Business Process Management: When Management Discipline Meets Pastoral Power

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) is management technique which seeks to constantly innovate business processes to improve customer service while reducing costs. It is introduced into organisations alongside software called Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). BPM monitors and measures processes to find opportunities for improvement of these processes. The system enables the capture of business processes by rendering them as process models; these are used to link to information, to deliver this information to staff, to automate tasks where possible, and to turn tasks into work flows which appear on manager's and staff's desktops as 'to do' lists. This thesis presents a case study of the implementation of BPM and a BPMS into a large insurance company in New Zealand. The initial research objective was to identify critical success factors (CSF's) for BPM and use Action Research (AR) in conjunction with ethnography to track the presence of the CSF's and to develop strategies to compensate for any lack in CSF's. The pilot BPM project in the organisation was successful, although it did require radical change in the business unit. However, the BPM project failed to embed BPM techniques in the rest of the organisation and was ultimately cancelled. At this point the research objective shifted to understanding the forms of power and resistance that had emerged over the course of the implementation. To understand these, a theoretical framework was developed with Rescherian process philosophy as its ontological foundation and Foucauldian concepts of power/knowledge as its epistemological foundation. The axiological foundation is that the self-formed in this processual reality is formed in the grid of power relations in which it is situated. The key findings of the research are that the concepts of culture and values are not sufficient to explain the forms of resistance that emerge when BPM and its associated Information Systems (IS) are implemented. Instead, a processual analysis using Foucauldian concepts of power and resistance proved to be a richer and more explanatory framework. This analysis found that the insurance industry is a technique of bio-power. This form of power relies on techniques of pastoral power to produce ethical, self-regulating, risk-managing subjects, both consumers and suppliers of risk mitigation products. These subjects are seen as self-governing, guided by conscience, and capable of unique responses to situations so that the manager is primarily a coach. BPM, on the other hand, is a technique of disciplinary power which produces disciplined, docile, utile subjects. These subjects are seen as requiring the three elements of hierarchical observation, normalising judgment and examination to ensure productivity and quality so that the manager is primarily an enforcer. These two forms of managerial subjectivity are opposed so that the introduction of the form of disciplinary power relations required by BPM generated resistance from the existing predominant forms of pastoral power. Ultimately this predominant form of power successfully resisted the introduction of disciplinary power. I suggest that this framework may prove useful for predicting resistance in future BPM projects.