اعمال کوچک حیله گری : بوروکراسی، بازرسی فنی و حرفه ای، 1890-1914

The expansion of the managerial bureaucracy is a key organisational innovation of the late nineteenth century. Alfred Chandler has depicted this as a natural phenomenon triggered by geographic expansion and growing organisational complexity. The expansion of the branch networks of British retail banks contributed to their increased scale, but did not considerable scope for managerial choice over technology and organisation. A key development was the emergence of the bureaucratic career as the central form of control over individual performance and the presentation of the self. The development of the career was paralleled by the elaboration of ‘small acts of cunning’, organisational routines and reporting devices to monitor, track and discipline the individual over the long run.

The rise of the bureaucratic career from the mid-nineteenth century onwards has been a defining issue for Anglo-American business history. For Chandler (1977), the ‘visible hand’ of the giant corporation displaced the ‘invisible hand’ of the market as the central coordinating mechanism of modern capitalism by the early twentieth century. As the sheer volume of economic transactions swamped the market mechanism so administrative coordination prevailed. Foucauldian analyses have identified the preconditions of the managerial bureaucracy in the slow growth of unremarkable accounting controls from the early nineteenth century onwards (see, inter alia, Miller and O’Leary, 1987). Savage (1998) identified the development of the bureaucratic career as the first truly ‘modern’ attempt to address the problem of industrial discipline. The great railway firms of nineteenth century Britain with their geographically dispersed workforces made face-to-face management control difficult and expensive to sustain. Promotion through elaborate job ladders was the incentive for employee self-control, an organisational innovation that triggered the development of centralised personnel record systems to monitor and compare individual career paths (Grey, 1994 and Townley, 1995). We have used Savage's path-breaking research as the starting-point for our investigation of the emergence of the career as a central feature of the experience of Victorian clerks. Here we focus on the regulation of everyday social processes; not the limit experiences of total institutions, but the governance of the mundane. We begin by sketching the bureaucratisation and hesitant mechanisation of the clerical labour process in the late nineteenth century. Our focus is on the banking sector, particularly the development of an internal labour market in the Bank of Scotland. We then turn to the notion of the career and the institutional mechanisms that policed the depth of an individual's self-regulation: the inspection system. The inspection system turned upon central monitoring of procedures and maintaining detailed staff ledgers, recording task competence and inferring attitudes from behaviour. The inspection system was the mechanism by which the individual was rendered visible as an employee (Miller and O’Leary, 1987). The individual was now exposed to new forms of administration, management and raised expectations of self-management. Inspection remained a descriptive, linguistic system for many decades and was not ‘rapidly superseded or at the very least accompanied by traces’ of ordinal, scalar representations (see Rose, 1988, p. 190). To be rendered visible was not necessarily to be made calculable; to be made calculable did not necessarily result in the individual being completely ensnared by instrumental reason.

By the early twentieth century clerical work was increasingly recognised by employer and clerk alike as a permanent and confined occupation rather than preparation for entrepreneurship or senior management. The rationalisation of the clerical labour processes was not dependent upon technological change as much as the development of organisational systems. The banks were prime movers in the systematisation and intensification of clerical work and of relatively sophisticated internal labour markets. The articulation of the career as an economic and moral project was critical to the legitimacy of the emerging internal labour markets. In turn, the creation of the modern career required the development of systems of regular appraisal and centralised records to monitor the individual's progress over several decades of employment. Here, we have focused on the pivotal role of the inspection system. The branches were little theatres of compliance, back-lit by the inspection system. For the organisation, the career was a highly efficient form of supervision that relied heavily upon individuals’ self-regulation. For the individual, conformity resulted in promotion and career progression. The career was not simply an economic mechanism but a moral project without end or hope of completion. The emergence of the modern career was part of a wider process of bureaucratisation of banking management, a process that eroded the monarchic power of branch managers and enhanced the power of the centre. If the inspectors were the executioners of monarchic power then local managers were the pallbearers, complicit in the reduction of their personal powers. The inspection system and the vast staff ledgers were conditions of possibility for surveillance but did not constitute a fully realised normalizing regime. The ledgers lacked a common marking scale and there was no headquarter function responsible for analysing their staff population's behaviour over time. The process did, however, document an orderly population and identified disorderly individuals for detailed scrutiny and remedial, even redemptive, action. Just as individual clerks assumed a personal obligation for self-regulation in return for secure and relatively well-paid employment, so the institution regarded the moral improvement of the individual as an economic and moral imperative. Refining and extending the vigil of care was central to the development of the bank as a pastoral bureaucracy.