Making out and making do: how employees resist and make organisational change work through consent in a UK bank

• Date: 01 March 2014
• Published date: 01 March 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12023

Making out and making do: how employees

resist and make organisational change work

through consent in a UK bank

Darren McCabe

This article draws on fieldwork conducted in the back-office of

a major retail UK bank and explores how, when introducing

change, management drew on contradictory normative and

rational discourses. Its primary concern is to explore how, in

this context, employees engaged in contradictory acts that

combined elements of both resistance (‘making out’) and

consent (‘making do’) that are difficult to disentangle. It is

argued that although both are moves within the game, they can

be distinguished from each other because the former works

against the grain of corporate intentions, whereas the latter

works with them.

Keywords: consent, power, resistance, normative, subjectivity,

qualitative

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in workplace resistance (see, e.g.

Jermier et al., 1994; McKinlay and Taylor, 1996; Knights and McCabe, 1998; Ackroyd

and Thompson, 1999; Taylor and Bain, 1999; Symon, 2005), which has tended to dis-

place ‘consent’ (see Burawoy, 1979; Edwards, 1990; Sturdy, 1992) as a focus for study.

Earlier research that attended to consent explored how employees engage in activities

that reproduce the status quo (e.g. Roy, 1969; Burawoy,1979). This paper endeavours to

contribute to this literature through elucidating how employees engage in activities

that are a messy combinationof resistance and consent. Nevertheless, the concern is not

to simply highlight ambiguity because it is argued that there are important differences

that need to be drawn out between acts/subjectivities that work with versus those that

work against the grain of corporate intentions.

Cressey and MacInnes’ (1980) posited that it is ‘only by controlling the means of

production in the sense of subjecting them to its own physical and mental operations,

its own will, does the workforce actually expend any labour’ (op cit: 14). This highlights

the significance of consent for as they continue ‘the workers themselves actually control

the detail of the performance of their tasks, and the importanceof this, though it varies

with the production process, never disappearsaltogether’ (ibid.). These insights suggest

that while we need to consider resistance in terms of how workers say ‘no’ to power,

Darren McCabe (d.mccabe@lancaster.ac.uk) is Professor of Organisation Studies in the Department

of Organisation and Technology, Lancaster University.He has a broad interest in the cultural conditions

of work, including power, resistance, identity and subjectivity.He has conducted qualitativeresearch in

the financial services and manufacturingsectors and is the author of McCabe, D. (2007), Power at Work:

How Employees Reproduce the Corporate Machine (London: Routledge).

New Technology, Work and Employment 29:1

ISSN 0268-1072

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Making out and making do 57