FIAT’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION: TQM as Functional Integration

this version: 02/11/99 [originally printed in Science-as-Culture Volume 3 Part 1 Number 14 (1992); pp.25-61]

or…

SHERREN HOBSON

I have to tell you quite frankly that what we are proposing is a revolution – a cultural revolution ... Total Quality means, more than anything else, the quality of the men who work in the company, whatever their level, from the lowest to the highest. The Japanese are right when they say that before you can construct the products, the company has to construct the men.

The Italian daily, il manifesto(1), reported the above speech by FIAT’s managing director, Dr Cesare Romiti, addressing his top management on 21 October 1989 in a country villa near Marentino, in the hills overlooking Turin. Thus the strategic objective of Total Quality was announced. The old ’enemy within’ had apparently been defeated exactly ten years earlier. The march of the so- called 40,000 – the silent majority, represented by office staff and middle management, supporting the company – had indeed effectively marked the end of an era of growth for the workers’ movement. (2)

That of Agnelli and Romiti was not... a ’managerial revolution’. Neither was it a simple financial reorganization. It was not even - as it is often presented – a political victory which prepared the way for the company’s technical and economical relaunching, almost as if it were indispensable first to get rid of worker and union control, in order then to innovate. It was, rather, in the first place, a technological revolution which prepared and made possible the successive political victory. (Revelli, 1989, pp.10-11)

The traditional Fordist, one-dimensional organization of production, characterized by la catena (production line), had been learned to good advantage by the workers, so that the weakest link in the chain could be snapped, in hot conditions of industrial agitation, weakening FIAT’s control over production. The new technologies are epitomized by the robots which, shown on every TV mention of industry, have effectively become an icon for industrial progress. The Flexible Manufacturing Systems, in which these suggestive elements are employed, introduced a new dimension. No single group of workers – increasingly isolated – could disrupt the company by exercising direct control over the process. So why was FIAT not satisfied with its newly restored domination? Why this inability to guarantee a product whose quantities, and qualities, could be kept under control by traditional command

structures? Should we be satisfied with FIAT’s common-sense explanation that it is all a logical consequence of ’objective’ market laws: that the customer is king, and ’we’ have to compete, to survive? More specifically, where is the logic in translating this ideology into that publicized as Total Quality, and how is it supported by a worldview whose paradigms are those of science and technology?

THE INTEGRATED FACTORY AS METAPHOR Quality is increasingly defined in functional, systems terms, as prior to the common-sense idea of material, finished product properties. Product quality derives from process quality. The objective is that of total control of systems design, and the factors of production – one of which is the ’human factor’. I want to emphasize the coherence of FIAT’s ideological and technological praxis of ’socio-technical systems’ (see Young, 1990). The April 1991 number of FiatQuadri, the glossy in-house magazine for middle management, has the Integrated Factory on its front cover.

’The Integrated Factory’ A socially integrated Elementary Technical Unit, with Computer-Integrated Manufacturing System

Integration, here, means a coherence between the technology and the exploitation of workers’ know-how and creativity, in a total social system. The consolidated ideology of functionalism is evident in much of FIAT’s propaganda, even if it is presented as new. Critiques of functionalism/organicism (referred to in Young, 1990) have documented the influence of social Darwinism, analysing its roots in Spencer’s sociology, for example. The emphasis on Taylorist functional differentiation has always been strong. What FIAT appears to be proposing is an increasingly systematic attention to what could be termed functional integration. In Italian, the word funzione is widely used for ’department’: production,

maintenance, planning, personnel management are all ’functions’. The mathematician recognizes differentiation and integration as complementary functional operators. FIAT has adopted the Total Quality strategy in an attempt to legitimate their control of various integrating factors, such as the insistence on common-sense market logic, and inevitable computer-integrated manufacturing systems. This article highlights two natural metaphors, evoked as models for what in Italian is called interfunzionalità: inter-functional organization. The first is the classical anatomical metaphor: middle management is supposed to be analogous to the circulatory and nervous systems of a body, and no longer (only) rigid or skeletal. The second, more innovatively, uses information technology language and the imagery of integrated circuits, operating systems and networks. Dr Romiti has never made any secret of his view of ’the technical caste’. In fact, he is reported as having confided the following, in June 1989, during a seminar for young managers entitled ’Where is Italian capitalism going?’:

Burnham [1960] argued that in order to keep companies going and in order for them to prosper, the technician represented the most important figure. Of whom he said, ’Capitalism will die but it will not be replaced by Marxism; it will be replaced by the domination of the technicians.’ (Romiti, 1989)

They are vital allies, but Romiti is very sensitive to any sign of engineers usurping the prerogatives of traditional management. Nevertheless, at Marentino, FIAT’s manage- ment training and conference villa, FIAT’s managing director called on a well-known young Italian exponent of this technical caste, the engineer Giorgio Merli, author of Total Manufacturing Management, to read the lesson from the pulpit. (3)

In the Taylorist vision, in fact, the success of the industrial enterprise was the fruit of an ’inevitable’ exploitation of man in the three roles connected with the functioning of the enterprise: The customer, who inevitably had to be exploited for the company’s profit. The supplier, who had to be ’squeezed’ as much as possible. The employee, who had to be ’used’ up to the maximum allowed limits. This new strategy, on the other hand, is based on presuppositions which are exactly the opposite, and which constitute precisely its strong points. They can be expressed thus: The customer has to be satisfied as much as possible (to assure the company’s survival and the possibility of a profit). The supplier is to be seen as an essential partner, precious to the success of the company (and hence treated as a collaborator and not as an adversary). The employee is not a simple source of labour with an exclusively economically based contract but, rather, he is the company itself (the company is made up of people) . (G. Merli, 1987, p.15)

The process has absolute priority in production, and the whole organization has to aim at keeping it under control in the most efficacious and economic way. The logic is therefore that of prevention rather than inspection, of mastering the processes and not handling consequences. The Japanese have demonstrated that this turns out to be decidedly more economical. Process regulation is carried out by operational units called ’regulators’... their design is the most important organizational aspect of process control. The quality control service fundamentally has the role of ’regulator of regulators’... In order to realize process control efficaciously, one has to have a complete knowledge of the process behaviour. The fundamental point is therefore the design of memories (in the cybernetics sense) and the use of quality techniques in diagnosing control problems. Activation of process control follows two phases: identification of special causes, and elimination of’out-of-control states; removal of the common causes, and continuous process improvement. Once the causes have been identified, the remedies are found, and operating procedures are standardized. Process control has to work for the continuous improvement of ’process capability’.

(G. Merli, 1987, pp. 148 – 9)

Merli’s book did the rounds of FIAT technical managerial staff after its publication in 1987. I refer to it here, not for its originality, but rather for its evident influence on the Italian version of TQM. In their critique, Parker and Slaughter stressed the ’management-by-stress’ philosophy: Merli used a slightly different metaphor (lowering the water level in a lake to expose hidden reefs) but the message seems to be universal. We could amuse ourselves with the biological metaphor: industry wants a body with no fat, and no duplicated kidneys. And in fact, we find reference to ’lean production’ in the April 1991 number of FiatQuadri.

GETTING THE PROCESS UNDER CONTROL Il manifesto was not the only place you could read Dr Romiti’s Marentino speech. Uomini e Business published the establishment version in June 1990.

I would not wish to use an exaggerated word, but I would speak of quality as ideology... You understand that what I am proposing is not simply a case of doing more and doing it better. Rather it is a cultural leap... I know that it is not easy, because the ingredients which make up the recipe of quality are partly known, partly already used. If we examine them one by one, without gathering them into a global vision, we run the risk of banalizing, of not understanding the novelty. This is a trap into which many of us initially fell, myself included.

And then Dr Romiti specifies the link between the new Total Quality philosophy and the less new philosophy of control:

Today, the fundamental priority which I have to point out to you is that of getting the process of developing new products under control, and improving it: a process towards which all the company functions work.

If we examine this ideology of ’a system to get under control’ more closely, we understand Dr Romiti’s totalizing ambitions when he says,

’The company is a complex system made up of an internal part and an external part.’

He explains that the ’external part’ is to be understood – at least initially – as the network of suppliers, distributors, retailers and service industries involved in FIAT’s (huge) business area. The old idea of controlling the market takes on a new meaning in this theoretical framework. FIAT does not publicize the way it controls the media – the general cultural field – to ’stimulate demand’, and induce the customer (in his splendidly limited state of sovereignty) to ’need’ a product with certain qualities. They take as given the new customer attention to the product as status and a complete service (availability, maintenance, reliability and so on). And then they make the brilliant discovery, ’by analogy’, that there is an ’internal market’. the workforce is to be researched, analysed (divided) and handled by analogy with the concept of ’market sectors’. Finally, this internal market is theorized in terms of ’internal customers’: each worker ’supplies’ something to his colleagues (customers), who ’require’ a quality product (or service). This seems to me a significant index of FIAT’s offensive: the ideological position has to be analysed for its material effects. In this case, the ideology which naturalizes the falsification of the employer – employee relation, and stresses the entrepreneurial attitude, prepares the ground for a further erosion of collective bargaining power. FIAT has every interest in declassifying union-negotiated wages towards risky, performance-dependent handouts – a dependent variable, with little worker control over performance definition (or conditions).

IDEOLOGICAL CONTROL

There is a direct relationship between Quality Management, Quality of the environment and Quality of life.

(F.W. Huibregtsen, director of McKinsey and Co., addressing first European Quality Management forum, 19 October 1989.) FIAT has to convince us that the relationship is common sense:

(industrial) TQM = cause; Qualityoflife = (natural) effect.

Dr Romiti says it is necessary to make the ’collaborators’ (employees) change mentality. With this in mind, we can interpret Dr Auteri’s article, reproduced for FiatQuadri. It tells us that

’in order to apply the concepts of Total Quality, training, responsibility and involvement of all the (human) resources is indispensable. And that is possible only through the correct use of communication’ (Auteri, 1990).

While we are all anxious to learn ’the correct use of communication’, we read further on that ’languages and means must cease being treated as empirical voluntarism, to become part of a new company discipline which is increasingly removed from approximations and managerial improvisation’.

This language heralds a new company discipline, in the full sense of the word: a significant development of scientific management. The management of the two in-house monthly glossy magazines, FiatQuadri (for managers) and Illustrato (for everyone else), is attentive to the formation of a compact ’team spirit’, ideologically based on an interpretation of reality as supplied by the company. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Total Quality is that of its appeal to the general ideology, by which ’you have to construct men with the right qualities’. It is taken as common sense that personal quality is a property – and FIAT is fully intent on controlling it totally. Ideological control certainly does not limit itself to this level, which is still too abstract, all things considered. Sociology – naturalized by analogy with the pre-quantum worldview of (individual) particles, whose qualities are reduced to quantity – bases itself on the characteristics of the individual: one has to construct men with the right characteristics. And in order to do that, here comes research to the rescue, sociology’s conclusions (in management’s hands) reveal the intrinsic characteristics which lead individuals to identify with this or that set of values. Dr Auteri, head of Personnel and Organization, draws the scientific conclusion:

It has been clearly demonstrated, at all levels, that there is a substantial understanding/acceptance of the company logic of efficiency, profit, meritocracy and professionalism. Alongside this, a predominantly individualistic logic has been consolidated in the single individual, as far as his relationship with the company is concerned; this is united, nevertheless, with a widespread aspiration towards integration of the self into company life – both at work and in wider terms of socialization. (Auteri, 1990)

To avoid the old word egemonia (hegemony), they talk of aziendalizzazione (adjustment to the culture of the company). Total Quality openly requires a new mentality, a collaborative attitude, ’professionalism’, and so on. One of the emblematic and practical instruments for encouraging this attitude is that of the Quality Circles. They are by no means new, but give an idea of the way FIAT exploits workers’ creativity, channelling their potential for self- organization into company-controlled structures.

Quality Circles FIAT publicizes their well-consolidated experience of Quality Circles, as a concrete example of how they want us to understand the ’human factor’. Workers spontaneously (according to management) decide to get together, in unpaid time, to discuss ways of improving their work. The coordinator may well be the boss, but participants insist that ’everyone is equal’, that every worker can contribute (freely!) his or her ideas. This, of course, is one of the reasons FIAT is so keen on Quality Circles – to the extent of trying even to extend them to office staff. of trying even to extend them to office staff. There is a belief that one of the reasons for this spontaneous philanthropism is an expectation of eventual company favours: a Circle participant hopes his or her son might get taken on by the Company, for example. ’A family affair’, you might say, with the Company reinforcing its paternalistic (or godfather) vocation.

But there is undoubtedly a strong sociological explanation, in terms of identification with the group, and a need to have one’s ideas listened to and recognized. Where a credible, motivating personality coordinates these circles, FIAT arrives at an involvement of up to a quarter of the workforce, for certain sites. It must be noted that membership of a Circle requires management approval: it is not completely spontaneous and automatic, in that sense. And naturally, there is a strong correlation between Circle membership and predisposition towards identification with the company and job satisfaction. The April 1991 number of Illustrato (internal distribution 261,300 copies) ran an article on the recent changes in the organization of the Quality Circles. It is entitled ’Good ideas which pay’, emphasizing the fact that workers are to be rewarded with about £25 for each accepted, successful quality-improvement proposal. The FIAT reporter quotes a thirty-five-year-old electrical maintenance worker:

’When I heard about this initiative, I talked about it with my family. I already had an idea for solving a problem on the oil pump feed line... now the problem has been solved.’ It felt good, going home to tell his wife about this accomplishment... ’The important thing is to be able to contribute your ideas to the Company. The way it is done does not matter ... The money gets spent, but the information and the culture which comes to us through work done in the Circles stays with us.’

In the March 1991 number of the FIOM union’s Informafiom, we read that: In 1982 [the Circles] were 9 and today they are 668 in the Fiat Auto sector, and 800 for the whole group... ’At first we were suspicious, we were afraid FIAT would create these groups to "replace" the factory councils,’ remembers a union representative in Teksid, ’and in fact, the intention was there... the Circles were extended but over time curiosity has given way to a certain passivity.’

Other interesting company innovations in this line are the company-organized courses for union representatives (in union time), aimed at explaining the logic of the market, and a recent training programme for workers (Illustrato, April 1991):

’We often went over the planned two hours. Participation, voluntary and out of working hours, required some shrewdness for commuters to be able to get home, but support was almost total – so much so that the initiative will be extended’... Francesco, 46, who has been at the factory 29 years, 22 of which as a union representative, adds, ’Today we are all convinced that quality is the winning card for a modern industry. The course explained it clearly with concrete examples... The initiative is also the demonstration of a new relationship between employee and management: a relationship based on collaboration and involvement.’

The above are clearly not statistically significant results, but give a plausible indication of FIAT’s success in the ideological field. It is increasingly common sense that collaboration is a value in itself, divorced from wage claims.

FIAT fish: systematic idea nets Process control means solving a technical problem. The technician, the systems analyst, sees the world, and his work in particular, in these terms. Those who sound out the customer, and those who design and realize a new factory layout, do not have any doubt: it is a question of technique, science and technology. A simple but indicative example of technique is that of the Ishikawa fishbone charts, which FIAT’s Quality Circles use as their method of analysis. Cause – effect analysis starts by identifying an effect, in order to come up with its causes up line. The interesting thing is the Japanese-style emphasis on the ’Four Ms’. The ’fish’ is drawn with four major bones, labelled materials, methods, machinery and man (or similar).

The effect – the fish-head – is understood as a defect: either of a physical product or of a service. In this way, the technique forces us towards a ’solution’ in terms of a ’correction’ of the process variables – and the variable ’MAN’ appears as an entity to control, just like the

others. This is the common sense of the technique. Using this method of analysis, it is highly unlikely that a Quality Circle will identify a defect in the organization, and come up with causes of a structural nature, still less of a policy or political nature. There has been recent emphasis in FIAT on the similar CEDAC (Cause-Effect Diagram with the Addition of Cards) charts. This is a technique which encourages the individual to contribute ideas, and should logically have preceded the group, Quality Circle, phase of ’participation’. A technique of systems analysis which explicitly recognizes the special role of control, developed for the US Air Force, is used both for productive and general systems. In this way, we analyse productive systems, and we design new systems, in terms of control structures. A technician certainly is not trained to consider ’control’ in terms of work relations. His role is that of making the system work more efficiently. So far, nothing new. The novelty of Total Quality, looked at from this point of view, is the emphasis on the control of information. I see this quite clearly in the aspect of my work which, frankly gives me the most professional satisfaction: that of analysis, understood in its interview-of-the-experts phase. We go along to learn about an existing production process, and try to translate the workers’ (and management) know-how into terms we can transform into software. This is perhaps one of the most clearly understandable ways the company concretizes the mental capacities of its workers. Virtually everyone seems keen to talk about what they know how to do; and in particular, in the present context, we are interested in how they interact with ’process variables’: adjusting this, checking that, balancing up one factor with another, bypassing potential trouble spots, and so on.

TECHNOLOGICAL CONTROL There are those who consider technological innovation as simply a development of the logic which replaces living labour with robots, aimed at increasing productivity and, more recently, at the requirements of production flexibility imposed by the market. There are those who believe that the phase of investment in new technologies is substantially overshadowed by the Total Quality campaign – which returns to a recognition of the value of living labour. There is undoubtedly a change, but it would be careless to abandon an analysis of the technical-technological dimension, in the general picture of control of the productive system. You have to monitor the process variables, possibly with some crude statistical sampling method, to keep the process under control. And this is a technical concept, understood as the reduction of process variance. First you eliminate the special causes of variability, and then you try to restrict the process ’tolerances’ as far as possible. If we consider the fact that one of the variables is precisely that of the performance of labour, we begin to understand the importance of the concept.

Control at a distance: Big Brother Monitoring will no doubt be explained in terms of registering the characteristics of raw materials, machine cycle times, process temperatures and settings. The question arises, though, concerning the monitoring of labour. The Big Brother syndrome is recognized, and explicitly forbidden by Italian law. In this connection, the following words, from article 4 of the Workers’ Statute (law no. 300, 20 May 1970), were highlighted in a union initiative a few years ago:

Plant and control apparatus, required for production and organizational needs, or work safety, but from which there derives also [even] the possibility of control at a distance of the workers’ activity, may be installed only after agreement with the union representatives at company leve1.(4)

In The Union and New Information Technologies, the union, CGIL, underlines that ’It is a question of defining in FIAT, and then at a general level, a code of conduct which effectively safeguards workers’ rights to freedom, in the factory, in the light of current organizational and technological modifications.’

’Machine monitoring’ means that plant is fitted with sensors wired up to record data in a computerized system. Now if the plant operator can be identified, named, and the computer can supply detailed analyses, at some remote terminal, of how the work proceeds during a well-identified period of time, how are we then supposed to interpret the words reported above? Machine monitoring becomes mutual monitoring – machines monitor men. Marchisio (1990) analyses one aspect of ’centralized command’ at IVECO, FIAT’s truck division. His view is that

’the power and fascination of the medium [info-tech] pushes the organizational structure towards an increasing centralization of the decisional system’.

This naturally weakens local factory autonomy, in an extended company system. The other side of the same coin is to be seen if we look closely at how the single worker ’interfaces’ with the system. The individual has the impression of interacting with his or her terminal: whether it be a confirm-button and traffic-light device, for repetitive control operations, or whether it be a state-of-the-art X-terminal with coloured pop-up menus, icons and graphics. The ’human factor’ ideology insists that the worker is made more responsible by being invited to press a button which means ’Okay’... or by typing in some judgement about the operation he or she is carrying out. The Japanese ideal, in fact, is that of allowing (requiring) the single worker who records an out-of-control process parameter, to halt production until the anomaly is rectified. Parker and Slaughter (1990) described one aspect of this ’pulling the cord’ to perfection. The impression is that of the single worker being in control. One does not have to look very hard to find the answer to the riddle of where the real control lies, of course. The responses allowed by the system are conditioned, to say the least. Anyone involved in designing applications for an end-user knows that part of the challenge of programming is that of out-thinking the ’responsible worker’: the system has to be idiot-proof. You try to foresee, and handle, all the ways a (possibly devious) operator could possibly use (or misuse, according to management) his terminal. You try to avoid the unforeseen and guarantee that the system cannot be given an input which it does not know how to handle.

A revealing example of mutual control is that of a system to monitor various parameters connected with a forging process. The general idea is to develop a kind of Design of Experiment to establish the interrelations between, for example, temperatures and cycle times, and their effects on metallurgical qualities. One of the hypotheses to be tested by this control-at-a-distance is that workers’ variations of production times affect the product quality. In the name of quality, no more ’working up the line’, upping the rate, to leave time for an end-of-shift chat. In other words, the information picked up from the monitored plant, including that relative to the operators’ input, is designed to give statistical evidence for tightening up control over the variable represented by living labour. From the individual plant operator’s point of view, however, the visible aspect is that of a helpful modern technology which tells him how things are going, and possibly helps him to avoid scrap and breakdowns, which lower his production quota. The important point is that of the emphasis on the technical nature of the process, and the emphasis on data gathering, with the possibility of greater control, by the company. There is nothing (and, increasingly, no one) to guarantee the worker that he or she will not be called to explain the variances in his or her performance, with respect to some period of time, or with respect to his or her colleagues. The individual worker would be hard pressed to try to cast doubt on the logic of the ’neutral’, objective system’s data.

Industrial engineering: Taylor revisited Not all technical innovation means immediate computerization. ’Changing working methods’ can mean lots of things. In particular, industrial engineering means the analysis of logistic aspects such as the activities of tooling/detooling, material transport, stock management, and so on – all seen as a technical problem of reducing inefficiencies (lead times), work in

progress, and production times. The striking aspect, though, is the lack of participation of representatives of the workers involved. Involvement appears as the willingness of individual workers to explain to technical consultants how they work, and to be video-recorded, for an analysis of work times, and so on. The individual worker is unlikely to be able to challenge the technique of industrial engineering, from the point of view of work relations, and assert effective control over his own activities. Thus one understands the company’s preference for a soft approach to work methods studies, so as to present the new working method as a rational, technical solution, which is hard to criticize. In effect this is the ’peopleware’ (or ’liveware’ or ’groupware’) concept, to be developed systematically alongside software, firmware and hardware.

Teams and UTEs

Organizational-structural control is the aspect which is given most emphasis by those who proclaim the Total Quality ideology, but this terrain can be largely understood as a logical consequence of ideological and technological changes.

In fact, an organizational gimmick, publicized in the April 1991 number of FiatQuadri, is explained thus:

- Why do you talk in terms of UTEs [Elementary Technological Units] rather than squadre [teams]? - I know the new acronym has caused some puzzlement, but there are two important reasons for this novelty: one is ’technical’, the other is avowedly ’political’. Firstly, one wants to underline the fact that what is entrusted to the person responsible is above all the management optimization of an ’elementary technical system’, that is, a set of homogeneous machines – or those characterized by a specific product – rather than a ’team’, which is a predefined number of men.

The emphasis is on optimization, contrasted with Taylorist specialization. The scientific, technical rationale becomes more evident. One senses the mathematical and economic concepts of local and global optimization theory: a technical question of allocation. The company aims to create structures which are designed to leave workers just enough space for the exploitation of local field conditions, leaving the global boundary conditions firmly in management’s hands. The idea of UTEs, in the ’integrated factory’ context (see Rieser, 1991), gives a clue to FIAT’s attempt to integrate a technical rationale with their broadly conceived social ideology. Campetti put it neatly in his il manifesto article (30 June 1991) called ’Integrated on the Orient Express’:

’And in the end, out of the integrated factory comes the integrated worker.’

To sum up, it could be said that it is all a question of management needing to know what is going on, on the shop floor, in the offices – especially where there are unpredictable human factors involved in the delicate machinery of the production process. Anyone not directly

involved in productive industry would probably be surprised at how poor a visibility management has of the physiology of industry – or of the industrial circuit elements – depending on your metaphorical preferences. There is often a very real, justified sense (on management’s part) of not being in control of the situation. So the present trends could simply be seen as an attempt to put out more feelers, sensors, receptor nerves in the productive tissue, to feel – and remember – what is going on. And this suggests a need for a closer look at the appeal of the classical physiological metaphor.

PHYSIOLOGICAL METAPHORS Dr Auteri used an illuminating metaphor in his December 1989 article in FiatQuadri, ’From company structure to company system’:

To say that the quadri [middle management] represent the company and that, in carrying out their tasks, they are direzione [management], does not mean we are making a political or essentially ideological statement. Rather, it means underlying the logical consequence of a structural situation which sees the quadri today... as, at the same time, skeleton (hierarchical role), circulatory system (role of feeding information necessary for the work process, and relative feedback) and, lastly, as nervous system (decisional role, of orientation and stimulus) of that organic body which we call the company ... The comparison between a company and the human body is certainly not original, but it constitutes a clear and illuminating reference for how we shall have to understand the model of tomorrow’s company... The ’nervous system’ and the ’circulatory system’ will have an increasingly widespread importance in the company system: this must lead us to the consideration that the relative ways of functioning are... more complex, with respect to the past... Tomorrow’s company will be even more of a complex organic system, comparable to the human body.

At the propaganda level, Dr Auteri proves himself convinced that words have a material force. The concepts have to first motivate middle management and then, through the nervous system, they have to stimulate the ’collaborators’, and finally the workers, the muscles: the ’hands’. It seems that FIAT is concentrating on the integrational aspect of functionalism – which is not an alternative to Taylorist differentiation.

’Objective : Quality’. They run to catch up with the rising sun

At a more practical level, we find the following definitions of the new professional figures (in the context of FIAT’s UTEs).

The line technologist is rather like the GP who has a general professional competence and knows well the personal history of his ’patients’, while the specialized technologist is like the heart surgeon or the orthopaedist, who goes into a particular branch in depth.

And what about the dinosaurs? The April 1991 FiatQuadri lead article on ’The integrated factory’ ends with the following ’eloquent’ note:

The challenge is ambitious, but every flexible strategy means complex problems. An eloquent example comes to us from the animal world. In the merciless struggle for survival... millions of years ago, the dinosaurs became extinct, to make way for more evolved animals... Mammals’ bodies require a more sophisticated control, and hence a bigger and more complicated brain. For the company, as for any human institution, it is the same: flexibility is indispensable, but it has to be paid for with an increasing degree of complexity.

But even if such imagery has no immediate effect on real behaviour, the metaphor of the nervous system could naturalize centralized command structures. Butera (1990), recommended to FIAT middle management, was reviewed thus by il manifesto (6 November 1990):

In place of the castle-enterprise, we find in Butera’s book the enterprise-network – a pulsating organism which has need of a mind, a heart and lots of nerve endings predisposed for reacting to changes in the surrounding environment ... Middle management, the world of the professions and professionalism, is the heart of the enterprise.

Thus biological logic suggests an increasingly specialized and all-controlling brain, which receives messages from the whole body, via a monolithic nervous system (albeit analysed as ’autonomic’ and ’conscious’).

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY METAPHORS Current information technology, however, is attracted towards ’distributed processing architectures’. Parallel processing, networks of relatively autonomous computing centres and layered systems seem to be the logical architectures of increasingly complex systems – though relational databases could be seen as the new integrating factor. In the production circuit, the signals to control have always been the costs, and added value – the gain – of each ’stage’ of the circuit. This is true for a company as well as for the global ’integrated circuit’ (see Levidow, 1990, p. 73). Over and above this, TQM re-dimensions the classical attention to time: circuit response and capacitance (time to market; lean production), synchronization and baud rates (just-in-time; work rates). There is increased attention to the signal-to-noise ratio: a measure of circuit quality, understood as the elimination of factors which disturb the output signal (end product). It is true that you have to control the quality (tolerances) of the components (whether considering resistors or workers) but you also have to consider the operating conditions of the circuit. Above all, control means governing the system, to guarantee a condition of stability. Concepts of control, feedback and regulation, taken from cybernetics, are so much common sense that they can be freely invoked in scientific management texts. For example,

According to J.W. Forrester [1961], companies, like all social systems, may be represented by diagrams in which the activities which are carried out are controlled by a flow of information which describes their performance. This information is continuously analysed by a control centre, which performs the task of controlling and regulating those activities which are critical for the company. These centres, acting as regulators, are obviously also decision- making points. (Brusa, 1983)

This kind of appeal to systems language is certainly not specific to the Total Quality campaign. It acquires a heightened significance, however, as Quality becomes increasingly identified as a technical question, concerning the design and regulation of a productive circuit. A management book on Quality (Tamburrano, 1988) sets out a view of production, using the terms software and hardware in an interesting way:

The study of the fabrication process, in terms of product quality, understood as fitness for use, constitutes that which is defined as process programming. Process programming presents two aspects of a single purpose, which are strictly related: the study of the productive cycle, which we could define as the software of the process; the study of the plant and machinery, which we could define as the hardware of the process... By quality production, we mean that complex of activities connected to the execution of the plan deriving from the programming, and which goes by the more specific name of process control. (pp. 626 – 7)

It is not clear, in this image of process programming, whether there is still a ’liveware’ element, alongside the software and hardware. Rieser refers to ’feedback’ as a way of reading FIAT’s contradictions, from a union point of view:

The insistence on the concept of ’internal customer’... corresponds to an attempt to create and multiply points of feedback which are internal to the company system. Tendentially, the objective is that from every point of the company organization, there emanate feedback impulses towards the disorders ’up line’. Now one of FIAT’s main problems is that these feedback mechanisms do not work; that the ’corrective impulses’ get blocked without reaching their destination. That does not mean that the problems do not get faced, but rather that this happens in an informal and (often) clandestine way, producing solutions for ’getting by’, rather than a correction of the system. The system, that is, lacks transparency. (Lorenzoni and Sabattini, 1990, p. 44)

This union analysis highlights the connection between the social ideology (internal customers) and the systems approach. The info-tech concept of an operating system, as the organization and management of computer resources, suggests the obvious analogy with the economic concept of resource management. If we accept this metaphor, the question of human resource

management becomes that of optimizing responses, reducing resistances, and replacing faulty components. In fact,

’The worker is now expected to behave like a cybernetic organism, a human component in a cybernetic system...’ (Levidow, 1990).

The concept of an economic circuit, or network, begins to be used as a common-sense model. Integrated logistical systems of VANs (Value Added Networks) link together a chain of customers and suppliers, typically using a computerized method of ordering and scheduling.

If we return to the concept of ’enterprise network’, as described in FIAT’s review of Butera (1990), we find:

The ’network’ is characterized by ’nodes’ and ’connections’. The first are entities orientated towards results, capable of cooperating, ’interpreting’ events. The nodes can be internal or external to the juridical – administrative boundaries of the enteiprise... A network, in order to function, has need of culture and operating systems and management, that is, ’rules’. (FiatQuadri, April 1991)

Systems ideology is fuadamenta1 to all of the foregoing arguments. The following extract is from Structured Analysis and Design Technique, with a Foreword written by the ’discoverer’ of the methodology, Douglas T. Ross:

The world and everything in it, including our thoughts about it, can be viewed as a system of interacting systems of systems. A system has boundary, behavior, and substance, each of which is defined by the mutual interaction of that system with other systems, with which it composes still other systems. (Marca and McGowan, 1988, p. xii)

This is the technique I referred to earlier, which we tend to use as one of the instruments for modelling factory processes. It certainly gives authority to our activities as analysts, concretizing workers’ know-how into a scientific form which we can transform into computerized systems. Scientific and technical methodologies are used in the process of transferring control from living labour to that of capital. We have to look more closely at how a greater emphasis on the language of general systems theory implies the fetishism of information. The strategic goal of this phase of capitalist development is that of the definition, control and capitalization of cognitive labour. Workers’ knowledge (together with their self-perception and dignity) is reified and treated as a commodity – the vital commodity – to be accumulated and controlled by capital. Cillario comments on Barcellona (1990), spelling out the distinction:

Intellectual labour (contrasted with manual labour) refers to an empirical phenomenology of work performance; ’cognitive’ labour, on the other hand (contrasted with ordinary labour) refers to meta-process characteristics activated when labour, stepping outside of its routine, ’reflects’ and intervenes in the method of its own procedures. (il manifesto, 9 January 1991)

The question of ’practical reflexivity’ (Gunn, 1991) could be applied here. Cognitive labour relates to ordinary labour as philosophy to science: both relations are internal, social and active. Cillario concludes his article, ’The spirit of reflected knowledge’, with an appeal for a clarification which:

could help to open up a new scenario of analysis of the structure of capital, allowing us to connect the categories of labour processes with those of the economic and cognitive structures of accumulation... The clarification has to regard the role of ’money’ (the functions similar to that of money) which information takes on in communicative exchanges, and with reference to the cognitive structure of capital (that is, of knowledge considered as capital).

Let us remember Merli’s precept: ’One has to have a complete knowledge of the process behaviour.’ The capitalization of cognitive labour is first conceptualized by appeals to systems common sense – and then concretized (’operating procedures are standardized’) – possibly into software (increasingly recognized by accountants as a capital item) and expert systems. Again, referring to a discussion on Butera (1990), we find:

The centre of gravity of the [organizational] design resides in a sort of technological system memory, which accumulates knowledge and experience of production and organizational systems. Not in a precise place, nor in specific subjects, such as in the R&D labs, and worker memory, in the Taylorist factory: it is a deposit of knowledge which unites managers and their subordinates. (il manifesto, 9 January 1991)

THE HUMAN FACTOR: CONTRADICTIONS FIAT wants to engineer, and totally control, a whole system. As a systems analyst, I am particularly sensitive to the way systems concepts are used to justify and naturalize management’s control over industrial relations. This means that FIAT has to minimize the contradictions inherent in their ’human factor’ propaganda. Let us remember Merli’s philosophy: ’The employee is the company itself.’ A more correct formulation would be: ’The employees should be the company itself’: the human factor ideology glosses over the reality of capitalist organization. Sergio Garavini, secretary of the Communist Refoundation Party, wrote, soon after the initial debate on Romiti’s Marentino speech, an article about ’The unresolved contradictions of Romiti’s strategy’. He refers to a ’fundamental contradiction of interests’, and notes Romiti’s ’political and ideological certainty’ that ’the general risk of conflict’ no longer exists. Bob Young (1990) sums up the Gramscian concept of how

’the real relations of power are obscured and internalized in people’s consciousness, thereby enforcing the existing order of society without the use of physical coercion’.

The way this is done depends on which sector of the company’s ’internal market’ is being targeted. A number of contributors to the Italian debate have pointed out top management’s need to renegotiate the implicit pact with middle management. It is increasingly clear that the first, tactical target sector is that of the quadri. Indeed, it was almost immediately evident that the Total Quality rhetoric masked the fact that the operation was strictly top-down. The European Foundation for Quality Management policy document (1990b) specifies the importance of a ’management-led’ policy. A tiny minority of managers and technical staff is supposed to be actively involved – ’convincing or constraining’ the passive majority to do what is objectively necessary.One of the recurring comments of those invited to such management-led Total Quality forums, or company meetings, is to ensure that, if nothing else, TQM provides a common language. Managers from different realities, with different priorities, are led to use ’quality’ terminology as an integrating factor; and this has an effect which goes beyond the contents of what is said. It is common sense: the company’s objectives are naturalized, while worker objections are neutralized. Virtually no one is against ’quality’. It simply goes against the grain to make a shoddy job of something you are capable of doing well. So FIAT, with their slogan of Total Quality, is onto a winner. This factor can be called ’professional identification’. And the company exploits it, even if it is not felt as identification with the company itself. This is certainly an aspect to develop: the following extract suggests an interesting example of the language of contradictions:

The ’cooperation technologies’ [software and the networks for managing office communications] have as their ob- jective the expropriation of the dependents’ intellectual capacity – Federico Butera of Rso-Futura speaks un- ashamedly of ’a mental and emotive world which is getting drawn in to become part of the enterprise’ – without this appearing as an act of domination over their lives... It is no coincidence that management encourages a professional culture, and professionafism. An expedient which comes up against incongruities: anyone who makes professional culture his own, is not too keen on any strong sense of belonging [to a company] : this encourages mobility, both inside and outside the enterprise, becoming a perturbatory element for internal stability. (il manifesto, 6 November 1990)

The culture of professionalism is encouraged at all levels. On the one hand, the company encourages shopfloor workers and office staff alike to see themselves as individual suppliers of goods and services to their ’internal customers’. On the other hand, starting with quality circles, FIAT is working on the group factor. UTEs are to replace the more rigid teams of workers, each with a precisely defined job; inter-functional organization and working groups are supposed to dissolve the rigidities of middle management.

INFORMATION IS SOCIAL RELATIONS Quality should be attributed to men, not to things; and human quality is raised and refined to the extent that man can satisfy a greater number of needs and thus make himself independent of them. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 308)

The theory of Total Quality calls for a serious analysis of its potentially progressive implications. Certainly Dr Romiti would hesitate before claiming any connection with the founder of the Communist Party of Italy. But the Total Quality approach, rightly, shifts the accent from things (finished products) towards the processes, understood as the sum of production, training, information, distribution and consumption relations. And this has a lot in common with the Gramscian concept, in the final analysis. Commodities, things produced for exchange, are nothing but the reification (the visible expression and concrete form) of social relations. Young (1977) argued that, in this sense, science and technology are social relations. The TQM experience suggests that information, in general, increasingly has to be considered in the same way: information is social relations.

There is a space in which the contradictions of this (integrated) functional system could develop, in my opinion. The company emphasis (in theory, though not in practice!) on communication provides a clue. We can agree that product quality (goods or services) depends on the quality of the process, and that the exchange of information between the various parts of the process becomes crucial. One of the elements in this exchange of information is the growing realization that workers who are directly involved in the ’integrated factory’ are capable of managing the process and that one of the major obstacles to improving the process is precisely the present ideology of participation and control. The words ’participation’, ’co-determination’ and ’involvement’ have been stripped of their potentially democratic force. So in order to improve quality – as process – we have to consider industrial relations. We have to improve the quality of the democratic process, to face the real conflicts of interest in a serious way.

FIAT emphasizes that the various company functions have to be integrated, in an organic process. This appeals at a general cultural level. There is certainly a strong need to identify one’s self as part of something organic – to fill a void of sense; but it avoids facing the basic question. The classical Marxist analysis, by which the industrial system developed its own contradictions through the phys- ical interaction (aggregation) of workers in factories, seems to have been negated by flexible manufacturing systems. Workers have been increasingly isolated and disaggregated, physically. Total Quality, though, recognizes the centrality of a greater communicative interaction. So far, experience has shown how difficult it is for FIAT to translate this theory into practice. In particular, there is a predictable resistance on the part of upper middle management to a serious two-way communication. We have to show more clearly that continuous improve- ment depends on a greater transparency in the decision- making process: we cannot do without an effective organization which allows us to learn from our mistakes. The emphasis on communication, if we insist on it – calling FIAT’s bluff, when they don’t respond to criticism – leads us to pose the fundamental question of industrial democracy. This is the broad conclusion drawn by many of the nineteen brief contributions to the union paperback by Lorenzoni and Sabattini, which reports a seminar held in June 1990. Lorenzoni, in her long preface, emphasizes that there is:

A need to constitute a permanent, Piedmont working group, starting from what already exists in terms of knowledge, skills and experience concerning FIAT, and work organization themes. This is a topic with a low degree of internal interaction and communication: bringing the existent out into the open, and socializing it, is therefore an indispensable starting point for an equally indispensable deepening and later comparison with other Italian and foreign experiences. (Lorenzoni and Sabattini, 1990, p. 7)

Sabattini, secretary of the Piedmont section of the national, general union, CGIL, insists, in his summing up, on:

A basic contradiction: on the one hand, FIAT recognizes that the business, in order to make the qualitative leap which is needed, has to restore an active dimension to labour; but on the other hand, they want to confine this active dimension to a purely subaltern collaboration for ends and objectives which are entrusted exclusively to the (albeit enlarged) company management. We can demonstrate the impracticality of a business reformation which does not take account of a real process of industrial democracy. (Lorenzoni and Sabattini, 1990, pp. 114 – 5)

Such an observation is immediately dismissed as ’ideological’. Meanwhile, Romiti speaks positively of Total Quality ’as ideology’. FIAT has no choice but to impose their FIATspeak definition of ’the correct use of communication’, as ideological control; and to insist that their Big Brother technological control is natural and inevitable. The Italian left finds itself at a crossroads. One of the (many) challenges to its (increasingly few) ’organic intellectuals’ is precisely that of a refounded capacity to demonstrate that the future has not been foreclosed. The alternative to FIAT’s definition of communication and control has to be that of insisting on a continuous questioning of purposes.

The union, on this basic question, has its own contradictions to resolve. The contributors referred to here have since declared themselves for the collaborationist line. The ’round table’ published in Quaderni sulla FIAT (Lorenzoni et al., 1991), together with Bertinotti (1991), give a good idea of the reformist/antagonist debate in the context of TQM. Lorenzoni and Rieser (1991), for example, argue that it is in the workers’ interest to expose the inefficiencies and dysfunctions of FIAT management. The real enemy is middle management: the workers should support those elements of top management who offer a collaborative pact, with the prospect of re-legitimating the union, and strengthening its bargaining power.

Revelli (1990) and Bertinotti, on the other hand, stress the dangers of a further attack on worker solidarity. The ’integrated worker’ is called not only to contribute ideas for tightening up control over his own work (for small change), but is expected to denounce his fellow workers (internal suppliers) when they don’t supply him with quality products. TQM language forecloses debate on purposes. It becomes simply ’unrealistic’ to put in question the policy of producing more motor cars. TQM proclaims the human factor as ’crucial’, but cannot accept this factor as critical, in the sense of criticizing capital’s policy-dictating prerogative. Union criticism tends to limit itself to exposing inconsistencies in management practice, without a clear analysis of the antagonisms between capital’s objectives and workers’ interests. Bertinotti, national union leader of the minority left, echoes criticism of the way the union apes management metaphors: ’The dinosaur: a social animal’ (il manifesto, 20 July 1991). Carlini (il manifesto, 24 July 1991) follows up with ’Dinosauri o integrati’. The single word, integmti, can mean integrated circuits or chips – and here has the intentional double meaning, referring to integrated workers. Carlini’s subtitle is ’a parable for the left...’. Although the bulk of the article refers to a 1950s psychological experiment by Solomon Asch, he opens with the dinosaur metaphor. The metaphor is ’sbagliatissima’ – extremely mistaken

’because these large reptiles were perfectly adapted to their environment... and nothing, if it were not for a killer asteroid,... suggested that they were candidates for extinction’.

As Montgomery (1991) warns about ’the dinosaur and other icons’, we risk swallowing these natural metaphors whole – hook, line and sinker. Natural, common-sense values are embodied in the evolution metaphor, turned against ’conservative’ union defence of worker solidarity. Scientific, common-sense values are integrated in the info-tech metaphors, raising the values of ’efficiency’ and control to an inevitable, natural status. These values, expected of the integrated worker, delegitimate possible alternatives – such as social solidarity and industrial democracy – as ’ideological’. The (majority) reformists accept this naturalization of socio-

technical language, and tend to respond in the affirmative, albeit with some embarrassment, to Campetti’s question, ’Are we all in the same boat?’ (il manifesto, 27 June 1991). Revelli admits to ’an Orwellian shiver of uneasiness’ when the union supports management’s idea- fishing campaign, with pamphlets entitled, ’Have you got the idea?’ (’From the crisis of Taylorism to the ”harmonic factory”: FIAT rediscovers Arcadia’, il manifesto, 10 July 1991). The project of formulating alternative purposes, antagonis- tic to TQM’s definition of quality (for example, counterposing process quality/free time), is increasingly unthinkable. Even the (old) common-sense notion that you cannot do a good job if you are pressured to up the rate is displaced by the TQM common-sense logic of global systems efficiency. Thus FIAT’s Newspeak leads us to internalize capital’s values, in the guise of natural metaphors.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To Les Levidow and SaC colleagues for patient criticism of drafts. Thanks to Gabriele Polo and Loris Campetti for the original stimulus, and for their commitment, which is not always rewarded in the short term. The present essay is based on an interview for Quaderni sulla FIAT (Hobson, 1991). Thanks also to the RSJ seminars and ’Science is social relations’, (Young, 1977) – my motivation for reading Marx and Gramsci.

NOTES

1 Il manifesto, ’quotidiano comunista’, is an Italian national daily with a circulation of about 90,000. They carried initial criticism of FIAT’s Total Quality, transcribing Romiti’s Marentino speech from a video made by the company of the ’historic’ occasion. Il manifesto covered the debate on Total Quality extensively. 2 For more about the Italian context, the reader is referred to Revelli (1989), and Quaderni sulla FIAT3 On this occasion, Merli was hotfoot from a presentation (Merli, 1990) at the first EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) Forum, held two days earlier (19 October 1989) at Montreux, Switzerland. The present vice president of the FIAT Group, Umberto Agnelli, was one of the fifteen members of the governing committee. Merli provided a brief historical synthesis of the European response to Japan by national ’character’.

Great Britain: mainly oriented to ’management by norms’, Netherlands: global and long-term. Germany: focus on the technical. France: capillary diffusion, involvement, pragmatic. Italy: trying to understand if it can be an entrepreneur. Sweden: global, intensive but pragmatic.

4 It has to be noted that this law stands very little chance of being interpreted in such a way as to give concrete effect to the words ’only after agreement’. An attempt to enforce FIAT’s observance of the more sensitive Article 5 of this same, fundamental industrial legislation was a notable recent failure. This article is supposed to regulate the diagnosis and classification of illness and accidents at work. 5 Unfortunately, this metaphor has recently reared its head in union circles. Paolo Griseri reports (il manifesto, 3 July 1991) that union delegates who oppose collaboration with management (by withholding contribution of ’quality’ ideas) are termed ’dinosaurs’.

For them, the organization’s leaders [FIOM union, Rivalta] continue to churn out Darwinian metaphors. To be likened to the now extinct giant reptiles may be unpleasant, but it is much less gratifying to be lumped together with the apes. It is taken for granted that in the scale of evolution proposed by the FIOM of Rivalta, Homo sapiens is the new delegate who accepts collaboration with the company.

6 Best (1991) considers ’Metaphors in postmodern science and social theory’. In the present context, I would propose a related essay: ’Chaos in the factory system’! Production systems are highly non-linear and, in the info-tech metaphor, subject to ’noisy’ disturbances, perturbations, etc. To avoid a ’natural’ development of chaotic behaviour, the (mathematical) capitalist operates to control certain ’degrees of freedom’ in the integrated factory system. 7 These ’internal’ relations have to be developed. Gunn (and Best) might be interested in the ’vicious’ circularity of the ’bootstrap theories’ of ’elementary’ particle physics. Which came first: the philosophy or the science?; cognitive labour or ordinary labour?; gluons or hadrons? Total Quality, practically, realizes the political, dynamic nature of the question. (And that questions determine answers.)

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