From: OPE-L Administrator (ope-admin@ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu)
Date: Sat Jan 11 2003 - 23:06:42 EST
I am pleased to welcome Paul Adler to our list. Paul is a Marxist professor of management (!) at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Paul is originally from Australia but moved to France in 1974 where he received his Doctorate in Economics and Management. His dissertation topic was "Automation and work: the case of banks" and the Chair of the Dissertation committee was Michel Aglietta. While in France he worked as a financial analyst for an accounting firm and a research economist for the Employment Research Center of the French Ministry of Labor in Paris. He came to the US in 1981. Before his current job at USC in 1991, he had a Guest Scholarship at the Brookings Institute in association with the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1981-82 and taught at Columbia, Harvard and Stanford universities. I encourage listmembers to visit his website at http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~padler/ for more interesting details on his career and writings. His self-introduction follows: %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Jerry suggested I introduce myself. Here goes: I am currently a professor of management in the business school at the University of Southern California. My research focuses on the capitalist firm and work organization within it. I am interested in large, complex organizations in particular, since that context affords greater visibility into the underlying structural determinants of work organization. Most of my work is guided by my enthusiasm for an old-fashioned, teleological version of Marxism. I (still) find very compelling the idea that socialism is inevitable, and equally compelling the idea that this inevitability springs from the more-or-less irreversible and irrepressible development of the forces of production coming into ever-sharper contradiction with the persistence of capitalist relations of production. This trope seems to me a very fruitful one for understanding the evolution of work organization over the last century. As I interpret it, it implies a position quite contrary to Braverman's. Specifically, it implies that capitalists are forced to upgrade (not degrade) workers' capabilities (since these are part of the forces of production), and in doing so to create a class increasingly intolerant of capitalism's limitations (recurrent crises, inequality, wars, ecological devastation, etc.) and increasingly capable of taking a leading role in governing society. This upgrading of capabilities (the "class in itself") is seen in rising average skill and education levels, a tendency to greater responsibility at work, and growing breadth of workers' world-horizons. These trends in turn seem to me to reflect the growing knowledge-intensity of advanced economies and a concommitant increase in interdependence within and across firms firms. I have explored these issues in connection with the impact on work of advanced technologies in manufacturing and engineering and with the Toyota Production System, and I'm currently looking at large-scale software systems development organizations and hospitals. You can get a flavor of my research interests looking at the publications listed on my website at http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~padler/ Working in a business school gives me a chance to study these issues from close up. (Given the contradictory role that my paleo-marxist theory attributes to managers, teaching them doesn't seem like a total waste of time...usually.) The downsides of working in a business school are obvious: business schools are ideologically toxic and scientifically weak. But that situation is not entirely immutable. There are quite a few progressives, even radicals, on business school faculties -- more in Europe, where b-schools come under pressure not only from business but also from unions and governments, and there are even some in the US. In order to galvanize progressive forces in b-schools, I have been working over the last few years to bring together a left-wing caucus within the Academy of Management (which is the main professional organization for profs teaching subjects such as "organizational behavior," "organization theory," "strategy," "human resource management," etc.) Our "Critical Management Studies" network was accorded official Interest Group status within the AoM this last year. Our website is at http://aom.pace.edu/cms/ and we run a listserv (c-m-workshop). (Somewhat confusingly, a sister network by the same name operates a biannual conference in the UK. It is loosely affiliated with a listserv, critical-managment, which is distinct from our CMS9-IG listserv c-m-workshop) I'm looking forward to learning from and contributing to your network's discussion. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Prof. Paul S. Adler, Management and Organization Dept, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0808 USC office tel: (213) 740-0748 Home office tel: (818) 981-0115 Home office fax: (818) 981-0116 Email: padler@usc.edu List of publications and course outlines at: http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~padler/ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Paul: welcome aboard! Solidarity, Jerry
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