Empowerment

Empowerment and production and production

workers: a knowledge-based workers

perspective
177
N. Duru Ahanotu
Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

Introduction
In 1994 and 1995, Saturn aired an automobile commercial to demonstrate the
company’s commitment to the empowerment of production workers. The
advertisement depicted a production worker who, on recognizing an anomaly
on the assembly line, stops the line and alerts the resident manufacturing
engineers to the problem. The engineers quickly locate and repair what turns
out to be a minor problem, and the production worker expresses pride in his
contribution to the problem-solving effort. Even though he recognized an
aberration, he lacked the knowledge to diagnose and/or fix it. In fact, the
engineers in the advertisement make no attempt to share or transfer some of
this knowledge: they simply display the malfunctioning part. Of course, a
television advertisement is a snapshot image rather than a comprehensive
study, but as a representation of empowerment for production workers, this
scenario seems to be missing the substance of empowerment.
What the previous example demonstrates is dependence under the guise of
empowerment: there certainly exists a degree of participation in the problem-
solving activity, but empowering knowledge, the knowledge that builds the
capacity to handle value-added job enrichment and/or enlargement, is absent.
While organizations have achieved some success in empowering today’s white-
collar and other professional workers, they have had less success with
production workers. I argue that, too often, production workers remain captive
to external sources of design knowledge: managers, engineers, and other
manufacturing professionals. This design knowledge constructs production
processes and controls the direction of innovation. Even efforts to bring
continuous improvement to the factory floor relegates workers to improve
quality and productivity under the given production paradigm, but it does not
provide them with enough tools or opportunities to alter, much less challenge,
that same paradigm.
Ultimately, production workers will not feel empowerment until they are
participants in the innovative processes of a manufacturing company. This
participation goes beyond quality programs and continuous improvement
efforts. This level of participation requires that production workers actively
contribute to innovative manufacturing practices, gain freer access to design
knowledge, and acquire more design knowledge (formal and theoretical) Empowerment in Organizations,
Vol. 6 No. 7, 1998, pp. 177-186.
through operative, experimental, and absorptive (collaborative) activities. I © MCB University Press, 0968-4891
Empowerment in have elsewhere called these activities the tripartite of production tasks (TPT)
Organizations (Ahanotu, 1998); they establish a bi-directional flow of knowledge between the
6,7 factory floor and the design sources of knowledge. Otherwise, production
workers will remain dependents of the production system and not become
active participants in a process of evolving manufacturing core competencies.
The knowledge-based perspective on empowerment presented in this paper
178 reveals the essential role that knowledge and innovation play in making
empowerment a reality for production workers.

Origins of the need for empowerment: beyond the demonization of

Taylor
Before discussing how production workers can achieve empowerment and
before justifying the need for it, one should ruminate on the origins of the need
for this empowerment (also see Honold, 1997 for a comprehensive literature
review). These origins expose some of the knowledge-based principles for re-
achieving empowerment for production workers. There was a time in industrial
practice during which production workers were essentially already empowered.
It is well-known that the craftsmen that preceded scientific management and
mass production were masters of their domain; they created and controlled their
workspaces (for example: Hayes et al., 1988; Hirschhorn, 1984; Romer, 1993;
Taylor, 1911). The knowledge wielded by these experts was carefully cultivated
and obtained mainly through the close supervision of apprenticeship programs
and the slow, steady diffusion of proven practices. In general, the owners of
production completely deferred to their craftspeople for the design and
execution of production processes.
This organizational design deeply disturbed Frederick Taylor, one of the
prime figures in the rise of scientific management: he believed that the informal
knowledge creation amongst craftspeople that created a variety of methods to
execute similar tasks was intolerably inefficient and that only academically
trained managers and engineers could study this knowledge, formalize it, and
create optimized standards. While much has been written about Taylor and his
influence on manufacturing practices, it is appropriate briefly to review here his
impact on worker empowerment. I conduct such an examination less in the
modern, information/knowledge-era spirit of vilification of his work and more
towards an appreciation for the dual nature of his work.
Taylor’s fundamental ideologies are stated quite clearly in his important
work The Principles of Scientific Management: “In almost all of the mechanic
arts the science which underlies each act of each workman is so great and
amounts to so much that the workman who is best suited to actually doing the
work is incapable of fully understanding this science, without the guidance and
help of those who are working with him or over him, either through lack of
education or through insufficient mental capacity” (Taylor, 1911, pp. 25-6).
Taylor goes on to claim that even if production workers had the mental capacity,
they could not take time away from production activities to develop the sciences
of manufacturing, nor could they conduct such work on the factory floor (pp. 38,
104). The appropriation of manufacturing knowledge by management took a lot Empowerment
of the thinking out of the doing of production work. Awash in standardized and production
learning and bereft of genuine opportunities to innovate, production workers workers
quickly became “disempowered”: the locus of sanctioned knowledge
development moved up the hierarchy and away from the factory floor.
The belief in one optimal methodology for any task tends to stifle innovation:
multiple ideas cannot be compared, contrasted, and tested. However, Taylor 179
conceded that continuous improvement was essential and that production
workers should be allowed to suggest new ideas to an appreciative management
willing to investigate in good faith (p. 118). Taylor even refuted the claim that
his philosophy of knowledge standardization destroyed worker independence
by comparing his training methods to those for surgeons who get the benefit of
best practices and who are free to create new ideas rather than re-invent old
ones. Taylor placed heavy emphasis on the responsibility of firms to train and
improve their workers (pp. 6, 12). Finally, he was a firm believer in collaboration
among production workers, engineers, and managers as the path to success in
manufacturing: “… the time is coming when all great things will be done by
that type of cooperation in which each man performs the function for which he
is best suited, each man preserves his own individuality and is supreme in his
particular function, and each man at the same time loses none of his originality
and proper personal initiative, and yet is controlled by and must work
harmoniously with many other men” (p. 140). As is evident here, Taylor tried to
establish a difficult dual concept of closely regulated innovation and controlled
but expressive individual expertise.
Thus, while Taylor’s obsession with efficiency and scientific practice
disempowered production workers, a good amount of the spirit of his writing
suggests that, had industrial establishments so chosen, they still could have
maintained workplaces that valued the contribution of employees and their
improvement. Despite his heavy hand, Taylor recognized two critical
components of manufacturing. First, he recognized that manufacturing
innovation had to both extend beyond direct application on the factory floor and
be integrated with actual manufacturing practice. Limiting one’s knowledge
field directly to production activities generates limited innovation. Deep
technical understanding comes from study, experimentation and intimate
collaboration with colleagues. Second, although he undervalued the intellectual
potential of workers, Taylor appreciated the wealth of experiential knowledge
resident amongst production workers. In fact, Juravich (1985) correctly claims
that “… one of Taylor’s fundamental insights – the notion that workers’
knowledge is the place to begin any production reform – has been forgotten. On
the other hand, those aspects of the Taylor system that stress management
control on the shop floor have been most thoroughly accepted” (p. 90). Thus,
selective interpretation of Taylor’s work led to the crisis in manufacturing that
precipitated the modern-day pronouncements of the empowerment movement.
Several writers have keenly demonstrated how even in this era of
disempowerment that the working knowledge of production workers remained
Empowerment in absolutely essential to maintaining functional plants (Darrah, 1996; Juravich,
Organizations 1985; Kusterer, 1978). In today’s attempts to re-appreciate knowledge in the
6,7 workplace, we now face the renewed peril that management may ultimately
seek to re-appropriate the knowledge that is particularly critical to their
businesses. Organizational practitioners and researchers preach on methods to
take advantage of tacit knowledge, diffuse knowledge more widely and faster
180 through an organization, or catalogue intellectual capital. Most interestingly,
many of the movements which have sought to streamline organizations and
make them more efficient, such as re-engineering, just-in-time (JIT) production,
statistical process control (SPC), best practices, and total quality management
(TQM) are ironically reminiscent of Taylor’s systematic approach to eliminating
waste. Juravich (1985) even suggests that the celebrated excellence of Japanese
manufacturing practice is perhaps due more to the perfection and refinement of
Taylor’s attention to detail and to the awareness of the importance of
manufacturing than to any unique Japanese or Eastern ethos (p. 94).
Klein (1989) recognizes that “… the attack on waste … inevitably means
more and more strictures on a worker’s time and action”. Klein (1989) further
reveals the drawbacks of some of these initiatives: the minimal buffers in JIT
can eliminate the slack and idle time workers require to conduct non-production
activities … thus substantially reducing opportunities to participate in
processes of innovation. Under such systems, it is hard to imagine how calls for
empowerment through self-organizing, organic structures can succeed. Even
Taylor recognized how a day full of production tasks sets ceilings on innovative
potential. Klein’s (1989) intriguing solution consists of scheduled “preventive
maintenance” for workers in which non-production, knowledge-creating
activities, such as collaborative gatherings and experimentation, can be
scheduled just as machines are temporarily removed from production for
maintenance requirements. This maintenance helps sustain long-term
performance.
What we witness then in empowerment for production workers is a conflict
between the imperative to make products faster and better and the time and
freedom to exercise the expanded tasks required to develop the knowledge
needed to sustain empowerment. In earlier work, I developed a conceptual
model for organizations to balance these goals through a set of production tasks
(the TPT): production, experimentation, and absorption (Ahanotu, 1998). The
learning during production is usually called learning-by-doing (LbD) –
although Upton (1995) does claim that operations activity can also produce new
design knowledge if workers are encouraged to actively seek to understand how
and why a process works. Experimentation is an opportunity to test and reflect
on new ideas apart from the immediate pressures of production. Absorption
involves any collaborative activities, particularly between production workers
and sources of specialized design knowledge. This same model is applicable
and relevant to principles of empowerment. The underlying presumption is that
without consistent and diligent attention to knowledge development that
integrates production workers into processes of innovation, we cannot achieve
empowerment among production workers. We next investigate the Empowerment
characteristics of knowledge and innovation that make them so critical to and production
empowering production workers. workers
Knowledge and the empowered, innovative production worker
It appears then that to talk of empowerment for production workers,
practitioners and researchers have come full circle in an attempt to restore that 181
which had previously existed. These modern efforts exist in a new knowledge-
intensive and informated production paradigm driven by powerful computing
technologies and sophisticated machinery. A direct emphasis on participative
roles in processes of innovation has not occupied enough of these discussions.
This participation proceeded unimpeded before mass production because new
manufacturing practice came about through the collective, evolutionary
activities of expert craftspeople. Now, the division of labor and complexity of
production technologies has apparently made roles of participation harder to
conceive. Barley (1996) is one of the few thinkers helping to clarify these roles
using knowledge and learning as a central theme: “Consultants portray
empowerment as a motivational device or a means of enhancing quality, rather
than a response to the fact that technical expertise increasingly lies in the lower
echelons”. Such a reality for manufacturing practice would certainly dismay
Taylor as being quite regressive. Yet, the misplaced emphasis on motivation
rather than knowledge development has certainly hindered the effective
implementation of empowerment programs.
To understand how and why the truly empowered production worker must
participate more fully in processes of innovation, we must conceptualize
production work around knowledge just as so much has been done to re-orient
the work of white-collar and other professional workers around knowledge.
Despite the neglect existing throughout the organizational learning and
knowledge management literature, Romer (1993) is encouraging: after noting
efforts at General Electric that have shown that “all of the good ideas come from
hourly workers”, Romer (1993) notes that “… every worker in an organisation,
from top to bottom, can become a ‘knowledge’ worker if given the opportunity
to do so.” Cusimano (1995), Darrah (1996), Juravich (1985), Kusterer (1978), and
Leonard-Barton (1995) all present convincing evidence of a centrality of
learning and knowledge to production work that is very suggestive in its
implications for manufacturing empowerment.
First and foremost, knowledge is the potential to do work (Ahanotu, 1998).
As such, an empowered production worker is one who can develop knowledge
free of artificial restraint. If knowledge development is otherwise blocked, then
the worker cannot express his/her fullest potential for work. The ultimate
expression of this potential is through innovation. However, as intimated earlier,
production workers have typically been constrained to learn within a given
production regime. That is, it has been some other function’s privileged
responsibility to innovate new production processes; once developed these ideas
are passed forward where manufacturing can begin to continuously improve on
Empowerment in the concept. This continuous improvement is largely learning-by-doing with
Organizations little option for other knowledge development activities (see Nilsson, 1995).
6,7 Some close exceptions have been the efforts of companies like IBM to
implement “early manufacturing involvement” in the development of new
semiconductor manufacturing processes (Bradbee et al., 1989).
Dertouzos et al. (1990) list several benefits of active knowledge development
182 amongst production workers: workers can organize their own work better, less
reliance on technical specialists for handling production contingencies, and
increased capability of the entire production system. These are all
characteristics of empowerment, and they rely on knowledge development.
Wilson (1996) describes this environment as “inform-and-entrust”. Workers are
given as much freedom as possible to communicate, share information and
knowledge, and learn in an organization of self-managed teams. Even without
official sanction empowered front-line workers tend to form communities-of-
practice that provide conduits of knowledge and innovation that give these
workers intimate and socially, rather than organizationally, validated control
over their work practices (Brown and Duguid, 1991).
An empowered production system is able to contribute its own knowledge to
the design function and even to internalize some design knowledge. Without
this bi-directional flow, production knowledge becomes isolated and detached
from larger organizational core competencies. Norros (1995) creates the term
“expansive system development” to describe the collaborative activities among
production workers and designers that can foster this type of knowledge flow.
The expertise of operators is improved through theoretical understanding and
awareness of the entire system and designers learn better about the realities of
production. This mutual understanding and the resulting bi-directional flow of
knowledge both relieves the constraints that each knowledge source presents
on the other and expands the opportunities for innovation, especially for
production workers. This process goes beyond “design for manufacture” (DFM)
through which designers remain in control of knowledge generation, and
production knowledge can be explicitly structured for codification (particularly
in computer-aided-design software). Expansive system development requires
the active participation and involvement of both knowledge sources.
Yet, instead of expansive system design, inform-and-entrust, high-trust
(Vickery and Wurzburg, 1996), sanctioned communities-of-practice, or the TPT,
we find production worker empowerment programs that too often limit
themselves to routine continuous improvement. Argyris (1998) identifies the
general, hidden limitations of many empowerment programs by asserting that
they only generate external commitment to improve performance in relatively
routine and structured tasks. As an example from Sitkin et al. (1994), the
emphasis on reducing error rates and doing things correctly the first time under
TQM forces production workers into single-loop learning (Argyris, 1993),
meaning that they focus on continuous improvement of current processes but
not on developing new knowledge for alternative production or product
possibilities. Despite Pasmore’s (1994) caution that there is a difference between
“constant improvement and perfection of the current system” (p. 82), most Empowerment
production workers experience these as one and the same. In fact, after and production
studying several industrial companies, Neal and Tromley (1995) assert that workers
“generally major technological changes are not a result of quality improvement
process activities”, again suggesting that continuous improvement is only
innovation of a limited scope. After all, innovations usually increase error rates
before reducing them, working against the edicts of total quality programs. 183
Thus, efficiency-based manufacturing practices such as TQM can indeed
have the effect of limiting empowerment rather than encouraging it (see Klein,
1989). Sitkin et al. (1994) introduce total quality learning (TQL) as one solution.
TQL is implemented in the nascent, uncertain stages of a production system
where tuning of learning processes instead of TQM’s tools of cybernetic control
is paramount. After a certain body of knowledge has been gained, TQM
becomes more applicable. Wilson (1996) proffers knowledge management as an
improvement upon TQM. I have presented the TPT as a conceptual framework
for resolving dilemmas of knowledge development for production workers
(Ahanotu, 1998). The primary point is that knowledge-based manufacturing
practices are key for taking the next step in freeing up the factory floor to
exercise its highest of potential. They are key to supporting the empowered,
innovative production worker.

Examples from industry

While my own empirical research in this area, using the semiconductor
industry and other smaller industries, is still on-going, there are a few examples
from the literature which show promise. I present here one example from the
literature and another example from one exploratory case study (together with
some supporting literature).
The New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) plant in Fremont,
California (USA) is an example of a company that gives its workers time to
exercise the non-production activities conducive to empowerment. When work
is low, rather than automatically reducing the workforce, NUMMI sends
workers into knowledge-creating activities, kaizen teams, to work on specific
improvement projects or to training classes (Adler, 1993). Although this process
does not guarantee innovative thinking beyond existing production systems, it
is a suggestive example of an opportunistic technique that utilizes spare or
slack resources. Even more germane to the framework I am proposing is the
job-enlargement that brings NUMMI production workers closer to industrial
engineers. Production workers devise their own work by learning work
analysis, description, and improvement. Interestingly, they also use the
organizational hierarchy as a supporting structure for their efforts and
standardization to diffuse the lessons learned from effective work practices
(Adler, 1993). The use of the hierarchy can be beneficial if each level adds value
to the level below (Espejo et al., 1996). As an example of the expertise and
knowledge developed, employees made over 10,000 suggestions in 1991 with
over 80 per cent of those being implemented (Adler, 1993).
Empowerment in Sun Hydraulics of Sarasota, Florida (USA) essentially allows its
Organizations approximately 280 employees (at the Sarasota valve-making plant that I visited)
6,7 to choose their individual levels of empowerment. Because workers can plan out
their own work and can freely collaborate with engineering staff, a sizable
number of employees (about 20-25 per cent, according to various informants)
actively drive innovation on the factory floor. One particularly exceptional
184 employee with whom I spoke implemented a novel manufacturing process to
make a product that had previously presented the company with a host of
production problems. The significance of Sun’s empowerment concept is
substantial, considering that both production and innovation occur without
official job titles, with salaries that match the average industry rate, and
without special recognition given for innovations or improvements (also see
Henderson, 1997; Kaftan and Barnes, 1991). Both Salancik and Pfeffer (1978)
and Argyris (1998) help us understand such a system by challenging the
efficacy of external rewards in fostering effective work practices. Specifically,
Argyris (1998) suggests that most reward systems only reinforce external
commitments, as opposed to intrinsic and lasting commitments, by creating
“dependency” on these rewards to gain satisfaction from work. These scenarios
again suggest that empowerment should be knowledge-based. Ultimately,
effective empowerment co-exists with opportunities to freely exercise working
knowledge and to participate in processes of innovation.

Summary and conclusions

Vickery and Wurzburg (1996) identify increased productivity, shorter
production cycles, and improved quality as benefits of highly trained (for my
purposes, knowledgeable) production workers, but they admit that the
causality of these improvements is not readily evident. Indeed, in general, Roth
and Miller (1992) claim that we have a poor understanding of how
manufacturing strategies create competitive capabilities and profit. This of
course makes implementation of production worker empowerment all the more
difficult: the benefits of empowerment are usually long-term and only gradually
become evident.
Rather than appeal directly to efficiency and other economic principles, this
paper presents a knowledge-based perspective as an alternative approach to
understanding both the need for and the impact of empowerment on the factory
floor. From this perspective, we can understand that empowerment cannot exist
without knowledgeable workers and that empowerment is not complete until
participation in processes of innovation occurs. Taylor (1911) recognized the
wealth of knowledge of production workers and concluded that to empower
management and engineers, organizations had to appropriate this knowledge
from production workers. Taylor understood the centrality of knowledge.
Where this principle was applied, it of course had the effect of disempowering
workers. Ultimately, a combination of design’s necessarily incomplete
knowledge of the realities of production, production worker’s inability to
participate in processes of innovation and fundamental change, and the
inevitable resulting decline in manufacturing performance in the face of a major Empowerment
re-alignment in global production potentials and capabilities, necessitated and production
today’s empowerment movement. workers
This paper demonstrates that empowerment for production workers comes
hand-in-hand with closer, long-term linkages to design sources of knowledge and
a loosening of the ties to short-term efficiency-based logic. There exists no single
organizational structure or optimal industrial model that best accomplishes this 185
goal, but each level of the organization must contribute knowledge-based value
to the overall manufacturing mission. Now that manufacturing practice has
begun to return to full utilization of working knowledge and innovation, it is
hoped that sustained emphasis on knowledge-based practices will establish well-
grounded empowerment on the factory floor. I also hope to encourage continued
research into knowledge-based principles for furthering the goals and
methodologies of empowerment in manufacturing organizations.

References
Adler, P.S. (1993), “Time-and-motion regained”, in Howard, R. and Haas, R.D. (Eds), The Learning
Imperative: Managing People for Continuous Innovation, Harvard Business School Press,
Boston, MA.
Ahanotu, N.D. (1998), “A conceptual framework for modeling the conflict between product
creation and knowledge development amongst production workers”, Journal of Systemic
Knowledge Management, Vol. 1 No. 1, e-journal at http://www.free-press.com/journals/
knowledge/issue1/article9.htm
Argyris, C. (1993), On Organizational Learning, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, MA.
Argyris, C. (1998), “Empowerment: the emperor’s new clothes”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 76
No. 3, pp. 98-105.
Barley, S.R. (1996) “Technicians in the workplace: ethnographic evidence for bringing work into
organization studies”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 41, pp. 404-41.
Bradbee, G.R., Gates, K.B. and Wilcox, R.B. Jr (1989), “Early manufacturing involvement in new
process technology”, IEEE/Semi International Semiconductor Manufacturing Science
Symposium, Burlingame, CA, pp. 12-16.
Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. (1991), “Organizational learning and communities-of-practice:
toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation”, Organization Science,
Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 40-57.
Cusimano, J.M. (1995), “Turning blue-collar workers into knowledge workers”, Training &
Development, Vol. 49 No. 8, pp. 47-9.
Darrah, C.N. (1996), Learning and Work: An Exploration in Industrial Ethnography, Garland
Publishing, New York, NY.
Dertouzos, M.L., Lester, R.K. and Solow, R.M. (1990), Made in America: Regaining the Productive
Edge, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Espejo, R., Schuhmann, W., Schwaninger, M. and Bilello, U. (1996), Organizational
Transformation and Learning: A Cybernetic Approach to Management, John Wiley, New
York, NY.
Hayes, R.H., Wheelwright, S.C. and Clark, K.B. (1988), Dynamic Manufacturing: Creating the
Learning Organization, Free Press, New York, NY and Collier Macmillan, London.
Henderson, A. (1997), “Corporate freedom: Sun Hydraulics of Sarasota prides itself on a unique
management culture that encourages employees to be creative by leaving them alone”, Florida
Trend, Vol. 40 No. 4, pp. 54-6.
Empowerment in Hirschhorn, L. (1984), Beyond Mechanization: Work and Technology in a Post-industrial Age, The
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Organizations Honold , L. (1997), “A review of the literature on employee empowerment”, Empowerment in
6,7 Organizations, Vol. 5 No. 4, pp. 202-12.
Juravich, T. (1985), Chaos on the Shop Floor: A Worker’s View of Quality, Productivity, and
Management. Temple University Press, Phialdelphia, PA.
Kaftan, C. and Barnes, L.B. (1991), “Sun Hydraulics Corporation (A and B) (abridged case study)”,
186 Harvard Business School Case Study, Vol. 9-491-119, pp. 1-17.
Klein, J.A. (1989), “Human costs of manufacturing reform”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 67
No. 2, pp. 60-6.
Kusterer, K.C. (1978), Know-how on the Job: The Important Working Knowledge of “Unskilled”
Workers, Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
Leonard-Barton, D. (1995), Wellsprings of Knowledge, Harvard Business School Press, Boston,
MA.
Neal, J.A. and Tromley, C.L. (1995), “From incremental change to retrofit: creating high-
performance work systems”, Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 42-54.
Nilsson, E.A. (1995), “Innovating-by-doing: skill innovation as a source of technological advance”,
Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 33-46.
Norros, L. (1995), “An orientation-based approach to expertise”, in Hoc, J., Cacciabue, P.C. and
Hollnagel, E. (Eds), Expertise and Technology: Cognition and Human-Computer Cooperation,
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 141-64.
Pasmore, W.A. (1994), Creating Strategic Change: Designing the Flexible High-performance
Organization, Wiley, New York, NY.
Romer, P. (1993), “Ideas and things: the concept of production is being re-tooled”, The Economist,
Vol. 328 No. 7828, pp. SS70-SS72.
Roth, A.V. and Miller, J.G. (1992), Success Factors in Manufacturing. Business Horizons,
Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 73-81.
Salancik, G.R. and Pfeffer, J. (1978), “A social information processing approach to job attitudes and
task design”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 224-53.
Sitkin, S.B., Sutcliffe, K.M. and Schroeder, R.G. (1994), “Distinguishing control from learning in
total quality management: a contingency perspective”, Academy of Management Review,
Vol. 19 No. 3, pp. 537-64.
Taylor, F.W. (1911), The Principles of Scientific Management, Harpers & Brothers Publishers,
New York, NY.
Upton, D.M. (1995), “Flexibility as process mobility: the management of plant capabilities
for quick response manufacturing”, Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 12 Nos 3-4,
pp. 205-24.
Vickery, G. and Wurzburg, G. (1996), “Flexible firms, skills and employment”, The OECD
Observer, No. 202, October/November, pp. 17-21.
Wilson, D.A. (1996), Managing Knowledge, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford.