Work

A Critique

Steven Vallas

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745646794, 9780745646787
• eBook ISBN: 9780745680705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a critical overview of the myriad literatures on "work," viewed not only as a product of the marketplace but also as a social and political construct. Drawing on theoretical and empirical contributions from sociology, history, economics, and organizational studies, the book brings together perspectives that too often remain balkanized, using each to explore the nature of work today.

Outlining the fundamental principles that unite social science thinking about work, Vallas offers an original discussion of the major theoretical perspectives that inform workplace analysis, including Marxist, interactionist, feminist, and institutionalist schools of thought. Chapters are devoted to the labor process, to workplace flexibility, to gender and racial inequalities at work, and to the link between globalization and the structure of work and authority today. Major topics include the relation between work and identity; the relation between workplace culture and managerial control; and the performance of emotional labor within service occupations.

This concise book will be invaluable to students at all levels as it explores a range of insights to make sense of pressing issues that drive the social scientific study of work today.

1

Introduction

Social scientists of widely varying persuasions – from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber to the Chicago School of sociology – have long acknowledged the centrality of work in all social and cultural life. They confronted the industrialization process, and were keenly aware of the ways in which industrial capitalism gripped the working lives of peasants, artisans, landowners, and merchants. As it did so, it remade the social landscape, refashioned the temporal rhythms of human experience, and redefined the way that authority, community, gender, and domestic life were all defined. Indeed, it might be said that classical social theory was one sustained debate over the division of labor modernity had wrought, and how it was likely to shape the character of human life.

What of our own era? How are the withering away of manufacturing industries, the spread of digital media, the rise of financial models of work and organizations, and the global mobility of production processes combining to transform our everyday working lives and identities? Has the wish for full-time employment in a stable career now become an exercise in nostalgia? Has a new, “post-Fordist,” regime of work emerged, with instability and uncertainty constituting permanent features of the economic landscape? And which (if any) of these developments can be submitted to democratic choice rather than to the blind forces of the marketplace? To pose these questions is to acknowledge that long-established assumptions about the nature of work have been disrupted, and that the very concept of “work” now warrants close and careful deliberation.

Of course, there is no shortage of discussions about work. Yet in the USA, especially, managerial assumptions have proven so powerful as to sideline unsponsored inquiry into the forms that work is beginning to assume. Indeed, at their most extreme, managerial statements about work have become minor industries in their own right, as in the case of Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (which has spun off multiple small businesses), Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? (now available in a special edition for pre-teens), or Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation (which invites its readers to regard themselves as their own CEOs). For their part, policy analysts often do address workplace issues, but commonly adhere to a formulaic montage of well-worn solutions. Should unemployment insurance benefits be extended? How will increases in the minimum wage affect the labor market? Dare we consider public works programs, or paid family leave? Unasked are questions about the forces that govern the structure of work organizations, why some jobs are valued so much more highly than others, how stereotypes of the most “appropriate” workers for a given occupation influence the distribution of opportunities at work, or whether work might begin to reflect the wishes of those who perform it. All too often, questions of agency and choice in the economic realm have been relegated to the personal advice columns in the business section, which unfailingly school their readers in how to compromise with one’s boss. Images of muffled dissent and cynicism find expression in such outlets as Dilbert and The Office.

If discourse on work in the United States is a function of the political and ideological characteristics of US society, it should not surprise us that the market for workplace analysis displays a family resemblance to that which governs tabloid TV talk shows, rewarding writers who can make the most spectacular claims about the trends gripping our working lives. Hence we find Jeremy Rifkin (2004) declaring the “end of work,” Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio (1995) alluding to the “jobless future,” and Ulrich Beck (2000) holding forth on the collapse of the “work society.” Such sensationalism is of course counterbalanced by careful and deliberate social scientific analyses of work. But these are usually sequestered within academic journals far removed from the public eye. Worse, perhaps, they are subject to a division of labor that carves work up into a welter of competing trades that enjoy little coordination. Thus sociology of work coexists uneasily alongside parallel literatures devoted to the study of organizations, occupations, labor markets, professions, and economic networks. Since each trade favors its own conceptual tools and jargon, little fruitful discussion ensues across the boundaries that demarcate each field.

In this book, I try to put at least some of the pieces back together. Three goals seem especially crucial here. One involves the labor of integration – that is, an effort to pull together, in a succinct and thoughtful manner, the disparate strands of thought that scholars have generated with respect to “work” in recent decades. A second objective involves the labor of critique – that is, to interrogate the main lines of scholarly work that have developed, in an effort to open up analytic paths that seem especially likely to advance the frontiers of the field. A third is to sketch out a view toward work that might spill over academic fields, engaging issues that ought to be on the agenda for public debate.

Approaching Work

Work is a primordial part of the human condition; like the biblical poor, it will always be with us. Yet the specific form that work assumes has varied enormously across historical periods and national boundaries. This is certainly the case today, as many of our conceptions of “work” have grown contested and ambiguous. We ought therefore to reflect on what the term “work” means, how that meaning has shifted in recent years, and why.

At the most abstract level, we can define work as any expenditure of human effort aimed at producing a socially valued good or service. This is a deceptively simple definition, however, and one that requires several provisos. First, few workers get to choose the institutional system in which their labor will be expended. Rather, we must typically conform to the dominant institutional structures that define how work must be performed. A related point is that the institutional structure that is most familiar to us – work as paid employment, performed in exchange for a wage or salary – is only one of several types that have developed over time. Indeed, the dominance of wage-labor in relation to the labor market is a recent construct, and one whose triumph often required the exercise of cultural and political power, and even military force.

Moreover, although we have come to view paid employment as the only “real” form of work, in fact work has been defined entirely outside of the labor market for the great bulk of human history. This is certainly the case with unfree or “forced” labor – slavery, serfdom, prison labor, child labor, and other forms of servitude – which persists in many societies (including our own) to this day.¹ An equally important form of non-market labor is that of domestic or household work, performed in order to reproduce one’s daily life. Farming communities that provided their own food, clothing, and other material goods had little need for any labor market; family members were expected to shoulder the daily tasks required to eke out a living from the land, producing goods for sale only at the margins of their daily lives. More familiar to us are the many forms of work required in our own families, in the form of cooking, washing, cleaning, and caring for young children – certainly, work by any definition.

So dominant has the labor market become in our own society that we have come to view paid employment, or wage labor, as the only “real” form of work. This would have struck our predecessors as a most unusual point of view. As the American historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall (2000) reports, when cotton mills first began to appear in the American South, farming families often referred to factory work as “public work.” They viewed work outside the bounds of one’s farm as a strange phenomenon – one that engulfed unfortunates who had lost their land to the banks, and had few alternatives but to enter the labor market. Moreover, for much of the nineteenth century, protest against wage labor – operating with the notion of the independent artisan who owned “his own competence” – construed it in terms of “wage slavery.” How much has changed.

And change continues to happen, for paid employment is not a static thing. The boundary between work in this sense and “non-work” has become an increasingly difficult line to draw in recent years. This is obviously the case for professional or sales employees tethered to their jobs by their trusty smartphones and portable PCs: here the boundary between the job and private life begins to break down (Fraser 2002; Orlikowski 2007). It is also the case in a growing number of ambiguous situations, such as those that are familiar to graduate students, participants in workfare programs, and, increasingly, to unpaid interns as well. Indeed, graduate students have begun to assume so many teaching obligations that they have sometimes sought to form unions as a matter of self-defense, only to have courts deny them legal status as workers (they have ruled that graduate students are not workers, but students in professional training programs). For their part, workfare participants often seem to be half workers and half public wards. Like workers, they must be paid in accordance with minimum wage laws, and are protected under sexual harassment laws. But, like public wards, they cannot choose their own place of employment, and cannot form unions to defend themselves (see Krinsky 2007). And many employers, it seems, are happy to arrange internships in lieu of paid employment – a point the US Department of Labor has begun to explore (Perlin 2011). In cases such as these, the very definition of work is contested, involving litigation and judicial rulings to decide whether incumbents of these roles are protected under US labor law.

A final point follows from the above. Whether an activity warrants the term “work” even by our narrow, market, standards is not simply a function of the activities it entails. For the very same functions may or may not be “work,” depending on the social and organizational context in which the activity occurs. The very same activity – say, listening to someone’s emotional problems, driving a car, or having sex – means very different things, and involves very different experiences, depending on whether the activity is performed by a worker engaged for pay or someone in a social (or non-market) relationship. Indeed, one of the defining features of contemporary capitalist societies is that it is very difficult to imagine any activity that cannot be performed in a market context, for pay.

This book will largely be concerned with work in the form of paid employment. It is written from the standpoint of what may be one of the more peculiar occupations one can imagine, yet one that its practitioners find inspiring: that of the sociologist of work. For our job is that of explaining why work itself is defined in certain ways; why jobs are allocated to the members of some groups and not to others; how the structure of work and employment is evolving in an era of global capitalism, and how these shifts are likely to affect both our social structure and our own personal lives. You might view this book as something of a user’s guide or manual for this most peculiar trade.

Three Rules of Thumb

Any trade will of course need some basic principles, or axioms, that can guide practitioners as they set about doing their work. Of course, as with any area in the social sciences, the sociology of work is often riddled with sharp divisions and debates (these are discussed later in this chapter). In spite of these divisions – or, perhaps, as the outcome of them – sociologists interested in work as a social construct have hammered out three rough principles that do provide coherence for the field. The first is the simple yet profound argument that work is consequential for human life, both individually and collectively. Second, and equally important, is the axiom that work cannot be viewed as a mere economic transaction, or as the outcome of technological imperatives; rather, work is almost always embedded in social and institutional settings that lend it a different character than a purely economic approach can reveal. A third point is that what actually happens at work often departs, in subtle yet vital ways, from the formal rules and official policies inscribed within employee handbooks. There is a hidden underside of workplace life, often invisible to authority figures, where informal norms and practices are established that often stand at odds with formal expectations.

The primacy of production

Although the most celebrated theorist who embraced the “primacy of production” thesis is surely Karl Marx, in truth the modern origins of the idea can be traced to John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers who developed the philosophical notion of homo faber, or a conception of human nature that distinguishes the human species on the basis of our capacity to create, or to use tools and concepts with which to transform the natural world. Indeed, in this view, humans are doubly creative: we not only transform the external world through our labor; in so doing, we also transform ourselves. It is in this sense that work constitutes an especially formative influence at both the individual and the collective levels of analysis.

This view has been widely embraced in the sociological literature on work. Literature on the relation between work and the self abounds. E. C. Hughes, a major figure within the Chicago School of sociology, argued that “a man’s work [sic] is one of the more important parts of his social identity, of his self; indeed of his fate in the one life he has to live.” Work, from this point of view, is “one of the things by which he is judged, and certainly one of the more significant things by which he judges himself” (1994 [1951: 57]). Much evidence attests to the validity of Hughes’s point. Examining existing studies of the mentalities that accompany particular occupational domains, Bensman and Lilienfield (1991: xv) found occupationally specific “attitudes towards everyday life,” and viewed these as the outcome of “habits of thought that emerge and are developed in the practice of an occupation, profession, or craft.” In a series of studies conducted over the span of several decades, Melvyn Kohn and his colleagues (1969, 2006; Kohn and Schooler 1983) repeatedly found that the occupational conditions under which people are employed (for example, whether the design of their jobs gives them a bit of autonomy or freedom from close supervision) have enduring effects on their psychological functioning, shaping people’s levels of intellectual flexibility, self-esteem, and even parental values. Myriad studies have found strong connections between aspects of the work situation and such mental health outcomes as psychological distress, depression, or hostility (see Kornhauser 1965; Karasek 1979, 1981). Physical health too is affected by the nature of one’s work. A recent French study (Cambois 2004) found that after controlling for relevant variables, white-collar men who were promoted tended to live significantly longer lives than did their counterparts who were left behind. The general implication of this literature is simple: the job shapes the person to a substantial extent.

But the structure of work does more than this. How work is arranged also has massive institutional and cultural effects that are evident at the collective level of analysis. As E. P. Thompson’s landmark studies showed (1964), the coming of industrial capitalism brought about unprecedented conceptions of time and work discipline, reshaping the very sinews of everyday life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The stability or instability established by work institutions can have widespread effects on social control over whole populations. The absence of work for large segments of the population – whether during the Great Depression, or within poor or ghetto communities today – can have massive consequences, sometimes engendering large-scale movements to demand social change (Piven and Cloward 1977), and at other times straining the community’s ability to exercise control over their own neighborhoods (Wilson 1996). Indeed, the economic historian Sebastian de Grazia (1994) was so struck by the weight industrial capitalism placed upon productive employment that he characterized the modern West as constituting a “work society.” Ulrich Beck (2000: 63) believes that as Western societies have grown more secular, people have “lost their faith in God,” and come to believe instead “in the godlike powers of work to provide everything sacred to them: prosperity, social position, personality [and] meaning in life.”

To be sure, there are reasons to question such sweeping claims. The growing consumption of cultural goods, the proliferation of mass and digital media, and shifts in assumptions about the stability and longevity of attachments to any given firm have emboldened some theorists to challenge arguments concerning the salience of work and to question the presumed link between work and identity. In this latter view, identity is no longer so firmly anchored in the realm of production as in the past; rather, people increasingly define themselves by embracing one or another style of life, as reflected in their cultural tastes, style of dress, bodily comportment, speech, and personal style. In some accounts, the world of production has been overwhelmed or even invaded by cultural influences that stem from television, magazines, movies, and consumer goods. The relation between work and self thus becomes more complex or weakened, as regimes of person-hood emerge that are more firmly rooted in the nation-state, consumer markets, and ideologies of citizenship than in the realm of production as such (Rose 1990).

Evaluating these claims, Leidner (2004) finds them to be narrowly one-sided and overdrawn, citing several considerations. Although one can certainly point to trends that have increased the importance of “non-work” influences in the production and presentation of self, there have also been countervailing trends that operate in the opposite direction. For one thing, the urge to consume often reinforces the need to work; and, indeed, the evidence suggests that American workers now labor substantially longer than was the case two or three decades ago. Although this trend has developed unevenly across different classes and groups (Hochschild 2001; Jacobs and Gerson 2004), the spread of 24/7 work schedules has increasingly impinged on the rhythms of family relations and cultural life more generally. A related development has been the dramatic increase in the proportion of adult women – especially those who are married and have young children – who have entered into the paid labor force, for this structural shift exposes a much larger swath of adults to the demands of work organizations than was true of previous generations. The expansion of professional and managerial occupations, which often fill jobs through national searches, has dispersed employees geographically, weakening extended family relations, and in turn actually reinforcing the growth of care work provided through the marketplace. Moreover, the rise of “knowledge work,” especially among high-pressure professionals in technology-intensive industries, exposes workers to jobs that make increasingly demanding claims on their time and their souls; the concept of the “greedy institution” seems if anything more applicable than ever before (Kunda 1992; Ross 2008; Kunda and Ailon-Souday 2005; Sennett 1999). And analysts studying new “high-performance” work organization or systems using Total Quality Management have often alleged that these structures seek to incorporate workers’ identities to a much greater extent than under work informed by older, more traditionally bureaucratic patterns.

Nor are the expansive demands of work on identity limited to professional and managerial work. As revealed in the literature on interactive service work, which by its very nature requires social interaction between the customer and the worker, employers increasingly seek to define, direct, and control the feelings and emotions that workers display while engaging in their jobs. These practice...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Key concepts
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Capitalism, Taylorism, and the Problem of Labor Control
• 3 From Fordism to Flexibility?
• 4 Ascriptive Inequalities at Work, I: Gender
• 5 Ascriptive Inequalities, II: Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity at Work
• 6 The Globalization of Work
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index