Il knowing out: il gioco cognitivo di produzione e le strategie manageriali di costruzione del consenso. Analisi di un cantiere navale

This study critically examines the consent manufacturing in an italian shipyard (Shipfactory). The problem of consent in an industrial organization constitutes an recurring issue in sociological literature, and it can be analysed as assimilation to ideological axes of the firm or as outcome of process of social construction. The argument of this paper follows the second perspective and it points out that the cooperative behavior in the labour process emerges from organizational games, where every actor (esecutive worker, supervisors, staff and management) defines the rules of game. This analytical perspective has been the core of the making out, the analytical purpose elaborated by Burawoy in Manufacturing Consent. This case study shows the emerging of a new organizational game, the knowing out; in the firm structure, the passage from a serial production model to prototypical production model generated organizational variations that required a new relational order, able to guarantee consent and social cohesion in the new organizational context. But Burawoy stresses that the "making out" is a game that produces a spiral of labour intensification, it obscures the surplus value and strengthens the hegemony of management on politics of production at level of shop floor. In Shipyard, the game of knowing out becomes a mechanism of firm governance: in this case, the managerial hegemony is exercised controlling the process of codification of tacit knowledge owned by the skilled and craft workers in the shop floor. The new organizational conditions change the "stake" of conflict and cooperation.

Igor Piotto, Il knowing out: il gioco cognitivo di produzione e le strategie manageriali di costruzione del consenso. Analisi di un cantiere navale in "STUDI ORGANIZZATIVI " 2-3/2001, pp , DOI: