WEEK 17 LECTURES 1 & 2 – ORGANIZATIONS AND LABOUR Flashcards
Organizations
- A group with identifiable membership that engages in collective actions to achieve common purpose
- Ex. Corporations, businesses, political parties, churches, schools, sports clubs
Formal Organizations
- deliberately planned groups that coordinates people and capital (resources) through formalized roles, statuses, and relationships to achieve a specific set of goals
Spontaneous Organizations
- arises very quickly to meet specific goal then disbands once goal is achieved.
- Ex. Search parties, protests
Bureaucracy
- most common type of formal organization
Weber bureaucracy - uses rules and hierachal ranking to achieve efficiency
Bureaucracy
Weber ideal criteria bureaucracy type includes:
- Division of labour
- Hierarchy of authority
- Written rules and regulations
- people to know when to expect
- Clear standards for performance and procedures - impersonality - don’t bend rules based on individual circumstances. Everyone treated the same.
- Employment based on technical qualifications
Bureaucratization
Ritzer & McDonaldization
- principles of McDonalds as global corporation are being emulated by other organizations
Components:
1. Efficiency - best means to achieve an end
2. Predictability - people want to know what expect when purchasing commodities.
3. Calculability - quantity over quality.
4. Substitution of non-human technology - robots replacing jobs because humans unpredictable. Robots lack ability to act unpredictably
5. Control - over customers and consumption process
Ex. Limited seating, drive through
*Other organizations emulate these things to maximize profits
Oligarchy
- society run by a few people
- Limited people have ultimate control
Iron law of oligarchy
“Who says organization, says oligarchy ”
- even where organizations start democratically, we will eventually see a few on top making a hierarchy of power
Works & Occupations
Work - the paid or unpaid carrying out of tasks requiring expenditures of mental and physical effort
*basis of economy
- consists of institutions that facilitate production and distribution of goods and services
Occupation - work you get paid for with wage or salary
Forms of work that do not conform to occupation or job
- volunteer work (unpaid)
- Ex Ultimately fills gaps often ignored by official goods and service providers
- Construction work
- By undocumented citizens
- care work
Takes place inside home not in exchange for income
- Sex work
Occupation as it is exchange of service for income. Canada doesn’t see this because labour rites, taxation, etc.
Division of labour
- nature of work has shifted significantly because of industrialization
- Durkheim - mechanical to organic solidarity and likes DOL
- Marx - specialization means alienation, does not like DOL
Approach to labour process
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT APPROACH TO HOW WE ORGANIZE LABOUR
by Frederick Taylor
- maximum efficiency and productivity through scientific method and labour process
- Break down industrial process to be precisely timed and organized to create efficiency
- Widespread impact on organization of industrial production and on workplace politics
- Birth of micromanagement EYW “Taylorism”
Assembly Line
Henry Ford
Ford adopted Taylor’s work
Ford adopted Taylor’s
approach in designing his
auto-plant in Germany.
Led to the birth of the
assembly line
* Increased DOL for mass
production
Critiques of Taylorism & Fordism
Low trust systems: jobs being set by management.
- because set by management no employee atonomy, no say over what job you do
- close supervision of those carrying out tasks
- Surveillance of workers
ALTERNATIVE
High trust systems
- workers can control the pace and content of work within over all guidelines
- not just maximizing profits, but instead, a human relations approach
- communicaiton and participation in work
WORK IS SHIFTING
Decentralization of work and labour process
- often looks like collaborative work in teams or groups
flexible production and mass consumption
- shift nature of traditional assembly line/factory
- new technology allows mass production of customizable items
EXAMPLE
- 5000 shirts might be produced in a factory in each
- technology can customize each shirt at the same expense
Spread of Global production
- Big retalers are not just reduced to controlling production within state borders, tend to have factories all across the world.
- also how like use of engineers
More Open operational structures
- introduction of more open operational structures
- amplified during covid (working home, less collaboratively, more health and safety, freedom in scheduling)
- Hybrid work
- Remote first work
- Flexible work schedules
Gender and Work
Three main categories of workplace inequality
women enterring labour force in higher positions
- workplace gender inequality still exists
- Occupation Segregation
- many occupations are segregated by gender where women tend to carry more admin roles and men more exec roles
*Glass ceiling: even if men and women start at same starting postion, women will hit a glass ceiling within a hierarchy
- men continue to move up the corporate ladder, women get stuck
- CEOs, chairs, far less women in these roles or authority and power - Precarious labour
- part time
- contract - no stability
- unpaid
*women tend to occupy jobs that are precarious
*Does not supply employment security - Gender wave gap
- men earn more than women in general
- Men earn more than women in SAME/ similar job
Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan
- during WWII women were largely homemakers
- Pushed unto public work because men were at war
- women responsible for maintaining the economy
- when men back, women were encouraged back home
- Friedman book: a study on Educated Housewives
- Classes on how to be a good housewife
- PhT - awwarded to wives when husbands attained degrees
late 1950s
- interviewed housewives about dissatisfaction in their lives
- didn’t know why they were depressed because socialized that being a good wife and mother should make them happy
*One solution: Remove education from women
*One solution: take away the right to vote
Pharmacuticals: Valuem & Nervine was drug called mothers little helper so that they no feel depressed
Betty Friedan: Feminine Mystique was the problem!!!
- feminity being end goal and source of happiness for women - THIS IS A MYTH
