Empowerment Redux: Structure, Agency, and the Remaking of Managerial Authority

Research on the new managerial regimes has been hampered by its neglect of the question of human agency—specifically, the nature of workers’ responses to the advent of the new forms of work organization. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in five manufacturing plants, the author seeks to overcome this limitation by exploring the nature and effects of workers’ responses to the changes they confront in their work situations. Although the data suggest ways in which outcomes rested on structural attributes, they also reveal that worker agency shaped the fate of workplace transformation in subtle yet decisive ways. Developing a fourfold typology of workers’ responses, the author shows how each type affected the path down which workplace change evolved. These findings suggest that workplace transformation should be approached as a relational phenomenon whose outcome hinges on the orientations and practices that workers themselves adopt when confronting the restructuring of their jobs.