McCabe's Case Study Review

Review of Case Study in "Factory Innovations And Management Machinations: The Productive And Repressive Relations of Power" by Darren McCabeThe case study is about the management's approach toward deunionization of workforce at an automobile assembly plant in UK which faced losses due to recession. The management of the plant wanted to bring the workforce directly under their control by eradicating the trade union and trade leaders in the name of so called unity between the workforce and the management. The labor however understood the message of the management quite opposite to what the management wanted to say. This misunderstanding can be associated with the contradictions in management's discourse and their underline assumptions about the demand's and perspective of the trade union. Subsequently the workforce became more insecure as the management's authoritative emphasis on increasing the employability of the employees was presented with demands of higher output/performance from the workforce, this was done in a way that workforce's sense of job security deteriorated and they eventually felt the need to look for alternative job within a span of two years in future. The management was in an intellectual or academic hubris that their achievements or failures in the process of innovating the environment for unity were irrelevant until their end objective remained innovation for the sake of it; innovation became an end in itself instead of a means toward a greater end. There was a-priori belief that management's efforts to innovate the environment would eventually bring unity as a byproduct if they keep insisting on what they deem was correct. Despite inequality prevailed or reinforced even within the management's hierarchy, they kept on deluding themselves with an illusion of equality. The style of the top management was also autocratic such that they wanted to force everyone to feel and believe that they are equal to managers in their capacity to contribute, without any practical demonstration or walking the walk. The management therefore wanted to change the environment without taking the personal transformation that was required, and they kept deluding themselves that desired change would eventually happen with mere rhetoric and repeating the mantra of change over and over again.