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19 Emp. Resp. & Rts. J. 1 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/emprrj19 and id is 1 raw text is: Employ Respons Rights J (2007) 19:1-15 DOI 10.1007/s 10672-006-9028-5 Manufacturing Resistance: Rationalizing the Irrationality of Managerial Control on the Shop Floor in a US Medical Electronics Factory Victor G. Devinatz Published online: 21 February 2007 O Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007 Abstract Juravich (1985) asserts that the organization of US industrial manufacturing is irrational as well as appearing chaotic from the workers' viewpoint because of manage- ment's refusal to integrate the workers' knowledge into the production process. Because of this, Juravich argues, if and when the workers' knowledge is integrated into the production system, the workers no longer will experience chaos on the shop floor. Extending Devinatz's (1993) analysis in response to Juravich, this article argues that workers use resistance as a logical strategy for rationalizing what they perceive to be the irrationality of the shop floor. Utilizing Kusterer's (1978) work, I argue that the use of many, but not all, resistance strategies constitutes a type of survival knowledge acquired and used by workers in response to managerial control. I maintain that these strategies constitute a special type of workplace resistance which I refer to as pure and simple resistance. Key words workplace resistance - managerial control - labor process In Chaos on the Shop Floor (Temple University Press), Juravich (1985) contends that the organization of US industrial manufacturing is essentially irrational as well as appearing chaotic from the workers' perspective because of management's refusal to incorporate the workers' knowledge into the production process. Because of this, Juravich argues, if and when the workers' knowledge is integrated into the production system, labor-management cooperation will emerge, resulting in the workers no longer experiencing chaos on the shop floor. In an article elaborating on the problematic nature of Juravich's analysis, Devinatz (1993) maintains, primarily based on Kusterer's (1978) seminal treatise on working knowledge, that the workers' attainment of working knowledge enables them to adequately manage this shop floor chaos while serving as a major instrument in the V. G. Devinatz (E) Department of Management and Quantitative Methods, College of Business, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790-5580, USA e-mail: vgdevin@ilstu.edu 4) Springer