teams
Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Fri, 31 May 1996 10:17:57 -0700 (PDT)
In response to Tim, I had thought that the critique of teamwork and
accountability would be widely familiar by now, even if one doesn't
agree with it. A main attraction of teamwork for employers is that
it provides an intrinsic disciplinary mechanism: team members discipline
one another more efficiently than top-down managers. This has been
well documented, for example in the Barker article in ASQ that I cited.
I can see someone arguing that education should prepare people for that
kind of work, the way that people might be trained in any other job
skill. But I don't see that group work as such necessarily entails the
particular language and methods that business has been using. There
are lots of ways of talking about and practicing group work; see for
example Janet Gastil's "Democracy in Small Groups" (New Society Press).
(I believe I was pointed to this book by someone on xmca, though I
apologize for not recalling who.) If we want socialist group work
then we should look for socialist values and language and practices,
not for talk of mutual regulation, much less a regime that provides no
space for discussing the overall goals and values of the work. Socialism
was been well and truly forgotten if this distinction is not obvious.
Phil Agre