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Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2006. 32:17189 doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.32.061604.123146 Copyright c 2006 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

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First published online as a Review in Advance on April 10, 2006

ORGANIZATIONAL RESTRUCTURING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES: Rhetorical and Structural

Kellogg School of Management, 2 Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208; email: paulhirsch@kellogg.northwestern.edu, m-desoucey@northwestern.edu

Paul M. Hirsch1 and Michaela De Soucey2

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Key Words

organizations, efciency, downsizing, labor, management discourse

Abstract In this review, we examine the idea of organizational restructuring as a conceptual tool and how it has been used to alter societal denitions and interpretations of employment. Although use of the term restructuring is relatively recent, the broad issue of changing employment conditions with which it is concerned has a long history, going back to the industrial revolution. Our main focus is a consideration of the causes and consequences of restructuring, in its more recent rhetorical and structural versions. In their pursuit of greater efciencies, organizations adapt to the demands of increasingly global markets, and these adaptations are crucial components of what is popularly referred to as the new economy. Such developments are applauded in most economic theory, but sociologists examine both sides of their social impact, including the adverse effects and implications of such externalities as the social disruptions caused by downsizing and other organizational and corporate changes. These studies provide important contributions to our knowledge of how much, and when, promises of organizational efciency are in fact deliverable and responsive to those affected by them. We argue that the language of restructuring is regularly used to mask, reframe, and sugarcoat economic slumps as possessing positive social outcomes. We conclude by positioning restructuring as an important component of the current American export of managerial ideology to transnational contexts and suggest further examination of how restructuring affects the culture of business in these other national contexts.

INTRODUCTION
In this review, we identify what is distinctive about the term organizational restructuring, a practice that has occurred repeatedly and continuously since the inception of capitalist industrialism. The term labels and signies part of a continual historical and cross-disciplinary project. It has been variously coded as negative, positive, or neutral in its tougher labor policies and employment practices, in which job security and performance are dominated by the inevitability of competitive market forces and globalization. Restructuring is rhetorically
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framed both to connote a defensive organizational move against external and contextual pressures (from competition, political and economic power, and cultural change), as well as to describe a process that affects workers at all levels of industrial and postindustrial organization (Frenkel 2003). Here, we summarize these trends and review the different ways recently used to interpret the idea of restructuring as a conceptual tool. Although we note particular structural changes that have accelerated large corporations reductions in the size of their workforce (cf. Fligstein & Shin 2004), our primary focus is the rhetorical framing of the conceptthe trends in how restructuring has been conceived across different disciples, as well as communicated, interpreted, and sold in the public arena. Organizational restructuring has been commonly characterized in popular, trade, and academic management literature as effective and efcient reorganization of the components of corporate work.1 Typically, it involves the positive language of reducing costs, increasing prots, improving product and service quality, increasing share price, and responding quickly to new opportunities. These myriad sources reect important disciplinary differences in generating a consistent denition of restructuring, yet they also demonstrate noteworthy similarities in tone and approach. The concept of restructuring was introduced into corporate language in the 1970s, when it was negatively associated with economic distress. In the 1980s, the term took on a more positive and constructive connotation of providing organizations an opportunity to make structural changes to increase efciency and prots. As this linguistic turn entered the popular lexicon, this revised interpretive understanding also appeared in the more academic studies of social scientists, including sociologists of work and occupations. As a rhetorical tool, this framing of the discourse supports a dialogue of consensus that focuses on restructuring as a positive force for achieving efciency in a cutthroat marketplace. It follows that the loss of jobs, or their outsourcing, are part of the natural workings and operation of a free and increasingly global marketplace for jobs and careers. Restructuring has also been a topic of public discussion during political campaigns, with competing assertions about its short-run versus long-term impacts, and the United Statess business-friendly environment provides organizations strong institutional support to respond readily to new demands and use
1 Three textbooks reect the different normative and descriptive emphases of their disciplines and applications. A textbook on organization behavior denes restructuring as altering an organizations structure by such actions as eliminating a department or reducing the number of layers of management to streamline the organizations operations and reduce costs (George & Jones 1999, p. 18, italics added). A more sociological text (Corneld et al. 2001, p. xiii, italics added) conceives of it as a three-dimensional transformation of workplace social structure. Finally, in their text on managing personnel (human resources), GomezMejia et al. (1998, p. 9, italics added) discuss organizational restructuring as entailing the attening of management levels in a process that requires effective management of human resources. . .in a hybrid blending of rms with diverse histories and labor forces.

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resources effectively in their quest for continued protability (Gowing et al. 1997, Phan & Hill 1995, Tienda et al. 1987). Ideas about adaptation to new environmental demands are crucial components of successful organizational structures (Aldrich 1999, Thompson 1967) and may also help organizations appear more stable and efcient than they may actually be (Van Maanen 1998). Our focus in this review is a consideration of rhetorical and structural treatments of the characteristics, causes, and consequences of organizational restructuring. We characterize rhetorical tools as linguistic persuasion devices and as distinct from structural changes in the pattern and organization of corporate work. This involves recognizing the conditions that precede these deliberate organizational changes as well as the social costs that result from restructuring. Although the term restructuring appears more frequently in the literatures of business administration and economics (Gaughan 2002, Gowing et al. 1997, Hoskisson & Johnson 1992, Zajac & Kraatz 1993), the issues addressed by restructuring are integral to the subelds of organizational, economic, and occupational sociology. Across disciplines, agreement is widespread that organizations strive to be exible and adaptable to survive and compete in the contemporary marketplace. For example, the development of more global markets increased competition and promoted smaller rms entry into markets, forcing large rms to become more focused on reducing costs and increasing efciencies (Hirsch & Shanley 1996, Prechel 1994). Since the 1980s especially, developments in information technology have made it increasingly possible for small rms to be more fast-moving and dynamic relative to larger rms (Quinn 1992). One result has been the accompanying rise and acceptance of new linguistic terms (e.g., downsizing, rightsizing, and warehousing) that describe diminished job security and narrowed long-term employment opportunities within the larger corporate sector (Arthur & Rousseau 1996, Haveman & Cohen 1994). Moreover, the denitions of the terms organization and career have been concurrently adjusted to allow for more virtual models of organizational forms and hierarchies, as well as types and principles of employment (more temporary and contract, rather than full-time with benets) (Hirsch & Naquin 2001, Smith 1997). Economic and organizational sociologists recognize that even though the traditional career model with more long-term employment and job security is no longer as applicable, previously reliant structures and institutions (e.g., employersponsored pensions and health insurance) are less quick to adapt (Corneld et al. 2001; Newman 1988, 1993). What is popularly referred to as the new economy involves redened obligations, risks, corporate logics, career paths, networks, and framing strategies (Dobbin 2004) that also have social (and therefore sociological) effects outside of organizational boundaries (Granovetter 1985, Lee 1987). These changes are also reected in new managerial discourse and what Van Maanen (1998, p. 193) called the penchant for fad and folderol, where advice tracts and change manifestos reect a pressing need for problematizing the rhetoric of organizational restructuring and change within various organizational types.

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SOCIOLOGICAL TREATMENTS OF RESTRUCTURING

For sociologists, an interesting and important correlate of the widespread restructuring of organizations and its relationship to employment has been a restructuring of what Bendixs (1974) classic work called the rhetoric and ideology of management in the course of industrialization. The general managerial argument has been that the decrease in the size of a rms workforce is an opportunity for those remaining to take on more responsibility and thereby become empowered (Arthur & Rousseau 1996, Corneld et al. 2001). Untangling the discrepancies between (a) the negative economic connotations of dismissals (for some) (Spalter-Roth & Deitch 1999) and (b) the positive management code for empowering the employees (Wanous et al. 1984) that remain also signals a reinvented structure of work and organizational practices (Castillo 1997, Grunberg et al. 2000, Kanter 1989, Smith 1997). Balanced against the rhetorical frameworks supporting lean and mean companies (Harrison 1994) and the proliferation of strategic alliances in the global marketplace (Fligstein 2001, Han 1994), we also note a rise in the less positive framing of the structural ramications and rhetorical criticisms of organizational restructuring and their implications for society at large (Fiss & Hirsch 2005, Kentor 2001). If capitalism and a market-based society are the ideals that American-based organizations, at all levels, encapsulate and promote internationally, sociological examinations of peripheral inequalities provide important contributions to our knowledge of how much, and when, such promises of organizational efciency are in fact deliverable and responsive to those affected by them (Cascio 2002, Corneld et al. 2001, Kalleberg et al. 1996). Within the realm of academic sociology, the term organizational restructuring is used sparingly, and its determinants are conceptually undertheorized. Discourse around the structures of workplace social organization relies on the notion that bureaucracy is what is actually being reconceived by social scientists on the global level. Marxian sociology, especially, would make a more acerbic statement about the realities of restructuring for workers and the general population. Organizational restructuring as such would have been too tame a term for conceptualizing the social change correlated with global political-economic practices that affect large populations of workers. Additional sociological conceptual frameworks, alongside and preceding restructuring, include organizational decline (Grant & Wallace 1994), deindustrialization (Harrison 1994), reorganization, exibility (Kalleberg 2001), organizational change, and reinvention. Sociology often attempts to personalize the relationships between employees (as factors of production) and social institutions. Organizational sociologists have considered restructuring from the standpoints of both the dependent and independent variable in a large variety of contexts. Examples include institutional change (Abolaa & Biggart 1991), corporate structures and control (Ocasio & Kim 1999, Perrow 2002), interrm networks (Uzzi 1997), and ideas about the meaning of work and careers (Castillo 1997, Haveman & Cohen 1994, Hodson 1996, Kalleberg

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2003, Wuthnow 1990). The process of organizational change has sporadically slowed and sped up in different political and economic conditions, but it has not ceased (Aldrich 1999). To some extent, the social and research outcomes of organizational restructuring deemed negative by sociologists may signal a disciplinary disconnect with the discourse of those who frame it as positive and benecial for the economy and society at large [e.g., see Zuckerman (2004) and Zajac & Westphals (2004) debate over economic sociologys domain and assumptions]. Large-scale shifts in bureaucratic form and process have demonstrated past capabilities of social organization to adapt and benet from such change. They suggest a potential upside for future restructurings following additional systemic changes on local, national, and global levels (Kentor 2001, Rubin & Smith 2001). An alternative and more traditional, though equally broad, view of the sociological agenda in researching and theorizing this topic has conceived organizational restructuring quite differently from its near-exclusively positive treatment in other elds. The discipline has a long tradition of studying the adverse effects and implications of social disruptions caused by organizational and corporate change, whereas management studies habitually examine the bottom line of organizational goals. Sociologists monitor restructurings macro effects, and economists monitor externalities, in a wide variety of tangential arenas. These externalities include gender inequalities (Kay & Hagan 1999, McCall 2000, Quadagno 1999, Skuratowicz & Hunter 2004, Tienda et al. 1987); immigration, race, and discrimination (Hagan 2004, Massey & Denton 1993, McBrier & Wilson 2004, Spalter-Roth & Deitch 1999, Sunstein 1991); downsizing, unemployment, and income polarization (Corneld et al. 2001, DiPrete 1993, Galbraith & Berner 2001, Grunberg et al. 2000, Hodson 1996); and the impacts of globalization on career paths and organizational processes (Dobbin 2004, Fligstein 2001, Frenkel 2003, Galbraith & Berner 2001, Quadagno 1999, Ruet 2003). These studies focus on the correlates of reduced, rather than enhanced, opportunities (Hirsch & Shanley 1996). Whether or not sociologists use the exact term organizational restructuring to describe the momentum behind such economic and social changes, corporate efciency is used even more sparingly to describe the outcome of these disruptive forces. Within corporate structures, sociologists of work and organizations investigate inequalities in job mobility (DiPrete 1993, DiPrete & Nonnemaker 1997, Haveman & Cohen 1994, McBrier & Wilson 2004); trends in perceived job quality (Frost 1985, Prechel 1994, Quadagno 1999, Reger et al. 1994, Uzzi 1997, Wallace & Leicht 2004); wage disparities (Handel 2005, Hernandez-Leon 2004) and career paths (or lack thereof) (Arthur & Rousseau 1996, Hirsch 1986, Hirsch & Shanley 1996, Royal & Althauser 2003); technology usage among workers (Burris 1999); and interorganizational culture (Frenkel 2003, Frost 1985, Hodson 1996, Martin 2002, Wallace & Leicht 2004). In addition to its business rm application typically used to generate and illustrate organizational theories (Hodson 1996, Kalleberg 2003, Ocasio & Kim 1999), the rhetoric of restructuring has been extended to describe practices in law

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rms (Kay & Hagan 1999), religious orders (Bartunek 1984, Wuthnow 1990), the federal government (Rodriguez 2004, Yamagata et al. 1997), health care organizations (Leicht et al. 1995), education (Dolan 1994), and unions (Brueggemann & Brown 2003, Kochan et al. 1986). Such variety of usage in the eld begets further sociological inquiry into the issues that organizational restructuring entertains and addresses, relieving normative presumptions about economic forces and mechanisms as they inuence social dynamics.

UNPACKING RESTRUCTURINGS DISCURSIVE FRAMES Business and Industrys Linguistic Perspective

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Since the early days of large corporate organizations, discursive frames of deliberate change have been replete with terminology used to describe socio-economic processes (Perrow 2002, Roy 1997). The popular arrival of the term organizational restructuring was accompanied by the claim among business publications that traditional organizations had become dinosaurs in the landscape of American corporate enterprise. In employing this term, corporations and the publications that serve as their gatekeepers into the public arena created a prominent rhetoric of exaggeration that both describes the contemporary reality of the corporate experience and distracts rms and workers from it (Littler & Innes 2004). As markets globalize, technologies advance, and knowledge diversies, the environment outside the corporate organization rapidly transforms, necessitating linguistic explanations. Jacques (1996), for one, calls the language of the business world a pidgin language, a polyglot of overlapping dialects. . .speak[ing] the articially claried and semantically impoverished language of hypothesis testing alone (Jacques 1996, p. xi). In terms of the organizations inner workings, we are told through popular business publications about the new employee (Grunberg et al. 2000, Jones et al. 2002), the proactive, self-managing, team-oriented knowledge worker (Jacques 1996, p. 1). Somewhat surprisingly, or perhaps not, this description applies to the sought-after worker both now and decades ago. Beyond the rhetorical tool of restructuring, the world of corporate enterprise is replete with the replication of themes possessing different ofcial names or supporters. Examining organizational change through a historical perspective attuned toward discursive frames can help organizational researchers separate these titles from actual trends. Table 1 places some of the more macrosociological elements and practices surrounding the discourse of restructuring in this broader context. The structural changes noted in Column 1 of the Table take epochal events discussed by Fligstein & Shin (2004) and further elaborate on their linkages with descriptive qualities of changes (Column 2) and the rhetorical labeling (Column 3) associated with the transformed organizational forms and environmental impacts. Throughout this period, various shocks to the economy affected rm size and relationships both within and among industries. This, in turn, inuenced trends in labor markets, union participation, and the culture of business environments, as

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ORGANIZATIONAL RESTRUCTURING TABLE 1 Organizational restructuring perspectives by decade Changes in employment relationships Impact on individual and corporate investments Firm size begins to shrink

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Structural changes in economy and worka 1970s OPEC oil shock Economic crisis: high ination, slow growth Deregulation of trucking and airline industries

Rhetorical descriptives and trends Restructuring enters the lexicon as strategic reorientation Worldwide prot squeeze Efcient Market theory Dehumanization and deskilling of work Corporate refocusing Shareholder value over stakeholders rights Inuence of changing management and corporate culture on downsizing, outsourcing, and employment of contract workers Redenition of core workers: from employees as partners to costs to be minimized Downsizing and layoffs instead of ring External pressures from global markets to reorganize and restructure More exible labor markets employment is streamlined Intensication and greater feeling of efcacy at work Changes in the denition and category of worker (Continued)

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1980s Wave of recession: permanent closure of production and manufacturing facilities, deindustrialization, layoffs of blue-collar workers Increase in income and wage inequality Decline in union membership and participation Global trade restrictions lifted 2540 leveraged buyouts worth $297 billion between 1981 and 1989b 55,000 mergers and acquisitions worth just under $2 trillion between 1981 and 1989b

Transfers of worth from workers to owners Restructuring seen as correcting for overdiversication in the 1960s and 1970s Heightened work loads, diminished morale, fear of layoffs, and reduced employee commitment Enhanced quality, customer service, risk taking, workforce competence, and productivity Worry about increased work motivation leading to self-protectionism and a withdrawal from social and cultural life Dropping employee retention rates Rise of temporary and contingent workforce

1990s Second wave of recession: downsizing of service sector Increase in the idea of working 24/7 thanks to technological advances Changes in health insurance, benet, and pension plans

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TABLE 1

(Continued) Changes in employment relationships Rhetorical descriptives and trends Question of how to build worker loyalty A delayered, horizontal corporate model Seen as a competitive advantage for rms because exibility and autonomy give rms competitive advantages Further restructuring of practices, products, and processes Organizational innovation and workplace reform Boundaryless careers

Structural changes in economy and worka Stock market boom and collapse

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2000s Large-scale rm shift from manufacturing to business services Increased wage disparity between highest and lowest levels of rm employment

a b

Historical events mentioned drawn from Fligstein & Shin (2004). Data reported in Johnson (1996) and Jensen (1993).

detailed in the popular press. Restructurings rhetoric is more variable with the disciplinary and political frameworks at hand and, therefore, can be more ambiguous. Like Abrahamson & Fairchild (1999, 2001), we see a need for future research into how Column 3s corporate and social implications are publicly interpreted and challenged.

Trends and Effects of Restructurings Rhetoric

Nonoffensive language (terms such as adjustment and exibility) is regularly used to mask, reframe, and sugarcoat economic slumps as possessing positive social outcomes. Consistent with this logic, the term restructuring provides a way to talk legitimately about squeezing efciency out of the same set of assets within organizational limits. As the social and institutional logics surrounding work have changed (Thornton & Ocasio 1999), we nd ve salient themes have evolved in studies of organizational restructurings effects. This literature examines (a) changes in types of work, (b) reduced benets from work, (c) increased hours of work, (d) perceptions about work, and (e) increased income inequality. In a valuable treatment of restructuring, Leicht (1998) shows how these changes develop, noting several supporting structures and concrete forms change has taken: extended use of subcontracting and outsourcing, the attening of organizational hierarchies, growing use of consultants and contingent workers, downsizing of the permanent workforce, and virtual communication across boundaries and borders through technological advances. Organizational restructuring, then, regularly appears in the machinery of popular business and consultant-related managerial

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language as a necessary component of remaining competitive (Cascio 2002, Uhlenbruck et al. 2003). The positive impact of these changes on higher levels of productivity has not been proven (Gordon 1996, Gowing et al. 1997, Harrison & Bluestone 1988), although explanations asserting increasing efciency and worker empowerment (of those who remain) often appear in public and managerial discourse (Davidov 1993). Rhetorically, this resonates in the U.S. business world to rationalize downsizing, outsourcing, buyouts, and transformations and shifts in the organization of assets (Gowing et al. 1997, Jones et al. 2002, New York Times Spec. Rep. 1996, Newman 1993). The changes in the workplace during the 1980s and 1990s reect these changes in ideas of corporate control as solutions to the economic crises of the 1970s (Handel 2005, Harrison 1994). Restructurings consequences for social conditions, especially for workers, have not been factored into these decisions (Corneld et al. 2001). Especially relevant for sociological analysis, inequalities among employees in this period intensied. Assets frequently changed hands in the course of these restructurings, typically from workers to owners and investors through the mechanism of the corporate mergers, acquisition, or takeover (Hirsch 1986, Palmer et al. 1995, Shleifer & Vishny 1991). Executives were highly rewarded through salaries and benets or generous exit packages, whereas less skilled employees and the more vulnerable workers received reduced salaries, benets, and job security. Fligstein & Shin (2004) call this transformation the emergence of a shareholder value society, where changed working conditions follow from the reorganization of the corporate rm. This combination of ownership and cultural changes at the macro level, with the revised framing of the employment relation embodied by restructuring, brought an end to what has been viewed as a golden era of economic development and rising wealth in the United States for both investors and workers. During the years following World War II, the American economy excelled, with smoother labor-management relations and job security for the white-collar managers who identied (and were so labeled by Whyte 1956) as organization men. However, organizational structure cannot be held to be constant in its interdependent relationship with economic history (Rubin & Smith 2001). Whether focusing on actors, processes, or the environment, organizational forms are expected to vary and uctuate in response to economic and environmental stimuli (Thompson 1967). Yet, the rhetoric used to describe restructuring often frames it as a specic (onetime) point of change within a corporate or workplace organization (Cascio 2002, Phan & Hill 1995, Webster & Omar 2003) rather than a constantly transformative process. Over time, restructuring has followed a normative climate of economic development. It is not singular in its perceived status as an event or incident, or only symbolic of present day economic circumstances, but rather continuous, often reected in shifts in the concentration of wealth and power (Perrow 2002). Fluctuations in this continuum of shifting power have accelerated since the era immediately following World War II. We suggest that the postWorld War II

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period should be considered the anomaly, not the paradigm, of the history of American organizations and capitalism (Dahrendorf 1997). The experience of work in America was tougher and more individualistic before this window and, as the wide, popular use and recognition of the term restructuring attests, has shed some of these reassuring characteristics to return to a relatively less generous, more competitive approach to employees and their labor market.

Restructurings Symbolic and Political Usage

Colloquially, the concept of restructuring is equated with, and often used in place of, less attractive alternatives, such as ring, closing, or relocating. The terms denition is ambiguous, enabling it to be used as a symbolic tool with increasing cultural power and resonance. As a symbol for changes in employment contracts, understandings, and relationships, we nd the issues to which it speaks are also addressed under other descriptive names and titles in popular and sociological literature. Under changing historical circumstances and differing disciplinary agendas, the words used to describe the topics encompassed by the term possess symbolic political value in the public arena. The term restructuring is used to indicate both active and passive processes within organizations, contingent on the circumstances behind the rhetoric and the dependent variable to be explained. A linguistic boomerang, the terms academic capital has lost and gained support over the past several decades, even though its occurrence and operation as an organizational process never ceased. In the 1970s and 1980s especially, the language of restructuring indicated broader social processes and trends, providing a value-laden term to positively encompass and describe the reorganization of capital and industry (Shleifer & Vishny 1988) as it affected social and economic conditions (Gordon 1996, Harrison & Bluestone 1988, Scott 2004). Kanter dryly calls the continual restructuring process in many companies a corporate tness regimen. . .for companies trying to win in the global Olympics (Kanter 1989, p. 58). This changing understanding of restructuring (from a negative to a more positive framing) provides a salient indicator, helping to explain the updating and redenition of the social contract that had dened the American company and American industrial development since about 1945 (Fligstein 2001, Minnick & Ireland 2005, Rubin & Smith 2001). The perceived need to restructure as economic necessity to create greater share value, not just to rearrange corporate assets in response to takeover threats, is socially embedded (Granovetter 1985). Its framing is reliant on historical context and alternative players in the corporate arena. Order can be found in markets just as disorder can be found within rms. Bureaucratic management structures recurrently miscalculate the amount of cooperation they will get from employees, also underestimating the integration costs of such workplace disruptions (Kanter 1989, Reger et al. 1994). Environmental inuences, particularly those with nancial interest, play a signicant role in creating pressure to restructure (Bowman & Singh 1993, Johnson 1996).

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Restructurings contribution to workplaces transforming social structures raises questions for sociologists of work about fundamental shifts in the distribution of power and authority in the organization, the depth of mutual commitment between employer and employee, and worker livelihoods and life chances (Hirsch & Naquin 2001). The signicance of the terms usagethe so whatis that the positive reframing of restructuring brought it from a largely descriptive to a more meaning-laden political term (and for some critics, codeword), masking changes that may benet owners while causing (at least) short-term harm to workers and society more broadly.

Historical Evidence and Relationships

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Following from the rhetorical trends discussed above, we suggest that the term organizational restructuring is a distinctively American construct, an important component of the current American export of managerial ideology to transnational contexts (Frenkel 2003, Poster & Prasad 2005). The assumption of restructurings legitimacy as a way to favorably achieve the pretext of efciency within global markets is more the case in the United States than elsewhere in the world (Fligstein 2001). Predispositions of historical evidence suggest an enveloping political and economic, rather than social, climate (Fligstein 2001, Harrison 1994). This American version of capital, in particular, supports policies that justify the movement of organizational hubs around the world, actions that in other countries might cause more labor unrest (Galbraith & Berner 2001, Royal & Althauser 2003, Smith 2001). It operates at a level above unions or government regulation, which suggests an enduring cultural hostility to federal ownership or control (Starr 2004). This version of capitalism also is distinct from capitalism elsewhere because it is Americas history and politics, as opposed to simply referencing them (Perrow 2002, Roy 1997). Outside of the United Statess social and political context, this positive framing of the restructuring concept within corporate agendas is unfamiliar and ahistorical (Jones et al. 2002).2 In Europe, among other countries, for example, the focus of restructuring is more on macrolevel state policies, such as labor markets (Galbraith & Berner 2001, Haney & Pollard 2003, Wilensky 2002). Themes of discovering the best ways to manage employees repeat themselves through the various industrial logics that have controlled American business since the industrial revolution. The history of American industrial organizations suggests viewing the concept of efciency, for example, as an ongoing convention of thought. Efciency has been a potent factor in resolving contradictions embedded in business logics stretching from the initial stages of industrial production to recent Wall Street Journal announcements. In the United States, the institutional logic of organizational change (Thornton & Ocasio 1999) is primarily one of natural
2 However, see the recent piece by Ahmadjian & Robbins (2005) for Japanese adoption of American-inuenced corporate changes.

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selection, following a sense of social or organizational Darwinism: that which is inefcient does not survive or prosper (Rubin & Smith 2001). Incentives for organizational dynamism and competition are, however, situated in, dened by, and structured through the production of rms, their social relations to each other, and their relations to government (Fligstein 2001, p. 98). Organizational restructuring situates corporate change within the broader political economy of state economic development (Grant & Wallace 1994). Corporate selfinterest typically precedes benevolence in terms of relationship building, contracting, capital investitures, and workers (Dore 2001 [1983]). A range of dimensions of states political economies, such as state scal capacities, the organizational capacity of labor, social wage policies, and state political/electoral context (Grant & Wallace 1994) has lasting and profound effects on organizational relationships and competitive processes in the marketplace. Social and cultural schema also play a part in understanding organizational restructuring as a component of a larger, more historical project. Looking directly at the American context, Perrow notes in his writings a tendency to turn away from the power of the organization as a collective entity and instead focus on individuals, culture, and laws (Perrow 1986, 2002). This propensity mirrors what political, economic, and cultural sociologists recognize as American exceptionalism in the understanding and construction of a social, not an individual, problem (Hilgartner & Bosk 1988, Kollmeyer 2004, Poppendieck 1995, Quadagno 1999, Rao et al. 2000). Abroad, restructuring practices and supporting policies offer different approaches to examining the meaning of work (Castillo 1997), industrial policies (Dobbin 1994), inequalities (Galbraith & Berner 2001), labor markets (DiPrete & Nonnemaker 1997), and business models (Dore 2001 [1983], Jones et al. 2002). These alternative components of organizational effects demonstrate the cultural and social specicities that connect both global markets and local understandings to the symbolic values of restructurings rhetoric. Earlier in this chapter, we mentioned managerial ideology as an American business export into the global marketplace. Changes in global business practices initiate sensemaking about organizational restructuring (Jones et al. 2002). Evaluating how the diffusion of such procedural designs is framed demonstrates that the relationship among various business strategies may be premised under the American exceptionalist perspective outlined above. The discourse of American exceptionalism emerges in elds where conceptions of global business practices are framed as having the greatest structural effects (Fiss & Hirsch 2005). The outcome of such framing may ease or hinder the widespread acceptance of restructuring as the appropriate discourse and practice in the global context (Hirschman 1991).

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RESTRUCTURINGS RELEVANCE TO LABOR

The study of restructurings impacts on labor and workers, both in the United States and abroad, is clearly a sociological topic of academic, public, and policy concern

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(see, e.g., Danaher & Burbach 2000, Krugman 1994, Stiglitz 2003). Its framing generally requires implicit legitimation and understanding of the loss of worker power in its midst (Hodson 1996, Spalter-Roth & Deitch 1999). Sociological interest in restructuring as corporate practice frequently tackles changing conceptions of work, employment, and other issues related to this transformation (Arthur & Rousseau 1996). Our interest in the U.S. wage structure and income inequality (Galbraith & Berner 2001, Kentor 2001), the decline of union membership and power (Kochan et al. 1986), and the political economy of manufacturing growth and decline (Grant & Wallace 1994) demonstrates the powerful inuence of organizations, especially corporate organizations, on social life. Peeling back another layer, recent themes within economic sociology also document a shift from a world of relatively balanced and peaceful labor negotiations to one in which unions and workers have lost power and become viewed as more expendable. As these wider labor market transformations and societal processes unfold, the changing structures of organizations as both individual and collective entities have tangible consequences and implications for their own workers. Waves of reorganization of both rm structure and organizational purpose (especially in the 1980s when the term restructuring gained popularity in the business press) shifted the boundaries of control and power to and from different roles in the corporation (Hirsch 1987, Johnson 1996, Perrow 1986, Zajac & Kraatz 1993). Some rms strategically restructure through specializing, cultivating their core competence, and contracting out (or outsourcing) functions formerly performed within the rm. Remaining competitive in the global marketplace has been portrayed as one of the key drivers of such organizational restructuring (Jones et al. 2002). A decrease in mutual loyalty and commitment by workers and their employer rms has been one result. As collective actors, organizations develop interests and goals distinct from those of their individual members, or workers, affecting social mobility, stratication, and growing inequalities, in both national and international contexts (Scott 2004, Sills 1958). The market optimistically values corporate announcements of restructuring as improving the future outlook of the organization or industry (Kanter 1989), even though evidence suggests that specialization and change do not often bring about the aforementioned goals of positive returns (Johnson 1996). For example, rms advance their share price in the short term by publicizing layoffs, even though we do not know if these changes enhance their competitiveness or overall nancial health (Fligstein & Shin 2004). Symbolic reactions to the globalization of labor processes (protests, boycotts, etc.) demonstrate the intense emotion attached to the structural realities of downsizing and the outsourcing of jobs (Gowing et al. 1997, Greider 1997). These realities include, for example, internal labor markets collapsing under the pressures of external market forces, and opportunities for job advancement or security declining within these contracting organizations (Royal & Althauser 2003). Scholars of management studies, such as Uhlenbruck et al. (2003), call such strategic change defensive downsizing. Much of the public discourse around restructuring

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implicitly indicates the loss of jobs, however positively the language is presented (Kalleberg 2003). Ideas about exibility in the workplace (Frenkel 2003, Kalleberg 2003, Vallas 1999), for example, typically refer to the lifting of constraints on managements ability to hire, transfer, and re workers. Organizational restructuring, as rhetoric and practice, illuminates the realities of corporate power.

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Sociologists have examined a wide range of consequences of bureaucratic and organizational restructuring on social conditions and worker livelihoods, including limitations on upward career mobility, low wages, unemployment, occupational safety and health, and the accessibility of social insurance (Quadagno 1999). The disciplines conceptions do not share the managerial assumption that views greater efciency as an unquestionable good, such that cutting back on wages and workers is legitimated almost automatically if one can say it leads to greater efciencies. It also connects to the more frequently cited studies of organizational change and decline, as well as to their greater exibility and reorganization within the discipline. In this review, we have highlighted the tension between the concept of restructuring as an autonomous structural or a rhetorical trend. We trace its treatment and implications within the sociology of organizations and work as it links corporate and social dynamics. Although we spend considerably less time discussing questions and theories related to the causes of restructuring, we feel this contribution is a useful one. Furthermore, the normative discourse and framing of work reects and further inuences both public and sociological interpretations of the impact of restructuring. We agree with Zajac & Westphal (2004) that sociology should veer further into economic territory to address some of its value-laden assumptions and note the political-economic trends that are the meaning-lled causes and the processes, as well as the consequences, of restructuring. Our consideration of the rhetorical frameworks used to conceptualize change within the American model of bureaucratic organizations is evidence that sociologists need to examine further how restructuring affects the culture of business in other national contexts. We note its strong layers of institutional support in the American context and that this support is less assumed and legitimate in other societies. By taking a more comparative focus, sociologists of work and organizations will be further able to parse out social and cultural variables within international economic sociology (Form 2002, Wilensky 2002). Ahmadjian & Robbinss (2005) study of Japans changing corporate structures in the 1990s and Orru et al.s (1991) comparative study of cultures and economic development in Asia provide excellent examples. We see a need for more such comparative research, as well as for an examination of the inuence of transnational groups and international governing bodies such as the World Trade Organization and their impacts on working conditions and labor unions and movements.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors thank Daniel Corneld for helpful comments and suggestions for this review. The Annual Review of Sociology is online at http://soc.annualreviews.org LITERATURE CITED
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