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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 the 'managerless' system came under strain. This book will be of essential reading for researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates interested in the areas of management studies, human resource management, and organizational studies, among others. "... this book provides a very useful evaluation of the rationale and ethos of management systems of self-surveillance. The authors raise important issues around the incompleteness of governmental relations. Not least, they ask why systems predicated on worker self-management fail, even in circumstances where local management retains a belief in manager-less systems."


Douglas Martin, University of Central Lancashire, UK, Work employment and society

Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization: Inside the Factory of the Future

1. The Will to Empower: Governing the Workplace 2. Working for the Yankee Dollar 3. Greenfield Site, Green Labour? 4. 'Not just Another Number': Empowerment, Discipline and Teamworking Freedom 5. Confession, Discipline and Freedom 6. 'Just Like Any Other Factory'