Discourses on Downsizing: Structure and Sentiment in an Organizational Dispute

Abstract

Abstract: Downsizing, sometimes accompanied by staff amalgamation, has become a grim but pervasive cost-cutting device in Western societies of the 1990s. This article focusses on two hospital-based nursing schools, in an economically marginal Maritime community, that faced merger and the loss of a number of much-prized teaching jobs in the early 1990s. Although both staffs approved, in principle, of raising educational standards for nursing employment, they held distinctly different positions on how educational qualifications should figure in the layoff formula. Downsizing provoked a discourse that unveiled the significance of interpersonal loyalties and workgroup identitiesThe case presented here concerns cultural activity played out in a formal-organizational setting. Concretely, the study compares the way nursing instructors in two hospital-based training programs (in Stelton, a small Maritime city) differentially and creatively interpreted job qualifications in a situation of competition for continued employment. The conditions that provoked competition -- program amalgamation and staff downsizing -- were ultimately rooted in forces of political economy and mediated by formal-organizational factors. The study is thus set against a sketch of that backdrop. But these contextual features are not determinative. Rather, I focus on how the instructors acted as human agents, responding in terms of their grounded (i.e., localized, day-to-day, direct) experience. With respect to layoff criteria, each staff generated its own position, which reflected interpersonal loyalties and in-group identities. These polarized positions will be analyzed as a discourse, generated in terms of interpersonal dynamics and personal meanings that played themselves out in the narrative context of everyday work life, one in which extraorganizational roles figured.The case analysis arises from a prior critique of the popular notion of culture.(f.1) Specifically, organizational culture (OC) is a misnomer disguising cultural variation within bureaucracies. Secondly, as a reification, it glosses over cultural process and, thirdly, it creates artificial boundaries between intra- and extraorganizational statuses that are relevant to the way cultured actors interpret structural principles (values, norms and institutions). That critique highlights important methodological issues and creates an alternative framework that is used here for the analysis of organizational behaviour.Cultural Complexity in OrganizationsAnthropologists have noted that the burgeoning OC literature from management studies mishandles intraorganizational cultural complexity (e.g., Gregory 1983). It does so largely by conflating the organization's culture with the business ideology of senior management. It is, in brief, management-centric, and has been rigorously taken to task for it (Alvesson and Berg, 1992; Baba, 1989; Davis, 1985; deRoche, 1997 and 1994; Gamst, 1989; Hochwald, 1990; Kunda, 1992). The critique does not suggest that subordinates reject all bureaucratic authority. The nursing instructors I studied do not contest the hospital administration's right to make budgetary decisions that effect layoffs. This does not mean, however, that they agree with officially sanctioned decisions about layoff criteria. Nor does it mean that each staff's perception of these decisions is uniform. On the question of educational qualifications, in fact, the women employed at each of the schools (St. Martha's and Stelton General, respectively) differed dramatically.The OC literature gives some limited attention to professional subcultures within organizations (see, among others, Deal and Kennedy, 1982:150 ff.; Kilmann, 1985: 352; Kilmann, Saxton and Serpa, 1985: 11-12; Schein, 1989: 7). It does not, however, examine intraprofessional differences in the workplace. It also recognizes that subcultural variations arise through mergers, which bring together separate organizations and thus cultures. …