The Plant Managers’ Rational Resistance

Abstract

The textile plants were parts of a corporation, which issued instructions about the organization of work. Often there were demands for reorganization in order to increase efficiency and profit. The instructions were to be converted by plant managers into actual changes. However, the plant managers were chastened and they saw the corporate directives as expressions of new organizational fads. One of them reacted like this: ‘The CEO discovers something new, tells everyone that we need to use it, explains what happens if we don’t use, calls in some outsiders [consultants] to show us how to set it up, then expects us to do the rest.’ But the directives still had to be put into effect. According to the corporate plan, the reason for the change was that overall efficiency at the corporate level had to be strengthened. Corporate managers pointed in particular to the need to reduce the time it took to manufacture a product and then distribute it to the customer, while simultaneously improving quality. This required a reorganization into teamwork, especially as issues of quality could then be built into the responsibilities of the teams, rather than controlled post-production. All this would promote flexibility and enable constant adaptation to capricious markets. The corporation would shift from competing purely on low costs to a combination of low costs and product differentiation.