Changing the Subject

Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity

Julian Henriques, Wendy Hollway, Cathy Urwin, Couze Venn, Valerie Walkerdine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134746446
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Changing the Subject is a classic critique of traditional psychology in which the foundations of critical and feminist psychology are laid down. Pioneering and foundational, it is still the groundbreaking text crucial to furthering the new psychology in both teaching and research. Now reissued with a new foreword describing the changes which have taken place over the last few years, Changing the Subject will continue to have a significant impact on thinking about psychology and social theory.

1
Fitting work: psychological assessment in organizations

Wendy Hollway

Occupational assessment is conventionally seen as one area of application of those parts of the science of psychology which measure and evaluate individuals and differentiate between them for the purposes of prediction and control of behaviour. In this chapter I want to examine occupational assessment from a rather different point of view. Analytically speaking, occupational assessment demonstrates the relations between power and knowledge (see pp. 115 ff.). Practically speaking, it shows psychology in action as a ‘technology of the social’. These are perspectives drawn from Foucault’s approach (which is developed fully in the Introduction to section 2). By the term ‘technology of the social’, I am not denoting technology in the conventional applied psychological sense of the hardware of psychological methods, with the neutrality that this implies. Rather it ties in with our emphasis—as outlined in the Introduction—on psychology’s part in the processes of social regulation which are so central to modern social organization (see the Introduction to section 2, p. 106 for an elaboration of this usage within discourse theory). A technology of the social has its effects because it is legitimized by social science knowledge. Reciprocally the knowledge is a historical product of certain practices. This is what Foucault means by the mutuality of the powerknowledge relation (see the Introduction to section 2, especially pp. 100 ff.). Thus a ‘knowledge’ is not a body of truth as science would have it, but a historical product of certain practices, such as ‘technologies of the social’. It is in this sense that I talk about the knowledges that make up psychology, rather than talking about psychology as a discipline. It is worth pointing out that power should not automatically connote something negative; something linked with oppressive practices. In a Foucauldian analysis, power is productive of all knowledges, oppressive and liberatory.

Through a look at different occupational assessment practices— job analysis and evaluation, selection testing and interviewing, performance appraisal and the measurement of potential—I shall illustrate how applications of psychology are themselves productive of psychological knowledges and show that the latter are therefore not simply governed by considerations internal to scientific discovery, but rather by considerations based on the effectiveness of occupational assessment as a ‘technology of the social’.

The difference in approach is not a matter of splitting hairs. Psychology’s approach assumes that the knowledges that make up psychology are scientific. Contained in that assumption are ideas about objective progress towards absolute truth. It also assumes that there are such things as individuals and that it is just a matter of developing methods to assess them. Finally it sees applications as flowing from pure science, but only affecting scientific knowledge insofar as they provide a testing ground for ‘truth’.

In contrast the second point of view sees knowledge and power as mutually productive: not just productive of changes in applications, but productive of knowledges. The knowledges which make up occupational assessment are productions of a combination of powers, sometimes pulling in the same direction, sometimes in tension. There is the power of psychology’s scientific status (and thus the belief in and acceptance of it as fair and rational). There is the power of its statistical method to produce norms and thus to produce deviants. There is the institutionalized power of personnel managers, training officers, job analysts, organizational consultants and work study specialists to administer, regulate and evaluate personnel according to the needs of organizational productivity. These applications do not only produce (or fail to produce) organizational effectiveness. They also produce, modify and reproduce psychological knowledges which may or may not be consistent with each other or with the knowledges being produced in the mental hospital, or in the psychological laboratory. Through the examples of assessment practices in organizations it will become clear that progress towards ‘truth’ is not the simple aim or result of psychological knowledge.

A useful way into this analysis is to ask a seemingly straightforward question of occupational assessment: does it work? The question immediately begs two others. First, what is ‘it’? Second, what constitutes ‘working’? In answer to the first question, it can be recognized more readily that psychological assessment is not a homogeneous body of knowledge when we see it as a production in various diverse sites.

The first part of this chapter will summarize some of the recent knowledges involved in occupational assessment to illustrate this point.

A schematic answer to the second question is as follows: we shall see that there can be a discrepancy between psychology working to produce more powerful knowledges concerning people (more powerful in the sense of better understanding or prediction of their activities) and psychology working as a social technology enabling the administration and regulation of employees.

In the course of looking at how occupational assessment works, two themes will crop up regularly: one is the problem of the concept of ‘individual’ and the other is the scientific method. Chapter 3 provides a historical analysis of the emergence of the ‘individual’. We shall see how the concept of individual is theoretically inadequate, yet works as part of a social technology. Underlying both its failure and its success is the dualism which separates it from the ‘social’ (see Introduction to section 1, pp. 13 ff.). Similarly with the scientific method, we shall see on the one hand its failure to produce knowledge of the complexity of people’s relation to work, and on the other how it works to strengthen the powers of organizations to administer and control employees in the interests of productivity.

Sometimes the requirements of productivity pull psychological science in the direction of more powerful models: for example the glaring failure of performance appraisal methods (see pp. 52–5) to elicit the required inf ormation on which to base predictions of subsequent perf ormance has led to at least some acknowledgement that relations between assessor and assessee play a part in that method (a notion that psychology is singularly ill equipped to handle). Sometimes the successful use of psychological tools drowns out theoretical criticisms. For example, the 16PF (see pp. 46–9)—an instrument to measure’general personality’—is beloved of personnel staff dealing with management selection in many private sector organizations because ‘it works’ (that is, it appears to help distinguish good managers). Yet few psychologists would be prepared to defend its theoretical assumptions and thus, ultimately its validity as a selection tool.

Changing times, changing knowledges

In this part of the chapter, I shall summarize the main parameters in the history of occupational psychology. The perspective I take is one which will emphasize the production of diverse psychological knowledges and how these are an integral part of changing economic and wider cultural conditions. The summary is a ‘history of the present’ (see Introduction to section 2, pp. 100–5) in the sense that I am not aiming to represent all the trends and developments in psychology and its occupational applications. Rather I am concerned to illuminate the way that present practices are informed.

Two periods saw significant changes in the intensity of concern with the individual worker. In the first period, at around the turn of the century, I want to identify two themes. The first is the ‘scientific management’ of Taylor (1911) which was concerned to rationalize the motions entailed in labour in order to extract maximum productivity for energy expenditure by the worker. The second is the increasing size of organizations and the accompanying bureaucratic practices which required the administration of individual employees. Both produced a fairly uncomplicated managerialism (although with appropriately different emphases) which defined the position of occupational psychology as it emerged as a distinctive field.

The second epoch of significance is the economic boom period after the second world war. During this period certain problems in the traditional managerialist approach came to light (not least because of conditions of full employment and the consequent powerful position of workers). This period illustrates the relation between different psychological knowledges and the problems of organization and productivity.

Power over labour

Until the 1960s, occupational psychology was more clearly a field of application committed to helping organizations and their managers deal with the complex problems of maximizing profitability. The field of occupational psychology was summed up in the model devised by Professor Alec Roger:¹ ‘fitting the man to the job and fitting the job to the man.’ The first half of this definition covers the areas of occupational assessment, training and vocational guidance usually under the personnel function. The second half refers to problems of work design.

Although not called occupational psychology, Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ of the late nineteenth century was also the expression of the concern to maximize the productivity of the worker. In this earlier capitalist view, the worker was simply treated as an ‘operative’ from which to extract the maximum surplus value (see chapter 3, pp. 124 and 130–2, to see how this ties in with psychology’s ‘subject’). ‘Scientific management’ consisted in the measurement—down to the finest detail of the motions executed in the course of work. (See Braverman, 1974, for a detailed description and analysis.) The logic which saw management as maximum control over labour was the same logic which produced the work assembly-line with its rigid definition of jobs through the technology itself. Henry Ford, explaining his system of keeping workers at the bench and having stock chasers bring the materials, said, ‘save ten steps a day for each of 12,000 employees and you will have saved 60 miles of wasted motion and misspent energy’. Braverman, who quoted this (1974, p. 310), comments ‘that every individual needs a variety of movements and changes of routines in order to maintain a state of physical health and mental freshness and from this point of view such motion is notwasted’.

In more recent times, the functioning of capitalist technology in this maximization of control and productivity has acquired a new effectiveness in microelectronics technology as de Beneditti, director of Olivetti, described:

The Taylorisation of the first factories…enabled the labour force to be controlled and was the necessary prerequisite to the subsequent mechanisation and automation of the productive process…. Information technology (microelectronics) is basically a technology of coordination and control of the labour force…which Taylorian organisation does not cover.

(Quoted in Albury and Schwartz, 1982, p. 149)

Although some of the problems of management were solved through the division of labour, and through control via the technology of production, others were produced as a direct result of it. By the 1950s the concept of alienation had been given widespread currency through sociology. Its main application was in describing the problem of the relation of workers to blue-collar jobs. The problem of the control of labour was heightened by economic expansion and consequent full employment. Massive absenteeism and labour turnover produced problems of under-productivity, as did the consequent periods of training required before replacement workers were at peak productivity. In addition, two other factors made it necessary to consider the well-being of workers. Because of full employment, there was not a long queue of substitute workers prepared to take jobs under any conditions. If trained (and untrained) workers were to be kept, working conditions had to be considered. If one thing impressed this upon management it was the continuous sabotage of the production line which, along with turnover, absenteeism and industrial action, damaged productivity.

Organizing corporate well-being

It was in this economic context that different psychological knowledges were taken up and produced. A general humanism was ascendant in western culture in the 1960s. Concerned psychologists expressed humanistic values through a growing focus on ‘the quality of working life’. Projects of job enrichment and job satisfaction mushroomed. It became a cliché that job satisfaction was not simply related to rate of pay and, similarly, that productivity was not solely dependent upon workers’ skills and abilities. The question became how could employees be motivated to produce? A wider humanistic culture meant changing emphases in existing approaches to occupational assessment. For example, where selection boards had been oriented to making successful pass/fail decisions about candidates, in the 1960s and 1970s some assessment programmes changed the emphasis towards ‘identification of individual development possibilities’ (Stewart and Stewart, 1976). Similarly, in performance appraisal, the ‘professional development’ of the appraisee was seen as an important goal and this depended on feedback from colleagues—‘peer assessment’ (Kilty, 1978). The ‘nomothetic’² methods of psychoinetrics began to be criticized as being inappropriate f or the purposes of development (Smith, Hartley and Stewart, 1978). As well as counselling, peer- and self-assessments (Kilty, 1978) and experiential methods (Smith, 1980; Golembiewski, 1980), techniques such as the repertory grid began to be applied to this end (Smith, Hartley and Stewart, 1978). The emphasis shifted from selection to training and development, as would be expected in a period which combined full employment and rapid expansion of organizations which thus needed experienced personnel to fill jobs at higher levels.

This movement did not just appear within organizational psychology.³ The criticisms of nomothetic methods were part of a wider dissatisfaction with the lack of relevance of experimental laboratory-based methods and their objectification of people. Humanistic psychology, in contrast, stressed relating to people as people, in an egalitarian, empathic and caring mode (see for example Rogers, 1951 and 1961). People like Carl Rogers were working as therapists and producing models of the person consistent with such values, and many were applying these models in clinical psychology. Similarly group relations and interpersonal skills training for managers was also heavily inf luenced by these developing humanistic knowledges. Applications in the 1950s and early 1960s were much more influenced by the social psychology of groups, which had seen such a rapid expansion at that time (Back, 1979), but during the 1960s and early 1970s they became increasingly oriented to interpersonal relations and ‘personal growth’.

Extremely influential in this regard was Maslow’s concept of ‘selfactualization’ (1968), which still remains the starting-point for most humanistic approaches to organizations. Maslow’s concept of a hierarchy of needs was taken up in contrast to models of economic man which assumed that workers were only interested in money. Maslow addressed the problems of alienation at a time of affluence; his hierarchy of needs specified that when material (lower-level) needs were met, individuals formed higher-level needs such as self-fulfilment. McGregor’s (1960) typology of the differences between ‘theory X’ and ‘theory Y’ assumptions about people summarized these contrasting old and new knowledges, describing them exclusively from the point of view of managers. The crux of the difference between old (theory X) and new humanistic (theory Y) assumptions was whether it was believed that people disliked work—in which case they required direction, control and coercion—or whether ‘the experience of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest’ (Porter, Lawler and Hackman, 1976, p. 36) in which case people will be motivated to work and exercise selfresponsibility (see also chapter 4 in relation to schools).

The essentialism and idealism of this latter position is striking. It does not consider the conditions of work on assembly lines and ask if there is anything ‘natural’ about such work. It assumes that the core characteristics of a person will be displayed whatever the work and whatever the social relations which control that person’s work performance. In the context of industrial unrest, ‘theory Y’ was taken up as the ‘correct’ view of people and it was assumed that if managers were persuaded that they had been wrong to treat subordinates as if they needed to be controlled, then employee relations would improve. No one asked how managers came to hold ‘theory X’ assumptions in the first place, and no one recognized that it was implicit in their job function and position in the hierarchy. It is characteristic of the idealist view that people are seen as the origins of society and social relations and that therefore psychologistic interventions can succeed in changing the organization. Thus when things go wrong, groups of individuals (in this case managers) are identified as being the cause of the problem and also the case for treatment.

Organizational Development (OD) first emerged in the United States as a specific expression of this idealistic view, and flooded the western world through American multinationals, consultants and academics.⁴ It was a faithful expression of this view, being concerned with training managers in interpersonal skills such as expressing feelings honestly and learning how to listen and empathize. Such managerial styles would produce, it was hoped, less conflictual relations with subordinates who would thus experience commitme...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: The point of departure
• Introduction to Section From the individual to the social—a bridge too far
• 1 Fitting work: psychological assessment in organizations
• 2 Social psychology and the politics of racism
• Introduction to Section Constructing the subject
• 3 The subject of psychology
• 4 Developmental psychology and the child-centred pedagogy: the insertion of Piaget into early education1
• Introduction to Section Theorizing subjectivity
• 5 Gender difference and the production of subjectivity
• 6 Power relations and the emergence of language
• Bibliography