Alan Mckinlay
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3847092 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Alan Mckinlay |
| PRENOMES | Alan |
| SOBRENOME | Mckinlay |
| ASSINATURA | MCKINLAY A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of St Andrews |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 53 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 254 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1986 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Governing the factory
Microhistory is an established form of cultural history but marginal to management and organization history. Methodologically, microhistory searches out moments and practices that are meaningful to participants but deeply strange to us. Such peculiar moments are subjected to intense scrutiny to understand how they were meaningful to participants. Understanding the extraordinary becomes the portal to the cultural commonplace. Michel Foucault’s gen…
Foucault, governing and knowledge
How do managerial bureaucracies emerge? We consider this central question of Chandlerian business history by examining how Tata and Sons governed its steelmaking company TISCO, 1907–1925. Tata had no steelmaking knowledge and was reliant upon American expertise and personnel. This knowledge imbalance skewed power in favour of autocratic American steelmasters who wielded complete operational control. Unable to impose its will on TISCO, Tata was fo…
The ties that bind us
The dominant view of careers is that they have been transformed by the emergence of ‘post-bureaucratic’ organizations. ‘Neo-bureaucratic’ structures have emerged, retaining centralized control over strategy and finance while outsourcing production, creating employment precarity. British television epitomizes a sector that has experienced long-run deregulation. Producing television content is risky and highly competitive. How do broadcasters minim…
Hope labour and the psychic life of cultural work
How do we understand the psychic life of cultural workers under neoliberalism? ‘Hope labour’ is a defining quality of a cultural worker’s experience, practice and identity. Hope labour is unpaid or under-compensated labour undertaken in the present, usually for exposure or experience, with the hope that future work may follow. Hope labour is naturalised by neoliberal discourses but not fully determined by them. Drawing upon empirical research inv…
Getting together, living together, thinking together
This contribution analyses internal management development activities at Tata Sons during the 1940s and 1950s in India. The existing literature has concentrated on the establishment of management education programmes at universities, and our understanding of in-company managerial training and development activities remains very limited. The contribution challenges the commonly held assumption that the American influence on Indian higher education…
Strategic responses to low-cost competition
This article examines path dependency and technological lock-in in the evolution of the Dundee jute industry, from its beginnings in the 1860s to its demise in the 1970s. The evolution of the industry is explored using the resource-based view of the firm (RBV). The results suggest that the nature and construct of jute fibre was the root cause of a lack of sustainable strategic responses in the sector. Path dependent decisions and technological lo…
Foucault, governmentality, strategy
Strategic change, leadership and accounting
Strategic change in public sector organizations has been well documented. This article suggests that public management research would benefit from a greater appreciation of how calculative practices are deeply imbricated with, and constitutive of, organizational life. In turn, the article argues that the field of interdisciplinary accounting has much to learn from public administration, especially in terms of leadership. The overarching argument …
Governing souls
Foucault and Managerial Governmentality
Narrating histories of women at work
This article explores narrative in business history and business histories as a means of understanding the absence and presence of women. We develop the argument that narrative is constructed in the historical research process, and note the implications of this for our understanding of business history as product and practice. We suggest that business historians work with a distinction between stories in description, generated by participants as …
Accountable creatures
Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism remains a seminal text for social theory and economic and social history. Weber suggests a general relationship between religious belief and economic action. We argue that only by examining the practices of individuals and institutions can we adequately address Weber's question. Specifically, we re-examine the role of the confessional diary and Church governance practices as forms of accou…
Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization
This book traces how abstract managerial ideas about maximizing production flexibility and employee freedom were translated into concrete, day-to-day practices at the Motorola plant in East Kilbride, UK. Using eyewitness accounts, the book describes how employees dealt with the increased freedom Motorola promoted amongst its employees, how employees adapted to managerial changes, specifically the elimination of large-scale management, and where t…
Following Foucault into the archives
Michel Foucault's historiography remains enigmatic, despite his intention of providing a conceptual ‘toolkit’ for historical and contemporary research. We examine Foucault's own practice as a historian and his deliberate stripping out of the social history of the events and institutional processes he analysed. We consider the making of the modern archive and what this means for business history. One of the peculiarities of the business archive is…
Banking, bureaucracy and the career
The cornerstone of banks' internal control was the inspection system that fanned out from the centre to examine all local transactions and records. A critical aspect of the inspection system was reporting on staff performance. Inspection was the lynchpin of the banks' surveillance systems that reached into all aspects of their employees' professional and personal lives before 1939. The nature of this control was revealed by a court case involving…
Cultures of strategy
This article explores the changes that took place in the BBC during the late 1980s and 1990s. The paper traces the antecedents to the changes, particularly a report prepared by McKinsey, the management consulting firm, in the early 1970s. Many of the problems identified by McKinsey were tackled a generation later, although using strikingly different methods from those advocated by the consulting firm. The second section of the paper focuses on th…
All they lose is the scream’
Henry Ford insisted that his development of mass production owed nothing to Taylorism. But Ford and Taylor can only be understood as part of a wider revolution in American management that prioritized efficiency, experimentation and flow. Following Foucault, Henry Ford represented the rationalizing capability of ‘sovereign power’. Ford's radical innovations in production techniques depended upon parallel innovations in administration and accountin…
Governmentality, power and organization
Michel Foucault has moved from being marginal to organization studies to perhaps the most important authority in critical management studies. Yet his methods, historiography and the theoretical value of his work remain obscure, contested or, even worse, simply taken for granted. Governmentality, Foucault's term for how institutions are imagined, offers a way of understanding how specific forms of knowledge and power emerge, develop and decline. G…
Business in Britain in the twentieth century
Business in Britain in the twentieth century, edited by Richard Coopey and Peter Lyth, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, xii + 405 pp., £68.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-922600-9 This wide-rang
American multinationals and British trade unions, c .1945–1974
In the period 1945–1970 Scotland received the greatest inflow of American direct investment in the world, outside Canada. The presence of American multinational companies was welcomed by both the local and the national state as providing examples of best business practice in production methods and in the deployment of labour. All of these incoming firms were anti-union in principle, but in practice they enjoyed little success in eliminating craft…
American corporations and European labor
Power without knowledge? Foucault and Fordism, c.1900–50
The Ford Motor Company underwent transition from workplace supervision based on a system of terror to one predicated on modern discipline. With what some contemporaries claimed was ‘the world's largest private army’ and an enormous espionage network, Henry Ford resisted adoption of human relations approaches and the new foremanship ideas that captured rivals such as General Motors. This account explains how in the 1940s the Ford Motor Company eve…
Rethinking the assembly line
Previous assessments of Ford's assembly line have been based on a limited set of highly aggregated data. New, more detailed and extensive data allows a reconsideration of Ford's operations and their effectiveness to confirm more fully some earlier understandings through extending the analyses to show the line's impact over a longer period and with more detail about its operational and organisational effects. The reconsideration also challenges so…
Creative Labour
Creative Labour
PART I: THEORY AND OVERVIEW Introduction: Labour Process Analysis and Creative Industries C.Smith& A.McKinlay Creative Labour: Contract, Content and Control C.Smith& A.McKinlay From Conception to Consumption: Creativity and the Missing Managerial Link P.Thompson, M.Jones& C.Warhurst Working in the Creative Economy Risk, Adaptation, and the Persistence of Exclusionary Networks S.Christopherson PART II: CREATIVE LABOUR AND PRACTICE Film, Theatre an…
Managing in the creative industries
This article introduces its subject with a brief overview of some of the contention concerning the creative industries, in terms of their purview, their significance within political economy, and the extent to which, and how, they may differ from other sectors. Arguing that the `motley crew' is a very broad church, and management must not confine itself solely to the management of production but should also consider the role of consumption, the a…
Foucault, Management and Organization Theory
Hope labour and the psychic life of cultural work
How do we understand the psychic life of cultural workers under neoliberalism? ‘Hope labour’ is a defining quality of a cultural worker’s experience, practice and identity. Hope labour is unpaid or under-compensated labour undertaken in the present, usually for exposure or experience, with the hope that future work may follow. Hope labour is naturalised by neoliberal discourses but not fully determined by them. Drawing upon empirical research inv…
Managing Foucault
Business history has become an increasingly inter-disciplinary space, and has been rejuvenated by this inter-disciplinarity. Despite the theoretical openness of business history, and his influence elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities, Michel Foucault has had little or no impact outside the specialist niche of accounting history. Foucault’s central text for many historians is his study of the emergence of the modern penitentiary, Discip…
Following Foucault into the archives
Michel Foucault's historiography remains enigmatic, despite his intention of providing a conceptual ‘toolkit’ for historical and contemporary research. We examine Foucault's own practice as a historian and his deliberate stripping out of the social history of the events and institutional processes he analysed. We consider the making of the modern archive and what this means for business history. One of the peculiarities of the business archive is…
Governmentality, power and organization
Michel Foucault has moved from being marginal to organization studies to perhaps the most important authority in critical management studies. Yet his methods, historiography and the theoretical value of his work remain obscure, contested or, even worse, simply taken for granted. Governmentality, Foucault's term for how institutions are imagined, offers a way of understanding how specific forms of knowledge and power emerge, develop and decline. G…
Careering alone
The relationship between career and social capital is an important but relatively unexplored research topic. In this article, we draw on the literatures on social capital and careers, and on empirical studies of the shifting nature of careers in financial services and television production firms, to argue that, in labour markets where key skills are in short supply, the concept of social capital constitutes a rich resource for understanding the i…
Narrating histories of women at work
This article explores narrative in business history and business histories as a means of understanding the absence and presence of women. We develop the argument that narrative is constructed in the historical research process, and note the implications of this for our understanding of business history as product and practice. We suggest that business historians work with a distinction between stories in description, generated by participants as …
Power without knowledge? Foucault and Fordism, c.1900–50
The Ford Motor Company underwent transition from workplace supervision based on a system of terror to one predicated on modern discipline. With what some contemporaries claimed was ‘the world's largest private army’ and an enormous espionage network, Henry Ford resisted adoption of human relations approaches and the new foremanship ideas that captured rivals such as General Motors. This account explains how in the 1940s the Ford Motor Company eve…
The limits of knowledge management
This paper traces the impact of three knowledge management (KM) projects inside a global pharmaceuticals firm. The first was a conventional debriefing exercise; the second a major investment in an electronic repository, ‘Warehouse’; and the third, ‘Café’, an attempt to use web technology to construct new ‘communities of practice’. Discussions of KM have been dominated by prescriptive and managerialist approaches that ignore organisational politic…
In Search of Perfect People Teamwork and Team Players in the Scottish Spirits Industry
Much of the mainstream and critical literatures stress the potential of teamwork for normative integration through socialization and peer pressure. This article utilizes case studies in the large bottling halls of spirits producers in Scotland to explore the characteristics of and limits to such integration. A multi-dimensional model of team-work and an examination of both practices and attitudes enables the research to identify the variety of ma…
Accountable creatures
Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism remains a seminal text for social theory and economic and social history. Weber suggests a general relationship between religious belief and economic action. We argue that only by examining the practices of individuals and institutions can we adequately address Weber's question. Specifically, we re-examine the role of the confessional diary and Church governance practices as forms of accou…
Strategic change, leadership and accounting
Strategic change in public sector organizations has been well documented. This article suggests that public management research would benefit from a greater appreciation of how calculative practices are deeply imbricated with, and constitutive of, organizational life. In turn, the article argues that the field of interdisciplinary accounting has much to learn from public administration, especially in terms of leadership. The overarching argument …
Banking, bureaucracy and the career
The cornerstone of banks' internal control was the inspection system that fanned out from the centre to examine all local transactions and records. A critical aspect of the inspection system was reporting on staff performance. Inspection was the lynchpin of the banks' surveillance systems that reached into all aspects of their employees' professional and personal lives before 1939. The nature of this control was revealed by a court case involving…
The ties that bind us
The dominant view of careers is that they have been transformed by the emergence of ‘post-bureaucratic’ organizations. ‘Neo-bureaucratic’ structures have emerged, retaining centralized control over strategy and finance while outsourcing production, creating employment precarity. British television epitomizes a sector that has experienced long-run deregulation. Producing television content is risky and highly competitive. How do broadcasters minim…
Cultures of strategy
This article explores the changes that took place in the BBC during the late 1980s and 1990s. The paper traces the antecedents to the changes, particularly a report prepared by McKinsey, the management consulting firm, in the early 1970s. Many of the problems identified by McKinsey were tackled a generation later, although using strikingly different methods from those advocated by the consulting firm. The second section of the paper focuses on th…
Reluctant Europeans? The Federation of British Industries and European Integration, 1945–63
British industry is often portrayed as one of the main forces in favour of closer integration with western Europe. In the period prior to the rejection of Britain's first application to join the Common Market the Federation of British Industries (FBI) played a pivotal role between Whitehall and the wider business community. It had a role both in policy-making and in creating business opinion. However, this was not a static and sustained position:…
Managing for Ford
In explaining the rationale for his classic account of working for Ford, Beynon (1973, 1984) argues that he was filling a gap in our knowledge of the experience of work. While the founders of corporate dynasties such as Henry Ford are public figures, at the time of Beynon's book we knew little of the people who do the work that makes corporations such as Ford public names. Beynon set out to remedy this deficiency. This paper sets out to fill a ga…
Getting together, living together, thinking together
This contribution analyses internal management development activities at Tata Sons during the 1940s and 1950s in India. The existing literature has concentrated on the establishment of management education programmes at universities, and our understanding of in-company managerial training and development activities remains very limited. The contribution challenges the commonly held assumption that the American influence on Indian higher education…
Management, technology and work in commercial broadcasting, c. 1979–98
This article explores the relationship between management strategy, technological change and collective bargaining in the British commercial television industry. The demanning and deskilling potential of digital production technologies remained largely untapped until the second half of the 1980s. The termination of national collective bargaining that had regulated minimum crewing levels was the watershed in terms of work organisation
From Industrial Serf to Wage-labourer
Since the publication of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital in 1974, an increasing number of social historians have turned their attention towards the workplace as a major site of class struggle. In particular, social historians have focussed on the unequal struggle between employers and craft-workers to determine patterns of work organisation and the balance of power in the labour market. However, despite the growth of interest in the …
Foucault, governing and knowledge
How do managerial bureaucracies emerge? We consider this central question of Chandlerian business history by examining how Tata and Sons governed its steelmaking company TISCO, 1907–1925. Tata had no steelmaking knowledge and was reliant upon American expertise and personnel. This knowledge imbalance skewed power in favour of autocratic American steelmasters who wielded complete operational control. Unable to impose its will on TISCO, Tata was fo…
All they lose is the scream’
Henry Ford insisted that his development of mass production owed nothing to Taylorism. But Ford and Taylor can only be understood as part of a wider revolution in American management that prioritized efficiency, experimentation and flow. Following Foucault, Henry Ford represented the rationalizing capability of ‘sovereign power’. Ford's radical innovations in production techniques depended upon parallel innovations in administration and accountin…
American multinationals and British trade unions, c .1945–1974
In the period 1945–1970 Scotland received the greatest inflow of American direct investment in the world, outside Canada. The presence of American multinational companies was welcomed by both the local and the national state as providing examples of best business practice in production methods and in the deployment of labour. All of these incoming firms were anti-union in principle, but in practice they enjoyed little success in eliminating craft…
Rethinking the assembly line
Previous assessments of Ford's assembly line have been based on a limited set of highly aggregated data. New, more detailed and extensive data allows a reconsideration of Ford's operations and their effectiveness to confirm more fully some earlier understandings through extending the analyses to show the line's impact over a longer period and with more detail about its operational and organisational effects. The reconsideration also challenges so…
From Industrial Serf to Wage-labourer
Since the publication of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital in 1974, an increasing number of social historians have turned their attention towards the workplace as a major site of class struggle. In particular, social historians have focussed on the unequal struggle between employers and craft-workers to determine patterns of work organisation and the balance of power in the labour market. However, despite the growth of interest in the …
Competitive Strategies and Organizational Change
The debates about organizational responses to economic crisis have focussed on the need for strategic and structural realignment. Work organization is rarely considered as an integral element of competitive strategy. Current shifts in the contours of previously stable mass markets and product and process innovation demand equally profound organizational change to maintain competitiveness. In this context maintaining or regaining competitive advan…
The Inter-War Depression and the Effort Bargain
The Meanings of Managerial Prerogative
(1989). The Meanings of Managerial Prerogative: Industrial Relations and the Organisation of Work in British Engineering, 1880–1939. Business History: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 32-47
Forward? The Limits of Labour Politics in Scotland
The arrival of the first single volume history of the Labour Party in Scotland is to be welcomed. But in many ways the essays compiled, and largely written, by Ian Donnachie and his colleagues must also count as a missed opportunity. And the nature of this missed opportunity is implicit in the title of the text itself. On the one hand, Forward! rightly celebrates the contribution of the popular socialist newspaper edited by Tom Johnston which did…
Maitres ou employeurs? Travail et rapports d'autorite dans la construction navale
Alan McKinlay, Maîtres ou employeurs? Travail et rapports d'autorité dans la construction navale: l'exemple des chantiers de la Clyde (1900-1939), Le Mouvement social, No. 156, Les Ouvriers Européens de la Navale (Jul. - Sep., 1991), pp. 75-94
British Business History
After Henry
Since 1979 the Ford Motor Co. has attempted to introduce fundamental changes in its corporate strategy, management structure and labour relations. This article focuses on the impact of corporate restructuring on the management of Ford UK. Significant changes in industrial relations and work organisation have been tempered by strong continuities with Ford's maintenance of its traditional management prerogative. The most profound changes have been …
Managing for Ford
In explaining the rationale for his classic account of working for Ford, Beynon (1973, 1984) argues that he was filling a gap in our knowledge of the experience of work. While the founders of corporate dynasties such as Henry Ford are public figures, at the time of Beynon's book we knew little of the people who do the work that makes corporations such as Ford public names. Beynon set out to remedy this deficiency. This paper sets out to fill a ga…
Managing Foucault
Through the Looking Glass
The Politics of Partnership? Innovation in Employment Relations in the Scottish Spirits Industry
Perspectives that emphasize links between workplace innovation and broader HR policies, particularly of a ‘mutual gains’ nature, have become increasingly influential. This paper analyses the links and tensions between workplace change and industrial relations systems in the context of attempts to create a shop‐floor politics of partnership during a period of corporate restructuring in two spirits companies. We argue that interface tensions betwee…
Foucault, Management and Organization Theory
Management, technology and work in commercial broadcasting, c. 1979–98
This article explores the relationship between management strategy, technological change and collective bargaining in the British commercial television industry. The demanning and deskilling potential of digital production technologies remained largely untapped until the second half of the 1980s. The termination of national collective bargaining that had regulated minimum crewing levels was the watershed in terms of work organisation
Foucault, Management and Organization Theory
In Search of Perfect People Teamwork and Team Players in the Scottish Spirits Industry
Much of the mainstream and critical literatures stress the potential of teamwork for normative integration through socialization and peer pressure. This article utilizes case studies in the large bottling halls of spirits producers in Scotland to explore the characteristics of and limits to such integration. A multi-dimensional model of team-work and an examination of both practices and attitudes enables the research to identify the variety of ma…
Reluctant Europeans? The Federation of British Industries and European Integration, 1945–63
British industry is often portrayed as one of the main forces in favour of closer integration with western Europe. In the period prior to the rejection of Britain's first application to join the Common Market the Federation of British Industries (FBI) played a pivotal role between Whitehall and the wider business community. It had a role both in policy-making and in creating business opinion. However, this was not a static and sustained position:…
Introduction
Dead Selves
The rise of the modern career based on merit and open competition rather than connections or seniority was associated with the slow emergence of the managerial bureaucracy. These processes unfolded in Scottish banking in the 20 years before 1914. Inspection of local adherence to centrally specified procedures was critical to both processes. Inspectors developed and maintained central files that charted the individual's technical competence and co…
The limits of knowledge management
This paper traces the impact of three knowledge management (KM) projects inside a global pharmaceuticals firm. The first was a conventional debriefing exercise; the second a major investment in an electronic repository, ‘Warehouse’; and the third, ‘Café’, an attempt to use web technology to construct new ‘communities of practice’. Discussions of KM have been dominated by prescriptive and managerialist approaches that ignore organisational politic…
Careering alone
The relationship between career and social capital is an important but relatively unexplored research topic. In this article, we draw on the literatures on social capital and careers, and on empirical studies of the shifting nature of careers in financial services and television production firms, to argue that, in labour markets where key skills are in short supply, the concept of social capital constitutes a rich resource for understanding the i…
Managing Foucault
Business history has become an increasingly inter-disciplinary space, and has been rejuvenated by this inter-disciplinarity. Despite the theoretical openness of business history, and his influence elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities, Michel Foucault has had little or no impact outside the specialist niche of accounting history. Foucault’s central text for many historians is his study of the emergence of the modern penitentiary, Discip…
Labor Process
Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capitalism (1974) was a craftsman's roar of indignation against the relentless deskilling of modern work. His starting point was explicitly Marxist: the distinction between labor power and labor. That is, all forms of management are not neutral forms of coordination and mobilization, but necessarily involve the transformation of the potential productivity latent in labor power into actual work and output. Exploitati…
Matters of Fact/Matters of Fiction
How do we imagine change in a world of facts? If we accept, with Castoriadis, that we live within institutions of society which are essentially imaginary ‐ and we further accept that in order to pa
Creative Labour
Political science (41 obras) · Sociology (35 obras) · Economics (32 obras) · Law (31 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Business (21 obras) · Law (20 obras) · Management and Organizational Studies (17 obras) · Epistemology (15 obras) · Management (15 obras)