As in the new organizational arrangement of human resources staff in American Security's SystemsGroup, centralized personnel groups may acquire more and more of the responsibilities of middle managers. Top management at American Security touted the new system as a way to decentralize human resources management and make it more responsive to diverse divisional concerns; in fact, the system created a more direct and centralized line of authority between the SystemsGroup unit and top management. In general, centralized groups are assuming new and authoritative positions in the corporate management circuit.^[9]

The concentrated management structure, part of the concept of area management (Chapter 4), will similarly decrease the organizational distance between strategic management and production processes. The area management group would allow the spatial reorganization of middle management (a form of off-site management), as AMG representatives would circulate about branches, monitoring and evaluating branch employees.

Observing the convergence of these four trends, we may reasonably ask whether we are simply witnessing a return to the craft-like, autonomous work processes that characterized an earlier form of management predicated on a high level of decentralization of shop-floor production processes. If we were to accept the claims about flexible manufacturing at face value we could almost envision the reemergence of a simple drive structure of management, in which workers semi-autonomously worked on their own with only a loose system of management, "unintegrated" in Litterer's (1963) terms.

The "drive system" preceded technical and bureaucratic management systems (Nelson 1975). A comparatively decentralized arrangement consisting of integrated knowledge and control held by those directly involved in production, it included foremen as the most immediate representatives of strategic management (Gardner and Whyte 1945; Roethlisberger 1945; Wray 1949; Patten 1968). The drive system of managing production also included some degree of workers' participation in coordinating and directing the work process.

Before the rise of coordinated, bureaucratic administration, discussed in Chapter 1, firms were vulnerable to market exigencies. The drive system "allowed for flexible adjustment to shifts in demand and was effective in holding down unit labor costs" (Jacoby 1985, p. 123). To maximize profitability, firms had to be able to respond to external factors outside their control; they were sensitive to and confined by local markets, suppliers of materials, and agents of distribution (Edwards 1979, p. 24). The drive system thus allowed firms to maintain a short-term manufacturing orientation (Jacoby 1985). Foremen and plant managers, administering employment in a variable and unpredictable economic environment, "looked for quick results and maximum flexibility; the work force was to be adjusted to changes in technology and to fluctuations in output" (Jacoby 1985, p. 6).

That description does not stray far from the vision of the proponents of flexibility. But is the early twentieth-century structure of management appropriate for the contemporary corporation? Sophisticated organizational and technological devices as well as the profound shift in employment practices, all discussed above, give corporations far more power to control, monitor, and integrate low-level production activities. Although firms may encourage workers, supervisors, and middle managers to embrace the ethos of participation, the fact is that participation, increasing responsibility, and decision making all occur within an environment under tight surveillance. By slashing levels of management; strengthening and legitimating their ability to cast off superfluous workers and managers; increasing their ability to gain detailed data immediately about production, distribution, and finance by means of computer systems; and relying on centralized, high-level managerial groups, top managements decrease their organizational distance from production operations and solidify their ability to manage from afar.

Such techniques were not available to owners and managers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century; indeed, technical and bureaucratic management systems, introduced in different periods of the twentieth century, were deployed precisely to overcome the extensive autonomy enjoyed by workers and supervisors under the early drive system (Edwards 1979). Thus more likely than a return to the earlier system is the emergence of a new form of work and management with only the semblance of decentralization: the responsibilities of middle-level management pushed down into the lowest levels of the corporation, and workers increasingly prevailed on to act both as workers and managers within tightly defined limits. (See Burawoy and Lukacs^[*] [1989] for a similar criticism of the flexible specialization thesis.)

In sum, what may seem to well-intentioned policy analysts to be humane and logical reorganization strategies often represent to corporate top management little more than license to institutionalize the impermanence of jobs and skills and thus workers. The concept of flexibility, while providing tangible benefits for employers, currently portends more troublesome results for corporate workers themselves. Clearly, managerial and nonmanagerial employees alike end by paying the costs of flexibility and corporate restructuring.

The Politics of Flexible Production

The proponents of flexibility have made many provocative claims. Sorting through the devastating restructuring processes of the seventies and eighties, these theorists are attempting to chart bold directions for corporations in the 1990s and beyond. Between the admonitions to adopt a more flexible orientation to markets and the guidelines for a more participative and flexible set of workplace relations, they have offered us the ingredients for a transformed corporate America.

Blueprints for increasing productivity and uniting the efforts of labor and management in a new corporate agenda are critical. However, they can only suggest to us what can be, not what will be. Much about the restructured postindustrial corporation, although perhaps technologically and organizationally feasible, is politically indeterminate, something rarely acknowledged in the postindustrial optimism. Because of that indeterminacy, it is important to discuss the politics of change in order to assess the likelihood of moving to new flexible, postindustrial work arrangements.

Skeptics have not held back from addressing the political difficulties of this issue in the prevailing atmosphere of dissension between labor and management in the United States. Howard (1985), for example, agrees with the thrust of the postindustrial perspective. He notes that new computer technologies, often adopted to give corporations a competitive edge, prefigure a more positive and decentralized reorganization of work that can benefit management and workers. Workers could assume greater responsibilities in organizing production and could utilize their unique skills to design new ways of working. At the same time, Howard argues, the new technologies are not likely to reveal their potential in the current antagonistic labor-relations climate of American industry, unless management agrees to treat workers as partners, with respect and trust. If current hierarchical arrangements prevail, workers will be forced into a coercive brave new workplace. In view of the current orientation of American corporate management toward short-term profit-making, Howard may be correct in his pessimism. American employers may hesitate to make the long-term investment in the technology and training necessary for implementing genuinely flexible and participative work systems. This point is only briefly touched on by Sabel (1982, p. 219) in his discussion of neo-Fordist work arrangements.^[10]

Zuboff (1988) emphasizes even more adamantly that American business organizations stand at the crossroads with regard to new, flexible technologies. All too frequently, she argues, top-level managers operate under traditional restrictive assumptions about their political relations with labor. More than willing to deploy computers solely to automate (and thus to extend control over workers), management will seldom strive to maximize workers' skills and intellect or use the technology simultaneously to incorporate and expand workers' unique knowledge through what Zuboff calls "informating" processes. To take the former route will be fatal, according to Zuboff, because it will permanently consign American firms to a regressed, secondary status in the world economy.

Highly suspicious of claims about the benefits of flexible specialization for workers, Gough (1986) suggests that the new technologies that facilitate flexible specialization production systems, such as CAD and CAD/CAM (Computer-Aided Design/Computer-Aided Management) are often precisely the technologies top managers use to deskill and impose new systems of discipline on workers (Gough 1986, pp. 65–67). Workers must self-consciously and systematically develop their own "oppositional restructuring" agenda to increase the unity of the working class and enable that class to struggle effectively against capital.

Whether or not the new work arrangements can succeed must be considered in the context of prevailing labor/management politics. Middle managers themselves frequently object to coordinating worker self-management (an objection interpreted as irrational, inexplicable resistance to change in the popular business press). Cognizant of losing authority and discretion as workers are empowered, many middle managers object to passing on decision-making powers to lower-level workers when managers may still be held accountable for final outcomes. Not coincidentally, but without adequately explaining why, Lawrence (1985) sees managers' resistance to the new ethic of participation as one of the biggest blocks to the upgrading of workers' jobs (p. 359).

Workers too, in many cases, have greeted new flexible work arrangements with ambivalence and distrust, generating a highly politicized atmosphere when asked to become managers and to embrace new flexible technologies and organizational devices. Workers often view increases in responsibility without increase in compensation, heightened involvement as self-managers, and reduced participation of upper-level managers as indicators of significant speedups and future redundancies (Simmons and Mares 1985, chap. 14).^[11] Such perceptions create a negative payoff to the firm when workers feel that new work arrangements and technology are a source of stressful extra work and accountability rather than a source of enrichment (Zuboff 1988).

Simmons and Mares tout the potential advantages to workers, citing the decrease in alienation and increase of morale and pride as important outcomes of greater worker involvement. Yet even they acknowledge that one of the principle limitations of existing QWL programs and other schemes designed to enhance worker participation is that in the majority of cases in which participation has increased, there has been little fundamental change in workers' power and authority. The result has been the disillusionment and antagonism of the workers. Asked to do more, to consider themselves as agents of management, and to adopt the goals of the firm as their own, workers' ability to control the most meaningful factors of work life (investment, plant closures, etc.) is nevertheless sharply circumscribed, a situation well captured in Simmons and Mares's phrase "participation but not control" (1985, chap. 7). Often management uses quality circles to give workers the "feel" of participation without a meaningful voice in decision making, or to co-opt existing and future unions with the intent of maintaining managerial flexibility (Grenier 1988; Parker and Slaughter 1988; Businessweek , 10 July 1989).^[12]

Unions have responded in various ways to flexibility. As mentioned earlier, recent collective-bargaining negotiations have included commitments to employee-involvement programs. In many cases unions have agreed to those programs because they have no options: they must either acquiesce to management's demand for flexibility or see their plants close down (Kochan, Katz, and McKersie 1986). But some unions have resisted worker-participation schemes; union leaders, for example, may resist joint consultation with management on flexible technologies and worker involvement because they fear that their members will feel they are simply being co-opted by management (Thomas 1988).^[13] Indeed, the pressure to participate has occasionally backfired, leading dissident rank-and-file workers, in at least one important case, seriously to challenge the judgment of their union leadership and to call for new leaders who will be less willing to cooperate with top management.^[14]

I do not conclude from those cases that the redistribution of managerial authority is unequivocally bad for workers. To the contrary, the outcomes for workers are indeterminate. The downward movement of authority, for example, in and of itself may have positive outcomes for workers as they gain greater control of shop or office. It may be very much in workers' interests to participate in top-down self-management schemes if, for example, the survival of the firm depends on increasing productivity. Indeed, the redistribution of authority can benefit both workers and the firm; it is known that managers can inhibit productivity by ignoring workers' unique expertise (Juravich 1985).

That indeterminacy, however, means that it is important to demystify the concept: to investigate the numerous and ambiguous causes and outcomes, for workers, of "flexibly organized production" and, in particular, to understand the interaction between and politics of managerial deskilling and worker "upskilling." It becomes important to ask, for example, who initiates flexible programs and what happens to compensation and job classifications as firms burden their workers with managerial responsibilities and eliminate strictly defined managerial positions? Will job security be guaranteed in return for the relaxing of job classifications and any subsequent productivity increases? If firms have the unstated goal of laying off workers and closing plants, then gaining the participation of workers in self-managing teams to stave off closure temporarily can rightfully be viewed with suspicion. Ironically, the unequal trade-off between top management and workers-in which workers make concessions about flexibility but gain little or no power to influence decisions concerning the security of their jobs and their firm-could limit the successful spread of so-called QWL programs, since, in the estimation of Kochan, Katz, and McKersie (1986), QWL ini-

tiatives stand the greatest chance of success when they are linked to employment and income security (p. 211).^[15]

Demystifying flexibility is also important for understanding how restructuring may affect opportunity structures for women and minority workers. In key ways, the techniques designed to implement flexibility may diminish opportunities for women and members of other historically disadvantaged groups. In the light of the present examination of American Security Bank and of data on larger trends in the organization of employment relations, three outcomes seem possible in the coming years.

First, when firms wipe out middle managerial positions, they eliminate positions that have only recently been made available to women and minorities. The most significant change in women's labor-force patterns in recent years has been their increased participation in managerial and administrative jobs: women went from being 18.5 percent of the managerial and administrative work force in 1970 to 37.9 percent in 1987 (Blum and Smith 1988; U.S. Bureau of the Census 1989). Throughout the 1970s, black workers made important gains in professional and managerial staff jobs in large corporations, after decades of being excluded from those positions (Collins 1989). As firms become more committed to cutting overhead in the form of administrative costs and layers, they are doing away with the jobs that had just opened up to women and minorities and undermining the advances these groups have made in wages, status, and security.^[16] The computerization of workers' jobs can similarly undercut supervisorial jobs that have been important bridges for women and minorities into the upper levels of the corporation. New integrated computer systems combine production and supervisory tasks previously performed by different jobholders into one job at a computerized workstation. In tandem with the computer system that has the capacity to measure and control the worker using the technology, one upgraded clerical worker runs the workstation without being directly monitored by a supervisory worker; the new integrated jobs are often dead-end positions even though they are comparatively upgraded (Baran and Teegarden 1987). Doing away with bridge jobs can both keep women and minorities out of internal labor markets, which provide greater security and certainty of mobility, and weaken the internal labor market itself by taking away the progressive steps upward in the firm. In sum, eliminating low- and mid-level managerial jobs in the service of flexibility may systematically destroy employment opportunities only recently gained by women, blacks, and other minorities.

Second, a countervailing trend that is part of the movement toward flexibility may have a unique effect on women's work opportunities. As firms try to implement quality circles and other participative schemes in blue- and white-collar workplaces, they may seek employees who have great emotional flexibility and a high tolerance for intense personal relations to work as "facilitators" or "group leaders." Such persons may be perceived as being better equipped to cajole and manipulate workers and overcome their apprehensions about new technological and social work arrangements. Companies might design jobs just for those persons, who presumably would be most able to cooperate and least strictly committed to hierarchical authority relations.

If, for whatever reasons, employers view women as well suited for that type of intense, cooperative, interpersonal work, they may go to great lengths to recruit women employees for the purpose. And in fact some managers and management experts have argued that firms would do well to recruit women to work in the less hierarchical, less bureaucratic firm of the postindustrial era. Women make better managers, in this line of reasoning, because of their allegedly superior ability to cooperate, intuit and work around the feelings of others, and confront situations that are intensely social-relational (see Blum and Smith [1988, pp. 530–534] for a review of this claim).

Although this second trend would open up a sphere of managerial jobs for women, in contrast to the first, which does away with managerial jobs, the new job category could easily turn into a less desirable, "feminized" occupation. By gender-typing lower-level managerial and supervisorial jobs as "women's work," managers and employers could deliberately select women over men and exclude women from other types of positions. Psychic costs to women will be high if they are continually thrust into changing, uncertain, and fluid positions with responsibility for absorbing tension and conflict over changing roles in the workplace. The costs would also be monetary, if women are confined to a new female ghetto of relational work with the characteristic disadvantages of female occupations, such as lower pay and prestige (Reskin and Roos 1987; Strober and Arnold 1987). In other words, female managerial work could stabilize as a subspecialty within the larger occupation of management (Reskin and Roos 1987).

Cutting across the first trend of diminishing opportunities at higher levels in the firm, the expansion of intense interpersonal managerial jobs would stymie women's mobility by restricting them to a new "emotion work" ghetto (Hochschild 1983).

The issue of a feminine-hence gender-based-managerial style is provocative, but, in this case, it is a smokescreen. It obscures potentially costly and permanent changes in women's employment as a result of corporate restructuring. What is important, however, is whether and how employers exploit the theory of difference between male and female managers to justify confining women in disadvantaged positions.

Finally, the growing trend toward the peripheralization of professional and managerial jobs offers American corporations new ways to marginalize women. For decades, of course, women and minority workers have had the majority of part-time and temporary jobs, most frequently at lower levels of large firms or in the secondary labor market (Edwards 1979, chap. 9). In both situations, women's wages were among the lowest in the economy; they received few benefits and had few opportunities for promotion (Smith 1983).

Now, however, firms are employing more elite professional and managerial workers on this basis. Very likely this so-called dual internal labor market (Mangum, Mayall, and Nelson 1985), only recently emerged, will be interwoven with women's employment patterns. That is, because of family and child-care constraints and managerial stereotypes about women's lesser commitment to careers, employers may hire white male workers for core activities and women for their peripheral work force. Women may have to accept part-time and temporary jobs, even though so many women have worked in the core work force on a full-time and permanent basis over the last fifteen years.

Unfortunately, the increase of a peripheralized professional and managerial work force coincides all too well with a current corporate interest in developing different career tracks for different groups of women. These tracks vary according to managements' perceptions of whether women will be committed, long-term employees or will have a dual commitment, to a less than all encompassing professional life and to raising families. The female dual-track proposition has been described, analyzed, attacked, and defended in the popular and business press (F. Schwartz 1989; Businessweek, 20 March 1989). However much its advocates wish to deny that the dual track should be used to discriminate against women, the so-called mommy track already appears to firms a perfectly reasonable way to accommodate both women's needs and the needs of the firm for greater flexibility.

If firms need a peripheral work force that can be shed or built up according to prevailing economic and market conditions, top managers may well tap into a pool of workers they perceive as having only an intermittent interest in wage labor, less interest in promotions and mobility when they are employed, and weaker bargaining power-a description that closely fits Felice Schwartz's (1989) picture of the women on the family/work track. Thus alternative, non-fast-track career choices for women will be institutionalized in the unpredictable employment practices of firms.^[17]

The outcomes of this trend, too, have an indeterminate, political character and will depend on a worker's class and race. For women who have the organizational bargaining power and leverage-presumably upper-managerial, educated, skilled workers in the largest corporations-these trends could prove to be emancipating. Those women will be in a better position to control when and how they will work on a part-time or temporary basis, rather than at the mercy of the corporations' business cycles. For other women the outcomes will be mixed. The labor-force participation of those employed by less paternalistic or less profitable firms, or those whose race, ethnicity, or lack of education casts them into a less privileged position, will be more vulnerable to uncertain business cycles. Firms must develop the capacity to respond to economic downturns and upswings and the capacity to change product lines rapidly; firms may inflict the corresponding unpredictable employment needs of business fluctuations on disadvantaged groups of women employees. Privileged women will be in a position to control the timing of their employment and to accommodate their personal life-cycles to the business cycles of the flexible post-industrial firm without paying huge personal and professional costs. But less privileged women and women of color may be forced to accept whatever positions are offered them, regardless of the fluctuations of their own lives.^[18]

Overall, restructuring and flexibility appear to create new opportunities for exploiting old assumptions about women's labor-force participation. The practices discussed above could be used to block the progress that women have made in the labor force over the past ten to fifteen years. Just as women made huge strides in professional and managerial work, those levels of the corporation are being slashed away. Just as women have shattered stereotypes that define "women's work," corporations seem to be building whole new domains of emotionally laden occupations for which women may be seen as prime candidates. And just as women are being taken seriously as full-time workers with deep and meaningful commitments to professional and administrative work, firms are developing part-time and temporary ghettos within these occupational levels and are managing to marginalize even historically elite workers.

Because of the overwhelming presence of women in lowerlevel clerical, service, and retail sales jobs (Rothschild 1981), it has long been clear to students of gender relations that women workers have an enduring relationship to the postindustrial economy. The phenomena described above, however, show other ways that women's work and gender inequality will be an integral part of changing authority relations and corporate hierarchies in the restructuring, postindustrial workplace.

The Politics of Restructuring

In theorizing and creating new work arrangements, corporate managers and the postindustrialists must also deal with the general politics of restructuring. Whether and how workers and middle managers resist restructuring will be critical to top management's attempt to gain greater control over the corporation. It appears that more and more corporate employees, managerial and nonmanagerial alike, are sharply critical of short-term strategies for profitability and investment and are challenging top management's prerogative to make decisions that devastate communities, firms, and occupational groups.

Nonmanagerial workers have, in varied circumstances, resisted paying for corporate downsizing with their own efforts (in the form of speedups) and with their own jobs. They have attacked corporate diversification policies that strip productive enterprises of profitability. Because their struggles have had an institutionalized, legal form, located within a formal bargaining framework, such resistance has been far more discernible and "measurable" than managerial resistance.

Union leaders and members, for example, have pressed for legislation to restrict plant closings at the local, state, and national levels (Deitch and Erickson 1987; Lawrence 1987; Staudohar and Brown 1987, part 5). The 1986 steelworkers' strike at U.S. Steel was inspired by distrust of top management's investment and diversification policies (Businessweek , 19 May 1986; Hoerr 1988). To halt Safeway Stores' top management from making unilateral decisions about selling off assets and laying off workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers mobilized to gain some degree of veto power in these negotiations (Businessweek , 8 September 1986).

In one recent and highly publicized case of opposition to paying the costs of corporate restructuring, the United Airlines contingent of the Airline Pilots Association attempted to buy the airline company from UAL Incorporated, its parent company. This bid was pursued expressly in opposition to UAL's diversification strategies. The pilots argued that top management's policies would jeopardize the airline; the pilots predicted job loss, disruption of business, and a general drain of United Airlines financial resources as top management continued to acquire other businesses (Wall Street Journal , 9 April 1987; Businessweek , 20 April 1987). They proposed, in return for a controlling interest and ownership by the entire United work force, a leveraged buyout using pension fund money and labor cost reductions.

Similar criticisms guided the recent strike by Eastern Airlines machinists. Machinists and pilots fought company head Frank Lorenzo's notorious agenda to break up the company and sell off assets without regard for the long-term integrity of the airline (New York Times , 9 March 1989). Other manufacturing and production unions have bought out plants that top managements were threatening to shut down (Whyte 1987).^[19]

My study suggests that managers' resistance to paying the costs of restructuring have been hidden within the firm. I documented some forms of this resistance in American Security Bank and explained how they were shaped by the politics of corporate restructuring. Preliminary evidence from other large corporations suggests similar patterns in the complex in-firm politics of management restructuring.

General Motors, a firm that has surfaced occasionally throughout these pages, experienced a major managerial crisis in the face of reorganization processes that cut back both blue- and white-collar workers severely. One report, which framed this crisis as a morale problem, focused on the depression and anger felt by managers who faced the possible disappearance of their own jobs, as well as the pressures and strains of having to "select subordinates as candidates for 'voluntary departure.'" Managers' contradictory position as agents and objects of GM's contraction evoked such a wide reaction that top management identified it as a genuine company problem (Wall Street Journal , 26 May 1987b). American Telephone and Telegraph reported a similar "managerial morale crisis." In the wake of its breakup, and extreme cost and personnel cuts, AT & T's middle managers were "deeply disturbed and disillusioned" (CommunicationsWeek, 16 February 1987).

These are unsystematic references, to be sure. But although some may persist in calling the subject of this study a "managerial morale crisis," such accounts provide glimpses of profound disturbances in the largest and most powerful corporations in the country. One may reasonably speculate that the real extent to which the in-firm politics of corporate restructuring are blocking and reshaping corporate management directives is much greater than has been revealed.

Similarly little understood are the ways middle management and professional opposition to corporate restructuring agendas can force top management itself to restructure. In other words, top management may have to change its policies when large groups of employees refuse to participate in them; boards of directors can take action to oust those at the top if strategic management fails to gain the consent of key groups in the firm.

In the case of American Security Bank, for example, under pressure from the board of directors, chief executive officer Wedgewood eventually was forced to step down from his position when it became apparent that his policies had failed and that middle managers were not going to manage out massive numbers of "unnecessary" workers. Although it was not the exclusive cause of his departure, middle management refusal added to the impression that the restructuring project in general was failing. United Airlines's parent company similarly jettisoned its corporate head, Richard Ferris, when it became clear that no restructuring program would work without the cooperation of company employees; top management felt that banks would be willing to finance a restructuring plan if the company had the consent of its workers (New York Times , 12 June 1987).

Certainly, different groups of workers possess different degrees of organizational capacity and political leverage to resist paying the often severe price of restructuring. One of the most significant differences is between managers and workers who have been targeted for different roles in the new corporate division of labor. While strategic management encourages workers to manage themselves up to self-managers, it encourages middle managers to manage out workers and management itself, goals that appear to be at cross-purposes.

Nevertheless, by articulating and acting on these criticisms, corporate workers, managerial and nonmanagerial alike, resist paying the multiple costs of restructuring. They have taken a critical and oppositional stance to diversification and investment strategies. Perhaps if the agenda to scale down management, embedded at present within change programs that tend to disguise the degradation of management, becomes explicit and more openly coercive, managers' resistance will become much more visibly tied to the resistance of those they manage. Although it would be atypical in view of the history of unionization in the United States, some have suggested that managerial workers might affiliate with traditional blue-collar unions or form white-collar unions (Osterman 1988, p. 81).^[20] It is difficult to predict whether workers in such disparate positions in the corporate division of labor could collectively embrace an antistrategic management politics, or whether such a politics would have the power to stop rather than simply contain the effects of restructuring (Burawoy 1983). Like the future of the workplace, these political currents remain to be observed and analyzed further. But as Kanter and Mirvis (1989) note, workers at all levels-blue-collar, white-collar, professional, and managerial-have become exceedingly cynical about American corporate management policy, particularly as a result of many of the contradictory processes that have been outlined in this book. Corporate employees distrust the "managerial evangelism" whereby business leaders use "smoke and mirrors schemes" to manipulate workers (Kanter and Mirvis 1989, chap. 6). Workers have also been disillusioned by the failed promises of employment contracts; their loyalties and commitments have eroded as corporations slash and burn away much of the excess work force. In a climate of cynicism, corporate employees may feel compelled to find systematic and organized ways of battling the business mentality that disregards the well-being of those who make business as usual possible.

Between the postindustrial proposals and the realities of American business policies, then, two paths appear to extend from the current economic morass. The paths start at the same point: a consensus about the need for new corporate strategies and about the organizational designs that should in theory improve American competitiveness and industrial relations. But beyond that point the paths diverge. In the current economic era, corporate management needs the commitments of all its employees. It is unclear whether American corporations will try to gain that commitment by following the high-trust, enlightened model of the postindustrialists, however, or whether they will follow more antagonistic, lowtrust, hierarchical, short-term cost-cutting policies. Perhaps it is more likely that firms will pursue low-trust hierarchical policies of cutbacks using the rhetoric of high-trust flexible relations, a course of action well illustrated by the case of American Security Bank.^[21]

This book has examined the case of one not atypical path that American corporations can follow, as well as the organizational politics created by that choice. Looking at the labor management, product market, and production process strategies adopted by top management in one restructuring corporation, this book analyzed the effect of those strategies on the firm's industrial relations system. American Security Bank's situation illustrates the depth of the difficulty of achieving fundamental corporate change and demonstrates why U.S. top management may be tempted to follow that troubled path for reconfiguring organizational structures and employment relations, rather than the optimistic suggestions of the postindustrial theorists.

If it is to succeed, the postindustrial model may require that American top management relinquish the absolute control it is accustomed to exert over investment and diversification policies; it may also require that firms give too much genuine power to workers. Perhaps more germane, postindustrialism's high-trust premises may be workable only if business leaders are willing to forgo instantaneous high profit margins, to wait out crises, and invest in building a solid, enduring foundation on which to deal with corporate employees. If we look at the reigning short-term profit outlook and the reassertion of ownership in the 1980s, during which Wall Street gained tremendous influence in determining investment and diversification strategies, we see few signs that American corporations are ready to engage in such a constructive long-term endeavor. At the same time, this study suggests that if corporate managements follow a path that shifts responsibility for corporate upheaval and decline onto its lower-level employees, they may produce high-conflict situations in which managers and workers alike refuse to go along blindly with draconian corporate agendas.

Finally, let us return to the larger question of the future of management. Will "management, as a traditionally conceived, hierarchical function . . . disappear altogether" as one prominent management theorist speculates (Schein 1989, p. 65)? Or will corporate leaders solve their competitive problems through other strategic and organizational means? Whether or not bureaucracies and middle management must be revamped in order to regain corporate competitiveness is a question that is beyond the scope of this study. Certainly such theorists as Zuboff, Hirschhorn, and Hoerr present compelling evidence that the new technologies, combined with current economic exigencies, make it imperative to dislodge exclusive responsibility from the ranks of management and to develop more cooperation between workers and corporate management.

But the lack of research about correlations between the structure of management and profitability, and about other possible internal sources of current economic problems, makes the analysis presented here of the causes and consequences of restructuring all the more important. Corporate top managements have all too willingly scapegoated middle management for alleged problems of hierarchy and rigidity. In the absence of persuasive scholarly evidence to the contrary, they will have full license to continue to cut and degrade management, often at the expense of both managers and workers.

This study proposes a different interpretation of the roots of the competitive dilemma. It suggests that corporate management strategies ultimately create organizational hierarchies and behavior. What many consider rigid middle-managerial bureaucracies are in fact products of empire building by corporate managers themselves; in a particular economic context those bureaucracies more than fulfilled their purpose. But throughout much of the twentieth century, strategic management at American Security Bank and numerous other corporations developed aggressive profit strategies that were shortsighted in two important senses and led eventually to the demise of bureaucratic management structures. They relied myopically on assumptions of endless growth, and they strove for immediate, maximum short-term returns at the expense of building structure and investing in technologies that would endure in a very different global context. Those strategies have forced corporate top management to make choices about regaining power and profits, and for the most part, they appear to be exercising quick-fix choices that target relatively powerless parties.

By acquitting middle management of ultimate blame for U.S. competitive problems, I do not intend to canonize individual middle managers. To be sure, middle managers may be complacent and may build personal empires at the expense of the larger goals of the corporation (criticisms that have been incorporated into the standard lexicon for scapegoating middle management). I am rather taking a structural perspective on the problem, arguing that we cannot accept at face value that these phenomena explain America's current competitive position. The most important determinant of the failure of the large corporation is top management strategic decision making; the extensive, semi-autonomous structure of middle management was historically a direct by-product of those decisions.

The case of American Security Bank shows that, far from being a major impediment to contemporary restructuring, middle managers in many ways held the social and productive fabric of the corporation together in the face of strategic management's drastic, albeit disguised, objectives. Middle managers carried a different conception of the firm's corporate interest, inspired in part by an explicit criticism of aggressive, shortsighted growth strategies. Because of this criticism, top management lost its credibility for engaging middle managers in the dirty work of restructuring. Middle managers, however, did not dismiss the possibility of overhauling the employee relations framework; instead, they put the brakes on this process, slowing it down, reinterpreting and reworking the new policies both to increase productivity and to maintain the credibility of the firm in the eyes of their employees. From strategic management's perspective, with its insistence on immediate and profitable results, middle managers' actions most certainly were an obstacle; from the perspective of thinking about the future of the American corporation and the prospects for consent to and legitimation of change, middle managers' actions could, in a different strategic context, make possible the cooperation so highly touted by both policy analysts and strategic managers.

Some may wish to say that when it comes to formulating remedies for our economic situation, it matters little who is responsible for the current crisis in the corporation: we should just face the facts and look for new ways of working that will increase productivity and efficiency, even if that means laying off hundreds of thousands of managerial employees and turning remaining workers into controlled managers. Yet there is no reason to think that these policies will be viable in the long run if they are based on inadequate or distorted explanations of how American firms ended up where they are today. This study has attempted to go to the origins of the problem and to relay a sense of the consequences of blindly pursuing corporate employment strategies without regard to the history and power relations of the modern corporation.