Bureaucracy Transcended? New Patterns of Employment Regulation and Labour Control in the International Automotive Industry

During the last two decades the notion of post-modern organisations has emerged as a central theme in management and labour studies in research into the changing nature of the firm. It has been notably associated with changes in the nature of work and employment regulation supposedly necessary for global competition. The assumption is that the reorganisation of core work permits workers to enhance performance through participating in decisions that alter the traditional Taylorist organisational routines (Appelbaum et al.. 2000). Thus, work is reorganised in such a way as to use participative shop-floor production teams in problem solving and statistical process control. Moreover, individuals should be rewarded on the basis of their contribution to company performance. These supposedly are at the heart of the new organisational transformations. Among many practitioners and researchers this transformation seems to have been taken as a sign of a shift from Weber’s typology of bureaucracy to post-bureaucracy at the level of work organisation. What is commonly agreed is that at the heart of societal notions of the post-bureaucratic organisation is the idea of a more flexible, integrated and increasingly productive set of employment and industrial relations requiring changes in the methods of production and corporate organisational structures.