The Labour Process and the Changing Nature of Work, Management and Organization.

Question 1

What does labour process mean?

Answer 1

Its the role that people play as they apply their labour at work to produce goods and services. The conditions that people perform their work, the skills they use and the amount of autonomy and control they have over it.

Question 2

What was labour like in the pre industrial era?

Answer 2

Agriculture was key to society and most activities were carried out through all family members, working to produce goods necessary for their own needs.

Question 3

What is labour like in the industrial era?

Answer 3

1. The workforce is urban based. 2. People sell their labour to employers in exchange for wages. 3. Workers have little independence or control in the labour process. 4. Employers control place of work, days and hours worked and products produced. 5. Work and homes are separated. 6. Production is mainly carried out using technology rather then manual craft skills.

Question 4

What are low trust systems of management control?

Answer 4

The idea that workers cannot be trusted and need to be closely supervised or monitored an idea which has risen in the industrial era.

Question 5

What did Abercrombie et al identify?

Answer 5

Four types of strategy for controlling the workforce. Direct control, technical control, bureaucratic control and responsible autonomy.

Question 6

What’s direct control?

Answer 6

Clear supervision of workforce by the owners and managers. This is not very common today and typically found in small businesses.

Question 7

What’s technical control?

Answer 7

The nature of jobs and the speed of work are controlled by technology. Each worker is given a limited range of tasks, tasks involving little skill.

Question 8

What’s bureacratic control?

Answer 8

Workers are controlled by a hierarchy of authority: every worker has an immediate superior and formal rules controlling their job.

Question 9

What’s responsible autonomy?

Answer 9

Workers are given a wider degree of discretion/control and are less controlled by direct supervisors. The workforce is more self policing.

Question 10

What’s scientific management?

Answer 10

The management of workers should follow scientific principles, strict control of the workforce and performance tasks in the same way as a piece of machinery.

Question 11

What’s Taylorism?

Answer 11

It was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centaury, breaking down work into the simplest elements, managers give workers clear exact instructions on how to do their job. It was a way to control the workforce, using the principles of scientific management. Taylor believed that the best means by which management could reduce the power of workers was over the labour process in order to increase the maximum output of goods.

Question 12

How is Taylorism implemented? (3 ways.)

Answer 12

1. Making the labour process completely independent of autonomy, creativity and ability of the industrial worker. 2. Defining each task in work down to the smallest detail and working out how long each task should take. 3. Removing as much skill as possible from the workers job, breaking each task down into such small, simple and repetitive tasks that they could be completed without hardly any skills at all. Workers then became extensions of the machinery they were operating.

Question 13

What’s Fordism?

Answer 13

Taylorism was applied by Henry Ford who used assembly lines to produce the first mass produced car, the Model T-Ford. Cheap standardized cars were produced and labour costs were kept relatively low. Fords cars only cost about half the price of cars sold previously. There was however little choice of personalization. Workers lacked skills and knowledge of the production process and were completely removed from descion making.

Question 14

What did Ritzer come up with?

Answer 14

Mcdonaldisastion.

Question 15

What is McDonaldisastion?

Answer 15

A contemporary way that Taylor and Fords ideas are applied. Its the principles of a fast food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of society. The labour process split into 4 stages: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control.

Question 16

What’s efficiency?

Answer 16

The aspects of the labour process is evaluated so that the production line is streamlined and carried out uniformly. For example, there are cashiers, a packer and an order maker.

Question 17

What’s calculability?

Answer 17

Each item in the production process is carefully calculated and quantified. For example, products such as the Big Mac are of similar weight and size so can be processed in the given amount of time.

Question 18

What’s predictability?

Answer 18

The products, the way the staff treat the customers and the environment are stable, consistent and predictable and can be duplicated in all branches across the world. For example, you’d expect all McDonald workers to be payed fairly and have similar products across the world.

Question 19

What’s control?

Answer 19

Management control the labour process through technology and ideology. For example there are layers of management within a McDonalds.

Question 20

What did Braverman come up with?

Answer 20

As a Marxist, he viewed the rise of Taylorism/Fordism and Mcdonalidisastion and came up with his deskilling thesis.

Question 21

What is the deskillling thesis?

Answer 21

Management cannot trust workers to work efficiently so they minimize the autonomy of workers. The workforce is deskilled through the application of scientific management principles through the deskilling and degration of work. In contemporary capitalism, this is happening to an increasing amount of jobs. This results in a loss of creativity and control over the labour process by the workers. This results in jobs becoming less secure.

Question 22

What’s an example of the deskilling process?

Answer 22

Cashiers.

Question 23

What did Frey and Osbourne predict?

Answer 23

Computerization could make nearly half of even highly skilled, knowledge based middle class careers redundant in ten to twenty years.

Question 24

What’s an example of a job being made redundant by technology?

Answer 24

Lift operators.

Question 25

What are 4 critisms of Braverman?

Answer 25

1. Gallie found that there was little evidence to support deskilling thesis, many workers have found that their work has been upskilled, with more qualifications needed to get their jobs and more time spent on training (can be linked to Weber and upgrading your market position. 2. In the 19th centaury most workers were already in unskilled or semi skilled jobs. 3. Rather then removing jobs, technology has created more. 4. Fordist methods are seen as old fashioned and employees look for a wider range of skills within their workers.

Question 26

What did Elton come up with?

Answer 26

An alternative to the Fordist approach, the human relations theory. Mayo lead a team of researchers to the Hawthorne plant in Chicago and found that workers were more productive if they felt valued, less controlled by management and enjoyed their work. This approach attempts to overcome worker resistance to the labour process whilst retaining management power and control.

Question 27

What does the human relations theory suggest the 4 ways are to make work more rewarding?

Answer 27

1. Job enrichment, giving workers more independence and responsibility for the descions they make in the work, a chance to use initiative rather than being closely supervised. 2. Job rotation, giving workers a variety of jobs to do. 3. Job enlargement, including a wider range of factors and skills within a job. 4 Teamwork, where a team is responsible for completing a product rather than individuals having responsibility for a single, boring task.

Question 28

What was an issue of validity with the humans relations theory?

Answer 28

To see what effected productivity, conditions were worsened within the factory however productivity stayed the same showing that the study may have been effected by the Hawthorne effect.

Question 29

Why was Friedman critical of Braverman?

Answer 29

Although also a Marxist, he argued that employers can achieve more effective control of the labour process and higher levels of efficiency by involving workers more in their work rather than by scientific management. If workers identify more with a company and their work, they require less supervision and control. Management should be giving people responsible autonomy.

Question 30

Why do Piore and Sabel criticize Fordist methods?

Answer 30

Its increasingly outdated, people have become more demanding firms therefore use computer technology and more skilled workers to make production more flexible. This is referred to as flexible specialization.

Question 31

How are there flexible working hours at Microsoft and how does that link to responsible autonomy?

Answer 31

There are more choices over how many hours you work, they are able to do at least 50% of their work at home on Microsoft teams. This can allow people to feel more motivated.

Question 32

What do Pollert and Dex and McCulloch argue?

Answer 32

The extent of post ford changes have been exaggerated.

Question 33

What is the proof that post ford changes have been exaggerated?

Answer 33

1. The demand for mass products has not disappeared such as seen with clothing companies. 2. Flexibility is often restricted to large firms as they have the most money and therefore the most ability too. 3. Workers now just perform a range of tasks that require little skill.

Question 34

What would postmodernists argue about surveillance in the workforce?

Answer 34

Self surveillance is just taking on the role once performed by external surveillance.

Question 35

How many of those in employment are self employed?

Answer 35

4.37 million, after covid self employment levels dropped to around the same as the middle of December 2015, before then they had been constantly growing.

Question 36

What are self employment figures like for men and women?

Answer 36

2.8 million men are self employed and 1.6 million women. There has been consistently more men then women self employed. Men are much more likely to be self employed in construction.

Question 37

Why do the self employed have more control of the labour force?

Answer 37

They have more autonomy over making decisions.

Question 38

Why might it be argued that the control that the self employed have over the labour force is exaggerated?

Answer 38

Many have little control and may depend on selling their labour services to others. The majority of the self employed work situation is not much different than the rest of the workforce.