Factory Innovations And Management Machinations: The Productive And Repressive Relations of Power

This article explores how power is exercised by managers in both ‘repressive’ ways so as to chase out or deny alternative interests/subjectivities and in ways which are ‘productive’ of the subjectivity of those they employ and indeed their own subjectivity. Rather than necessarily an intention of managers, exercising power in productive and repressive ways, is a condition and consequence of the strategies they deploy. Nonetheless, the concern here is to question the totalizing effects of power whether in relation to management strategy, total quality management, business process reengineering or culture change. Through exploring innovation in an established automobile manufacturing company, it is argued that a necessary though not sufficient condition of such a prospect, is that managers reconstitute themselves. It is demonstrated that such a reconstitution is problematic when one considers managers as thinking, social beings, situated in a historical context of power and inequality rather than structural automatons or agents that are free of power.