Chapter 6: The responses to change
6.6 Science versus business
6.6.7 Middle management: caught between the corporate vision and science
apparent at the SPL level, as mentioned earlier. SPLs were in a difficult position in the organisational structure - seen by senior management to be the enforcers of the new direction and of organisational values while their success was dependent on the groups under their management. They were expected by senior management to have a ‘One AgResearch’ vision but their success was more likely to be reliant on meeting their budgets and getting funding. Bate (1998: 69) describes middle management as subscribing to a segmentalist culture while senior management, who naturally have an overview of the organisation, subscribe to a unitarist culture.132 SPLs could be seen to be adapting to the views of senior management by accepting better pay to ‘manage’, however, two SPLs told me they accepted management positions to maintain a good environment in which others could do science.
131 Denis Elvidge, pers. comm. 10-3-01.
132 Bate (1998) himself subscribes to a ‘both-and’ culture. He thinks there needs to be a mix in organisations and what is important is whether “there is a ‘fit’ between the form and its environment” (ibid.: 71). Primarily AgResearch has had to demonstrate to Government (shareholders) that it is changing to fit the environment, as prescribed by Government policy and enforced by FRST. Most organisational culture theory says organisations have to respond to their external environment, e.g., Nilakant and Ramnarayan (1998).
Evan (SPL) is aware of the risk of uniformity demanded by the ‘One AgResearch’ vision and its challenge to the ‘psychic self’, as Catherine Casey (1995) would call it:
... personally, I think that there is a danger of looking for too much conformity and uniformity. We’re not Dekka, we’re not the NZ Army, we’re not Harcourts. You know, we are a bunch of fairly intellectual individuals and I think there is an over-estimation of the effect that training courses can have on achieving conformity and uniformity. Personally, I think AgResearch could do well to celebrate diversity and maximise the value from that diversity ... So, I think that this idea that the Science Leaders can kind of control their so-called Platforms to a degree of precision and uniformity is not true. I don’t think it can be done. That’s what worries me a bit right now (Evan, SPL).
In conclusion, this section has demonstrated the conflicts experienced by workers when their organisation developed a business emphasis and how they have responded to this by emphasising that their priority is science.133
6.7 Conclusion
In this chapter I have described and made a preliminary interpretation of the
responses of scientific workers in AgResearch to the changes they experienced as a result of the restructuring of the system for the public funding of science. In this initial interpretation I have been influenced only minimally (where mentioned) by my reading of any academic literature on the topics of work and management. What I observed is that scientific workers adapted to the changes in their organisation and to the funding system in order for their work to continue, but they have mainly been able to carry on with their work by practising different forms of quiet resistance. Many of these forms of resistance act to distance them from organisational communication. This protects their identities and enables them to receive the feedback from their work of science described in Chapter 5. When taken together these examples demonstrate the many tactics workers had in their ‘tool box’,134 which enabled them to negotiate and protect valued ways they had of making their working lives meaningful. In the final section I have demonstrated how some of the values and ways of doing science conflict with the ways of doing business, and how scientific workers give priority to ‘doing science’.
133 For another description of this conflict see ex-AgResearch scientist’s book, Science Friction (Edmeades, 2000).
Conclusion to Part B
In Part B I have explained how the feedback scientific workers receive from their work is important to them for reinforcing valued aspects of their identity, and how this feedback may differ between technical workers and scientists. I have described how this identity was often based on the heritage of the past – what was valued and important in society when attitudes to work were being formed for these workers. The feedback scientific workers get from belonging to their work group is very significant to them. For scientists, the feedback from belonging to the scientific community and its claims of excellence is important. The exclusiveness of this community was described, as was the way in which some scientists use it to close themselves off to outsiders in order to resist interference from Government policy and commercial interests. The lack of value placed on input from non-scientific sources by some scientists was also established. Because the culture of science emphasises autonomy at the expense of personal feedback, the practice of science has become a very powerful feedback mechanism for scientific workers. It reinforces the ideas these workers have about themselves, such as their trustworthiness, skill and accuracy. The practice of science also rewards them in many other ways. On the other hand, the culture of the organisation in which they work, through
corporatisation and a focus on accountability, is perceived to not value them in the same way, and at times interferes and conflicts with the things that are important to them. They respond to this in many ways, most of which enable them to continue to do the work that is important to them; however, the majority feel compromised and unhappy.
At the beginning of this research I was concerned that workers spent a lot of time moaning, complaining and being cynical about the management of the organisation and I felt they should be doing something about it. What I have learned is that this behaviour is serving the purpose of distancing workers from caring too much about and believing in an organisation that may well let them down. It protects them from making personal changes to their beliefs about themselves that may not work for them in the future. It protects them from changing the ideas they hold about their work and the implications these changes would have for their identities. There are, however, inevitable conflicts and risks when ‘doing science’ conflicts with ‘doing
business’. In spite of all the responses these scientific workers made to enable them to continue their work, the fact is that they still complained and most of them were not happy at work. This environment and the behaviour required of them in it was very stressful.
There was a tired scientist at Lincoln Who eventually got around to thinkin’ – Why did I study for years
And get all these grey hairs
When AgResearch seems to be sinkin’? Ten years for a crime I didn’t commit A bloody long time you’ll have to admit I’m dreaming about an early release
No problem said FRST, your funding will cease …
(Limericks written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of AgResearch, 17-7-02.)135
In Part C I will report on some of the related sociology of work literature which my initial foray into the AgResearch data provoked. I will also take another look at the context of this research, and then, informed by these ideas, consider again the response these scientific workers made to the circumstances in which they found themselves.
135 RSNZ (2002: 3): “Science and technology remuneration … offers insufficient compensation for the years invested in training …” etc.
PART C: FURTHER ANALYSIS INFORMED BY THE
LITERATURE
During the first analysis of the case studies I became aware that two of the major themes were the meaning of work for scientific workers, and its relationship to identity. These two themes did not have sufficient depth. It was not enough to just describe this meaning. There was something else happening in this situation that made these workers unhappy. Why did they complain so much when they were also telling me about how they placed so much importance on their work, and describing it with so much enthusiasm and obvious enjoyment? I started reading more about resistance. Often the discussion and arguments in the literature did not fit what I had observed. Usually the literature focused on blue collar workers in factories and industrial situations. It was to do with forms of conflict that I had never observed, such as pilfering, sabotage and wasting time (e.g., Mars, 1982). Only some of the labour process writers (Knights and Morgan, 1991b; Collinson, 1994, 1992; Knights and Collinson, 1987) (with the introduction of subjectivity) and one or two
Americans (Ashforth and Mael, 1998; Hodson, 1991; 1995a, 1995b) seemed to take seriously the accounts of the workers themselves. The latter, however, were not referring to particular empirical studies but reflecting on the topic in general. Even these writers placed a greater emphasis on macro issues rather than on what was going on for workers. I became aware, thanks to a seminar given by Perkins and Thorns,136 that I was studying how this group of people at AgResearch were making their work meaningful and were resisting the things which contested that. It seemed to me that writers taking a Foucauldian approach (with their interest in subjectivity) and/or those adopting a labour process perspective or an organisational culture approach, while concerned about identity, were stripping away the very things that I considered to be important. In their desire to uncover relationships of power they disregard the ways in which people act to negotiate and mediate the impacts of power in order to make their lives meaningful. This emphasis on ‘making meaning’ is exactly what I have not found in any literature. It is what my research offers.
I then became aware that a focus of much of the resistance literature, and more widely, the industrial sociological literature, was on methods of work control which were not a common feature of AgResearch management. A particular form of control called ‘normative control’ (Ashforth and Mael, 1998: 113) most closely described what I was observing. Normative control is a system of management in which
attempts are made to regulate the thoughts and feelings of workers to align them with particular organisational values (ibid.). Attention to this as a conscious form of work control only surfaced in the sociology of work literature in the late 1980s (e.g., Rose, 1988137). Actual research studies of organisations in which it was practised started appearing in the 1990s (e.g., Kramer and Neale, 1998; Bate, 1998[1994]; Casey, 1995; Jermier, Knights and Nord, 1994; Kunda, 1992; Sturdy, Knights and Willmott, 1992b; Kondo, 1990). This aspiration on the part of management to consciously control the beliefs and attitudes of workers through normative control was arising at the same time as the New Zealand Government’s restructuring endeavour. State sector organisations were developing management structures to ensure accountability and efficiency of workers. It is not surprising to see the two – accountability and normative control - coming together in AgResearch.
In Chapter 7 I discuss some of the literature relating to work, in particular the story of how the contested nature of the meaning of work between employers and
employees has led to the development of the normative control of work. I will examine the responses of workers to such control as observed and interpreted by other writers, although I will be focusing only on the literature that I see as relevant to the themes and ideas that were arising in the data from Part B. In Chapter 8,
through reflecting and building on what others have said about work and its meaning, I extend the analysis of the data further to finally develop two models of resistance which encapsulate the responses of those I have been studying.
137 In the first edition of this work (Rose, 1978[1975]), the author does not mention this form of work control.