Management and Empowerment Programmes
本文揭示了赋权口号与现实之间的差距，通过酒店、主题公园及化工厂等案例，说明高层管理者与基层管理者对赋权的理解不同，赋权计划更多是重组基层管理工作而非真正增加工人自主权。
This paper addresses the divergence between the widespread rhetoric of empowerment and limited reality of empowerment programmes. Having demonstrated the ambiguities and contradictions in the concept of empowerment to be found in the management literature and, hence, the amenability of the concept to a variety of interpretations, the paper considers evidence from studies of hotel companies, a theme park and chemicals and telecommunications manufacturing plants which shows that the interpretation of empowerment which senior managers enthusiastically promote is rather different from the one which junior managers reluctantly accept and that empowerment programmes are as much about the putative reorganisation of junior managers' work as any substantive increase in worker autonomy. An interpretation of these findings is then offered in terms of how the ideological space opened up by ambiguities in the empowerment concept presents senior managers with a convenient ideological justification for the reorganisation of managerial work but also presents junior managers with a set of ideas with which to justify their continued existence, at a time when the managerial labour process is being rationalised and the raison d'être of junior line managers, in terms of responsibility for a labour process, is becoming problematic. The rhetoric of empowerment is an ideological terrain on which the conflict between senior and junior managers over attempts to reconstitute managerial work is conducted.