Towards Critical Practice in a Teaching Company Scheme
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Towards Critical Practice in a Teaching Company Scheme Lorraine Warren 7/te need to he iociallt aware dutint,' interventions presents
Background
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The company, Aggregate Products Limited (APL; produces and supplies a range of building and garden products to civil engineering contractors, large I)IY/garclen centre companies and direct to the end consumer. It employs around 22 full time production operatives in four separate departments, with an annual turnover in the region of 2M. The company has been in operation for around 40 years, much of that history as a family business. Jack, the Chairman, has now semi-retired from his last role as
company undertalcing a 'Teaching Compani Scheme project. Some general lessoni for interventions in small companies are drawn out.
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Introduction 'l'he need to he 'socially aware' during an intervention into an organisation has led academics
Managing Director; he operates in an advisory
from various areas of business and management to design programmes of participatory research which guide and legitimise their activities. For example, in the systems movement 'critical systems thinking' (CST) emerged in the late 1980s in hard and soft systems thinking were criticised Ihr paying too much attention to managerial agendas. Practically, CST remains a complex set of commitments for researchers or practitioners to operationalise and evaluate; early attempts to formalise CST such as Total Systems Intervention have been replaced by a more nebulous commitment to 'critical practice' (Jackson, 2000).
capacity to his son David, who is now the Managing Director.
APL elected to undergo a 'business process reengineering (BPR)' project supported by the Department of Trade and Industry's (DTI) Teaching Company Scheme (TCS). The company was experiencing typical problems of growth around the delegation and control of activities, in tandem with a need to achieve economies of scale through automation of production. In other words, if they could not improve efficiency at every level, they would be unable to compete in their markets, and
This paper presents strategies
could well face decline and eventual closure.
which were used in the spirit of critical practice to
develop participatory action research in a small
Hence, they were attracted to undertaking a 'BPR'
company undertaking a Teaching Company Scheme project. The first section of this paper sets
project, with the aim, inter alia, of improving strategic and operational performance through the development of integrated management and
the context for the intervention, describing the company and the background to the project; this is
production systems. The labelling of this project as 'BPR' is not justified analytically here -- rather, it is
followed by a discussion of the possibility
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