Sizing down: chronicle of a plant closing: with lessons for understanding and survival.

(Ithaca: ILR/Cornell University Press 1996).

WHO IN THE United States now cares about "downsizing?" In the 1970s and early 1980s, massive layoffs and their devastating ripple effects for workers and communities were widely regarded as tragedies. Youngstown, Gary, Detroit -- tragic.

By 1989, Michael Moore's popular documentary film "Roger & Me" distinguished itself with tragicomedy. Reagan, Flint, AutoWorld! -- tragicomic. Today, however, the daily news seems as nonchalant as the layoffs are relentless: 10,000 jobs, 2,000 jobs, 40,000 jobs; blue collar positions evaporate in what seemed only yesterday the shiny new growth industries located in the various high-tech regions, corridors, and valleys. Indeed, today's public interest and concern appears inversely related to the sheer ubiquity of the downsizing buzzword, such that it matters not if news magazines give national prominence to a few unlucky CEO's, who must play the role of coldhearted rapacious capitalists, or if the New York Times adds its special news-of-record voice to a sober, seven-part front-page look at "The Downsizing of America." Mixing theoretical metaphors, the hyperreality of the American one-dimensional society continues to contain the political significance of economic dislocation for all but perhaps those directly sacrificed and otherwise immediately effected by massive layoffs. Who now cares about downsizing?

Louise Moser Illes provides one answer, which is an exception to my rule just stated, and which also gives reason for pause: human resource managers care about downsizing. Illes' chronicle of the 1993 closing of the Signetics semiconductor plant in Orem, Utah, is indeed written by and for human resource managers. Simply put, Illes came to see her position as the plant human resources manager as an opportunity "make a real contribution to those who were in my position, a victim of downsizing and yet charged with its orchestration." (viii) While Illes imagined that work on the book might prove a "release for my own anxieties and frustrations," her ultimate goal would be to "advocate a better way of managing this pervasive phenomenon" by providing "lessons to those who may someday find themselves dealing with plant closures or sizable reductions-inforce." (viii, ix) Sizing Down is thus Illes serving up her own experience as well as that of her Signetics employee and management colleagues for the betterment of the human resources management profession.

Given her intended audience, it is not surprising that Illes treats her year-long downsizing experience at Signetics in primarily psycho-social terms, that is, as parallel to "the experience of dealing with a family death or major illness." (ix) Arranged in separate chapters that correspond to the passing months of 1992, Illes presents a seven-stage, Kubler-Ross-like theory of the downsizing "adaptive and adjustment process." (ix) These stages are: (1) initial shock, (2) anger and denial, (3) bargaining and negotiations, (4) distancing and alienation, (5) regeneration and renewal, (6) transitions, and (7) winding down. For each "stage," Illes provides separate recommendations for employees, management, and policymakers. For example, employees in the distancing and alienation stage should "resist [the] tendency to withdraw," while policymakers in the "transitions" stage should "provide adequate outplacement services" (192), and so forth. Boxed in by her a priori commitment to the professional ideology of human resource management, Illes' analysis and recommendations will be of little interest to the free-floating social scientist.

Still, the details provided in Illes' well-written and well-organized chronicle are often interesting. Consider the nuances of shifting a corporate name and identity in the midst of an extended plant closure, as the Signetics plant had to do in mid-1992 when it was publicly absorbed by its Dutch parent company, or the sticky public and employee relations surrounding a company donation to a local government group formed to explore the possibilities of securing an outside buyer or an employee ownership option for the plant, which some, including members of the local press, regarded as a company pay-off to ensure local government cooperation in the closure process. Description at this level of detail will likely interest labour studies specialists.

Furthermore, a close reading of Illes' own situation and perceptions may reveal something of interest about the entire class of middle-level functionaries who, like Illes, could be seen as occupying a strategic position in what Jurgen Habermas has dubbed the "seam" between system and lifeworld. Here, we might read Illes-the-orchestrator-of-Signetics' downsizing for her furtive recognition of an unhappy capitalist reality, as when, for example, she notes: "It is amazing how a plant closure announcement draws other businesses, like hungry predators circling around a fresh kill." (22) As herself part of this kill, Illes faces in her own experience the inexorable contradiction of, on the one hand, the pain and suffering of economic dislocation, and, on the other, the mandate to execute the microprocesses of the dislocation itself. What else could she do? It may be, as Peter Sloterdijk has argued in his Critique of Cynical Reason, that this type of consciousness is the dominant social-psychological orientation of late capitalism, where "the objective situation and the instinct for self-preservation speak the same language," as in "Others would do it anyway, perhaps worse." Thus, in addition to consideration of its ethnographic accounts, one might also profitably read Sizing Down as a study in the social psychology of late capitalism.

If instead of viewing Louise Moser Illes' Sizing Down as an interesting fieldwork source or as an unintended glimpse into the contradiction- and conflict-filled world of the middle-level functionary, one chooses to read the book only as it is intended, then let this reader have a professional or otherwise vested interest in managing the nuts and bolts of the downsizing process. There is little else of compelling interest in this work, except perhaps that on balance it contributes in a small way to the further de-politicization, normalization, and sanitation of systemic political-economic catastrophe.

Steven P. Dandaneau University of Dayton