The indeterminacy of ‘temporariness’: Control and power in neo-bureaucratic organizations and work in UK television
Jonathan Morris, Catherine Farrell and Mike Reed
Abstract
Whereas historically, the UK television industry was characterised by hierarchy and vertical integration of programme production within a few large broadcasters, new neo-bureaucratictemporaryorganizational forms have proliferated in the industry in the past twenty years. This has been a product of a variety of factors, including globalisation, technological change in the industry, deregulationandcost cutting.
This paper draws on research involving 75 participants working in the large broadcasters, independents and as freelancers. The temporary form in the industry is an extreme case, in that they can be of very short duration (under a week). This has far reaching implications for industry coordination and control. However, these forms are far from ‘one-offs’ and they are continuously reinvented and recast. This neo-bureaucratic form is controlled and regulated by the major producers through a set of powerful normative methods, based partly on an evolving custom and practice, but also in the extreme familiarity of people in the industry, across the large broadcasters, the independents and freelancers. The paper evaluates how the structures, processes and coordination of these organizations through the manipulation of social capital in the industry are used to regulate and control a set of confused and ‘messy’ temporary arrangements.
Keywords
Contingent work, control, neo-bureaucratic, organizational forms, social capital, temporary, television industry.
Introduction
While temporary organizational forms have a long history in certain industries, they can also be viewed as part of a wider organizational shift from hierarchical forms which dominated western economies for the second half of the twentieth century to more responsiveforms, representative of a neo-bureaucratic organizational setting (Clegg, 2011; Farrell and Morris, 2003;Townley et al.,2009). Thus within a broader context of intensified global competition, corporations are concentrating on core activities in leaner organizations by outsourcing non-core activities (‘choose and focus’). This has also been facilitated by far-reaching technological (ICT) developments.
This paper will report on the emergence of the neo-bureaucratic organizational form in the UK television (TV) industry in the past twenty years, driven by globalization, deregulation and technological change (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2012; Sengupta et al.,2009). While the TV industry is not alone in using temporary forms, it is unusual in several regards, not least in the length of duration of the temporary organizations. While longer term temporary organizations existin the industry, it is also characterised by extremely short term arrangements of as little as a few days or a week (Bechky, 2004). Multiple temporary organizational settings are being enacted at any one time by large broadcasting companies at the apex of the neo-bureaucratic form,by independent producers and indeed by the freelancers who proliferate in the industry. This has significant implications for how these temporary organizations are coordinated and controlled, particularly compared with temporary organizations that are more long standing and durable.These temporary organizational settings are being continuously reinvented and reconfigured, personnel-wise.
The empirical data focuses on three aspects of temporary organizing, the structure, process and coordinating mechanisms in this neo-bureaucratic form.This indicates that the structure of the independent organizations in the industry is more more complex than previously indicated, and the relationships are not based on spot-market transactions. Rather,large broadcasters use such mechanisms to channel and coordinate this neo-bureaucratic form of organizing through setting norms and expectations (Reed, 2011), by using familiar ‘go to’ individuals and firms, and using insider knowledge of personnel to ensure ‘quality control’, thus manipulating social capital. While much has been written on how social capital is used in such forms, and in television in particular, the focus has largely been on how individual freelancers leverage their social capital to gain work (Tempest et al., 2004). How the large broadcasters and independents use it to regulate and control the form has received little attention. As such the paper makes a number of contributions. First, it adds to the literature, theoretically and empirically, on how these new organizational forms are controlled by large corporations (in this case the broadcasters) through their regulation of the neo-bureaucratic form, through normative and cultural means, in a context where many of the people working in the industryno longer do so in a formal bureaucratic setting. Second, it expores how social capital plays an important role in this temporary organizational setting, as much as a means of coordinating and controlling freelance work as of accessing it. Thus this temporary organizational form needs to regarded as inextricably interwoven within a certain organizational and social context (Jones et al., 1997). It further explores how the structures and processes of temporary organizing are used to regulate these forms. In short, the paper explores the control regimes used in a ‘neo-bureaucratic’ setting. Third, it adds to our knowledge of ‘temporariness’ arguing that , far from temporary work fitting into neat categories, such notions of temporality are confused , overlapping and complex, and as such,it explores the structure and process of temporary organizing.
To this end, the paper is divided into three further sections. The next will outline the emergence of neo-bureaucratic organizationalforms with a particular emphasis on power, control and coordination of these forms. It will then describe developmentsin work and organization in the UK TV industry over the past few decades as context for the emergence of temporary organizations in this industry, reporting on research findings drawn from 75 interviews with industry participants in large broadcasters, independent companies and freelancers. The findings are divided into sections exploring the structure of temporary organizations, the process of temporary organizing and how temporary organizations are coordinated and controlled through the use of social capital in the industry. A discussion of the findings are then made and conclusions drawn.
Temporary arrangements as ‘new’ organizational forms
There has been increasing interest in temporary organizations as part of a wider discussion of alternative, neo-bureaucratic organizational forms, alternative in the sense to traditional principles of either hierarchies or pure markets. They are, it is argued, premised upon more uncertain markets which, in turn, are predicated upon global competition and pressures to offer a more flexible organizational response. However, such forms have been particularly prevalent in a relatively small number of settings, some long standing such as project based work in construction, for example, others in newly emerging high technology sectors including biotechnology and software engineering (Barley and Kunda, 2004), and yet others in existing, but reformed industries, suchas film and TV. As portrayed in the next section, the TV industry has shifted from being one based on traditional hierarchical principles, to one based on far greater outsourcing and use of the external labour market, a neo-bureaucratic form which requires new types of control regimes. As Reed(2011 p. 233)notes, contemporary debates on such neo-bureaucratic organizations have major impications for the control regimes associated with network forms of governance, which have led to more complex logics and modes of control which differ from bureaucratic regimes. The bureaucratic control logics will be replaced by ‘a multi-dimensional organization control logic and mode that supercedes core control principles’. However, (author ref.) argues that these new forms will represent a hybrid form of organizing which also has implications for control (Clegg, 2011; Courpasson and Reed, 2004).
Analytically, it is possible to distinguish, in ideal typical terms, between three distinctive forms of organization – ‘bureaucratic’, ‘neo-bureaucratic’ and ‘post-bureaucratic’ – in relation to three, interrelated, conceptual components. The latter comprise the structural logics on which the organization’s co-ordination and control systems are designed; the governance mechanisms through which these systems are legitimated and managed; and the cultural frameworks that embeds such control systems and governance mechanisms within wider, overarching value orders.
Over the last two decades or so, successive attempts have been made to identify these crucial analytical variations and to develop models that theorize the contrasting ways in which they can be combined to generate distinctive forms of organizing and the conditions under which they are most likely to appear (Farrell and Morris, 2003; Alvesson and Thompson, 2005). Although the logic of ideal typical analysis is based on the search for contrasting generic types which are internally coherent and externally separable, an emerging theme within this type of analysis has been the increasing recognition afforded to ‘hybrid forms’ and their importance for understanding contemporary workplaces (Clegg, 2011; Courpasson and Clegg, 2012; Courpasson and Reed, 2004). The relevance of hybrid organizational forms, combining contrasting, if not opposing, design and control logics, seems to become even more acute under socio-economic and political conditions of enhanced complexity, uncertainty and instability (Johnson et al., 2009; Palmer et al., 2007). Under these conditions, it is argued, institutional elites and their organizational managers have little choice but to construct, operate and legitimate structural designs, control technologies, and corporate cultures that are inherently fragmented and unstable. Thus hybrid forms, such as the ‘neo-bureaucratic organization’, emerge under such conditions and have little or no choice but to follow design and control logics which are meant to contain and channel the underlying structural and cultural contradictions that necessarily confront them.
The key analytical features of the ‘bureaucratic’ organizational form have been a focus for organizational theorizing and research since Weber. However, the need to locate and interpret the former within the latter’s analysis of institutionalized power relations has not been so clearly or consistently recognized (Clegg et al.,2006; DuGay, 2005). Indeed, Weber’s ideal typical specification of ‘legal-rational bureaucracy’ as a distinctive organizational form, has all too-often been ripped out of his wider socio-political and cultural analysis in ways which have had fateful negative theoretical consequences for social scientific work in this area over an extended period of time (Alvesson and Thompson, 2005). As a result, contemporary research and analysis of changing organizational forms continues to be focused around evolutionary models of structural differentiation and socio-technical development which marginalize, if not ignore, the wider power relations and political processes within which the latter are necessarily embedded.
Unsurprisingly, debates about the ‘post-bureaucratic organization’ identify, or at least envisage, a fundamental set of interrelated technological, economic, political and cultural transformations that undermine, if not emasculate, the material and structural foundations on which the organizational edifice of legal-rational bureaucracy rested (Alvesson and Thompson, 2005; Child and McGrath, 2001). In summary form, these radical changes, it is argued, interact and combine to generate levels of decision-making complexity, environmental uncertainty and political instability that the bureaucratic organization is incapable of coping with – never mind dealing with - in an effective and coherent manner (Mason 2015). As the design logic, control regime and cultural system defining the latter begin to unwind, fragment and breakdown – admittedly a protracted and complex process for even the most ardent of the ‘post-bureaucratic theorists’ (Castells 2000) – under the escalating pressures exerted by this conjuncture of radical changes, system-wide transformations kick-in which make the bureaucratic form of organization untenable. They also usher in an alternative ‘post-bureaucratic form’ that breaks with the axiomatic principles and core rules on which bureaucratic organization was based. This is the case insofar as the former rests on a design logic, control technology and cultural system diametrically opposed to that sustaining its bureaucratic forebear – the whole organizational edifice has to be subject to root and branch reconstruction rather than selective refurbishment and repair.
Consequently, the post-bureaucratic organization can be represented in an ideal type that transmutes the core elements associated with the classic bureaucratic form to produce an organizational form of an entirely different order and identity. Specialization, standardization and formalization of work practices and relations are superseded by collaborative, flexible and spontaneous modes of working in which improvisation, risk-taking and creativity are regarded as normal, indeed crucial, characteristics of the work environment and culture rather than as threats to an established administrative order that have to be contained, if not eradicated, in order to protect the latter’s coherence and integrity. Within this much more individualized and personalized workplace, control moves away from the direct, intrusive and continuous surveillance associated with bureaucratic organization towards the ‘concertive’ modes of work regulation typical of high skill, expert-dependent and ‘knowledge-intensive’ working environments (Courpasson, 2000; Ezzamel and Burns, 2005; Reed, 2005;Sewell and Barker, 2006). The latter control regime, typical of the post-bureaucratic organization, integrates highly decentralized project-led and team-based working with concentrated strategic control at the centre through advanced communication and control technologies which make work activities and relations, at all levels below the strategic centre, much more open, transparent and accountable. Finally, this collaborative working environment and concertive control regime are overlaid by a ‘high-trust/soft power’ corporate culture in which individual and collective learning from mistakes and failures are encouraged rather than punished and ‘the employee’ is treated as a unique individual rather than a number on a spreadsheet (Fleming and Spicer, 2007). The post-bureaucratic organization becomes a contested social and spatial arena within which employees, of all grades and specialities, are encouraged, indeed required, to challenge and contest the policies and practices through which the former becomes a sustainable reality.
The ‘post-bureaucratic organization’ thesis tends to be rather long on theorization and rather short on empirical grounding – never mind ‘verification’ (Johnson et al.,2009). As a result, a number of organizational researchers, particularly those working on public service organizations in which the role of the state, at all levels of political governance, is much more important in shaping workplace cultures and practices, have developed a hybrid model of the ‘neo-bureaucratic organization’ as an ideal type which strives to get closer to the ‘messy reality’ of contemporary organizational life (Farrell and Morris, 2003; Clegg et al., 2006; Courpasson and Clegg 2012; Hoggett, 2005).
Considered in these terms, the ‘neo-bureaucratic organization’ is seen to retain several of the key structural features of ‘bureaucratic organization’ – such as centralized strategic control, technologically-advanced systems of workplace surveillance and regulation, and continuous monitoring of workplace behaviour against corporately-determined performance targets – while combining them, however uneasily and ‘messily’, with modes of cultural integration and corporate socialization that decisively break with the logic of bureaucratic management. The latter place much greater trust in horizontal workplace relations and behaviours more appropriate to project-based forms of team working characterized by short-term timelines and contractually-based modes of workload allocation in which a modus vivendi must be struck between centrally-determined policies and highly contingent, flexible and temporary patterns of operating. Neo-bureaucratic organization, as an inherently hybridized organizational form, achieves this modus vivendi between corporate control and professional/ craft-based modes of working characteristic of creative industries, such as the UK television industry (Townley et al., 2009), by combining a wide range of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power mechanisms in which the former take on a level of complexity and significance that cannot be accommodated within the structural logic of the bureaucratic form.
As a hybrid form, neo-bureaucratic organization becomes much more dependent on ‘soft power’ mechanisms to integrate employees into a corporate culture that expects them to manage and control themselves in ways that are appropriate to professional-cum-craft based modes of working in which project-based autonomy and highly specialized technical skills are at a premium. However, it cannot afford to dispense entirely with the ‘hard power’ mechanisms associated with bureaucratic management because this would be too high-risk in a working environment already pervaded by levels of uncertainty and instability characteristic of a vertically disintegrated and horizontally co-ordinated industry in which there is constant political and financial pressure to rationalize, marketize and downsize. Neo-bureaucratic organization facilitates the development and legitimation of ‘polyarchic’ governance regimes (Clegg et al, 2006; Courpasson and Clegg, 2012; Reed, 2012) that combine ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power mechanisms in ways which allow knowledge workers, craft-based professionals and technical specialists a relatively high degree of freedom and autonomy in performing their work roles, while simultaneously ensuring that their capacity to elide and resist managerial control is contained within the limits laid down by administrative elites. Polyarchic governance regimes maintain a flexible and dynamic balance between elite strategic control and professional operational autonomy by maintaining the overall authority of the organization’s upper echelons or managerial oligarchy, while ensuring that middle-ranking experts and specialists receive sufficient encouragement to engage with and be socialized by internal cultural and symbolic mechanisms facilitating corporate identification and integration. In this way, inter-organizational co-ordination and intra-organizational control can be simultaneously achieved by combining selected elements of network-based forms of regulation with hierarchically-based forms of managing in order to ensure an always inherently dynamic, shifting and contested balance between corporate power and professional autonomy.
Neo-bureaucratic organization involves the continued centralization of selective ‘hard power’ mechanisms typical of orthodox bureaucratic control, such as intensive and remote performance monitoring, combined with the delegation and devolution associated with certain ‘soft power’ mechanisms, such as those corporate cultural programmes aimed at re-investing work roles with high-level emotional and personal value for individual employees (Fleming and Spicer, 2007; Fleming and Sturdy, 2006). Polyarchic governance regimes provide a regulative architecture within which hard and soft power mechanisms can be brought together insofar as they facilitate a simultaneous ‘hollowing out’ of conventional administrative control systems previously operated by middle and lower-level management, while ensuring that a more ‘participative’ and ‘open’ form of elite dominance emerges that is politically and ideologically sensitive to the needs of professional and technical groups (Courpasson and Clegg, 2012).