I’ve recently read two extraordinary and, I suppose, largely forgotten novels, both published in the early 1940s, and both three-generational sagas set mainly in the Pittsburgh steel industry from the 1870s to the 1930s. That setting will immediately pique the interest of students of organizations because of course it was here that Frederick Taylor developed the tenets of Scientific Management, in a context which I mention briefly in the book (p.33-35). The steel mills of Pittsburgh and surrounding towns might very well be regarded as the birthplace of many of the management techniques and organizational processes that dominated industrial capitalism and continue to have much purchase today.
The novels are The Valley of Decision by Marcia Davenport, originally published in 1942 (hereafter, Valley) and Out of this Furnace by Thomas Bell, originally published in 1941 (hereafter, Furnace). It is perhaps telling that both books were subsequently re-published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, attesting to their significance as historical records as much as works of fiction. Both were based to a degree on direct and indirect personal experience.
The authors
Marcia Davenport (1903-1996), born Marcia Glick, was for a time married to Russell Davenport Junior, whose father, Russell Davenport Senior was a senior manager at, first, Midvale Steel and, later Bethlehem Steel. Those names are again resonant within organization studies as they were the companies where Taylor worked and, indeed, Davenport and Taylor was close associates at Midvale, and Taylor was hired by Bethlehem on the recommendation of Davenport (Misa, 1999: 184). Apart from this family connection, Marcia Davenport had, during a previous marriage, lived in Pittsburgh and amassed documents and letters about its steel industry which were the basis of the book (these are now archived at the University of Pittsburgh).
Thomas Bell (1903-1961), born Adelbert Thomas Belejcak in Braddock, one of the Pittsburgh steel towns, was the grandson and son (on his mother’s side) and the son (on his father’s side) of Slovakian (more precisely Lemko and Rusyn) immigrants who worked in the steel and other industries in and around Pittsburgh. Bell himself worked as an apprentice in the steel industry before becoming a full-time writer. Furnace is a fictionalised account of three generations of his family.
The Valley of Decision
Valley tells the story of three generations of the Scott family, of Presbyterian Scottish ancestry, who own a small but successful steel mill in Pittsburgh, but the pivotal character is Mary Rafferty, who is from a working-class Irish Catholic family and in 1873 begins working life as a maid to the Scotts. Her brother, James, works in the Scott mill and is an organiser for the ‘Amalgamated’ (the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Maker). Mary and Paul Scott, the son of William, the firm’s owner, fall in love and despite the class and religious differences his family support their engagement. However, the marriage is abandoned after James Rafferty murders William Scott in the course of a bitter strike.
Subsequently, in a long and convoluted drama, Mary ends up being Paul’s housekeeper and also begins to befriend the newly arrived Slovak immigrants. Disparagingly called ‘Hunkies’ (meaning Hungarians, though in fact most of them are not), they are kept out of the best jobs by the earlier generation of Irish immigrants and are regarded as almost sub-human by the mill owners. Mary’s particular friend is Julka, matriarch of the Hrdlicka family (in fact, partly Czech and partly Slovak: there is a brief reference to Czech disparagement of Slovaks).
In the third generation, Claire Scott marries Anton, the son of Julka (she has become an official in the newly independent Czechoslovakia). And, indeed, Pennsylvanian Czechs and Slovaks had played an important role in the achievement of this independence, which was declared by Tomas Masaryk – who became its first President in 1920 – in Philadelphia in 1918. His son, Jan, who was Czechoslovakia’s Foreign Minister from 1940 until his death in 1948, was Marcia Davenport’s lover and Anton appears to be based upon him. The later sections of the book are concerned in particular with rise of Nazism and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the case against US isolationism.
Throughout the long book, which has many sub-plots and characters, there are recurring themes of class (including fine gradations within the middle and upper classes) and ethnicity, and of violent capital-labour conflicts. There is also an ongoing story of attempts to keep the Scott mill as an independent family-owned and run firm in the face of massive consolidation within the steel industry, led by the magnate Andrew Carnegie, to form what eventually became the United States Steel Corporation. This gives rise to frequent family and boardroom conflicts over the decades (and a sub-theme is how the successive generations shift from being active entrepreneurs to remote stockholders). It could be regarded as showing the distinctions between early capitalism, very much informed by the Protestant Work Ethic à la Weber, and the development of monopoly and finance capitalism.
Out of this Furnace
If Valley focusses primarily on the steel industry owners and their interrelations with the Irish and, then, Slovak workers who labour in their mills, Furnace is centrally and solely concerned with the experience of Slovak workers and their families. As alluded to in Valley, but shown in minute detail in Furnace, this is a story of appalling hardship told through the central characters of the Kracha and Dobrejcak families. The first generation story centres on Djuro Kracha, the second on his daughter Mary and her husband Michael Dobrejcak, the third on their son Dobie.
These families, like the Hrdlickas, are emblematic of the massive flow of Slovak emigrants (and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe), fleeing poverty, persecution and compulsory military service under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some half a million Slovaks came to the US between 1880 and 1920, of whom about half came to Pennsylvania, mainly to Pittsburgh and surrounding areas. Bell regarded their treatment as a hidden and shameful part of American history, and their contribution to US industrial development as having been ignored. The Slovaks, largely from rural and agricultural backgrounds, arrived in the hope of a better life but experienced grindingly hard and very dangerous work (death and maiming are commonplace, and Michael is killed in an industrial accident) for pitiful wages.
They also face discrimination and cruel stereotyping from both mill owners and managers and from Irish workers, which keeps them in the very worst jobs and housing. Although not depicted in the book, Bell’s uncle was effectively murdered by Irish or possibly Scottish workers (there was also a major group of Welsh workers in the Pittsburgh steel industry, but they do not appear in either book). In short, a life of constant struggle is depicted – a struggle to survive and to create the basic elements of a decent life against almost insuperable barriers.
Shared themes
One of the central themes of Furnace, as in Valley but more strongly so, is the struggle of trade unions to organize and to improve working conditions and pay. In both books there are references to the 1892 Homestead strike – a pivotal defeat for American organized labour in the period - and in Furnace there are accounts of brutal strike-breaking activities during the failed 1919 Great Steel Strike and, again, the growing dominance of Carnegie’s big corporate conglomerate – though here seen from the perspective of the workforce rather than the owners of an independent firm.
In the third generation, through the character of Dobie, and with the Amalgamated giving way to the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) trade unionism finally achieves a degree of success and is certainly represented by Bell as the best and only hope for the workers to achieve a modicum of dignity. (In Valley, a SWOC activist in the 1930s refers disparagingly to the Amalgamated, James Rafferty’s union in the 1870s, as outmoded, just as, for Rafferty, the Sons of Vulcan union that was one of the Amalgamated’s precursors was ancient history).
Another very important theme in both books, but again more strongly in Furnace, is the pivotal role played by women in holding together Slovak families (and also, in Valley, Mary’s role in holding together the Scotts, but this is depicted more as a feature of her individual character than as a wider cultural characteristic). Often, they were brought over to America after their husbands or fiancés had established themselves in a job. They are depicted as only having had paid employment when unmarried and this seems also to be the case for the Irish women, and that work appears to have been mainly domestic service. Before her marriage, Mary Kracha has a job as a maid with a wealthy mill owning family just as Mary Rafferty’s working life began as a maid with the Scotts in Valley. In both cases the contrast of the opulent houses where they work is compared sharply with the squalor of their own homes.
Once married, with their husbands working backbreaking 12 hour mill shifts (when work was available), women faced the constant drudgery of housework in an environment made filthy by industrial pollution, the expectation of near annual childbirth, the common experience of early widowhood, and, frequently, their own early deaths (Mary Dobrejcak dies of TB as, in real life, had Bell’s father). Yet they maintained their families and frequently supplemented family incomes by taking in boarders – typically young male steel workers, since men outnumbered women greatly at least in the early period. The strong sense of community Bell depicts is partly down to the role of women but also because, in common with, but possibly to an even greater extent than, other immigrant groups the Slovakian migrants of this period lived in close proximity.
Whilst Valley contains many realistic depictions of the hardship of both Irish and Slovakian workers – and there are some oblique references to prostitution and drunkenness - it is to a degree a romantic melodrama and not a demanding read (it was, in fact, turned into a film with Gregory Peck and Greer Garson). Furnace is far more gritty and harrowing, and although it does depict the very tender love between Mary and Michael Dobrejcak that love is blighted by hardship and tragedy. Nor is it a romanticised picture in that some characters, especially Djuro Kracha, are shown to be cruel, sometimes violent, frequently drunk, and in some cases dishonest and manipulative.
Overall, despite the partial uplift of growing union success towards the end of the 1930s it is – and, based on the Afterword to the University of Pittsburgh edition, it’s clear that Bell intended it to be – a deeply painful account of lives deformed by poverty, injustice, and prejudice. In that, it speaks to the experience of so many immigrant groups both past and present. There is passing reference (in Furnace, but not Valley) to the experience of Black Americans, with “negroes” brought in, initially as strike breakers, and experiencing discrimination from Slovaks which, as Dobie observes, replicated some of the hostility Slovaks had themselves previously faced from Irish workers, just as the Irish had from the English settlers.
Relevance for Organization Studies
Together, apart from many other things, these two books fill out the point I make in the book about the role that ethnicity played in the development of Taylorism. Much of that was about discrimination and prejudice, epitomised by Taylor’s dehumanising and derogatory use of the “mentally sluggish” Bethlehem worker ‘Schmidt’ (actually Henry Noll, of Dutch descent) to illustrate the benefits of his system. Bill Cooke (2003) includes this example in his explanation of the continuities and inter-relationships of slavery, and the management of slaves, and modern management theory and practice – something that has been systematically excluded from established histories of management.
Arguably there were ways in which it broke some of these prejudices down. I note (p.35) how the Taylorist emphasis on managers hiring ‘scientifically’ on merit broke down the power of work gang leaders and even give the hypothetical example of Irish foremen discriminating against East European immigrants. I am not sure where I got the idea of that particular example from, but, amazingly, something almost identical features in one of the most dramatic scenes in Valley, when it emerges that a skilled Slovak worker – Charlie Hrdlicka, Julka’s husband - trained at the Skoda works, has been forced to do menial work because the Irish work gang leader will not hire “Hunkies”. Paul Scott immediately promotes him (and, when criticised by the Irish foreman, challenges him to strike with the reminder of what had happened at Homestead).
I suggest in my book that this is a version of the ‘ethic of impersonality’ which forms part of Paul du Gay’s defence of bureaucracy. Yet it can also be read as an example of one of the ways that Taylorism, in particular, formed part of a much more complex history of ‘race management’ (Roediger & Esch, 2012). On Roediger & Esch’s analysis this history (as Cooke also argues) reaches back to slavery, and also explains the racial segmentation of hierarchies such as that between the Irish and Slovak workers (or between white and Chinese workers in the construction of railroads), with Taylorism as a new, ‘integrationist’ but still racialised episode within this history.
It’s no longer a novel (no pun intended) proposition in organization studies that novels can be a source of great insight and ‘respectable’ evidence, and I find these two to be particularly so, for several reasons. Firstly, they provide a quite extraordinary amount of really detailed information about working practices and industrial relations in the steel industry in this period. Second, and perhaps relatedly, their structure and focus means that taken together they provide a multi-generational, multi-ethnic and multi-class set of perspectives on that industry and period.
Third, and I think most significant, is the way that these novels disclose a small but significant part of the hidden history of management and organizational theory. Within the textbooks, certainly, you would hardly discern what these theories are actually about or where they came from. I am quite sure that Taylorism would be far better taught and understood through reading novels such as these rather than through the sanitised, ahistoric, asocial, bloodless non-stories of most ‘Introductions to Organizational Behaviour’.
References
Bell, T. (1941) Out of this Furnace. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Cooke, B. (2003) ‘The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies’, Journal of Management Studies 40 (8): 1895-1918
Davenport, M. (1942) The Valley of Decision. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons
Misa, T. (1999) A Nation of Steel. The Making of Modern America 1865-1925. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Roediger, D. and Esch, E. (2012) The Production of Difference. Race and the Management of Labor in US History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sunday, 28 June 2020
Saturday, 11 April 2020
The coronavirus crisis
This blog has been sadly neglected in recent years, as all my blogging time and energy have been taken up with my Brexit Blog. But the current coronavirus crisis prompts me to return to it, because so much of what is happening in this crisis has an organizational dimension, and some of it relates directly to the themes of the book which this blog accompanies. In this post, I’ll discuss some of them, with the focus on what is happening in the UK but no doubt at least some of it has a wider relevance.
Overall, it’s possible to see many of the chickens of contemporary organization coming home to roost. This is most obvious in the National Health Service where spending as a percentage of GDP effectively flatlined between 2011 and 2019, and per capita is well below that of most other highly developed countries (e.g. France, Germany, Japan, Australia). Crucially, this is against the background of a rapidly ageing population and – as has also been laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic – a social care system that was already in crisis and has been for at least half a decade (as discussed on this blog in May 2016).
The issues here go well beyond those of funding, though. They also relate to managerial apprehensions of the ‘efficient’ use of that funding. In the book (p. 142) I use the specific example of the NHS to discuss this, writing that “one way this has been done is to reduce spare capacity in the system. This in turn has the effect that unusual peaks in demand, such as a major incident or a flu epidemic, swamp the system … the question still remains: efficient for whom? Is spare capacity inefficient from the point of a view of a patient caught up in a demand peak?”
This seems almost prophetic now, as the NHS faces a desperate struggle to obtain the machinery and protective equipment needed to deal with coronavirus, whilst old people dying in care homes are not even included in the official coronavirus mortality statistics. Of course, it would be absurd to argue that any health system could permanently maintain all of the spare capacity needed to deal with so unprecedented crisis. But running a system for years without any spare capacity at all was always bound to lead to disaster.
Similarly, we are now seeing the consequences of the endless restructurings and in particular the dynamic of centralization-localization as the supposedly inefficient bureaucracy of the NHS is subjected to almost yearly reforms. It was such an analysis which led to the fragmentation of the NHS into Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), to break down the ‘monolith’ of the NHS. This was happening even as it was being reported that the problem with NHS procurement was lack of centralization, but under the dogma of ‘post-bureaucracy’ this was ignored (discussed on p. 87 of the book). Fast-forward to the coronavirus crisis and what do we fine? That very quietly the government has taken back central control of procurement from the CCGs to deal with it.
Nor is it only in health care that we see the consequences of the ill-judged managerial reforms and budget cuts of the last decade or more. I wrote on this blog in October 2016 about the crisis that was already underway in prisons. No surprise, then, that coronavirus is sweeping through them now, and there are calls for the early release of at least low-risk offenders and prisoners on remand.
Beyond public service issues, the coronavirus crisis has laid bare the inequalities and insecurities associated with the new capitalism and its associated ‘precariat’ (discussed on p. 118-120 of my book). The supposedly self-employed ‘entrepreneurs’ and zero hours workers of Uberfied business models are by the far the most economically vulnerable to the lockdown of the economy. The gap between this precariat and the salariat (like me) who have continued security as they work from home is more obvious than ever. It falls to government, at least partially, to bear the costs of this – in effect bailing out the employers who have for years benefitted from this ‘flexible’ workforce. As with the financial crisis, what we see is a privatization of profits and a socialization of costs and risks.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands who had never expected to now turn to the welfare system and find that it is very far from the generous safety net they had imagined, let alone the scroungers’ paradise that the tabloid press had led them to believe (see also p.120 of book). This is not just a matter of a one-off crisis. Rather, it comes against the background of the middle-calls insecurity which has been underway for some time, and is intimately linked to the demise of middle management and the white-collar underclass that has characterized the new capitalist model (p.123 of book; see also this blog post from February 2015).
Intimately linked to precarious employment is the use of foodbanks (blog post from September 2016) and here, too, coronavirus has had an impact. On the one hand, they face mounting demand as people’s incomes dry up. On the other, staffing and donations are both impacted by the illness, and some foodbanks are having to close down just as they are most needed.
No doubt there are many more examples of how coronavirus is exposing underlying issues within the organization of public services, of work, and of society more generally. The key words are ‘exposing’ and ‘underlying’. In this post I have made frequent reference to what I wrote in my book or on this, accompanying, blog. The message is not meant to be a self-congratulatory ‘I told you so’. Rather, it is intended to show how so much of what is happening grows directly out of things we already knew, or which were already happening.
This is absolutely crucial for otherwise they would just be regarded as ‘crisis’ events and, as such, unusual or short-lived. This in turn would support the idea that once the crisis is over we can and should return to ‘business as usual’. To an extent, this is what happened after the financial crisis. Although many expected that it would lead to a wholesale re-evaluation of how – at the most generic level – we organize, that didn’t really happen. Instead, we saw what Colin Crouch aptly dubbed the strange non-death of neo-liberalism.
Perhaps this time things will be different. The neo-liberal or new capitalist model has been much more challenged by the coronavirus in that it has led to the mobilization of state resources in a way not seen since the Second World War. That ought, at least for a while, to put paid to the innumerable paeans to the superiority of the market for any and every political and economic question. It feels, at least at the moment, as if something quite fundamental has ruptured – although one should be wary in assuming that any such rupture will have predictable, let alone positive, effects. And even should they be positive, it is a tragedy that it will have taken the deaths of so many to demonstrate what was, in so many ways, already obvious.
Overall, it’s possible to see many of the chickens of contemporary organization coming home to roost. This is most obvious in the National Health Service where spending as a percentage of GDP effectively flatlined between 2011 and 2019, and per capita is well below that of most other highly developed countries (e.g. France, Germany, Japan, Australia). Crucially, this is against the background of a rapidly ageing population and – as has also been laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic – a social care system that was already in crisis and has been for at least half a decade (as discussed on this blog in May 2016).
The issues here go well beyond those of funding, though. They also relate to managerial apprehensions of the ‘efficient’ use of that funding. In the book (p. 142) I use the specific example of the NHS to discuss this, writing that “one way this has been done is to reduce spare capacity in the system. This in turn has the effect that unusual peaks in demand, such as a major incident or a flu epidemic, swamp the system … the question still remains: efficient for whom? Is spare capacity inefficient from the point of a view of a patient caught up in a demand peak?”
This seems almost prophetic now, as the NHS faces a desperate struggle to obtain the machinery and protective equipment needed to deal with coronavirus, whilst old people dying in care homes are not even included in the official coronavirus mortality statistics. Of course, it would be absurd to argue that any health system could permanently maintain all of the spare capacity needed to deal with so unprecedented crisis. But running a system for years without any spare capacity at all was always bound to lead to disaster.
Similarly, we are now seeing the consequences of the endless restructurings and in particular the dynamic of centralization-localization as the supposedly inefficient bureaucracy of the NHS is subjected to almost yearly reforms. It was such an analysis which led to the fragmentation of the NHS into Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), to break down the ‘monolith’ of the NHS. This was happening even as it was being reported that the problem with NHS procurement was lack of centralization, but under the dogma of ‘post-bureaucracy’ this was ignored (discussed on p. 87 of the book). Fast-forward to the coronavirus crisis and what do we fine? That very quietly the government has taken back central control of procurement from the CCGs to deal with it.
Nor is it only in health care that we see the consequences of the ill-judged managerial reforms and budget cuts of the last decade or more. I wrote on this blog in October 2016 about the crisis that was already underway in prisons. No surprise, then, that coronavirus is sweeping through them now, and there are calls for the early release of at least low-risk offenders and prisoners on remand.
Beyond public service issues, the coronavirus crisis has laid bare the inequalities and insecurities associated with the new capitalism and its associated ‘precariat’ (discussed on p. 118-120 of my book). The supposedly self-employed ‘entrepreneurs’ and zero hours workers of Uberfied business models are by the far the most economically vulnerable to the lockdown of the economy. The gap between this precariat and the salariat (like me) who have continued security as they work from home is more obvious than ever. It falls to government, at least partially, to bear the costs of this – in effect bailing out the employers who have for years benefitted from this ‘flexible’ workforce. As with the financial crisis, what we see is a privatization of profits and a socialization of costs and risks.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands who had never expected to now turn to the welfare system and find that it is very far from the generous safety net they had imagined, let alone the scroungers’ paradise that the tabloid press had led them to believe (see also p.120 of book). This is not just a matter of a one-off crisis. Rather, it comes against the background of the middle-calls insecurity which has been underway for some time, and is intimately linked to the demise of middle management and the white-collar underclass that has characterized the new capitalist model (p.123 of book; see also this blog post from February 2015).
Intimately linked to precarious employment is the use of foodbanks (blog post from September 2016) and here, too, coronavirus has had an impact. On the one hand, they face mounting demand as people’s incomes dry up. On the other, staffing and donations are both impacted by the illness, and some foodbanks are having to close down just as they are most needed.
No doubt there are many more examples of how coronavirus is exposing underlying issues within the organization of public services, of work, and of society more generally. The key words are ‘exposing’ and ‘underlying’. In this post I have made frequent reference to what I wrote in my book or on this, accompanying, blog. The message is not meant to be a self-congratulatory ‘I told you so’. Rather, it is intended to show how so much of what is happening grows directly out of things we already knew, or which were already happening.
This is absolutely crucial for otherwise they would just be regarded as ‘crisis’ events and, as such, unusual or short-lived. This in turn would support the idea that once the crisis is over we can and should return to ‘business as usual’. To an extent, this is what happened after the financial crisis. Although many expected that it would lead to a wholesale re-evaluation of how – at the most generic level – we organize, that didn’t really happen. Instead, we saw what Colin Crouch aptly dubbed the strange non-death of neo-liberalism.
Perhaps this time things will be different. The neo-liberal or new capitalist model has been much more challenged by the coronavirus in that it has led to the mobilization of state resources in a way not seen since the Second World War. That ought, at least for a while, to put paid to the innumerable paeans to the superiority of the market for any and every political and economic question. It feels, at least at the moment, as if something quite fundamental has ruptured – although one should be wary in assuming that any such rupture will have predictable, let alone positive, effects. And even should they be positive, it is a tragedy that it will have taken the deaths of so many to demonstrate what was, in so many ways, already obvious.
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