Introduction
Control and isolation in
the management of
empowerment
David Collins
The author
David Collins is Senior Lecturer in HRM at Sunderland
Business School, University of Sunderland, Sunderland, UK.
Abstract
Attempts to reanalyze the concept of empowerment as it
relates to management. Tracing the origins and nature of
management, outlines a case for viewing empowerment as
part of a larger system of management control innovations,
or cocktails of control. Does not seek to debunk or dismiss
empowerment as simply founded on control, and so unwor-
thy of serious analysis. Instead, using the concept of gover-
nance, attempts to analyze how managers use the rhetoric of
empowerment to secure control. From here analyzes the
limits to managerial control, founded on empowerment.
Offers observations and conclusions for future research on
empowerment.
Empowerment in Organizations
Volume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · pp. 29–39
© MCB University Press · ISSN 0968-4891
29
Commentators differ over the specific chrono-
logical origins of management: some date it as a
modern phenomenon, while others would claim
the existence of management principles as far
back as 6000 BC[1-3]. However, most would
agree that no matter when management as a
concept emerged, it is clear that from the outset,
managers have been engaged in an ongoing
struggle to secure control over output levels and
to secure labor discipline.
Over time, in their attempts to ensure disci-
pline and control output levels, managers have
experimented with a range of managerial cock-
tails. Past decades have produced cocktails such
as management by objectives (MBO) and man-
agement by walking about (MBWA) to name
only two. Currently empowerment is a key
ingredient in the cocktail consumed by manage-
ment. This paper sets out both to stir and to sip
from this managerial cocktail.
Cocktails of control
Throughout the history of management, man-
agers have experimented with a variety of con-
trol methods. Reflecting the eclectic gathering
and mixing of ideas and orientations we might,
with some legitimacy, refer to these as cocktails
of control.
Fordist production methods, for example,
made use of both the stopwatch and wider
forms of control which, reflecting demographic
changes and wider cultural movements,
attempted to extend the scope of managerial
cocktails beyond the factory gate, into the social
life of employees[4] and into their family life
more generally[5]. We should note, therefore,
that control innovations tend to emerge and
gain popularity under specific historical, cultur-
al and social circumstances and, to some
degree, will change in response to changes in
sociopolitical ideas and movements. However,
we should also make explicit the fact that man-
agers are led to seek out and experiment with
control innovations since any managerial solu-
tion or cocktail developed to secure managerial
control is almost certain to be incomplete. As
Bendix[6, p. 256] notes:
 Control and isolation in the management of empowerment
David Collins
Beyond what commands can effect and supervi-
sion can control, beyond what incentives can
induce and penalties prevent, there exists an
exercise of discretion important even in relatively
menial jobs, which managers of economic enter-
prises seek to enlist for the achievement of man-
agerial ends.
Systems of management control, then, are open
to re-evaluation and challenge from competing
schools of thought, (often represented by man-
agement consultants), and from subordinates.
However, whereas subordinates “making out”
under a particular system of control tend to
react in ways designed to short-circuit or expose
the flaws of the system, management consul-
tants seek both to expose the flaws of existing
systems and to proffer new ways to deal with the
problems of management.
Control and empowerment
Beginning from the premiss that managers are
engaged in an ongoing struggle to maintain
control, and to secure discipline over workers,
this paper will reanalyze the concept of empow-
erment. To this end the paper is structured as
follows. Empowerment will be examined as an
innovation in managerial control. In undertak-
ing this examination, the facilitating factors
which have focussed attention on empowerment
will be examined. From here a critical appraisal
of empowering initiatives will be launched.
However, the paper will not seek to dismiss
empowerment as simply founded on control,
and so unworthy of serious consideration or
further analysis. Instead this paper will argue
that, far from dismissing and debunking the
idea of empowerment, we should take the
notion of empowerment very seriously indeed.
The paper will argue that empowerment repre-
sents an important focus of analysis, not
because it has rejigged relations at work, but
because it is at the forefront of attempts to rejig
the appearance and symbolism of relations at
work. Empowerment, then, is an issue deserv-
ing of further study because, in a symbolic way,
it represents an attempt to reshape the rhetoric
of organization.
Rose[7] argues that an understanding of the
process of governance represents the key to
understanding the process by which managers
secure the consent of subordinates in the
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Empowerment in Organizations
Volume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · 29–39
workplace. Governance, then, relates not to the
imposition of control but to the realignment of
control whereby managerial concerns are
aligned with the mainstream rhetoric and con-
cerns of democratic societies. Following Rose,
this paper will argue that the expertise of psy-
chology has had a profound effect on labour
discipline, since at the level of rhetoric, it sup-
plies coherence and legitimacy to managerial
action. Governance, therefore, represents a
useful means by which to understand the role of
the rhetoric of empowerment in granting legiti-
macy to managerial action and so, facilitating
management control.
Taylor et al.[8], discussing Japanese foreign
direct investment, document a system of disci-
pline and control, mediated by labor turnover
which, in aligning itself with the rhetoric of duty
and individual contribution, is hinged on gover-
nance. They note, for example, how manage-
ment maintained consent and control through:
“the entrenchment of an ethos in which any dis-
satisfaction could be represented as an individ-
ual failure to deserve employment”[8, p. 222].
Similarly, a BBC television program (Situa-
tion Vacant, BBC 2, 9 February 1995), which
tracked candidates through the recruitment and
selection procedures of a major toy retailer,
allows us further insight into these processes of
control. The documentary demonstrated how
the manager of the store in question was able to
portray those who rejected the ethos of the
company; that managers should work, perhaps
100 hours and be paid for 40, as “ducking out”.
Indeed the impression given was not just that
those who quit had not deserved the opportuni-
ty in the first place, but that those who elected
not to work for the company were as good as
opting out of some civic responsibility.
Much of this control is rooted in the form
and rhetoric of selection techniques, and in
work design initiatives. These initiatives are
rooted in the “psy” sciences which, accordingly,
play a key role in framing relations at work. On
the impact of the “psy” sciences Rose[7, p. 4]
tells us that:
their role is much more than the legitimation of
power. They forge new alignments between the
rationales and techniques of power and the values
and ethics of democratic societies.
Viewed in this way it is clear that, far from
reducing managerial control over work,
 Control and isolation in the management of empowerment
David Collins
managers through the vocabulary of empower-
ment, are attempting to enhance managerial
control by reclothing it in the rhetoric and
concerns of democracy.
Like the “psy” sciences which underpin it,
empowerment constitutes an extremely potent
means of ensuring labor discipline, therefore,
since it:
achieves its effects not through the threat of
violence or constraint, but by way of the persua-
sion inherent in its truths, the anxieties stimulated
by its norms and the attraction exercised by the
images of life and self it offers to us[7, p. 10].
Focussing particularly on the concept of isola-
tion contained within Rose’s view of gover-
nance, this paper will investigate the promise
and the limits of empowerment. However, in
order to do this it is first necessary to analyze the
economic and political factors which have
allowed empowerment to emerge as the latest
control innovation.
The rise of empowerment
Like any control initiative, the rise of empower-
ment can only be understood within a larger
framework of political economy, since without
this wider view of context, we lack any sensible
measures to explain how ideas, such as empow-
erment, become thinkable. Since, in manage-
ment circles, empowerment rose to prominence
during the latter part of the 1980s, it seems
sensible to suggest that the concept can only be
understood when set against a consideration of
the changing market and political conditions of
this decade.
‘…in reacting to foreign competition
managers have been encouraged and
indeed have encouraged others to think
of management control and
organizational success as bound up with
national identity…’
Throughout the 1980s, human resource man-
agement (HRM) emerged as a key focus for
management attention. Philosophically,
empowerment and HRM have close links. Thus
we can learn much about empowerment by
analyzing HRM. Indeed it could be argued that
empowerment is, in fact, little more than the
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Empowerment in Organizations
Volume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · 29–39
current incarnation of HRM, at least in its
“soft” form[9].
Any attempt to understand HRM must be
focussed on the market. HRM takes its inspira-
tion from the need to address changing market
conditions, and the need to satisfy customer
requirements[10]. To understand the concepts
of HRM and empowerment, therefore, we must
make some attempt to understand the economic
and political significance of these changing
market conditions.
There is no doubt that for a range of industri-
al concerns, competition has become more
intense. However, in reacting to foreign compe-
tition managers have been encouraged and
indeed have encouraged others to think of
management control and organizational success
as bound up with national identity. Part of
HRM’s potency, therefore, relates to its ability
to forge linkages between the rhetoric of democ-
racy and the rhetoric of management practice.
Thus Kanter[11, p. 13], setting out her own
personal mission and hinting at the contribution
she hopes to make to American management
and business, notes:
Cheering for American Companies in the interna-
tional marketplace is not just a matter of national
pride; it is the best hope we have for ensuring that
our standard of living can be maintained, let alone
improved, for ourselves and our children.
Similarly, Peter Parker, in the introduction to
The Art of Japanese Management[12, p. xiii]
notes:
Japanese competitiveness has become one of the
paramount economic events of the post-war
world. Nowadays our mirror on the wall is no
longer giving the West the flattering answers of the
fairy-tale … Now the mirror’s voice seems to have
cracked a bit; the tone has changed. Rather shakily
it suggests we take a second opinion.
As these quotations show, management practi-
tioners have been caught up in a series of events
which have questioned the activities and orien-
tations of management. This has led to a search
for new cocktails of control and in the process of
developing these, managers, reflecting the
notion of interdependency assumed by soft
HRM models, have repackaged control in the
rhetoric of democratic freedoms and national
identity.
However, we should note that managers
would have been unable to sell this package to
 Control and isolation in the management of empowerment
David Collins
workers without the aid of other supporting
voices or agencies. Writing from a Marxist
perspective, Holloway[13, p. 160] notes: “man-
agement depends on the state to provide a
disciplined environment for the exploitation of
the workforce and the accumulation of capital.”
Thus a further factor promoting interest in
empowerment which should be noted, has been
a change in the political environment and an
associated attempt to reconfigure cultural atti-
tudes toward business and enterprise. Examin-
ing the British context Keat[14, p. 1] argues
that:
During the course of the 1980s, the idea of an
enterprise culture emerged as the central motif in
political thought and practice of the Conservative
government in Britain. Its radical programme of
economic and institutional reform had earlier
been couched primarily in the rediscovered lan-
guage of economic liberalism, with its appeal to
the efficiency of markets, the liberty of individuals
and the non-interventionist state. But this pro-
gramme has increasingly also come to be repre-
sented in “cultural” terms, as concerned with the
attitudes, values and forms of self-understanding
embedded in both individual and institutional
activities. Thus the project of economic recon-
struction has apparently been supplemented by, or
at least partly redefined as, one of cultural recon-
struction – the attempt to transform Britain into
an “enterprise culture”.
Similarly Huczynski[15, p. 38] notes:
that the Thatcher government’s promotion of the
notion of “popular capitalism” and the “enterprise
culture” with its critique of the traditional educa-
tion system had given legitimacy to popular
management assumptions. It had revitalized them,
and had led to their extension to all forms of
management education.
It is against this backdrop of changed economic
conditions and attempts to reshape political and
economic realities that empowerment has been
promoted as the key ingredient by which man-
agers are to secure the promise of HRM. How-
ever, while managers may have reconfigured the
language of labor control, it is not so clear that
the concept of empowerment has, in any mean-
ingful way, altered structures of control.
To examine this issue it is necessary to ana-
lyze empowerment as defined by supporters of
the concept. From a consideration of these
definitions the promise and limits of empower-
ment may be analyzed.
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Empowerment in Organizations
Volume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · 29–39
Defining empowerment
Given that management innovations emerge to
address the problems of ensuring discipline and
control, it should be of no surprise that they
often exhibit similarities or build from the same
basic ideas. Empowerment has much in
common with previous control initiatives. In
particular it shares a common ancestry with
initiatives such as autonomous working schemes
and worker participation schemes. Thinking
back to the business requirements of HRM, the
logic of this becomes clear.
‘…we could say that quality products and
services require worker commitment and
worker “ownership” of problems. In
short, effective participation in work
springs from a sense of empowerment…’
According to Pateman’s[16] line of analysis,
participation and empowerment are natural
corollaries since effective participation is born of
a feeling of political efficacy. In more managerial
terms, we could say that quality products and
services require worker commitment and
worker “ownership” of problems. In short,
effective participation in work springs from a
sense of empowerment. This much on empow-
erment may be understood intuitively. Whether
any more reflective analysis underpins the con-
cept of empowerment within management
literature is less apparent.
In fact, writers on empowerment seem to be
quite coy when examining the concept. Within
the management literature, there appears to be a
taste for home-spun examples. Here, concepts
are defined by analogy. Fox[17], for example,
characterizes the dynamics of empowerment in
terms of a child embarking on an unsupervised
shopping trip. Empowerment, she tells us,
occurs when the child is briefed to buy a certain
article of clothing, say trousers, and is trusted to
make the right choice as to which style and
brand of trousers to buy, without further adult
supervision. Martin and Nicholls[18],
discussing commitment at work, develop a line
of argument similar to Fox’s. Thus commitment
for Martin and Nicholls refers to giving all of
yourself at work, and is contrasted with
compliance.
 Control and isolation in the management of empowerment
David Collins
However, definition by analogy is the thief of
informed debate. Just what does the relationship
between a child and a parent illuminate about
the relationship between peers at work, or
between boss and subordinate? And just what
does it mean to give all of yourself at work?
In order to understand the significance of
empowerment as a concept, and in order to
understand the role of empowering initiatives
within managerial control systems, it is neces-
sary to examine empowerment in more depth.
Definitions of participation
As noted earlier the concepts of empowerment
and participation have much in common. We
might expect, therefore, that they would exhibit
definitional similarities.
Participation is a problematic concept to
define since it is generally acknowledged to be a
highly vague term – a term characterized by
ambiguity and semantic elasticity. In this way,
commentators on participation acknowledge,
not a single definition of participation but a
continuum of definitions, reflective of different
world views[19]. A version of this continuum is
presented in Figure 1. Following Bendix[6], the
continuum is bounded by participation which
allows workers to exercise a veto over policy
developments at one extreme, and by the
absence of formal participative structures and
procedures at the other. Bendix notes that
worker engagement, above and beyond the
contractual requirements set out by manage-
ment, is always required to produce results. The
continuum scale, therefore, begins not at zero
participation but at “some” participation and
extends toward some idea of workers’ control.
Like participation, empowerment may also
be represented along a continuum. One way of
Figure 1 A logical continuum of employee involvement and participation
One-way
information Joint decision
exchange making
No form of Joint
consultation
employee
involvement
catered for
Empowerment in Organizations
Volume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · 29–39
bounding such a continuum would be to con-
sider the roles, either adopted by or ascribed to
managers and workers in the process of empow-
erment. In a sense, then, the continuum offered
here invites a consideration of the character of
empowerment; a consideration of the rights and
duties of each party.
On the left side of the proposed continuum,
empowerment takes a passive form. This seems
to be the form which managers are keen to
promote. Here primacy is placed on the role of
manager as leader and empowerer of others.
Those siding with this type of view tend to stress
the need for managers to develop and share
strategic visions with subordinates. They also
stress the need to provide opportunities for
teamworking so that workers may collaborate on
a range of production-oriented problems.
‘…Participation is a problematic concept to
define since it is generally acknowledged
to be a highly vague term – a term
characterized by ambiguity and semantic
elasticity…’
At this end of the continuum, the concept of
empowerment seems to turn on some notion of
accountability; accountability to your team and
accountability for the work supplied to cus-
tomers. If we consider that most managerial
control initiatives current within organizations,
have more than a flavor of “After Japan” about
them, and that many managerial initiatives
represent attempts to tailor and adopt Japanese
practices, then it should be no surprise that in
mimicking a highly corporatist state, we adopt a
vision of empowerment which stresses duty
above rights[20].
Towards the right-hand side of the conti-
nuum, empowerment takes on a much more
active character. Here a greater stress is placed
on rights and so, empowerment is no longer
something which has to be conferred. Instead
empowerment takes place when workers act
with a sense of their own power and vitality. At
Worker
control this end of the continuum, management do not
confer empowerment on workers. Instead work-
ers, with a sense of their own capability, act to
wrest control from managers[21,22].
33
 Control and isolation in the management of empowerment
David Collins
Control, participation and
empowerment
In line with our earlier discussion of cocktails of
control, we should note as Ramsay[23,24] has,
that over the last century or so, innovations in
participation have alternately waxed and waned.
Ramsay argues that this cyclical pattern of
institution and dissolution is reflective of strug-
gles over control at work. Thus, when managers
have been confronted with challenges to man-
agerial control, he argues, they have altered
their control structures to institute worker
participation schemes. Ramsay argues that such
participation schemes are used to head off or
deflect challenges to managerial authority and
legitimacy.
‘…Thus managers became interested in
participation schemes, in the 1960s and
1970s, as workers began to pursue their
own empowerment…’
Reconciling participation and empowerment,
we can see that managers develop an interest in
participation schemes when workers begin to
assert themselves, and work together with a
sense of their own potency.
Thus managers became interested in
participation schemes, in the 1960s and 1970s,
as workers began to pursue their own
empowerment. We can see, too, that in setting
up participation schemes, managers hoped to
deflect or temper worker aspirations so that,
instead of combining to wrest control from
management, workers would settle for being
“empowered”.
Recently the work of Ramsay has come under
fire from Ackers et al.[25]. Ramsay’s detractors
have argued that, throughout the 1980s, man-
agers have become more committed to partici-
pation schemes when, according to Ramsay’s
line of analysis, managers should have been
dismantling these schemes or allowing them to
fall into disrepair.
As the following sections will show, this
apparent paradox demonstrates the usefulness
of the concept of governance, in the examina-
tion of empowerment.
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Empowerment in Organizations
Volume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · 29–39
Governance and empowerment
In previous papers I have argued that the logic
underpinning empowerment initiatives is, in
fact, disempowering[19,26]. These papers
argued that gauging interest in participation on
a simple count of schemes in operation is a very
crude system of measurement for issues of such
complexity. Instead the papers argued that what
is important, is the type and scope of participa-
tion allowed by these schemes. Thus while we
can readily acknowledge that managers may
well have instituted new schemes over the last
decade or so, we should not equate this with an
extension of the scope of participation, or an
extension in the roles and rights offered to
workers. Indeed the experience of the 1980s
points to managers simultaneously increasing
their interest in participative schemes while
downgrading the type of worker input allowed
[27, 28].
In the name of competition, managers have
sought to tap into and control worker talent,
and in the name of empowerment managers
have been able to disempower. This is the crux
of governance.
The governance of empowerment
Most commentators agree that the nature of the
competitive process is now such that firms must
mobilize all of their assets – especially the
human ones. Thus the message of soft HRM is
that managers and workers are now caught up in
new relations of interdependence which make
methods of control and strategies based on
compliance less effective. However, the history
of management interest in such innovations
reminds us that concepts, such as empower-
ment, must be understood within a larger
framework of managerial control and discipline.
Indeed earlier sections have argued that empow-
erment has become part of general discourse in
a period when managers have been clawing back
control and prerogative. In terms of governance,
this process is representative of a period when
the rhetoric of democracy and liberalism has
been mobilized to promote a vision of empower-
ment which, when examined closely is found to
turn on managerially constructed notions of
duty and loyalty. Far from reducing managerial
power, therefore, the rhetoric of empowerment
 Control and isolation in the management of empowerment
David Collins
has played a key role in facilitating the reconsti-
tution of, and advancement of, managerial
power and prerogative.
To demonstrate this, the remainder of this
paper will examine the plants of foreign direct
investors such as Nissan and Mazda since with
their “new style” labor agreements and their
claims to have revolutionized working practices,
these plants, represent prime sites for the analy-
sis of the role of governance in securing labor
control[13, 29-32].
Governance, control and isolation
Rose[7] tells us that in order to govern a popula-
tion we must, first, be able to set that population
apart. He argues that:
to govern a population one needs to isolate it as a
sector of reality, to identify certain characteristics
and processes proper to it, to make its features
notable, speakable, writable, to account for them
according to certain explanatory schemes[7, p. 6].
Isolation plays a key role in the process of gover-
nance and so we will seek to examine the role
which isolation plays in allowing managers to
forge alignments between mainstream democra-
tic ideals and the aims and goals of manage-
ment. In particular this section will examine two
interrelated aspects of isolation; the first relates
to the physical isolation of these establishments
and the isolation from industry customs and
practices which this promotes. The second
aspect of isolation, studied here, concerns the
isolation of workers from ideas and structures
which seek to promote or defend the rights of
workers vis-à-vis the duties imposed by manage-
ment.
‘…in their attempts to construct reality,
managers are keenly aware of the need
to remove the hindrances of past
customs and practices…’
Isolation is most obvious in the physical location
of these plants [31]. Often greenfield sites are
selected for the construction and development
of these plants, since such areas have no prior
workplace histories or traditions. Alternatively
management may select derelict brownfield sites
which, having associations with previous man-
agerial and industrial “failures”, signal the
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Empowerment in Organizations
Volume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · 29–39
inappropriateness of prior traditions and histo-
ry[32]. Isolation is important, therefore since, in
their attempts to construct reality, managers are
keenly aware of the need to remove the hin-
drances of past customs and practices. Thus the
physical isolation of these plants plays an impor-
tant role both in bolstering management
rhetoric and in isolating the workforce from the
customs and practices of the industry which
workers developed to promote their collective
rights.
Yet for governance to operate effectively in
the workplace, it is not enough just to isolate
one population from another. For any particular
population, governance can only operate with
full effect, if within that population, the man-
agement message is put across in full, with
minimal dilution, contradiction or parody. To
achieve this – to allow management to commu-
nicate its “vision” in its entirety – control over
the nature and structures of communication is
required. Here, as the earlier quotation from
Taylor showed, the processes of worker selection
and termination play important roles in ensur-
ing the isolation or individualization of the
worker.
Fucini and Fucini[32] document the lengthy
selection process used by Mazda as they pre-
pared to open their first US plant. They note
that the selectors stressed the need for workers
to demonstrate their normative commitment to
the company. In the group selection exercises
and problem-solving sessions, which formed an
important part of the selection process, workers
were expected to develop process innovations.
However, Fucini and Fucini use the insight of
an experienced factory worker to demonstrate
the contradictions inherent in these process
innovations. Thus the experienced hand had
misgivings over the naïve enthusiasm of his
fellow candidates. Unlike the others, many of
whom had no previous manufacturing experi-
ence, this man could see that the “kaizen-ing” of
tasks was not cost free and in the long term
would lead to job losses.
Graham’s work[33] further pierces the mysti-
fication and decontextualization[34] of the
labor process which is central to kaizen training.
Unlike the managerial celebrations of kaizen,
she notes that, when any particular kaizen
improvement is put in place, the process
improvement will place costs on workers
 Control and isolation in the management of empowerment
David Collins
up-stream and downstream, since the “kaizen-
ed” workers will now require a greater feed-rate
from the work space prior to theirs, and by
pushing work out more quickly, they will also
pressurize workers, downstream, to process
their work more quickly. Thus any “kaizen-ing”
of work will cause a ripple effect throughout the
organization which, since the plants are run at
an extremely high pace, will force other groups
to improve just to make life tolerable[19]. What
might be called competitive kaizen-ing, then, is
facilitated by the pace of work and by manageri-
al control of communications and norms. Here
teams and team leaders play a key role in manu-
facturing isolation.
In HRM systems, first line supervisors play
an important and more central role in the man-
agement of human resources. Indeed in such
systems these workers are normally retitled as
team leaders to express their role in forging new
ideas and commitments. Backed by the rhetoric
of democracy, team leaders play a key role in
ensuring the engagement of conforming work-
ers, or the extreme isolation of non-
conformists[8,34,35].
‘…In these ways, the rhetoric of
empowerment, and competitiveness,
serves both to isolate workers and to
insulate management…’
Within HRM systems these appear to be the
two alternative forms of making-out, one stable
and supportive, the other precarious and lonely
– but really these amount to the same thing,
since in committing yourself to the concept of
being empowered, you must offer an open-
ended commitment to the company. However,
we can see that the terms of exchange are not
fully reciprocal.
The managerial concept of empowerment
stresses duty over rights, thus any commitment
from the company will be conditional on contin-
ued conformance, and the continuing demon-
stration of a much more open-ended commit-
ment on the part of the employee. And with
workers isolated as individuals and isolated from
previous traditions, managers are able to define
skepticism, or disquiet, as a personal failure or
as “ducking out.”
In these ways, the rhetoric of empowerment,
and competitiveness, serves both to isolate
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Empowerment in Organizations
Volume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · 29–39
workers and to insulate management. In this
way, as the next section will argue, empowering
initiatives play a key role in re-forming organiza-
tions and organizational realities.
Re-forming and reforming organizations
Viewed in terms of governance, empowerment
is not primarily concerned with the physical
restructuring of organizations. Indeed so-called
empowering initiatives do little to change the
control structures or the physical lay-out of
organizations. Instead empowerment plays a key
role in how we are encouraged to think about
and visualize reality. Empowerment and HRM,
then, do not change organizations in a physical
sense, rather they work to locate, inform and
legitimize managerial activity. In this way the
concept of empowerment serves not to reduce
managerial control, but facilitates and extends
this control through the manipulation of norms
and values.
As Keenoy and Anthony[34] hint, isolation
promotes the manufacture of reality in a decon-
textualized way, and from such cultural manipu-
lation, managers are better placed to control
and restructure the organization in a physical
sense. Put more succinctly: by re-forming atti-
tudes, managers hope to reform organizations.
As Wilmott[36, p. 60] notes: “language con-
structs reality rather than simply reflecting it”
(original emphasis).
This is represented in Figure 2 as an iterative
process. However, the managerial construction
of reality and the reformation of organizations,
like all managerial attempts to control and
discipline, is bound to be incomplete. Thus,
while empowerment represents a powerful
means to promote control by rejigging the
Figure 2 Organizational restructuring
Attitudinal restructuring
Organizational re-form
Physical restructuring
Organizational reform
 Control and isolation in the management of empowerment
David Collins
symbolism of relations at work, this attempt at
reconfiguration will be open to challenge. As the
next section will argue, worker experience of
labor discipline and control can, in spite of the
rhetoric of management, lead to the recontextu-
alization of the labor process. In such situations
effective challenges to managerial control may
emerge where workers unite to resist
collectively.
Management cocktails – the after taste
Like all cocktails of control, empowerment
operates with an incomplete grip of the moral
universe. Both Graham[33] and the
Fucinis[32], for example, have demonstrated
the limits which worker experience of work
places on managerial empowering initiatives.
Experience, therefore, plays a key role in com-
bating the moral grip of empowerment.
Fucini and Fucini, for example, note the
rhetorical strength of management initiatives
such as empowerment. However they also
document a process whereby worker innocence
turned to bitterness. They document a growing
awareness of collective strength and a growing
willingness among workers to empower them-
selves based on their common experience of
work, of compulsory overtime and of industrial
injury.
Graham’s work, however, demonstrates a
further weak spot in the governance process at
work. She notes, based on her covert participant
observation research, that workers are learning
to short-circuit aspects of the isolationism built
into these methods of managerial control.
Whereas Fucini and Fucini draw attention to
the process whereby workers through the shared
experience of work and control, come to lose
their innocence and so learn to confront man-
agement and overcome their isolation, Gra-
ham’s work points to attacks occurring on isola-
tion during the process of selection itself.
As we have seen, HRM systems place great
stress on selection techniques. During the selec-
tion process managers attempt to hire workers
who say the right sorts of things and who
demonstrate appropriate character traits such as
teamworking and problem-solving abilities.
However, Graham notes that from the very
initial stages of their contact with the company,
workers in a limited way and as individuals, are
37
Empowerment in Organizations
Volume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · 29–39
attempting to circumvent the selection proce-
dures. She notes, for example, the willingness of
workers to trade, what we might call, selection
secrets. This type of behavior represents an
explicit and calculative approach to “commit-
ment”; workers are aware that they must sell
managers a particular image in order to secure
employment, and so they attempt to learn the
appropriate tricks and phrasing which selectors
look out for. There is evidence, therefore, that
even during the processes of selection workers
are already rejecting key elements of the moral
universe constructed for them.
‘…workers, in their relations with the
company, weigh up both the terms of
exchange and the opportunities and
costs associated with dissent…’
We can see then, that workers are not the simple
innocents or dupes which Fucini and Fucini
tend to portray. Indeed Graham hints that
workers, in their relations with the company,
weigh up both the terms of exchange and the
opportunities and costs associated with dissent.
Thus where Fucini and Fucini see innocence,
Graham sees a control system characterized by
worker isolation, where new recruits are natural-
ly keen to demonstrate the appearance of com-
mitment.
From this perspective we can see that work-
ers may not have to lose their innocence in order
to combat management. Instead what they have
to overcome is the feeling of isolation which the
rhetoric and structures of organization attempt
to enforce. Thus the experience of work facili-
tates the development of collectivism which
allows workers the collective confidence to
empower themselves, in spite of management
attempts to decontextualize the labor process.
Indeed Graham seems to hint at a new
avenue for research into empowerment which
would demonstrate the limits of managerial
rhetoric when confronted by collective respons-
es. Through the lens of governance we can see
that management may be attracted to a female
workforce since such groupings may be easier to
isolate. However, what makes such workers easy
to isolate, initially, also sets them apart from
mainstream managerial ideas especially when
these demand open-ended commitment. As
 Control and isolation in the management of empowerment
David Collins
Graham notes, women with child-care responsi-
bilities soon run into conflict with management
requirements for overtime working at short
notice. Equally, the managerial requirements
for “commitment” cause obvious conflicts with
regard to the more general commitments of
female workers.
There may be the possibility, therefore, that
within a workforce generally inexperienced in
factory production, women may play a key role
in attacking the processes of isolation and con-
trol which underscore many of the current
innovations within management. This is not to
say that women will necessarily form the van-
guard of collective struggles, since this too,
might cause problems with regard to domestic
commitments. What seems a more likely sce-
nario is that the individualized struggles of
women may allow workers to develop the confi-
dence and feelings of mutual trust required to
generate a collective response necessary to
challenge the rhetoric of empowerment and so
challenge management control founded on
isolation.
Thus while we can agree with Wilmott[36],
that managers are first and foremost in the
business of reality construction, we should
acknowledge that neither managers, nor lan-
guage can construct reality anew. And so while
the rhetoric of empowerment represents a
powerful addition to the arsenal of management
control, the shared experience of workers repre-
sents a significant challenge to this weapon.
Conclusion
This paper has attempted to revise understand-
ing of empowerment. The paper has attempted
to explain the popularity of the discourse of
empowerment, in spite of the evidence of man-
agerially inspired disempowerment throughout
the 1980s.
To this end, the concept of governance has
been used to explain this contradiction and, in
particular, the paper has argued that manage-
ment has attempted to isolate the workforce as a
means of buttressing the rhetoric of empower-
ing initiatives.
The paper has argued that the nature and
contours of control initiatives founded on
empowerment, should be understood as taking
place within a larger framework of managerial
38
Empowerment in Organizations
Volume 4 · Number 2 · 1996 · 29–39
control which, in turn exists within a particular
politico-economic environment. Indeed the
problems noted in defining participation and
empowerment imply that future research on
empowerment should address itself, not only to
larger questions of political economy but to
micro-political issues within the workplace.
Thus a key issue which should inform research
on control and empowerment, since it doubtless
conditions any challenge raised against it by
workers is; how does “empowerment” manifest
itself in policy and action for this group, in this
locale, at this time?
Thus when investigating the promise of
empowerment, we must also have an eye for its
meanings and its limits.
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