Production, Safety and Teamwork in a Deep-Level Mining Workplace

Through data gained from a six-month ethnography, this book explores the reasons and conditions for frontline mining teams and supervisors to resist or facilitate managerially designed workplace change initiatives in the day-to-day running of the production process in a mining company in South Africa. It looks at miners’ statements, interpretations, and experiences of managerially defined workplace change initiatives to show that they are critical, rather than passive, recipients and shapers of organizational change practices and use the informal practice of “making a plan” to offset production bottlenecks, and that standardized procedures and regulations are not always appropriate. It describes informal working practices in various organizations to outline the organizational, managerial, and social processes that create informal organizational practices and strategies at the point of production; the triggers for employees to make a plan; the outcomes of the production bonus scheme the mine instituted to increase productivity and its impact on the informal organizational practice to make a plan; the impact of generational differences on team performance; the relationship between teamwork training in self-directed work and its implementation; the effects of the mismanagement of production on frontline mining teams and supervisors; and the miners’ occupational culture at the level of supervisor-worker relations, in terms of the skill of making a plan.