This paper contributes to a developing body of literature which questions the claim that the 'factory of the future' is a total institution in which self-subordination through 'new wave management' is virtually inescapable. It examines the experience of frustrated management efforts to re-engineer working practices, mainly at the point of production, in response to repeated corporate-driven initiatives designed to implement a range of 'lean manufacturing' initiatives at 'Northern Plant', a pseudonym. Our findings illustrate how workers can and do employ a variety of individual and collective forms of resistance involving dissembling cooperation with change initiatives whilst maintaining a distance from them. In accounting for resistance, we note the significance of market conditions but focus primarily upon the importance of workers' identification with practices that had been established earlier when management were content to indulge self-managing patterns of work in return for securing required levels of output.

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Drawing on four `tales from the field', provided one each by the authors, this article examines the ethical and moral dilemmas ethnographers can face during their research. In particular, we address two key questions. First, what does being ethical actually involve? Second, is there a moral duty owed by researchers and, if so, to whom is this duty owed? The article reviews current debates over ethics in ethnographic research, specifically the responsibilities of the researcher to his/her research subjects, before turning to the four `tales from the field'. These tales form the basis for a discussion of a researcher's ethical responsibilities when confronted with wrongdoing, in different forms, in the course of their fieldwork.

This paper examineslooks at the implications of quality auditing in Hhigher Eeducation in the UK from a labour process perspective. It examines and questions the idea that quality is a panoptic mode of managerial control and surveillance over the academic labour process from which there is no escape. The paper shows how conditions of possibility of resistance to quality auditing do exist, but that, unfortunately, these include 'peer exploitation'. This term reveals the ways in which academics avoid responsibility for, or significant involvement in, quality to protect their personal research and career interests at the expense of others who are left to shoulder their share of responsibility.