Embedding Process: Situating Process in Work Relations

Introduction

In social science, process has become paired with structure as each concept is defined in relation to the other. ‘Structure’ is invoked to characterize something comparatively enduring and static, such as a framework or a generative mechanism. ‘Process', in contrast, is deemed to be comparatively dynamic and transient. In the field of organization studies, analyses of process accompanied an expansion of social scientific thinking in business schools (e.g., Silverman, 1970; Burrell and Morgan, 1979). A boost was then received from the sjgnificance ascribed to ‘processes’ in prominent consultancy prescriptions – notably, organizational learning (Senge, 1990), where ‘personal mastery’ is conceived as a ‘process', (ibid: 142) as well as from business process reengineering (Hammer, and Champy, 1993). As interest in ‘process’ has steadily burgeoned from a low base,1 so too have the meanings ascribed to it (Hernes, and Weik, 2007). In this chapter, ‘labour process’ analysis is considered another significant but seldom recognized variant of process studies.

The approach adopted here heeds the caution that ‘in the absence of an unambiguous foundational truth in the social sciences, the only sensible way forward can be conscious pluralism’ (Pettigrew, 2001: S62). In its interpretation of ‘conscious pluralism', the chapter points to the varied politico-ethical bases of analyses of process (Ezzamel and Willmott, 2014). More specifically, forms of hegemonic power associated with different ethical orientations are understood to coalesce and become institutionalized in plural methodologies devised within diverse epistemic cultures (Knorr Ketina, 1999).

Politico-ethical considerations are, arguably, of key importance in generating, endorsing, [Page 617]and subscribing to particular forms of knowledge (e.g., of ‘process'). The connection is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in studies that reject, and then radically counteract, the myth of value-free social science – for example, in feminist critiques of patriarchy in science (see Harding, 1986; Fox Keller and Longino, 1996). Ontological and epistemological assumptions that, in conventional analysis, are considered to underpin and inform social scientific knowledge are reappraised as articulations of politico-ethical commitments. It is those distinctive commitments that authorize, yet can never fully realize, specific closings of accounts with reality (James, 1983). Accordingly, the plausibility or validity of competing conceptions and accounts of ‘process’ are not assessed in relation to their claimed correspondence to features ascribed, self-referentially, to what they seek to mirror or capture. It is assumed, instead, that knowledge of such features does not exist independently of the methodological means of their identification and analysis. Moreover, successful – that is, plausible – representations are seen to rely upon productive, yet simultaneously restrictive, exercises of power institutionalized as ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1984). Regimes invariably carry some measure of moral force – force that surfaces when norms are breached – as they are by proponents of labour process analysis in relation to mainstream accounts of workplace relations – and steps are taken to restore normality.

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