Works
- Designed for learning: a tale of two auto plants, Sloan Management Review (Spring 1993), 85 to 94, 1993
- Two types of bureaucracy: enabling and coercive, Administrative Science Quarterly 41(1), from p. 61, 1996
- Ergonomics, employee involvement, and the Toyota production system: a case study of NUMMI's 1993 model introduction, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 50(3), 416 to 437, 1997
- Flexibility versus efficiency? A case study of model changeovers in the Toyota production system, Organization Science 10(1), 43 to 68, 1999
- The future of critical management studies: a paleo-Marxist critique of labour process theory, Organization Studies 28(9), 1313 to 1345, 2007
- The sociological ambivalence of bureaucracy: from Weber via Gouldner to Marx, Organization Science 23(1), 244 to 266, 2012
- Bureaucracy for the 21st century: clarifying and expanding our view of bureaucratic organization, Academy of Management Annals 16(2), 427 to 475, 2022
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Enabling bureaucracy
Ideas
Enabling and coercive bureaucracy. Formalization helps or harms employees depending on whether it is designed to help them master their tasks or to force their effort and compliance. Caveat: Conceptual; the article argues from research on the design of equipment and presents no evidence of its own.
Bureaucracy that learns. NUMMI combined a highly bureaucratic organization with flexibility through metaroutines, worker and supplier involvement in nonroutine tasks, temporal separation, and partitioning, all resting on training, trust, and leadership. Caveat: One plant.
A paleo-Marxist critique of labor process theory. Argued that labor process theory ignores the socialization of the labor process, which drives long-term skill upgrading, and reread Taylorism and lean production in that light. Caveat: A theoretical essay.
The ambivalence of bureaucracy. Even where bureaucracy's enabling role is salient to employees, it typically appears to them as both enabling and coercive at once, an ambivalence Adler explains with a reading of Marx. Caveat: A conceptual essay.