Work and Society

Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods

Tim Strangleman, Tracey Warren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415336482
• eBook ISBN: 9781134327775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Work and Society is an important new text about the sociology of work and employment. It provides both undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, business and politics, with a firm and enjoyable foundation to this fascinating area of sociology, giving comprehensive coverage of traditional areas of the sub-discipline as well as new trends and developments.

The book is divided into three complementary and interconnected sections – investigating work, work and social change and understanding work. These sections allow readers to explore themes, issues and approaches by examining how sociologists have thought about, and researched work and how the sub-discipline has been influenced by wider society itself. Novel features include separate chapters on researching work, domestic work, unemployment and work, and the representation of work in literary and visual media.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

What is work?

What is the sociology of work?

How could the sociology of work change?

Philosophy of the book

Organisation of the book

Internal structure of chapters

WHAT IS WORK?

The answer to this basic question, ‘What is work?’ may seem a simple one. Work is what we do for a living, we work to earn a living, to purchase the things we need, food, clothing, heat, light, power, shelter and hopefully have something remaining to enjoy ourselves. Easy, right? Well, we also work for other reasons such as self-respect, tradition, we feel forced to work by norms and values, or people are literally coerced into working for others. Some people love their work; others hate it with a passion. For some, work is inextricably bound up with who they are; it defines their identity not only for themselves but also in their family and community. Work can divide people and can unite them.

So as soon as we try to pin down what work ‘is’ we run in to problems of definitions as to what counts as work and what is not work. Work could simply mean effort or labour. We could extend this to include mental as well as physical labour. We could simply define work in terms of effort which is rewarded by the payment of money. But this would exclude all sorts of work not formally recognised by the payment of cash – much domestic labour and care work, voluntary work, and a variety of hidden work.

This question of what is work is made more complex still if we reflect back on the ‘historical meanings of work’. In the ancient world, to work was to occupy a dishonourable position in society. Indeed, it was the mark of the common mass or even the slave. Leisure was the defining principle of the élite in ancient Greece and Rome. In later Christian societies, work was viewed as the curse of Adam and Eve, the punishment of God for humans having eaten from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Much later, Protestants began to view hard work as a sign that they were part of an elect to be saved on the Day of Judgement. This gospel of hard work, the Protestant work ethic, developed in many western societies during the eighteenth, nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. In liberal political thought, to be a worker, to be economically independent was seen as the mark of a citizen, a fully adult member of society. To be dependent on the work of others was to be less than a full citizen.

In socialist and communist states in the middle of the twentieth century, the worker was lionised and fêted. Countries in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America defined themselves as workers’ states. Still later, debates about work and the work ethic have been renewed in welfare states in many developed countries where politicians fear that generations of men and women have ‘lost the work ethic’. Policies are devised to make employment central to people’s lives, work being seen as the answer to almost every social problem from community cohesion to education. At the same time, these debates are occurring against a background where work has changed and is continuing to change profoundly. Within a generation, we have seen the growth of service industries, globalisation, an explosion in the use of information technology, and deindustrialisation or huge reductions in manufacturing industry in the West and massive industrialisation in other parts of the world. With these processes has come a huge shift in the social relations around work with important consequences for the individual, the family and communities. Some commentators now openly talk about a ‘crisis in work’, or even the ‘end of work’. Others suggest that work now has no meaning for the people who undertake it. Where once what one ‘did’ defined one’s character, identity is now supposedly derived from what one consumes or wears. While some celebrate this liberation from the ‘dogma of work’, others detect nostalgia for the perceived certainties of a work-based past.

So the question, ‘What is work?’ becomes even more difficult to answer. It is made complex to define at any one point in history, shifting in its meaning across cultures. In some societies work is or has been what defines the individual, it is what makes them a fully adult citizen, in others it is the definition of an absence of citizenship. In turn, it is a curse, or a sign of being saved, something to be cherished and embraced or discarded and avoided at all costs.

WHAT IS THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK?

The varying definitions of work raise important questions about how we should study work. How do we make sense of the historical and changing meaning of work? What analytical, theoretical and methodological tools can we bring to bear in understanding the world of work? What do the changes witnessed in the world of work over the past thirty or forty years mean for such a study? And what will happen to work in the future?

There are lots of ways to answer these questions and the study of work is one that exercises a great many academic disciplines – history, economics, political science, social policy, geography, industrial relations, anthropology, management, theology, philosophy as well as literature. In this book we attempt to examine work from a sociological perspective, one that brings what C. W. Mills (1959) described as the ‘sociological imagination’ to bear. Work has exercised this sociological imagination from the very beginnings of the discipline in the nineteenth century. Each of sociology’s founding fathers was concerned with the transition from a largely rural society to one defined by industry and the urban environment. They were interested in understanding different aspects of what this transition meant for individuals, families, communities and wider society. Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber asked a set of questions about this new society and the way people were to live in it – how is order possible in mass society?; how is work to be organised and allocated?; what does work mean to people now and in the past?; what happens if people do not have enough or any work?; how do people adapt to greater levels of specialisation?; and how is paid work supported and underpinned by other social structures? What is striking about the questions posed by nineteenth-century sociologists is how central and relevant they still are today. In the twenty-first century, we still need to ask these same questions about work and those who do it.

Of course, sociologists do not have all the answers to these questions and to some extent the intellectual divide between those who study work is an accidental or arbitrary one. So what is distinct about the sociology – or perhaps that should be the sociologies – of work? Both authors of this book are sociologists with a distinct set of interests and training in the discipline, and in the production of this book have thought long and hard about what a sociology of work looks like. So here goes. First, sociology is a subject underpinned and shot through by theoretical understandings of how society is created, reproduced and changes over time. Sociology has a series of concepts and analytical tools for understanding society and the work that goes on inside it such as the division of labour, the employment relationship, alienation, rationalisation, gender, ‘race’ and class, and so on. Through these formal and abstract concepts we examine the empirical world of work. Sociology at its best does this historically and comparatively. It is also capable of looking at the world of work simultaneously at the macro, mezzo and micro levels so that we can make intelligible large-scale shifts in industry alongside small-scale interaction on the floor of a workplace or in the domestic arena. Sociologists of work can also draw on a remarkable range of methodological approaches to examine the world of work at these different levels. These range from the compiling and interrogation of quantitative data sets about trends in and experiences of work, through a wide variety of qualitative approaches such as oral history, ethnography and visual techniques.

In Work and Society, we want to describe and celebrate how sociologists have studied work but this will not be an uncritical evaluation. Work and Society offers the reader a critical account of what the sociology of work has looked at as well as pointing out absences. We want the reader to gain a sense of why work sociology has chosen to examine certain aspects of working life and not others at different times. We also want the reader to come out of each chapter with a sense of where current debates are within work sociology as well as suggesting where sociology might usefully develop in the future. In doing so, we are deliberately catholic in our choice of literature drawn on from outside sociology which could be integrated in to future analysis.

HOW COULD THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK CHANGE?

In the spirit of this disciplinary self-criticism we want to suggest a variety of ways in which the sociologies of work could develop and expand. This can be seen in terms of approaches, themes and methods. In this book we present a variety of areas which should be the subject of greater sustained attention by sociologists of work. This is not to say that sociologists have not looked at them already but rather their integration into the mainstream of work sociology has been problematic. We could cite the examples of domestic work, unemployment, ‘race’ and work, and visual approaches and material in this respect. The reasons for this neglect are involved and complex but in part they are due to the way that the sociology of work has been defined and reproduced over time. In the past what counted as the sociology of work was often defined by the employment relationship, namely, paid work often carried out by men in large industrial organisations. While there are understandable and fascinating reasons for this that tell us much about the history of sociology, it is important that the future of the discipline is not held captive by this past structure. Equally it is important that where new issues emerge, we do not simply bolt them on to our existing frameworks. Rather, we argue here that a novel and vibrant sociological study of work is one that genuinely integrates and embeds approaches to issues like gender and ‘race’. Importantly, though sociologists equally need to be aware of the rich tradition of sociological research and the way the sociological imagination has tackled a variety of perennial issues and questions, we try to encourage here the development of a robust historical depth to the study of work. We want also to encourage sociologists to be unafraid to look outside the sociological canon when trying to understand what is happening to work. Of course, sociologists have always done this to some extent but we are keen to give licence to the reader to study beyond the obvious close subject matters to also draw on approaches such as literature, art, photography, film and cultural studies. We are not suggesting that these are a substitute for sociological analysis, rather that they help us shed light on new or even old issues: they offer a different cut in to our subject. Finally, we want the reader to be aware of the variety of research methods which can be brought to bear in the study of work. We cover here both established and relatively new methodologies in various chapters.

What we want to argu...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• TABLES
• TEXT BOXES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Investigating Work
• Part II Work and Social Change
• Part III Understanding Work
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX