The New American Workplace: High Road or Low Road?

Abstract

Extravagant claims about workplace transformation have proliferated in the late twentieth-century US, as corporate experiments with various forms of worker participation have captured the imaginations of managers and social scientists alike. Traditional, top—down forms of organising work have increasingly been criticised in favour of such innovations as employee involvement, quality circles, pay-for-knowledge, multi-skilling, and teamwork. These techniques have spread from manufacturing to the service sector, and can be found in unionised as well as non-union settings. The new ‘high-performance’ workplace has been credited both with raising productivity (and thus competitiveness) and with enhancing the quality of workers’ daily lives on the job. It is often portrayed as a means of alleviating the nation’s economic malaise, and at the same time as a form of workplace democratisation, since the various participatory and skill-enhancing schemes it comprises include workers in processes and activities that were formerly monopolised by management. Indeed, evidence that workers themselves prefer the new forms of work organisation to more traditional ones is accumulating (although this remains an under-researched aspect of the phenomenon). Many observers see workplace reform as a key prerequisite for moving toward a high-skill, high-wage economy — the ‘high road’ for human resource management.