Management Divided: Contradictions of Labor Management

Managers face a contradiction between ensuring workforce discipline and harnessing worker creativity, which has intensified over the last four decades. Matt Vidal presents a synthetic theory called organizational political economy that emphasizes how contradictory developments lead management to be divided. This theory applies to a wide range of occupations, including education, healthcare, software development, and many more.

Format: Hardback
Length: 384 pages
Publication date: 18 March 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

One of the critical dynamics shaping organizations today is the contradiction managers face between ensuring workforce discipline and harnessing worker creativity. This contradiction has been escalating over the past four decades, as employee involvement has become increasingly significant in response to rapid technological change, the need for flexibility, and the demand for continuous improvement. In the manufacturing sector, global best practices include lean production with substantial worker empowerment; cross-training in enlarged tasks and inclusion in problem-solving and decision-making. However, many managers instead face these conflicting pressures by training workers in narrow tasks and utilizing them exclusively for manual labor.

In this extensively researched study of American manufacturing, Matt Vidal presents a synthetic theory called organizational political economy, integrating concepts from organization theory into a classical Marxist framework. This theory emphasizes how contradictory developments—conflicting pressures and competing logics of labor management—lead management to be divided. Some managers adopt best practices by substantively empowering their workforce, while others settle for good enough. Capitalist management is increasingly becoming a source of organizational inefficiency. This argument is not limited to manufacturing. Managers experience contradictory pressures—for standardization versus discretion, deskilling versus upskilling—in a wide range of occupations, including education, healthcare, software development, and many more.

Weight: 724g
Dimension: 240 x 163 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780198795278