The Adventures of Managerial Hegemony: Teamwork, Ideology, and Worker Resistance

Abstract

New forms of work organization have spread throughout much of the corporate world. Critics warn that team systems may encourage workers to internalize managerial definitions of their work situations, and-as a result-strengthen management's hegemony over them. This article presents an ethnographic analysis of four manufacturing plants in which team initiatives have been introduced. The findings cast doubt on the hegemony thesis. Analyzing data bearing on the degree of managerial legitimacy, the salience of class boundaries, and instances of worker defiance in both traditionaland team-based production areas, I find only occasional evidence of increased worker integration or incorporation within a nascent managerial regime. Indeed, by drawing attention to the limited authority that workers were actually allowed, team systems tended to heighten worker suspicion and distrust and to foster patterns of solidarity that were difficult for managers to control. The most significant feature of the new production concepts may not be their siren-like appeal, but rather the tensions and contradictions they introduce into work organizations. In fact, such concepts provide workers with subtle yet strategic resources with which to renegotiate the boundaries of managerial authority.