Privilege and invisibility in the New Work order: a reply to Kyng

Summary and Questions The Collective Resource Approach inScandinavia began as a political move-ment, not a technologi cal one. It was thisoriginal political content—that localworkers could and must challenge man-agement definitions of skill and techno-logical legitimacy—which threatened acozy system of centralized industrial re-lations which valued historical and polit-ical collaboration almo st as much as pro-ductivity and profits. The collective re-sistance of Scandinavian unions andemployers forced a change in the origi-nal concept of the CRA to a much morenarrowly defined technocratic focus ondesign and interfaces rather than workercontrol and an independent vision oftechnology.In the U.S., the absence of a formalsystem of centralized industrial rela-tions, of universal union membership,and of a strong overlap of unions and po-litical parties, means that the technocrat-ic, not political, components of CRA willbe selected or rejected by employerssolely on the basis of their utility to man-agers. The terms “cooperation,” “partici-pation,” and “empowerment” will all beused to describe this process. None ofthese, however, can have anything to dowith work place democratization.Even in Scandinavia, with its verydifferent traditions of industrial rela-tions, cooperation and participation forthe few cannot mean, as Kyng wouldhave it, that “democracy in the work-place means expanding choices forworkers and developing working strate-gies that allow more voices to be heard.”This is little more than dressed up—anddiscredited—sociotechnical “participa-tion” in its most elitist form.If the Collective Resource Approachis to advocate genuine democracy—andseriously address the issue of power andcontrol in the modern work place—we