Willmott Accounting Representation

Accounting Representation and the Road to Commercial Salvation

Mahmoud Ezzamel Cardiff University

Simon Lilley Leicester University

Hugh Willmott Cambridge University

We acknowledge the research support provided by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the EIASM Workshop on Writing, Rationality and Organization, Brussels, 21-22 March 1994. The authors are particularly grateful for the helpful suggestions made by Bob Cooper, Anthony Hopwood, Rolland Munro and two anonymous reviewers. The usual disclaimers apply.

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ACCOUNTING REPRESENTATION AND THE ROAD TO COMMERCIAL SALVATION

Abstract The paper examines the contribution of inscriptions, in particular new accounting measures, to a process of transforming the ethos and operations of `Britech’, a high tech division of a major British manufacturer. Focusing upon the increased and changing use of inscriptions at this site, we interpret them as moves to signify and facilitate an increasingly “commercial” orientation towards activities. We describe how new writings, particularly new management accounting measures, were deployed to create spaces of representation in which traditional views and practices were problematized in a strategic effort to constitute a new organizational reality for Britech employees. The new systems of inscription, we argue, were a key resource in the translation of established practices. This translation was facilitated by writings that expressed and promoted conditions of accelerating change that were prompted by pressures to avoid closure or divestment of the Britech assembly site. Analysis of the inscriptions is thus of significance for understanding how a human agency deemed capable of enacting the new commercial agenda at ‘Britech’ is constituted and reproduced.

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ACCOUNTING REPRESENTATION AND THE ROAD TO COMMERCIAL SALVATION Despite the importance of writing1 for the communication of information and the promotion of a common frame of reference, its presence and effect in organizations has attracted little direct attention from researchers.2 Although accounting inscriptions such as budgets, performance measures, periodic reports, memos, etc. are widely deployed inter alia in the enactment of what is accounted for in organizations, and have been extensively researched as sets of techniques and practices that impact on organizational functioning, the particular attributes they have, and their power effects as forms of writing per se, remain to be researched adequately (but see Latour, 1990; Robson, 1992). Moreover, our knowledge is limited concerning the extent to which accounting inscriptions permeate a particular organizational layer more than others, and the particular discontinuities (e.g., changes in ownership structure or market conditions) that condition, enable or impede changes in the form of existing inscriptions or the emergence of new written measures.

Our principal concern in this paper is to explore the roles played by new forms of written representations, in particular accounting inscriptions, in contemporary work organizations. We examine the inscription and reception of new performance measures at Britech (a pseudonym of a division of a British high-tech manufacturer that produces/assembles small numbers of very high value products that are sold in global markets) that heralded and promoted what we characterise as ‘a more commercial agenda’. During the three years of our study (1993-96), Britech was in the process of becoming designated as a distinct and separate “space of representation” (Miller, 1992; Miller and O'Leary, 1993; Carmona et al., 2002) responsible for its own performance in the market, having previously been an integral part of a sprawling conglomerate. In the early 1990s, following a significant reduction in public contract business, the site had been regarded as “uncompetitive” with a very uncertain future, and a variety of initiatives were under-way to save it 1

We take a broad definition of `writing’ here, encompassing a range of representational forms including the alphanumeric and the graphical, whether paper or screen-based. 2 The power of writing (Derrida, 1976; 1978; Ong, 1982; McArthur, 1986; Goody, 1986; 1987) is evident both in the importance that is attached to “putting it in writing”, and in the reluctance of those seeking to keep their options open to commit themselves to the relative permanence and presumed unambiguity of the written word. Writing is a systematic conversion of the power relations between controller and controlled into written words (Foucault, 1974); indeed, inscribed texts are fundamental ‘facts’ of power (Nietzsche, 1930). Writing is subject to processes of interpretation, and it is therefore necessary to pay attention to how inscriptions are received and deployed.

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from closure. In addition to internal changes, negotiations were in train to transform the site into part of a joint production venture with a foreign partner3. This anticipated ‘selling’ of the organization served to intensify the ‘need’ for internal transformation.

Focusing upon the emergence of diverse written performance measures in Britech, we seek to examine the potential of writing for establishing inscriptions that are generally presented by managers as an impersonal, neutral set of mechanisms and metrics for removing unnecessary ambiguity and wastage of resource. We explore the impact of: (i) changes in the form of inscription and representation at senior and middle management levels; and (ii) the introduction of new inscriptions on the shopfloor. We locate the emergence of the new inscriptions within the context of efforts to secure capital needed to re-equip and re-organize Britech. We read the new performance inscriptions as devices for supporting and justifying the attraction of levels of investment necessary to refurbish the plant and thereby maximize the chances of its profitable survival.

We do not, however, view these inscriptions as purely ritualistic formulae developed to impress or appease senior managers of the parent company. At Britech, the extensive use of writing was accompanied by a reorganization of the shopfloor into teams with operational responsibility for adhering to the targets marked out in the new inscriptions. This move identified workers as individuals capable of interpreting complex processes, making choices and exercising discretion to ensure that targets were met. Hence, the inscriptions were present and influential on the shopfloor in articulating and constructing a new from of power/knowledge. This move went well beyond a Taylorist intention to appropriate employees’ knowledge and place it exclusively in the province of management. For the new manufacturing practices at Britech sought to discipline employee knowledge within a series of inscriptions designed by managers but shared with and enacted by workers. Their purpose was to secure managerial control over production processes but in a way that was intended to involve employees in the exercise of managerial discipline, enshrined in the inscriptions, by inviting them to participate in planning and organizing their work as well as monitoring their own achievement, rather than to distance or alienate employees from its operation.

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Initial attempts to form a joint venture with one foreign partner fell through at a relatively early stage of the study. Britech eventually became part of a European consortium of three partners that sought to develop a new generation of products. Towards the end of our study, Britech’s higgest and most established competitor ceased trading and thereby at a stroke secured the company’s future.

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The inscriptions contributed to the development of a survival ethos that emphasized the necessity of shifting rapidly from a factory regime based on ‘cost plus’ defence contracting to a regime that aspired to (re)organize the manufacture of products at commercially viable levels of cost, quality and delivery. These manufacturing practices were greeted by many employees with a degree of scepticism about the new regime and the prospects of its smooth and full implementation. Accordingly, we do not regard employees as ‘inscription dopes’. We recognise how they are capable of developing alternative readings of the new inscriptions - as ‘nonsense’, ‘the latest fad’ or ‘old wine in new bottles’ (Bougen, 1989), or indeed as part of a managerial offensive intended to secure commitment to the demands of an intensifying agenda of commercialism (Munro and Hatherly, 1993). By attending to the promotion of new forms of communication and accountability through writing, we note how the operation of these measures could be curtailed and their effects could be contested.

Our empirical material is drawn from several sources: (i) over 50 semi-structured interviews, each lasting between one and one and a half hours, with senior managers, middle managers, shop stewards, supervisors and fitters in Britech; (ii) numerous internal documents; (iii) repeated visits to examine the organization and use of inscription in the factory; and (iv) press cuttings. Therefore, we draw upon both actual inscriptions (ii & iii) and accounts of these inscriptions by internal (i) and external (iv) informants.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we describe the conditions claimed to necessitate sweeping changes in culture, processes, structure, and accounting at Britech. We then analyze the shift from production-push to build-to-order and the emergence of the new commercial agenda. Focusing upon a particular inscription - that of a ‘motorway’, we explore how this was deployed to emphasize the interdependence of processes, technical literacy and commercial urgency. Then we discuss the introduction of new accounting measures and practices before examining the key role played by human agency in these processes and commenting on the possibilities of resistance on the shopfloor. Finally, in a concluding section, we elaborate our understanding of the varying visibility of the power of accounting inscriptions.

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THE PREVIOUS CONTEXT OF BRITECH Britech has been one of the pioneers in its industry in terms of technology, product design and reliability. Its commercial activities began in the 1920's as a stand alone business and the company continued to grow over the next five decades. In the early 1980's, Britech was acquired by a large company, which itself was formed in the 1970's through the amalgamation of a disparate group of businesses. The parent company was noted for the quality of its engineering skills while exhibiting some financial weaknesses. At the time of Britech’s acquisition, these weaknesses were not seen by management to pose a problem as the parent’s major client (Defence) indemnified losses by paying prices based on an agreed formula of ‘cost plus’. However, following defence cuts in the 1980’s, defence contracting became more competitive. This placed additional risk on the parent company that sought to shift its focus towards the civil market.

In order to strengthen its financial position following the removal of loss indemnity, the parent acquired a motor manufacturer (£3 Billion turnover) and a property business (£280 Million). However, these acquisitions became a drain on cash as their assets were tied to the business, a problem that was compounded as the property business suffered from a market collapse during the late 1980’s. To improve cash flow, the parent launched a rights issue of over £400 Million, but the financial situation continued to deteriorate. By the end of 1992 group losses were nearly £200 Million, the share price had dropped from £6 to £1 over twelve months, annual interest payments approached £200 Million, and cash flow shortages became acute.4

In 1992 a new management team was appointed in the parent company with responsibility to improve the financial position and to divest ‘non-core’ businesses. Britech’s customised product range, which by this time was enjoying strong demand that exceeded its production capacity, was defined as ‘core’ business. Yet, Britech was also a major loss maker, mainly because of fierce competition from a (heavily subsidised) European manufacturer but also because its activities were deemed to be extremely costly. To minimize liabilities arising from commitments to past customers 4

As the recession struck, many companies leasing some of the parent’s major products returned them. The parent could only obtain poor lease rates for their product, rates which could hardly cover its own lease payments. The parent was initially effectivly indemnified against losses as its sales were at cost-plus but because of a significant change in the market from defence to civil deals, this indemnity disappeared when its sales became based on fixed prices.

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(e.g. ongoing maintenance, buy back), the parent partially disengaged itself from Britech by converting it into a stand alone subsidiary: “[the Group] couldn't stand the losses and basically....the level of resource that was out there....was horrific as well” (Accounting Manager). The creation of a ‘separate’ company was intended to isolate these problems and to provide maintenance support to past customers: “[We] have a lot of products that are still being used by customers and they need supporting and maintaining. So who else better to do that than [Britech]? So that's another rationale to keep [Britech] going, to service the fleet [already out there].” (Senior Manager)

Some long-serving senior managers perceived the separation of Britech from the parent company as a damage limitation move for the group. It was also claimed that recent recruits to Britech were determined, with the support of the parent, to explore avenues that would enable Britech to fly rather than fail. The new recruits, appointed in early 1993, included: one Senior Manager drawn from the accountancy profession as well as a Managing Director, a Senior Production Manager and a Senior Human Resources Manager who were all recruited from the motor car industry. A number of middle managers were then recruited from a wide range of industries.

The other main prong to Britech’s plan was the intent to attract, through a joint venture, a cash-rich partner who was under-resourced in technological and manufacturing expertise. This partner, it was hoped, would finance the transformation of Britech into a viable enterprise in exchange for the acquisition of expertise that, in the medium term, would enable it to develop its own manufacturing capacity. Such a joint venture (jv) was seen to be the only alternative to the unmitigated and terminal application of ‘hard love’ (Legge, 1989) by the parent organisation: “The rationale for the jv is certainly that [the division's poor results]. I think in simple terms [the group] had two options, close or sell, simple as that....[The site] has made losses under [group control], I suppose it's a cash drain....If you look at the `92 accounts there was provision in that which was one option for the site. If we don't have option A we have option B. It's as simple as that really. But option B [i.e. closure] isn't the option. Option A is the joint venture ongoing, that's what we're working to” (Senior Manager). The prospects of entering into a joint venture were, however, uncertain and, in any event, were understood to complement rather than substitute for a programme of strategic reorganization of

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Britech. Central to this drive to restructuring Britech was the problematization by the new managers of the legacy of organizational, engineering, and accounting practices in Britech. Table 1 below contrasts this problematization against the recipes promoted by the new managers to deal with these problems.

INSERT TABLE (1) ABOUT HERE The new managers diagnosed Britech as having an outdated functional structure that militated against concern for processes, an oral culture that vested engineering knowledge in few experts who in turn controlled work organization; fragmented operations and failure to recognise their holistic nature; dominance of engineering mentality over pressing commercial considerations; and building for stocks rather than producing to order. Previous engineers were criticized for being obsessed with purely technical matters and driving the business primarily by these considerations without paying attention to commercial imperatives - for example, by ignoring the cost of the components they designed. One Senior Design Engineer, who has since retired recalled “We just did what we thought was best from an engineering point of view…We were very much interested in the best structures without the economics at all.” Since contracts were based upon ‘cost plus’, there was no incentive to contain costs or streamline established working practices so long as these delivered “what was best from an engineering point of view”.

Previous management accounting practices at Britech were presented as “built up from a ‘function’based organization” and focused upon product cost, utilisation and efficiencies using manhours as the only cost driver. The accountants were castigated for needing “a dose of reality” (Production Manager) because they represented Britech as a fragmented set of functions instead of emphasizing the holistic nature of the business. Middle managers also represented previous accounting reports as having little value by claiming that they were accessible only to senior/middle managers or that the reports simply “sat on the accountants’ shelves”. Although these reports seemed to have “monitored everything to death”, they did not reach shopfloor operators except through oral communication via cell leaders:

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“[The old report] was of very poor quality. It gave you very little information. The information it did give you was very difficult to decipher and work with. It was very difficult to say to operators what we achieved this week and what we hope to achieve next week.” (Middle Manager, our emphases)

In the remainder of the paper, we will focus on what we identify as key issues rather than follow mechanically the order of issues listed in Table (1) above. We will argue that the new management team set about to address the problems they had identified (see above) by: (i) evolving the new vision that would guide Britech’s future decisions; (ii) developing a new organization of work to replace an ‘out of favour’ functional structure; (iii) disembodying the skill/knowledge base, so that it was liberated from the province of the individual ‘barons’ of craft expertise and inscribed for all to access5; (iv) redefining and inscribing task boundaries and businesses; and (v) evolving and using new written performance measures commensurate with the newly established commercial agenda. We address the first four issues in the next section, leaving the fifth issue to a later section.

FROM PRODUCTION PUSH TO MARKET PULL: THE EMERGENCE OF COMMERCIALISM AT BRITECH

The Post-Disengagement Challenge: Divisional Vision and Accounting Inscription The survival of Britech was in the balance following its separation from the parent, the loss of the security of ‘cost-plus’ defence contracting and the shift to producing for the more competitive civil market. As one Britech manager observed of this shift: “We no longer have this one customer [Defence] that we work with on long time scales. They don't mind if it takes you three years to do a [product]. You are now in the civil market where all they are interested in is the contract date [and] the price. And the price is determined by the market not what it costs.”

The removal of the predictability associated with defence contracting was compounded by the simultaneous removal of the protective shield provided by the parent: “Because we now stand alone we've not got the [group] piggy bank so we've got to be slicker, quicker. We've got to be much leaner and meaner.” (Senior Manager)

Early in 1994, a major New Business Initiative (NBI, a pseudonym) was launched by the Managing Director of Britech through a video presentation, and in July 1994, it was printed in a booklet. In the 5

To disseminate and disembody skill and knowledge is to reduce the dependence of the organization upon the expertise of a few agents and thereby reduce their capacity to influence and control.

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NBI it was stated that: (i) “We cannot expect [the parent] to support us indefinitely as a drain on the company’s resources”; and (ii) “We will need to convince our partners in the Joint Venture6 that we are the best site to assemble the new product when it is developed - and to do this we need to be world class in both efficiency and profitability”. It was claimed that, given the recession and the intense market competition, improvements in the financial performance of Britech could not be achieved through increased prices; hence7:

“If we cannot meet our profit targets from prices we are left with two alternative paths to follow: to cut our costs and bring in more revenues from other activities.” (NBI Booklet)

The NBI document identified three business objectives for Britech: (i) to break even in 1997 and be profitable thereafter; (ii) to be cash flow positive 1995 – 2000; and (iii) to reduce the working capital needed to finance sales. Against these objectives, eleven key themes8 with their targets were identified, each being included in the NBI with its own allotted champion manager. The themes were: enabling people to maximize their contribution to achieve profitability; quality enhancement and elimination of non-value adding work; reduction in unit cost of production; releasing potential and contribution from facilities, assets and infrastructure; adding market value to products and services; controlling cash; building to order; maximizing opportunities for revenue enhancement; effective management of product and service change; product evolution; and spares.

For each theme, accounting measures were used to construct a scenario as to how, and by how much, it would contribute to the business objectives of Britech. The theme on reduction in unit cost of production, for example, had a target of reducing the Bill of Material cost by 19% on the previous year in order to improve profitability by £36 million, and it spelt out clearly the key tasks from which the specific contributions to this target were to be achieved. The spares business was to increase its sales by 30%, reduce its cost by 25%, reduce its inventory by 15%, and increase its profitability from £1 Million to £8 Millions. Project evaluation was to be performed in half the previous time at one third of previous cost and cash flow was to be increased by £600 Million. Similarly, the build-

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At that time, the prospect of establishing a joint venture with a cash rich but technologically less advanced partner seemed likely. 7 Other internal documents also hammered the message home; in another glossy document the General Manager of the factory stated: "We must recognise however, that our costs are far too high in relation to the output we are achieving". 8 These were more like perfromance indicators, but in consistency with Britech’s inscriptions we use the term ‘theme’ throughout the paper.

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to-order theme had a target of reducing inventory used in final assembly from £155 Million to £65 Million by ensuring that 100% of orders are delivered “first time, on time, every time”. The previous production method of ‘production push’ was seen to have resulted in an over-reliance upon a rigid and risky production plan which had ultimately faced the problem of finding customers. In contrast, build-to- order was presented as a flexible, pull process that produced only as and when “our customers” required it to. “Evangelical”9 Operations Accountants played a key role by working with production and logistics staff to create credible scenarios of future costs. Such practices were deemed essential when production had to be reverse-engineered from seemingly ‘given’ pricing constraints. As a result, these accountants were granted a much greater scope of influence over production at the site compared to the accountants of the past (see below).

Restructuring Britech INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE The new managerial regime at Britech sought to instantiate a (more) commercial rationality by making production and pricing policies more responsive to the dictates of the market “There are still more [products] available than customers, which inevitably means that we are not obtaining the prices we require for the [product]” (NBI Booklet). It was anticipated that simply re-arranging functional units - for example, by reducing their size or even by delimiting their scope - would be insufficient. The ‘old’ work arrangements, structures and measurements were construed by the new managers as militating against attempts to improve Britech’s capacity to compete on price and performance. A document entitled “Announced Organisation” issued in 1991 stated “We must ensure a market led culture utilising a process based management structure aligned to the market drivers and business objectives.” It was claimed that production processes were masked within functions (as a ‘black box’) as, at that time, the focus on functions was paramount. The functional structure was considered to harbour ‘undesirable’ features such as walls between groups, gaps in activities, bottlenecks, a ‘relay racing’ mentality in production, ‘poor teamwork’, ‘power plays’, ‘poor communication’, frustration, long-lead time and financial waste (see Figure 1). One Manufacturing Engineering Manager described how under the functional structure “sporadic, very high profile activities were pursued at a considerable expense to other activities.” The new managers

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In their own words.

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presented the methods of organizing production they inherited as something that inhibited innovation and change because, as one Production Manager argued, they “stimulated very little intellectual challenge of where the front is and where the boundaries could be pushed forward.” Another Manager observed that as multi-functional teams began to be established on the shopfloor, while preserving the functional structure “it was getting harder to do our ‘every day job’ as well as being on all these multi-function teams.” The shopfloor considered the functional structure to have been chaotic and conducive to wasting resources:

“Money was going down the drain unnecessarily. It was going down like water, right. And the main things were organised chaos, incompetence at a very high level, right and everything else that went with it.” (Shopfloor Convenor)

One shopfloor Fitter likened the functional structure to “the old military style, just order it kind of style.” He went on to suggest that under that structure the rationalising of activities was based on “the wrong arguments” which focused on the function rather than the process. Another Fitter referred to the paper chase required under the functional structure to order even very minor items needed for production, such as bolts, which required the shopfloor to “get a memo out from the top, you know from the ivory tower, which had to be followed to the letter”. This red-tape was rationalised on the basis of seeking to keep inventory levels down, even though the volatility of product demand required much greater flexibility in stocking such low-cost items, whose availability was critical because if they were out of stock it took “thirty-eight week waiting list” to secure these bolts, with the inevitable delay in product completion and delivery to customer.

INSERT FIGURES 2 AND 3 ABOUT HERE

The various changes introduced to reduce cost and waste were accompanied by a shift from the discredited functional organization to a matrix structure presented via text, diagrams and pictures. The new representation construed Britech as comprising six product-oriented processes: marketing, selling, building, customising, customer support, and management and control. The processes were to be managed by product teams and steering groups with functions being subsumed within processes rather than the reverse, as was previously the case (See Figure 2). Clearly articulated reporting relationships were drawn to emphasise interdependence and clarity of the parts of the

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matrix. The reporting relationships detailed several dimensions; in particular, relevant strategies, objectives, funding, product requirements, budgets and resources, product building standards and conflict resolution.

Having already diagnosed a lack of commercialism as the main ailment of past practices at Britech, new prognoses were promoted: “We must ensure a market-led culture, utilising a process based management structure aligned to the market drivers and business objectives.” (Internal Document, 1991). The new structure was presented as one that would ensure “delivering customers requirements and continual process improvement through measurement”, enhance “ability to react”, “improve costs”, and avoid “political wranglings” as the new structure was presented as “seamless” and “achievement oriented” (see Figure 3). Multi-functional process management teams were deemed to be “the primary mechanism for managing a portfolio of activity” (Internal Document, 1991). Management commended a metaphor of the ‘motorway’, emphasizing urgency, interdependence, ease of reading signs, and speed of identifying the location of bottlenecks. This was presented as a major break away from the ‘relay racing’ mentality with its bottleneck problems.

The Disembodiment of Engine ering Knowledge Britech had three product lines in addition to providing substantial maintenance for in-service products. Competition for the first product was fierce but the market was expanding, hence managements’ ambition to maintain its 25% market share; in contrast, the market for the second product was fairly stable and the aim was to increase market share from 7% to 20% (Internal Document, 1991). The basic condition for continuation of activities at the site was identified as making its operations “cost-effective” (NBI Booklet).

The key staff working directly on the product, beyond the design stage, divided mainly into highly skilled electricians and fitters. The skills invested in electricians divided into two main types: basic, almost household, type of electrical skills, and more product-specific high-level skills that directly impacted on the safety of the product. According to one senior Design Engineer, the latter skills involve testing the functioning, continuity and safety of various complex high-spec electronic devices and electric wires, fitting them in the correct places, and ensuring that the aggregate electric load on

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the wiring when all the components were installed does not compromise product safety or violate the threshold required to avoid the risk of fire. In the case of fitters, their skills were also of a very high calibre. Although the various parts being assembled in Britech were manufactured elsewhere either within the Group or by other suppliers, fitters had to test them carefully for functionality and safety before they were put together. Moreover, the fitters’ skills involved “getting the structure of the product together, putting together pieces of equipment and hydraulics, pieces of wire of the correct length, so that the product is correctly fitted together as a working system” (senior Design Engineer). As another Manufacturing Engineer summed up the importance of fitting skills:

“Fitting is a bit of a worry. You’ve got to make sure everything is connceted properly. You’ve got to watch the hydraulic fluids and make sure everything is joined up on that. The other thing you’ve got to watch is when assembling the [product] you’ve got to make sure that one system does not interfer with another by abberation or rubbing, and you’ve got to make sure that if a fire occurred it would not spread from one system to another.”

Any errors in fitting or electrical work, no matter how simple, “would compromise the functioning of the various components and electronic devices to catastrophic consequences, by malfunctioning or giving conflicting, and at times, reverse directions to what is intended” (Assembly Manager).

In the ‘old days’, very little inscription of work organization took place on the shopfloor. Technical knowledge was entrusted to the working memories of factory employees and to their capacity to organize work processes. Much of that technical knowledge was acquired through apprenticeships that were frequently “handed down father to son” (Operations Manager), or “senior operator to apprentice” (Design Engineer). One Fitter stated that in the ‘old days’ he had to aquire and retain a knowledge of exactly what to do and the order in which the different pieces had to be fitted:

“There was nothing there to tell me what to do. I just had to know what to do. You never saw a design engineer, unless you had a real specific problem where you had to drag him out kicking and screaming to come and look at the [product]. And you were expected to carry the decision making process over every single facet of the [product].”

Thus, technical skill was vested in individual operators rather than disembodied as a set of procedures that can be taught to newcomers in a systematic way. Since only those shopfloor workers who understood the manufacturing and assembly activities knew in any detail how the job was progressing, it was possible to concoct plausible stories that managers were unable, and

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perhaps unwilling, to challenge. Management’s dependence upon shopfloor workers arose from the embodiment of expert knowledge in craft technology and its skilled operators. Management, it was claimed, neither had good knowledge of individual tasks nor a mental map of how the tasks were woven together:

“[In the old days] You knew what you could get away with. You knew when you were personally interrogated, you knew what your particular experience was of it. You made sure that you could show him [the superior] anything that he wanted to know. But that’s the thing. You were the technical expert and everybody accepted it and they knew it. That would never happen now. The manager would never ever get in that position.” (Engineer)

Even when some fitting instructions were written down in manuals, these seem to have been mainly for external legitimacy “In the past the starting point was pretty much the way we used to do service bulletins and maybe to a certain extent to do the bulletins for our exterior consumption” (Manufacturing Engineering Manager). As Ackroyd and Lawrenson (1996, p.182) have observed of craft technology: “Worker(s) autonomy extended to the task of dividing work between themselves, coordinating production activities between different skills, and between workers with different levels of skills.”10

To emphasize the ‘oral’, in contrast to the ‘written’ culture of the ‘old days’, one Manager said that once a fortnight “the production manager, who was an old war horse from the track, would come down and talk them [the shopfloor] through the history stage by stage and the lads would say where they were up to”. Referring to many of the charts installed on the shopfloor recently, he recalled the practice in the ‘old days’:

“No, we did not have any of these charts. All we had was this machine. It was one of my things that I did as a technical expert to understand the way that [the product] went together. Nobody told me. I just had to know it. There was nothing there to tell me what to do.”

INSERT FIGURE 4 ABOUT HERE 10

This understanding, and the risks posed to its perpetuation by writing, is not foreign to those who participate in such systems. Consider, as a dramatic illustration, the following excerpts from the nineteenth century member's pledge to the ‘Tin Plate Workers Society’ (from an exhibit at the Pump House People’s History Museum in Manchester, 1994): “I will never instruct any person in the art of tin plate making... I will never make known any signs, tokens, passwords, or write any information respecting this Society, on stones, sand, wood, tin, lead or anything visible or invisible to the eye... If I reveal any of this solemn obligation, may all the Society disgrace me so long as I live, and may what is now before me plunge my soul into the everlasting pit of misery.”

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The past ‘trusting’ of memory was perceived by the new managers to have preserved the status quo, allowing those with expertise to control the organization of work in sub-optimal ways. The new managers sought to render the process of production more transparent and manageable through the use of new inscriptions - in the form of shopfloor layouts, signing, and the use of highly detailed planning sheets and progress charts that signalled quickly and clearly problems and bottlenecks. Technical knowledge now had to be coded and inscribed in detail: “To protect ourselves we have to have it [technical knowledge] down in writing, every thing down in infinite detail and he [the operator] has to work to the instructions like a trained monkey” (Manufacturing Engineering Manager). One Manufacturing Director characterised the new philosophy as:

“We took the approach to attract a number of individuals from a wide range of industries to essentially seed in the middle level management at that time a change in thinking and the ability to challenge the black art of [product] construction and the heritage that had allowed a number of processes to evolve almost unchecked for such a considerable amount of time, such that they actually became the business’s biggest constraint.”

New knowledge - whether engineering, commercial, financial or managerial – was identified as a key driver of Britech’s future activities. In what was dubbed “The Process of Process Improvement”, reform was seen to depend upon, and be facilitated by, rendering visible and explicit - through writing and ‘modelling’ - as much as possible of what previously had been tacit and beyond the purview of formal procedures (see Figure 4).

The codification and depersonalisation of knowledge was intended to translate previously hidden and implicit knowledge into a written form that is visible for all to see and share:

“I don’t like any one person knowing everything that’s going on. I would rather everybody had access to the visibility so that they know exactly what is going on. People still say understanding what’s going on is the biggest problem. And there is no reason now for anybody not to know what is going on; the cell leaders and everybody else carries out the weekly briefs, the cascade briefs and everything else that we brief.” (Senior Production Manager)

It was claimed that changes in production technology had resulted in much greater interactions and information-sharing than previously: “There are thousands of such potential interactions to take into account in building [the product] and the complexity has evolved beyond the point when any single individual can understand it” (Senior Production Director). In a document titled “Process Modelling, Review and Improvement”, a chart was prepared, and widely circulated, with the aim of

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emphasizing both knowledge de-personalization and its importance for the effective management of interdependent activities. Modelling and business knowledge was called upon to inscribe and define current processes. Once defined in writing, current processes were to be analyzed using business knowledge; process metrics were to be developed; required processes were to be defined; and changes in plans and processes were to be effected. In short, knowledge of the production process was to be disembodied. Charts were prepared for each process: “Two of my values are visibility and shadow boards. I like to make things visible, cos if people can see that it’s visible, this is what this is about. The business awareness cell, the quality improvement cell and this, if you like, control centre are themes which I established to meet a requirement for that and the same theme has been picked up on now on employee communications. You can walk now up to the whole of this site and see different areas responding to different requirements as far as visibility is concerned.” (Senior Production Manager)

One way of de-personalizing and visualizing knowledge at Britech was the extensive deployment of bar charts. These were commended as particularly useful in storing valuable information for future use/analysis in order to improve performance on a continuous basis:

“Bar charting is actually the key to making sure that you’ve got repetitivity, taking the analysis off it and taking the information off it, analysing it and determining how to do it better next time. So a lot of effort goes into that, taking that information off the bar charts, the networks, and down loading that information and ensuring that we do it better next time and not make the same mistakes. It’s a very visual, visible tool. It is a very powerful tool to see where you are in the programme, where the labour is deployed, what is the labour that is required, etc.” (Production Manager)

One particularly acute problem was monitoring the use and movement across the factory of a large number of very expensive tools. ‘Shadow boards’ were presented as an effective way to handle this problem, according to one Senior Production Manager:

“Tools were a problem and we are trying to shadow board all of these resources, it all goes on the shadow in one way or another, markings on the floor or whatever. So that’s what I mean by shadow boarding and visibility and visibility charts as far as what I’d term plastic brains, are very very powerful. And that supplements what’s going on with the networks, the bar charting.”

These inscriptions, and the newly espoused concepts of monitoring, visibility and knowledgesharing, were increasingly promoted as part and parcel of the vision of the new management and its emphasis upon internalizing work targets and financial discipline into employees:

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“We actually share with people now as much as is possible what the business is, how it’s constructed and what it’s made up of and where the costs are... It should be more self-generating. The guys that are in the teams, they know what the milestone is and they’re very good, almost to a man, very very keen to get it.” (Senior Manager)

Moves to codify and inscribe previous tacit, ‘invisible’ knowledge were not primarily part of a Taylorist initiative intended to deskill the workforce. Rather, their stated intent was to subject Britech employees to an alternative disciplinary regime in which they were invited to participate, through involvement in planning and organizing their work, by making as well as reading the new inscriptions. It was through these inscriptions - milestones, progress charts, etc. – that senior management at Britech endeavoured to lay out the corporate road to commercial salvation. Inscribing Space and Businesses: Building the Motorway, Making the Motorists The disembodying and inscribing of knowledge at Britech was accompanied by attempts to redefine factory space and knowledge location by imposing new boundaries to make the flow of activities both more coherent and visible. A major aim was to encourage the sharing/transfer of skills across different production specialisms. The redefining of boundaries was considered an essential condition to effect the de-personalization of knowledge: “I want to get people more aware of what goes wrong in service, so that we can improve in some way our testing or whatever, or our assembly. So we’ve got to strike if you like new boundaries that say ’Ok how are we going to get that feedback?’...So that may impact on the boundaries that people traditionally operate within their disciplines.” (Senior Manager)

New boundaries that cut across disciplines were defined to promote feedback and to encourage cross-functional exchange and collaboration. Other initiatives, including the setting up of "multifunctional" teams, were deployed to strengthen and speed up the move in that direction. To facilitate the new focus upon processes and their added value, the new Finance Director and a Senior Finance Manager set about a (re)inscribing of divisions within the site to integrate functions. This new representation was conditioned by wider demands for change and aspirations for stronger financial accountability and was pursued through segmental disclosure and benchmarking: “In terms of pull, I think people are becoming aware that they need to be able to be benchmarked.11 I mean they don't really know if they're performing well or not. [Then the new FD] arrived here and asked the question “Well what's going on?” and he's not quite got the visibility he wanted. So we're moving towards segmental accounting in terms of profit centres, allocating working capital to each of the various sectors in the business so we can really benchmark their performance.” (Finance Manager) 11

Note here the re-presentation of the interests of others to legitim ate actions. Being seen to act on one’s own behalf is to risk being seen as self-interested and provides no such legitimatory grounds (Wildavsky, 1991).

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Three major segments12 were identified: product assembly, the spares business, and product simulators used for training customers. Within product assembly a coalition built around one of the Senior Production Managers and one of the Operations Accountants set about a further segregation. Three businesses were to be set up within the assembly segment: the manufacture of a major component, a standard product assembly and a product customisation. By doing this, a Manufacturing Manager claimed, Britech would have its own design, engineering, procurement and contract organization within each of the businesses to obviate the need to go to outside suppliers. Concurrently, new representations of work organization were made by an influential Production Director, based upon the metaphor of the motorway. 13 Another Director justified the use of the metaphor on the grounds that managers’ “powers of articulation are quite limited” and that he finds it easier to “convey [to his subordinates] in some detail what “good” would look like because most people actually struggle with trying to figure through in their minds where they are going.” The motorway metaphor was presented as a reflection of the extensive process mapping that went on in Britech and as an organizing principle for the new inscriptions of work organization and performance measures. Each business was to become a motorway with a network being constructed to manage interdependence between activities. The time implications of “bottlenecks” in this new “culture of urgency” were made clear: “The motorway type metaphor is the recognition that identifies that there are problems in the process and tends to lead people’s minds to think that it only has an effect at that particular part in a process map. The truth of it is when one is driving down the M6 and you get within forty miles of Birmingham you only need to get the traffic to slow down by five miles an hour because the M5 is speeding on at a disproportionate rate to the flow of the M6 and all of a sudden it has an impact on the process all the way through. Essentially it’s capturing the understanding that it’s not as simple as having process inefficiency in pockets, because it affects the whole, no matter how far upstream or downstream you are of it.” (Production Director)

Management’s desire was for the production ‘mentality’ associated with the motorway metaphor to cut through the supposed ‘black art’ of product construction at the site:

“He [the Production Director] came from the car industry and he really does come from the point of view: what is the problem? We have stable build volume, 20 plus or minus 4. We know exactly what we are going to build, we have got this commonality, we have got a stable production programme, stable in terms 12

Following the spirit of continual re-division, a fourth ’segment’ is now in place. Despite repeat ed inquiries during the interviews, no one seems to recall where the metaphor of the motorway came from. The Production Director took pride in referring to his MBA qualification which he had acquired relatively recently and which he claimed was an essential additional qualification to engineers that he demanded his junior colleagues to obtain. 13

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of ten months before deciding which kinds of products to build. Why aren’t we knocking them out like peas out of a pod?” (Senior Production Manager)

The Production Director saw the motorway metaphor as the means of improving response time. He foresaw the possibility of introducing this large element of predictability in the production planning process without sacrificing the scope to customize the product. He claimed he knew what parts, master build schedule, and assembly volume should be, and hence he characterized the control process as stable and predictable. One of the aims of the motorway metaphor was to emphasize to the shopfloor the multiplicity and interdependence of activities within the site in an image that was familiar and especially resonant to senior managers recruited from the car industry. Its focus upon the holistic nature of the business became paramount in sharp contrast to the previous tradition now presented as having parcelled the business into pockets of seemingly separate, and chaotically (dis)organized activities paralleled in the meanderings and intersections of secondary roads:

“Certainly if you’d set out to process the whole [old] organization trying to get it on a piece of paper, it’d be worse than spaghetti junction. It would be horrendous, because it would be a classic case of you do that and it goes into a loop and then comes out and you do that and nobody knows what’s going on.” (Finance Director)

Under the new process mapping style, processes were inextricably linked to the motorway, in the sense that each process would be achieved through driving on the appropriate motorway: “Once we identified the key processes we establish what the process motorways are” (Production Manager). It was claimed that the motorway network, presented in the form of a diagram, would lay out the ground required for an effective transformation towards desired objectives as the Production Director claimed: “The mechanism that we’re gonna adopt, is in establishing the vision for each one of the three businesses – here is a diagram that helps to establish the way in which each of these relates to each other and the way we cede authority for them to do their task, what we've looked at is establishing what the motorways are, or the key processes within each one. And the way we're gonna go through it is in giving them a motorway for each one of these major subjects that takes us from where we are currently to where we want to be, is to establish all the motorway service stations or junctions and what the goals and the tangible objectives are for each stage of that transition or evolution from A to B.”

The link between setting up the motorways and management vision was made by several managers: “The motorways help us clarify the visions, the process visions, that we’ve got in our strategy” (Senior Manager). One Senior Operations Manager stated that the motorway metaphor would help 20

eliminate production delay, by claiming that it would generate an optimum build cycle with a critical path which, when not achieved led to delays in the production programme. At the same time, management asserted that this new holistic view of activities, involving “a thinking, an understanding, a literacy” (Production Manager), was not to be achieved at the expense of individualized responsibility. Participants at the site were cast by production managers as drivers on and off the motorways. It was their responsibility to read the signs and, in the longer term to suggest ways of developing better motorways. Through “empowering” and “devolving ownership” for these new representations and the processes seen to underlie them, a new culture was envisioned and expected to emerge that, it was claimed, would accrue substantial benefits for Britech. The building of the motorways was also intended to improve competitiveness (at all levels), not least because, it was claimed, key processes would be ‘owned’ by employees. To dramatise this vision further, one Production Manager explained that the motorways were being built in the ‘back garden’ 14 of employees - that is, as close as possible to their users so that they would have to take responsibility for their motorway’s successful operation: “If it [the motorway] was in your own back garden and you had to manage it, the analogy is if it was a family business then you know, you are a nickel and dime merchant. You know the things you have to monitor and the things you don't and I'm working very much with a brief that I want these guys to be running them [the businesses] as if they were the Mafia. Therefore they’re concentrating on what makes money and they're very quick to get rid of that that's not opportune.” (Production Manager)

Moves to improve upon the current situation involved developing new products and work ‘processes’ documented through the carefully managed creation and employment of inscriptions. Key processes were identified, and these were focused upon customer, product and supply, with each of these three processes having attached to it associated activities. Each product team became linked explicitly to process teams appropriate for the product with the requisite marketing, selling, building (production), customising and customer support skills drawn from various functions; the emphasis being on process-based management. This way, it was claimed, “attaining improvements in business processes was ensured” (Manager).

This shift in emphasis was linked to a focus on understanding process mapping enshrined in the motorway metaphor (see earlier): “Each department now has to identify its customers. We’re very 14

“We tend to fall in the trap of using a whole bunch of analogies... to help express, describe in terms of what we’re conceptually trying to get across... We tend to use a considerable amount of metaphors, analogies and general mental descriptions” (Senior

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much into process mapping the work that we do. ISO9000 says that you should be able to look at each process and look at its inputs, its outputs and the causes that affect it” (Human Resource Manager). Key in this approach was the empahsis being placed upon ‘velocity ratio,’ or what one Manager defined as “the time it takes to do the work that’s inside the process divided by the total time that’s elapsed.” This new empahsis, it was claimed, required a radical shift in attitude among staff in a manner that moved away from the ‘old’ style of waiting for things to emerge before any action is taken towards a more entrepreneurial style that promoted taking initiative, innovation and experimentation with new modes of organizing to provide instructive, remedial guidance to those with a ‘settler mentality’. By following the new pathways and adopting the understandings laid out in the site representations by the pioneers, it was anticipated that novel ways of working would be engaged in by the ‘settlers’ with a security provided by these new representations that spoke of the transformation of the site and the appropriateness of the new behaviour it required. One Design Engineer summed up what he described as the emerging mood among many employees, contrasting a settler mentality with a pioneering approach:

“There was a settler mentality which was looking for the ground already to be laid to get you forward. The pioneering approach was to bring people who actually had experience, knowledge and perhaps flair to recognise that things and processes could be organized in a different way, with a confidence that they would deliver results and essentially be able to lay the ground such that the settlers would be able to move forward positively and with the confidence that hitherto may have been lacking.”

The analogy drawn between the “Mafia” (see earlier quote) and the commercially aware pioneering approach to doing the business is significant. Through such an analogy the message could be driven home that the new way of doing business at Britech would be underpinned by the urgency and ruthlessness of being “quick to get rid of that that’s not opportune”. Rather than shy away from these attributes, they were being promoted as both legitimate and necessary to secure the survival and future success of Britech in the face of what were construed to be extremely hostile markets. Once motorways are installed in the “back gardens” of employees, managers claimed, the visibility of what is “opportune” would be enhanced through inscriptive devices. Bar, or “Gantt”, charts were used to record allocated valuable “resources” (i.e. employees and components) to sub-tasks with a prespecified completion time. These “plastic brains” were conceived to provide a “highly successful”

Production Manager).

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system of representation, providing both “visibility” and responsibility as two key factors in the realisation of accountable empowerment. The declared intention was for this system to be operated by management acting at a distance. Employees were invited to utilise their agency, literacy and common sense to read and respond flexibly to the new planning regime. One Union Convenor stated:

“We know that industrial muscle is away in the past, we are very forward looking and we are very keen on the European approach as regards social partnership. One of my constant statements to the management here is, the only change that you will ever get successful and long term is that which is shopfloor driven, at the end of the day it will be the change that the lads demand, and that is starting to happen, we have greater accountability for the manuals.” An initiative called the “involvement scheme” was launched, which entailed, one Cell Leader indicated, “asking operators to highlight their ideas for reducing lead times, saving money, basic issues like that”. Fitters would participate with their supervisors in deciding on how the product should be constructed, what the product is made of, and also be involved in identifying the most appropriate ways to plan, organize and monitor their work. As the Operations Accountant, using a graph showing resources plotted against activity, said: “You had the resource coming down the side so what you had was fitter 1, fitter 2, fitter 3, then you had time here [across the horizontal axis] and what you've then got is the actual activity [as a horizontal block]. So when the fitters came to look they said “Well we don't do that job here, that job happens here.” So what you did was you brought the planning to the man and the man and the supervisor came to use the planning to suit the way they built it.”

This involvement of the shopfloor was part of a plan to develop the cell leader and his team through active discussion; one Senior Operations Manager pointed out how managers took steps to “devlop the cell leader and the team by bringing those people into quality discussions, into development plans, training plans and costing.” Management was construed as not being the management of the past, the management that intervened in the work. As newly commercialised agents, the fitters were expected to do much of the old ‘managerial’ work, even though there is evidence that some fitters were unable to recognise, or were reluctant to acknowledge, this change of role to include the selfmonitoring of performance through the continuous completion of written records of job progress (see below).

The written played a key role in the sustenance and monitoring of this self

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management, as paperwork was constituted to be the process of controlling flows along ‘the motorway’: “We’re trying to take it to the stage now where the process is actually the paperwork itself. There isn’t going to be a process, the actual documentation that you follow for doing it would define the process, so that the process becomes the working pattern. And so the records are self generating.” (Employee Relations Manager)

In an effort to ensure the compliance of new, seemingly empowered employees, plottings of progress against plan for the new accounting measures were carried out weekly. This discipline was thought to have promoted the new commercial agenda of the business, speed of action, ruthless focus on money, clear direction, individual responsibility and interdependence. If the present was found to be not where it was intended to be, the plan would then be broken down to the next level of detail. The introduction of streamlined administrative and production processes presented opportunities in 1995-6 for major headcount reductions of employees. Manufacturing managers, shop stewards and shopfloor employees suggested that the number of employees was reduced from about 5,500 to approximately 1,700. While some of those who lost their jobs were from among managerial levels, most redundancies came from the shopfloor. Some have argued that “the people who went under those cost-cutting excercises were in most cases the right people to go” (Cell Leader). Most of those who lost their jobs, we were told, were those who were ‘lazy’ or wedded to the ‘old’ practices. One Fitter described them as “what they call dead wood, you know, a lot of people who had been here thirty, forty years and they were still working the same way.”. When commenting on new training programs introduced by the new management, the Employee Relations Manager stated:

“Those that didn’t accept it [new training], stuck in their own school of putting times on jobs and expecting it to be done and then washing their hands as they went, they very brutally went as well. There was no compassion with it. If they didn’t fit the business, they went.”

Despite this concurring with management’s assessment that excessive over-manning in the past necessitated the trimming down of the labour force to more efficient levels, there was widespread belief among the shopfloor that at least some of the redundancies were not warranted, as one Fitter observed “the lads are fearful, they perceive some of the reductions as unnecessary.” One Convenor suggested that most of the redundancies were “particularly focused on the manual side.” He suggested that management find it “easier to get rid of the guy on the shopfloor but at the end of the

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day he is adding value and he is a productive worker [compared to staff] who are indirect, they are not adding value.” Another Convenor claimed that those who lost their jobs were not all ‘bad guys’:

“Under the redundancy we saw a lot of good guys as well as bad guys, so people now have the perception that, well no matter what I do it is not necessarily going to save me.”

Following the previous massive wave of redundancies, another round was announced with the intention of reducing the remaining labour force by a half and making good any shortfall with just-intime agency workers who could be hired in response to changing patterns of demand for their specialist skills. This second wave of redundancies further fuelled employees’ uncertainty. As one Operator stated “The thing is that we know how many people are going to go at the end of the year. Now everybody feels at risk because they don’t know who those people are so we aren’t living normal lives.” So, while pursuing the motorway vision entailed the involvement and cooperation of the workforce, waves of redundancies posed a threat to the security of even the most loyal and productive employees, thereby casting serious doubt upon the commitment of the company to its workforce. NEW PERFORMANCE MEASURES, NEW PERFORMERS The new accounting measures had two key objectives; first to integrate engineering and commercial knowledge, and secondly to inscribe new measures commensurate with the new commercial agenda that “empower and educate people to actually make it happen” (Operations Accountant).

Integrating Engineering and Commercial Concerns through Accounting Inscriptions In the ‘new era’, senior managers argued, engineers had to be coaxed or coerced into line, and their skills had to be depersonalized and visualized through inscription by “translating their knowledge into a format that everyone could use as a visual aid” (Operations Accountant). Engineers were required to become more financially aware in order for them to “understand what the pound notes are of the components and what they’re building” (Operations Accountant). This change was to be achieved by means of an integration, through written accounting measures, of financial information with representations of the materiality of the site and components assembly in a way that would reconstitute engineers as ‘cost conscious’ agents:

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“When you start assigning pound note signs to items that have been fitted... people soon start to realise the importance of what they’re doing.” (Production Manager)

Moreover, new “evangelical” accounting was introduced to replace the old, discredited engineeringdominated, accounting mentality. For example, to transform engineers and assembly staff into ‘cost conscious’ agents, every part had to have a cost attached to it:

“You want every time there's a part number shown on any system screen the value will flash up on it....[We did this at another site and] when the supervisor was gonna scrap something, ‘Shit, is that how much it is?’ and they had to think twice about what to do with this. That's the culture we'll have on [this site] in another six months time. People will know what things cost, they'll have respect for those items.” (Accountant)

The marketing and selling process was translated into a set of calculations showing selling prices, target margins, detailed costs per product and per process. More relevant to the engineers, the making of standard products and customization processes were converted into detailed calculations showing the business plan, targets, added value and achievements for each programme, cycle time, inventory, costs, supplier prices, and engineering support. These new inscriptions were aggregates of new detailed measures introduced on the shopfloor (see below) and were reported regularly to engineers.

The inscriptions signalled clearly the new, commercially-driven, measures of the

components used with the intention that engineering and financial concerns would be integrated.

New Accounting Measures and the Shopfloor A set of key business drivers was articulated in a document called “Introduction, 1992”, focusing on three such drivers: customer response time (lead time for final assembly + procurement + engineering), cost, and quality. These drivers were then converted into a five 9’s focus (99 9 99) of customer related targets: 9 months product response time; 9 week customer response time; $9 Million unit cost and 99% quality. Further, the NBI Booklet contained detailed targets for the eleven key themes mentioned earlier. Based on these measures, it was decided that accounting would be extended to: (i) incorporate “new” measures that would emphasize concern for quality and added value; and (ii) develop more detailed measures, out of these broader measures, to be targeted at shopfloor operators.

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Processes dedicated to “market pull” were promoted as the new entities upon which employees’ energies and new management accounting practices were to be focused. This focus was inscribed notably in the NBI and the “Manufacturing Strategy” documents. Accounting and business terminology were mobilized to spell out the financial benefits that would accrue from “build-toorder”: “reduced working capital employed; reduced risk of incorrect model mix; reduced total cost; improved responsiveness; superior quality; improved revenue” (Manufacturing Strategy Document). The accounts given by our informants were underpinned by an extensive use of new inscriptions. The quest for new measures at Britech signalled a significant shift in the focus of control from exclusive obsession with manhours and labour cost15 to inventory cost and stock ratio. The very expensive products in stock on the shopfloor were now seen as the ‘big numbers’ whose drivers were to be monitored: “the value of the product that we’re dealing with is so great. What I am interested in is the things that drive the big numbers and the big numbers in this context is look out of the window. They're all around us [products in stock]. They're on what I describe as the dust test, then that is no way to run a chip shop.” (Manufacturing Director)

Economic Value Added (EVA); Market Value Added (MVA); net present value (NPV); quality enhancement and revenue enhancement were identified by senior managers as new measures needed to inform decision making and to instil financial discipline right down to the shopfloor. The new emphasis was presented as being holistic by looking at Britech as a “total business unit”. It was claimed that the new performance measures were focused on “the ability to add value through time” or the ability “to move [stocks] and create wealth quickly” as distinct from situations where “the clock is ticking but they're [stocks] going nowhere”. To inaugurate and drive through this holistic vision, a four dimensional approach to performance management based on the European Foundation of Quality Management (EFQM) was inscribed. Underpinned by new accounting calculations, it was presented as “a rating methodology that looks at the total business and analyzes all the processes” (Senior Director). An Internal Document produced in 1992 identified four axes of the EFQM model: NPV, growth, sustainability of growth and business breadth; these were presumed to capture the overall health of the business. The diagram presenting the EFQM to employees identified and quantified the attributes of the model in terms of two sets: enablers (50%) and results

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(50%). The enablers were inspired leadership (10%), incorporation of quality values and concepts in policy and strategy (8%); releasing employees’ full potential through people management (9%); providing necessary resources, including financial, material and technologies (9%); and reviewing and revising processes (14%). The results subset (notice the asymmetry) was enhanced satisfaction of employees (9%); customer satisfaction (20%); better impact on society (6%); and improved business results (15%).

INSERT FIGURES 5-8 ABOUT HERE The EFQM model was supported by a plethora of accounting and production reports, pi-charts and histograms. These revealed to managers, and more significantly, to the shopfloor, detailed statistics on production volume, quality rejects; production time schedules; costs, etc. (for some example see Figures 5-8). In turn, the factory shopfloor was partitioned into centres of calculation full of large, colourful charts of work scheduling, performance, and cost consciousness. In each production cell written work schedules were displayed in which work was logged down to individual operators. The charts showed weekly details on customer specifications, conditions of supply, production progress, weekly spend and achievement analysis in man hours for days, nights and subcontracting (see Figure 8d), lead time analysis per assembly set (completed and uncompleted; see Figure 8c), weekly labour analysis (day and night; see Figure 8b), site spend (man hours) both actual and forecast per assembly set (see figures 5 and 8a), job delay summaries, shift attendance and absence in man hours, factory utilization during day and night shifts, overtime per operator, production effectivity, etc. The inscriptions also displayed details of product audit reports, bar-charts for defects in terms of quantities and causes (see Figure 6), throughput monitoring (actual versus required and outstanding deviations), responsibility for corrective action and levels of important cost items, such as engineering costs in terms of actual, budget and outlook for the monitoring and planning of work (see Figure 7).

Managers claimed that there was a significant shift from the exclusive focus upon man hours which predominated in the ‘old days’. One Manufacturing Manager noted the shift in empahsis on man hours thus: “Quite frankly, in the past people have been predominated with looking at man hours and 15

As noted earlier labour cost was addressed through waves of redundency and the hiring of flexible contract

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the cost of pay rolls and all the rest of it. I couldn’t give a monkey’s…I’m interested in how much of it [activities] is adding value because the value of the product we’re dealing with is so great.” The Production Director echoed the above view:

“The way they used to account for projects was to attach a great deal of effort to man hours monitoring and performance, even though they were looking at only ten percent of the total costs.”

The fact that the detailed measures now used in Britech still contained man hours was not seen as presenting any contradiction from the desire to shift emphasis away from man hours for two reasons. First, in contrast to previous practice where man hours predominated, under the new regime man hour measures were but one of a battery of detailed measures now being considered. Second, traditional measures such as man hours were now being linked more clearly to the new measures. One Manager stated that:

“EVA, MVA and DCF are all linked back to some of the traditional things [measures] because essentially our cost is largely driven cost with time. So it puts the focus and the rigour into the ability to add value through time. If you like the wealth creating fits into what we call a whole span of traditional manufacturing measures.”

One Operations Manager commenting on the measures used in his area observed that:

“Most of what you see here is either on cycle time or man hours. So it has a pound note equivalent. And so therefore, by a simple piece of maths, we could soon decide on what the pound effect was. With the new measures, everything will be struck on bringing it down to the bottom line of what it costs.”

The key logic here is that the new holistic measures, such as EVA and MVA, could only be enhanced if staff in Britech secure savings in line with the traditional measures employed previously, as well as the new measures. Hence, waste in man hours, higher defect rates, or higher engineering costs are reflected in unnecessarily higher costs to the business which will ultimately translate into lower EVA, MVA and NPV. Third, managers claimed that the traditional measures were used in a different manner. Concern for throughput time efficiency meant that man hours remained of some importance, but not in their raw form or in terms of the cost of labour as in the ‘old days’. Instead, as one Manufacturing Manager stated, man hours were regarded as a basic component in

labour.

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emphasizing the “cost relationship to time.” Emphasis shifted therefore from tracking every minute spent by an operator to focusing more on the effective use of time and a new link was now forged between man hours and inventory levels:

“The issue of direct labour is not so much tracking the man hour for every minute that he [the operator] is on the job. The key to it is the effective use of labour and with linking it to inventory, that clearly affects lead time. Now the driver to disclose performance against plan would be inventory accruals not man hours.” (Assembly Manager)

Further, an Operations Manager claimed:

“I might be the guy on the shopfloor, I understand all the big boards that you see measuring performance down on the shopfloor on the big bar charts that we use driving throughput time efficiency which they [shopfloor] can all relate to, but it will give them a link into how they can value the measurement of policy and strategy ‘cos the feedback which allows us to make our policies and strategies clear overall are vital to complete success.”

Hence, it is the application of resources through time, rather than simply tracking man hours, that now mattered. Undepinning this argument was the recognition that obsession with short term manufacturing measures, such as man hours, would militate against the attainment of a longer term vision in which issues of growth and sustainability were considered paramount, and for which a broader assemblage of costs associated with doing the business was required:

“We all recognise that it’s easy to adopt short termism in levering present value. The whole context of course is that what I’m trying to achieve is business growth. Now I will not achieve business growth without the other dimension which is sustainability. Again that’s why we’re looking at the relationship between all the costs associated with doing business today and then taking a discounted cash flow on what the forward book is, and then looking at the cost of being in business to exploit that forward order book.” (Operations Director)

To emphasize the holistic nature of the business, the product assembly positions sheet (not shown here for reasons of confidentiality) designated by time, date, month and year, made visible, in a pictorial format supported by accounting numbers, to supervisors and operators the added value (or incurred cost) to the product for every additional week in assembly. Also, as the inscriptions in this sheet moved from one assembly stage to another, or as the motorway metaphor would imply, added value was signposted as the product moved through different stages along the motorway. In this new shopfloor practice of accounting inscription, the relevant statistics were displayed against the business plan and were produced for each product. Further, charts showing rejects were displayed

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on the shopfloor, and factory managers and supervisors were expected to act on them. Pictures of various parts of the product with their corresponding cost figures were also displayed throughout the factory, with the aim of enhancing the cost consciousness of operators when handling these parts. Regular written reports per process were produced containing weekly and monthly statistics for things such as operations, assembly, and quality, combining financial and quantitative non-financial figures and arranged in tabular formats and charts. For each activity, the tables and charts showed target/budget, actual and current forecast (outlook) with variances calculated in relevant tables.

These written measures were seen to “do the business” whilst talk of change was just hot air, here today and gone tomorrow - “You couldn’t talk change and you couldn’t buy change” (Employee Relations Manager). Activities were recorded in writing and rendered more accountable in relation, for example, to any subsequent product recalls. As Said (1991, p. 134) has pointed out, “To write therefore comes to mean more…than to speak, for the appearance of writing alone gives assurances of regularity and meaning that the tumble and dispersion of speech denies.” Writing provides an indelible record that is more difficult to deny or obfuscate in comparison to the spoken word. The (semi)permanence and visibility of written measures was seen to provide the certainty about performance appraisal that would enable change. As we have noted earlier, it was intended that inscription, through the responsibilization and accountability it engendered, would produce (commercial) agents who compared current circumstances with planned scenarios as they endeavoured to meet the demands of the new agenda. The continued deployment of appropriate inscriptions was aimed at obviating the need for personal appeals and confrontations by enabling the inscriptions to ‘empower’ those subordinate in the hierarchy. Plans served to relate people and resources in the name of the good of the business, and were increasingly seen as the only way to prescribe and describe sensibly such relations, making alternative versions of events fewer and further between: “The generic process reviews, understanding your processes, how you go about that, fishbone techniques and all the rest of it, are all things that should become part of their common language and way of working....It is creating a style of language that everyone knows what that means.... actually share that common language. It can actually make decisions without reference because they know what will be a right decision.” (Senior Manager)

The “generic process” and “fishbone techniques” were meant to signify the new, commercially driven, decision making style; one that takes as its starting point the prices dictated by market forces

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and the specifications of product quality demanded by the customers, and internalises commercial awareness into the subject. This decision making method was intended to become the “common language” shared by all Britech employees as enshrined in new writings that were to be widely disseminated.

To emphasize the new commercially inspired competitive focus further, league tables were posted on the shopfloor for such things as attendance and productivity. These tables showed for each area current, lowest and highest performance of the week, and current and previous league positions, all contrasted against the business plan. In this process, accountants at the site were presenting themselves, and were increasingly becoming recognized by others, as agents of change who, by preparing league tables and running “mini-business things” with all employees, sought to educate the non-commercial in the reading of the newly inscribed commercial agenda. One Operations Accountant suggested:

“We’re able to get the message of finance across to people. I encourage my people to get out there, understand what the processes are, get involved in those processes and then they can start changing them. I got awarded... at the end of ‘92, ‘changemaker of the year award’, manager of the year award. It was only a couple of books, and stuff like that, but it didn't really matter, I was speechless at the time.”

THE SCOPE FOR SHOPFLOOR RESISTANCE

We have already noted how mass redundancies coupled with the threat of further job cuts served to remove intransigent employees, including managers, and weaken opposition to change. For those who remained, there was an expectation that their full support would be given to the new agenda. Despite this, the new inscriptions were not endorsed fully by the shopfloor: many employees expressed strong resentment and frustration with them, casting doubt as to their relevance to Britech’s activities and aspirations. However, as we argue below, there was also a sense of fatalism on the shopfloor about these new measures.

In the case of the motorway metaphor, initial steps to operationalize it by painting the factory floor to reflect its essence were treated with sarcasm by operators:

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The first thing we painted was a big blue patch on the flooring and people [that is, shopfloor employees] put cardboard cut outs of ducks swimming around in it, drowning men and ships and all that, you know. That provoked a laugh!” (Employee Relations Manager)

While seemingly embracing the terminology associated with the motorway metaphor, some fitters undermined it by claiming that its translation into operations terms was based on an ideal world scenario. One fitter commented on how times allowed by management for doing specific jobs to keep the different lanes of the motorway running smoothly were unrealistic :

“[They say] it will take you x amount of time to do that job, now that assumption is made by somebody who has never done the job and is never likely to do the job and it is never taken into consideration the problems that occur within this place with regards to parts not turning up, everything is an ideal world scenario. They say well it takes 12,000 hours to build [the product]. I can guarantee it will take at least 14,000 because you have got to calculate in an extra 2,000 for the problems along the line. But they say it is not acceptable, but it is the old problem you see.”

Other fitters sought to undermine the motorway metaphor and its chief proponent, the Production Director, by lampooning the irrelevance of his previous work experience in the car industry to the production technology at the site: “the problem is that you have got to talk to a man that was carorganized and you cannot put [our product] out like cars. Cos [our product] does not have a wheel at each corner, right? And also on top of that, there’s no lay-bys either.”

Claims by management that ‘mini-business’ communications, ‘cascade briefs’, ‘video presentations’, etc. ensured that employees became ‘educated’ in what the ‘new commercial agenda’ meant were not necessarily shared by the shopfloor. The intention of Britech management was to educate and thereby control the workforce by using inscriptions to communicate the new agenda, realize new practices and, indeed, construct new employees. However, at least for some, the message didn’t seem to be quite hitting home, partly because the fitters had problems understanding the new performance measures and partly because their concern was more focused on their pay: “When you go on these presentations you get shopfloor and you get finance people. You get a mixture. Some understand it and some don’t. We go in as a mass, we have the same presentation. Sometimes it’s easy, but in a lot of cases it’s in a language of the financiers. [And] there’s quite a lot of them [fitters] just want to know how much is in their wage packet at the end of the week.” (Fitter)

There was, therefore, resistance to managers’ use of inscriptions to focus their attention on issues of competitiveness, cost and profitability, and to develop and hone their skills in order to maintain their

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(external) marketability (see Watson, 1994). As the above quote indicates, there was often a failure to connect, or a refusal to make the connection, between the commercially-driven language of the capital and product markets, and the domestically-driven concerns of shopfloor employees with families to support and mortgages to pay. The tension was evident in managers’ use of inscriptions to alert employees to the cost of scrapped parts. One fitter who observed: “If you scrap a piece, you usually find out how much it costs. It comes up on the screen”, later added: “The actual day to day, they [managers] never say ‘You’re costing so much or that costs so much’”. If managers had hoped that the flashing of component cost on computer screens would internalise costconsciousness into operators, this fitter’s account suggests otherwise.

Despite managers’ efforts to ensure that the new written performance measures reached the shopfloor, some operators developed different interpretations of these initiatives:

“They tried this with us once, you know, going to these bar chart meetings but it was a bit of a waste of time really. You know, we are more effective on here [the track]. Those [the charts] I think you’ll find are mainly for visitors and people like yourself. When they bring visitors round they always lead them to the bar chart. Whether they’re impressed or not I’ve no idea.” (Fitter)

There was also talk of teams and empowered responsibility as management sought to change the organization of work in a way that engendered a more disciplined and participative shopfloor (see also Ezzamel and Willmott, 1998). This presented some paradoxes for the new agenda and its demands for individualized visibilities. Management attempted to square such circles through the seductive policing notion of ‘peer pressure’ combined with practices of work intensification. According to one Human Relations Manager: “We can’t force a man to do something but if he’s part of a team and he’s not pulling his weight within that team then they’re the people who’ll sort that out. The days of the scallywag who used to come to work and go and hide in the toilet for eight hours [have gone], it used to happen, it was a symptom of British industry. It doesn’t happen anymore because the teams are so small the man is missed.”

However, this claimed ‘dose’ of ‘empowerment’ was interpreted differently, at least by some operators; one Fitter said: “The job I’m doing hasn’t changed. I’m still doing the same job I was doing five and a half years ago.”

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These dismissive comments by shopfloor employees regarding changes in manufacturing methods, including the introduction of written measures, are not necessarily in contradiction to management’s accounts of their relatively smooth introduction and reception. Perhaps the fitters were simply refusing to acknowledge the impact of teamworking on their work. Such denials can be interpreted as expressions of self-assurance. It is also possible that “craft pride” or “bravado” accounted for the defensive reaction by fitters to management’s attempts to impose a stricter disciplinary and monitoring regime on the shopfloor; the response being “nothing has changed”. Alternatively, by focusing upon the tasks performed, it was possible to disregard the changed context of their execution. Yet, even if what they did had not changed per se, because the product and assembly work had not significantly changed, the way their work was now planned and monitored was, arguably, subject to a new and more strict discipline underpinned by intensive inscribed measures. When performance was reported to have fallen below targets constituted by the new accounting inscriptions, operators had to provide explanations to cell leaders and middle managers in meeting rooms located at the shopfloor. The existence of such sessions might suggest that their purpose was to find fault with, and discipline individual workers or teams. However, evidence from the workers themselves and their union representatives as well as from cell leaders and managers indicates that the focus of such discussions was upon diagnosing and remedying processes that had failed to deliver expected levels of performance, rather than upon the operators who, by and large, worked diligently, pressurised by the surveillance of their activities and the lack of managerial inhibition about substituting contract for permanent labour. When introducing and enforcing these methods, managers could appeal to the craft/professional pride when introducing self-managing methods; hence their claims of internalizing control into employees, such as “Quality is now the individual”, or “they know what the milestone is and they’re very good, almost to a man, very very keen to get it”. This interpretation suggests that the operators responded to, or interpreted, the new measures in ways that were broadly consistent with what management required. But this does not deny or exclude their expressions of resentment and frustration. While there was a measure of skepticism about the prospect of implementing the new agenda to achieve the long-term objectives, the response of employees was generally muted and fatalistic. Britech workers had little confidence in the capacity of the new measures to deliver the projected improvements in profitability, but they could identify no viable alternative – a resignation

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that was fuelled by their recognition of the cyclical and volatile nature of the markets in which the company operated.

In addition to the recent history of redundancies and uncertainties about career prospects, the potency of labour resistance in Britech may have been blunted by two factors that worked in tandem. First, the new inscriptions and accounting measures reached much deeper into the shopfloor, in great detail and at more frequent temporal intervals. There were fewer possibilities for labour to “get away with” managerially unacceptable work practices by being able to show the supervisor “anything that he wanted to know”, as was claimed to have been the case in the ‘old days’ of embodied technical knowledge and oral communication. As a union convenor commented: “Our lads know that they're checked and he [a fitter] is accountable and if he doesn't do a good job, then he's going to have someone on his back”. Secondly, the use of written measures to facilitate the new managerial rhetoric at Britech seemingly enjoyed some support at lower levels in the hierarchy as they became interpreted -either optimistically as an unequivocal expression of trust or as a denial of their likely, restrictive impact - as simply extending the scope for the exercise of productive discretion by shopfloor workers: “There is nobody to control us, there are no under-supervisors. We could be doing nothing all day, but we don’t” (employee). Similarly, an Employee Relations Manager claimed: “We don’t discipline anyone for poor workmanship or lack of effort anymore…It just doesn’t happen.” The newly constituted “commercial” discipline demanded that employees took the appropriate “commercial” decision themselves, as the aim was for the new measures to be internalized into the subject: “They wouldn’t be told, they would know themselves. There wouldn’t be anybody around to tell them” (Senior Production Manager). Management claims that many of the new measures were internalized by operators may therefore be partly credible although, as we have suggested, this might be more appropriately characterized as a form of resigned accommodation, prompted by fear of further job losses, rather than evidence of a committed faith in the new measures. CONCLUSION This paper has drawn attention to the neglected issue of the power of inscriptions in endeavours to regulate and transform organizational practices. Specifically it has focussed upon the roles and significance of accounting inscriptions and writing in the context of a high tech case study of strategic

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change (Britech). Our emphasis has been upon new, and changes in the form of, written performance measures aimed at the construction and implementation of a ‘new commercial agenda’.

The use of diverse forms of inscription is significant, we have suggested, because in certain settings/contexts written communications – chapters and diagrams as well as documents – are attributed greater weight and permanency compared to oral modes of communication. The construction of agents, structures, processes and metaphors, and the codification of technical and business knowledge through writing, in contrast to being kept in an oral form, provides an indelible record that “enables one to lay side by side different accounts emanating from different times and different places, and so perceive contradictions which in the oral mode would be virtually impossible to spot” (Goody, 1987, p. 220). It also facilitates the substitutability of labour as knowledge becomes disembodied in inscriptions whereas in the absence of writing it would be invested in the oral culture of long-serving personnel. Unlike oral information, inscribed measures are more mobile, both spatially and temporally, less amenable to interpretive manipulation, and susceptible to more sophisticated disaggregation and analysis; all such characteristics allow greater visibility of agents, processes, activities and structures and facilitate the exercise of power in the form of action at a distance (Latour, 1987; Robson, 1992; Ezzamel and Hoskin, 2002).

In assessing the impact of inscribed measures on the functioning of Britech, it is important to appreciate the difficulty of isolating the effects of writing from changes in industry and market conditions. The introduction and influence of inscriptions have to be located within the wider politico-economic and institutional contexts of their application. Notwithstanding these caveats, our analysis of Britech suggests three specific implications of the intervention of new inscribed measures in organiztions.

First, the power of new inscriptions can become manifest in the construction of new agents and new organizational methods. The introduction of the inscriptions could, in certain respects, be interpreted as a Tayloristic effort to deskill and degrade labour by codifying shopfloor knowledge and thereby asserting managerial control over the production process. Certainly, the new measures brought a degree of transparency and accountability that facilitated the removal of porosities and wasted effort, thereby raising employee productivity. However, the intention and effect of the new accounting

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representations was not just to subjugate employees by demanding their compliance with new practices (e.g. recording and communicating information in managerially proscribed ways), but also to subjectify employees by encouraging their identification with, if not internalization of, the new regime so that they could become co-producers of its future development and refinement (see Foucault, 1982, especially p. 212 et seq). We noted earlier how fitters were invited to participate in developing an understanding with their supervisors regarding how the product should be constructed, what it is made of, and how shopfloor work should be planned, organized and monitored. Knowledge was not simply disembodied and monopolised by management but was to be shared and even ‘owned’ by the shopfloor. Workers were required to log the information publicly and were invited to be individually as well as collectively responsible and accountable for slippages and deviations from production targets that incorporated an anticipated gain from the discipline of continuous improvement. Through inscriptions the new managerial team at Britech sought to release the potential of ‘empowered’ employees through individualized responsibilization, internalization of inscribed measures, and depersonalization of engineering skills through the disembodiment of knowledge.

Second, inscribed measures facilitate the development and enactment of new powerful metaphors that have the capacity to underpin new organizational ‘vision’. In the case of Britech, the motorway metaphor, for example, was promoted and mobilized with the aim of promoting and implementing the new vision of ‘commercialism’. Not only was this metaphor articulated in writing, but it was also expressly linked to a host of inscriptions: process maps, motorway signs and measures reflecting such things as throughput, speed, efficiency of time usage, and quality that were calculated to be consistent with the new commercial agenda.

Third, written measures are at the centre of power/knowledge relations (Ezzamel and Hoskin, 2002). In Britech, it was through such written measures that the new ‘evangelical’ accountants and managers sought to shift the balance of power away from a complex dominated by engineering towards a financially centred complex that offered an ostensibly more ‘credible’ representation of Britech and its technology, and promoted greater cost awareness by evolving new measures that underpinned the finance-based new commercial agenda.

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Through the deployment of new or different forms of written performance measures in Britech, a new organization, made up of (among other “things”) new employee agents, was to be constituted. Old methods were indicted and rejected because they were judged to have generated inappropriate (out of touch with modern commercial needs) agents carrying out inappropriate actions in a disabling, functionally-based, and “disjointed organization”. Against these, the new “motorway”based representations were commended as progressive, process-driven, entrepreneurial and productive. Through its use, management was able to both construct and emphasize several key elements of the new manufacturing vision that employees were enjoined to share (by appealing to the characteristics that competent drivers on the motorway have to exhibit). Improved vision and clarity of direction to the desired destination (transformation towards Britech’s tangible objectives) were to be engendered; and as on a motorway, navigation from point A to point B was to be enhanced in a manner that parallels drivers’ acquisition of the knowledge comprising the Highway code. Such literacy was evident, inter alia in employees’ ability to read factory signs (shadow boards, plastic brains) correctly and to assess the speed of production flow and critical bottlenecks, just as a competent motorway driver is able to assess the speed of traffic, recognise signs foe speed limits, junctions and service stations. Awareness of interdependence and the speed of flow of other activities, was fostered to appreciate the interconnectedness of the activities on the site, and recognise how a delay in any of the processes (a slowing down on the motorway) would have detrimental effects that cascade throughout Britech. This was accompanied by an urgency in exploiting the “opportune” and Mafia-like ruthlessness in obliterating the “non-opportune”. A final element involved capitalizing on ownership of the motorway attributed to employees and its proximity to their locations (by constructing the ‘motorway’ in their “back gardens”) so as to exploit intimate knowledge of their work situations in order to develop better future work situations (or routes to commercial salvation). The aim was that “operator” and “supervisor” would be (re)created as “commercial” operator and “commercial” manager through their interaction with the written plans and performance measures.

At the centre of these initiatives were the new managers, and notably the (evangelical) accountants who decomposed Britech into new centres of calculation through segmental reporting and working capital allocations; benchmarking targets and the use of EFQM, EVA, EVM, NPV, revenue and quality enhancement metrics. The new managers contrived to introduce on the shopfloor new

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accounting inscriptions that were far more intensive, detailed, frequent, far reaching and penetrative than previously in the hope that this would result in better discipline and improved financial performance for Britech. To the extent that some old measures were retained, they were being used differently and linked to company-wide measures. Rather than a focus exclusively on tracking time in the form of man hours, the emphasis shifted to ensuring an efficient use of time and to inventory as this was what drove the ‘big numbers’. Efficient use of man hours was linked to the NPV for the whole site.

Yet, as Said (1995, p. 272) has persuasively pointed out, “a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth”, which is itself a representation.” In the case of Britech, the new regime of ‘truth’, underpinned by the the new accounting measures, ushered a revised configuration of power relations. (Nietzsche, 1930; Foucault, 1974). These reflections have some affinities with other recent accounting-centred contributions to the examination of inscriptions. In particular, the linking of new bodies to new practices and products of inscription, bears a striking resemblance to Hoskin and Macve’s (1986) genealogy of the emergence of a new disciplinary power, associated with a new form of education, that was predicated on writing. In each case, we see “change agents” being written as they write. Just as the commercially constituted “movers and shakers” of the contemporary corporate world seek to instantiate commercialism through inscription upon, and representation of, the diverse resources of the workplace, so too were the magistri officials, described by Hoskin and Macve (1986, p. 112), instrumental in the deployment of the inscriptions that inscribed them. The new commercial agenda at Britech and use of the motorway metaphor also resonates with Miller and O’Leary’s (1994) account of new economic citizenship and the creation of a ‘Highway’ at Caterpillar. However, whereas their respective considerations of inscriptions and metaphors were in passing, we have addressed them more directly and systematically.

While we have emphasised the novelty and significance of the new inscriptions as harbingers of change, we have been careful in avoiding a conflation of prescription and implementation. We have highlighted the distinctiveness and potency of inscriptions with respect to their indelibility and mobility, for example, but we have also emphasised that their effects are necessarily dependent upon how these measures are interpreted, or consumed, by their users. The inscribed representations of

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the new regime of ‘truth’ by the new managers at Britech were, we have argued, rationlised by the demands of capital to secure higher long-term profitability, as reflected in the requirements placed by the parent upon Britech to match or exceed specific performance targets. These demands were not, however, universally supported by Britech employees for whom other considerations – notably security of employment and rewards – assumed greater importance. Production and labour markets produced conditions which discouraged any organised resistance to the new measures which, in principle, assisted the job security of remaining employees, and it would be a mistake to assume that these measures were embraced with enthusiasm rather than a fatalistic resignation. In a context where there was widespread acceptance of the precariousness of Britech’s prospects, as presented by senior management, employees showed little appetite for a struggle to preserve jobs and/or develop an alternative business model and associated plans and new working arrangements.

It is possible to imagine a future scenario where the new measures contribute to their own downfall in circumstances when, for example, disappointment and disillusionment follow exaggerated expectations of their transformative power. A space may then open up for alternative readings of the inscriptions that are less enamoured with the productivist benefits ascribed to their introduction. Responses from the workforce suggest that, even after the cull of staff deemed least amenable to the new factory regime, considerable scepticism remained about the operation, and effectiveness of the new measures in delivering management’s vision of work organization. Managers’ claims that the deployment of impersonal inscriptions in the form of ‘appropriate’ targets, schedules and performance indicators had transformed the organization were challenged by sections of the workforce who suggested that the changes introduced were more an extension or formalization of an established disciplinary matrix than something that clearly exemplified and nutured a commercial ethos. These observations have parallels in previous work. For example, Bougen (1989, p. 231) notes how the effectiveness of accounting calculations as an educative medium in dealing with the shopfloor can crumble as and when these calculations fail to convince a skeptical workforce.

Of greatest significance for the realisation of management’s vision, the unexpected withdrawal of the chief competitor from Britech’s market (re)created a monopoly situation whereas the rationale for introducing the new measures had emphasised their role in rendering Britech more competitive. The demise of the chief competitor not only obviated the need for a joint venture partner but

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simultaneously subverted the rationale for radical transformation as a condition of commercial survival. In the absence of competitive pressures, it may be anticipated that the new representations will lose some of their urgency and potency unless effectively yoked to some other, equally compelling post-survival rationale. In this scenario, it is possible that pressures from the parent, and ultimately from shareholders, to capitalise upon the opportunity to make monopoly profits, combined with the need to ensure the continuing cooperation of shopfloor employees as a condition for increasing profits, may accommodate some relaxation or even subversion of the new measures, especially if there is minimal improvement in employees’ terms and conditions. For, ultimately, making Britech’s high-tech products, and thereby realising monopoly profits, depends upon the productive cooperation of employees who have been repeatedly told that the principal rationale for the new inscribed measures resides in improving the company’s competitive position.

The unexpected withdrawl of Britech’s main competitor serves as a valuable reminder of the importance of the changing contexts in which new written measures and associated practices are introduced. At the time of our study, they formed a central part of a survival package that was presented as necessary for the company’s continuing operation. The heavy use of inscriptions, we have argued, went well beyond a centralising Taylorist move to appropriate and disembody knowledge from shopfloor workers. It was inspired instead by a concern to re-educate the workforce by incorporating them, as active participants (in planning and organizing their work as well as in self monitoring), in a new manufacturing regime in response to a rapid reduction in defence contracting. This development occurred in a climate of uncertainty where the experience and continuing prospect of job losses rendered employees more receptive (or submissive) to involvement in a process of work intensification secured through their compliance with the discipline of the new measures. What is less certain is whether this discipline has been institutionalized and internalized, or whether resistance to its demands will be ignited by the competitor’s withdrawal and simultaneously appeased not least by pressures from shareholders, mediated by managers, wishing to take advantage of beneficial trading conditions. For this reason, we have urged that the study of inscriptions be placed within and connected to an appreciation of the context of their introduction – a context that also conditions their reception, effectiveness and sustained application as it is itself formed and read, in part, through the new inscriptions.

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REFERENCES Ackroyd, S. and Lawrenson, D. (1996) “Manufacturing Decline and the Division of Labour in Britain: The Case of Vehicles” in I. Glover and M. Hughes (eds.), The Professional-Managerial Class, Aldershot: Avebury. Bougen, P.D. (1989), “The Emergence, Roles and Consequences of an Accounting-Industrial Relations Interactions”, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 203-234. Carmona, S., Ezzamel, M. and Gutierrez, F. (2002) “The Relationship between Accounting and Spatial Practices in the Factory”, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 27, pp. 239-274. Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ezzamel, M. and Hoskin, K. (2002), “Retheorizing Accounting, Writing and Money with Evidence from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt”, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Vol. 13, pp. 333-367. Ezzamel, M. and Willmott, H. (1998), “Accounting for Teamwork: A Critical Study of GroupBased Systems of Organizational Control”, Administrative Science Quarterly, (July), pp. 358-396. Foucault, M. (1974) The Archaeology of Knowledge, London : Tavistock Publications. Foucault, M. (1982), “The Subject and Power”, in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 208-226. Goody, J. (1986) The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J. (1987) The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hoskin, K.W. and Macve, R.H. (1986) “Accounting and the Examination: A Genealogy of Disciplinary Power”, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 105-136. Latour, B. (1987), Science in Action, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Latour, B. (1990) “Drawing Things Together”, p. 19-68, in M. Lynch and S. Woolgar (eds.), Representation in Scientific Practice, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp. 19-68. McArthur, T. (1986) Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, Learning and Language From the Clay Tablet to the Computer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Miller, P. (1992) “Accounting and Objectivity: The Invention of Calculating Selves and Calculable Spaces”, Annals of Scholarship, Miller, P. and O’Leary, T. (1993) “Accounting Expertise and the Politics of the Product: Economic Citizenship and Modes of Corporate Governance”, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 18, Issues 2 and 3, pp. 187 - 206. Munro, R. and Hatherly, D. (1993), `Accountability and the New Commercial Agenda’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 4, 4 : 3 PAGE NUMBERS? Nietzsche, F. (1930), The Will to Power, Vol. XV of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, London : T. N. Foulis. Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy, London: Methuen. Robson, K. (1992) “Accounting Numbers as ’Inscriptions’: Action at a Distance and the Development of Accounting”, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 685708. Said, E. W. (1991), The World, the Text and the Critic, London : Vintage. Said, E.W. (1995), Orientalism: Western Conceptions of The Orient, (London), Penguin Books. Watson, T. (1994), In Search of Management, London: Routledge. Wildavsky, A. (1991) 'Self Interest and Legitimation', paper presented to the Department of Accounting and Business Method, University of Edinburgh.

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TABLE (1) – CONTRASTING THE OLD AND NEW SYSTEMS AT BRITECH OLD SYSTEM Defined by

NEW SYSTEM Defined by Organizational/Engineering Issues:

- Functional structure - Oral culture (little/no writing) on the shopfloor - Engineering knowledge embodied in experts who controlled work organization - Independence of operations/ fragmentation of the business - Bottlenecks/relay-racing mentality - Push of annual planning cycle (build for stocks) - Engineering dominance; cost plus contracting

- Matrix structure /Process focus - Writing culture (extensive written measures) on the shopfloor - Disembodiment of engineering knowledge through writing for all to see/access - Holistic and interdependent operations - Motorway metaphor/culture of urgency - Pull of the market (build to order) - Accounting/Finance dominance; commercial agenda/awareness Accounting Information:

- Traditional manufacturing measures that emphasized fragmentation of business (manhours; labour cost; utilisation; efficiencies) - Historical and aggregate - Sitting on managers’ shelves - Lack of visibility: conventional presentation in inaccessible format

- Focus on inventory cost (and stock ratio); quality; added value; wholeness (five 9’s; EVA; MVA; NPV; quality/revenue enhancement; EFQM; 11 key themes) - Forward looking and detailed - Dissemination through hierarchy down to shopfloor - Visibility: shadow boards; pictorial presentations histograms; charts; plastic brains

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