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Empowermentand productionworkers
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Empowerment and productionworkers: a knowledge-basedperspective
N. Duru Ahanotu
Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
Introduction
In 1994 and 1995, Saturn aired an automobile commercial to demonstrate thecompany’s commitment to the empowerment of production workers. Theadvertisement depicted a production worker who, on recognizing an anomalyon the assembly line, stops the line and alerts the resident manufacturingengineers to the problem. The engineers quickly locate and repair what turnsout to be a minor problem, and the production worker expresses pride in hiscontribution to the problem-solving effort. Even though he recognized anaberration, he lacked the knowledge to diagnose and/or fix it. In fact, theengineers in the advertisement make no attempt to share or transfer some of this knowledge: they simply display the malfunctioning part. Of course, atelevision advertisement is a snapshot image rather than a comprehensivestudy, but as a representation of empowerment for production workers, thisscenario seems to be missing the substance of empowerment.What the previous example demonstrates is dependence under the guise of empowerment: there certainly exists a degree of participation in the problem-solving activity, but empowering knowledge, the knowledge that builds thecapacity to handle value-added job enrichment and/or enlargement, is absent.While organizations have achieved some success in empowering today’s white-collar and other professional workers, they have had less success withproduction workers. I argue that, too often, production workers remain captiveto external sources of design knowledge: managers, engineers, and othermanufacturing professionals. This design knowledge constructs productionprocesses and controls the direction of innovation. Even efforts to bringcontinuous improvement to the factory floor relegates workers to improvequality and productivity under the given production paradigm, but it does notprovide them with enough tools or opportunities to alter, much less challenge,that same paradigm.Ultimately, production workers will not feel empowerment until they areparticipants in the innovative processes of a manufacturing company. Thisparticipation goes beyond quality programs and continuous improvementefforts. This level of participation requires that production workers activelycontribute to innovative manufacturing practices, gain freer access to designknowledge, and acquire more design knowledge (formal and theoretical)through operative, experimental, and absorptive (collaborative) activities. I
Empowerment in Organizations,Vol. 6 No. 7, 1998, pp. 177-186.© MCB University Press, 0968-4891
 
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have elsewhere called these activities the tripartite of production tasks (TPT)(Ahanotu, 1998); they establish a bi-directional flow of knowledge between thefactory floor and the design sources of knowledge. Otherwise, productionworkers will remain dependents of the production system and not becomeactive participants in a process of evolving manufacturing core competencies.The knowledge-based perspective on empowerment presented in this paperreveals the essential role that knowledge and innovation play in makingempowerment a reality for production workers.
Origins of the need for empowerment: beyond the demonization of Taylor
Before discussing how production workers can achieve empowerment andbefore justifying the need for it, one should ruminate on the origins of the needfor this empowerment (also see Honold, 1997 for a comprehensive literaturereview). These origins expose some of the knowledge-based principles for re-achieving empowerment for production workers. There was a time in industrialpractice during which production workers were essentially already empowered.It is well-known that the craftsmen that preceded scientific management andmass production were masters of their domain; they created and controlled theirworkspaces (for example: Hayes
et al.
, 1988; Hirschhorn, 1984; Romer, 1993;Taylor, 1911). The knowledge wielded by these experts was carefully cultivatedand obtained mainly through the close supervision of apprenticeship programsand the slow, steady diffusion of proven practices. In general, the owners of production completely deferred to their craftspeople for the design andexecution of production processes.This organizational design deeply disturbed Frederick Taylor, one of theprime figures in the rise of scientific management: he believed that the informalknowledge creation amongst craftspeople that created a variety of methods toexecute similar tasks was intolerably inefficient and that only academicallytrained managers and engineers could study this knowledge, formalize it, andcreate optimized standards. While much has been written about Taylor and hisinfluence on manufacturing practices, it is appropriate briefly to review here hisimpact on worker empowerment. I conduct such an examination less in themodern, information/knowledge-era spirit of vilification of his work and moretowards an appreciation for the dual nature of his work.Taylor’s fundamental ideologies are stated quite clearly in his importantwork 
The Principles of Scientific Management 
: “In almost all of the mechanicarts the science which underlies each act of each workman is so great andamounts to so much that the workman who is best suited to actually doing thework is incapable of fully understanding this science, without the guidance andhelp of those who are working with him or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient mental capacity” (Taylor, 1911, pp. 25-6).Taylor goes on to claim that even if production workers had the mental capacity,they could not take time away from production activities to develop the sciencesof manufacturing, nor could they conduct such work on the factory floor (pp. 38,
 
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104). The appropriation of manufacturing knowledge by management took a lotof the thinking out of the doing of production work. Awash in standardizedlearning and bereft of genuine opportunities to innovate, production workersquickly became “disempowered”: the locus of sanctioned knowledgedevelopment moved up the hierarchy and away from the factory floor.The belief in one optimal methodology for any task tends to stifle innovation:multiple ideas cannot be compared, contrasted, and tested. However, Taylorconceded that continuous improvement was essential and that productionworkers should be allowed to suggest new ideas to an appreciative managementwilling to investigate in good faith (p. 118). Taylor even refuted the claim thathis philosophy of knowledge standardization destroyed worker independenceby comparing his training methods to those for surgeons who get the benefit of best practices and who are free to create new ideas rather than re-invent oldones. Taylor placed heavy emphasis on the responsibility of firms to train andimprove their workers (pp. 6, 12). Finally, he was a firm believer in collaborationamong production workers, engineers, and managers as the path to success inmanufacturing: “… the time is coming when all great things will be done bythat type of cooperation in which each man performs the function for which heis best suited, each man preserves his own individuality and is supreme in hisparticular function, and each man at the same time loses none of his originalityand proper personal initiative, and yet is controlled by and must work harmoniously with many other men” (p. 140). As is evident here, Taylor tried toestablish a difficult dual concept of closely regulated innovation and controlledbut expressive individual expertise.Thus, while Taylor’s obsession with efficiency and scientific practicedisempowered production workers, a good amount of the spirit of his writingsuggests that, had industrial establishments so chosen, they still could havemaintained workplaces that valued the contribution of employees and theirimprovement. Despite his heavy hand, Taylor recognized two criticalcomponents of manufacturing. First, he recognized that manufacturinginnovation had to both extend beyond direct application on the factory floor andbe integrated with actual manufacturing practice. Limiting one’s knowledgefield directly to production activities generates limited innovation. Deeptechnical understanding comes from study, experimentation and intimatecollaboration with colleagues. Second, although he undervalued the intellectualpotential of workers, Taylor appreciated the wealth of experiential knowledgeresident amongst production workers. In fact, Juravich (1985) correctly claimsthat “… one of Taylor’s fundamental insights – the notion that workers’knowledge is the place to begin any production reform – has been forgotten. Onthe other hand, those aspects of the Taylor system that stress managementcontrol on the shop floor have been most thoroughly accepted” (p. 90). Thus,selective interpretation of Taylor’s work led to the crisis in manufacturing thatprecipitated the modern-day pronouncements of the empowerment movement.Several writers have keenly demonstrated how even in this era of disempowerment that the working knowledge of production workers remained
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