Creating Sociological Awareness
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Creating Sociological Awareness

Collective Images and Symbolic Representations

Anselm L. Strauss

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Creating Sociological Awareness

Collective Images and Symbolic Representations

Anselm L. Strauss

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About This Book

This volume of papers from the distinguished sociologist Anselm Strauss reflects his self-professed lifelong intention to create sociological awareness in his readers and students. As Irving Louis Horowitz notes in his foreword to the book, at the center of Strauss's effort has been the democratization of sociology. He has achieved this goal by making sure that relativities of status, power, and wealth are acknowledged in the conduct of everyday life, and by recognition that all collective life is subject to negotiation, rearrangement and reconstruction.

Represented here is some of the work for which Strauss is best known, and the principal themes that have captured his imagination throughout his productive career. These include work, leisure, culture, illness, identity, and policy. All are linked by Strauss's "web of negotiation" by which organizational arrangements can be changed. The volume concludes with a selection of his work in problems of method, consultation, and teaching, affirming Strauss's commitment to passing along the sociological awareness reflected in this volume to a next generation.

Squarely in the long tradition of the Chicago School of sociology, the work of Anselm Strauss represents the very best thinking in modem sociological and psychological analysis. Those interested in the development of his major conceptual frameworks, as well as those interested in the development of the specific subject areas to which Anselm Strauss has devoted his career will find this an essential volume. Professionals in the history of sociology, the sociology of knowledge, or medical sociology will find the book of particular interest.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2018
ISBN
9781351525244
Subtopic
Sociologie
Edition
1

II
Work

5
Work and the Division of Labor

(1985)
This chapter is designed to fill a gap in studies of the division of labor by conceptualizing the division of labor in terms of close scrutiny of work itself, and especially the work of given projects that entail extensive sequences of tasks for their accomplishment.1
The aim of this conceptualization is to stimulate research into the nature of work itself and the organizations where it takes place. My approach is interactionist, though as there are several quite different varieties of interactionism, perhaps it might be classified as structural or Pragmatist (that is, Dewey or Mead) interactionism (see Glaser and Strauss, 1968; Strauss, 1977; Glaser, 1978; Strauss et al., 1985; Gerson, 1983; Gerson and Star, 1986).
A word about the analytic style of this chapter should be useful. The several concepts discussed here are “grounded” insofar as they rest on data collected over many years (Glaser and Strauss, 1965; Glaser and Strauss, 1969; Fagerhaugh and Strauss, 1978) and were developed further during an intensive field observational study of medical work in acute care hospitals (Strauss et al., 1985). The concepts may apply more directly to rapidly changing industries and organizations, like health and high tech; but perhaps also, in part at least, to more slowly changing ones. Properly utilized, the concepts are instruments to guide research, not merely descriptive tags: to use them so would be useless. The analytic style in discussing them is not so usual perhaps in sociology, since readers are accustomed either to considerable data presentation or to abstractly couched theoretical essays. In this chapter, relatively few illustrations will be given since readers should easily, from their own research and lives, be able to supply those. For indeed, much of what is in this chapter will be recognizable in the sense that one has either experienced or seen the phenomena. It is a conceptualization, however exploratory, that I am aiming at here, along with drawing attention to the need for something like it when studying work in relation to the division of labor. (Readers interested in the data underpinning can find this in The Social Organization of Medical Work [Strauss et al., 1985].)
A summary of the conceptualization is as follows: Projects involve a course of action that entails a division of labor—meaning not only of actors but of actions. It is useful to keep those analytic distinctions separate. In “work” terms, the project action is made up of many tasks done over time, and divided up according to various criteria among the actors (persons, classes of persons, departments, or other organizational units). The totality of tasks we shall term the arc of work—the central concept in this chapter. The implications of this concept involve the asking of many questions, and direct research into aspects of the division of labor. Some of those aspects have been studied previously, hence are discussed here. The related concepts include actor accountability and accountability systems, which have bearing on the carrying out of types of work and their implicated tasks. Since the plurality of tasks making up their totality, as well as the relations of actors to tasks, are not automatically articulated, actors must do that too, and often in complex ways. We call the work of doing this “articulation work”—a supra-type of work. Of course, such work involves also the accountability actions. I have made a distinction also between the division of work and the division of rights—rights that actors can claim, impose, assume, manipulate for, negotiate over, concerning various tasks and types of work constituting the total arc of work. I shall touch on this distinction only because in the literature on division of labor the two phenomena are sometimes confused, although we found it useful in our research to make the distinctions clearly. Another potentially useful concept is the collective styles of interaction, which evolve among workers when carrying out their respective tasks: examples being the collaborative and the harshly conflictful. Interactional styles seem not only to affect the precise dividing up of work—what and who—but how that is put into operation; including in relation to accountability and to the necessary articulation of tasks. Organizational and supra-organizational conditions also affect the arc of work, and some of these are discussed, again in relation to rapidly changing situations. Some of these conditions pertain to organization, occupation, and market—three bases of allocation of actors to jobs that have been extensively discussed in the literature dealing with the division of labor. It seems probable that the cumulative effect of numerous, even countless, projects would have some effect on the organizations and industries themselves; this is suggested near the end of the chapter, as arc some possible directions for future research.
Paradoxically and perhaps a bit ironically, however, neither traditional nor contemporary writing on the division of labor has been much concerned with the work done in the division of labor. Attention has been not on the tasks entailed in the work but on issues pertaining to differential distribution of rewards to classes of individuals (sex, class, race, occupation, and so on), and perhaps especially the dividing up of work by the various occupations and professions. Distribution is where the emphasis has been, and “labor” in both senses of the word—(wo) manpower and work—has meant largely the former.
Indeed, mirroring this has been the intense focus by the sociologists of occupations-professions and work on the first part of this combined term, work being quite subordinate to that focus. In contrast, the approach taken here leads to a threefold distinction: (1) tasks to task, (2) person to task, and (3) person to person. All three are aspects of the division of labor. The first two will be of chief interest here. Keeping those conceptual distinctions clear will help to clarify and deepen this central sociological concept, at least in its participle (working, laboring) aspects. And if it makes sense to make those distinctions, then it also follows that there is still another type of work, that of coordinating and organizing the task-to-task and person-to-task relationships.
Eliot Freidson (1976) reviewed literature on division of labor (Clements, 1972; Kemper, 1972; Labovitz and Gibbs, 1964) and offered some suggestions for conceptualizing this important phenomenon in terms of work. Aside from his own contributions, which I will touch on below, his review suggested that, at least in the last decades, there are three basic approaches to the relations of social organization and the division of labor: (1) occupational, (2) organizational, and (3) market. All of these approaches are principally addressed to the allocation of work, especially the bases of allocation, rather than to work processes themselves. Who gets to do what, when, how, and how much, is determined or affected by occupational position, organizational principle, and market factors. Behind the allocation, as Freidson notes, there certainly are ideological conceptions, “theories,” of how work should be distributed among and within occupations and organizations, and of how the accomplishments of workers should be rewarded; and of course how the market should be organized so as to distribute and reward workers’ labor. These deeply political and value-laden conceptions embody moral and operational principles for evaluating performances in accordance with criteria (whether they are specified clearly or not), and cover the “rights” of classes of workers to task and rewards.
All of those kinds of social science concerns are addressed primarily to the allocative issues of the division of labor—but though those are multiple and interesting, of course, they are unduly restrictive, as Freidson correctly notes, of a larger range of potential issues. For that reason Freidson began to address the division of labor in terms of the work engaged in by the workers themselves, arguing that the occupation-organization-market principles “are in a sense separate from the work activities these purport to order.” Why is this? Because “They are diffused when translated into work. In and of themselves, the concrete work activities of the division of labor are interactive and emergent in character.” Freidson’s approach embodied both the traditional interactionist themes of “emergence” and of “conspiracy, evasion, negotiation and conflict” (see Dalton, 1959), as well as an older sociological theme of how formal organization does not entirely constrain workers to act as they see fit.
However, that is where Freidson has left the matter: his interest really was to focus attention of division-of-labor theorists and researchers on work itself. He did not actually carry out any further the examination of work in relation to division of labor issues, but his calling attention to the centrality of work in connection with the division of labor did point to a redirection of theorizing about the latter.
In this chapter, my intent is to take up where Freidson left off. Its central foci will be the following:
  • Attention both to work as sets of tasks and to workers as the latter relate to the work.
  • A language for handling those relationships—for analyzing in general any division of labor.
  • An emphasis on division of labor as related to phases of doing the work of any project over time.
  • A consideration of the articulation work that is involved in organizing both the tasks and relationships to them of the people who perform them.
  • A contrast of the division of labor involved in carrying out a project (an “arc of work”) as compared with that involved in a “line of work.” which encompasses many projects.
  • A brief discussion of the division of rights as contrasted and related to the division of labor.
  • An emphasis on changing as well as stable divisions of labor as those relate to macro structural conditions.
  • A suggestion about how cumulative projects might in turn affect macro structural conditions.

Project, Arc of Work, and Types of Work

In carrying out any project—inventing a new model of computer, building a house, getting a voluntary organization off the ground—a multitude of tasks must sequentially and simultaneously be carried out (Becker, 1982). While studying a special type of project (“an illness trajectory” that pertained to the work of staffwho were involved in managing the illness of any hospitalized patient), we developed the conception of arc of work (Strauss et al., 1985). An arc for any given trajectory—or project—consists of the totality of tasks arrayed both sequentially and simultaneously along the course of the trajectory or project. At least some of the arc is planned for, designed, forseen; but almost inevitably there are unexpected contingencies that alter the tasks, the clusters of tasks, and much of the overall task organization. Hence the arc cannot be known in all its details—except in very standard, contingency-minimal projects—until and if the actors look back and review the entire course they have traversed.
In the hospital research, we also developed a conceptualization pertaining to types of work that are implicated in an arc. Thus illness trajectory management includes a bundle of work types, including: clinical safety, technological (equipment, drug, procedural), error, psychological, information, and articulation work. Of course both the types and their combinations will vary by different arcs: in (say) a physics research project, there would be neither clinical safely nor comfort work, much error work (though its dimensions would be different), but also other types of work probably missing from clinical medical management. The arc concept—with its implicated phases, types of work, clusters of tasks, and articulation of tasks—can be central for a deeper analysis of medical work in relation to division of labor issues, and possibly for work in other settings.
These different projects or trajectories with their implicated arcs of work entail different divisions of workers (persons or classes of persons or units of organization) in order to get the constituent tasks done. Insofar as the mix and articulation of tasks and work types vary, so will the distributions of persons at work. The implications of that in turn include the following.
  1. The division of work among classes of persons may therefore be different during different phases of the project or trajectory, each successive one perhaps necessitating new classes with particular skills or relying on different skills of the same workers. It is the skills and actions that are the essential elements, then, not simply the class of worker as such. (The detailed description by Kidder [1982] of a team project for building a new model of computer is an excellent illustration of these points. In the final phases of this project, for example, certain engineers turned out to be best at debugging the model’s errors, especially during the last and most difficult steps; and these men in fact chose themselves to do those tasks after others had failed at them.)
  2. The division of labor called for may vary considerably by the component type of work—with its constitutent tasks—being performed as part of the total project work. Thus in medical work, different workers (or the same worker employing different skills) may be called on to handle clinical safety work, error work, and comfort work. But in the safety work, for instance, also different skills, possibly involving different personnel, are utilized for discerning a safety error—calling for its rectification, rectifying it, and monitoring the rectification. So, again, it is the variation in work, not merely the class of worker, that is the essential ingredient for getting tasks accomplished.
  3. Analysis of the division of labor also requires detailed scrutiny of how a cluster of tasks performed by workers, simultaneously and/or sequentially, are related to each other. For instance, when a cardiac patient is brought into the surgical recovery room, an observer can note that the immediate tasks consist of making a multitude (perhaps ten or twenty) of connections between the patient’s bodily parts or apertures and various machines. Two or three nurses or technicians will be busy making the connections at which they are skilled—one, two, or more of them—while a physician will be making others; meanwhile perhaps four other technicians and nurses will be standing at the foot of the bed awaiting their turns to make their respective connections. Notable in this particular division of labor is how tasks are done both sequentially and simultaneously, but involve only a single worker performing one task at a time: that is, in this cluster of tasks, no task is likely to engage the cooperative effort of two or more workers. In later phases of working on the same patient two or more physicians or nurses, or nurses and technicians, may work together on a common basis. Of course, the particular illustration reflects a relatively non-problematic handling and sharing of tasks by different specialists. If either the tasks or the specialty sharing were to be problematic, then there would be a question of who shall do them. Or if the division of labor is contestable, then there will certainly be debate and perhaps struggle over the outcome. (This kind of issue is touched on later in the section on division of rights.)
  4. None of this arc of work is called into play automatically. Some actor—person or other acting unit—must be “responsible” for deciding and planning that: (1) a project is necessary or desirable: (2) then the same or other actor must be responsible for deciding on and possibly planning the totality or segments of the arc, including the major tasks structures; (3) also there must be actors responsible for articulating the various tasks and clusters of tasks making up the arc. As will be remarked on below (see “Division of Rights and Division of Labor” and “Actor Accountability”), responsibility involves not simply what actor is willing to be assigned responsibility but questions of rights.

Action and Actor

The distinction between tasks and actors who carry them out needs to be taken with the utmost analytic seriousness, because they do represent different issues. (At any rate the distinction is central to the analysis in this chapter.) The specific questions about tasks of course include: what, where, when, how, for how long, how complex, how well defined are their boundaries, how attainable are they under current working conditions, how precisely are they defined in their operational details, and what is the expected level of performance. 2 (Which of those are the most salient dimensions depends on the organizational-work context under study, and we cannot emphasize too much that it is the researcher who must discover these saliences.) Two other important questions are how they are put together in task clusters and linked together in an organization of tasks. “Work,” which constitutes the total arc, or some portion of it, is then “decomposed” (Gerson, 1983), even perhaps in some arcs down to detailed minitasks—the most minute of tasks (such is epitomized, say, by the staggering number of minuteness of minitasks entailed in getting the space mission to and from the moon).
What about the carrying...

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