Bryn Jones: Forcing the Factory of the Future. Cybernation and Societal Institutions. - Review - book review

1997, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 300 pages.

Speculations and research efforts aimed at discovering future organizational forms attract a lot of attention, both in practice and among organization and strategy scholars. Descriptions of new organizational forms are numerous. However, so far, the analysis of their expected properties and their contribution to competitive advantage have received less attention. Usually, these descriptions are derived from idiosyncratic cases. In the literature of the past fifteen years, various examples of new organizational forms have been described, such as the internal network form (Miles and Snow 1986), the spherical form (Miles and Snow 1994), the N-form (Hedlund 1994), the hypertext organization (Nonaka 1994, Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995), the platform organization (Ciborra 1996) and the flexible form (Volberda 1998). In analyzing the emergence of organizational forms, these contributions asked for theories addressing questions such as: How and why do new strategic forms of organizing emerge and evolve from ancestral form s? Unfortunately, such theories are still in their infancy (Lewin and Volberda 1999). As Van de Ven and Grazman (1999: 186) have recently pointed out: 'There is no one comprehensive theory of organizational change able to explain how and why organizations grow and develop as they do'. Among the promising candidates for such comprehensive theories are co-evolutionary theories. In analyzing the emergence of organizational forms, these theories incorporate both environmental selection processes and organization adaptation processes (Lewin and Volberda 1999). After reviewing Jones (1997), in which the question is raised as to whether the organizational form of the factory of the future will be forced towards a universal model or will be fragmented due to national particularities, we will discuss how the research questions and methodology as used by Jones (1997) can be further explored by taking an explicitly co-evolutionary perspective into account.

This paper is structured as follows. First, we will discuss Jones' (1997) contribution: Forcing the Factory of the Future. In this 'discussion', we will limit ourselves to considering this publication as an example of an interesting research effort aimed at gaining an understanding of how, over time, forces external to the firm may influence the organizational form in use in a particular industry and the extent to which the national institutional context matters. In doing so, we will focus on Jones' (1997) research methods and findings and point out key strengths and weaknesses of this approach. Next, we will briefly sketch a co-evolutionary perspective on the emergence of new organizational forms and use this perspective to reflect on Jones' (1997) research questions. In doing so, we will illustrate that using such an approach may contribute to answering more generic questions.

Although in the recent literature on knowledge-intensive organizations and the new knowledge economy (Hodgson 1999) manufacturing organizations get less attention, the future form of factory organization and the understanding of its determinants are obviously important. In the context of manufacturing organizations, examples of relevant questions are the following: Will the future form be a completely reprogrammable and computer-integrated factory without involvement of human skills? Or will human skills be necessary in the future form in mediating between the technological and social worlds? To what extent, and why, will the long-term trend of replacing human action by machine operations -- a trend towards 'the workerless factory' -- take place? Will the future form of factory organization be completely different from the past and present version, and will a universal form emerge across countries and industries? These questions are raised by Jones (1997) who investigated the impact of computerized production in the metalworking batch production industry. We will discuss Jones' (1997) research questions, methods and findings and will point at strengths and weaknesses of the approach chosen.

Jones (1997: 3) investigated to what extent information and computer technology replace human skills in a factory organization 'by an all-encompassing, integrated machine system'. Information and computer technology aimed at the automation of the automation of the factory is coined as 'cybernation'. The investigation is guided by three research questions (Jones 1997: 244):

Q1: 'Will computer technologies finally establish true factory principles through the cybernation of the "workshop" sphere of batch production?'

Q2: 'Is the emerging organization a continuation of earlier industrial revolutions, or is it qualitatively different?'

Q3: 'Are the newer practices sufficiently powerful and universal to transcend the national variations that have developed in the past?'

The first question deals with the impact of a major external force on organizational change. The second raises the question of whether incremental change/continuity or revolutionary change (transformation) takes place. The third question addresses the importance of the national institutional context.