managers through the vocabulary of empower-ment, are attempting to enhance managerialcontrol by reclothing it in the rhetoric andconcerns of democracy.Like the “psy” sciences which underpin it,empowerment constitutes an extremely potentmeans of ensuring labor discipline, therefore,since it:
achieves its effects not through the threat of violence or constraint, but by way of the persua-sion inherent in its truths, the anxieties stimulatedby its norms and the attraction exercised by theimages of life and self it offers to us[7, p. 10].
Focussing particularly on the concept of isola-tion contained within Rose’s view of gover-nance, this paper will investigate the promiseand the limits of empowerment. However, inorder to do this it is first necessary to analyze theeconomic and political factors which haveallowed empowerment to emerge as the latestcontrol innovation.
The rise of empowerment
Like any control initiative, the rise of empower-ment can only be understood within a largerframework of political economy, since withoutthis wider view of context, we lack any sensiblemeasures to explain how ideas, such as empow-erment, become thinkable. Since, in manage-ment circles, empowerment rose to prominenceduring the latter part of the 1980s, it seemssensible to suggest that the concept can only beunderstood when set against a consideration of the changing market and political conditions of this decade.
‘…in reacting to foreign competitionmanagers have been encouraged andindeed have encouraged others to thinkof management control andorganizational success as bound up withnational identity…’
Throughout the 1980s, human resource man-agement (HRM) emerged as a key focus formanagement attention. Philosophically,empowerment and HRM have close links. Thuswe can learn much about empowerment byanalyzing HRM. Indeed it could be argued thatempowerment is, in fact, little more than thecurrent incarnation of HRM, at least in its“soft” form[9].Any attempt to understand HRM must befocussed on the market. HRM takes its inspira-tion from the need to address changing marketconditions, and the need to satisfy customerrequirements[10]. To understand the conceptsof HRM and empowerment, therefore, we mustmake some attempt to understand the economicand political significance of these changingmarket conditions.There is no doubt that for a range of industri-al concerns, competition has become moreintense. However, in reacting to foreign compe-tition managers have been encouraged andindeed have encouraged others to think of management control and organizational successas bound up with national identity. Part of HRM’s potency, therefore, relates to its abilityto forge linkages between the rhetoric of democ-racy and the rhetoric of management practice.Thus Kanter[11, p. 13], setting out her ownpersonal mission and hinting at the contributionshe hopes to make to American managementand business, notes:
Cheering for American Companies in the interna-tional marketplace is not just a matter of nationalpride; it is the best hope we have for ensuring thatour standard of living can be maintained, let aloneimproved, for ourselves and our children.
Similarly, Peter Parker, in the introduction to
The Art of Japanese Management
[12, p. xiii]notes:
Japanese competitiveness has become one of theparamount economic events of the post-warworld. Nowadays our mirror on the wall is nolonger giving the West the flattering answers of thefairy-tale … Now the mirror’s voice seems to havecracked a bit; the tone has changed. Rather shakilyit suggests we take a second opinion.
As these quotations show, management practi-tioners have been caught up in a series of eventswhich have questioned the activities and orien-tations of management. This has led to a searchfor new cocktails of control and in the process of developing these, managers, reflecting thenotion of interdependency assumed by softHRM models, have repackaged control in therhetoric of democratic freedoms and nationalidentity.However, we should note that managerswould have been unable to sell this package to
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Control and isolation in the management of empowerment
David Collins
Empowerment in OrganizationsVolume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · 29–39
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