Fads, Techniques and Control: The Competing Agendas of TPM and TECEX at the Royal Mail (UK)
通过对英国皇家邮政两个变革案例的质性研究，揭示了传统管理思想如何以新术语包装后继续主导当代变革，并反映了控制与自主之间的根本矛盾。
The paper offers empirical insight into how traditional thinking can continue to dominate contemporary change initiatives, and suggests that the propensity to repackage and sell ‘old’ management theory as new techniques reflects the persistence of fundamental, insoluble dilemmas in the nature of organizing. Empirical evidence is drawn from a detailed qualitative study of two case study sites at the Royal Mail, the UK postal service. The analysis shows how the two different change initiatives of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Technical Centres of Excellence (TECEX) are in competition through their methods and discourse, and how this reflects underlying and competing differences in ideologies of management. It vividly demonstrates how contemporary management thinking can involve repackaging old ideas in new rhetoric and a tendency for faddism. In organizations such as Royal Mail the consequence is that far from proving to be the solution to organizational problems, the techniques perpetuate a traditional management dualism in strategies of labour management between control and autonomy.