Organisational control as cultural practice—A shop ﬂoor ethnography...

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Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 305–331

Organisational control as cultural practice—A shopfloor ethnography of a Sheffield steel mill

Thomas Ahrens a,*, Massimiliano Mollona b

a Accounting Group, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UKb Anthropology Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK

Abstract

Field studies of management control and accounting have tended to study organisational meaning through practices.We identify three strands of practice research on organisational control (viz., governmentality, actor network theory,and accountability) and propose a forth: cultural practice. The study of control as cultural practice is grounded inobservation because it conceives of cultural knowledge as practical and largely extra-linguistic. It conceptualises organ-isational control as an effect of the actions and ideas of organisational members beyond the ranks of management, thuswidening the field of empirical inquiry. It also makes studies of steady state organisations more attractive thereby open-ing the possibility that the assemblages of people, purposes, and technologies, which give rise to specific forms of organ-isational control, may be understood as less ephemeral than, particularly, studies of governmentality and actor networktheory have suggested. Our ethnography of a steel mill in Sheffield is based on 11 months of participant observation onthe shop floors of the hot and cold departments. We argue that the subcultures of different shop floors were constitutedin practices of control which enabled organisational members to pursue diverse objectives that were related to their var-ious wider cultural aspirations. Organisational control practices relied on diverse accountings and accounts of organ-isational actions and purposes. Whilst we found considerable diversity between subcultures, we also found thatindividual subcultures, and the tensions and contradictions within them, exhibited much continuity. The ability of stud-ies of organisational subcultures to bring out the diversity as well as continuity of practices holds considerable potentialfor our understanding of organisational control.� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

0361-3682/$ - see front matter � 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reservdoi:10.1016/j.aos.2006.08.001

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 247 657 2953.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (T. Ahrens),

[email protected] (M. Mollona).

Introduction

Technologies of control, like accounting andother information and planning systems, can havediverse organisational effects because their usesdepend on the particular ways in which they

ed.

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

306 T. Ahrens, M. Mollona / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 305–331

become part of organisational practices (Schatzki,2005). Practices as collective action are self-refer-ential. They are activities that are ordered by theirpractitioners’ intentions to contribute to thosesame practices (Barnes, 2001). Practices are recog-nisable as projects with general applicability, suchas activity based costing, that adapt to specificcontexts by meshing with the intentions of organ-isational practitioners and organisational mean-ings more generally. Control technologies, andthe practices through which they come to haveorganisational effects, are therefore inherentlymeaningful. New or modified accounting controlsystems, for example, can become implicated inprofound changes of organisational strategiesand their members’ perceptions of organisationalpurpose (Czarniawska-Joerges & Jacobsson, 1989;Dent, 1991; Kurunmaki, 1999; Roberts, 1990).

Those perceptions, and organisational mean-ings more generally, belong to the symbolic realmof organising. Through, for example, language, rit-ual, and attire (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984), butalso technologies (Gell, 1992; Harvey, 1997;Mauss, 1973), the symbolic expresses organisationand its structuring effects. Thereby, the symbolicaspects of organisation themselves take on system-atic characteristics. They become symbolic systemsamenable to cultural analysis. The notion of sym-bolic systems has served as a definition of culturefor anthropologists as diverse as Bloch, Geertz,Malinowski, and Sahlins. It characterises culturesas meaningful orders that become part of thesocial fabric insofar as they relate to practices,thereby giving rise to culturally meaningful, butultimately unpredictable actions (Rosaldo, 1993;Sahlins, 1995; Schatzki, 2002). Organisationalcultures provide the frames of meaning for organ-isational continuity and change alike (Martin,2001).

Even though the practices that engage technol-ogies are potentially of great cultural significance,few studies have addressed the cultural dimensionof organisational control technologies. Field stud-ies of control and accounting, for example, havetended to study the meanings of control with refer-ence to various practice frameworks but not sym-bolic systems. They have shared a concern with thedispersion and temporary nature of organisational

meanings and the highly specific, localised uses ofaccounting (e.g., Ahrens & Chapman, 2002; Briers& Chua, 2001; Ogden, 1997). Few field studies ofthe relationships between accounting control andorganisational meanings have drawn explicitly ontheories of culture (e.g., Dent, 1991).

At stake in the conception of control practicesas cultural is the dependence of organisationalcontrol on systems of symbolic significance.Anthropological studies of organisations (Janelli& Yim, 1993; Ouroussoff, 1993; Rohlen, 1974)have lead us to expect symbolic systems to berooted in diverse aspects of organising, includingwork processes and their technologies, organisa-tional members’ values, beliefs, and social rela-tions, and the strategies and formal controls ofmanagement. The task of the study of control ascultural practice lies in exploring the relationshipsbetween those and further sources of organisa-tional culture, organisational practices, and organ-isational control. Conceived as an effect of thesymbolic organisation of practices, control isdependent on, but also influencing, the spectrumof ambitions of organisational members. The cul-tural analysis ought to shed light on the sourcesof those ambitions, the extent to which they areshared or in competition with one another, and,thus, how they contribute to making some prac-tices unremarkable, taken-for-granted, and subjectto objective ‘‘technical’’ discussions, and otherscontentious and subject to ongoing struggles overorganisational purposes and, possibly, the natureof organising itself (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984).

This paper presents an ethnography of organi-sational subcultures and control on the shop floorsof the hot and the cold departments of a steel millin Sheffield, a northern English industrial townonce famous for its steel works. Based on detailedobservations of shop floor activities it gives a com-parative account of the steel mill’s subcultures andhow they were constituted by distinctive practices.Following a review of the relationships betweenculture, meaning, and control in the accounting lit-erature, we discuss anthropological approaches tothe study of organisational control. We present theethnographic method used in this study and pro-vide some information on the mill. We then pres-ent the first part of the ethnography of the

T. Ahrens, M. Mollona / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 305–331 307

smeltery and the grinding bay of the mill, afterwhich we offer some reflections on the ways inwhich management strategies and productiontechnologies can affect the control practices ofthe different organisational subcultures. The sec-ond part of the ethnography is followed by a dis-cussion of how the social relations betweenorganisational members and their social back-grounds can give rise to different cultural practicesof control. We distinguish between ways of know-ing productive processes qualitatively and throughmeasurements, discuss possible implications forthe fragmentation of the symbolic systems oforganisations, and reflect on organisational con-trol as cultural practice more generally.

1 See also the extensive accounting literature on Hofstede’snomothetic concept of culture (Hofstede, 2001) and, particu-larly, his exchange with Baskerville (Baskerville, 2003; Basker-ville-Morley, 2005; Hofstede, 2003).

Culture, meaning, and control in the accounting

literature

The accounting literature on culture has, on thewhole, adopted an objectivist stance and shiedaway from developing an ethnographic (Jonsson& Macintosh, 1997; Power, 1991) understandingof accounting. Conversely, field studies that weregrounded in the everyday reality of accountingpractices (Tomkins & Groves, 1983) did not drawon theories of culture or anthropological methods.In view of the significance accorded to the study ofaccounting in action (Burchell, Clubb, Hopwood,Hughes, & Nahapiet, 1980; Hopwood, 1987) thiscomes as a surprise because ethnography, theanthropological method (and genre) for the studyof culture, can be very useful for producing longi-tudinal observations of organisational everydaylife through which the functioning of accountingand control can be most fully appreciated (Hop-wood, 1976, 1983). The promise of studying theeveryday functioning of accounting in this waywould be deeper and more detailed insights intothe ways in which accounting makes possibleand, ultimately, constitutes specific forms oforganisation.

Even though the constitution of organisationthrough accounting has been an important moti-vation for studying accounting in action, muchaccounting research on culture and control hasturned this line of argument on its head. Instead

of studying the relationship between accounting,control, and specific organisational cultures, cul-ture has frequently been framed by a functionalconception of organisation. Anchored in generalblueprints of the functioning of organisation, cul-ture was held to affect organisational members’perceptions of technical controls, which meantthat different national or organisational culturesmight ‘‘require’’ different controls (Birnberg &Snodgrass, 1988).1

Culture has two important effects on theMCS (management control system) process.It can affect the choice of stimuli to whichthe individual attends, or it can affect anyvalue judgements about the stimuli (Birnberg& Snodgrass, 1988, p. 449).

Studies of this kind proceeded from definitionsof generic organisational control subsystems(e.g., planning, monitoring, evaluation, andreward (Birnberg & Snodgrass, 1988, p. 447))whose functioning could then be postulated asmore or less effective depending on the psycholog-ical dispositions (cultures) of their users (organisa-tional members).

Accounting field studies which, by contrast,sought to unearth the ways in which accountingconstitutes specific organisational processes haverarely drawn on concepts of culture. With thenotable exception of Dent (1991), they have tendedto conceptualise accounting as part of organisa-tional and social practices rather than in relationto organisational cultures. We distinguish threeinfluential strands of practice studies (cf. Ahrens& Chapman, forthcoming).

Studies of governmentality have theorised aconcept of practice rooted in the disciplinary pow-ers of accounting. It has been based on the analysisof specific cases of emerging programmes of gov-ernment as diverse as new forms of managementand freight pricing at the Pennsylvania Railroadin the 1850s (Hoskin & Macve, 1988), invest-ment decision making and the reorganisation of


manufacture at Caterpillar Inc. in the 1980s(Miller & O’Leary, 1994), and the contemporarymanagerialism of UK water companies (Ogden,1997) and efficiency audits in Canada’s public sec-tor (Radcliffe, 1998). For studies of governmental-ity, organisational control is an effect that arisesout of the temporary combination of programmesof government with diverse technologies, such asaccounting. The technologies are characterised byspecific programmatic ambitions, giving them par-ticular forms and making them operable, yet leav-ing the actions of individual actors indeterminate(Miller, 2001). Actors are left with choices thatare conditioned but not determined by the disci-plining effects of programmes and technologies.

A second strand is actor network theory(ANT). An important point of contact with gov-ernmentality lies in the concern of ANT to tracethe generative paths by which programmatic ambi-tion combines with the actions of humans andnon-human actors (like computer software,machines, or materials, for instance) to produceassemblages capable of making a difference, ofleaving an imprint for the ANT researcher(Latour, 1987, 1999; Law & Hassard, 1999). ForANT, any such imprint is the result of heteroge-neous networks that are instantiated by theactor-like qualities of its human and non-humancomponents. Accounting researchers have, forexample, drawn on ANT to delineate the genera-tive paths of responsibility accounting in the Brit-ish (Bloomfield, Coombs, Cooper, & Rea, 1992;Preston, Cooper, & Coombs, 1992) and Australian(Chua, 1995) health sectors and shown the idiosyn-cratic emergences of new accounting systems inprivate sector companies (Briers & Chua, 2001;Quattrone & Hopper, 2005).

A third strand of field studies of accountingand control has theorised organisational practiceswith reference to notions of accountability. It hasfocused on the systematic relationships betweenaccounting systems and systems of accountability‘‘[. . .] analysed as institutionalised forms of inter-dependent social practices’’ (Roberts & Scapens,1985, p. 446). Of particular interest to theaccountability literature has been the potentialof accounting control systems to disembed per-sonal and face-to-face notions of accountability

and replace them with anonymous forms of con-trol (Roberts, 1991; Robson, 1992). Private andpublic sector studies have explored in detail theorganisational processes and, in particular, themanagerial strategies employed to position anon-ymous forms of control such that they are takenseriously throughout the organisation (Ahrens,1996; Ahrens & Chapman, 2002; Frow, Margin-son, & Ogden, 2005; Llewellyn, 1998; Roberts,1990).

Anthropological approaches to organisationalcontrol

All three strands have been concerned withexploring the constitution of accounting throughorganisational practices and vice versa. They havesought to trace the emergence of discourses ofaccounting and, to some extent, its specific organ-isational meanings through an examination of keyevents in the case histories on which they werebased. Those objectives distinguish them fromthe case studies of management control and cul-ture of the organisational symbolism school(Dandridge, Mitroff, & Joyce, 1980; Turner,1989), which have frequently ignored the socialdynamics of organisational relationships. Organi-sational symbolism has tended to subscribe tothe textual notion of culture that emerged in thecontext of American cultural anthropology duringthe 1980s and that has undergone a major criticalreview (Asad, 1983; Fox, 1991; Ortner, 1999;Roseberry, 1982). Geertz’ seminal collection ofessays, The interpretation of cultures (1973),defined culture as a public text that is constitutedby a system of symbols, anthropology as a scienceof interpretation, and ethnography as the searchfor meanings through the informants’ interpreta-tions. Geertz’ textual turn eventually underminedthe validity of fieldwork as a research techniquethrough a reflexive framing of the relationshipbetween the subject and the object of anthropolo-gical research. It led Marcus and Fischer (1986) toclaim that anthropology should first and foremostbe literary critique, progressively involved in tex-tual analysis, rather than the study of socialinstitutions.

2 Our account of social and cultural anthropology’s concernstout court is seeking to draw out broad strands of anthro-pological thinking from the early insistence on observation infieldwork, over the interpretive turn and its critical reception,up to contemporary discussions of the anthropology ofemancipated subjects.


Critics of Geertz have stressed that analysingcultures as public texts gives rise to ‘‘timeless’’,‘‘over-coherent’’, and ‘‘bounded’’ notions of cul-ture (Fox, 1991; Ortner, 1999). In reducing actionsto signs, they claimed, Geertz had collapsed cul-ture’s material and symbolic aspects and obscuredmatters of power and conflict (Roseberry, 1982).Social relations are denied historicity and, thereby,specificity. The organisational symbolism school issusceptible to the same critique. Early contribu-tions to the organisational symbolism literaturesought to ‘‘read’’ working practices as part of fan-tastically coherent and unchanging organisationalbelief systems (Schein, 1985), not unlike the dimen-sion ‘‘belief system’’ in Simons’s (1995) ‘‘levers ofcontrol’’ framework. But even the critics of staticand unitary conceptions of organisational culturewithin the organisational symbolism literature(e.g., Gregory, 1983) have, often followingGeertz’s textual approach, studied organisationsas bounded communities, isolated from broaderhistorical, political and cultural processes, whilstclaiming at the same time that they ‘‘signify’’ (orreplicate) society on a smaller scale (e.g., Jermier,Slocum, John, Fry, & Gaines, 1991). Organisa-tional actors were presented as captives of organi-sational cultures and subcultures, much as theymay have defined themselves in opposition to them(Kunda, 1991). Alvesson and Berg’s (1992) reviewshowed that the organisational symbolism litera-ture has sidestepped the deeper sources of powerand conflict, and ignored the ongoing socialchanges that emerge from the social relations inand around the organisation.

Rather than smother organisational dynamicswith reference to unitary organisational cultures,a number of organisational ethnographies byanthropologists have highlighted that organisa-tional cultures are rarely homogenous spheres ofmeanings, beliefs, and values (Kim, 1992) and thatthey are made up of subcultures that emergearound specific locations, products, and workpractices (Janelli & Yim, 1993; Rohlen, 1974).Such studies have been instrumental in bringingto organisational research an insight that hasemerged over decades of anthropological studies,namely, that culture is not deterministic and thatthe anthropological description of distinctive cos-

mologies does not deprive those who share thosecosmologies of pragmatic action. Rather, theirpractical solutions are interpreted through theircultural schemes, just as the cultural schemes arerealised through pragmatic action (Sahlins, 1985,1995).

The use of cosmologies and cultural schemeshas been criticised as motivated by a search for asuperior ‘‘catch-all’’ explanatory strategy thatcan afford to ignore the explanatory potential ofpower, gender, biology, technologies and materialarrangements, etc. (e.g., Bonnell & Hunt, 1999;Ortner, 1999). We agree that all of these sourcesof social orderings can exert powerful influenceon symbolic systems. Studies of cultural practicemust account for them in order to avoid overbur-dening symbolic explanations (Biernacki, 1999).What distinguishes the researcher who seeks outsymbolic systems that are generative of the mean-ings that are ‘‘the socially constructed understand-ings of the world in terms of which people act’’(Roseberry, 1982, p. 1016) is an insistence thatpeople’s actions are intelligible with reference tosymbolic systems. The nature of those symbolicsystems, however, is not a matter of dogma butresearch. Just how coherent, fragmented, shared,or, indeed, stable they may be, becomes only clearin the course of the fieldwork.

Anthropology’s long-standing interest in sym-bolic systems stems from their potential to connectinterpretations of what people say and do indiverse spheres of social life, for it is through peo-ple’s actions that existing logics-in-use are con-firmed or modified and new ones created.2

Culture is practical and ideational at the same timebecause meanings do not exist independent ofpractices. Meanings can neither determine acti-vities nor can they simply be ‘‘attached’’ to thembecause meanings and practices are co-produced(Rosaldo, 1993). From this vantage point cultureas symbolic system is never a reified set of values,


beliefs, and assumptions but always a result ofpractical activity (Ortner, 1984).3 It cannot be readlike a text that exists at one remove from practices,but its interpretations spring from the stuff ofsocial activity that alone contains the consciousunderstandings of actors and the shared imagina-tions that may be so taken for granted as tomake them inaccessible to actors’ reflection andarticulation (Bourdieu, 1977). Defining culturalknowledge

[. . .] as that which needs to be known inorder to operate reasonably efficiently in aspecific human environment (Bloch, 1991,p. 183)

we focus on the construction of distinctive world-views through organisational practices and iden-tify three contributions of the study of control ascultural practice to the existing body of practice re-search on management control and accounting.

Firstly, the study of control as cultural practiceis grounded in observation because of the empha-sis on action in the definition of symbolic systems.Many of the practice studies cited above could notdraw on observation of organisational action,which made it harder for the researcher to studytaken-for-granted aspects of organisational prac-tices on which organisational members could notreport and to exploit the revealing tensionsbetween what organisational members say anddo. Moreover, organisational practices are com-prehended through discourses as well as activities.Knowledge of them can be conceptual as well as‘‘embodied’’ or ‘‘practical’’ (Bloch, 1991; Lambek,1993). For example, what, superficially, oftenpasses for accounting knowledge—the discursiveschemes, such as accounting theories and conven-tions, to which accountants in particular makefrequent reference—are only a small part of organ-

3 An anthropological collection that may be of interest toaccounting scholars in this respect is Parry and Bloch’s Money

and the Morality of Exchange (1989). Through a comparison ofexchange practices among different peoples, they show thatmoney does not belong to an amoral ‘‘economic’’ sphere withan abstract rational force of its own, but that money becomesembedded in more general symbolic systems that have partic-ular logics for exchange relationships.

isational accounting knowledge. The far greaterpart of organisational accounting knowledge ispractical. It is accounting as understood by organ-isational members through their diverse activities(Ahrens, 1997).

Secondly, the study of control as cultural prac-tice is suggestive of a conceptual and empiricalshift from managerial to organisational controlpractices, insisting that organisational control isan effect of the actions and ideas of organisationalmembers beyond the ranks of management. Themajority of practice studies cited above were con-cerned with management control. They reportedon management plans to change control practices,often with limited insights into the responses ofother employees. It is possible to conduct excellentcontrol practice research even where managementforbids research access to workers, as shown byMouritsen (1999, p. 35), for example. However, amore inclusive approach does hold the potentialof novel insights and a changed research agenda.

A key theoretical problem in this regard is therelationship between the ambitions and activitiesof many different practitioners and their practice.The notion of ‘‘practice as collective action’’(Barnes, 2001) has emphasised the meaningfulordering of activities over the presence of identical,or routine, activities. The idea is that practitionerscontribute to a practice by using their understand-ing and practical experience of the practice toguide them in the course of further contributingto it. This means that practitioners must be ableto apply certain rules but, above all, in pursu-ing objectives related to their practice as theyunderstand it, they must know how to use theirdiscretion to decide when to bend or abandoncertain rules. Through the use of discretion prac-tices remain adaptable to new ideas, materials,demands, etc., without having to change labels.Practice as collective action defines practitionersthrough a general and evolving description of cer-tain activities combined with their intention tocontribute to the practice in question. This notionof collective action is inherently political because itdefines as members of the collective all those whowish to contribute to the practice, irrespective oftheir potential differences over what the best waysof contributing might be. Barnes’ (2001) notion of


practice mirrored important anthropological con-cerns with respect to the definition and portrayalof the knowledge and activities that characterisemembers of a culture (Fox, 1991; Hastrup, 1997;Rosaldo, 1993).

Thirdly, studies of control as cultural practiceoffer an argument for the study of steady stateorganisations, which is unlike the bias towardsstudies of change in the extant control practicesliterature. The changes usually gave the impetus,if not for the studies, then for the published narra-tive. Studies of change have probably yielded mostof the present knowledge of control practices, butthis may have biased existing notions of control.Governmentality and ANT studies, in particular,have emphasised the ephemeral nature of theassemblages of humans and non-humans whichgive rise to specific control practices. This maybe a general feature of organisational control,but its prominence may also be a consequence ofstudying control practices in the context of organ-isational change. Without more studies of steadystate organisations it is difficult to know. Thestudy of control as cultural practice may identifyat least some elements of control practices thatexhibit continuities, such as cultural dispositions,class, education, etc. This is not to exclude organ-isational change from the agenda of cultural prac-tice studies of control, especially since change is tosome extent endemic to organising (Ahrens &Chapman, 2002, pp. 156–7), but simply to pointout that change is not a priority.

Using those three contributions to define stud-ies of cultural practices of control, it would appearthat Dent’s (1991) analysis of the cultural transfor-mation of a railway company does not qualify. Itrelied mainly on interviews, not observations,emphasised management, not organisational con-trol, and focused on the relationships betweensymbolic meaning and change rather than the cul-tural significance of day-to-day activities.

Ethnographic method

The ethnographic method, which privileges par-ticipant observation through extensive fieldwork,has been suggested for the study of accounting in

action (Jonsson & Macintosh, 1997). In theanthropological tradition the participant observerimmerses in the lives of the ethnography’s subjectsby living in their communities, learning their prac-tices, and studying their culture and social organi-sation. In-depth participant observation andextensive fieldwork show institutions and organi-sations as systems of meaningful practices thatare historically and politically contingent, andsocially structured, yet open to change (Ortner,1999; Rosaldo, 1993).

Underlying the ethnographic method thusunderstood is a concept of culture which recog-nises that the distinctions between social andcultural anthropology are not absolute. The partic-ipant observer has no unmediated access to themeanings that may constitute organisational sub-cultures. She imagines the representation of thosemeanings by observing social interaction that con-stitutes social organisation through practices.

For many ethnographers the tracing of culturethrough practices is not just an issue of methodo-logy because they take meanings to exist in prac-tices (Schatzki, 2002). Cultural knowledge, inBloch’s (1991) terms, is too complex to be articu-lated within the constraints of language and there-fore resides in practices themselves (Ortner, 1984).The implications for the study of organisationalcultures are considerable. Whereas folk psycho-logy insists that knowledgeable actors ‘‘know whatthey do’’, which is taken to mean that they canalso articulate what they do, the participant obser-ver cannot trust their accounts in isolation butmust place them in the context of observedpractices.

Thus when our informants honestly say ‘thisis why we do such things’, or ‘this is what thismeans’, or ‘this is how we do such things’,instead of being pleased we should be suspi-cious and ask what kind of peculiar knowl-edge is this which can take such an explicit,linguistic form? Indeed, we should treat allexplicit knowledge as problematic, as a typeof knowledge probably remote from thatemployed in practical activities under normalcircumstances (Bloch, 1991, pp. 193–194,emphasis in original).

4 A pseudonym.


Grounded in detailed observation of daily prac-tices, organisational ethnographies have the poten-tial to reveal as interested or ideological some ofthe folk theories (of organisational practices) thatare spread through organisational discourses.Compared with interview based studies of controland accounting in ‘‘action’’, ethnographies can laymore credible claim towards studying organisa-tional practices.

However, a key difficulty for the ethnographerof cultural practices is the fact that, unlike dra-matic performances, ethnographic texts are notthemselves action (Hastrup, 1997). Underlyingthose texts is, however, a period of shared practicalexperience between the participant observer andthe ethnography’s subjects during which they hadoccasion to share at least aspects of a way of life.

Fieldwork has been defined in various ways,but it boils down to living another world.There is, of course, a lot of systematic workinvolved, a lot of method and questioning,but the essence of fieldwork is to learnanother world by way of experience (Hast-rup, 1997, p. 356, emphasis in original).I found it useful if I wanted to understandhow and why Africans are doing certainthings to do them myself: I had a hut andbyre like theirs; I went hunting with themwith spear and bow and arrow; I learned tomake pots; I consulted oracles; and so forth(Evans-Pritchard, 1956, p. 243).

Ethnographers comprehend action by way oftheir own action in the cultural space under study.In order to convey the participant observers’ extra-linguistic cultural knowledge in linguistic form,ethnographies have often made use of detaileddescriptions of sights, sounds, smells, sensations,and tastes as part of the layered descriptions ofobserved activities with little or no direct speechreported (Evans-Pritchard, 1976; Lambek, 1993;Lan, 1985; Leach, 1954; Levi-Strauss, 1974; Parry& Bloch, 1989). Where direct speech was used itshould not be mistaken as proof of the argumentbecause after months and years of observations itwould be easy to report direct speech selectively.Rather, the ethnography’s credibility rests on itsability to convey important meanings in the lives

of the observed, a group’s symbolic systems, byshowing how they play out in practice. The presentpaper makes use of direct speech simply for illus-trative purposes and to improve readability.

Our concepts of culture and practice go someway to guard against naıve accounts of empathetic‘‘understanding’’ of informants by the participantobserver (Hastrup, 1997). We should be equallywary of presenting cultures as all-too-neat ‘‘sys-tems’’. Critiques of the anthropological traditionto cast observations of the natives in regularitiesand taxonomies have suggested that ethnographiesinstead bring out the active nature of the practicesthrough which the subjects of ethnographies createand negotiate cultural order (Bourdieu, 1977; Ort-ner, 1984; Rosaldo, 1993). The wealth of observa-tion which underlies the ethnography, and which ispartly presented in the published work, should notbe misread as supporting claims to interpretive clo-sure of accounts of organisational practices. Morefield material supports more complex interpreta-tions but it does not absolve authors and readersfrom challenging the argument with alternativeinterpretations (Hastrup, 1997). Anthropologicalresearch has often been concerned with thedetailed documentation of social action aboveand beyond what is needed for the author’s imme-diate purposes of theorising (Evans-Pritchard,1956, p. 254).

The ethnography of the present study is basedon the practical experience of Massimiliano Mol-lona, who worked at UNSOR,4 a steel company,for 11 months, between January and December2000. He spent 7 months as a helper at the furnacein the hot department and 4 months as a helper inthe cold department. During 3 days every week heworked on nightshifts (from 8 pm to 7 am) in thehot department and on day shifts (from 8 am to 5pm) in the cold department. During weekends, hemet the steelworkers in the local pubs and joinedtheir snooker matches and fishing expeditions. Ini-tially, he took extensive notes on the shop floor.As the research unfolded, he interacted with theworkers without taking notes on the shop floor,transcribing key observations and bits of conversa-


tions after work. Altogether he collected morethan 2000 pages of notes on UNSOR during thefieldwork.

The UNSOR steel company, 1994–April 2001

UNSOR was formed in 1994 through a buyoutby Mr. Turner and Mr. Armitage, who were thechief electrician and the marketing director ofUmro Steel, the engineering division of a multina-tional corporation based in Pennsylvania, USA.

The two new owners of the company main-tained the manufacture of high quality specialsteels to the aerospace, mining, and automotivesectors whom they supplied with high carbonand high speed bars, billets, and wire rods. Theyalso diversified into the low quality production ofrods, bars, and wires for the building and indus-trial engineering industries, and for householdand sanitary appliances, thus combining the largeprofit margins from high quality products with asteady supply of orders from the lower qualityproducts.

UNSOR could pursue this diversification strat-egy because of its totally integrated productionprocess. Unusual for the British steel industry, itwas designed as a minimill that could melt, roll,and finish steel in-house. UNSOR operated one30-t electric arc furnace in a batch production pro-cess.5 Besides allowing prompt response to cus-tomer orders, UNSOR’s technical integrationinsulated it from the price fluctuations of its inter-mediate products, i.e., billets, bars, and rods. Par-ticularly for the production of special steels, thosefluctuations could be extreme.

In 1999, some German, Belgian, and Spanishsteel-makers consolidated, and British Steelmerged with the Dutch Hoogovens into Corus,the then fifth largest steel producer in the world.UNSOR’s position in the European market weak-ened and its profit fell from £259,000 in 1998 tojust £5000. In November 1999, UNSOR’s owners

5 UNSOR’s output was small by comparison with its Britishcompetitors who tended to use much more expensive contin-uous casting furnaces that would melt around 150–250 t of steelin one batch.

announced 60 redundancies and started operatingthe furnace, the billet mill and the rod mill on oneshift only.

In February 2001, Corus doubled the price ofraw steel directed to the domestic market whilstcutting the price for special steel sold in the Euro-pean market. UNSOR’s high margin sales of spe-cial steel in the European market becamesuddenly unprofitable. For a short while UNSORwas able to raise the prices of its domestic raw steeland concentrated on the production of high vol-umes of low quality steel. UNSOR needed salesvolume because increasing sales were a conditionof one of its bank loans. In the long run, however,the strategy of concentrating on sales volume andquantity, rather than on product quality and highmargins, was unsustainable for UNSOR’s smallproductive capacity. In March 2001, the com-pany’s pension schemes were frozen and the firmwent into administration.

In April 2001 the smeltery, billet, and rollingmill were closed and the company reduced itsoperations to grinding and coating coils. The oldowners, Mr. Armitage and Mr. Turner boughtwhat was left of their former company and contin-ued production only in the grinding bay with asmall team of young and flexible workers.

Comparative ethnography of production on two shop

floors

The smeltery of the hot department is located ina dark corrugated aluminium structure thatencloses an immense space approximately 200 mlong and 30 m high.6 It is dominated by the 30-telectric arc furnace and the crane, which is usedto load the furnace and, when the steel is ready,teem it. Preparations for the nightshift begin inthe morning. The furnace manager, Mr. Beat, col-lects the production orders from the qualitydepartment and uses red chalk to write the list of

6 In this paper, we use the ‘‘ethnographic present’’ (Clifford &Marcus, 1986) for the ethnographic description. We are awarethat the use of the present tense throughout the text gives thedescriptions an unwarranted timelessness, but we feel that itimproves overall readability.


alloys and scrap required for the three ‘‘heats’’7,8

of the nightshift on the blackboard of his officetogether with the budgeted costs of electricity.Leaving the judgement of the precise quantitiesof alloys and scrap to be used to the smelters, heonly writes down the total of their allowable costsas calculated by the quality control department.Roger, the smeltery supervisor, arriving aroundhalf an hour after Mr. Beat, reads the notes onthe blackboard and drives the battered forklifttruck between the warehouse and the furnace togather the right alloys for the nightshift. Duringthe day he also directs Pete, the crane driver, toassemble the right amount and quality of scrapby the scrap basket next to the furnace.

The one remaining nightshift in the smelterystarts at 8 pm when three labourers, Tom, Johnand Ian, and the two smelters, Phil and Dave,gather around the pit. Phil and Dave begin theirwork by checking the condition of the refractorybricks inside the furnace and the functioning ofthe furnace roof. They direct the work of Pete,the crane driver, control the degree of humidityof the lime, keep an eye on the temperature ofthe furnace, and empty the slag cabin by liftingthe thick steel plate that covers the floor surround-ing the furnace with the help of the crane driver.During this operation, they hang suspended overa red mountain of solid slag whose heat wouldsuddenly cross their faces causing red flushes andtrickles of sweat.

Meanwhile the three labourers are preparingthe moulds inside the pit. The pit is about 15 mlong, 3 m wide and 2 m deep. John and Ian layheavy steel plates at the bottom of it and fit hol-low-squared refractory tiles into long pipes aroundthe four runs of the bottom plates by hand. Theykeep climbing into and out of the pit hole withpiles of tiles and wet clay in their hands. Withthe help of the crane driver, moulds are stood upin the pit, narrow end down, and fitted onto theclay pipe. Balancing their bodies with one leg onthe ground and the other on the mould, the

7 Following ethnographic convention we use inverted com-mas for native terms.

8 Their term for one batch of molten steel.

labourers lay thick linings of clay and sealingaround the joints.

Once the smelting process has begun, Phil andDave inject oxygen into the furnace with a longpump that they fit in the opening of a steel screenbehind which they hide to protect themselves fromthe fire’s violent bursts that shower them withheavy drops of steel. They are also protected bytheir thick blue clothes, green anti-dazzlingscreens, and asbestos gloves. They load their shov-els, weigh the alloys, and throw them into the‘‘steel bath’’, standing, in turn, in front of the fire,and departing from it, following circular trajecto-ries in order to avoid each other and the ‘‘spits’’of steel. Their heavy protective clothes make their‘‘shovel dance’’ in front of the furnace slow andmeasured. As the carbon content of the steel rises,the movements of the steel bath inside the furnacebecome violent and unpredictable, and sparks andlarge drops of steel shower the smelters’ bodies.While they perform this physically wearing anddangerous task, they have to think constantlyabout the level of the bath and the ‘‘holes’’ onthe surface of the molten steel where the alloyshave to land, the condition of the furnace roof,and the activities of the crane driver above. Duringmost of the shovel dance, the noise and their faceprotection prevent them from speaking. Phil andDave communicate their observations, measure-ments, and reckonings only with nods and handsignals, leaving the details of their judgementsunarticulated. As Phil explains it, ‘‘I don’t reallythink, right, now I should add another shovel ofthis alloy, because of the colour and electricityabsorption or whatever. I more, like, just see allof that and then just do the next thing’’. Oftenthe smelters manage to turn out the night’s pro-duction with less alloys then budgeted, an achieve-ment in which they take much pride. When theyneed more alloys than budgeted they use their‘‘bin’’, a small store of powdered alloys which theysweep off the shop floor after each nightshift.

The large clock on the factory wall usuallyshows 10:30 pm or thereabouts when the crane dri-ver drops the second 10-t charge of scrap. Daveand Phil continue their close observation of thesurface and colour of the steel bath, its noise,and the height and density of the smoke in order


to assess the carbon content of the heat. They fre-quently mount a new measurement tip on the endof the 2-m pole of the temperature gauge and care-fully insert it all the way into the steel bath. Thelast measured temperature remains displayed onthe large analogue display next to the furnace.During one bath, the colour of the steel changesfrom ‘‘blood’’ and ‘‘cherry’’ (700 �C) before thecrane driver drops the second charge of scrap, to‘‘orange’’ and ‘‘yellow’’ (1000 �C) just after thethird one, and finally ‘‘dirty white’’ (1500 �C) whenready to be teemed. After the third and last 10-tscrap charge has been released Phil and Dave con-tinue to make small adjustments to the level andcomposition of the bath by shovelling more alloysand lime, occasionally using the scale next to thefurnace to check that they have enough alloysfor the remaining two heats of the nightshift. Allthe while, they keep an eye on the large dial thatindicates the furnace’s electricity absorption. Elec-tricity absorption should be held constant, set atthe level that heats the steel bath at the right speedto obtain the required quality of steel.

Eventually, the fire is ‘‘killed’’ and the move-ments of the steel inside the furnace become pre-dictable. The bath moves in long horizontalwaves, its noise is low and rhythmical, and its col-our almost white, ‘‘like milk’’. When the steel bath‘‘looks ready’’9 to be tapped into the basket, usu-ally around 12 midnight, Phil activates the alarm.The crane driver lowers the ladle into the furnacepit and Dave tilts the furnace so that the moltensteel runs out into the ladle. The labourers, whohave little opportunity to observe the cookingsteel, look at the molten steel now running intothe ladle in silence, trying to guess the quality ofthe heat (and the company’s ability to sell it expen-sively) from the colour and consistency of the fall-ing steel. The smelters, too, fall silent and watch.For a few seconds, the workforce stands still asif hypnotised.

Phil and Dave’s ‘‘hand melting’’ without the useof automated alloy-injecting pumps, and time-con-suming chemical laboratories to test the propertiesof the steel before its final pouring into the moulds

9 For an ethnography of skilled vision see Grasseni (2004).

results in considerable savings of time, and therebyelectricity costs, because they generally ‘‘get theheat right’’ before the ‘‘Polivac’’ finishes its time-consuming testing procedure. The ‘‘Polivac’’ is alarge quality control machine located in an adja-cent building with banks of indicators and dialsthat reads the carbon content of steel samples byrefracting light waves on its surface. Two testsare taken during most heats. The test readingsare automatically transmitted to the smelters’ por-table computer in their break room. Usually, how-ever, the smelters tap the steel into the mouldsbefore even looking at the second reading.

After the tapping, the crane driver carries theladle over the first cluster of four moulds. One ofthe labourers, the ‘‘pit-man’’, operates the handleto release the stopper at the bottom of the ladleand the molten steel flows out through the claypipes and into the moulds from the bottom. Afterthe teeming all the moulds are filled and sparklewith small flames on their surface. The labourersrun to the corner where the clay is lined, loadtwo bags of sand and clay on their shoulders,and throw them into the bottom of the pit to pre-vent the moulds sticking on the pit ground. Forevery bag thrown into the pit a small explosioncovers them with sparks. The labourers wear onlyT-shirts, and are not protected against the sparks.They dislike the protective clothes and helmets ofthe smelters because they make movement difficultand restrict personal interaction. Equally, how-ever, protective clothing is a marker of status,which the labourers do not possess. Whilst throw-ing bags of sand and clay into the pit and gettingcovered in sparks, the labourers move quicklyback and forth, bumping into each other, laughingand swearing under the flying sparks.

After the first heat, the smelters check the bricklining inside the furnace and the state of the elec-trodes, the labourers strip the old moulds and laynew ones, and the crane driver begins to gatherscrap with the big magnet. During a nightshift,the 11 workers of the smeltery produce 348 ingotsof steel in three heats of 30 t each. The tapping ofthe second heat takes place at 3 am and the lastone at 6 am, when the first rays of sunlight shinethrough the big holes in the smeltery’s corrugatedaluminium walls.


During the day, the 14 workers of the rollingmill roll the ingots into billets on two shifts. Afterhaving been left in the cooling bank for at least2 h, the billets are checked and rough ground bythe six workers at billet conditioning and sent tothe rod mill. Here, Chris, the quality supervisorchecks the chemical properties of the billets andtheir adherence to customers’ specifications. Inthe rod mill, 20 workers roll billets into rods ontwo shifts. After having been hardened, some ofthe rods are coated and stored in the warehouseand others are turned into coils for externalcustomers or further processing in the colddepartment.

Work in the smeltery revolves around the elec-tric arc furnace, and is implicated in competingvisions of its costs, efficiency, production stan-dards, and physical dangers. The smelters possessgreat tacit knowledge of the furnace operation.Their daily reconciliation of the instructions thatappears on the computer with their qualitativeassessment of the requirements for the nightshift’s‘‘heats’’ reproduces the familiar tensions betweenproduct-oriented metallurgists (UNSOR’s qualitycontrol department) and process-oriented engi-neers (the smelters) (Grasseni, 2004). By supple-menting their impressions of the ‘‘heat’s’’ colour,sounds, smells, surface movements, ‘‘holes’’, andsmoke with various measurements of tempera-tures, electricity absorption, timings, and theweights of alloys, the smelters know practicallywhen to discharge what kind of scrap into the‘‘heat’’, when to blow how much oxygen onto itssurface, when to add what quantities of alloys,and when to use how much electricity for howlong, in order for the steel to fulfil the quality con-trol department’s technical specifications. Produc-ing the intended output at a reasonable costdepends on their experience.

In contrast to the hot department’s organi-sation of work around big machines and theirtechnological imperatives, workers in the colddepartment work more independently from oneanother. Instead of the smeltery’s predictable dailysequence of planning, materials provision, andproduction, work in the cold department is dic-tated by the composition of customer orders. Theshop floor of the cold department, approximately

100 m long and divided into three bays, is locatedin a Victorian red-brick building about three min-utes walk from the dark structure of the smeltery.The temperature in the cold department is oftenbelow zero during the winter and very high duringthe summer, because the old Victorian tiles on theroof had been replaced with plastic screens.

The cold department processes the rods that areproduced in the hot department or purchased assemi-finished goods from other steel mills. In bay1 the rods are coated. Steam of sulphuric acid,phosphate, stearate and lime solutions fills thespace with yellow and pale magenta clouds. Threeworkers stand suspended by the 5-m-high tanks,plunging coils in them with the help of cranes.The coils coated in bay 1 are sold. A final qualitycheck on the finished products is made by thechemical engineer before they are packaged andloaded by the fork lift drivers, weighed and regis-tered at the gatehouse, and driven away by Bob,the lorry driver.

Other rods are transferred by crane and forklifttruck to bays 2 and 3 where they are processed fur-ther. The six workers in bay 2, supervised by Alan,transform rods into wires in the Schumagmachines, flat spinning drums that hammer rodsinto small dies by percussion. White lubricatingsoap for the dies (aluminium and sodium stearate)and coating powder cover the floor of bay 2. Inbay 3, the grinding bay, two Windsor machinesstraighten rods into bars that three operators andtheir supervisor grind on three separate grindingmachines, producing silver particles of steel thatcover the floor of the grinding bay. Four operatorspack them and the forklift truck driver takes theminto the yard. A wide door that opens automati-cally under the weight of the approaching forklifttrucks connects bays 2 and 3. Forklift trucksspeedily cross the shop floor, beeping at the work-ers in their way.

Unlike the work in the smeltery, production inbays 2 and 3 of the cold department is not organ-ised around one dominant machine but aroundseveral machines, which have different functions.The work processes in bays 2 and 3 are not tightlycoupled because the machines are designed to beoperated by single workers and because work inprogress inventories act as buffers between the dif-

10 British intermediate school leavers’ qualification.


ferent stages of production. They allow some flex-ibility in the timing of the stages of production,unlike the furnace’s steel bath that must be pro-cessed as one batch in one coordinated sequencethat Phil and Dave determine for everyone onthe smeltery shop floor. Also, in the cold depart-ment the length of individual production runs var-ies with the sizes of customer orders, whereas inthe smeltery it is determined by the furnace capac-ity and the physical processes through which thesteel is transformed. Customers can only order30 t of a type of steel or multiples thereof.

Those technological differences have implica-tions for the regularity of the working days in thecold department. Instead of the smeltery’s predict-able daily sequence of planning, materials provi-sion, and production, the labour process in thecold department is dictated by the composition ofcustomer orders. Production schedules in front ofeach machine and inside each loading space in thecold department are constantly updated by Chris,the quality controller, and by the production plan-ners. Because of the owners’ strategy of expandingthe cold department’s output, the working day iswithout beginning or end. Production is continu-ous in three shifts, punctuated only by the breaktimes and the handovers between different shifts.

In the grinding bay there is very little interac-tion between workers. The ‘‘men’’, as the grindingbay’s older workers are known, perform repetitivepacking operations. During any one shift, four ofthem are busy packing bars of finished steel andmoving the cranes along the shop floor. Like smallmechanical extensions of the crane, they move onthe grinding bay sideways, never talking to oneanother or releasing their bodies into unplannedmovement.

The three grinders and their supervisor in bay 3,known collectively as the ‘‘boys’’ (from now onwithout inverted commas), move back and forthbetween the two Windsor machines that are usedto straighten rods into bars and the three grindingmachines with which they give the bars their spe-cial surfaces and tensile strength. Altogether, bay3 employs 13 young grinders working around theclock in three shifts. Their work pace at the grind-ing machines is frantic. Their earmuffs shut out thenoise of the machines surrounding them, allowing

them to concentrate on their highly skilled tasks.In the cold department, the contrast between thesteady rhythm of work of the ‘‘men’’ and the fren-zied activity of the boys reflects the fact that,unlike the ‘‘men’’, the boys are paid bonuses basedon their production. They lift bars onto the grind-ing machines, sometimes with the aid of the ‘‘men’’and a crane, tighten the various hand wheels, andset about making adjustment to improve the cylin-drical accuracy of their work piece.

The company classes the boys’ operations in thegrinding bay as skilled whereas the wire makingwork in bay 2 is classified as unskilled. With regardto recruitment policy, the company requires a min-imum of four GCSEs10 of applicants for grindingjobs and only ‘‘physical strength’’ for the workersin bay 2. Grinders earn between £7 and £9 perhour, and the workers in bay 2 between £6 and£7 per hour. The average age in the grinding bay(including the older workers in the packing sec-tion) is 30, most of the boys are under 30 yearsold. For comparison, the average age in bay 2 itis 35. The boys at the grinding machines workbetween 50 and 55 h per week without complaintor absence. The other cold workers work a mini-mum of 48 h a week. In the grinding bay, the‘‘men’’ are all members of the same metal tradeunion, the Iron and Steel Trade Confederation(ISTC), but none of the boys is. By contrast, inbay 2 all the workers are members of the ISTCand the bay supervisor is also the company healthand safety representative. (Incidentally, none ofthe hot department workers are ISTC members,regarding it as ‘‘too bureaucratic’’ and ‘‘not con-cerned with real shop floor issues’’.)

The boys’ production output can be measuredwithout recourse to qualitative judgement. Aftergrinding, the measurement of the finished barscovers all of their relevant characteristics: theirdimensions, the evenness of their surface, theirstrength and resilience. The boys’ liking for theobjective, factual character of their work can beobserved in the keenness with which they use themicrometer to measure the width of bars beforeremoving them from the grinding machine.


Adjusting the three ball pens that are clipped tothe chest pocket of his overall, Sean (25 yearsold) comments, ‘‘we like to work with facts andquantitative information. We don’t need to chatand socialise on the shop floor . . .’’. When com-pleted, the bars are stacked next to the grindingmachines for the forklift trucks to take them tothe quality control stations.

The formal accounting system is central to themanagement of the grinding activities. Based ona standard batch costing system, targets for qualityand time are set for each production batch andvariances are analysed upon completion by thequality control department. The most significantcontrollable costs are labour and waste. Manage-ment seeks to keep the costs of unproductivelabour low by offering the grinders relatively mod-est hourly wages combined with the opportunity ofperformance related pay (see Fig. 2). As a conse-quence the grinders themselves incur considerableopportunity costs when they do not manage toproduce the bars according to specifications(thereby wasting raw materials). They are thenunable to achieve the targets based on which theyearn ‘‘bonus’’ payments.

Bonus payments are calculated as a percentageof the revenue, known as the ‘‘value’’, of the orderon which the grinders work, and they are paid inaddition to the hourly wages at normal and over-time rates. Bonus payments can be considerable.Even though the formal wage structure (seeFig. 2) of the firm is flat and polarised betweenmanagement and the manual workforce, if over-time and bonuses are considered, the grinders ofthe cold department receive greater remunerationthan the furnace manager in the hot department.The division between management and workersin terms of basic payments turns into a divisionbetween hot and cold departments when the totalremuneration including overtime is considered.

Reflections on control, strategy, and technology

Management strategy

The owners and managers pursued a strategy ofprogressively subcontracting the work of the hot

department and overstretched the cold depart-ment, cutting costs in the former and increasingovertime in the latter. Their human resource policywas to hire young, multi-skilled grinders with for-mal engineering qualifications who could alsooperate ground-operated and travelling cranesand fork lift trucks, thereby increasing their inde-pendence from the auxiliary workers. The boys’greater technical autonomy was reflected in thehigher formal authority of their supervisor, com-pared to the hot department supervisors, and inthe lack of a dedicated shop floor manager in thegrinding bay (see Fig. 1). Working in shifts of fouroperators, one of whom acted as supervisor, theboys were effectively operating in self-managingteams. Relying on the cost standards, overtimeand bonus payments of the formal accounting sys-tem and on the self-managing capabilities of theteams on the individual shifts, management pur-sued a technocratic stance to efficiency control(Saravanamuthu & Tinker, 2003). By contrast,the workers in the hot department had been withUNSOR for longer periods of time. The smelterswere on relatively modest wages but stayed withthe company because they enjoyed practicing theircraft. The other hot workers were regarded asreplaceable. Many were laid off as a consequenceof shrinking the hot department’s operations.

The subcultures of the grinding bay in the colddepartment and the smeltery in the hot departmentwere influenced by those business and humanresource strategies. The subculture of the boys,who worked independently on dedicatedmachines, relied on their own skills, and were paidindividual bonuses, revolved around the maximi-sation of the value of their individual output. For-mal accounting information had immediaterelevance for them because they regarded com-pany profit as tantamount to increased outputand greater overtime and bonus payments forthemselves. Competitive and individualistic in out-look, they welcomed the intensification of theirwork. By contrast, the workers of the hot depart-ment valued friendship and cooperation. Its mem-bers were hired from the factory’s immediateneighbourhoods. Hiring policies, remunerationplans, production planning, and budgetary controlthus contributed to the contrasts between the sub-

OWNERS, MR. ARMITAGE,

MR. TURNER

GENERAL MANAGER

PRODUCTION MR. BELL

HOT DEPARTMENT

PRODUCTION MANAGER

ELECTRIC ARC

FURNACE MANAGER

BILLET MILL

SUPERVISOR

ROD MILL

SUPERVISOR

BAY 2

SUPERVIS.

BAYS 1 & 3

SUPERVIS.

QUALITY

CONTROL

MANAGER

QUALITYCONTROL

SUPERVISORCHRIS

MANAGER PERSONNEL

AND ADMINISTRATION

HEALTH AND SAFETY

MANAGER

HEALTH

AND

SAFETY

SMELTERS (PHIL

AND DAVE)

LABOURERS

BILLET

ROLLERS

WIRE WORKERS GRINDERS

PACKERS

ACID TANK

ROD ROLLERS

COLDHOT

DEPARTMENT

SMELTERY

SUPERVISOR

DEPARTMENT

Fig. 1. UNSOR organisation chart.


cultures by dividing the workforce into the literate,young, well-paid workers of the cold department,and the less qualified, older, badly remuneratedworkers of the hot department.

This is not to paint an unduly homogeneouspicture of the individual managers’ and owners’priorities. The quality control department triedto stabilise the production standards, the generalmanager to minimise overall electricity costs, andthe owners to grow the sales of cheap, low qualitysteel. Seeking to accommodate whom he regardedas irreplaceable workers (Saravanamuthu & Tin-ker, 2003), the smeltery manager frequently gavein to the smelters’ preference for higher electricityconsumption in the execution of production. Atthe same time the owners’ moves to expand theoutput of low quality steel and to substitute fur-nace production through the purchase of semi-fin-ished coils had the effect of reducing UNSOR’s

dependence on the smelters’ tacit knowledge ofproduction. Different managers contributed toUNSOR’s management practices depending ontheir particular expertise and objectives (Saravan-amuthu & Tinker, 2003).

Relating in this way the management strategyand objectives, as borne out by human resourcepolicies and the uses of other management con-trols, to the workers’ practices, understood asordered meaningful activities, begins to outlineorganisational control as cultural practice.

Technology

Work in the smeltery revolved around the elec-tric arc furnace, and was implicated in competingvisions of its costs, efficiency, production stan-dards, and physical dangers. The smelters pos-sessed great tacit knowledge of the furnace


operation. Their daily reconciliation of the instruc-tions that appeared on the computer with theirqualitative assessment of the requirements for thenightshift’s ‘‘heats’’ reproduced the familiar ten-sions between product-oriented metallurgists(UNSOR’s quality control department) and pro-cess-oriented engineers (the smelters) (Misa,1995). By supplementing their impressions of the‘‘heat’s’’ colour, sounds, smells, surface move-ments, ‘‘holes’’, and smoke with various measure-ments of temperatures, electricity absorption,timings, and the weights of alloys, the smeltersknew practically when to discharge what kind ofscrap into the ‘‘heat’’, when to blow how muchoxygen onto its surface, when to add what quanti-ties of alloys, and when to use how much electric-ity for how long, in order for the steel to fulfil thequality control department’s technical specifica-tions. Producing the intended output at a reason-able cost depended on their experience.

The smelters’ sense of how to go about makinga good heat was a source of frequent irritation forthe smeltery manager whose priority was to mini-mise electricity costs. Yet management could nei-ther codify the smelters’ work nor insulate themfrom the work processes surrounding them toachieve greater control over the smeltery. The dif-ferent groups of workers in the smeltery were tiedtogether by the sequential and interdependentorganisation of production practices of the hotdepartment, the sequence and speed of whichwas determined by the heating times of the fur-nace. Similarly, the activities in the hot depart-ment’s rolling mill were determined by set rollingsequences. Technology determined that the hotworkers work collectively within the spaces definedby the interdependencies between the machinesand it made UNSOR dependent on the craftknowledge of the smelters without whom the hotdepartment would have come to a standstill.

The cultural consequences of the smelting tech-nology were to strengthen the smelters’ craft orien-tation through their control over the process ofsmelting and the activities of the labourers. Theircraft orientation helped them outline a commercialstrategy of high quality steel production that theyregarded as an alternative to the volume strategyof the owners and managers. Not being in a posi-

tion to put their strategy to the test, the smeltersresigned to a position of opposing owners andmanagers and the boys whom they regarded astheir accessories to ruining the company. Thismade the smelters an important source of a them-and-us culture of class division in UNSOR furtherstrengthening their defence of ‘‘our’’ furnace oper-ations against ‘‘management interference’’.

Whereas the craft character of steel productionin the smeltery rendered the extensive use of for-mal, quantitative information for managementcontrol ineffective, the grinding operations in thecold department were susceptible to detailed pro-duction planning. Its output could be measuredand rated in every aspect, bringing into viewUNSOR’s management control systems as anothersignificant aspect of technology. UNSOR preparedmonthly variance analyses for the heads of depart-ments, based on annual operating and capital bud-gets. For the smeltery the daily variable costs ofscrap and alloys were planned and controlled inaggregate and electricity costs separately. Thequality control department’s standard costing sys-tem only afforded management relatively globaloutput measures of the smeltery’s performance.By contrast, the grinding practices were mutuallyindependent and individually paced, thus enablingthe measurement of each worker’s performance.The boys’ culture of work was individualistic andtied to the company’s formal accounting systems.Grinding followed the pace set by the bonussystem.

Comparative ethnography of social relations on two

shop floors

The differences in the physical appearances ofthe smelters’ and the labourers’ break-rooms arestriking. The labourers call their break-room the‘‘donkeys house’’. It is located outside the shopfloor and faces a big field with a canal at the endof it. On a table by the door stands a microwave.A smell of baked beans, eggs, and cigarettes hangsin the air. The labourers eat at the table in the mid-dle of the room, often joined by Roger, the smelt-ery supervisor. Most days the room is very cold.Sometimes, when the crane driver is reloading


the furnace, the labourers sneak out of the shift fora short nap on the wooden bench by the wall.

The relationships between the smelters and thelabourers are fraught with mutual distrust andconflicting outlooks on work. The smelters’ expertknowledge and control of the chemical propertiesof the steel gives them also control over the labour-ers’ movement around the fire. Unlike the smelt-ers, the labourers fear the fire and do not like to‘‘play with it’’. For the labourers, the steel bathis unpredictable because they cannot see it fromtheir usual places of work. They get showered bysparks, for example, when oxygen is pumped. Alsowhen producing high quality steel, Phil and Davedirect the labourers to throw bags of additives intothe steel bath, causing explosions that leave themcovered in sparks. The labourers resent and pri-vately account for the additional work that iscaused by high quality steel as much as the dangersof moving closer to the fire. As one of them puts it,‘‘each bag of sand weighs 2 kg. It takes more than20 s to walk from the protective screen to the fur-nace. In these 20 s we have to run towards the fur-nace without protective clothes, exposed tosparkles and fire. Phil and Dave don’t realise thateach of their ‘small adjustments’ costs us hard andrisky labour’’.

The labourers’ resentment against the smelterstakes a variety of forms. One evening in thebreak-room, Armstrong, one of the labourers,says, ‘‘the whole story of the danger of the fur-nace is an invention by Mr. Beat and the twomelters to control the melting shop, raise theirwage and exploit us.’’ The labourers are awarethat the owners and the quality control depart-ment are pushing the smeltery to produce lowerquality steel faster and cheaper and they fullyendorse this ‘‘philosophy of work’’. ‘‘Who dothey think they are?’’ Ferrell, another labourer,joins the discussion. ‘‘Only because they standin front of the furnace, smell a bit of smoke,and get a few scars, they think they can run thebusiness!’’11 Observing that ‘‘from up there theirjobs look very dangerous’’, Pete, the crane driver,

11 Notice the inconsistency with the view that the labourers’own 20 s runs to the furnace with bags of sand were ‘‘hard andrisky labour’’.

is cut short by Ferrell. ‘‘The more steel we make,the more we earn. To us it makes no difference ifit’s special steel or scrap [low quality steel]. Scrapsteel saves us labour. With special steel we haveto reinforce the seals on the moulds, put extraclay on the pipes, sweat to strip them out, andspend an extra hour loading the scrap basket.’’Armstrong rebukes the researcher’s objection that‘‘Phil and Dave like doing a good job’’. ‘‘A goodjob is a job where labourers don’t sweat blood!Phil and Dave are more concerned with the bricksin the furnace than with our safety. On that shiftthat Ferrell fell into the pit hole, Phil kept watch-ing the furnace lining as if nothing had hap-pened’’. ‘‘Ferrell was bloody drunk’’, repliesRoger, the smeltery supervisor, who often joinsthe labourers in their break-room. Ferrell startscackling. But Roger, too, is critical of the smelt-ers’ ‘‘hierarchical’’ way of running the smeltery.‘‘For God’s sake! Phil thinks he can read the car-bon content of the heat better than the bloodyPolivac!’’

According to Phil, the labourers work ‘‘likedonkeys’’, never searching a ‘‘deeper meaning’’ intheir repetitive actions. The smelters’ break-roomcontains a desk on which a computer and a kettleface each other at the two opposite corners, andthree chairs. It is located on the shop floor, over-looking the furnace with two big windowpanes,one of which is protected by a steel grate that isconstantly hit by the sparks coming out from thefurnace. The heavy panel near the side windowcontains electricity switches, indicators, and thelevers to tilt the furnace and to open the roof.From the panel, the smelters can also look at theback of the furnace through a lorry window mir-ror. The three chairs are for Phil, Dave, andRoger, their supervisor.

More often, though, the supervisor’s chair isoccupied by Mr. Beat. Married without childrenfor 40 years, he often pops into the smeltery atnight from his home, in slippers and with tousledhair, ‘‘to stay with the guys’’ and ‘‘to control theheat’’. He has a special relationship with the smelt-ers with whom he shares the same fundamentalvalues: respect for hierarchy and discipline, anda strong distaste for such superficialities as‘‘money’’, ‘‘career’’, and what they regard as the


exaggerated technical and economical language ofthe top management. Even though he is formallythe manager of the smeltery Mr. Beat feels closerto the smelters’ subculture than that of UNSOR’smanagement.

Nevertheless Phil and Mr. Beat can often beseen arguing on the shop floor of the smelteryabout how to deal with specific heats. Phil andDave’s concerns for the refractory bricks and theelectrodes of the furnace, and their awareness thata ‘‘good heat never boils’’, lead them to seek stabil-ity in the heat, whereas Mr. Beat’s concerns for theelectricity costs leads him to use the furnace’spower unevenly (high with high quality steel andlow for low quality) thus damaging the electrodesand making the steel more dangerous to work withand, according to Phil, ‘‘always at the edge ofbeing burnt’’.

Mr. Beat’s efforts to keep electricity costs to aminimum sometimes come at the expense of thefurnace and the smelters’ safety, for instance, whenhe instructs the crane driver to load more than 10 tof scrap in the basket for a single charge. ‘‘If wedivide the scrap in two loads [of 15 t each] wecan reduce the cooking time by about 20 minand reduce [electricity] absorption by 5–10% . . .Depends on the grade of steel we’re making.’’ Lar-ger scrap loads speed up production but Phil findsthis ‘‘irresponsible’’ because excessive scrapcharges can damage the furnace electrodes (forthe maintenance of which the smelters are formallyresponsible).

Phil and Dave’s ways of assessing the quality ofthe steel differ from Mr. Beat’s. Mr. Beat relies onthe electrodes’ electricity absorption indicatedon the control panel inside the control room andthe readings of the ‘‘Polivac’’. According to Philand Dave, Roger, the smeltery supervisor, for fearof getting too close to the furnace, often takes thesample for the Polivac too close to the surface,which makes the Polivac readings inaccurate. Theyalso complain that Mr. Beat’s insistence on mini-mising electricity costs makes the use of electricityso uneven that one can hardly infer the steel’s car-bon content from the electricity absorption. Theytherefore prefer to assess the quality of the steelinductively, through their close observation ofthe surface and colour of the bath, the noise of

the cooking steel and the height and density ofthe smoke floating above the furnace.

In summary, the smelters oppose the owners’strategy of obtaining large orders for low qualitysteel that debase their skills and deteriorate thefirms’ largest tangible asset, the furnace. Theyregard the flexible production of quality steel asUNSOR’s main strength and the decision to com-pete with Corus’ cheap steel as ‘‘ruinous’’. Theydistrust the short-term financial calculations thatmake the owners’ strategy appear profitable.Their own accountings of production are rootedin notions of craft production and qualityproducts.

The boys, too, are dedicated to quality produc-tion and practical expertise even though the statusof craftsmanship is of little consequence for them.They support the owners’ strategy because it helpsthem make ends meet. With more than half oftheir income made up of bonus payments (seeFig. 2), the boys have strong incentives to contrib-ute to UNSOR’s sales success. They are keenlyaware of the market values of the different batcheson which they work. For them, timely productionof quality output with a minimum of wastedlabour time and material are priorities.

Ultimate responsibility for the management ofthe grinding bay lies with the general manager pro-duction, Mr. Bell. He can often be seen walkingaround the grinding bay, the earmuffs on his hel-met sticking out laterally like insect antennae, dis-cussing the hardness, flexibility, and tensile ratiosof the bars with the bay’s shift supervisor andChris, the quality control supervisor. Chris, too,spends a lot of his time in the grinding bay, awayfrom his office, bringing new customer orders,changing old instructions, and checking the qual-ity of the bars that the grinders produce. Mr. Bell’sand Chris’ direct involvement underline the signif-icance that UNSOR’s management accords to thegrinding bay’s activities.

The boys’ efforts at self-management are sup-ported by the detailed accounting informationand general management information that they,unlike any other group of workers withinUNSOR, receive through their supervisors. Thesupervisors take part in the cold department’sweekly management meeting. Also present are

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Bell Managers Beat Admin. Fitters L.D. Melters Crane Bay 3 Bay 2 Billet Rod Labourers

Staff support Mill Mill

Fig. 2. UNSOR remuneration.

12 A public house.


usually the general manager of production, Mr.Bell, and the production manager of the hotdepartment. Here the supervisors receive informa-tion on and discuss UNSOR’s order book, theproduction schedule for the week ahead, and theshort term financial performance, including cashflows and debt. The most significant costs in thecold department are labour and waste. Qualityproblems that entail waste of labour and materialsand require rework are a major cause of cost over-runs and are therefore discussed in great detail.Finding ways of enhancing quality is an importantobjective of the meetings, as a result of which, forexample, two maintenance engineers have beendedicated to preventative maintenance in the colddepartment. Other important topics of discussionin the cold department’s weekly managementmeetings are trends in customer specificationsand sales forecasts, forecasts for overtime work,and health and safety updates. Also sourcing strat-egies such as the purchase of coils from Spain andGermany in order to increase the cold depart-ment’s output independent of the hot departmentare discussed here.

The boys are all married, apolitical, well edu-cated, moderate in their views on working atUNSOR, and balanced in their judgements. Theyavoid the working class rhetoric of ‘‘them-and-us’’. According to Sean (25 years old) almost allof his friends outside UNSOR are ‘‘managers orself-employed’’. ‘‘It doesn’t really matter if theyare managers, owners or workers, since we all livein Park Hill, we all drink at the Red Lion12 on Sat-urday night, and we know each other since wewere kids.’’ Sean is unusual in that he lives nearthe factory in Park Hill. Most of the other boyslive with their young families in mortgaged housesin the newer suburbs to the southeast of Sheffield.They seek to keep away from the centres of the oldindustrial and mining towns in the area, thus dis-tinguishing themselves further from the otherUNSOR workers.

For Sean ‘‘[the] problem in UNSOR is thatthere are too many old men with old ideas aboutwork, rights, and socialising on the shop floor. I


don’t come to work to socialise but to work! Andto work fast because I don’t know if this place willbe open tomorrow’’. For him the social relation-ships on the shop floor are closely related to theways in which workers go about their tasks. Like-wise, Willie (26 years old) reveals his instrumentalorientation to work during a break: ‘‘My interestsand the interests of the owners are the same: tomake money’’. He does not want to get involvedin organisational politics because he cannot seethe point. The boys agree with the general man-ager production that ‘‘employees are creators ofvalue’’ and ‘‘profit makers’’, and not just simplemanual workers. They reject the hot workers’‘‘philosophy of work’’ based on seniority andfriendship, and their mixing of leisure and workon the shop floor.

‘‘Men’’ and boys are not only distant on theshop floor, but also during break-time. The boysspend their break-times in isolation from oneanother. They sit behind the cardboard screensand wooden cupboards they have built aroundtheir machines and decorated with postcards,drawings, letters and calendars. They drink teaand use their mobile phones to speak with theirfriends and family. In contrast to the workers inthe hot department and the ‘‘men’’ in the colddepartment, the boys, with the exception of Sean,do not socialise with their workmates, neitherduring break-times, nor outside the factory. Mean-while the ‘‘men’’ spend their breaks in thebreak-room used by the workers of bay 2, accusingthe boys of being co-opted in the firms’ strategy ofmaximising the firms’ profit at the expense of theworkforce. They have become ‘‘capitalists’’. ForTom, one of the men, ‘‘they [the boys] are likethe owners. They see this place only as a placewhere they can make money, and not a placewhere they can improve as persons’’. He has alow opinion of the boys, saying that ‘‘all the boyscare for is their mortgages and their nice cars toshow off at the weekends’’. The boys see them-selves not as capitalists but, on the contrary, asthe hardest working labourers in the company.According to Willie, ‘‘we don’t do real money.We don’t deal with the expensive assets, like themelters [who control the electric arc furnace]. Theyare the ones who really run this place’’.

Reflections on control as subcultural practice

Accounting for social relations

Management’s efforts at dividing the workforceinto the older workers involved in the capital-intensive production processes of the hot depart-ment and the younger workers performing labourintensive tasks in the cold department had cometo structure the workers’ understandings ofUNSOR’s social relations. The different groupsof workers characterised their own (and otherworkers’) relationships with the owners’ and man-agers’ strategies through highly specific uses ofaccounting terms (‘‘cost’’, ‘‘profit’’, ‘‘asset’’, ‘‘cap-ital’’) and more general commercial assessments(‘‘profitable’’, ‘‘ruinous’’).

Their opposition to the owners’ and managers’strategy allied the smelters with the men from thecold department’s packing bay and opposed themto the boys from the grinding bay. They claimedthat the boys had become capitalistic in outlookbecause they valued short term ‘‘profit’’ before‘‘personal relationships’’ and ‘‘craftsmanship’’.For the smelters and the men from the cold depart-ment’s packing bay the boys’ craft was tainted bytheir reliance on and responsiveness to financialincentives, undermining the dignity of the boys’craft and marking them as industrial proletariat.They said that the boys were ‘‘greedy’’ and beingco-opted into the owners’ ruinous strategy of pro-ducing low quality steel.

Notwithstanding their agreement with the own-ers’ commercial objectives, the boys thought ofthemselves as labourers proper because they regu-larly worked overtime in the most labour-intensivepart of UNSOR’s production. They accused thesmelters of being the real ‘‘capitalists’’. After all,the smelters controlled the most capital-intensivephase of production and they were the ones withpretensions of ordering about the labourers intheir department.

Lastly, the semi-skilled labourers who workedin the smeltery tended to agree with the generalmanager’s objective of containing the labour costsin the smeltery, and the company’s overall strategyof favouring the production of low quality steel.For them low quality steel required less wearing


and dangerous work at the pit and less interactionwith the smelters during the smelting process. Lowquality steel was generally ordered in greater vol-umes and therefore often resulted in higher wagesfor them. ‘‘We get more money in less time andwith less danger.’’ They did not share in the smelt-ers’ gratification from working hard and produc-ing better quality steel, but opposed the smelters’attempts to exercise control over them (and thesmeltery manager) as ‘‘capitalist’’.

Curiously, but consistently, all of those groupsof workers—smelters, packers, grinders, andlabourers—saw themselves in opposition to a setof ‘‘capitalists’’ whom they defined in their ownways. For the smelters and packers, capitalists val-ued accounting profit over the greater values ofquality craftsmanship and worker solidarity. Theycontrasted their own notions of personal growthwith what they called ‘‘capitalist greed’’. In theirday-to-day work, the smelters tended to act inways that prioritised their specific notions of qual-ity production over financial cost. By contrast, thegrinders and labourers had an instrumental orien-tation to work and used accounting cost and profitmeasurements to orient their preferences and prac-tices. The labourers suspected that the smeltersused their alternative benchmarks of craftsman-ship to tighten control over them. The grinderssaw the smelters’ control over the electric arc fur-nace and the smeltery labourers as the hallmarkof the capitalist.

The different cultural practices, and the com-plex social relations in which they were implicated,contributed to the uneven impact of the companystrategy on the company’s subcultures and gaverise to distinctive control practices on the differentshop floors. The social relations also emphasisedthe political nature of cultural practices.

Social backgrounds and aspirations

An ethnographic study of control as culturalpractice does not a priori accept the formal bound-aries of the organisation as the natural boundariesfor fieldwork. The ethnography should selectivelyinclude those aspects of the ‘‘private’’ lives oforganisational members that shed light on theirorganisational practices and preferences. Espe-

cially an ethnography of different organisationalsubcultures ought to address in how far the socialbackgrounds of their members can shed light ontheir motivations for seeking out, and acquiescingto, their subcultures—those specific combinationsof working conditions, manual and automatedtechnologies, social relationships and shared out-looks, statuses, remuneration, and opportunitiesto control one’s own work and that of others.

In the case of UNSOR, the extent to whichmembers of particular subcultures shared similarsocial backgrounds and aspirations turned out tobe striking. A clear distinction could be madebetween the boys in the cold department’s grindingbay on the one hand, and the older smelters andmen in the cold department on the other. Theolder men and smelters had already independentchildren and no monthly mortgage payments tomake. They were economically relatively self-suffi-cient, claiming that they worked for self-gratifica-tion and that the wage was only a small part oftheir motivation to work. The smelters and mostof the other hot workers were recruited locallythrough friendship or kinship connections andhad longer personal and family occupational his-tories in skilled trades (smelting, forging, rolling)and longer experience of the UNSOR factory thanthe boys. They valued the fact that the companywas located close to their homes and that theycould cultivate friendships and their manual skillson the shop floor. Their relative economic inde-pendence from UNSOR constituted an importantresource for the maintenance of their subcultures.

By contrast, the boys were recruited for theirformal engineering skills (which, at the time ofthe study, were generally in greater demand thanthe skills of the other workers) and their willing-ness to work long hours of overtime. The boyswere economically dependent on the firm’s wagesand worked intensively to maximise their income,which they had used to obtain mortgages andhouses in the newer suburbs to the southeast ofSheffield. The fact that the boys’ cultural practicesaccounted for the value of their production usingthe criteria of the formal accounting systems werethus rooted in their personal circumstances as wellas their training and employment histories. Theboys showed no emotional attachment to UNSOR


and left the factory as soon as more lucrative jobsbecome available.

The smeltery labourers’ social backgrounds didnot fall easily into one or the other category. Mid-dle-aged and, like the boys, mostly with children athome and mortgages to pay, their economic strat-egy was different from the boys. Much as they, as agroup, sided with the views of the owners, manag-ers, and boys and against those of the smelters,and much as they had a purely instrumental out-look on work, their willingness to over-work waslimited. The labourers did not seek self-gratifica-tion in their job and pragmatically avoided extraefforts or taking extra risks. They measured andassessed their work quantitatively, in terms of thenumber of ingots produced and money earnedduring each shift. Most of them had a secondday-time job besides their nightshifts at UNSOR.Arriving at work already tired, they tried to econo-mise on effort, for example, by finding opportuni-ties to nap on the wooden bench in the ‘‘donkeyshouse’’ in between heats. Whilst eating duringtheir breaks, the labourers’ jokes often revolvedaround the arguments between Mr. Beat and Philabout the furnace’s temperature, or the ‘‘hierarchi-cal mind’’ of the smelters and their ambition toorganise ‘‘the company’s business’’ better thanthe owners.

Mr. Beat, even though a member of manage-ment, shared the smelters’ social background andcrafts outlook. Having started his career in theR&D department of Firth Brown more than fortyyears ago, he later trained in metallurgy andbecame a manager in one of the firm’s smelteries.As he put it one night, ‘‘even if I was a metallurgistand a theoretician, I have always thought that thework of the guys on the shop floor was moreimportant than the work of the managers’’. Whenhe was a young manager, he was especiallyattracted by the smelters’ ‘‘sense of dignity and ele-gance’’ and by their ability to enforce disciplineand a ‘‘sense of hierarchy’’ on the shop floor.

This shop floor discipline, Mr. Beat and thesmelters agreed, had been lost at UNSOR due tothe labourers’ lack of involvement in their joband their ‘‘narrow interest in money’’. To themthe instrumental work attitude of the labourersreflected the company’s short-term strategy of

abandoning the quality market to increase thesales of low quality steel. They saw one source ofthe labourers’ ‘‘greediness’’ in management’smaterialistic values, which ‘‘trickle down ontothe shop floor’’. According to Phil and Dave, themanagers’ high wages and expensive company carspushed the workers into conspicuous consump-tion, mutual competition, and distrust. Mr. Beat,too, thought this was true. After the last redun-dancies, he had agreed to link his salary to the out-put of the smeltery, ‘‘like all the other workers’’,thereby effectively reducing his income.

Discussion

Little is still known about the ways in whichorganisational subcultures may be characterisedby specific cultural practices through which eco-nomic and technical measurements are communi-cated, and labour and management processes arenegotiated. As part of those processes diverse cal-culations, estimates, reckonings, etc. becomemobilised through, but also shape, the culturalpractices of an organisation. The uses of numbersand measures has particular effects on organisa-tions and their cultures (cf. Crump, 1990). Mea-sures that were used in UNSOR’s labour andmanagement processes included weights, dimen-sions, temperatures, and chemical compositions.Using measurements rather than qualitativedescriptions of colours, consistencies, sounds,and smells, can characterise activities as part ofspecific symbolic systems and thereby affect theways in which labour and other organisationalprocesses are communicated and culturallyconceived.

In the cold department measurements were usedto define tasks through abstract control conceptsand precisely defined objects. Measurement sym-bolised objectivity and made statistical aggrega-tion and analysis possible. It engendered aculture of technical specifications and financialbudgets, in which the defined bonus paymentsfor each customer order completed on time andon budget acted as a great incentive for the boys.Since the boys and their managers agreed overthe accounting for determining its success, grind-


ing, as a practice defined by collective action(Barnes, 2001), exhibited comparatively great uni-formity of organisation and objectives. Negotia-tions were confined to practical details such aswho would fulfil which customer order when.The manner in which such matters of productionplanning were negotiated marked them as ‘‘techni-cal’’, that is, with little potential to disrupt thesymbolic order of the practice. In turn, the pres-ence of a technical realm thus defined markedthe practice of grinding and its related managerialpractices as culturally relatively unified. Grinding’ssymbolic significance was shared amongst its prac-titioners and stable.

By contrast, the smelters’ conceived of theirlabour process as dominated by qualitativeinsights and tactile skills. Their concerns lay withthe processes of crafting a quality product. Thesmelters considered a ‘‘good job’’ one that wasdangerous and hard, like the smelting of specialsteel for aerospace applications. It had the highestcarbon content and was therefore lighter, whiter,and more ‘‘unsettled’’ and unpredictable in itsmovement inside the furnace than ordinary steel.The smelters preference for quality steel and theirconcern with the firms’ largest asset, the furnace,conflicted with the smeltery manager’s preoccupa-tion with electricity costs. For Mr. Beat, ‘‘electri-city’’ was not only a measurement of cost but alsoof quality, and he frequently sought to lower thequality of the heat to the quality control depart-ment’s specifications in order to save electricitycosts. Chris, the quality control manager, wantedto standardise the properties of the steel and theproduction process through the use of the portablecomputer located on the smelters’ desk and the‘‘Polivac’’ measurements. His reliance on standardmeasures and protocols stood in contrast to thesmelters’ practical knowledge. According to Philthe quality department’s output specificationsignored the steel’s molecular structural transfor-mations during smelting. ‘‘Hardness and resil-iency’’ could not be set with reference tostandard carbon content because the character ofeach heat was unique and could not be fully repro-duced. Also, Chris’ concern to stabilise productionconflicted with Mr. Beat’s attempts to speed upproduction in order to cut the costs of electricity

and alloys. Finally, for the semi-skilled labourerswho prepared the pit, a good job was ‘‘quick andeasy’’. They assessed their job in terms of numberof ingots prepared in each shift and their pay.Their tasks were repetitive and labour-intensive.Their main concern was to save physical effort.

The symbolic fragmentation of smelting as apractice was marked by the different notions ofwhat ‘‘a good heat’’ was according to the smelters,the furnace manager, the quality control manager,and the labourers. They used different knowledgeof the production process, and different ways ofaccounting for its quality and costs. With respectto the subcultures of UNSOR and their symbolicsystems, it made a difference if the steel wasdeemed ready for teeming when it had reached ameasured temperature and carbon content, orwhen its colour had become ‘‘like milk’’ and itssurface ‘‘moved in long waves’’ because this differ-ence mapped onto distinctions between industrialand crafts cultures (Ingold, 2000), and therebythe ways in which technologies mediated the orga-nisation’s priorities and strategies as well as itssocial relations. Technical considerations did thusnot function as arbiters of practice because theywere themselves products of the different symbolicsystems that organised the different organisationalmembers’ practices and marked them as cultural.

Despite deep-seated disagreements over howsmelting should be practiced, controlled, andjudged, smelting persisted as collective action inBarnes’ (2001) sense because its various practitio-ners acted in ways that sought to contribute tothe production of steel ingots and were recogni-sable as doing so. Ingots were ordered, produced,and delivered through collective action and therewas agreement that this happened. Since the activ-ities performed by practitioners in the course ofmaking the ingots were ordered by competingsymbolic systems, the social relations of the practi-tioners were characterised by tension and coercion,as was the practice of smelting. Phil and Davecoerced the labourers and, most of the time, Mr.Beat into their preferred sequence of activitieswhilst making sure that Chris obtained ingots of(at least) the carbon content he had specified. Atthe same time Phil and Dave found themselveswith fewer opportunities to impose their will as


senior management increasingly purchased ingotsfrom other steelworks.

By conceiving of the various organisationalmembers’ practices of control as cultural practiceswe could show the differences in motivations andunderstandings between them and why those differ-ences persisted. The many activities of UNSOR’smembers were ordered by specific motivationsand understandings and formed distinctive organi-sational practices. The practices constituted thetwo subcultures of the hot and the cold departmentand their subdivisions, all of which were character-ised by distinctive symbolic systems. The culturalrepresentations of practices were shown to be dee-ply political. Each symbolic system was continu-ously re-enacted in meaningful practices throughwhich members of the subculture made sense oftheir production technology, social relations withinthe organisation, their own social backgrounds,and management objectives and policies. Controlpractices mobilised, but also depended on, particu-lar accounts of what was profitable and whatcostly, what represented UNSOR’s most signifi-cant capital, and how best to maintain and exploitit in the pursuit of diverse commercial, occupa-tional, and social ambitions and concerns. Organi-sational control could thus be seen as an effect ofthe managers’ and workers’ combined culturalpractices in the various departments.

Conclusions

The cultural practices underlying the differentways in which the workers at UNSOR conceivedof and talked about their work and its controlwere structured by their membership of particularshop floor groups. The boundaries of those groupsdid not follow neatly from the managerial demar-cations between organisational subunits, forwithin the cold and the hot department furthersubdivisions could be observed. They coincidedwith the distinctive subcultures that arose fromthe workers’ tasks and shop floor practices, skillsand occupational histories, the technologies theyused, their broader outlooks on work and organi-sational membership, and, significantly, thoseaspects of their social backgrounds that clarified

their reasons for seeking out, and acquiescing to,particular organisational subcultures.

The concept of organisational culture (and sub-cultures) holds much potential for understandingin greater detail the elements of organisationalcontrol and their practical functioning. By con-ceiving of culture as a set of values that are merelycomplementary to enduring social structures, thecomplexity and dynamism of culture, which allowsorganisational members to entertain diverseunderstandings of organisation, goes unnoticed.Organisational members are denied agency. Byconceiving of organisational culture as dependenton practices whose meaningful ordering in turndepends on the organisational subcultures’ sym-bolic systems, attention is drawn to the interrela-tionships between diverse formal and informal,practical and conceptual, human and non-humanelements of control.

In this study we did not take the formal man-agement control systems as the starting point ofour research, nor, indeed, for the rendition ofour findings. Nor did we organise our paperaround the implications of organisational pro-cesses for management control. Instead, we usedour ethnographic record to develop a more encom-passing notion of cultural practices of control inthe context of organisation. By exploring theambitions and concerns of different groups ofworkers and managers and the practices throughwhich they sought to pursue them, we sought todevelop the notion of organisational control tobe more inclusive than management control. Wethereby sought to substantiate our claim that con-trol practices can be constitutive of organisationalculture generally.

Organisational members can be shown to enactorganisational subcultures through practices ofcontrol by combining heterogeneous materialsand bodies of knowledge. Our account, whilstemphasising the significance of spatial arrange-ments, technologies, material constraints, andother non-human elements, remained focused onthe human actors and their symbolic systems andgroup identities. The practical nature of organisa-tional subcultures is revealed through the ways inwhich their members actively reconstitute their con-trol practices by drawing on them as a shared


resource. Considering, in particular, organisationalmembers’ access to formal accounting information,the case of UNSOR suggested that, with (manag-ers, grinders) and without (hot workers) access,organisational members framed their activitiesthrough specific notions of economic success. Wesaw that organisational members worked withshared informal accountings that were groundedin very particular notions of costs, profitability,and capital. In order to establish a shared under-standing of what it meant to do well, they drewon, but were not captured by, those shared accoun-tings. Our notion of cultural practices of control,which includes the workers’ efforts at controllingtheir own work and criticising others’, showed theresponse of workers to management control as apositive achievement that fed on their specificvisions of the organisation as a business and formedan important part of the organisation’s culturalpractices of control. In view of the extant controland accounting literature’s focus on managementpractices in processes of organisational change,the ability of studies of organisational subculturesto bring out the diversity as well as continuity ofpractices holds considerable potential for ourunderstanding of organisational control.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Bruno Bernardi,Chris Chapman, Mahmoud Ezzamel, Jim Mackey,Fabrizio Panozzo, Heike Schimkat, Mitch Sedg-wick, Juhani Vaivio, participants at research sem-inars at Cardiff Business School, Universita Ca’Foscari di Venezia, and the Open University, andespecially the two anonymous reviewers for com-ments and suggestions on earlier drafts of thispaper.

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