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Advanced Manufacturing Technologies: Work Organisation and Social Relations Crystallised

This paper considers the ways in which technologies are underpinned by patterns of work organisation and power relations in manufacturing industry. It takes as its starting point the emergence of manufacturing technologies during the Industrial Revolution, showing how these were imbued with the methods of factory organisation which were then gaining currency - the visions of industrial entrepreneurs, engineers and political economists. Technologies have continued to be associated with particular patterns of work organisation, both actual and envisioned. The major concern of the paper is with a contemporary manufacturing technology, Computer-Aided Production Management (CAPM). It shows how CAPM has developed according to the dominant templates of manufacturing organisation - first American and now Japanese. It charts the growth of the ‘enterprise culture’ in the West — a discourse which stresses flexibility and prescribes production methods, such as just-in-time, which mimic those of the Japanese. It looks at the promotion of CAPM as a technology which can assist in this process and at the incorporation within CAPM of facilities for doing so. Finally, the paper shows that these manufacturing agendas are not easily implemented. CAPM user organisations find the technology inappropriate to their existing patterns of work, and so modify systems to fit these. CAPM technology therefore embodies patterns of work organisation at several levels. It incorporates both the dreams and programmes for work organisation which are promoted by the industrially powerful at anyone time, and the actual practices of work organisation which pertain in the sphere of use.