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Organisational control as cultural practiceA shopfloor ethnography of a Sheffield steel mill

Thomas Ahrens a,*, Massimiliano Mollona b

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

Abstract

Field studies of management control and accounting have tended to study organisational meaning through practices.We identify three strands of practice research on organisational control (viz., governmentality, actor network theory,and accountability) and propose a forth: cultural practice. The study of control as cultural practice is grounded inobservation because it conceives of cultural knowledge as practical and largely extra-linguistic. It conceptualises organ-isational control as an effect of the actions and ideas of organisational members beyond the ranks of management, thuswidening the field of empirical inquiry. It also makes studies of steady state organisations more attractive thereby open-

ing the possibility that the assemblages of people, purposes, and technologies, which give rise to specific forms of organ-isational control, may be understood as less ephemeral than, particularly, studies of governmentality and actor networktheory have suggested. Our ethnography of a steel mill in Sheffield is based on 11 months of participant observation onthe shop floors of the hot and cold departments. We argue that the subcultures of different shop floors were constitutedin practices of control which enabled organisational members to pursue diverse objectives that were related to their var-ious wider cultural aspirations. Organisational control practices relied on diverse accountings and accounts of organ-isational actions and purposes. Whilst we found considerable diversity between subcultures, we also found thatindividual subcultures, and the tensions and contradictions within them, exhibited much continuity. The ability of stud-ies of organisational subcultures to bring out the diversity as well as continuity of practices holds considerable potentialfor our understanding of organisational control. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

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

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

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

[email protected] (M. Mollona).

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Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 305331
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become part of organisational practices (Schatzki,2005). Practices as collective action are self-refer-ential. They are activities that are ordered by their

practitioners intentions to contribute to thosesame practices (Barnes, 2001). Practices are recog-nisable as projects with general applicability, suchas activity based costing, that adapt to specificcontexts by meshing with the intentions of organ-isational practitioners and organisational mean-ings more generally. Control technologies, andthe practices through which they come to haveorganisational effects, are therefore inherentlymeaningful. New or modified accounting controlsystems, for example, can become implicated inprofound changes of organisational strategies

and their members perceptions of organisationalpurpose (Czarniawska-Joerges & Jacobsson, 1989;Dent, 1991; Kurunmaki, 1999; Roberts, 1990).

Those perceptions, and organisational mean-ings more generally, belong to the symbolic realmof organising. Through, for example, language, rit-ual, and attire (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984), butalso technologies (Gell, 1992; Harvey, 1997;Mauss, 1973), the symbolic expresses organisationand its structuring effects. Thereby, the symbolicaspects of organisation themselves take on system-

atic characteristics. They become symbolic systemsamenable to cultural analysis. The notion of sym-bolic systems has served as a definition of culturefor anthropologists as diverse as Bloch, Geertz,Malinowski, and Sahlins. It characterises culturesas meaningful orders that become part of thesocial fabric insofar as they relate to practices,thereby giving rise to culturally meaningful, butultimately unpredictable actions (Rosaldo, 1993;Sahlins, 1995; Schatzki, 2002). Organisationalcultures provide the frames of meaning for organ-

isational continuity and change alike (Martin,2001).Even though the practices that engage technol-

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

meanings and the highly specific, localised uses ofaccounting (e.g., Ahrens & Chapman, 2002; Briers& Chua, 2001; Ogden, 1997). Few field studies of

the relationships between accounting control andorganisational meanings have drawn explicitly ontheories of culture (e.g., Dent, 1991).

At stake in the conception of control practicesas cultural is the dependence of organisationalcontrol on systems of symbolic significance.Anthropological studies of organisations (Janelli& Yim, 1993; Ouroussoff, 1993; Rohlen, 1974)have lead us to expect symbolic systems to berooted in diverse aspects of organising, includingwork processes and their technologies, organisa-tional members values, beliefs, and social rela-

tions, and the strategies and formal controls ofmanagement. The task of the study of control ascultural practice lies in exploring the relationshipsbetween those and further sources of organisa-tional culture, organisational practices, and organ-isational control. Conceived as an effect of thesymbolic organisation of practices, control isdependent on, but also influencing, the spectrumof ambitions of organisational members. The cul-tural analysis ought to shed light on the sourcesof those ambitions, the extent to which they are

shared or in competition with one another, and,thus, how they contribute to making some prac-tices unremarkable, taken-for-granted, and subjectto objective technical discussions, and otherscontentious and subject to ongoing struggles overorganisational purposes and, possibly, the natureof organising itself (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984).

This paper presents an ethnography of organi-sational subcultures and control on the shop floorsof the hot and the cold departments of a steel millin Sheffield, a northern English industrial town

once famous for its steel works. Based on detailedobservations of shop floor activities it gives a com-parative account of the steel mills subcultures andhow they were constituted by distinctive practices.Following a review of the relationships betweenculture, meaning, and control in the accounting lit-erature, we discuss anthropological approaches tothe study of organisational control. We present theethnographic method used in this study and pro-vide some information on the mill. We then pres-ent the first part of the ethnography of the

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smeltery and the grinding bay of the mill, afterwhich we offer some reflections on the ways inwhich management strategies and production

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

Culture, meaning, and control in the accounting

literature

The accounting literature on culture has, on thewhole, adopted an objectivist stance and shiedaway from developing an ethnographic (Jonsson& Macintosh, 1997; Power, 1991) understandingof accounting. Conversely, field studies that weregrounded in the everyday reality of accounting

practices (Tomkins & Groves, 1983) did not drawon theories of culture or anthropological methods.In view of the significance accorded to the study ofaccounting in action (Burchell, Clubb, Hopwood,Hughes, & Nahapiet, 1980; Hopwood, 1987) thiscomes as a surprise because ethnography, theanthropological method (and genre) for the studyof culture, can be very useful for producing longi-tudinal observations of organisational everydaylife through which the functioning of accountingand control can be most fully appreciated (Hop-

wood, 1976, 1983). The promise of studying theeveryday functioning of accounting in this waywould be deeper and more detailed insights intothe ways in which accounting makes possibleand, ultimately, constitutes specific forms oforganisation.

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

of studying the relationship between accounting,control, and specific organisational cultures, cul-ture has frequently been framed by a functional

conception of organisation. Anchored in generalblueprints of the functioning of organisation, cul-ture was held to affect organisational membersperceptions of technical controls, which meantthat different national or organisational culturesmight require different controls (Birnberg &Snodgrass, 1988).1

Culture has two important effects on theMCS (management control system) process.It can affect the choice of stimuli to whichthe individual attends, or it can affect any

value judgements about the stimuli (Birnberg& Snodgrass, 1988, p. 449).

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

Accounting field studies which, by contrast,

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

Studies of governmentality have theorised aconcept of practice rooted in the disciplinary pow-

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

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

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manufacture at Caterpillar Inc. in the 1980s(Miller & OLeary, 1994), and the contemporarymanagerialism of UK water companies (Ogden,

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

A second strand is actor network theory(ANT). An important point of contact with gov-ernmentality lies in the concern of ANT to tracethe generative paths by which programmatic ambi-tion combines with the actions of humans andnon-human actors (like computer software,machines, or materials, for instance) to produceassemblages capable of making a difference, ofleaving an imprint for the ANT researcher(Latour, 1987, 1999; Law & Hassard, 1999). ForANT, any such imprint is the result of heteroge-

neous networks that are instantiated by theactor-like qualities of its human and non-humancomponents. Accounting researchers have, forexample, drawn on ANT to delineate the genera-tive paths of responsibility accounting in the Brit-ish (Bloomfield, Coombs, Cooper, & Rea, 1992;Preston, Cooper, & Coombs, 1992) and Australian(Chua, 1995) health sectors and shown the idiosyn-cratic emergences of new accounting systems inprivate sector companies (Briers & Chua, 2001;Quattrone & Hopper, 2005).

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

and replace them with anonymous forms of con-trol (Roberts, 1991; Robson, 1992). Private andpublic sector studies have explored in detail the

organisational processes and, in particular, themanagerial strategies employed to position anon-ymous forms of control such that they are takenseriously throughout the organisation (Ahrens,1996; Ahrens & Chapman, 2002; Frow, Margin-son, & Ogden, 2005; Llewellyn, 1998; Roberts,1990).

Anthropological approaches to organisational

control

All three strands have been concerned withexploring the constitution of accounting throughorganisational practices and vice versa. They havesought to trace the emergence of discourses ofaccounting and, to some extent, its specific organ-isational meanings through an examination of keyevents in the case histories on which they werebased. Those objectives distinguish them fromthe case studies of management control and cul-ture of the organisational symbolism school(Dandridge, Mitroff, & Joyce, 1980; Turner,

1989), which have frequently ignored the socialdynamics of organisational relationships. Organi-sational symbolism has tended to subscribe tothe textual notion of culture that emerged in thecontext of American cultural anthropology duringthe 1980s and that has undergone a major criticalreview (Asad, 1983; Fox, 1991; Ortner, 1999;Roseberry, 1982). Geertz seminal collection ofessays, The interpretation of cultures (1973),defined culture as a public text that is constitutedby a system of symbols, anthropology as a science

of interpretation, and ethnography as the searchfor meanings through the informants interpreta-tions. Geertz textual turn eventually underminedthe validity of fieldwork as a research techniquethrough a reflexive framing of the relationshipbetween the subject and the object of anthropolo-gical research. It led Marcus and Fischer (1986) toclaim that anthropology should first and foremostbe literary critique, progressively involved in tex-tual analysis, rather than the study of socialinstitutions.



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Critics of Geertz have stressed that analysingcultures as public texts gives rise to timeless,over-coherent, and bounded notions of cul-

ture (Fox, 1991; Ortner, 1999). In reducing actionsto signs, they claimed, Geertz had collapsed cul-tures material and symbolic aspects and obscuredmatters of power and conflict (Roseberry, 1982).Social relations are denied historicity and, thereby,specificity. The organisational symbolism school issusceptible to the same critique. Early contribu-tions to the organisational symbolism literaturesought to read working practices as part of fan-tastically coherent and unchanging organisationalbelief systems (Schein, 1985), not unlike the dimen-sion belief system in Simonss (1995) levers of

control framework. But even the critics of staticand unitary conceptions of organisational culturewithin the organisational symbolism literature(e.g., Gregory, 1983) have, often followingGeertzs textual approach, studied organisationsas bounded communities, isolated from broaderhistorical, political and cultural processes, whilstclaiming at the same time that they signify (orreplicate) society on a smaller scale (e.g., Jermier,Slocum, John, Fry, & Gaines, 1991). Organisa-tional actors were presented as captives of organi-

sational cultures and subcultures, much as theymay have defined themselves in opposition to them(Kunda, 1991). Alvesson and Bergs (1992) reviewshowed that the organisational symbolism litera-ture has sidestepped the deeper sources of powerand conflict, and ignored the ongoing socialchanges that emerge from the social relations inand around the organisation.

Rather than smother organisational dynamicswith reference to unitary organisational cultures,a number of organisational ethnographies by

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

mologies does not deprive those who share thosecosmologies of pragmatic action. Rather, theirpractical solutions are interpreted through their

cultural schemes, just as the cultural schemes arerealised through pragmatic action (Sahlins, 1985,1995).

The use of cosmologies and cultural schemeshas been criticised as motivated by a search for asuperior catch-all explanatory strategy thatcan afford to ignore the explanatory potential ofpower, gender, biology, technologies and materialarrangements, etc. (e.g., Bonnell & Hunt, 1999;Ortner, 1999). We agree that all of these sourcesof social orderings can exert powerful influenceon symbolic systems. Studies of cultural practice

must account for them in order to avoid overbur-dening symbolic explanations (Biernacki, 1999).What distinguishes the researcher who seeks outsymbolic systems that are generative of the mean-ings that are the socially constructed understand-ings of the world in terms of which people act(Roseberry, 1982, p. 1016) is an insistence thatpeoples actions are intelligible with reference tosymbolic systems. The nature of those symbolicsystems, however, is not a matter of dogma butresearch. Just how coherent, fragmented, shared,

or, indeed, stable they may be, becomes only clearin the course of the fieldwork.

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

Culture is practical and ideational at the same timebecause meanings do not exist independent ofpractices. Meanings can neither determine acti-

vities nor can they simply be attached to thembecause meanings and practices are co-produced(Rosaldo, 1993). From this vantage point cultureas symbolic system is never a reified set of values,

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



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beliefs, and assumptions but always a result ofpractical activity (Ortner, 1984).3 It cannot be readlike a text that exists at one remove from practices,

but its interpretations spring from the stuff ofsocial activity that alone contains the consciousunderstandings of actors and the shared imagina-tions that may be so taken for granted as tomake them inaccessible to actors reflection andarticulation (Bourdieu, 1977). Defining culturalknowledge

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

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

Firstly, the study of control as cultural practiceis grounded in observation because of the empha-sis on action in the definition of symbolic systems.Many of the practice studies cited above could notdraw on observation of organisational action,which made it harder for the researcher to study

taken-for-granted aspects of organisational prac-tices on which organisational members could notreport and to exploit the revealing tensionsbetween what organisational members say anddo. Moreover, organisational practices are com-prehended through discourses as well as activities.Knowledge of them can be conceptual as well asembodied or practical (Bloch, 1991; Lambek,1993). For example, what, superficially, oftenpasses for accounting knowledgethe discursiveschemes, such as accounting theories and conven-

tions, to which accountants in particular makefrequent referenceare only a small part of organ-

isational accounting knowledge. The far greaterpart of organisational accounting knowledge ispractical. It is accounting as understood by organ-

isational members through their diverse activities(Ahrens, 1997).Secondly, the study of control as cultural prac-

tice is suggestive of a conceptual and empiricalshift from managerial to organisational controlpractices, insisting that organisational control isan effect of the actions and ideas of organisationalmembers beyond the ranks of management. Themajority of practice studies cited above were con-cerned with management control. They reportedon management plans to change control practices,often with limited insights into the responses of

other employees. It is possible to conduct excellentcontrol practice research even where managementforbids research access to workers, as shown byMouritsen (1999, p. 35), for example. However, amore inclusive approach does hold the potentialof novel insights and a changed research agenda.

A key theoretical problem in this regard is therelationship between the ambitions and activitiesof many different practitioners and their practice.The notion of practice as collective action(Barnes, 2001) has emphasised the meaningful

ordering of activities over the presence of identical,or routine, activities. The idea is that practitionerscontribute to a practice by using their understand-ing and practical experience of the practice toguide them in the course of further contributingto it. This means that practitioners must be ableto apply certain rules but, above all, in pursu-ing objectives related to their practice as theyunderstand it, they must know how to use theirdiscretion to decide when to bend or abandoncertain rules. Through the use of discretion prac-

tices remain adaptable to new ideas, materials,demands, etc., without having to change labels.Practice as collective action defines practitionersthrough a general and evolving description of cer-tain activities combined with their intention tocontribute to the practice in question. This notionof collective action is inherently political because itdefines as members of the collective all those whowish to contribute to the practice, irrespective oftheir potential differences over what the best waysof contributing might be. Barnes (2001) notion of

3 An anthropological collection that may be of interest toaccounting scholars in this respect is Parry and Blochs Moneyand the Morality of Exchange (1989). Through a comparison ofexchange practices among different peoples, they show thatmoney does not belong to an amoral economic sphere withan abstract rational force of its own, but that money becomesembedded in more general symbolic systems that have partic-ular logics for exchange relationships.



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practice mirrored important anthropological con-cerns with respect to the definition and portrayalof the knowledge and activities that characterise

members of a culture (Fox, 1991; Hastrup, 1997;Rosaldo, 1993).Thirdly, studies of control as cultural practice

offer an argument for the study of steady stateorganisations, which is unlike the bias towardsstudies of change in the extant control practicesliterature. The changes usually gave the impetus,if not for the studies, then for the published narra-tive. Studies of change have probably yielded mostof the present knowledge of control practices, butthis may have biased existing notions of control.Governmentality and ANT studies, in particular,

have emphasised the ephemeral nature of theassemblages of humans and non-humans whichgive rise to specific control practices. This maybe a general feature of organisational control,but its prominence may also be a consequence ofstudying control practices in the context of organ-isational change. Without more studies of steadystate organisations it is difficult to know. Thestudy of control as cultural practice may identifyat least some elements of control practices thatexhibit continuities, such as cultural dispositions,

class, education, etc. This is not to exclude organ-isational change from the agenda of cultural prac-tice studies of control, especially since change is tosome extent endemic to organising (Ahrens &Chapman, 2002, pp. 1567), but simply to pointout that change is not a priority.

Using those three contributions to define stud-ies of cultural practices of control, it would appearthat Dents (1991) analysis of the cultural transfor-mation of a railway company does not qualify. Itrelied mainly on interviews, not observations,

emphasised management, not organisational con-trol, and focused on the relationships betweensymbolic meaning and change rather than the cul-tural significance of day-to-day activities.

Ethnographic method

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

action (Jonsson & Macintosh, 1997). In theanthropological tradition the participant observerimmerses in the lives of the ethnographys subjects

by living in their communities, learning their prac-tices, and studying their culture and social organi-sation. In-depth participant observation andextensive fieldwork show institutions and organi-sations as systems of meaningful practices thatare historically and politically contingent, andsocially structured, yet open to change (Ortner,1999; Rosaldo, 1993).

Underlying the ethnographic method thusunderstood is a concept of culture which recog-nises that the distinctions between social andcultural anthropology are not absolute. The partic-

ipant observer has no unmediated access to themeanings that may constitute organisational sub-cultures. She imagines the representation of thosemeanings by observing social interaction that con-stitutes social organisation through practices.

For many ethnographers the tracing of culturethrough practices is not just an issue of methodo-logy because they take meanings to exist in prac-tices (Schatzki, 2002). Cultural knowledge, inBlochs (1991) terms, is too complex to be articu-lated within the constraints of language and there-

fore resides in practices themselves (Ortner, 1984).The implications for the study of organisationalcultures are considerable. Whereas folk psycho-logy insists that knowledgeable actors know whatthey do, which is taken to mean that they canalso articulate what they do, the participant obser-ver cannot trust their accounts in isolation butmust place them in the context of observedpractices.

Thus when our informants honestly say this

is why we do such things, or this is what thismeans, or this is how we do such things,instead of being pleased we should be suspi-cious and ask what kind of peculiar knowl-edge is this which can take such an explicit,linguistic form? Indeed, we should treat allexplicit knowledge as problematic, as a typeof knowledge probably remote from thatemployed in practical activities under normalcircumstances (Bloch, 1991, pp. 193194,emphasis in original).



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Grounded in detailed observation of daily prac-tices, organisational ethnographies have the poten-tial to reveal as interested or ideological some of

the folk theories (of organisational practices) thatare spread through organisational discourses.Compared with interview based studies of controland accounting in action, ethnographies can laymore credible claim towards studying organisa-tional practices.

However, a key difficulty for the ethnographerof cultural practices is the fact that, unlike dra-matic performances, ethnographic texts are notthemselves action (Hastrup, 1997). Underlyingthose texts is, however, a period of shared practicalexperience between the participant observer and

the ethnographys subjects during which they hadoccasion to share at least aspects of a way of life.

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

Ethnographers comprehend action by way oftheir own action in the cultural space under study.In order to convey the participant observers extra-linguistic cultural knowledge in linguistic form,ethnographies have often made use of detailed

descriptions of sights, sounds, smells, sensations,and tastes as part of the layered descriptions ofobserved activities with little or no direct speechreported (Evans-Pritchard, 1976; Lambek, 1993;Lan, 1985; Leach, 1954; Levi-Strauss, 1974; Parry& Bloch, 1989). Where direct speech was used itshould not be mistaken as proof of the argumentbecause after months and years of observations itwould be easy to report direct speech selectively.Rather, the ethnographys credibility rests on itsability to convey important meanings in the lives

of the observed, a groups symbolic systems, byshowing how they play out in practice. The presentpaper makes use of direct speech simply for illus-

trative purposes and to improve readability.Our concepts of culture and practice go someway to guard against nave accounts of empatheticunderstanding of informants by the participantobserver (Hastrup, 1997). We should be equallywary of presenting cultures as all-too-neat sys-tems. Critiques of the anthropological traditionto cast observations of the natives in regularitiesand taxonomies have suggested that ethnographiesinstead bring out the active nature of the practicesthrough which the subjects of ethnographies createand negotiate cultural order (Bourdieu, 1977; Ort-

ner, 1984; Rosaldo, 1993). The wealth of observa-tion which underlies the ethnography, and which ispartly presented in the published work, should notbe misread as supporting claims to interpretive clo-sure of accounts of organisational practices. Morefield material supports more complex interpreta-tions but it does not absolve authors and readersfrom challenging the argument with alternativeinterpretations (Hastrup, 1997). Anthropologicalresearch has often been concerned with thedetailed documentation of social action above

and beyond what is needed for the authors imme-diate purposes of theorising (Evans-Pritchard,1956, p. 254).

The ethnography of the present study is basedon the practical experience of Massimiliano Mol-lona, who worked at UNSOR,4 a steel company,for 11 months, between January and December2000. He spent 7 months as a helper at the furnacein the hot department and 4 months as a helper inthe cold department. During 3 days every week heworked on nightshifts (from 8 pm to 7 am) in the

hot department and on day shifts (from 8 am to 5pm) in the cold department. During weekends, hemet the steelworkers in the local pubs and joinedtheir snooker matches and fishing expeditions. Ini-tially, he took extensive notes on the shop floor.As the research unfolded, he interacted with theworkers without taking notes on the shop floor,transcribing key observations and bits of conversa-

4 A pseudonym.



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

The UNSOR steel company, 1994April 2001

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

The two new owners of the company main-tained the manufacture of high quality specialsteels to the aerospace, mining, and automotive

sectors whom they supplied with high carbonand high speed bars, billets, and wire rods. Theyalso diversified into the low quality production ofrods, bars, and wires for the building and indus-trial engineering industries, and for householdand sanitary appliances, thus combining the largeprofit margins from high quality products with asteady supply of orders from the lower qualityproducts.

UNSOR could pursue this diversification strat-egy because of its totally integrated production

process. Unusual for the British steel industry, itwas designed as a minimill that could melt, roll,and finish steel in-house. UNSOR operated one30-t electric arc furnace in a batch production pro-cess.5 Besides allowing prompt response to cus-tomer orders, UNSORs technical integrationinsulated it from the price fluctuations of its inter-mediate products, i.e., billets, bars, and rods. Par-ticularly for the production of special steels, thosefluctuations could be extreme.

In 1999, some German, Belgian, and Spanish

steel-makers consolidated, and British Steelmerged with the Dutch Hoogovens into Corus,the then fifth largest steel producer in the world.UNSORs position in the European market weak-ened and its profit fell from 259,000 in 1998 to

just 5000. In November 1999, UNSORs owners

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

In February 2001, Corus doubled the price ofraw steel directed to the domestic market whilstcutting the price for special steel sold in the Euro-pean market. UNSORs high margin sales of spe-cial steel in the European market becamesuddenly unprofitable. For a short while UNSORwas able to raise the prices of its domestic raw steeland concentrated on the production of high vol-umes of low quality steel. UNSOR needed salesvolume because increasing sales were a conditionof one of its bank loans. In the long run, however,the strategy of concentrating on sales volume and

quantity, rather than on product quality and highmargins, was unsustainable for UNSORs smallproductive capacity. In March 2001, the com-panys pension schemes were frozen and the firmwent into administration.

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

small team of young and flexible workers.

Comparative ethnography of production on two shop

floors

The smeltery of the hot department is located ina dark corrugated aluminium structure thatencloses an immense space approximately 200 mlong and 30 m high.6 It is dominated by the 30-telectric arc furnace and the crane, which is used

to load the furnace and, when the steel is ready,teem it. Preparations for the nightshift begin inthe morning. The furnace manager, Mr. Beat, col-lects the production orders from the qualitydepartment and uses red chalk to write the list of

5 UNSORs output was small by comparison with its Britishcompetitors who tended to use much more expensive contin-uous casting furnaces that would melt around 150250 t of steelin one batch.

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



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alloys and scrap required for the three heats7,8

of the nightshift on the blackboard of his officetogether with the budgeted costs of electricity.

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

The one remaining nightshift in the smelterystarts at 8 pm when three labourers, Tom, Johnand Ian, and the two smelters, Phil and Dave,gather around the pit. Phil and Dave begin theirwork by checking the condition of the refractorybricks inside the furnace and the functioning ofthe furnace roof. They direct the work of Pete,the crane driver, control the degree of humidityof the lime, keep an eye on the temperature ofthe furnace, and empty the slag cabin by liftingthe thick steel plate that covers the floor surround-

ing the furnace with the help of the crane driver.During this operation, they hang suspended overa red mountain of solid slag whose heat wouldsuddenly cross their faces causing red flushes andtrickles of sweat.

Meanwhile the three labourers are preparingthe moulds inside the pit. The pit is about 15 mlong, 3 m wide and 2 m deep. John and Ian layheavy steel plates at the bottom of it and fit hol-low-squared refractory tiles into long pipes aroundthe four runs of the bottom plates by hand. They

keep climbing into and out of the pit hole withpiles of tiles and wet clay in their hands. Withthe help of the crane driver, moulds are stood upin the pit, narrow end down, and fitted onto theclay pipe. Balancing their bodies with one leg onthe ground and the other on the mould, the

labourers lay thick linings of clay and sealingaround the joints.

Once the smelting process has begun, Phil and

Dave inject oxygen into the furnace with a longpump that they fit in the opening of a steel screenbehind which they hide to protect themselves fromthe fires violent bursts that shower them withheavy drops of steel. They are also protected bytheir thick blue clothes, green anti-dazzlingscreens, and asbestos gloves. They load their shov-els, weigh the alloys, and throw them into thesteel bath, standing, in turn, in front of the fire,and departing from it, following circular trajecto-ries in order to avoid each other and the spitsof steel. Their heavy protective clothes make their

shovel dance in front of the furnace slow andmeasured. As the carbon content of the steel rises,the movements of the steel bath inside the furnacebecome violent and unpredictable, and sparks andlarge drops of steel shower the smelters bodies.While they perform this physically wearing anddangerous task, they have to think constantlyabout the level of the bath and the holes onthe surface of the molten steel where the alloyshave to land, the condition of the furnace roof,and the activities of the crane driver above. During

most of the shovel dance, the noise and their faceprotection prevent them from speaking. Phil andDave communicate their observations, measure-ments, and reckonings only with nods and handsignals, leaving the details of their judgementsunarticulated. As Phil explains it, I dont reallythink, right, now I should add another shovel ofthis alloy, because of the colour and electricityabsorption or whatever. I more, like, just see allof that and then just do the next thing. Oftenthe smelters manage to turn out the nights pro-

duction with less alloys then budgeted, an achieve-ment in which they take much pride. When theyneed more alloys than budgeted they use theirbin, a small store of powdered alloys which theysweep off the shop floor after each nightshift.

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

7 Following ethnographic convention we use inverted com-mas for native terms.8 Their term for one batch of molten steel.



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to assess the carbon content of the heat. They fre-quently mount a new measurement tip on the endof the 2-m pole of the temperature gauge and care-

fully insert it all the way into the steel bath. Thelast measured temperature remains displayed onthe large analogue display next to the furnace.During one bath, the colour of the steel changesfrom blood and cherry (700 C) before thecrane driver drops the second charge of scrap, toorange and yellow (1000 C) just after thethird one, and finally dirty white (1500 C) whenready to be teemed. After the third and last 10-tscrap charge has been released Phil and Dave con-tinue to make small adjustments to the level andcomposition of the bath by shovelling more alloys

and lime, occasionally using the scale next to thefurnace to check that they have enough alloysfor the remaining two heats of the nightshift. Allthe while, they keep an eye on the large dial thatindicates the furnaces electricity absorption. Elec-tricity absorption should be held constant, set atthe level that heats the steel bath at the right speedto obtain the required quality of steel.

Eventually, the fire is killed and the move-ments of the steel inside the furnace become pre-dictable. The bath moves in long horizontal

waves, its noise is low and rhythmical, and its col-our almost white, like milk. When the steel bathlooks ready9 to be tapped into the basket, usu-ally around 12 midnight, Phil activates the alarm.The crane driver lowers the ladle into the furnacepit and Dave tilts the furnace so that the moltensteel runs out into the ladle. The labourers, whohave little opportunity to observe the cookingsteel, look at the molten steel now running intothe ladle in silence, trying to guess the quality ofthe heat (and the companys ability to sell it expen-

sively) from the colour and consistency of the fall-ing steel. The smelters, too, fall silent and watch.For a few seconds, the workforce stands still asif hypnotised.

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

results in considerable savings of time, and therebyelectricity costs, because they generally get theheat right before the Polivac finishes its time-

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

After the tapping, the crane driver carries theladle over the first cluster of four moulds. One of

the labourers, the pit-man, operates the handleto release the stopper at the bottom of the ladleand the molten steel flows out through the claypipes and into the moulds from the bottom. Afterthe teeming all the moulds are filled and sparklewith small flames on their surface. The labourersrun to the corner where the clay is lined, loadtwo bags of sand and clay on their shoulders,and throw them into the bottom of the pit to pre-vent the moulds sticking on the pit ground. Forevery bag thrown into the pit a small explosion

covers them with sparks. The labourers wear onlyT-shirts, and are not protected against the sparks.They dislike the protective clothes and helmets ofthe smelters because they make movement difficultand restrict personal interaction. Equally, how-ever, protective clothing is a marker of status,which the labourers do not possess. Whilst throw-ing bags of sand and clay into the pit and gettingcovered in sparks, the labourers move quicklyback and forth, bumping into each other, laughingand swearing under the flying sparks.

After the first heat, the smelters check the bricklining inside the furnace and the state of the elec-trodes, the labourers strip the old moulds and laynew ones, and the crane driver begins to gatherscrap with the big magnet. During a nightshift,the 11 workers of the smeltery produce 348 ingotsof steel in three heats of 30 t each. The tapping ofthe second heat takes place at 3 am and the lastone at 6 am, when the first rays of sunlight shinethrough the big holes in the smelterys corrugatedaluminium walls.9 For an ethnography of skilled vision see Grasseni (2004).



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During the day, the 14 workers of the rollingmill roll the ingots into billets on two shifts. Afterhaving been left in the cooling bank for at least

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

Work in the smeltery revolves around the elec-

tric arc furnace, and is implicated in competingvisions of its costs, efficiency, production stan-dards, and physical dangers. The smelters possessgreat tacit knowledge of the furnace operation.Their daily reconciliation of the instructions thatappears on the computer with their qualitativeassessment of the requirements for the nightshiftsheats reproduces the familiar tensions betweenproduct-oriented metallurgists (UNSORs qualitycontrol department) and process-oriented engi-neers (the smelters) (Grasseni, 2004). By supple-

menting their impressions of the heats colour,sounds, smells, surface movements, holes, andsmoke with various measurements of tempera-tures, electricity absorption, timings, and theweights of alloys, the smelters know practicallywhen to discharge what kind of scrap into theheat, when to blow how much oxygen onto itssurface, when to add what quantities of alloys,and when to use how much electricity for howlong, in order for the steel to fulfil the quality con-trol departments technical specifications. Produc-

ing the intended output at a reasonable costdepends on their experience.In contrast to the hot departments organi-

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

100 m long and divided into three bays, is locatedin a Victorian red-brick building about three min-utes walk from the dark structure of the smeltery.

The temperature in the cold department is oftenbelow zero during the winter and very high duringthe summer, because the old Victorian tiles on theroof had been replaced with plastic screens.

The cold department processes the rods that areproduced in the hot department or purchased assemi-finished goods from other steel mills. In bay1 the rods are coated. Steam of sulphuric acid,phosphate, stearate and lime solutions fills thespace with yellow and pale magenta clouds. Threeworkers stand suspended by the 5-m-high tanks,plunging coils in them with the help of cranes.

The coils coated in bay 1 are sold. A final qualitycheck on the finished products is made by thechemical engineer before they are packaged andloaded by the fork lift drivers, weighed and regis-tered at the gatehouse, and driven away by Bob,the lorry driver.

Other rods are transferred by crane and forklifttruck to bays 2 and 3 where they are processed fur-ther. The six workers in bay 2, supervised by Alan,transform rods into wires in the Schumagmachines, flat spinning drums that hammer rods

into small dies by percussion. White lubricatingsoap for the dies (aluminium and sodium stearate)and coating powder cover the floor of bay 2. Inbay 3, the grinding bay, two Windsor machinesstraighten rods into bars that three operators andtheir supervisor grind on three separate grindingmachines, producing silver particles of steel thatcover the floor of the grinding bay. Four operatorspack them and the forklift truck driver takes theminto the yard. A wide door that opens automati-cally under the weight of the approaching forklift

trucks connects bays 2 and 3. Forklift trucksspeedily cross the shop floor, beeping at the work-ers in their way.

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



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ferent stages of production. They allow some flex-ibility in the timing of the stages of production,unlike the furnaces steel bath that must be pro-

cessed as one batch in one coordinated sequencethat Phil and Dave determine for everyone onthe smeltery shop floor. Also, in the cold depart-ment the length of individual production runs var-ies with the sizes of customer orders, whereas inthe smeltery it is determined by the furnace capac-ity and the physical processes through which thesteel is transformed. Customers can only order30 t of a type of steel or multiples thereof.

Those technological differences have implica-tions for the regularity of the working days in thecold department. Instead of the smelterys predict-

able daily sequence of planning, materials provi-sion, and production, the labour process in thecold department is dictated by the composition ofcustomer orders. Production schedules in front ofeach machine and inside each loading space in thecold department are constantly updated by Chris,the quality controller, and by the production plan-ners. Because of the owners strategy of expandingthe cold departments output, the working day iswithout beginning or end. Production is continu-ous in three shifts, punctuated only by the break

times and the handovers between different shifts.In the grinding bay there is very little interac-

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

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

them to concentrate on their highly skilled tasks.In the cold department, the contrast between thesteady rhythm of work of the men and the fren-

zied activity of the boys reflects the fact that,unlike the men, the boys are paid bonuses basedon their production. They lift bars onto the grind-ing machines, sometimes with the aid of the menand a crane, tighten the various hand wheels, andset about making adjustment to improve the cylin-drical accuracy of their work piece.

The company classes the boys operations in thegrinding bay as skilled whereas the wire makingwork in bay 2 is classified as unskilled. With regardto recruitment policy, the company requires a min-imum of four GCSEs10 of applicants for grinding

jobs and only physical strength for the workersin bay 2. Grinders earn between 7 and 9 perhour, and the workers in bay 2 between 6 and7 per hour. The average age in the grinding bay(including the older workers in the packing sec-tion) is 30, most of the boys are under 30 yearsold. For comparison, the average age in bay 2 itis 35. The boys at the grinding machines workbetween 50 and 55 h per week without complaintor absence. The other cold workers work a mini-mum of 48 h a week. In the grinding bay, the

men are all members of the same metal tradeunion, the Iron and Steel Trade Confederation(ISTC), but none of the boys is. By contrast, inbay 2 all the workers are members of the ISTCand the bay supervisor is also the company healthand safety representative. (Incidentally, none ofthe hot department workers are ISTC members,regarding it as too bureaucratic and not con-cerned with real shop floor issues.)

The boys production output can be measuredwithout recourse to qualitative judgement. After

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

10 British intermediate school leavers qualification.



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Adjusting the three ball pens that are clipped tothe chest pocket of his overall, Sean (25 yearsold) comments, we like to work with facts and

quantitative information. We dont need to chatand socialise on the shop floor . . .. When com-pleted, the bars are stacked next to the grindingmachines for the forklift trucks to take them tothe quality control stations.

The formal accounting system is central to themanagement of the grinding activities. Based ona standard batch costing system, targets for qualityand time are set for each production batch andvariances are analysed upon completion by thequality control department. The most significantcontrollable costs are labour and waste. Manage-

ment seeks to keep the costs of unproductivelabour low by offering the grinders relatively mod-est hourly wages combined with the opportunity ofperformance related pay (see Fig. 2). As a conse-quence the grinders themselves incur considerableopportunity costs when they do not manage toproduce the bars according to specifications(thereby wasting raw materials). They are thenunable to achieve the targets based on which theyearn bonus payments.

Bonus payments are calculated as a percentage

of the revenue, known as the value, of the orderon which the grinders work, and they are paid inaddition to the hourly wages at normal and over-time rates. Bonus payments can be considerable.Even though the formal wage structure (seeFig. 2) of the firm is flat and polarised betweenmanagement and the manual workforce, if over-time and bonuses are considered, the grinders ofthe cold department receive greater remunerationthan the furnace manager in the hot department.The division between management and workers

in terms of basic payments turns into a divisionbetween hot and cold departments when the totalremuneration including overtime is considered.

Reflections on control, strategy, and technology

Management strategy

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

department and overstretched the cold depart-ment, cutting costs in the former and increasingovertime in the latter. Their human resource policy

was to hire young, multi-skilled grinders with for-mal engineering qualifications who could alsooperate ground-operated and travelling cranesand fork lift trucks, thereby increasing their inde-pendence from the auxiliary workers. The boysgreater technical autonomy was reflected in thehigher formal authority of their supervisor, com-pared to the hot department supervisors, and inthe lack of a dedicated shop floor manager in thegrinding bay (see Fig. 1). Working in shifts of fouroperators, one of whom acted as supervisor, theboys were effectively operating in self-managing

teams. Relying on the cost standards, overtimeand bonus payments of the formal accounting sys-tem and on the self-managing capabilities of theteams on the individual shifts, management pur-sued a technocratic stance to efficiency control(Saravanamuthu & Tinker, 2003). By contrast,the workers in the hot department had been withUNSOR for longer periods of time. The smelterswere on relatively modest wages but stayed withthe company because they enjoyed practicing theircraft. The other hot workers were regarded as

replaceable. Many were laid off as a consequenceof shrinking the hot departments operations.

The subcultures of the grinding bay in the colddepartment and the smeltery in the hot departmentwere influenced by those business and humanresource strategies. The subculture of the boys,who worked independently on dedicatedmachines, relied on their own skills, and were paidindividual bonuses, revolved around the maximi-sation of the value of their individual output. For-mal accounting information had immediate

relevance for them because they regarded com-pany profit as tantamount to increased outputand greater overtime and bonus payments forthemselves. Competitive and individualistic in out-look, they welcomed the intensification of theirwork. By contrast, the workers of the hot depart-ment valued friendship and cooperation. Its mem-bers were hired from the factorys immediateneighbourhoods. Hiring policies, remunerationplans, production planning, and budgetary controlthus contributed to the contrasts between the sub-



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

This is not to paint an unduly homogeneouspicture of the individual managers and ownerspriorities. The quality control department triedto stabilise the production standards, the general

manager to minimise overall electricity costs, andthe owners to grow the sales of cheap, low qualitysteel. Seeking to accommodate whom he regardedas irreplaceable workers (Saravanamuthu & Tin-ker, 2003), the smeltery manager frequently gavein to the smelters preference for higher electricityconsumption in the execution of production. Atthe same time the owners moves to expand theoutput of low quality steel and to substitute fur-nace production through the purchase of semi-fin-ished coils had the effect of reducing UNSORs

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

Relating in this way the management strategyand objectives, as borne out by human resourcepolicies and the uses of other management con-

trols, to the workers practices, understood asordered meaningful activities, begins to outlineorganisational control as cultural practice.

Technology

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

OWNERS, MR. ARMITAGE,

MR. TURNER

GENERAL MANAGER

PRODUCTION MR. BELL

HOT DEPARTMENT

PRODUCTION MANAGER

ELECTRIC ARC

FURNACE MANAGER

BILLET MILL

SUPERVISOR

ROD MILL

SUPERVISOR

BAY2

SUPERVIS.

BAYS 1 & 3

SUPERVIS.

QUALITY

CONTROL

MANAGER

QUALITYCONTROL

SUPERVISORCHRIS

MANAGER PERSONNEL

AND ADMINISTRATION

HEALTH AND SAFETY

MANAGER

HEALTH

AND

SAFETY

SMELTERS (PHIL

AND DAVE)

LABOURERS

BILLET

ROLLERS

WIRE WORKERS GRINDERS

PACKERS

ACID TANK

ROD ROLLERS

COLDHOT

DEPARTMENT

SMELTERY

SUPERVISOR

DEPARTMENT

Fig. 1. UNSOR organisation chart.



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operation. Their daily reconciliation of the instruc-tions that appeared on the computer with theirqualitative assessment of the requirements for the

nightshifts heats reproduced the familiar ten-sions between product-oriented metallurgists(UNSORs quality control department) and pro-cess-oriented engineers (the smelters) (Misa,1995). By supplementing their impressions of theheats colour, sounds, smells, surface move-ments, holes, and smoke with various measure-ments of temperatures, electricity absorption,timings, and the weights of alloys, the smeltersknew practically when to discharge what kind ofscrap into the heat, when to blow how muchoxygen onto its surface, when to add what quanti-

ties of alloys, and when to use how much electric-ity for how long, in order for the steel to fulfil thequality control departments technical specifica-tions. Producing the intended output at a reason-able cost depended on their experience.

The smelters sense of how to go about makinga good heat was a source of frequent irritation forthe smeltery manager whose priority was to mini-mise electricity costs. Yet management could nei-ther codify the smelters work nor insulate themfrom the work processes surrounding them to

achieve greater control over the smeltery. The dif-ferent groups of workers in the smeltery were tiedtogether by the sequential and interdependentorganisation of production practices of the hotdepartment, the sequence and speed of whichwas determined by the heating times of the fur-nace. Similarly, the activities in the hot depart-ments rolling mill were determined by set rollingsequences. Technology determined that the hotworkers work collectively within the spaces definedby the interdependencies between the machines

and it made UNSOR dependent on the craftknowledge of the smelters without whom the hotdepartment would have come to a standstill.

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

tion to put their strategy to the test, the smeltersresigned to a position of opposing owners andmanagers and the boys whom they regarded as

their accessories to ruining the company. Thismade the smelters an important source of a them-and-us culture of class division in UNSOR furtherstrengthening their defence of our furnace oper-ations against management interference.

Whereas the craft character of steel productionin the smeltery rendered the extensive use of for-mal, quantitative information for managementcontrol ineffective, the grinding operations in thecold department were susceptible to detailed pro-duction planning. Its output could be measuredand rated in every aspect, bringing into view

UNSORs management control systems as anothersignificant aspect of technology. UNSOR preparedmonthly variance analyses for the heads of depart-ments, based on annual operating and capital bud-gets. For the smeltery the daily variable costs ofscrap and alloys were planned and controlled inaggregate and electricity costs separately. Thequality control departments standard costing sys-tem only afforded management relatively globaloutput measures of the smelterys performance.By contrast, the grinding practices were mutually

independent and individually paced, thus enablingthe measurement of each workers performance.The boys culture of work was individualistic andtied to the companys formal accounting systems.Grinding followed the pace set by the bonussystem.

Comparative ethnography of social relations on two

shop floors

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



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

The relationships between the smelters and the

labourers are fraught with mutual distrust andconflicting outlooks on work. The smelters expertknowledge and control of the chemical propertiesof the steel gives them also control over the labour-ers movement around the fire. Unlike the smelt-ers, the labourers fear the fire and do not like toplay with it. For the labourers, the steel bathis unpredictable because they cannot see it fromtheir usual places of work. They get showered bysparks, for example, when oxygen is pumped. Alsowhen producing high quality steel, Phil and Davedirect the labourers to throw bags of additives into

the steel bath, causing explosions that leave themcovered in sparks. The labourers resent and pri-vately account for the additional work that iscaused by high quality steel as much as the dangersof moving closer to the fire. As one of them puts it,each bag of sand weighs 2 kg. It takes more than20 s to walk from the protective screen to the fur-nace. In these 20 s we have to run towards the fur-nace without protective clothes, exposed tosparkles and fire. Phil and Dave dont realise thateach of their small adjustments costs us hard and

risky labour.The labourers resentment against the smelters

takes a variety of forms. One evening in thebreak-room, Armstrong, one of the labourers,says, the whole story of the danger of the fur-nace is an invention by Mr. Beat and the twomelters to control the melting shop, raise theirwage and exploit us. The labourers are awarethat the owners and the quality control depart-ment are pushing the smeltery to produce lowerquality steel faster and cheaper and they fully

endorse this philosophy of work. Who dothey think they are? Ferrell, another labourer, joins the discussion. Only because they standin front of the furnace, smell a bit of smoke,and get a few scars, they think they can run thebusiness!11 Observing that from up there their

jobs look very dangerous, Pete, the crane driver,

is cut short by Ferrell. The more steel we make,the more we earn. To us it makes no difference ifits special steel or scrap [low quality steel]. Scrap

steel saves us labour. With special steel we haveto reinforce the seals on the moulds, put extraclay on the pipes, sweat to strip them out, andspend an extra hour loading the scrap basket.Armstrong rebukes the researchers objection thatPhil and Dave like doing a good job. A good

job is a job where labourers dont sweat blood!Phil and Dave are more concerned with the bricksin the furnace than with our safety. On that shiftthat Ferrell fell into the pit hole, Phil kept watch-ing the furnace lining as if nothing had hap-pened. Ferrell was bloody drunk, replies

Roger, the smeltery supervisor, who often joinsthe labourers in their break-room. Ferrell startscackling. But Roger, too, is critical of the smelt-ers hierarchical way of running the smeltery.For Gods sake! Phil thinks he can read the car-bon content of the heat better than the bloodyPolivac!

According to Phil, the labourers work likedonkeys, never searching a deeper meaning intheir repetitive actions. The smelters break-roomcontains a desk on which a computer and a kettle

face each other at the two opposite corners, andthree chairs. It is located on the shop floor, over-looking the furnace with two big windowpanes,one of which is protected by a steel grate that isconstantly hit by the sparks coming out from thefurnace. The heavy panel near the side windowcontains electricity switches, indicators, and thelevers to tilt the furnace and to open the roof.From the panel, the smelters can also look at theback of the furnace through a lorry window mir-ror. The three chairs are for Phil, Dave, and

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

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



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exaggerated technical and economical language ofthe top management. Even though he is formallythe manager of the smeltery Mr. Beat feels closer

to the smelters subculture than that of UNSORsmanagement.Nevertheless Phil and Mr. Beat can often be

seen arguing on the shop floor of the smelteryabout how to deal with specific heats. Phil andDaves concerns for the refractory bricks and theelectrodes of the furnace, and their awareness thata good heat never boils, lead them to seek stabil-ity in the heat, whereas Mr. Beats concerns for theelectricity costs leads him to use the furnacespower unevenly (high with high quality steel andlow for low quality) thus damaging the electrodes

and making the steel more dangerous to work withand, according to Phil, always at the edge ofbeing burnt.

Mr. Beats efforts to keep electricity costs to aminimum sometimes come at the expense of thefurnace and the smelters safety, for instance, whenhe instructs the crane driver to load more than 10 tof scrap in the basket for a single charge. If wedivide the scrap in two loads [of 15 t each] wecan reduce the cooking time by about 20 minand reduce [electricity] absorption by 510% . . .

Depends on the grade of steel were making. Lar-ger scrap loads speed up production but Phil findsthis irresponsible because excessive scrapcharges can damage the furnace electrodes (forthe maintenance of which the smelters are formallyresponsible).

Phil and Daves ways of assessing the quality ofthe steel differ from Mr. Beats. Mr. Beat relies onthe electrodes electricity absorption indicatedon the control panel inside the control room andthe readings of the Polivac. According to Phil

and Dave, Roger, the smeltery supervisor, for fearof getting too close to the furnace, often takes thesample for the Polivac too close to the surface,which makes the Polivac readings inaccurate. Theyalso complain that Mr. Beats insistence on mini-mising electricity costs makes the use of electricityso uneven that one can hardly infer the steels car-bon content from the electricity absorption. Theytherefore prefer to assess the quality of the steelinductively, through their close observation ofthe surface and colour of the bath, the noise of

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

In summary, the smelters oppose the owners

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

The boys, too, are dedicated to quality produc-

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

Ultimate responsibility for the management ofthe grinding bay lies with the general manager pro-duction, Mr. Bell. He can often be seen walkingaround the grinding bay, the earmuffs on his hel-met sticking out laterally like insect antennae, dis-cussing the hardness, flexibility, and tensile ratiosof the bars with the bays shift supervisor andChris, the quality control supervisor. Chris, too,spends a lot of his time in the grinding bay, awayfrom his office, bringing new customer orders,changing old instructions, and checking the qual-

ity of the bars that the grinders produce. Mr. Bellsand Chris direct involvement underline the signif-icance that UNSORs management accords to thegrinding bays activities.

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



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usually the general manager of production, Mr.Bell, and the production manager of the hot

department. Here the supervisors receive informa-tion on and discuss UNSORs order book, theproduction schedule for the week ahead, and theshort term financial performance, including cashflows and debt. The most significant costs in thecold department are labour and waste. Qualityproblems that entail waste of labour and materialsand require rework are a major cause of cost over-runs and are therefore discussed in great detail.Finding ways of enhancing quality is an importantobjective of the meetings, as a result of which, for

example, two maintenance engineers have beendedicated to preventative maintenance in the colddepartment. Other important topics of discussionin the cold departments weekly managementmeetings are trends in customer specificationsand sales forecasts, forecasts for overtime work,and health and safety updates. Also sourcing strat-egies such as the purchase of coils from Spain andGermany in order to increase the cold depart-ments output independent of the hot departmentare discussed here.

The boys are all married, apolitical, well edu-cated, moderate in their views on working at

UNSOR, and balanced in their judgements. Theyavoid the working class rhetoric of them-and-us. According to Sean (25 years old) almost allof his friends outside UNSOR are managers orself-employed. It doesnt really matter if theyare managers, owners or workers, since we all livein Park Hill, we all drink at the Red Lion12 on Sat-urday night, and we know each other since wewere kids. Sean is unusual in that he lives nearthe factory in Park Hill. Most of the other boyslive with their young families in mortgaged houses

in the newer suburbs to the southeast of Sheffield.They seek to keep away from the centres of the oldindustrial and mining towns in the area, thus dis-tinguishing themselves further from the otherUNSOR workers.

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

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

WeeklyRemuneration,

Basic

Payment

Including

Overtime

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

Staff support Mill Mill

Fig. 2. UNSOR remuneration.

12 A public house.



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dont come to work to socialise but to work! Andto work fast because I dont know if this place willbe open tomorrow. For him the social relation-

ships on the shop floor are closely related to theways in which workers go about their tasks. Like-wise, Willie (26 years old) reveals his instrumentalorientation to work during a break: My interestsand the interests of the owners are the same: tomake money. He does not want to get involvedin organisational politics because he cannot seethe point. The boys agree with the general man-ager production that employees are creators ofvalue and profit makers, and not just simplemanual workers. They reject the hot workersphilosophy of work based on seniority and

friendship, and their mixing of leisure and workon the shop floor.

Men and boys are not only distant on theshop floor, but also during break-time. The boysspend their break-times in isolation from oneanother. They sit behind the cardboard screensand wooden cupboards they have built aroundtheir machines and decorated with postcards,drawings, letters and calendars. They drink teaand use their mobile phones to speak with theirfriends and family. In contrast to the workers in

the hot department and the men in the colddepartment, the boys, with the exception of Sean,do not socialise with their workmates, neitherduring break-times, nor outside the factory. Mean-while the men spend their breaks in thebreak-room used by the workers of bay 2, accusingthe boys of being co-opted in the firms strategy ofmaximising the firms profit at the expense of theworkforce. They have become capitalists. ForTom, one of the men, they [the boys] are likethe owners. They see this place only as a place

where they can make money, and not a placewhere they can improve as persons. He has alow opinion of the boys, saying that all the boyscare for is their mortgages and their nice cars toshow off at the weekends. The boys see them-selves not as capitalists but, on the contrary, asthe hardest working labourers in the company.According to Willie, we dont do real money.We dont deal with the expensive assets, like themelters [who control the electric arc furnace]. Theyare the ones who really run this place.

Reflections on control as subcultural practice

Accounting for social relations

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

ital) and more general commercial assessments(profitable, ruinous).

Their opposition to the owners and managersstrategy allied the smelters with the men from thecold departments packing bay and opposed themto the boys from the grinding bay. They claimedthat the boys had become capitalistic in outlookbecause they valued short term profit beforepersonal relationships and craftsmanship.For the smelters and the men from the cold depart-ments packing bay the boys craft was tainted by

their reliance on and responsiveness to financialincentives, undermining the dignity of the boyscraft and marking them as industrial proletariat.They said that the boys were greedy and beingco-opted into the owners ruinous strategy of pro-ducing low quality steel.

Notwithstanding their agreement with the own-ers commercial objectives, the boys thought ofthemselves as labourers proper because they regu-larly worked overtime in the most labour-intensivepart of UNSORs production. They accused the

smelters of being the real capitalists. After all,the smelters controlled the most capital-intensivephase of production and they were the ones withpretensions of ordering about the labourers intheir department.

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



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and dangerous work at the pit and less interactionwith the smelters during the smelting process. Lowquality steel was generally ordered in greater vol-

umes and therefore often resulted in higher wagesfor them. We get more money in less time andwith less danger. They did not share in the smelt-ers gratification from working hard and produc-ing better quality steel, but opposed the smeltersattempts to exercise control over them (and thesmeltery manager) as capitalist.

Curiously, but consistently, all of those groupsof workerssmelters, packers, grinders, andlabourerssaw themselves in opposition to a setof capitalists whom they defined in their ownways. For the smelters and packers, capitalists val-

ued accounting profit over the greater values ofquality craftsmanship and worker solidarity. Theycontrasted their own notions of personal growthwith what they called capitalist greed. In theirday-to-day work, the smelters tended to act inways that prioritised their specific notions of qual-ity production over financial cost. By contrast, thegrinders and labourers had an instrumental orien-tation to work and used accounting cost and profitmeasurements to orient their preferences and prac-tices. The labourers suspected that the smelters

used their alternative benchmarks of craftsman-ship to tighten control over them. The grinderssaw the smelters control over the electric arc fur-nace and the smeltery labourers as the hallmarkof the capitalist.

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

the political nature of cultural practices.

Social backgrounds and aspirations

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

cially an ethnography of different organisationalsubcultures ought to address in how far the socialbackgrounds of their members can shed light on

their motivations for seeking out, and acquiescingto, their subculturesthose specific combinationsof working conditions, manual and automatedtechnologies, social relationships and shared out-looks, statuses, remuneration, and opportunitiesto control ones own work and that of others.

In the case of UNSOR, the extent to whichmembers of particular subcultures shared similarsocial backgrounds and aspirations turned out tobe striking. A clear distinction could be madebetween the boys in the cold departments grindingbay on the one hand, and the older smelters and

men in the cold department on the other. Theolder men and smelters had already independentchildren and no monthly mortgage payments tomake. They were economically relatively self-suffi-cient, claiming that they worked for self-gratifica-tion and that the wage was only a small part oftheir motivation to work. The smelters and mostof the other hot workers were recruited locallythrough friendship or kinship connections andhad longer personal and family occupational his-tories in skilled trades (smelting, forging, roll

Ahrens and Mollona Aos 07

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