Fads, techniques and control: The competing agendas of TPM and TECEX at the Royal Mail (UK)

The paper offers empirical insight into how traditional thinking can contin ue to dominate contemporary change initiatives, and suggests that the prope nsity to repackage and sell 'old' management theory as new techniques refle cts the persistence of fundamental, insoluble dilemmas in the nature of org anizing. Empirical evidence is drawn from a detailed qualitative study of t wo case study sites at the Royal Mail, the UK postal service. The analysis shows how the two different change initiatives of Total Productive Maintena nce (TPM) and Technical Centres of Excellence (TECEX) are in competition th rough their methods and discourse, and how this reflects underlying and com peting differences in ideologies of management. It vividly demonstrates how contemporary management thinking can involve repackaging old ideas in new rhetoric and a tendency for faddism. Tn organizations such as Royal Mail th e consequence is that far from proving to be the solution to organizational problems, die techniques perpetuate a traditional management dualism in st rategies of labour management between control and autonomy.