Power at Work: How Employees Reproduce the Corporate Machine

Providing detailed insights into working life, McCabe, a well known author in the fields of organization studies, labour process theory and critical management studies offers a distinctive approach to innovation in the work place.

In this ethnography of a major US bank he argues that many innovations associated with the ‘new’ corporation seem to reproduce many of the conditions that we associate with the industrial age such as hierarchy, the division of labour, task specialization and command and control approaches to management. Through exploring strategy, technology, teamwork and culture change programmes in a contemporary organization, McCabe demonstrates the debilitating consequences of these interventions.

This book explores a range of questions, including:

• Do employees who are treated as machines become machines?
• How do they cope with work that regards them as less than human?
• Do managers dream of electric staff?
• What are the consequences of such thinking and are there alternative ways to organize work in the twenty- first Century?

Accessible to numerous levels: undergraduate, MA and MBA, this book is an excellent resource for those studying business and management, organization studies, sociology of work, employee relations, psychology of work and strategy.