The High-Performance Workplace: Fact or Fiction?

Abstract

Many accounts of the nature of the high-performance workplace (HPW) tend to derive from ‘technologist’ conceptions of industrial development. This often results in analyses that are neutral, or silent, on such questions as capitalist dynamics and class relations at work. For example, one of the leading groups of writers in the field, Eileen Appelbaum and her colleagues (Appelbaum et al., 2000), have argued that the antecedents of the HPW can be traced back to the team-based experiments associated with the human relations and group relations movements earlier in the last century. While much is made of the importance for ‘progressive employers’ of raising workers’ discretionary effort through less authoritarian methods of managing labour, there is a certain reticence here in considering how these processes may serve to obscure the sources of labour exploitation at the point of production and service. This technologist emphasis is apparent again in the positioning of the emergence of the HPW in the context of shifting economic and market environments.