Work and the Enterprise Culture

Malcolm Cross, Geoff Payne

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351167543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Work and Enterprise Culture examines the world of work in the light of the major changes that have occurred over the last decade. In particular, the book focuses on what is understood by the term the 'enterprise culture' and considers what impact, if any, this concept has on traditional work practices. A major feature of the book is that the essays also address questions of equal opportunity on grounds of gender and race, and examine the effects of the coming of the 'enterprise culture' has had on these concerns.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Work and the Enterprise Culture

Malcolm Cross and Geoff Payne

The continuity of Conservative Governments under Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s has led to us seeing an apparent cohesiveness in the character of that decade. The rhetoric of public discourse has been focused on recovery from recession, ‘getting the economy moving’ and creating a new ‘enterprise culture’ to replace state controls and supposed inefficiency. Behind the facade of that coherence lies a period of economic and social change which has in reality been discontinuous, contradictory and disorganized. Tremendous changes have indeed taken place, but in complex societies political forces, demographic trends, cultural transitions, market pressures, technological innovation, and organizational restructuring do not all fit together neatly. One of the key tasks of the sociologist is to disentangle such components of large-scale, social processes, so that a clearer understanding of events can be constructed to replace conventional or ideological wisdoms.

This task is inevitably seen by those with a vested interest in the conventional wisdom as negative, or even subversive. At one level it is. If people buttress their own positions with selective accounts and simplistic appeals to vague symbols of legitimation — a problem that all politicians (not to mention others) have — then a social science perspective can only be perceived by them as threatening. At a different level, however, the social science project is marked by a concern for clarity, for better comprehension, for recognizing alternatives, and — by implication at least — for the construction of new and better policies. It follows that when the contributors to this volume raise questions about how the ‘enterprise culture’ actually has been manifested in the world of work, their prime concern is not to mount an ideological or narrow party political attack on enterprise, but rather to explore in specific contexts what has been happening in the 1980s.

The changes of the 1980s did not only alter the context of work, they also enhanced new forms of unevenness in both decline and renewal. The decade witnessed the increased significance of both space and time as boundaries of paid employment. The North-South divide is one example of the former; the crisis of the ‘inner cities’ is another. Similarly, work became increasingly concentrated within a shorter span of life. There was a redefinition of ‘working age’ as young people were excluded from work and as redundancies and early retirement sliced deeply into cohorts of the over 50s. In contrast to this early exclusion of young people from the labour market, the end of the decade saw a shortage of young people in the population with concomitant changes in employers’ recruitment strategies as they sought to compete for them and for the older women re-entering the labour market after child-rearing.

As firms radically restructured to survive, they dramatically altered the labour process and the form in which work would be available. ‘Flexible’, part-time labour grew at the expense of more stable, full-time employment. With this change has come a renewed segmentation by gender as the new jobs are carefully tailored to low cost, malleable, and largely non-unionized female workers. Similarly, the relocation of plants outside high cost and increasingly inaccessible inner cities has had profound effects on the composition of those able to take advantage of the economic upturn. British people of Caribbean and Asian origin are still disproportionately concentrated in regions and areas of major decline, and therefore their lives have been made even more vulnerable by the coming of ‘Enterprise Britain’.

On the other hand, the decade of the 1980s was also the one in which ‘equal opportunity’ and anti-discrimination legislation of the mid 1970s might have been expected to have an effect. The world of work does not exist in isolation from wider cultural and political processes. The exclusion of young people from the labour market during the earlier years of recession was matched by a rich variety of training and work experience schemes introduced by government legislation and promoted by unprecedented publicity. The question arises, as to how well these attempts at engineered social change have coped with the renewed segmentation by gender and race which have flowed from economic re-organization. At the same time, the ways in which sociologists study and think about these things have been changing, even more than in sociology in general. Sociologists of work have traditionally focused on class differences, for it is within that domain that relations of production are engendered. It became clearer, however, in the 1980s that class did not capture all that was important in the changing world of work. The salience of gender and race have in particular broadened our perspectives and added to our analytical repertoire. Age and the importance of locale are other examples of this growing sophistication. Ideas developed in other branches of sociology have cross-fertilized into what has hitherto been a narrower area: an analysis of graduate employment or the role of women in the miners’ strike become newly relevant to what we mean by ‘work’.

The sociology of work as a field of enquiry has also been responding to changes in its primary object of study, the social organization of the British economy and its associated processes. In the first half of the 1980s, as Britain’s recession deepened, ‘work’ was redescribed by sociologists in analytically powerful ways. In the second half, as a re-organized economy began to recover, we have started to explore what we mean by ‘enterprise’ and whether or not the term ‘enterprise culture’ has a meaning which is precise enough for analytical purposes. How different is the new economy from the old? How well do the seeds of so called ‘enterprise’ grow in those areas hitherto laid waste by economic decline?

This collection is a book about both Britain’s economy and how the sociology of work has been developing. Selected from among papers given at the annual conference of the British Sociological Association held at Polytechnic South-West, which took as its theme ‘Sociology in Action’, it represents a particular perspective of what the sociology of work should be like in the 1990s. At the centre of that project lies the idea that we need to engage with contemporary issues and events. The ‘enterprise culture’ is one such issue. Perhaps we run the risk of making too much of the term, or even of using it as a straw figure: we certainly use it as a convenient shorthand for a complex of notions. The authors of the chapters that follow are primarily concerned with exploring what real changes it signifies. Their enterprise lies in generating a better sociological explanation of work during a process of rapid social and economic change.

The Enterprise Culture

As Burrows and Curran point out ‘enterprise’ is a slippery concept that even its most frequent advocates find difficulty in defining. This itself suggests that it cannot readily be assumed to have very much explanatory power. Rather, ‘the enterprise culture’ is best regarded as a construct which has served to rationalize and thereby sustain political values of individualism, personal autonomy and supposed freedom from corporatist control (Bechhofer and Elliott, 1981). It is arguable that the true beneficiaries of economic changes in the 1980s have not been small businesses, but rather multi-national companies which have exploited deregulated markets, falling real wages, constrained unions and free currency movements to combine and extend their increasingly global concerns.

Burrows and Curran are sharply critical of theories of economic restructuring and of those that herald the significance of the petit bourgeoisie. In rejecting simplistic comparisons between the two, they are not suggesting that a stock of adequate theory lies elsewhere. Rather, a central conclusion they reach is that we have still no adequate guide to the rise and role of the small-scale entrepreneur.

Another crucial aspect of the enterprise culture is the changing culture of enterprise. We have, so it is claimed, moved from Fordism to Post-Fordism; from the perception that the culture of the firm is one characterized by an uneasy state of tension between parties with incompatible interests to one which identifies commitment and coalition as the pervading orthodoxy. But is this ‘new culture’ not the same as the ‘paternalist capitalism’ which pre-dated Fordism? Peter Ackers and John Black insist that a prior question is to explore what this earlier concept entailed and what led to its demise. Their conclusion is that in both an ‘external’ and ‘internal’ sense, paternalist capitalism was a reality. Some companies, usually with deep roots in nineteenth century technology and often cut off from other labour markets, were able to develop over long periods patterns of employee loyalty which ensured a stable workforce and quiescent industrial relations. Internally, paternalism could last longer, but in both senses it has rapidly given way to the pressures generated by capital concentration and changing competitive conditions. The same industries have not been immune from Post-Fordism, even though they may not have experienced much Fordism, and in this sense they could be said to be moving forward to the past. The reality of human resources management and associated practices is not, however, the same as old-style paternalism. One was born out of tradition and isolation, the other out of post-modernism and globalization. As they conclude, given the shifting pattern of management in the modernizing firm, any resemblance to old loyalties will be more apparent than real since it will be sustained by the cash nexus rather than by the warm glow of tradition.

If ‘enterprise’ is intended to be the solution to de-industrialization, then there can be no better test of its applicability than the South Wales coalfields. As Gareth Rees and Marilyn Thomas remind us, the gloomiest forecasts made by miners’ leaders at the time of the strike of 1984–85 turned out to under-estimate substantially the actual numbers of pit closures and lost jobs. More important, these massive transformations have curtailed traditional avenues into employment for young people. ‘Enterprise initiatives’ in this context imply no less than an engineered change in the local class structure.

The empirical results of the study reported by Rees and Thomas clearly suggest that managed attempts at class reform run into major obstacles. Loans for enterprise sustain those who have already located markets and who have the educational and other resources to exploit them. Ex-miners will not tend to invest their redundancy payments in small businesses partly because of a reluctance to bear the risk involved and partly because of a rational evaluation of their chances of success. It is tempting to dismiss this failure as merely a reflection of a ‘culture of dependency’ on waged employment but the crucial point is the link between economic and cultural causes. It is one thing to be ‘entrepreneurial’ in the south-east of England where craftsmen are scarce and pockets full; it is quite another in South Wales where the market is weak and over-supplied.

The ‘enterprise’ remedy is prescribed for the ills of the ‘inner city’ as much as for the declining coalfields. But we know surprisingly little about what causes the symptoms of poverty and misery which are all too apparent in some parts of inner urban areas. Nationally, there is evidence of income polarization and Nick Buck identifies six hypotheses which could account for it. Using an innovative estimating technique derived from two major national surveys, he shows that economic changes associated with the demand for particular jobs (as estimated either by the incidence of unemployment or by differential changes in rates of pay) account for more of the changes in income distribution than other possible causes. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates a spatial effect in that polarization is greatest in Inner London, possibly as so-called ‘global cities’ come to develop a post-industrial occupational structure with an increasingly highly paid sector at one end, in which married women’s incomes may be very important, and a growing poor, unstable sector at the other.

Age, Gender and Race in Production

Prior to 1980 it was rare to find studies of work and production that were embedded in anything but traditional class theory. Over the last decade, sociology itself has confronted the salience of other structured forms of inequality which cross-cut those of social class. The sociology of work is no exception and the six remaining chapters of this book focus on three of the most important, age group, gender and race.

During the 1980s, it became quite apparent that life-cycle effects were increasingly significant in predicting labour market experience, particularly so for the young (Wallace and Cross, 1990). The chapter by Ken Roberts and his co-workers reports on one part of a major ESRC initiative into the experiences of 16–19 year olds. The analysis uses longitudinal methods to unravel the pattern of ‘trajectories’ into the labour market. The major significance of educational qualifications in avoiding unemployment and the importance of area of residence in determining young peoples’ prospects are clearly demonstrated. More important, it also confirms that the benefits of vocational training have yet to be reflected in enhanced career prospects. YTS entrants, for example, appeared to gain little in terms of employment chances over those following traditional paths into employment at age 16.

Enhanced labour demand, consequent upon the current demographic changes, could well undermine the supposedly permanent bridge created in the 1980s by the coming of YTS. Moreover, employment training for young people has been bedevilled by wide variations in quality which might well have been avoided if alternatives had been more seriously considered a decade ago. A move has now been made to dispense with a free-standing system in favour of funding employers to provide vocational training. The other possible avenue would have been to raise the leaving age to 18 and greatly increase funding to the school system. The immense amounts of public money funnelled through the Manpower Services Commission and its successor the Training Agency could hardly have been less well spent had this choice been made. Notwithstanding the ideological assault on education, young people who choose schooling over alternatives are making rational choices in terms of career development.

As Michael Maguire points out, the absence of a gendered perception in the sociology of work is surprising, given the nature of changes in the forms of employment consequent upon economic restructuring. So called ‘flexibility’ has been generated in part by the rise of part-time employment, and it is married women who are predominently employed part-time (Pollert, 1988). Maguire reports on research into the retailing sector in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland economy has experienced all the major changes associated with economic restructuring, except the upturn stemming from a growth in non-governmental services. Retailing has undergone the familiar capital concentration and globalization as individual shops give way to multi-national chains. From an industry dependent on full-time, male labour power, it has become one characterized by part-time, female workers. Wages rates are low, conditions for the most part unprotected by trade unions and women cluster at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy.

What is important is that demand-side issues for an inexpensive, mature and docile workforce have helped sustain ideological manifestations on gendered work. These in turn reproduce images of women that serve themselves to legitimize sexual divisions. Thus changes in the structure of work undermine the possibility of ‘equal opportunity’ by making women’s work of lesser value. This could take place even where women had managed to penetrate ‘management’ posts, although in Northern Ireland they had not done so. The gendering process sustains profound structural inequalities without necessarily affecting access to all occupations. Policies to control discrimination can only operate outside gendered jobs, which is a severe constraint on their potency as strategies of social change.

The graduate labour market is precisely one where, potentially, equal opportunity policies could provide an opportunity for structural change. This is because economic restructuring processes are pressing in the opposite direction to those governing the utilization of unskilled labour power. Here, employers are anxious to adopt ‘equal opportunity’ approaches, with a view to giving themselves access to a wider pool of talent. As Tony Chapman argues, however, in his study of the graduate labour market, this does not mean that current anti-discrimination policies alone stand any chance of overcoming entrenched inequalities between men and women. In the first place, inequalities are sustained by socialized choices; second, they are underpinned by external constraints, and only third are they the result of direct or indirect discrimination in the workplace.

Mining communities again provide an important case study. Traditional community structures, which have adapted over centuries to the labour demands of coalmining, reveal an entrenched gender-based division of labour. Yet women clearly played a pivotal role in the 1984–5 strike, often seeming to provide the impetus to prolong the misery and discomfort which must have followed. In the research reported by Sandra Hebron and Maggie Wykes, however, the strike support groups were often led by women who had been active previously, and the researchers were unable to find major evidence of changing roles or consciousness after the dispute had ended. Change, particularly as measured by enhanced labour force participation, would have required a concomitant improvement in job availability. The evidence suggests transitory changes in the domestic division of labour which quickly reverted once shift work began again. The authors conclude, however, that women were more politicized and likely therefore to seek opportunities for less patriarchial relations if and when another chance occurred.

Plant based studies have made a major contribution to our understanding of patterns of access to occupational positions. Richard Jenkins (1986), for example, focused on the informal processes whereby discriminatory outcomes were sustained in a variety of industrial settings. Nick Jewson and David Mason report on research into the significance, if any, of formal recruitment and promotion procedures. They show that, where they exist, centralized and formalized recruitment procedures do have the effect of minimizing personal discretion which, providing a company has a commitment to equal opportunities, is likely to benefit ethnic minority applicants and employees. The problem, however, is that the drift of economic restructuring is in the opposite direction; towards decentralizing and delegating power and therefore shifting the locus of responsibility away from the personnel and human resource experts. Firms which are pressured to become flexible, pragmatic and performance (rather than procedure) oriented were not in a strong position to sustain what are essentially bureaucratic routines. Similarly, formalized procedures do not prevent ‘acceptability’ criteria predominating over job suitability. ‘Acceptability’ is determined more by an internal organizational culture which, when combined with a reliance upon internal labour markets, militates against change. Jewson and Mason suggest that there is no intrinsic reason why flexibility and informality should not be compatible with equal opportunity outcomes; it would simply require these to be included as performance measures. In this sense, outcomes are more important than procedures.

Internal employment procedures are not, however, the only barriers to employment. A prior factor is whether individuals apply or are directed towards future employers. This is not a chance procedure but one which is socially organized. As John Wrench reports most young people leaving school at 16 pass through the Careers Service on their way to a job or further training. Historically, the service has existed to provide a counselling f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Work and the Enterprise Culture
• 2 Not Such a Small Business: Reflections on the Rhetoric, the Reality and the Future of the Enterprise Culture
• 3 Paternalist Capitalism: An Organization Culture in Transition
• 4 From Coalminers to Entrepreneurs? A Case Study in the Sociology of Re-industrialization
• 5 Social Polarization in the Inner City: An Analysis of the Impact of Labour Market and Household Change
• 6 Young People’s Transitions into the Labour Market
• 7 Part-time Employment, Dual Careers and Equal Opportunity
• 8 Gender and Graduate Under-employment
• 9 Gender and Patriarchy in Mining Communities
• 10 Economic Change and Employment Practice: Consequences for Ethnic Minorities
• 11 Gatekeepers in the Urban Labour Market: Constraining or Constrained?
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index