Production and Productive Reason

Abstract

This article explores two rival understandings of production and what it means to be a rational productive subject. Against ‘technicist’ models of productive reason, it defends a ‘phronetic’ model on both normative and pragmatic grounds. The discussion begins with a description of the general principles underpinning technicist theories of workplace organisation, principles which continue to inform work design approaches to this day. The technicist model is thereafter criticised on three counts: that it represents a specific managerial agenda which privileges sectional interests; that it is suspect morally for a number of reasons; and that despite its aspiration of arriving at ‘one best method’, it represents but one way of organising work processes. The phronetic model is then set out using the notion of ‘practices’ as a guide. This notion is important in providing a view of production in which technical reason is subsumed under a broader practical reason incorporating individual experience and judgement. Against the charge that this view is merely an instance of nostalgic craft romanticism having little relevance to present industrial realities, there are recognisable contemporary instances of phronetic production, one of the most interesting being Volvo's innovations in automotive assembly systems.

Keywords:

• MacIntyre
• phronēsis
• productive reason
• Taylor
• technicism
• Volvo
• workplace organisation

Notes

My thanks to the reviewers of an earlier draft of this article for their helpful comments and suggestions.

By ‘productive work’ (poiēsis) I mean the fabricating ‘arts’ as exemplified in the manufacturing, engineering and construction industries. Although the arguments here focus on productive work in this sense, they are relevant to other parts of contemporary economies.

Indeed, Weber (1978: 1156) himself saw ‘scientific management’ as the logical conclusion of formal economic rationalisation, where ‘the optimum profitability of the individual worker is calculated like that of any material means of production’. On the connection between Taylorism and Weber's theory of formal rationalisation and bureaucratic authority, see Littler (1978: 192–4).

On Taylorism's historical context, see Braverman (1974: 59–62) and Nelson (1980). It should be stressed that Taylorism was celebrated both in the liberal West and the communist East, that it is a model of productive rationality and control not confined to capitalist workplace organisation. On Lenin's admiration for scientific management, for example, see Wren and Bedeian (2004).

As Berggren (1992: 29–36, 53–4) points out, apart from important technological and supply chain innovations, the main difference between Taylorism, which presumes an atomised workforce with minimal integration in the firm, and lean production is that with the latter workers are under continual pressure to improve the production process and must commit themselves wholly to the firm viewed now as a community. Lean production can therefore be classed as a form of ‘socialised Taylorism’.

See Dunne (1993: 1–8) on the revisions to educational practice inspired by the technicist ‘behavioural objectives model’. On the effects of state-driven research assessment exercises and the setting of research goals by management in UK universities, which clearly entail a neo-Taylorist revaluation of the role of academics, see Gill (2010).

Habermas (1987: 171). For criticisms of Habermas' theorisation of productive work, and also the views of Hannah Arendt and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others, see Giddens (1982), Honneth (1995), Breen (2007) and Smith (forthcoming).

See Friedmann (1955: 37–65). On the dubiousness of many of Taylor's ‘experiments’, in particular his account of pig iron handling rationalisation at Bethlehem Steel, see Merkle (1980: 28–9).

On the idea of self-realisation, see Elster (1986). It is important to recognise here that self-determination and self-realisation are mutually implicated concepts. A person cannot be said to be self-determining without actually exercising her capacity for autonomous judgement, just as she cannot herself realise her various capacities without deliberating upon her ends and determining the means to them.

These legitimations take the form of merit claims, that individuals fit and therefore deserve the work they do, or preference claims, that individuals desire the work they do. Both sorts of claim underpin Henry Ford's (1924: 103) assumption that ‘to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors. In fact, to some types of mind … the ideal job is one where the creative instinct need not be expressed’.

Kohn and Schooler (1983: 297), but see also Kornhauser (1964), Miller et al. (1985) and Hauser and Roan (2007). For pertinent discussions of these and related studies, see Schwartz (1982: 637–9), Lane (1991: 240–59), Walsh (1999: 328–31) and Hsieh (2008: 77–9).

For example, despite his endorsement of the detailed division of labour, Smith (1975 [1776]: Vol. II, 263–4), lamented its impact on human personality, concluding that a subject whose ‘whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations … [because he] has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur … generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’.

On the effect of work on individual political efficacy, see Pateman (1970), Elden (1981), Cohen (1989) and O'Neill (2008). On the role of work in generating self-esteem, see Lane (1991: 196–9, 254–5, 259) and Llorente (2002: 235–6).

Hamper (1986), for instance, tells of how assembly line workers in a Michigan GM automotive plant would routinely ‘double up’ jobs, thereby lessening the monotony of their work and freeing up time for relaxation and other pursuits. In a similar vein, Haraszti (1977) speaks of the practice of making ‘homers’, where machinists in a Hungarian tractor factory, though under a crippling piece-rate regime, would defy foremen by using their machines to create personal knick-knacks and objects of art.

The discussion of MacIntyre's theory here is necessarily compressed, but for fuller accounts see Keat (2000), Breen (2005, 2007), Moore and Beadle (2006) and Knight (2007).

MacIntyre (1985: 196) takes care to note that the external goods of wealth and status ‘genuinely are goods’ and that ‘no one can despise them altogether without a certain hypocrisy’. Nonetheless, an exclusive focus on these goods, as evinced in technicism, blinds us to internal goods definitive of our various roles and has a corrupting effect on social relations. It is also worth noting, against liberal worries that MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian approach would entail the imposition of a single telos or way of life, that insofar as there is a plurality of practices, each with its own internal good or telos, there is necessarily a plurality of ways of achieving a good or meaningful life, none of which can claim superiority over others.

In claiming that phronēsis is deliberation as to ends, I follow David Wiggins's (2001 [1975–76]) now canonical interpretation of Aristotle's understanding of practical reason, as opposed to commentators, including Kolnai (2001 [1962]) and Fehige (2001), who see Aristotle as offering an ‘instrumentalist’ account of practical reason as directed only to means, not ends.

MacIntyre (1985: 159). See also MacIntyre (1988: 104–5; 1994: 301; 1999: 6–7). For the argument that Aristotle erred in thinking poiēsis and praxis, technē and phronēsis, mutually exclusive, and also that the logic of his theory points to their proximity, see Murphy (1993: 88–110) and Nederman (2008).

MacIntyre (1985: 227–8). See also MacIntyre (1988: 111–12; 1994: 286; 1998b: 249; 2008: 263–5).

MacIntyre's (1999: 143; 2008: 268) examples include farming cooperatives in Donegal, New England fishing villages, Welsh mining communities, Renaissance and ancient city-states.

Hancké and Rubinstein (1995: 184). Some advocates of the Uddevalla project are reluctant to class it as a form of ‘neo-craftsmanship’. This stems from their belief that ‘craftsmanship’ fails to capture the technologically dynamic aspects of the system, but, also more importantly, from a reaction to the ideological use of the term by Uddevalla's lean production critics (for instance, Womack et al. 2007). Regardless of the terminology employed, the basic point is that work in Uddevalla clearly approached, even if it did not fully match, the complexity and level of skill typical of established trades.

As argued by Berggren (1993, 1995), Sandberg (1995) and Beirne (2006: 29–33), Uddevalla's clear successes in productivity, quality control and flexibility reveal its long-term competitive advantage over Volvo's traditional Swedish assembly facilities and contradict claims (for example, Wickens 1993) that its closure was due to financial or other inefficiencies at the plant.

The Uddevalla experiment largely came to a halt with the facility's initial closure in 1993, the emphasis on humanistic production gradually diminishing following the plant's reopening in 1995 as a joint venture between Volvo and Tom Walkinshaw Racing and the acquisition of the Volvo car division by Ford in 1999 and, thereafter, by the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group in 2010. However, the subsequent fate of the plant in no wise limits its broader significance for our understanding of the possibilities of workplace organisation within the capitalist market economy. Indeed, there are many other examples of similar innovative work practices being successfully institutionalised, including assembly at General Motors's Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, from 1990 onwards (Hancké and Rubinstein 1995), Maytag's reorganisation of washing machine manufacture in the late 1990s and Sony's restructuring of camcorder production in 2002 (Beirne 2006: 32–3).

‘The worker can regain mastery over collective and socialised production only by assuming the scientific, design, and operational prerogatives of modern engineering; short of this, there is no mastery over the labor process’ (Braverman 1974: 307). A vital step in this direction would be the universalisation of apprenticeship schemes similar to those underpinning the German car industry, where a large number of workers are highly skilled Facharbeiter (Jürgens 1995).