Bodies at Work

Carol Wolkowitz

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780761960645, 9780761960638
• eBook ISBN: 9781446223697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

?After reading this book it will be more difficult to "do" the sociology of work and the sociology of the body in the absence of the other. In some quite exquisite ways it throws down a challenge which practitioners in both fields will find difficult to ignore? - Paul Stewart, former editor of Work, Employment and Society, University of the West of England

Bodies at Work provides the first full-length, accessible account of the body/work relation in contemporary western societies. Bringing together fields of sociology that have hitherto developed mainly along separate lines, the book demonstrates the relevance of concepts developed in the sociology of the body for enriching our understanding of changing patterns of work and employment.

Bodies at Work begins by establishing key concerns in both the sociology of the body and the sociology of work. Drawing on existing research, the author proceeds to examine a wide range of employment sectors: industrial employment; customer relations; health practice; care work; the beauty industry; and sex work. The contribution of feminist theory and research is highlighted throughout, and analyses of photographs help the reader conceptualise the changing nature of the body/work relationship over time. Bodies at Work helps readers think more clearly and creatively about how work relations shape bodily experience.

---

ONE Embodiment and Paid Employment

---

This chapter seeks to provide the intellectual context within which research and debate on the body, embodiment and work can be located. It seeks to sketch, with a necessarily very broad brush, some of the main concerns considered in, firstly, the sociology of work and, secondly, scholarship on the body and embodiment, for readers who may be familiar with only one (or indeed neither) of these fields. But I also want to consider the absence of employment in the way the sociology of the body has developed as a field of study. As this book will show, research within the specialised literature on work, employment and organisation is already showing that dealing explicitly with the embodied character of work does much to enrich our understanding. Yet the main advocates of the sociology of the body in Britain have so far either resisted taking this research on board, or have done so very belatedly. The lack of attention to the world of work has many sources. As Scarry (1994) points out, we tend to associate bodies with sensuousness, play, pleasure and spontaneity rather than work, which is seen to involve mainly numbing routine. But underlying the neglect of paid employment may also be a reluctance to confront the kinds of constraints to fluidity and self-expression that work has historically represented.

What is the sociology of work and employment?

---

Traditionally, what distinguishes work from non-work depended on the social context within which an activity is undertaken and the value it is given in particular societies (Grint 1991). Although it is often seen as something that transforms nature, or that ensures survival, the meanings expressed by calling something ‘work’ are extremely variable. Feminist insistence on defining unpaid caring in the home as work demonstrates that, like other sociological categories, ‘work’ is a contested concept (Glucksmann 2006, 1995). Employment tends to be used as a narrower, more objective term, since the social relations within which it takes place are specified. Generally it refers to all forms of waged work in which an employee works under the authority of an employer (Edwards 2003: 1), and therefore excludes some kinds of paid work, such as self-employment, along with unpaid labour.

Three areas have dominated research. One focuses on long- and short-term changes in the structure of the labour markets that ‘bring together workers in search of a wage and capitalists in search of employees’ (Peck 1996: 1). Although many economists may understand labour market outcomes in terms of the inevitable logic of market exchange, in which jobs are allocated based on workers’ skills and other human capital, sociologists have long stressed their socially contingent nature. If only because the choices of both employers and workers are affected not only by economic incentives but also by many features of the wider society, including state welfare systems, migration opportunities, gender roles, family and household composition, and educational aspirations, the sociology of work and employment has always had to consider the social developments and institutions within which labour markets are embedded. Moreover, the structuring of labour markets feeds back into the wider society, since the output of employment includes ‘not only the production of goods and services but also the structures of advantage and disadvantage’ to which employment gives rise (Edwards 2003: 4).

Much debate concerns the effects of the sectoral shift that has taken place since the early 1970s in the labour markets of Britain and other advanced capitalist societies (Peck 1996; Sayer and Walker 1992; Warhurst and Thompson 1998). Much of the employment previously required by manufacturing, mining and agriculture has now been now transferred to lower-wage economies and has been supplanted by jobs in the service sector. This has involved to some extent the upgrading of employment through the growth of job opportunities in the ‘new economy’, led by knowledgeintensive work in, for instance, finance and business services, product design, retail management, the professions and the creative industries. However, many commentators stress counter-trends in which jobs available to previous generations of craft and assembly line workers have been replaced by less well-paid and less secure jobs as cleaners, fast-food retail workers and carers, to take just three examples of work that cannot be readily exported. Meanwhile many jobs even in new, technologically more advanced sectors still involve routinised, repetitive tasks and close monitoring, such as customer service work in high-volume call centres.

Herzenberg et al. (1998) suggest that the characteristics of jobs available in the labour markets of post-industrial economies have to be analysed in terms of the restructuring of a whole range of different aspects of employment, for example the characteristics of business organisation (including, the expansion of franchising arrangements and outsourcing); work systems (how jobs are defined and worker effort regulated, especially the types of incentives that are available and degree of autonomy permitted); and career paths, especially the balance between long-term employment with promotion prospects and casualised, insecure work. Many of these changes reflect the increasing possibilities offered by technological changes in information-processing and surveillance, and, at least in Britain, are intertwined with the privatisation of formerly publicly owned services and assets. These changes are resulting in complex new patterns of employment inequality and insecurity among workers (Beynon et al. 2002).

In the US the particular mix of manual and non-manual, union and non-union, and high-skill and low-skill jobs characteristic of different regional labour markets has important and contradictory implications for men and women, white and racialised minority workers (McCall 2001). In Britain the previous segregation of women into relatively low-paid jobs in manufacturing and routine services (along with their concentration in the lower strata of professional and semi-professional public sector employment, for example as primary school teachers and nurses) has been succeeded by a much more polarised labour market for women, which has seen highly educated women’s opportunities expand dramatically, although they still do not match those of men with the same qualifications (Walby 1997). At the other end of the labour market, jobs may be so ill-paid, insecure and dead-end, Peck (2004) argues, that at least in the US they are increasingly filled by workers effectively forced to accept them by prison parole programmes, immigration controls and the state workfare programmes, which have replaced welfare payments for the mothers of dependent children. Moreover, the monopolisation of access to jobs in the low-paid sector by temporary help agencies has made it difficult for workers to directly challenge terms and conditions of work.

These labour market changes have meant that a second area where sociologists have been especially active – the study of workplace relations – has also altered to some extent. Much of the research on workplace relations that is concerned to reveal a rich world of meaning (Cornfield and Hodson 2002: 6) has involved ethnographic case studies of particular occupations and workplaces. These initially focused on male workers, including classic studies of manual occupations, including fishermen (Tunstall 1962), lorry drivers (Hollowell 1968) and manufacturing and processing plants (Beynon 1973; Burawoy 1979; Collinson 1992; Nichols and Beynon 1977), but from the 1970s also focusing on the experience of women factory workers (Cavendish 1982; Pollert 1981; Westwood 1984).

Following Braverman (1974), many were influenced by the debate over the reworkings of Marx’s concept of the labour process, i.e. the processes of production which transform raw materials, through the application of human labour, tools and machinery, into use values that can be sold on the market as commodities (Thompson 1989: xv). According to this way of thinking, the labour process has a dual character, since the concrete labour processes through which specific goods are made and particular types of services provided are shaped by the capitalist labour process which seeks to turn labour into profit. In the light of the sectoral shifts noted above, ethnographic study has had to be extended by new research on the organisation of work in expanding sectors, for instance the hospitality industry, retail work, knowledge work and cultural production, and the new roles, relationships and identities these kinds of work may involve (Adkins 1995; Black 2004; Kunda 1992; Foner 1994; Lash and Urry 1994; Macdonald and Sirianni 1996; Pettinger 2004). There have also been important contributions by women journalists (Ehrenreich 2001; Toynbee 2003) who have sought to capture the experience of workers in feminised, low-wage personal services and sales work by taking low-paid jobs themselves and writing about their experiences. But it has to be said that the direction of ethnographic research still lags behind the sectoral shifts in the location of paid work.

Much of the research on paid work tends to be integrated by taking presumed commonalities in the employment relation – the relation between capital and labour, employers and workers – as its starting point, and focuses on how the labour processes involved in producing diverse goods and services shape (and are in turn shaped by) conflicts of interest between employers’ perceived interests (for instance, increasing profits, saving costs, controlling or monitoring workers’ input, marketing considerations) and by what workers define as theirs (e.g. financial rewards, security of employment, autonomy and self-esteem). However, research increasingly draws on new theoretical frameworks that focus on the subjectivity of the worker, said to be missing from labour process analysis (Newton 1999; Sturdy and Fineman 2001), or at least broadens the interest in worker’s consent or compliance to encompass with more precision? ‘how corporate power and worker subjectivity intersect within social relations of organisational domination’ (Fleming and Spicer 2003: 158; see also Kunda 1992). In fact, some critics argue that theorists influenced by the work of Foucault (see below) have been so preoccupied with the construction of worker identity and subjectivity that new approaches present a picture in which ‘the labour process is just part of the scenery’ rather than integral to the analysis (Thompson and Ackroyd 1995: 627, cited in Newton 1999: 425; West and Austrin 2002).

The sociology of employment increasingly overlaps with a third focus, the study of organisations, i.e. ‘the bureaucracies that employ workers in many occupations, organise them in hierarchies and shape movement between them’ (Halford et al. 1997: 3). Aspects of the organisational context within which work is undertaken are considered so important that this type of research has tended to push an earlier tradition, which focused on occupations as the building blocks of the division of labour, to the background. The biggest employers include not only private sector corporations but also public utilities and public services – the NHS is the largest employer in Europe (Culley 2001). The changing shape of organisation has become a particular concern; increasingly large organisations do not employ people directly, but obtain labour input through a variety of interfirm contractual arrangements, such as franchising, subcontracting, reliance on temporary staff agencies and the use of project management consultants. Under such conditions the responsibilities of employers to employees, and employees to employers, become blurred, making it even more necessary to link studies of the employment relationship and organisational analysis (Marchington et al. 2005).

Organisational theorists have been concerned with non-manual employment rather more than sociologists of work, especially with management as itself an employment niche and managers as a type of worker. Such research is frequently to be found in what is sometimes termed Critical Management Studies (Alvesson and Willmott 1992), which takes a more critical view of management neutrality and rationality than much applied research. Because most large organisations are divided by gradations in formal and informal access to the exercise of power, it tends to operate with a less binary model of power than those models of paid work focusing on the relations between employers and employees. It has tended to draw on postmodernist constructions of the plasticity of subjectivity and the mobility of power more than deterministic traditions in the sociology of work privileging structural constraints on the social relations between groups (Fleming and Spicer 2003).

Feminist interventions have contributed to all these developments in the sociology of work and organisation. Early initiatives were concerned with explaining the then segregation of women into a narrow band of lower-level jobs in manufacturing and services (Hartmann 1979), seeing women’s position in the labour market as determined by macro-systems, like capitalism and patriarchy, that were beyond their control. Feminist research also made a big contribution to workplace studies, as noted above, especially the importance of non-economic factors in the relations between workers and between workers and employers. Later accounts are more influenced by the poststructuralist focus on ‘the cultural [re]production of gendered identities through practices enacted in the workplace’ (Smith and Gottfried 1996: 13), thereby highlighting the role of women’s own practices in the sex-typing of occupations (Andermahr et al. 2000: 86–7). They have also paid special attention to the discourses of gender neutrality that obscure the unwritten, gendered assumptions of bureaucratic organisations (Smith and Gottfried 1996: 12).

Crossing these successive developments, however, has been a continuing interest in the relation between paid and unpaid work, production and reproduction, and public and private spheres. For instance, when the women journalists mentioned above undertook their studies of low-paid work, they each not only took a series of low-paid jobs themselves but attempted to set up a home and live on their earnings. Although the present volume has been unable to give the attention to unpaid work I would have liked, it does try to incorporate the paid work done in private homes (see Chapter 7) to a much greater extent than is normally the case in the sociology of employment. The paid care work now undertaken in private homes is only one example of the reconfiguration of the interconnections and overlap between work activities previously divided between paid and unpaid work or formal and informal sectors (Pettinger et al. 2006).

Bodies are not really new to studies of work, but for many reasons have been obscured till recent years. Marx, whose understanding of labour was central to the trajectory of radical approaches in the sociology of work, insisted on the mutually constitutive relationship between the body and work: bodies are both the source of labour and themselves its product. Marx saw the artefacts human beings create as ‘the memorialisation’ of embodied work, and the tools, land and material objects with which we labour as extensions or ‘prolongations’ of the worker’s body (Scarry 1985: 247). ‘Man’ remakes his body through labour (which is therefore also a kind of artefact), providing himself with sustenance and other use-values with which to renew his body. Weber, too, who is as important to the study of organisation as Marx is to the labour relation, gave importance to the embodiment of social actors in his analysis of charisma as a form of authority. However, each of these founding fathers also recognised that in modern societies the corporeality of the worker (or members of organisations, in the case of Weber) has become less evident. Weber argued that in modern societies charismatic authority was usually superseded by impersonal bureaucratic authority, vested in the office rather than the person, while Marx stressed that the incorporation in production of the labour of fragile and feeling human bodies is obscured under capitalism, by being turned into a commodity. Moreover, in so far as consumer and producer are linked only by the market, they can remain oblivious to each other’s existence as embodied beings.

The relative absence of the body from most studies of work is no doubt also due to the fact that most of the activities which directly service the body and the spaces it inhabits, to use Smith’s (1988) phrase, have historically been provided by servants or slaves, or by women in their roles as wives and mothers, i.e. outside the labour market and not publicly visible as work at all. Moreover, in so far as such work is reproductive, it has not been seen as appropriating nature by transforming it through the use of human labour. A number of shifts in employment, including the entry of women into work in large-scale organisations, the commercialisation of reproductive work, the focus on worker–customer interaction, the rise of new methods for monitoring work output, and the emergence of new work-based health hazards, have made some sociologists more conscious of the need to attend to the corporeality of workers.

A phenomenological analysis of the body’s ‘disappearance’ from everyday consciousness is also relevant to understanding its disappearance from the labour process, even when the body is patently involved, as in ‘manual labour’. For instance, building on the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962), Leder argues that although the body is ‘the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives’, it is also characterised by absence: ‘it is rarely the thematic object of attention’ (Leder 1990: 1). The disappearance of the various parts and sense modalities of the body are structured differently, Leder argues, and our conscious awareness of even our arms and legs, which are so central to human perception and motility, is limited. Instrumental activity, including labour, evokes awareness mainly of targets outside ourselves rather than the body from which we experience. To use a simple example, the archer concentrating on the bull’s-eye has little conscious awareness of his eye focusing on it or his arm holding the bow. The body only makes its ‘dys-appearance’, according to Leder, through pain, discomfort, the awareness of disability, or when a person becomes conscious of the scrutiny of other people. This might help to explain why, until recently, consideration of the physical body in work was restricted mainly to consideration of work-related injury and ill health. Moreover, questions regarding injury and impairment have been constructed mainly as technical questions, rather than being integrated into the main currents in the sociology of work (Williams 1993), reflecting the longstanding identification of the body with scientific descriptions of its anatomical and functional properties (Leder 1990: 5).

However, as discussed below, Leder’s view of embodied experience may be unduly universalistic. It may be insufficiently gendered, for instance, taking little cognisance of differences between men’s and women’s relation to bodily movements, as discussed below. (Women using a bow-and-arrow may have a different experience than men, for instance.) Moreover, although it is true that the heightened consciousness of one’s own body that people experience while learning new skills may tend to disappear once such skills become automatic, this is not only because skills become incorporated, as Leder suggests, but also because many tacit skills, including physical strength, are so rarely credentialised that they disappear from social analysis and come to appear as entirely natural abilities.

In seeking to convert the body in the workplace from a relatively unremarked ‘absent presence’ (Turner 1984) to an acknowledged aspect of the construction and experience of paid work, we must take account of the body’s many guises. As I discuss further below, the sociology of the body and embodiment persistently expresses uncertainty as to what the body really is or its relation to the sense of self (Howson 2004). As Terry Eagleton (1993: 7) put it, ‘It is not quite true that I have a body, and not quite true that I am one either.’ In different contexts we feel ourselves as fully embodied subjects, in others we become more conscious of having a body with which we do not fully identity or which confronts us with its Otherness. Bodies are physical entities, organisms located in biological and physiological processes, symbolic objects transformed by culture and represented by images of various kinds, and, pace Merleau-Ponty (1962), our way of knowing the world.

Where the body is present in the sociology of work, as it has become in recent years, it has been brought into view in particular ways, and these will be discussed in detail in the course of this book. For instance, as we shall see in Chapter 3, the body was at least a minor feature of some studies of male manual work, which celebrated the strength, skill and masculine presence of the male working body. More recently a focus on the body as an explicit target of sociological interest has been associated with the poststructuralist analysis of bodies, subjects and organisations as discursive constructs. This has led in two quite distinct directions, emphasising, on the one hand, the historical construction of the worker’s passified, ‘docile body’ (Foucault 1991; Schatzki and Natter 1996b; Bahnisch 2000) and, on the other, highlighting the disruptive potential of unruly bodily pleasures, excess and play as forms of resistance (Brewis and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Embodiment and Paid Employment
• 2 Picturing Embodied Labour
• 3 Industrial Bodies
• 4 Customer Services
• 5 Vulnerable Bodies: Workplace ‘Accidents’, Injury and Ill Health
• 6 Will Any Body Do? Conceptualising the ‘Prostitute Body’
• 7 Body Work as Social Relationship and as Labour
• 8 Concluding Remarks
• References
• Index