Wednesday 11 April 2012 at 16:30 - 18:00 WORK, EMPLOYMENT AND ECONOMIC LIFE 2


MIGRATION Anuratha Venkataraman, R.


ROGER STEVENS 11 University of Warwick


Changing Corporate Strategic Management and the Responses of Lower and Senior Level Middle Managers: A Case Study of Inventory Management in a Commercial Vehicle Manufacturing Plant in Southern India


This paper evaluates the attempts of corporate level management to effect change management in an automotive manufacturing plant in Southern-India. Contents of this change management strategy were premised upon prescriptions of a management consultantancy and Japanese lean manufacturing literature. It was initiated in 2006, and was an on-going project whilst I was doing fieldwork from late August 2008 to late June 2009. The data is drawn from my ethnographic case study of an Indian automotive industry firm conducted over 10 months in 2008- 2009, with a further visit in January 2010.


This paper unpacks, competing organisational discourses through a case study of corporate management's attempts to change inventory management in the firm, to increase efficiency, reduce expenditure and the inventory it held. Studying the inventory management process illuminated the difficulties of plant-management in implementing change management because of:- competing priorities between different middle managers and across departments, systemic short-comings in calibrating inventory that precipitated tensions and resistance to change-management from white-collar workers. It identifies the crucial importance of underlying social divisions in the practice of managing and management policy viewed from the purview of different generations of managers. It finally, tries to demonstrate that pragmatic management policy mandates an adoption of lean manufacturing that is selective, piecemeal, temporal, contingent upon considerations of context and primarily geared towards the balance-sheet.


The recession that began to be felt in late 2008, which as a fieldworker I was well positioned to observe, exacerbated the conflict between long-term transformative goals of corporate strategy and immediate but necessary requirement of contingency management.


Or, T.M. The Chinese University of Hong Kong Career Paths and Educational Credentials of Professionals in Post-Socialist China


One key issue in middle-class formation concerns whether these well-educated professionals share similar career trajectories or not. This paper attempts to contribute to this discussion by examining the work histories of 70 professionals in Beijing from two different sectors: medical doctors and information technology (IT) professionals. It is found that these two groups of professionals adopted different strategies for their career advancement. Whereas doctors took the organizational strategy by staying in the same hospitals and climbing up the career ladder rank by rank, IT professionals followed an occupational approach by moving among different types of firms and enterprises. Second, these professionals also differed in their attitudes towards further education. Doctors were more eager than their IT counterparts to pursue higher educational qualifications, which can be attributed to the recent credential inflation. IT professionals, in contrast, did not see a higher degree as a must due to their rapidly changing skills and technique. The third difference between these professionals lies in the role of seniority in their career advancement. Seniority was definitely a vital asset for promotion in the medical field, but it did not necessarily bring any advantages to older IT professionals because of the prevailing age discourse discriminating against them. These differences cannot be solely explained by the organizational settings of their respective fields. They were, as I argue, closely associated with


the differentiated opportunity structures encountered by


professionals from different generations. Vincent, S.


University of Leeds Moral Mazes in the Network Society: Exploring the Paradoxical Clique Politics of HR Consultants


In an increasingly networked society making and using the right connections is often vaunted as the way to 'get ahead'. This is particularly true for 'freelance' knowledge workers or self-employed professionals (SEPs), whose networking practices have been explored extensively across the fields of sociology, organisational theory, management studies and entrepreneurship studies. Here, a contribution is offered in this area through a grounded analysis of 26 qualitative interviews with freelance HR consultants. In contrast to other studies, which say little about network forms in terms of their political and economic relations, the analysis presented will assess the material bases of SEP communities by exploring the contracts and work opportunities that were traded across HR consultants' networks. In particular, it will assess how these material relations related to the 'norms of engagement' that freelancers developed as they interacted with other SEPs and clients. The analysis suggests that, due to the


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