Part 1: What are the legal, functional and ideological bases of the ¡®right to manage¡¯?Part 2: How do new work practices, associated with HRM, reinforce the traditional bases of the right to manage?Part 3: What factors (such as labour markets, employee r
... less efficient than when his personal ambition is stimulated; that when men work in gangs, their individual efficiency falls invariably down to or below the level of the worst man in the gang¡¯, if we want to get achieve more economic efficiency, we can manage the labour trough a scientific way---make division of them and ¡®This would result not only in higher levels of productivity per worker and cheaper labour, but also a more compliant workforce.¡¯ (Rose: 2001). Taylorism enabled managers have the right to plan, design, and other cerebral work activities. Managers should pay attention to all aspects of one job, they also have the duty to plan the whole task and then make decisions. The tasks remained were much easy, routine and less skilled demanded, so then could be taken up by cheap, easily replaced and available labour. That is to say these tasks required low-skilled worker and workers¡¯ output could be easily measured. Because works were simplified and measurable, worker performance could be easily checked and this facilitated management control. The scientific management holds that individuals are easily motivated by financial self-interest and have to be controlled and directed. Scientific management constructed a relatively more successful and more clear-defined functional bases for ¡®right to manage¡¯ to a certain extent. There is a serious problem which based on taylorism is that under such bad working circumstance workers are easily bored and frustrated. This can brings about resentment, resistance and so is self-defeating. Then may lead to the aftermath that the lower efficiency and the errors appear more, even workers may leave in order to find another better job. That means no productivity at all. According to Hawthorne¡¯s study about ¡®Human Relations¡¯, he insisted that the whole work group is quite essential which should be most concentrated on. That is to say human relations sees a ¡®complex social structure¡¯ and is concerned with groups and recognizes workers as irrational. The worker in the group must be treated as ¡®social man¡¯ who has the social compulsory. Based on Hawthorne experiment Rose (1988) claimed the social relations in the enterprises and motivation that derived from workmen¡¯s enthusiasms and attitudes towards tasks and hence leadership quality played a crucial role in determining workers¡¯ performances and efficiency as well. And Mayo (1933) argued that workers had either a non-logical or irrational response to situations. Only managers had a logical response---hence the importance of leadership. In Child (1969) view, he stated out a unitary view of the enterprise. He argued that the worker attitudes and behaviour were mainly determined by the quality of supervision. It also made an attempt to provide a new ¡®social legitimation¡¯ for management. But as Fox (1966)¡¯s view of point, both scientific management and Human Relations are based on the unitary view and workers must accept management authority, this authority requires three responses from workers: subordination, loyalty, and productivity. Both of them emphasize the importance of leadership in an organization, and the organization must be unified around one central source of authority. All of these discussed above provide the functional bases of ¡®the right to manage¡¯. c. Ideological bases Laws do not govern the ideology but scientific management forms the ideology. For Storey (1983) the doctrine of managerial prerogative is an ideology for legitimizing management control. Storey (1983) points out that there are four foundations to the ¡®right to manage¡¯: common law property right, the statutory law of ownership, the ¡®economic efficiency and leadership qualities. Now turn to the last one --- leadership qualities that is an ideological one. This point of view is formed from ¡®human relations¡¯ movement. Fox (1966) states that there two schools of management theory: ¡®scientific management¡¯ and ¡®human relation¡¯ school. The first one asserts the ¡®unitary nature¡¯ of the industrial organization. According to this view, there is only one legit source of authority, and any kind of conflict is incompatible. The workers must be loyal to the company. As a supporter of this point of view, Taylorism suggest that ¡®management must maintain their prerogatives intact¡¯ in order to achieve the large ¡®surplus¡¯ whereas the human relations recognized that ¡®leadership might be provided not by management including foremen and supervisors but by informal leaders of work groups¡¯. So the work groups need to use values and norms which will be antithetical to the organizational interests to manage the workers. Human relations school argues the organization would be cured by ¡®one central source of authority¡¯ and the authority must accepted by ¡®subordinate¡¯. Thus both of them recognize the authority comes from the view of unitarism. Leading by unitary perspective, managers are legislated to exercise leadership power, stimulate workers¡¯ incentives and participations through psychological methods in order to realize high efficiency and low cost which are ideological bases of ¡®right to manage¡¯. In another words, the recognition of the authority means the admission of leadership that is the base of ¡®right to manage¡¯. (2) The new work practices, associated with HRM, reinforce the traditional bases of the right to management. Sisson and Marginson (2003) firstly proposed the ideas of ¡®the flexible organization¡¯, ¡®high-commitment management¡¯ and ¡®partnership¡¯. Through internal and external flexibility, enterprises effectively adjust the relationships between demands and supply while employees are given respects, responsibilities and recognitions to stimulate their enthusiasms and passions towards their careers in high-commitment management. ¡®Management should design jobs that are as interesting and meaningfulness as possible and promote individuals¡¯ involvement and participation. Regarding to this new practice, flexible organization deemed a scientific mode of hierarchy levels which saves innumerable cost and labour meanwhile high commitment management erects workers¡¯ self-confidences and encourages their active participations which are good explanations of ideological notion but enrich it more contents apparently. Following that Legge(2000) did some researches in ¡®lean organizations¡¯, another development notion of HRM, by three aspects involving ¡®delivering and downsizing, TQM&JIT and business process re-engineering¡¯. Lean organizations perspective insists that excessive hierarchy levels and excessive employees should be cut down so as to achieve a much more clean-defined organization which is a extensive facet of functional bases of ¡®right to manage¡¯. JIT and TQM, new scientific practices in lean organization, have closely connected with each other. ¡®Hence there has symbiotic relationship in lean production of total quality management (TQM) and just-in-time (JIT)¡¯ .TQM takes responsibility for produce adequate amount of productions to meet needs of market while on the other hands JIT calculates the exact demand amount and makes sure all the production will be delivered on time. Two sides are imperative procedures and go into effect together in the whole assembly line. ¡®TQM similarly argues that ¡®empowered¡¯ employees should take responsibility for quality and engage in kaizen activities. A lean production assumes certain employee relations systems and requires team-working and intra-team flexibility to achieve maximum effectiveness¡¯ .TQM is an ideological management approach in which workers are persuaded to convince that they have adequate abilities to take responsibility for assigned tasks and guarantee production¡¯s quality. Meanwhile, workers are allowed to choose flexible time in order to cope with the fluctuation in the market demand that is regulated in JIM. Business process re-engineering again is proved to reinforce functional base of ¡®right to manage¡¯. BPR redesign the work process according to the labour market. Anything does not add value including the supply chain is cut down and more reasonable and complete organizational system will be re-united so as high productivity and low cost will be obtained in the end. Finally, Geary (2003) created a third work practices which pointed out new work practices have led to a re-regulation of the labour process. ¡®New forms of organization entail both autonomy and control and embraced within this is a series of inherent tensions and ambiguities¡¯. These new practices all embrace functional and ideological notions that demonstrated by the organizational inner reformation and autonomy that are given to the workers. Basically, three different new HRM practices were set on the basis of traditional base of ¡®right to manage¡¯ and hence keep on enrich more contents and extend more aspects in the different economical environments. It seems that traditional base is the guideline of new work practices and new work practices become developing epitomes of traditional bases of ¡®work to right¡¯. (3) Factors that restrict the right to manage. a. Labour market Workers usually not allowed to say during decision-making and th...