Power, compliance, resistance and creativity: Power and the differential experience of loose time in large organisations

Abstract

A re-examination of Foucault's approach to power suggests the notion of ‘loose time’ as a theoretical construct and methodological strategy to examine the limits of power's reach in large bureaucratic organisations. Following analysis of interview data from a range of sectors, individual innovation and creativity are proposed as integral to understanding the distribution of power.

Introduction

This paper speaks to the following two questions: how does the major cleavage in large organisations between those legally constrained by and those who fall within labour relations law influence the exercise of power inside Canadian workplaces? Second, since Information and Communications Technology (ICT) surveillance strategies dominate most workplaces, how and to what degree is the working out of personal freedom differentially expressed in the workplace?

The concept of loose time is introduced as an innovative conceptual and methodological strategy to study the asymmetrical distribution of power in large organisations. However, employees connect with loose time differently depending on their social location in the organisation. Specifically, employees' expressions of loose time correspond to the major cleavage of large organisations in Canada. That is to say, how an employee experiences loose time closely matches the Canadian provincial and federal state's formal division into those who may join trade unions and employees who are excluded. Twenty-four interviews (14 women and 10 men) were completed over a 6-month period covering employees in a variety of organisational settings, yet demarcated by inclusion or exclusion within Canadian labour relations laws. They included high school teachers; call centre employees, human resource consultants and managers, credit union financial advisors and regional government administrators. Relying on the voices of employees in a variety of workplaces, the paper concludes with a discussion of loose time as a conceptual, methodological and empirical modification to the study of power in large organisations.

Both sides of the organisational fence: Labour law and private and public sector organisations in Canada

Unlike other federal states such as the United States or Germany, labour relations law, trade unions and their federations in Canada are overwhelmingly confined to the 10 provincial jurisdictions while a meager 10 per cent of employees are eligible to join trade unions at the federal government level. Additionally, labour relations law is complicated further by Québec's adoption of French civil and criminal codes. Nevertheless, these complexities rest on similar definitions of employee; that is, someone who is eligible to join a trade union. Therefore, a simplified two-tiered private and public sector organisational hierarchy begins with the definition of employee recognised by Canadian labour law as ‘someone who has entered into or works under a contract of service to perform specified services and/or tasks for another, the employer, in exchange for money’ (Duhaime, 2010). This means that call centre employees along with high school, community college and university professors are defined as employees and can become members of s trade union. Of course, not all employees are members of trade unions in Canada. Today trade union membership stands at roughly 25 per cent. This definition excludes those who hold managerial, financial and related offices, those who supervise others in the organisation and independent contractors. Therefore, large organisations are constituted by a minimum of two distinct categories of workers—those employees who can be organised into trade unions and those who legally are ineligible.

The exercise of power in large organisations: From Weber to Foucault

Today, the concept of power for most social scientists stands on Weber's notion for legitimate or legal-rational authority, not war or personal physical prowess. (Weber, 1968). That is to say, the exercise of power as decision-making authority is based on the will of others holding offices positioned higher inside the bureaucratic hierarchy. As a result, modern bureaucracies depend for their social reproduction on the obedience of its employees. The individual's acquiescence rests, in large measure, on the belief that she or he is being treated fairly and objectively by criteria other than personal preference. The fact that legal-rational authority contains a set of canons that are abstract and transmitted culturally assures a sufficient degree of compliance to secure the smooth running of any large-scale organisation.

Individuals who experience unfair labour practices, on the other hand, are always ‘free’ to exit the organisation and seek employment elsewhere. This option is open to those who are socially located on both sides of the organisational fence. Or, if the grievances are experienced collectively, employees struggle to form organisations of their own which they believe could advance their interests as a whole either within the dominant organisations as trade unions or as separate entities such as co-operatives.

Within the critical social science tradition, however, researchers emphasise employee conflict and resistance to the actual unfair practices of individuals who own or control the organisation, particularly for-profit companies. If this vast literature were to be catalogued, research studies could be classified that confirm (1) compliance to the rules and regulations of the organisational regime and (2) resistance to what is felt or believed to be unfair or inequitable. However, there are critical social scientists who seek to understand how workplace resistance can result, paradoxically in continuity not the expected disjuncture of organisational life.

Michael Buroway's (1979) ethnographic study of a piece-rate factory system was among the first to point out how an informal system and culture of employees daily resistance to management's encroachments on their labour time actually reinforced the formal bureaucratic hierarchy of management-worker relationships. In the end, Buroway and others adopting labour process theory point out that the particular mix of the following ingredients are necessary to secure the workers' effort bargain with the employer: compliant managerial labour controls channel workers' resistance into social complicity to the organisational hierarchy (see, e.g. Braverman: 1976/1998; Wardell et al., 1999; Berberoglu, 2002).

The Electronic Panopticon in the new workplace

Unlike early visions of a shorter work week and more leisure time for almost everyone based on automated factories effortlessly churning out products with little downtime for maintenance and repairs, the truth of the matter about ICT impacts on the modern workplace has been somewhat more ominous (see, e.g. Gorz, 1985; 1987; Glenday, 1997).

ICTs can render virtually every task more visible to management by monitoring and shadowing employees all the while emphasising transparency and surveillance as the means of controlling the effort bargain and the mobilisation of worker experience, knowledge and skills. New information technologies and their application to the shop floor and office called out for a new metaphor that captured their pervasiveness and their ability to reveal the hidden talents of employees. Here and abroad, a few critical social science researchers adopted Michel Foucault's (1980; 1982; 1991) notion of Panopticon to capture the virtual ubiquitous impact of ICT in the workplace. However, Foucault reserved the prison as ‘the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form’ (Didier, 1989/1991: 77). The factory and office were described as distinct organisations. Nevertheless, researchers pushed the envelope to include the modern factory and office so that the modern workplace becomes home to the Electronic Panopticon.

Catherine Casey (1995) and Barbara Townley (1994) argue for the apparent ubiquity of the Electronic Panopticon. In their research, each author hopes that the end of modernity with its emphasis on productionism will create new opportunities for the self. However, each also point to ‘capitulated selves’ in the workplace. Catherine Casey (1995) for example, notes that workers ‘are unlikely to create new forms of alliances and solidarities outside those formed in and by corporations. The new corporate culture is a totalising culture’ (p. 197).

Others such as Sewell and Wilkinson (1992) view Just-In-Time and Total Quality Control, for example, as two of several devices in a ‘tool box’ that ‘both create and demand systems of surveillance which improve on those of the traditional bureaucracy in instilling discipline and thereby consolidating central control’ (p. 277). They proceed to say, ‘even if an individual worker is reluctant to share any positive divergence, it is likely that they will be revealed . . . through the concept of continuous improvement . . . a powerful instrument by which management can appropriate the ingenuity of the work force’ (p. 285). However, Sewell and Wilkinson also found that working in teams and multi-tasking led to enhanced spheres of worker influence. Much like Buroway and other labour process researchers, workers, with the tacit approval of supervisors and management, falsified productivity and quality information so long as it appeared production targets were met (p. 282). Apparently, the power of ICT in the hands of management to control their workforce has practical limits.

Research studies employing Foucault's notion of the Panopticon become trapped in much the same way as labour process theorists such as Buroway (1979; 1985) and others. Defined as knowledge secured from workers' experience, these approaches to the study of the workplace, be it in a factory or office, result in multiple ways to ‘skin a worker’ (Roy, 1980; see also Roy, 1959/60). Agency is replaced by complicity and knowledge is appropriated by surveillance. In neither approach do the forms of workers' actual daily resistance, nor her/his personal ingenuity surface. All succumb in the face of insurmountable, ICT-based, corporate controlled, bureaucratic power.

Foucault's ‘permanent provocation’ and freedom

First, Foucault conveys the important point that the exercise of power is not absolute but channels behaviour. For Foucault, ‘the exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome’ (Foucault, 1982: 221). Clearly, Foucault establishes the limits of power with his double use of possibility, not its ubiquity.

Having said that, the problem is ‘to know how you are to avoid these practices—[to go to] where power cannot play’ (1991b: 18; see also, 1982: 222). Refusing to submit to authority in the workplace is an exercise of freedom for Foucault but is, nonetheless confronted by power as a guide to conduct. That is, the actual exercise of managerial power in the workplace are attempts to find ways to structure possible outcomes. Therefore, the display of power in large organisations can never be totalising. There are always spaces or gaps that constitute captured labour time by employees. Other researchers have used ‘quiet and interaction time’ (Perlow, 1999: 71) or ‘cracks that particular conjunctures open’ (Certeau, 1988) when referring to the limits of power's reach. What is important to grasp is what happens inside these spaces that not only renders ‘conflicts at work more visible, but provide for a study of the limits of forms of power’ (May, 1999: 776; see also, May and Buck, 1998; Pile and Keith, 1997). Specifically, these spaces are where workers construct captured labour time.

Loose time

For the purposes of this research strategy, I will employ taut and loose time to refer to the accumulation of an employee's experience about the work tasks, work groups and organisational hierarchy. At the start of the work-time spectrum, all the employees in the organisation experience the time they spend at work as similar to a taut rope: new, inflexible and stressed. Overtime, often beginning not more than 4 or 5 months into the employment relationship, these same employees experience work time as more flexible, habitual and loose. Once familiarity with the particular tasks, duties, and responsibilities settle in, employees, regardless of their location in the organisation can now capture labour time as loose time. However, as noted above, not everyone in the organisation experiences the exercise of power in the same manner. It largely depends within which of the two tiers described above an employee is located. Additionally, the specific content of loose time contains not only how power is resisted and often controlled at the bottom level of the organisation but how individual creative or innovative outcomes are potentially fostered at both levels of the organisation.

Loose time and the organisation

As stated above, Canadian labour relations laws divide any large organisation into two classes of employee: a worker who enters into a contract of service and who sells his labour time for a specified period and those who fall outside this type of contractual arrangement. On a more theoretical level, there are researchers who distinguish between those in the organisation such as supervisors, managers and corporate executives who undergo occupational controls and all those lower in the hierarchy who come under the more familiar notion of the effort squeeze (see, e.g. Baldamus, 1961/2003).

The determination of wages for workers in the first category has little to do with occupational costs and more with the worker's input of physical and mental effort. Because of their relational differences within the organisation, the exercise of power and the practices and expressions of loose time experienced by these two categories of employees within the organisation will be dissimilar.

Methodological strategy

Analytically, decision-making strategies in the workplace seeking to stabilise and intensify the labour process open up fissures or spaces that can be captured by workers as loose time. Within loose time, these workers actions take form and are accorded substance. On the other hand, the top tier, in stark contrast, is more likely to experience the practices of power as potentially enabling; that is, loose time is often positively sanctioned.

The contingency of power rests inside loose time. The manifestation of loose time, then, depends on location in the organisation. That is to say, the experience of capturing loose time by employees located on both sides of the fence is encountered either as personally enabling or as resistance to power. The former will usually experience their loose time as resulting in new personal opportunities. There may also be potential benefits for the organisation in increased productivity or revenue. Those below them in the organisation find the experience collectively and individually constraining and will find ways to resist the power they experience on a day-to-day basis.

The methodological strategy I propose begins with employees in diverse work environments and located at both levels of the organisation described earlier. By so doing, I am taking into account the differential experience of power and loose time in large organisations.

Over a roughly 6-month period, from September 2007 until April 2008, interviews were completed with 24 employees: 14 women and 10 men. They included high school teachers; call centre employees, human resource consultants and managers, credit union financial advisors and regional government administrators. Of this group, only the high school teachers were trade union members. The call centre employees were without organisational representation. In some instances, interviews were conducted at the workplace. In others, a neutral site was selected while in a few cases, interviews were done in a quiet restaurant over lunch. Each interview took approximately 1 hour to complete and consisted of questions dealing with their work tasks, supervisory environment and their experience of loose time. By loose time, I meant the time in any given day or shift when each individual was able to either (1) ‘escape’ from his or her assigned duties or tasks and what they did during this time or (2) find time to investigate a problem, pursue or fulfill an objective. Methodologically, my aim was to talk to individuals about what they do to create time for themselves at work that falls outside the standard chatter, gossip or conversation engaged in daily by most employees.

Results

Employees differentially experience power's limits within the organisation to determine human conduct. As a result, the episodes of loose time are also differentially encountered within the organisation's hierarchy. The first number of passages comes from individuals who fall under the top group of employees. These will be followed by quotes from the second cluster of employees, those wedged inside the bottom tier.

The experience of loose time by employees in the organisation's top tier

Corporate employees spoke about the length of time in the employment relationship it took them to feel comfortable about using loose time and how their organisation enabled them to pursue interests that were mutually beneficial.

(Male Financial Administrator [10 months on the job] 1—corporate) ‘As you start to become more valued . . . once there is a trust built. You get a little more leeway. . . . a bit more time. I no longer feel I am tied to my desk. I can actually get up and move around and talk to people’.

(Male Regional Government Administrator 2) ‘as an employee becomes more familiar with the organisation, the supervisors and the culture, and how things are done around here, it allows people to understand what liberties they can take’.

Several corporate employees spoke of using loose time to create opportunities to develop professionally and to reinforce social bonds with fellow employees through direct face-to-face interaction and by so doing ‘get things done’.

(Female financial advisor 1—corporate) ‘You end up building relationships but you also end up learning things that you might not have expected to learn . . . If I wanted to get something done, I would typically email . . . and I stopped doing that. Now I go upstairs and actually talk to the person . . . that takes more time but things get done’.

(Male Regional Government Administrator 2) ‘I've used those web-based training seminars that are offered through certain organisations. I close my door, maybe some other people come in, and we watch this for 45 minutes, they are a little bit more interactive because you can actually comment on the phone’.

Others spoke about the differences between working at corporate and working in branch offices.

(Female Banking Administrator 1—corporate) ‘The other thing is that we can meet here, any time during the day. We set up a meeting, we all meet. They can't do that at the branch. They have to meet before or after hours. They have to pull people in and there is a cost to that. Time becomes very measured and costly in the branch network. I'm not saying it makes us lazy in here. It doesn't. It just seems a little backwards’.

ICTs in the office and social isolation

On several occasions, discussion turned to how socially isolating the new ICTs had become for many working in the modern corporate office. Often the offices were located along each of the four exterior walls to afford each corporate officer with a window. Instead of solid walls, most offices were panelled by large windows which looked out into the hallway and windowed boardroom offices.

(Female Banking Administrator 2—corporate) ‘If email is not working. If our system goes down. [begins to laugh]. I can't do anything.

(Male Government Administrator) ‘Here it (the phone or talking to someone directly) is the last thing used. The computer is number one and I’ll tell you something, I have seen people sitting beside each other at their desk, emailing each other, beside each other. Never mind say fifty yards away. And it really is the way that people use to communicate. . . . Blackberrys are all over this place. When I come into work and turn on my computer, I've got blackberry messages that came in at 10 o’clock at night’.

The experience of power as constraining

Conflicting managerial strategies in the workplace provides the first instance to study the exercise of power as constraining. The responses below begin with discussing the situation inside a call centre.

(Two employees were interviewed together. Female Call Centre 1: worker 1) ‘Our other manager.  . . . when she was on the floor she kept giving bad advice to our client. As well as the agents (call centre employees). They would have to go back onto the phone and say I apologise, you were misinformed, this is how it is really done . . . ‘.

(Two employees were interviewed together. Female Call Centre 1: worker 2) ‘Samuel (assumed name). is so laid back. We have a new manager . . . she is on top of everyone. . . . if you are late by 5 minutes, she will write you up. She doesn't want to speak to any of the employees. Now, its even more stressful than if it just started like that. Now we have to completely change our routines, and in a call centre that could be the death for some people . . . people who aren't really good with change or who are so focused on their routine, they have to start switching it up. And that's when you run into problems’.

(Female Call Centre 1: worker 3) ‘We have a new site director and his whole motto is, he wants leaders to try and change the whole way of thinking around here. Because in a call centre you loose so many people. Stress . . . he wants to find ways to appease the workers and bring in (sic) uplifting moral strategies to try and get them to enjoy their job a little more . . .’.

Inside the bottom tier, the squeeze is on. One of the financial analysts discussed ‘talk time’ at two of their call centres.

(Female Financial Administrator) ‘We had two call centres in Toronto and two in Montreal . . . and they are measured by talk time. When they had been on the phone for what they considered to be too long they had a beep in their ear so that they were being told they were on the phone for more than three minutes, and if they were on the phone for four minutes it would beep again and then at five minutes it would beep and a supervisor. So the supervisor would come over and see if there was some sort of problem’.

A human resource manager with a 25 year career advising medium to large businesses had this to say about the effort squeeze.

(Human Resource Consultant) ‘That's the trend I see going, its tightening up instead of getting looser. And the further you go down the corporate structure, the more tightly it is controlled’.

However, when pressed for examples of the Big Squeeze, this human resource consultant resorted to the following illustration:

(Human Resource Consultant #2) ‘On the Off Shift—afternoons and midnights—there is more “free” time because “the wheels” aren't supervising to death. Take an automotive type company, the workers Go, Go Go and their parts are out by 10:00pm . . . well there's 2 hours there. They go play euchre, read, go around and socialise and the supervisor turns a blind eye because he's got his numbers, these people get their shop time. Everyone's happy. The “wheels” know about it, everyone knows about it’.

The combination of the routinisation of work, conflicting managerial decision-making strategies and ‘getting more for less’ spawns resistance and ingenuity as the content of loose time. First, employees understand when they are being asked to eliminate jobs in the name of corporate efficiency.

(Female Call Centre 1: worker 4) [The company] is always changing the rules depending on how much money they want coming in. . . . on my job its a ‘Catch-22’.we have to have great ‘stats’ but because we have better ‘stats’ than what our target is. So [the company] looks at it as. We're losing money because we are paying so many people. Then we can cut down on staff.

(Female Call Centre 2: worker 1) (after a few months on the job) ‘as you progress, you don't have to concentrate as much. . . . things become automatic . . . Between calls when they aren't worried about what you are doing (the script becomes monotonous). You can think . . . so there is a little bit of time there. I was working on a novel at one point during down time’.

The following responses describe the interaction between loose time, play and corporate games to keep workers ‘happy’ and content with their jobs.

(Female Call Centre 1: worker 3). ‘Last week we celebrated someone's birthday. And we sat there eating cake. . . . you can sit there doing something completely different and your brain will still be able to handle the call’.

(Female Call Centre 2: worker 2) ‘Our section is doing so well, that they are having call centre Olympics. We are doing like a bean bag toss. They will take you off the call, meanwhile everyone around you is doing calls. Its like an extra break. They are designed to encourage you, to make work fun but in essence its extra time’.

(Two employees were interviewed together. Female Call Centre 1: worker 1 & 2) ‘so they will have snack day, they will say you can get off the phone and go get some snacks. Or like pyjama day, or hat day. Which is really weird because it reminds me of high school . . .  (Call centre employee 2 says) or elementary school] . . . yeah’.

The following excerpts describe the contradictory nature of high school teachers as professional workers. For one teacher, loose time became ‘stepping back’, or moving marginally outside the circle of day-to-day work routines.

Female Teacher #1 (Gym Class) ‘When I was in the gym class, the only thing that would lighten the load or change the routine is, I'd have kids referee . . . I could step back and do my own sort of thing’.

Female Teacher #1) ‘When I'm in the classroom, the only way I could step back would be to assign group work or presentations worked really well. That's the only way we could get away from the actual day-to-day instruction’.

Female Teacher #1 Special Ed) ‘I work in the resource room, I work with the student one on one now, I have to go and get the student out of class and bring them to my room and sit down and work on their class work . . . I also interview and monitor the student throughout the year. I have a lot of flexibility . . .’.

(Female Teacher #2 Special Ed)) ‘Its (The Special Education Room) not as restricted as a classroom situation. In the classroom you cannot move’.

Those holding careers inside large organisations understand loose time as encouraging personal development while those below them experience the constraining influence of power. High school teachers experience both the increased standardisation of work in the classroom and a degree of professional independence. Each category of employee uses their loose time in ways to establish their individuality and creativity while those in the bottom tier are more prone to find ways to also resist the exercise of power on them.

Discussion

Employing the concept of loose time as the focus for the cross section of interviews completed for this research exposed several important faces of power in large organisations. First and foremost, no matter where inside the organisation's hierarchy or whether the organisations were in the private or public sector, familiarity with the job led employees to capture labour time, that is, constructing their particular experience of loose time. Second, the extracts from the interviews confirm the substance of loose time corresponding to the bifurcated units of the organisational hierarchy. Capturing labour time for those in the top tier, for example, suggests how the experience of loose time can be self-actualising. In the case of several financial officers and senior government administrators, the ability to physically move about the organisation's offices generated opportunities for social interaction and problem solving. For others, loose time could be tied to taking short (45 minutes) on-line courses either alone or with one or two others behind closed doors.

Loose time for this category of employees resulted in increased personal interaction and communication that facilitated problem solving and on occasion, innovativeness and creativity. Loose time often became linked to corporate/bureaucratic goals. Whether increasing their professional costs to the organisation through on-line training programmes, or problem solving to achieve corporate efficiencies, these professionals understood the exercise of organisational power and their corresponding loose time as more often than not personally rewarding.

The impact of ICTs in the corporate office exposed another dimension to their social life inside the organisation. First and foremost was the dependence on ICTs such as emails and Blackberries for communication between individuals. Second was the potential for social isolation inside the office. On several occasions those interviewed spoke of how they broke with this form of technological dependence by walking and talking to others. This aspect of loose time became an act of human agency, a way to break from the rigours of work imposed by ICTs in the corporate/administrative office.

Those stuck in the bottom tier, on the other hand, experienced work as constraining, even enclosing or suffocating. The results reported here from a set of interviews across a small spectrum of bottom tier jobs do describe an encompassing network of rules, games and surveillance. However, the individual responses to power as the construction of loose time approaches Foucault's notion of power's ability to condition or direct conduct along possible avenues rather than hamstringing or ‘skinning’ employees. Employees met the many attempts by management to make-work in the call centres interesting or ‘fun’ such as Call Centre Olympics or Pajama Day with characteristic wit and opprobrium. Employees remained on the job and did as they were told while resistance to the organisation's games gave rise to individual acts of human agency.

Echoes of human agency could be heard from the human resource consultant while, more difficult to express in call centres, employees acted on their own when contradicting management and properly informing callers of a service, undermining managerial strategies to cut jobs and seeing through managerial strategies of play and corporate games.

Two call centre female employees spoke about contradictory approaches to employee performance in their workplace. In this case, incongruous managerial strategies resulted in more stress for some employees. Instead of opening up more space to capture loose time, these occasions were experienced negatively by many call centre employees. The contradictory messages added stress for those who ‘aren't really good with change or [those] who are so focused on their routines’. However, during recession, such as the one we are experiencing now, the option of voluntarily leaving the job is often closed and as a result, stress levels increase for many employees in these types of workplaces.

Teachers, however, expressed an ambiguous, often contradictory, familiarity with the changing goals of the organisation. There were opportunities for professional development such as ‘PD days’ while the standardisation of tasks tied them to the classroom. Some teachers sought out ways to minimise the experience of the effort squeeze by requesting assignments that allowed them to work with one or a few students. For the teachers interviewed for this study, what was required in the classroom took on more and more the attributes of a job not a career. Their sense of freedom to be creative with their students in the classroom was severely restricted; hence, the desire to ‘step out’ from doing their assigned tasks within the organisation. ‘Stepping Out’ becomes one of the strategies used by teachers to capture loose time for themselves and by so doing affirm human agency within the educational system.

The indeterminacy of power in the employment relationship at both organisational levels echoes throughout the reported interviews. It confirms Foucault's notion of power's limits to the appropriation of human skills and talents in the workplace, regardless of where one is positioned in the organisation. It remains clear, however, that those who enjoy professional careers possess many more advantages to exercise loose time as enabling and career building so long as the organisation can benefit.

Not all the employees doing bottom tier jobs who were interviewed spoke about the creative or innovative activities they did during their loose time. This was certainly more the case with employees supervised by occupational controls. However, as one employee in a call centre said, ‘I found time to work on my novel’. The desire to find the time at work to be creative or innovative was found at all organisational levels.

Finally, the voices of the interviewees not only corroborates Foucault's notion of power in large organisations as channelling human behaviour but establishes the importance of loose time as a conceptual and methodological strategy to showcase the limits of power's reach and by so doing affirm the power of human agency at all levels of organisational life.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant ‘Restructuring Work and Labour in the New Economy’ under the ‘Innovations of the New Economy’ for financial assistance.