The Meaning of Work

Papers on Work Organization and the Design of Jobs

Lisl Klein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367328313
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921421
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Lisl Klein has spent forty years working on the twin themes of the practice of social science in organizations and the importance of work and work organization. Papers on the first of these were published as Working Across the Gap. This volume brings together papers covering the second theme, the meaning and organization of work.

Chapter One
Introduction: the context

A perspective on work organization in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries

In 2006, the winner of the Best Actress award in the Hollywood Oscars said, “I just want to matter and live a good life and make work that means something to somebody.” In 2003, a young woman who had just landed an exciting, well-paid job that she had very much wanted, was already looking beyond it and said, “It will look good on my CV afterwards.” In 1944, a German refugee servant girl could see nothing beyond her situation and found comfort in a hymn, “Lord of the pots and dishes”. In their very different circumstances, and with their very different perspectives, all of them were looking for meaning in their work.

Work has always been central to human existence, though its content as well as its meaning for individuals and their societies continue to change and evolve as historical, technical, and economic circumstances change. In this chapter I present some of the background to the papers in this volume, which arose at various times during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is, of course, impossible to be comprehensive, and it would be foolish to try. I provide some indications of context where I know about it. That means that the more detailed historical background tends to have a European and British focus. It also means that I need to give some of my own background, to explain both why this has been such a preoccupation—not as an interesting topic for academic study, but as a vital aspect of human and social life—and how the papers arose.

There are topics under discussion today that do not feature in this collection, such as outsourcing or “portfolio working”. On the other hand, it is too fashionable to say that everything is different now. Jean-Paul Sartre’s dictum that there is nothing new under the sun is largely true. There are exceptions: information technology is—was—a truly new development, but the human dilemmas of adjusting to it and working with it and designing it, in their many variants, are essentially the same as they were for earlier technologies. We persuade ourselves that they are new only through not knowing what went before. I try to address this question at the end of the chapter.

Technology? Politics? Science? Psychology?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the conditions of work were a political issue in Europe. On the one hand there were the interests of “capital”—that is, the owners of capital—and on the other hand countervailing forces had developed, through both trade union movements and political parties, to represent the interests of working people, or “labour”. The technical developments of the industrial revolution had mainly served to support the interests of capital, by reducing labour costs in both the quantity of human work that went into a product and in the level of skill required. Most obviously, mechanization meant that fewer people were needed to produce the same amount of output, and in many industries women and children could now do the work that had previously been done by men, who were more highly paid. Unemployment and the fear of unemployment, as well as the lowering of living standards, led to sporadic outbreaks of rebellion against the introduction of machinery (see Chapter Four); the poverty and privation that resulted from early industrialization are well documented, both in scholarly work and in some of the well-known literature of the time.

In the wake of these technical developments, the work that resulted from mechanization came to be studied, analysed, and broken down to its smallest components so that it could be further simplified—and therefore reduced in skill content and variability (and cost)—and so that the people who did it were, as far as possible, interchangeable and easily replaced. The originator of this approach was Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), widely described as the “father of scientific management”.

Taylor was an engineer, and greatly enthused about scientific methods: the excitement of the Victorian age about the marvels of science and their contribution to human welfare carried over on to a scientific approach to people at work. These were the reductive scientific methods of mechanical engineering, which understood a system in terms of its individual parts and aimed to analyse complex things into their simplest constituents. Taylor believed that workpeople should be selected according to the level of the task they were doing, and that this should not include elements that were more appropriate for the attention of more intelligent and better educated managers. He considered that the methods and improvements in a job that were developed over time by experienced workpeople, perhaps with the help of their supervisors, were, in fact, inefficient and allowed management to avoid their responsibilities, which were the thinking, planning, and controlling part of operations. Having persuaded management to take up these responsibilities, one needed first to improve scientifically the equipment or machines being used; then select scientifically the workpeople involved; then simplify and improve their physical movements through method study; then train the people in the improved methods; and then follow this by detailed study with a stop-watch to arrive at the time in which that work should be performed:

The idea, then, of taking one man after another and training him under a competent teacher into new working habits until he continually and habitually works in accordance with scientific laws, which have been developed by someone else, is directly antagonistic to the old idea that each workman can best regulate his own way of doing the work. And besides this, the man suited to handling pig iron is too stupid properly to train himself. Thus it will be seen that with the ordinary types of management the development of scientific knowledge to replace rule of thumb, the scientific selection of the men, and inducing the men to work in accordance with these scientific principles are entirely out of the question. And this because the philosophy of the old management puts the entire responsibility upon the workmen, while the philosophy of the new places a great part of it upon the management. . . . Every single act of every workman can be reduced to a science. [Taylor 1911, pp. 63–64]

In this way, workpeople would be relieved of the burden of thinking and planning. Enormous improvements in productivity could be—and indeed were—obtained, which in turn meant that wages could be substantially increased. This in turn would mean that industrial conflict would be eliminated and replaced by harmony, mutual goodwill, and co-operation.

Taylor did not set out to reduce people to the lowest possible level of skill and initiative, but that was the effect of his way of thinking and system. Its influence has been pervasive throughout the industrialized world, and continues to be so. Therefore, it clearly taps into a need to rationalize, measure and control, which is more deeply ingrained, and therefore more widespread, than would otherwise be effected by the work of one man. It is, in fact, remarkable how both Taylorism and its counterpart, the “human relations movement”, seem to last. The thread of Taylorism is a constant, interweaving with different technologies as they succeed each other, but always re-emerging. Currently, it can most clearly be seen in the organization of call centres, and in the continuing “industrialization” of many tasks previously considered to be “professional”; that is, needing skill, experience, and judgement (for example, the design of power stations, see Chapter Eleven). Fifty years ago, its manifestation was in the techniques of work study, although people’s response to these was not what Taylor would have expected.

Already, quite early on, scientific management was causing unease, even in the USA. As early as 1915 there appeared a detailed critique based on an investigation of scientific management in its relation to labour, made for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations. It does not directly confront the question of individual satisfaction or development through work, but it includes criticism of unsubstantiated claims to “science”, of poorly trained practitioners jumping on to the bandwagon set in motion by more responsible workers in the field, of over-simplifying and lumping together methods that in fact vary considerably. And it discusses the effects of these techniques, which are more than one would expect: that the economic effects are very great, that the social effects are not the beneficial ones claimed but are, in fact, frequently harmful, and that ways must be sought to retain the first while reversing the harm done by the second (Hoxie, 1915).

In the long run, however, such expressions of unease had little impact, and, while Taylorism has been seen by many as the logical expression of American capitalism, it had scarcely less influence on the organization of work in the Soviet Union. In the newly established Soviet Union there were vigorous debates about Taylorism and scientific management. I was once told by an elderly Russian émigré that, in 1917 or 1918, students at Moscow University had rioted against Taylorism. In an effort to check this and to document it, I discovered a wealth of literature about the debates concerning Taylorism that took place in the early years of the Soviet Union:

Throughout the 1920s there was controversy, essentially between two factions. They were not debating for or against Taylorism, but about different versions of it: on the one hand there were those who interpreted the scientific organization of work along very strictly Tayloristic, or “technicist” lines, the chief proponent of which was Alexei Gastev, Director of the Central Labour Institute. Gastev was a poet. It will sound very paradoxical to modern ears that it was the very uniformity and harmony of rationalized work, produced by mechanization and standardization, and resulting in “a most exact molecular analysis of the new production” (Bailes, 1977, p. 5) which appealed to him as creating the culture of the new proletariat, equally standardized and mechanized.

On the other hand, critics in the “Moscow Group of Communists actively interested in Scientific Management”, centred in the Council on Scientific Management of the Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, took a broader, more systemic line, emphasizing the need to modify Taylorism with industrial psychology and to instil scientific management with more concern for the individual worker (ibid.). However, expression of the subjective experience of the individual worker—what we would call “job satisfaction”—does not feature on either side of this debate (any more than it does in the studies of the UK’s Industrial Health Research Board being conducted at about the same time). The issue was how best to heave a huge and largely agricultural population into the industrial age while at the same time retaining the ideals of communism.

Lenin himself expressed contradictory views about Taylorism, but some writers think it is more the case that he saw the inherent contradictions:

Although some analysts draw a sharp distinction between Lenin’s pre-1917 censure and subsequent espousal, it seems more accurate to say that Lenin echoed a dual note towards Taylorism from the start. As early as 1914 he contended that Taylorism was at once a way of extracting the last ounce of sweat from the worker and of securing “an enormous gain in labour productivity”. Of particular interest is Lenin’s suggestion that Taylorism was not entirely successful because it was “confined to each factory” and ignored the “distribution of labour in society as a whole”. In other words, it was not so much the inherent methods and principles of Taylorism that Lenin rejected as their use and application . . . The proposition which emerges from Lenin’s discussion of Taylorism is that capitalist methods could be employed to build socialism. [Sochor, 1981, pp. 247–248]

Lenin himself wrote:

The possibility of socialism will be determined by our success in combining Soviet rule and Soviet organisation or management with the latest progressive measures of capitalism. We must introduce in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and its systematic trial and adoption. [cited in Bell, 1956, p. 41]

The kind of issues being debated in the Soviet Union were:

whether work was separate from the rest of life, or part of it; whether the scientific organization of work meant only the physical movements and skills needed for a task or included elements of psychology;

whether the search for increased productivity benefits should focus on the factory units or the society as a whole;

a fragmented, piecemeal approach of distinguishing between “preparatory” (i.e., managerial) work and “actual” work, vs a more comprehensive, systemic approach;

the contradiction inherent in maximum exploitation of the worker while promising maximum economizing of worker strength and upgrading of worker skills;

the function of time in organizing work—the need to instil some feeling for time in peasants with no experience of industrial work, vs “chronometric barbarism”;

the conflict between improving material welfare and deferring individual gain in favour of broader social benefits.

These issues are not unlike the discussions in professional books and journals that I was to encounter when I did research on the “Human implications of work study” during the 1950s (see Chapter Five). The difference is that in Britain they were professional discussions conducted in the work study and psychological literature and conferences, while in the Soviet Union they were public policy debates, conducted in central conferences and the party journal Pravda. The difference is not between whether these methods benefited “capital” or “labour”, but whether these were questions for professional or political debate.

It is a cultural difference, and I find myself on both sides of it. I need to say something about that, and about how I come to be engaged in this subject area. Although I had not been aware of this history, which I have only just discovered, there must have been something of this way of thinking in my own background, and so it is necessary to say something here about where I come from— literally as well as figuratively.

The personal context

I have never understood why the enormously important topic of the nature of work, which takes up a large part of most people’s lives and influences them and their societies in myriad ways, has never been on anyone’s political agenda in this country. Almost my first publication was a Fabian Society pamphlet, “The meaning of work” (see Chapter Three), but this was at first rejected by the Fabian Society Executive as “not being political enough” and only a considerable fight, and the support of its then Secretary, Shirley Williams, got that decision overturned. Some time later, I developed some ideas for policy on the topic of the nature of work. I made a number of attempts, between 1970 and 2000, to get it on to a policy agenda, with both the Labour and the Social Democratic parties. But it was not in line with the prevailing culture of what constitutes politics in this country.

What had mainly concerned the trade unions and politicians of the left in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century was not so much the content and psychological meaning of work as its basic conditions: its availability and the problems of unemployment; pay and other rewards; hours and working conditions; physical dangers and health hazards. These were urgent and difficult issues, representing clear conflicts of interest that permeated upwards from the shop floor to the political and international arena. Over time, and with many difficulties that are too easily forgotten, improvements were achieved—through trade union action, law and regulation, and through custom and practice.

In this historical development, the Czechoslovakia into which I was born between the wars was on a par with other industrialized nations, perhaps a bit more progressive than some. The most important influence in my early life was an aunt, Fanni Blatny, who was a social-democratic member of parliament in the first Czechoslovak government of President Masaryk. Born in 1873, she had become a socialist as a very young woman, horrified by the poverty, inequalities, and working conditions in our part of the country, which was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She and I were very close, and as a child I liked nothing better than to listen to her stories of family and history. She was not academic, but in 1937 she and a colleague, Alfred Kleinberg, published a book detailing the working and living conditions of women in the Sudeten–German region at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. They called it Das Denkmal der unbekannten Proletarierin (Memorial to the Unknown Woman Worker) (Kleinberg & Blatny, 1937) and it is my most prized possession. She collected the accounts of numerous women and their families and the conditions in which they lived and worked, and Kleinberg put them into historical and economic perspective. There was no Charles Dickens or Mrs Gaskell to popularize knowledge of these conditions: a four-year-old is told by her mother that if she works hard at the lace-making she can have maize gruel to eat instead of maize soup, the gruel having more kernels in it than the soup. A domestic servant writes the saddest of letters to her sister before taking her own life; she can see no other way out from the unremitting overwork and ill-treatment. In such conditions of grinding poverty, and of the ill-health and early mortality that came with it, women were awakened to political organization. A fourteen-year old girl working in a grocery shop tries to persuad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FIGURES AND TABLES
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction: the context. A perspective on work organization in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
• SECTION I: MAKING THE CASE
• SECTION II: RESEARCH STUDIES
• SECTION III: CONSULTING AND ACTION RESEARCH
• SECTION IV: THE BOUNDARIES WITH OTHER PROFESSIONS
• SECTION V: AND FINALLY ...
• APPENDIX I: Work: its rewards and discontents (an Arno Press collection)
• APPENDIX II: Checklist for implementation issues
• REFERENCES
• INDEX