Engineering compliance and worker resistance in UK further education. The creation of the Stepford lecturer
| Date | 10 August 2012 |
| Pages | 534-554 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/01425451211248541 |
| Published date | 10 August 2012 |
| Author | Kim Mather,Les Worrall,Graeme Mather |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Engineering compliance and
worker resistance in UK further
education
The creation of the Stepford lecturer
Kim Mather
Keele Management School, Keele University, Newcastle-under-Lyme, UK
Les Worrall
Faculty of Business, Environment and Society,
Coventry University, Coventry, UK, and
Graeme Mather
Faculty of Business and Law, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore control and resistance in the UK further education
(FE) sector by examining senior college managers’ attempts to engineer culture change and analysing
lecturers’ resistance to such measures.
Design/methodology/approach – Data were derived from interviews with managers and lecturers
in two English FE colleges and the analysis of college documents. Interview data were analysed
thematically using NVIVO software.
Findings – It was found that college managers sought to build consent to change among lecturers
based on values derived from “business-like” views. Culture change initiatives were framed within the
language of empowerment but lecturers’ experiences of change led them to feel disempowered and
cynical as managers imposed their view of what lecturers should be doing and how they should
behave. This attempt to gain control of the lecturers’ labour process invoked the “Stepford” lecturer
metaphor used in the paper. Paradoxically, as managers sought to create lecturers who were less
resistant to change, individualised resistance intensified as managers’ attempts to win hearts and
minds conspicuously failed.
Research limitations/implications – The paper draws on data from two case study colleges and
this limits the generalisability of its findings.
Practical implications – The paper provides a critical perspective on the received wisdom of
investing in stylised change programmes that promise to win staff over to change but which may
alienate those they purpo rt to empower and ultimately lead to degenerative wo rkplace relations.
Originality/value – The paper offers new insights into culture change from the juxtaposed, polarised
views of senior managers and lecturers, while highlighting the negative consequences of imposing
change initiatives from above.
Keywords England, Further education, Organizational change, Academic staff,
Change management, Organizational culture, Resistance, Labour process, Management control
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The film Stepford Wives focused on the lives of women in a fictitious American
suburb who happily subscribed to a division of labour premised on meeting their
husbands’ needs: they engaged in acceptable women’s societies and dressed acco rding
to protocols around how “feminine”, “attractive” (to men) women should dress. As the
plot unfolds it becomes apparent that the women are robots, constr ucted and controlled
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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Employee Relations
Vol. 34 No. 5, 2012
pp. 534-554
rEmeraldGroup PublishingLimited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/01425451211248541
534
ER
34,5
by powerful men to serve their needs. As new men join the community they quickly
succumb to the allure of having docile, subservien t, well-dressed, well-behaved and
attractive wives. The experiment falters when one wom an, a new resident, questions
the behaviours of her friends and neighbours, and ultimately uncovers the sinister
programme led by the men “at the lodge”.
This is a narrative taken from a film: a story of control and of conformity to
preconceived notions of what it is to be a perfect woman, wife, mother and a female
member of a community, as defined by a group of powerful men. This narrative
surfaced during our research in the fu rther education (FE) sector as several lecturers
referred to being required to become a “Stepfo rd lecturer”. This fictional allegory
provides the impetus to this paper in which we explore two distinct themes: the first
explores college managers’ attempts to engineer consent to change; in the secon d
theme, we explore how lecturers expressed their resistance to such change. Our focus
is on attempts to engineer culture change in two FE colleges and how this can be
located within theoretical debates about the means of controlling behaviours and
attitudes within organisations and how those affected by change appear to resist.
Consequently we highlight lecturers’ responses to change initiatives by focusing on
individualised forms of resistance which encompass vocalised opp osition, cynicism,
surface compliance and, to use a militar y analogy, “dumb insolence”.
Underlying developments in each college was a senior management view that
lecturers both needed to be – and could be – “aligned” to some form of unifying “can
do” culture or behavioural stereotype. This implies the realignment and re-education
of lecturers, and their immediate managers, to accept and confor m to new ways of
working, behaving and thinking. What this means in practice is that lecturers were
expected to perform in prescribed ways, as defined by a dominant managerial
discourse. A useful way of conceptualising this is through Ball’s (2003, p. 216) analysis
of “performativity”, which he defined as “a technology, a culture and a mode of
regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive,
control, attrition and change” in which the compliant “perfo rmances” of individuals,
judged through the eyes of their managers, serve as proxy measures of productivity
or organisational worth. Ball comments that the issue of who controls the field of
judgement in which these assessments are made is crucial and concluded that the
teachers he had studied had found that their previously held values had be en
“displaced by the terrors of performativity” (2003, p. 216).
We see recent developments in FE as an instance of changes affecting the UK public
sector more generally as waves of New Public Managemen t (NPM) have washed
over the entire sector (Hood, 1995; Ferlie et al., 1996; Greuning, 2001). We argue that
NPM can be conceptualised as one aspect of the Taylorisation debate: specifically,
management decision making has become increasingly separated from task execution
with the effect of emboldening and reifying managerialism and creating a new
cadre of public sector managers (Worrall et al., 2010). As Cooper and Taylor (2000)
point out, the separation of task conception from task execution serves two purposes:
it cheapens and degrades labour and it facilitates management control. Our argument
is that the associated preoccupation with performance, and specifically its
management and measurement, is a natural outcome of the logic of NPM which has
come to dominate in ways that have “affected workers’ experiences of work as the locus
of control over the pace and nature of jobs has become increasingly contested” (Worrall
et al., 2010, p. 118). Recently, there has been an expansion in the number[1] and
organisational prominence of senior managers in the public sector who, we argue,
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Engineering
compliance in
UK FE
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