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

Abstract

In this article, we explore the genesis and operation of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) within a medium-sized U.K. bank from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. We dismiss the claims of those evangelical gurus who assume that BPR can be decontextualized and decoupled from organizational politics and posit that BPR can be managed instantaneously and unproblematically. Instead we argue that BPR is likely to be constituted by and through political relations, and that BPR in turn will reconstitute organizational forms and norms, in a highly political fashion. We endeavor to build upon current approaches toward organizational politics. We illustrate that politics is not simply about resistance to some putative organizational norm of stability or uniformity as BPR's gurus imply. Nor does it derive "exclusively" from diverse interest groups pursuing separate or conflicting ends that can be juggled and managed as processual or pluralistic accounts of organizational change tend to assume. Neither, in this instance, can one interpret politics as being entirely axiomatic with labor's resistance to management (capital) which is characteristic of a traditional labor process analysis, although expressions of this were apparent in our case study. We suggest that politics "also" needs to be understood in terms of power and identity relations or how individuals seek, through political maneuverings, to further or secure their individual careers and identities in an uncertain world. In view of this, we argue that politics are essential to the very fabric of organizational life, which renders the outcomes of BPR uncertain and contested.