When “Life Is but a Dream”: Obliterating Politics Through Business Process Reengineering?

In this article, we explore the genesis andoperation of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) withina medium-sized U.K. bank from the late 1980s to themid-1990s. We dismiss the claims of those evangelical gurus who assume that BPR can bedecontextualized and decoupled from organizationalpolitics and posit that BPR can be managedinstantaneously and unproblematically. Instead we arguethat BPR is likely to be constituted by and through politicalrelations, and that BPR in turn will reconstituteorganizational forms and norms, in a highly politicalfashion. We endeavor to build upon current approachestoward organizational politics. We illustrate thatpolitics is not simply about resistance to some putativeorganizational norm of stability or uniformity as BPR'sgurus imply. Nor does it derive“exclusively” from diverse interest groups pursuing separateor conflicting ends that can be juggled and managed asprocessual or pluralistic accounts of organizationalchange tend to assume. Neither, in this instance, can one interpret politics as being entirelyaxiomatic with labor's resistance to management(capital) which is characteristic of a traditional laborprocess analysis, although expressions of this were apparent in our case study. We suggest thatpolitics “also” needs to be understood interms of power and identity relations or how individualsseek, through political maneuverings, to further or secure their individual careers andidentities in an uncertain world. In view of this, weargue that politics are essential to the very fabric oforganizational life, which renders the outcomes of BPR uncertain and contested.