Comment on Ensmenger

Note this title, published by University of Wisconsin Press,

Harris, Howell John, 1951- , The right to manage : industrial relations policies of American business in the 1940s. Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

I referred to this book in the last couple of weeks.

In theory, there could be unions of personnel who hold control functions just as there are unions of prison guards, police, and so forth, but the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) excluded most supervisory personnel from the right to bargain collectively, thus throwing supervisors into the camp of employers because they had no other support options. The "right to manage," mythical because to manage a concern is not the same as to own a company, became according to Harris a rallying cry in corporate publicity throughout the 1950s, parallel with the second Red Scare and disputes with organized labor over labor's legitimacy and control over working conditions. The notion of a right to control what one is hired to control has become inscribed in our culture.

If we are going to understand how programmers and other groups that are networked around a shared skill or expertise can be, or may be seen as disruptive to management culture, we need to know more about how management structures itself socially, what the psychological benefits of holding a place in a hierarchy are, and on the other hand how management may also project itself as a community of practice in opposition to experts or technicians.