The Labour Process and the Changing Nature of Work, Management and Organization. Flashcards
What does labour process mean?
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.
What was labour like in the pre industrial era?
Agriculture was key to society and most activities were carried out through all family members, working to produce goods necessary for their own needs.
What is labour like in the industrial era?
- 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.
What are low trust systems of management control?
The idea that workers cannot be trusted and need to be closely supervised or monitored an idea which has risen in the industrial era.
What did Abercrombie et al identify?
Four types of strategy for controlling the workforce. Direct control, technical control, bureaucratic control and responsible autonomy.
What’s direct control?
Clear supervision of workforce by the owners and managers. This is not very common today and typically found in small businesses.
What’s technical control?
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.
What’s bureacratic control?
Workers are controlled by a hierarchy of authority: every worker has an immediate superior and formal rules controlling their job.
What’s responsible autonomy?
Workers are given a wider degree of discretion/control and are less controlled by direct supervisors. The workforce is more self policing.
What’s scientific management?
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.
What’s Taylorism?
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.
How is Taylorism implemented? (3 ways.)
- 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.
What’s Fordism?
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.
What did Ritzer come up with?
Mcdonaldisastion.
What is McDonaldisastion?
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.
What’s efficiency?
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.
What’s calculability?
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.
What’s predictability?
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.
What’s control?
Management control the labour process through technology and ideology. For example there are layers of management within a McDonalds.
What did Braverman come up with?
As a Marxist, he viewed the rise of Taylorism/Fordism and Mcdonalidisastion and came up with his deskilling thesis.
What is the deskillling thesis?
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.
What’s an example of the deskilling process?
Cashiers.
What did Frey and Osbourne predict?
Computerization could make nearly half of even highly skilled, knowledge based middle class careers redundant in ten to twenty years.
What’s an example of a job being made redundant by technology?
Lift operators.
