters of how best to use technology in order to better perform their jobs, participation is a key element of this approach to managing workplace technological change. Participation is the technique by which the effective use of the new technology is assured. At the same time it is a means to guarantee worker satisfaction and commitment to the technological change process itself. For this reason, user participation has become a standard element in vendor implementations.
One can think of the value of user participation in terms of three stages of the technology development process.1 At the stage of design the people who actually do the work to be automated and who will operate the new technology once it is developed are a crucial source of information for systems designers. Without the involvement of these users, as informants or “local experts” during the design stage, designers run the risk of creating systems that do not accurately reflect the work tasks and work organization to be automated—what one designer has called “automating a fiction” (Suchman and Wynn, 1979; Suchman, 1980; Sheil, 1983).
Once a system is ready for implementation, user participation becomes especially important. If the views of users are not taken into account in the implementation process, technology managers run the risk of generating worker opposition to the new system and new work practices—what is known, in the parlance of the profession, as “resistance.” Resistance can lead to the consistent underutilization of new technology or, worse, its outright rejection by users.
Finally, the absence of user involvement can have long-standing impacts even after systems are implemented. Effective use of new technology is intimately related to the quantity and quality of the training workers receive—a fact that the technocentric approach tends to overlook (Kelley, 1984; Schneider, 1984). Often, the best judges of how much and what kind of training workers need are the workers themselves. User participation can prove to be an effective way to organize worker training for new systems to ensure that users have the requisite skills for operating new technical systems.
One rather advanced model of user participation is a methodology, developed by Enid Mumford in conjunction with the Digital Equipment Corporation, known as ETHICS (“Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer-based Systems”) (Bancroft, 1982; Bancroft et al., n.d.). From the moment an office or department is slated for automation, a “design group” consisting of workers from a broad cross-section of occupational categories is established. Advised by technical experts and in regular contact with a management steering committee that sets the boundaries of the design group’s work, the members analyze their own workplace, propose alternative ways of organizing work tasks, and help select the technology best suited to the redesigned work organization.
The idea behind the ETHICS methodology is to include as many different perspectives as possible in the work redesign process. One ETHICS report (Bancroft et al., n.d.:4) even encourages companies to include a few “good ‘devil’s advocates’” in the design group in order to stimulate the consideration of alternative organizational plans. In this way, user participation is designed both to meet the efficiency goals of the organization and to win worker support for technological change. As the Digital report on ETHICS puts it, “Groups which are passive recipients of major innovation may be afraid and resistant; whereas those who are involved will learn how to cope, exert control and mold the change to fit their own needs, and the needs of their departments and companies.” Participation in technology design and implementation, the report continues, allows employees to “mold their own futures” and to “acquire confidence in their ability to contribute to the management of their own change” (Bancroft et al., n.d.:11).
The Limitations of the Organization-Centered Model
The concept of participation common to the organization-centered model seems to rest on a number of assumptions: That workers and managers share a community of interests about the means and the ends of workplace technological change, and that participation in the service of business interests will also lead to better work quality and improved worker satisfaction. At times these assumptions take on the quality of “necessary conditions” without which participation becomes, at best, problematic and, at worst, impossible.
However, what happens when the interests of various social groups in the workplace conflict? When the claims of equity and of efficiency, instead of reinforcing each other, prove contradictory? Because the concept of participation implicit in the organization-centered approach to workplace technological change is founded on the idea of consensus, such conflicts tend to threaten the very idea of participation itself.
The possibility of such conflicts generally means that, in the organization-centered approach, managers are constantly trying to control participation in order to make sure that it stays within predetermined limits. Thus, while Walton and Vittori (1983:15) call for an organizational approach to technological change and for active user participation in the change process, they make clear that “the particular criteria and [organizational] preferences” on which participation is based “will depend upon management’s philosophy and values, the nature of the business and past experience,” in short, business concerns alone.
The recent history of user participation by technology vendors reflects this same management-oriented conception of participation. Eleanor Wynn (1983) has described how most technology vendors conceive of user participation in a highly superficial way—more as a matter of marketing (how to “sell” new systems to potential customers) than as a mechanism for fundamental organizational transformation. According to Wynn, what passes for user participation at many technology vendors does not involve the ultimate users of the technology at all. Rather, it is a term to describe vendors’ efforts to communicate with and otherwise involve the line managers who manage the implementation of new systems.
Even relatively advanced forms of user participation, such as ETHICS, provide participants with little opportunity to actually influence the management decision-making process concerning technological change. Users are conceived exclusively as the performers of certain functions in the work organization, but not as bearers of social interests. And a management steering committee sets the parameters for the design group’s activities and investigations. Crucial decisions about personnel requirements, layoffs, and other issues are often made beforehand, without worker influence or line-manager input.
Moreover, the organization-centered approach to participation tends to underestimate the considerable difficulties involved in moving an organization from one work system to another. The assumptions and attitudes of the technocentric model are deeply ingrained throughout most work organizations; these attitudes do not simply disappear when a change in policy is made at the top. It is one thing to create a participative, high-commitment work organization in a brand-new company in a brand-new industry (e.g., Silicon Valley). It is quite another to imagine radically changing an already existing work organization and a corporate culture that is based upon some version of scientific management.
Finally, the organization-centered model seems to imply that, to the degree that there are labor relations problems or conflicts of interest between stakeholders, they can be—and should be—resolved at the level of the individual firm. But this is not always possible and, again, the technology issue provides the best example. The impacts of technology are often of a scope extending far beyond the corporation itself. Companies buy ready-made technology from vendors; what are the mechanisms for its managers or workers to influence how those vendors design systems? And what about those workers who end up losing their jobs because of technological change? What are the mechanisms for addressing that impact? In short, this approach ignores the fact that addressing the social impacts of technology may require social regulation that transcends the individual work organization.
Such built-in limitations to the scope and content of worker participation in technological change may be relatively easy to ignore in a workplace where the degree of worker organization is weak. However, where workers are formally represented by a trade union, it is more difficult to contain participation within management-defined limits. In addition to the business interests and goals of management, unions bring their own collective and social interests and goals to the workplace. As independent user representatives, unions provide a mechanism where the very criteria of worker participation in technological change themselves become subject to participation and negotiation.
In recent years there have been a number of attempts at worker participation in technological change involving unionized workforces in the United States. Often, they have taken place in industries facing new competitive pressures, whether as a result of increased international competition, as in the case of the auto industry, or of the deregulation of quasi-monopoly markets, such as the airlines and telecommunications industries.
A common theme in many of these cases is the potential conflict between management and union over the scope of participatory programs. These conflicts suggest the limitations of participation conceived purely in terms of business interests. To the degree that the two parties have been able to define mutually acceptable goals, participation often works. But when both management and workers understand participation solely in terms of cooperation, they are generally ill-prepared to deal with the conflicts of power and interest that changes in technology inevitably stimulate.
Thus, on issues where goals or interests conflict, participation breaks down quickly and each side reverts back to traditional managerial principles. Though the new participatory mechanisms are certainly a necessary step for designing effective workplace systems, they are not sufficient for addressing the unequal distribution of the social costs of technology. And, often, they become an excuse to do nothing.
Perhaps the most revealing American example is that of the joint labor-management programs of AT&T, the Bell operating companies, and the three major unions of the telecommunications industry. Few industries have seen more technological change in the past decade than telecommunications, and few corporations have had more experience with viewing technology as an element in a far-ranging organizational change.2
Participation in the telecommunications industry was the product of both equity and efficiency concerns. Technological development in the Bell system had traditionally been a classic example of some of the worst features of the technocentric model, where system engineers and technicians from Bell labs set the technical standards and work organizations used throughout the entire Bell system. It had been highly centralized with engineers and systems designers at Bell Laboratories creating the systems used throughout the entire telecommunications network.
With the rapid computerization of telephone work in the 1970s, workers in the industry suffered the spectrum of social costs typically associated with the technocentric approach—including the erosion of job skills and autonomy, increased job pressures, and occupational stress (Howard, 1980, 1985b; Kohl, 1982). In addition to the negative impact of these changes on employee morale, Bell System managers were especially concerned that the workforce and work systems at the Bell operating companies were especially ill-suited to compete in the deregulated telecommunications environment that was rapidly taking shape. In response to these dual concerns of declining employee morale and growing worker protests, on the one hand, and managerial concerns about efficiency, on the other, the 1980 Bell System collective-bargaining negotiations established a network of joint labor-management committees designed to address some of the problems associated with rapid technological and organization change.
One was a National Committee on Joint Working Conditions and Service Quality Improvement, consisting of three company representatives and three union representatives. It was mandated to set up a system-wide QWL program consisting of shopfloor QWL committees. Although the letter of agreement establishing the program did not refer specifically to technology, for the unions this was clearly one of the many work-related issues that the Bell system QWL program would address.
The two sides also established joint Technology Change Committees where, according to the language of the formal letter of agreement, the unions could “discuss major technological changes with management before they are introduced” (AT&T-CWA, 1980). Unlike the shopfloor QWL committees, they exist on a much higher level of authority. Each AT&T division and Bell operating company has its own committee, usually consisting of three upper-level corporate managers and three full-time district union officials. As part of this provision, the corporation also agreed to provide the union with six months’ advance notice of all major technological changes.3
Five years after the establishment of these joint labor-management participation programs, it seems clear that the Bell system QWL committees have been an important vehicle for building workers’ informal participatory practice at the local level. According to a recent study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor (Communications Workers of America et al., 1984:1), the Bell system QWL effort is “one of the largest worker participation programs in the country.” At the time of the Bell system divestiture in January 1984, there were more than 1,200 shopfloor QWL committees in operation throughout AT&T, involving nearly 15,000 unionized employees. And these QWL team members reported levels of job satisfaction 12 percent higher than those of the Bell system as a whole.
Though most of the committees have dealt primarily with environmental issues (improving the physical office environment, ameliorating local management practices and attitudes) in a few cases, they have gone further to touch upon issues of work organization and job redesign—for example, instituting flexitime programs or reorganizing office scheduling procedures in order to give workers some choice over their work hours. However, as the committees have moved closer to addressing issues that transcend the immediate workplace and involve company-wide policies about technology development, they have encountered some major obstacles. The choices and decisions about technology made by these technical personnel are largely beyond the capacity of local QWL groups to address (Howard, 1985b).
A case in point is what, for a time, was perhaps the most dramatic QWL success story, AT&T’s new Hotel Office Business Information System (HOBIS) office in Tempe, Arizona. Under the guidance of a manager sympathetic to the QWL concept, the office was planned in close cooperation with a QWL team. The committee developed a new work organization consisting of autonomous work groups in which some 120 office workers scheduled and performed their jobs without any first-line supervision. The savings resulting from the group’s reorganization plan (estimated at $250,000 in supervisors’ salaries alone) were put aside in a discretionary fund controlled by the committee and used to finance workers’ participation in company training programs.
However, in November 1985, executives at AT&T corporate headquarters decided for economic reasons to consolidate the Tempe facility with another HOBIS office in a different location. Despite the opposition of the local QWL committee and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) international, the Tempe office was closed and its promising experiment in worker autonomy cancelled. While some of the innovations developed in the Tempe HOBIS facility have been used in other AT&T offices, none has recreated the same degree of worker autonomy enjoyed by the Tempe workforce.
In theory, the Technology Change Committees, also established in the 1980 contract, are supposed to be the forum where these broader policy issues about technology can be addressed. Also, the six months’ advance-notice provision, at least potentially, provides a way for workers’ union representatives to be involved in company planning before systems reach the workplace. However, of the three joint committees established in 1980, the Technology Change Committees have been the least successful.
The formal union rights defined by the Technology Change Committees provision are extremely limited. The committees are primarily a vehicle for “notification” in which “the Company will advise the union of its plans with respect to the introduction of [technological] changes and will familiarize the union with the progress being made” (AT&T-CWA, 1980). The unions do not have the right to participate in the actual conception, design, or testing of new technical systems. Nor do the committees have any authority to make policy decisions or binding agreements about the technology development process. At best, the committees can only develop “facts and recommendations so that the company can make well-informed decisions regarding technological change” (AT&T-CWA, 1980).
The practice of the Technology Change Committees has reflected this narrow conception of participation. A Harvard Business School study4 conducted in 1983 found that, in the first three years of the program, nearly two-thirds of the committees had yet to have a single meeting. Where they had, the management participants called the meetings, set the agenda, decided what issues would be discussed, and determined how much information about management plans would be provided to their union counterparts. In a survey of Technology Change Committee members, conducted as part of the Harvard study, over half of the union representatives who responded reported that management regularly failed to provide them with the mandatory six months’ advance notice of major technological changes—a clear violation of the 1980 contract.
At times management involvement in the committees seems expressly designed to insulate management decision making about technology from effective influence on the part of the telecommunications unions. For example, the typical management representatives on the committees are labor relations personnel; their background and experience is in dealing with unions, not managing technological change. (In one case, management participants prepared their formal presentations beforehand with company lawyers, in order to avoid providing union officials with information that might prove useful in collective bargaining.) The engineers, systems designers, and other technical personnel who are responsible for determining how technology will be designed and used are rarely committee members. And those labor relations personnel who are on the committees often do not have basic information about new technical systems and their expected impacts—putting them in a position of ignorance not all that different from that of their union counterparts. (One point on which both management and union respondents to the Harvard Business School survey agree is that the prime obstacle to the effectiveness of the Technology Change Committees is their “lack of timely knowledge about the types of systems to be developed.”) To the degree that line managers or engineers themselves try to make the innovation process more responsive to social concerns, they do so, not through the Technology Change Committee but independent of it. This means that the official participative structure is bypassed.
As for the idea that, through the committees, unionists might actually influence company planning and development of new technology, a full 75 percent of union participants said the discussion in their committee had never resulted in changes in the implementation of new technical systems or in their design.
Part of the problem is with the union representatives themselves. In general, they are full-time district officials who are usually quite removed from the new technological systems and their impacts on the shop floor. And their work on the committee is just one small part of their overall responsibilities. In general, the unions have barely begun to think through what it would take to make concrete their hopes for a substantial role in the development of new technology. They have not committed the necessary resources—in terms of personnel, training, time, or money—in order to effectively influence the technological change process.
Thus, despite considerable progress in developing informal practice through the shopfloor QWL committees, the lack of formal rights of participation in company decision making about technology has limited the impact of the telecommunications worker participation effort. A 1984 report from the CWA Development and Research Department (Straw and Hecksher, 1984) captured this ambiguous result: “Though the QWL process has led to improved relations and less burdensome supervision in many offices, it has not reached to the fundamental policies which shape the development of new technologies. It seems that for every improvement in individual locations, a dozen systems come from Bell Laboratories reinforcing the dehumanizing patterns we are battling.” And the effectiveness of the Technology Change Committees, the report continued, “has been limited by the resistance of management . . . and by the lack of experience of union participants. As a result, membership attitude surveys over the past three years have shown, if anything, increasing levels of discontent with job pressures.”
Participation in the Service of Social Interests
There is another concept of participation that transcends some of the limitations of the organization-centered approach. It is based on the premise that participation should include the possibility (indeed, the likelihood) of conflicting interests in the workplace. Such an approach might be termed the “negotiation” model.
According to this perspective, instead of depending on shared interests, participation would be the process by which interest groups balance their various concerns about efficiency and equity and negotiate tradeoffs between those concerns when they differ. In economic terms, participation becomes a mechanism for “internalizing” the social costs of technological change and bargaining their distribution in a particular work organization (Ciborra, 1983a, 1983b).
In order for this to happen, however, participation must also include sharing power or influence. As Pacey (1983: 157) writes, “to engage in a genuinely open dialogue is inevitably to share power over the final decision.” Such influence can take two basic forms: “formal rights” giving workers an explicit role to play in company decision making concerning new technology; and “informal practice” or the constantly evolving activities, knowledge, and expertise that workers can bring to bear on company technology policies in the workplace itself.
The relationship between these two forms of influence is especially important. Without formal rights, informal participatory practice, however elaborate, runs the risk of becoming unstable, particularly when workers’ interests do conflict with those of technology designers or management. However, in the absence of active (and informed) informal practice, even the most explicit formal rights usually remain unrealized. It is precisely the interplay of strong formal rights and robust informal practice that makes for effective worker participation.
Finally, a concept of participation as negotiation would also expand the scope of worker participation in technological change. A broad participatory scope would, first, extend worker influence beyond merely discussing the impacts of technology (such as takes place in the U.S. telecommunications industry Technology Change Committees) to the very choices that shape how technology is developed and designed. In other words, it would involve a concept and method of “participatory systems design” (Nygaard, 1983). Second, it would extend worker influence beyond both technical and organizational issues to include the social goals of the entire work organization.
The negotiation model of worker participation in technological change is far more common in Europe than in the United States. Participatory experiments in European countries often have an explicit social component, and efforts in specific workplaces occur within a broad social context of formal collective-bargaining agreements and national work environment legislation. Often, this serves to create a social framework that influences the form and the content of worker participation at particular firms.
Perhaps the most advanced version of the negotiation model can be found in the Scandinavian countries, particularly Norway. For more than twenty years there has been a strong tradition of worker participation in Norway. In the early 1960s the Norwegian Industrial Democracy project spread joint labor-management participation experiments throughout industrial enterprises. Many of these early efforts at participation were similar in form to current American QWL initiatives (in fact, some of the recent U.S. initiatives are modeled on these early Scandinavian experiences).
However, in the late 1960s Norwegian unions began to grow dissatisfied with the limits of these joint labor-management projects, particularly in the area of workplace technological change. They found that technology often was the source of conflicts of interest between labor and management that made cooperation nearly impossible. Thus, unions began to search for ways to develop their own independent strategy to address workplace technology issues.
An important contribution to this goal was a unique social dialogue between the unions and a small but influential group of Norwegian computer scientists and systems designers. Often working at government research centers, these technical experts were sympathetic to the unions’ goals and joined with them in a series of action research projects aimed to build local union expertise on technology issues. These projects stimulated union activism and eventually led to the negotiations of the first labor-management collective-bargaining agreements on technological change, known as the Technology Agreements, in the mid-1970s.
The first national Framework Agreement was negotiated and signed by the Norwegian Employers Confederation (NAF) and the Trades Union Congress (LO) in 1975. Since then, similar agreements have also been negotiated in the public sector. And some of the provisions of the Technology Agreements have also been written into law in Norway’s 1977 Work Environment Act (Hjort, 1983; Schneider, 1984).
Unlike initiatives in this country to encourage worker participation on technology issues, the Norwegian Technology Agreements establish a comprehensive array of formal worker and union rights. Unions not only have the right of access to company information about new technical systems, they also can participate in company decision making about technology and bargain over company plans. In other words, negotiation about technology has become a legitimate part of the collective-bargaining relationship between managements and unions.
Local unions can negotiate local technology agreements that elaborate on and occasionally expand the rights defined in the national agreements. They also have the right to elect a permanent local union representative responsible for technology issues—known as the “data shop steward”—and to hire outside “technology consultants” (at company expense) to help them research the impacts of technology and prepare their collective-bargaining demands (Nygaard and Fjalestad, 1979; Keul, 1983; Schneider, 1984).
But the Technology Agreements have not only articulated new worker rights. They have been designed to expressly encourage the development of informal participatory practice so that workers and their union representatives can successfully put these new rights into effect (Elden, 1981; Finne and Rasmussen, 1982). For example, according to the agreements, workers are guaranteed both job-related training on specific technical systems and general education about computer technology and its design. And, under the provisions of the Work Environment Act, some 150,000 Norwegian workers (nearly 10 percent of the entire workforce) have completed, on company time, a forty-hour basic training course in techniques for analyzing and improving their workplace (Gustavsen and Hunnius, 1981).
In the immediate aftermath of the Technology Agreements, there was a tendency on the part of many unions to assume that the very existence of their new rights was sufficient to increase worker influence over technological change. Union locals would pursue what might be termed an after-the-fact strategy. They would wait for new technical systems to be introduced in the workplace, then bargain with management over the details of work assignments, wage rates, and the like, much as they had in the past.
However, some unions soon realized that if they waited until new technology was appearing on the shop floor, it was already too late. They began to formulate a before-the-fact approach that extends union and worker participation into the planning stages of technology development and also into broader questions about the organization of work.
These two factors—an emphasis on both general formal rights and local informal practice, and the conviction that union involvement must take place before the fact and extend to broad issues of work organization—have allowed Norwegian workers to move beyond narrow function-based participation (such as management-directed participation programs that conceive users as performers of functions) and to experiment with participation based on social interests. It has also made possible the extension of worker participation from narrow technical issues and goals (which vendor to choose, how best to configure a specific system, and so forth) to the organizational and social criteria and choices that shape technology in the first place.
To grasp the extremely broad extent of participation in Norwegian industry, consider the example of the Norwegian post office.5 In the late 1970s the Norwegian postal authorities inaugurated a large development project to automate the accounting functions in about 450 local post offices across the country. As is typical throughout Norwegian industry, the postal workers union negotiated representation on the formal project steering committee to oversee the development of this new system. Two experienced union members participated in three project subgroups—one developing system specifications, one analyzing training and work environment issues, and a third devoted to ergonomics.
The presence of these union workers on the steering committee proved very important in the early stages of the project, but not in the way that the union had hoped. The workers found that their role was primarily that of “end user informants” rather than as representatives of the union’s interests. In other words, the technical team wanted their advice on various technical aspects of the system. This role was not unimportant. The workers’ knowledge about work processes and organizational problems helped the systems designers to develop reasonably accurate specifications for the counter transactions to be automated. However, the unionists involved found that they were becoming preoccupied with planning the technical details of the new system—what they called becoming “hostage” to the technology—rather than examining what the impacts of the new system might be and whether they were desirable or not.
Convinced that it needed to broaden the scope of worker participation and union involvement in the project, the union requested that management commission a study of the work environment consequences of the new technology. An outside consultant from the Norwegian Computing Center, a public research institute, assembled two informal worker research teams consisting of sixteen postal employees drawn from a variety of occupational categories and from post offices all over the country.6 These teams set out, not merely to analyze the prospective impacts of the new system, but to actually develop a set of social, organizational, and technical criteria which would guide the development of the system itself.
Instead of starting with the proposed system specifications already developed by the design team, the worker participation groups began by analyzing their own work organization. From this analysis, they developed criteria for the kind of work organization most desirable from a social point of view. Then they evaluated the systems specifications developed by the design team against these criteria, suggesting numerous changes.
For example, the specifications had originally foreseen the establishment of data-entry centers where data would be read into the new automated system. To avoid the creation of what they considered to be narrow and monotonous data-entry jobs, the groups recommended that optical character readers be installed in each local office.
The original specifications had also called for worker access to information by means of video display terminals (VDTs) placed to the side of each post office window. However, because the space at each window was so limited and because they worried that VDT operation could potentially disrupt contact with customers and become an obstacle to quality service, the groups recommended that the VDTs be replaced with a small movable “text window” adequate for the information that workers would need.
It should be emphasized that worker research teams had no formal status in the technology design process. However, they came to have a great deal of influence. Although the changes they recommended were controversial and, at times, expensive, they were able to influence major aspects of the system specifications. One reason is that they had union support. There were strong ties between the formal union representatives on the design team and the union members involved in the informal worker research effort. Another reason is that, in the course of their fifteen-month research effort, they made themselves into the resident experts on the relationship between technology and work organization at the post office. This new expertise was something to which the design team and management had to respond.
The effort at the Norwegian post office concerned the development of a specific technical system. Other Norwegian unions have tried to institutionalize broad participation across the spectrum of workplace technology issues. In the process, they have systematically included union social goals and one criteria in the technological change process.
An appropriate example is the work of the Norwegian Bank Employees Union (NBF).7 One important aspect that has shaped this situation is that women make up approximately half of the union’s 26,000 members. They hold the lowest level jobs (usually those to be automated first), and nearly 70 percent work part time. According to a union-sponsored survey, 68 percent of these women have had no formal professional training.
These factors have shaped the union’s technology policy. The NBF is especially concerned that, as new technology transforms jobs in the banking industry, requiring new kinds of skills and more formal work knowledge, many of the union’s women members will become trapped in a progressively smaller low-wage ghetto and will be passed over for promotion to the skilled jobs that technology may create.
Therefore, the union has tried to design its technology policy so that it furthers social goals of equal opportunity in the banking industry. For example, as new technologies reorganize work, access to training becomes a determining factor of opportunity in the workplace. In the Norwegian banking industry, union and management have set aside a minimum of 40 percent of the places in their joint industry training center for women. This is an extremely important step because promotions and salary increases depend upon completing institute courses.
The union has also negotiated special access to training for worker mothers—including five hours per week of education study on company time for all women with children ten years old or younger.
Union technology policy also states that technology should be used not only to rationalize work but also to improve the quality of both workers’ jobs and customer service. It sees participation in technology development as only one part of a broad participatory process. Union officials like to talk about the “three legs of the stool”—three areas of participation necessary in any effective work organization: technology development, organizational development, and personnel development. This way, technology does not become isolated from other factors, in particular, the organizational and social needs of the workforce.
The NBF has developed elaborate structures to guarantee its participation in technology development. The union has its own internal technology policy committee, which develops and implements the union action program for new technology (revised and updated every two years); the members of the committee are also the union representatives on the steering committees of major industry technology development projects.
Union representatives also participate actively in the design of new computer-based systems both nationally and locally. For example, in November 1982 Norway’s twenty-one savings banks announced a joint project to design and implement a $70 million state-of-the-art computer system in 300 branch banks over a four-year period. Over eighty bank employees from a variety of jobs (expedition clerks, back office clerks, tellers, and others) were involved in developing the preliminary system specifications for the applications software. Ten working groups (each consisting of eight users and one technical specialist) met for three two-day sessions every month for a five-month period. Between meetings, the user participants returned to their workplaces to discuss and evaluate proposed recommendations with their coworkers. Once the recommendations were finalized, someone from the group was chosen to write up the findings as formal system specifications.
When systems designers at the banking industry’s research and development center proposed the acquisition of an automated loan-processing system, a union-management team at the largest savings bank chain in eastern Norway evaluated it to determine whether the proposed system was consistent with organizational goals. The team, made up of managers and workers from local branches, suggested a number of changes. For example, whereas the systems designers had planned to build loan criteria directly into the system (this was also true for the loan limits of individual loan officers), the union wanted the individual bank worker to retain the decision-making power to grant or not to grant loans. They also suggested that the dialogue between user and the computer be flexible so that data could be entered in any order rather than in one specific way. The group argued that these recommendations would improve both the quality of workers’ jobs and the services provided to customers.
It should be pointed out that, although the NBF counts on the formal rights of union participation as the foundation of this elaborate participatory process, the union realizes that these formal rights are not sufficient. For example, unlike other Norwegian unions, the NBF does not use the data shop steward system, in the belief that setting up worker technical experts can become an obstacle to broad worker participation on technology issues. Thus, the worker representatives in systems design projects are usually normal shop stewards or rank-and-file workers.
The union also emphasizes the importance of developing informal relationships or alliances with bank technical personnel, in an ongoing effort to educate them about the union’s social goals for technology. This relationship has developed to the point where some designers at the bank industry’s research and development center see union and worker participation as the preferred approach to creating new technical systems.8
One should emphasize that this kind of worker participation in technological change is always a balancing act. There is an ongoing effort, not always successful, both to use the formal rights provided by collective-bargaining agreements and legislation and, at the same time, to develop the informal practices which make those rights effective. From this perspective, participation is a kind of learning process, alternating between moments of cooperation and moments of negotiation over conflicting interests and goals. Workers are able to ask questions about changing fundamental aspects of their organizations (Argyris, 1983a; 1983b). What is more, informal cooperation becomes possible precisely because management recognizes the union’s formal rights. And, where interests of union and management conflict, the existence of these formal rights can become especially important.9
The work of Norwegian unions with the Technology Agreements does not eliminate all obstacles to worker participation in technological change. Nor are the specific mechanisms of participation, part of the unique social, political, and labor relations climate of the Scandinavian countries, easily translated to other contexts. However, the Norwegian experience does constitute an intriguing example of participation as a true negotiating process, one that, far from being limited to discrete projects or experiments, represents a new model for the overall organization of working life.
Barriers to Worker Participation
The extensive worker participation in technological change reflected in Norwegian union work with the Technology Agreements does not take place in a vacuum. Any participatory project faces a number of obstacles or barriers that threaten to constrain either the interests subject to participation, the degree of influence that workers actually have, or the scope of issues open to participation. What follows is a brief list of the most common of these obstacles.
Obviously, firms with a disadvantageous market position can find participation based on social interests especially difficult to maintain. When near-term competitive pressures are overwhelming, the short-term costs that participation can entail become too expensive. Often, worker participation is relegated to the back burner of both managerial and union priorities.
For example, workers at the Norwegian conglomerate Viking Askim (a manufacturer of automobile tires and rubber boots) were among the first in the Norwegian labor movement to develop a local technology agreement, dating back to the late 1960s. However, during the past decade the firm has faced increased international competition, which has forced the closing of some of its Norwegian operations and the shifting of production abroad, primarily to Southeast Asia. Faced with economic crisis and declining jobs, both management and union at Viking Askim have tended to see participation in technological change as a secondary concern, far less important than the more immediate priorities of economic restructuring and saving jobs.
At the same time, other firms see participation as an important means to becoming more responsive to competitive markets. This is certainly the case both at AT&T and the Norwegian banks. In both cases, work organizations that previously enjoyed a quasi-monopoly position are now confronted with new kinds of competition. In both situations technology plays a crucial role in determining ultimate competitiveness. Participation has become a mechanism to improve the organization’s ability to adapt to both changing technology and changing markets.
A second potential barrier to broad worker participation in technological change is the state of technology itself. Indeed, one can think of the opportunity for participation throughout the period of development of any particular technology as a kind of bell-shaped curve. Early applications of the technology often take place when both the technology and the uses to which it can be put are poorly understood. Technology experts dominate the situation and narrow technical concerns loom large. Broad participation in such a situation can prove extremely difficult if not impossible. As particular applications of the technology become better understood, however, organizational flexibility and, along with it, the possibility for participation expand. Finally, when the particular application becomes mature, the possibility for participation may decline once again as clearly defined package systems become the sensible option from an economic point of view.
Certainly, the development of computer-based technical systems reflect this trend. In the early phases the technocentric approach predominated. In the second phase, as the technology itself has increased in flexibility, the organization-centered approach and user participation has become more popular. But already-packaged systems are making any but the most superficial function-based participation difficult to put into effect. For example, in Norway, many unions have found that the increasing tendency of companies to rely on system packages (often designed in the United States, where the social concerns of the Norwegian unions are often less successfully articulated) has become an obstacle to their ability to influence how workplace technology is designed.
However, there is another argument that suggests that computer-based systems, unlike previous technologies, presents unique opportunities for participation. As the automation of discrete functions is increasingly replaced by the integration of entire computerized work systems, effective work will increasingly depend upon broad worker knowledge of both technology and the work organization itself. Participation may prove to be the most effective means for ensuring that that knowledge is widespread throughout the firm. In this respect, the evolution of workplace computer technology may actually require more worker participation, not less.
Another potential barrier is not so much technological as organizational—the ingrained practices and habits of thinking and working that influence (and, often, inhibit) what can be described as the organizational learning process. Using new technology effectively seems to require thinking about it in a new way. Instead of seeing technology management as merely a technical process (whether for the techniques of Taylorism or user participation), it conceives the design and development of new workplace technical systems as fundamentally social (or even political)—that is, as central to the realization of the goals and values of the organization as a social institution. From this perspective technology management is simply one facet of a much broader task—the overall organizational development of the firm. And precisely because technology is so important, it cannot be left to managers alone. Rather, it becomes the responsibility of both managers and workers, with company and union as equal partners.
But this still will not ensure that participation will extend to the social interests that various social groups bring to the workplace. One final barrier to the broad worker participation that we have described is the absence of formal institutions to represent worker interests in the workplace. When participation is managed entirely by management, there is a tendency in situations of conflict to revert to narrow business interests or to do away with participation altogether. This tendency to view participation as taking place entirely at the level of the individual firm ensures that participation will almost always remain hostage to the imperatives of efficiency and competitiveness. The idea of negotiating social tradeoffs between equity and efficiency will be weighted to the latter.
Part of the solution is similar to that developed in other areas of working life, such as occupational health and safety: to create a regulatory environment extending beyond the individual firm that, in effect, takes technology out of competition and sets certain standards or criteria for working life across the entire economy. This has been the impact, for example, of the Work Environment Act in Norway. This same mechanism is at work in occupational health and safety, equal opportunity, and minimum wage legislation in this and other industrial countries.
Of course, this is no simple task, especially when long-term social interests come into conflict with the immediate demands of international competition. However, it may be that this broader conception of worker participation in technological change is one part of a long-term evolution of labor relations in industrial societies. And one step in the creation of new institutions more suitable to an economic world founded on innovation and change.
Notes
1. Of course, these three stages of the technology development process are abstractions. This is not to imply that the process has a discrete beginning, middle, and end. In fact, systems design is an ongoing, iterative process. Once particular systems are in place, they are constantly being updated, maintained, and adapted to new uses. This makes user participation all the more necessary.
2. There are three unions representing workers at AT&T and the Bell operating companies—the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Telecommunications International Union (TIU), and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). In 1980, AT&T established Quality of Worklife (QWL) committees with each of the three unions. The examples used in these pages are drawn from the experience of the CWA and TIU.
3. When more than one union represented workers in a particular AT&T division or Bell operating company, a separate Technology Change Committee was established with each union. The 1980 Bell system collective-bargaining agreement also established a joint Occupational Job Evaluation committee. The work of this group is not considered here.
4. Dr. Schneider conducted this study in conjunction with Professor Richard E. Walton. The following information is based upon as yet unpublished personal interviews and survey data from that research project.
5. The description of worker participation at the Norwegian post office is based, in large part, on internal reports from the Norwegian Computing Center to the Norwegian Postal Directorate and on personal interviews conducted by the authors.
6. The worker participants were jointly chosen by management and the union. Although involvement in the union was not a formal criteria for selection, most of the participants were in fact union activitists.
7. This example is based on personal interviews conducted by the authors.
8. According to the NBF official responsible for technology issues: “It used to be that there was always a big discussion about precisely when the union should be informed. The question was, ‘When does a pre-project actually become a formal project?’ Now, our attitude is, ‘The moment an idea strikes you, that’s the time to call the union and begin discussing it.’”
9. As the NBF official says, “You can cooperate on these issues, because management, by and large, has come to recognize the union as an equal partner. They have also recognized that technology has social costs. They may not consider it as much of a problem as we do, but at least they recognize that, when you implement technology, you have to deal with the social and organizational consequences. When they stop listening, the union can always bang our little green collective bargaining contract and data policy on the table. Usually, that is enough to begin the dialogue again.”
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