Worker Responses to Quality Organisation: Discourse and Materiality in Organisational Change

Abstract

This paper explains varying degrees of employee commitment to organisational change across four organisations. Of the many workplace innovations in recent years, Quality Management (QM) is one of the most common and also, potentially, the most far-reaching. QM is the backdrop for a focus on variations in worker acceptance of change and the factors which explain this. These factors are split into two dimensions. First, the discursive aspects of quality are analysed, that is, the management ideology or `culture of quality' and the way this is communicated to employees. Second, the more material bases of work and employment are examined. Neither discourse or materiality are privileged in the analysis; rather, it is argued that only by grasping the interrelationship between the two can a thorough explanation of employee responses be derived.