49,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
The Sociology of Work, 4th Edition
This leading, authoritative textbook has been carefully and substantially revised to provide the indispensable foundational resource for the sociology of work. The fourth edition has been transformed to combine unrivalled explanations of classic theories with the most cutting-edge research, data and debates.
Keith Grint and Darren Nixon examine different sociological approaches to work, emphasizing the links between social processes, institutions of employment and their social and domestic contexts. The fourth edition includes:
- a new chapter on work and identity, exploring issues such as the rise of consumption and the cultural economy, work–life balance, the social meaning of work and unemployment;
- a fully rewritten chapter that comprehensively reviews trends in the contemporary service economy, particularly the rise of emotional and aesthetic forms of labour and the polarization of employment in the knowledge or informational economy;
- a new concluding chapter that examines the structure of the global economy, taking in debates around globalization, precarious labour and public sector reforms and unemployment in the wake of the financial crisis and austerity;
- updated bibliographic references and data throughout, with particularly significant revisions to the sections on gender and work, ethnicity and work, and work technologies.
The book has been designed to support readers' understanding of, and to develop their critical approach to, the field of 'work', with a range of empirical evidence and examples helping to reveal the complex picture of work–society relations. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book also provides suggestions for further reading and seminar discussion questions.
This fourth edition will continue to be essential reading for students of the sociology of work, industrial sociology, organizational behaviour and industrial relations. Students studying business and management courses with a sociological component will also find the book invaluable.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 1227
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Ähnliche
CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
1 What is Work?
Introduction
Problems of definition
Working beyond the contemporary West
Historical rhetorics of work: views from above and below
Radical approaches to work
Contemporary Western orientations to work
Domestic labour
Unemployment
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
2 Work in Historical Perspective
Introduction
Pre-industrial work
The transition from feudalism to proto-industrialization
Factories and technological change
Occupational change
Work, the family and gender
The rise of trade unionism
State intervention and the Factory Acts
The state and the development of clerical labour
Women, work and war
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
3 Classical Approaches to Work: Marx, Durkheim and Weber
Introduction
Marx and capitalism
Durkheim and industrial society
Weber
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
4 Contemporary Theories of Work Organization
Introduction
Coercion
Paternalism
Lenin
Human relations
Neo-human relations
Organizational cultures
Critical theories
Systems theories
Contingency theory
Action theory
Population ecology theory
Evolutionary biology
Rational choice theory
Complexity theories
Political organizational theories
Foucault and postmodernism
Actor networks
Institutional theory
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
5 Class, Industrial Conflict and the Labour Process
Introduction
Theoretical approaches to class
Class, trade unions and revolution
British trade unions and labourism
Class and industrial action
Accounting for industrial action
Marx, Taylorism and the capitalist labour process
Braverman and the labour process
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
6 Gender, Patriarchy and Trade Unions
Introduction
Theoretical viewpoints on women and work
Women and paid labour: the contemporary evidence
Labour market restructuring and professional women
Women and trade unions
Masculinity, domestic labour and violence
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
7 Race, Ethnicity and Labour Markets: Recruitment and the Politics of Exclusion
Introduction
Race, racism and ethnicity
Labour markets and racism
Recruitment and racism
Trade unions, workers and racial discrimination
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
8 Working Technology
Introduction
Technological determinism
Social determinism
Flexible specialization, Fordism, neo-Fordism and post-Fordism
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
9 Contemporary Work: The Service Sector and the Knowledge Economy
Introduction
The rise of the post-industrial knowledge economy
The informational economy
The growth and shape of Britain’s service economy
Skills, gender and low-level service work
Conclusions – a polarizing workforce?
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
10 The Meaning of Work in the Contemporary Economy
Introduction
The declining significance of work
Work, identity, culture, economy
Work–life balance and the invasiveness of work
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
11 Work in the Global Economy
Introduction
The contemporary global economy
Global financial meltdown and the Eurozone sovereign-debt crisis
Globalization, flexibility and the quality of work
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Occupational structure of England and Wales: 1688, 1759, 1801–3 (%)
Figure 2.2
Male labour force, 1841–1921 (%)
Figure 2.3
Female labour force, 1841–1921 (%)
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Organizational theories
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
UK strikes, 1895–2012: number of strikers (millions), strikes (thousands), days lost …
Figure 5.2
National comparison of strikes, selected years (days lost per 1,000 employees, by country)
Figure 5.3
Working days lost by employment category (UK), 1993–2002
Figure 5.4
Working days lost by main cause (UK), 1992–2002
Figure 5.5
Strikes and industrial tribunal applications (UK), 1980–2012
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Gender and occupation (UK), 2013 (%)
Figure 6.2
Full- and part-time employment (UK), 2013 (%)
Figure 6.3
Gender pay gap (UK), 1997–2012 (%)
Figure 6.4
Women in Parliament (selected countries), 2012
Figure 6.5
Percentage of professional female leaders (UK), 2003–2012
Figure 6.6
Percentage of women on the FTSE 100 boards, 2000–2013
Figure 6.7
Women as a percentage of senior management (selected countries), 2012
Figure 6.8
Maternity entitlements in Europe, 2013
Figure 6.9
Trade union membership (%) by gender and industry, 2012
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Ethnic minorities in England and Wales, 2011
Figure 7.2
Percentage of 16–24-year-olds in full-time education by ethnic group and sex (UK), 2003
Figure 7.3
Work permits issued (UK), 1946–2011
Figure 7.4
Self-employment, ethnicity and gender, England and Wales, 2011 (%)
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1
Total employment by gender (UK), 1978–2009
Figure 9.2
All employment by sex and occupation (UK), 2009
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1
The increasing importance of trade for national economies, 1960–2007 (exports and …
Figure 11.2
Workers employed in precarious jobs in Europe (%)
Figure 11.3
Employees in job quality/job security categories in selected EU countries
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
Selected distribution of the occupied (i.e., paid) British labour force (% of total …
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
British strike statistics (annual averages), 1895–2012
Chapter 6
Table 6.1
Median hourly earnings of full-time employees in professional occupations (UK), 2012
Chapter 7
Table 7.1
Employment rates by ethnic group, sex and highest qualification (UK), 2001–2002 (%)
Table 7.2
Highest qualification held: by sex and ethnic group (UK), 2003 (%)
Table 7.3
Employment and unemployment rates by ethnic group and gender (UK), 2013
Table 7.4
Occupation and ethnicity (men): England and Wales, 2011 (%)
Table 7.5
Occupation and ethnicity (women): England and Wales, 2011 (%)
Chapter 9
Table 9.1
Employee jobs by industrial sector (UK), 1978–2009 (%)
Chapter 11
Table 11.1
Non-standard work in the EU, 1983–2011 (%)
Table 11.2
Global trends in vulnerable employment
Table 11.3
Employment by economic class (‘000,000s) in the developing world and regions
Pages
iii
iv
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
The Sociology of Work
4th edition
Keith Grint and Darren Nixon
polity
Copyright © Keith Grint and Darren Nixon 2015
The right of Keith Grint and Darren Nixon to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition published in 1991 by Polity Press.Second edition published in 1998 by Polity Press.Third edition published in 2005 by Polity Press.This fourth edition first published in 2015 by Polity Press.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-7438-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grint, Keith.The sociology of work / Keith Grint, Darren Nixon. -- Fourth Edition.pages cmISBN 978-0-7456-5044-9 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-5045-6 (pbk.) 1. Industrial sociology. 2. Work. I. Nixon, Darren. II. Title.HD6955.G75 2015306.3’6--dc23
2014025594
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Introduction
This book concerns work. Work occupies a substantial proportion of most people’s lives and has often been taken as a symbol of personal value: work provides status, economic reward, a demonstration of religious faith and a means to realize self-potential. But work also embodies the opposite evaluations: labour can be back-breaking and mentally incapacitating; labour camps are punishment centres; work is a punishment for original sin and something which we would all rather avoid – something which was, to quote a woman munitions worker in the Second World War, ‘the blank patch between one brief evening and the next’ (Mass Observation, 1943: 43).
The ambiguous nature of work is a central theme running through this book. Rather than restricting the review to paid labour, and concentrating upon male factory workers as much industrial or occupational sociology has done, it considers work in a rather wider context, including unpaid domestic labour, which highlights the links between the sphere of employment and the domestic sphere, and which incorporates the notions of ethnicity and gender as well as class. Inevitably, an introductory text of this type can barely skim the surface of most of the debates here and we have not attempted to provide a comprehensive introduction to all forms of work in all varieties of society throughout all known periods of time. Instead, we have selected substantive fields that we consider significant and have attempted to illustrate these both with conventional material and with some rather less traditional. Since an underlying theme of the approach is the complexity and differences which exist at work, rather than the uniformities, the selection of substantive fields and source material is inevitably asymmetrical: it is, for example, because we dispute the allegedly archetypal significance of the male factory worker isolated from his domestic world that the book looks beyond him to female domestic workers, to eighteenth-century sailors, to twentieth-century women civil servants and to twenty-first-century service workers for the evidence. By definition, therefore, we miss out far more than we consider, but our intention is both to introduce the sociological world of work and to undermine some traditional myths, rather than to provide the definitive account of typical work – whatever that might involve.
Although introductory texts are, by their very nature, overviews of broad areas we do not think this means the book should avoid pursuing particular and explicit theoretical lines with regard to the current orthodoxies of the day. Each chapter has its own specific viewpoints to engage with but perhaps we should acknowledge an overriding engagement with four areas.
First is the denial of the superordinate position of class at the expense of gender, race and ethnicity, and the concomitant denial of the supremacy of the labour process separated from home and all else. The spheres of work, employment and home are all necessarily intertwined and to separate them as if they could exist independently is to misconceive the complex reality of work and misunderstand the significance of the relationships which it embodies. Moreover, to decant elements of social groups or individuals into categories like class, gender and ethnicity is to imply that individuals interpret the world through a single lens. If, on the other hand, individuals and the social groups they engage with are considered as heterogeneous constructs, for whom the world is perceived through a multifaceted lens, then we should concern ourselves with the fragmentation of work experience. Rather than puzzling over the ‘failure’ of the working class to develop a solidaristic political organization we might instead puzzle over why any collective organization exists and persists. In sum, what may appear to one person or analyst to be a self-evidently important social cleavage may not be interpreted as such by another.
The second issue is the polarization of organizational features into social and technical, with either the former or the latter being endowed with determinate qualities. Adopting the actor network approach, we argue that it is the mixture of human and nonhuman elements which generates significant resources, though how these ‘alloys’ are deployed is determined not by the content but by the interpretative actions of various agents within the network.
The third line we wish to pursue is that work is itself socially constructed and reconstructed. This implies that much of what we take for granted as inevitable or technically required or economically determined should be subjected to the most vigorous of critiques: if work is socially constructed then it is contingent and requires perpetual action by agents for its reproduction – it does not just happen but has to be brought off. Relatedly, whereas it is common to differentiate the moral economy of the pre-capitalist period from the market economy that displaced it, we argue that the moral and social aspects of work are still an essential component. To believe that contemporary employment is configured and constrained only by appeals to the rationality of market forces is to misconstrue the nature of work. If workers seek pay rises in line with inflation, rather than company profitability, or decry the disproportionate but performance-related increases of directors’ salaries, then the market model can explain these only be asserting the irrationality of such workers; but if we retain the notion of work as a social and moral sphere, as well as a market sphere, then workers’ actions become not irrational but rational from a different viewpoint. This does not mean that morality displaces market rationality and it would perhaps be more appropriate to consider the two as resources which different groups draw on to legitimate their particular campaigns at specific locations in space and time.
Fourth, and as an underlying feature of the above three issues, this book proceeds from the assumption that the world of work is one actively constructed through the interpretative acts of agents involved. Here, then, we should leave the world of ‘objective’ analysis, of certainty and predictability, and replace it with one constructed by indeterminacy, contingency and alternative viewpoints. What is important in attempting to explain the world of work is not what that world is but what those involved in it take it to be. In short, what counts as ‘work’, what counts as ‘inevitable’ and what counts as ‘rational behaviour’ does not lie within the object or the phenomenon itself but within the social relations and interpretative processes that sustain it.
Chapter 1 sets out to discuss this indeterminacy by establishing the enigmatic essence of work. It begins by noting the significance of any activity being labelled as work in so far as an evaluation may be placed upon such an activity. What appear to be identical activities very often embody widely contrasting norms of behaviour such that the same ‘work’ of individuals in war and peace may be either ‘heroic’ or ‘bestial’, depending on the social circumstances and relations under which they are undertaken. This equivocal feature of work is highlighted by focusing upon non-Western and historical approaches to work. It then moves on to consider the consequences of attempts to persuade workers that their efforts were either sanctioned by God or an essential element of their humanity or a necessary means to buy their way out of the hell they found themselves in. The chapter finishes by looking at informal work, particularly domestic labour and unemployment, through which the nature of work as a social construct is re-emphasized.
Chapter 2 explores the historical dimension of work in radically different societies. From Roman Britain to the Luddites to nineteenth-century textile factories and beyond we argue against any reduction of work to a single form and illuminate the moral economy of pre-capitalist work relations on land and at sea. Noting the occupational diversity that also typifies British industrial experience, we consider the redistribution of domestic labour and influence at home which accompanied the Industrial Revolution, and the consequential disappearance from visible paid employment by the majority of married women, especially the middle class, during the Victorian era. This is linked to the activities of the early trade unions which, in conjunction with the paternalistic concerns of the state, coerced women out of many areas of skilled employment and attempted to corral them within the home. Finally, we trace the rise of women’s employment through the advance of clerical labour and the two world wars to a point where, despite patriarchal influence, the beginnings of wage equality at work were established.
Chapter 3 moves from the substantive field of historical work to the theoretical endeavours of the historical ‘gang of three’: Marx, Weber and Durkheim. While noting the limitations of such classical approaches, especially the gender blind or patriarchal influences of all three, each has something in particular to offer our contemporary analysis of work though none individually nor all three together provide anything like a coherent account of work. They are, then, important but flawed foundation stones rather than the adumbrations that merely need to be fleshed out.
Chapter 4 switches from the historical to the contemporary and delves into the complex world of the modern organization and its multitude of competing viewpoints and analyses. Running through most of the major alternative interpretations of organizations and underlining what we consider to be their major problems, we explore the possibilities offered by the most recent advances in related areas: postmodernist theory and actor network theory. Drawing primarily on the latter, we develop an analysis which demonstrates the difficulty of separating human from nonhuman facets of organization and how such alloys of human technology can be captured and deployed by various contending groups within organizational settings.
From here the book moves on to review the three aspects of social stratification which we consider to be most important: class in chapter 5, gender in chapter 6 and race and ethnicity in chapter 7. We begin by considering the relative weight given to class rather than occupation and to income rather than wealth, and pose some doubts as to any universal assumption about the role of employment in accounting for life chances. We then move on to examine the form of work activity most closely associated with class action – the strike. Noting the essentially organized nature of such action, we throw doubt upon the class orientation of most British strikes, though we emphasize the recalcitrance that appears to typify many British workers. Finally, some time is spent examining the labour process debates, and we emphasize the problems of an approach that systematically devalues all but the class issues and denies the necessary links between the domestic and the non-domestic spheres of work. This linkage is continued in chapter 6 on gender, patriarchy and trade unionism which explains the various theoretical interpretations of gender inequalities and poses an alternative in which individuals are reconstructed as composite and heterogeneous embodiments of class, gender and ethnicity, rather than as discrete elements of each. Thus women and men do not experience work just through their specific gender, nor just through their differential class, nor through their ethnic group, but all three simultaneously. Using this model we examine the contemporary evidence of women at work, detailing the quest for equal pay, the advances and retreats of professional women, and the part played by trade unions in the subordination of women.
Chapter 7 considers the third of our three forms of social stratification, race and ethnicity. It looks first at alternative theories of inequality and progress to consider the wider issue of labour market influences. Again, the brief perusal of the empirical evidence suggests that we cannot consider ethnic minorities as a single group but reconceptualize them through the specificity of their ethnicity in conjunction with their class and gender. Following this, a number of different aspects of the connections between ethnicity, race and the labour market are covered, in particular the role of ethnic businesses, the value of anti-discriminatory policies and legislation and the role of management, especially in recruitment. Finally, the part played by trade unions in the persistence of racism at work is assessed before reviewing the comparative experiences of minorities in the USA and Britain.
Chapter 8 switches from the social to the technical aspects of work but only in order to illustrate the problems of demarcating one from the other. Through a review of the polarized arguments of technological and social determinists we argue that both approaches misconstrue the nature of the relations between human and nonhuman elements at work: technology-less work systems are usually as unproductive as human-less technologies. Only when we conceive of the two features of work as intimately related in a creative ‘alloy’ of both can we begin to explain the nature of work properly. This is supplemented by a brief review of the two most recent attempts to propel the complex and uncertain world of work into a future of radical difference and stark simplicity: the ‘post-Fordist’ and the ‘technocracy’ debates. Maintaining a healthy scepticism of such revolutionary changes, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, we conclude that neither new nor old universal patterns of work exist: diversity rather than universality remains the norm, and part of the reason for this remains locked into the interpretative methods by which we come to know the world of work.
Chapter 9 is concerned with the supposed changing nature of contemporary work. It begins by considering influential debates regarding the growth of the post-industrial ‘knowledge economy’ before exploring in detail the shape of the employment and occupational structure in Britain. The discussion focuses on the growth of service employment but highlights, in contrast to post-industrial theory, how such employment is actually extremely heterogeneous and involves the growth of both a range of activities and high and low-skill occupations. In exploring the nature and characteristics of low-end service work in particular, the discussion concentrates on forms of work generally neglected in post-industrial and knowledge economy theory. Nonetheless, the growth of low-end service work and its accompanying discourse of ‘customer service excellence’ are shown to have important implications for workers, particularly in terms of the increasing need to perform ‘emotional’ and ‘aesthetic’ forms of labour, and the gendered characteristics of such work. Finally, the continued robustness of employment in such work is argued to clearly undermine the universal up-skilling envisaged in many accounts of the post-industrial knowledge economy.
Chapter 10 attempts to navigate a path through contradictory debates regarding the meaning of work in contemporary societies. Deindustrialization, the growing significance of consumption and the ‘flexibilization’ of work over recent decades have sparked powerful commentaries documenting the ‘end of work’ or the declining importance of work for identity in contemporary postmodern consumer societies. Yet, such accounts stand in marked contrast to the predictions of post-industrial and knowledge economy theory and debates in the work–life balance, cultural economy and organizational culture management literatures, all of which highlight either the increasing pervasiveness of work or growing opportunities for more intrinsically meaningful work. After reviewing the respective debates and available empirical evidence, the chapter suggests that there does not appear to have been any significant revolution in work attitudes in either direction. There has not been a substantial rise in the number of workers who find work intrinsically meaningful. Yet neither has there been any significant drop-off in non-financial commitment to work, with nearly two-thirds of British workers saying that they would continue to work even if they had no financial imperative to do so. However, more flexible working time arrangements and the growth of the ‘cultural economy’ may offer new ways of ‘balancing’ or combining work, consumption, leisure and caring activities.
Finally, chapter 11 considers work in a more global context. The chapter begins by discussing the idea that a more integrated, interconnected or interdependent global economy has emerged over the last few decades, and explores how such developments can be measured. After outlining some of the key features and characteristics of the contemporary global economy the chapter moves on to explore some of its key consequences; first in relation to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the ‘austerity measures’ implemented by nations in response; then in relation to prominent debates around ‘flexibilization’ and its effect on the global quality of work. Particular attention is given to examining the concept of ‘precariousness’, as it is often argued to be increasing as a consequence of the search for greater organizational flexibility and the global growth of ‘non-standard’, ‘very atypical’ or ‘informal’ forms of work. While some general global principles, processes and trends are identified, it is argued that the impact of greater global economic integration remains crucially mediated by a range of country-specific characteristics and policies.
1What is Work?
Introduction
Problems of definition
Working beyond the contemporary West
Historical rhetorics of work: views from above and below
Radical approaches to work
Contemporary Western orientations to work
Domestic labour
Unemployment
Conclusions
Useful resources and seminar discussion questions
Introduction
This chapter demonstrates the difficulties of delineating the world of work from the sphere of non-work and argues that no unambiguous or objective definition of work is possible. Work tends to be an activity that transforms nature and is usually undertaken in social situations, but exactly what counts as work is dependent on the specific social circumstances under which such activities are undertaken and, critically, how these circumstances and activities are interpreted by those involved. Whether any particular activity is experienced as work or leisure or both or neither is intimately related to the temporal, spatial and cultural conditions in existence. This does not mean that the search for the meaning of work is the equivalent to the quest for the Holy Grail, nor that one person’s definition of work is as influential as any other. Rather, it implies that we should consider the past and present definitions of work as symbols of cultures and especially as mirrors of power: if what counts as work is glorified or despised or gender-related, then the language and practice of work allows us to read embodied fragments of wider social power. For example, to be categorized as ‘unemployed’ today not only signifies the historically atypical creation of a formal division between the economy and the polity, employment and work, but also embodies the significance attached to one particular facet of contemporary Western social life. Unemployment is not a category that would be recognized outside a very limited slice of space and time; that it is today, and that the label is crucial to the status of the individual, tells us as much about the kind of society we inhabit as about the kind of individual stigmatized.
To illustrate the indexical nature of work, this chapter considers contemporary Western definitions of work and compares these to non-Western and historical forms before silhouetting radical critiques of, and contemporary orientations towards, work. It then moves on to a brief analysis of two substantive fields traditionally excluded from the study of work to illustrate the effects of such traditions: domestic work and unemployment.
Problems of definition
Labour and work
It is more than just a pedantic requirement that this chapter begins by trying to answer the most basic of questions: what is work? One of the ways of distinguishing between them is via Arendt’s (1958) opposition between ‘labour’ and ‘work’: labour is bodily activity designed to ensure survival in which the results are consumed almost immediately; work is the activity undertaken with our hands which gives objectivity to the world. A major difficulty with Arendt’s approach, however, is that in many industrial societies very little activity generates products for immediate consumption, whereas in some hunter-gatherer societies very little activity generates material artefacts that give objectivity to the world. Perhaps more conventionally, work has been imputed with transformative capacity – an activity which alters nature – while an occupation is something which locates individuals within some form of market (R. Brown, 1978: 56). Yet those who are unemployed, that is no longer within the labour market, very often consider themselves as retaining whatever notion of occupation they previously had, so that the status of occupation, perhaps, may be divorced from the practice of that occupation; but neither the status nor practice of an occupation are the sine qua non of work.
Work as objective
Is work, then, simply that which ensures individual and societal survival by engaging with nature? Certainly, all societies have to engage with nature to ensure their survival but are activities which are not essential to societal survival (e.g., writing sociology texts?) non-work? What is objectively essential to societal survival anyway, and is this the equivalent of individual survival? It is surely significant that the work of slaves, often derided as mere ‘labour’, may be critical for the survival of society yet simultaneously effect the exclusion from society of the very same slave and possibly result in her or his death. Moreover, if by work we embrace all social activities that are in some way transformative of nature, do we end up with a set of activities too broad to be of any value; if everything is work can anything be leisure or rest? Clearly, as Garfinkel (1984), Silverman (1970) and Giddens (1979) inter alia have maintained, since social reality has to be worked at – that is it has to be brought off by knowledgeable agents who sustain meaningful interchanges with each other – it could be asserted that every human activity is work, in which case the sociology of work ought to become the sociology of everything. Again, if everything is work then the label is significant in demonstrating the importance of human processes of interaction; but unless we wish to impose our sociological conception of work as all human activities on to the populace we wish to study, then we should beware of assuming that what we think of as work is objective: to impute our own meanings into the language and practices of others is precisely to miss out on the significance of the social aspect. It is because the meanings secreted within and expressed through work are so variant that our conventional model of work as paid employment should not be taken as ‘normal’ (see Joyce, 1987). After all, if language is indexical, as the ethnomethodologists and others maintain (Sharrock and Anderson, 1986: 42–3; Woolgar, 1988), then the word ‘work’ cannot have an objective and transcendent meaning. Rather, the language and discourse of work are symbolic representations through which meanings and social interests are constructed, mediated and deployed. In short, the meanings of work do not inhere within the practices of participants but are created, challenged, altered and sustained through the contending discourses: if particular forms of activity are represented through discourse as valued or valueless then the activities themselves take on such characteristics for those appropriating such a discourse. For example, whether one regards domestic activities as ‘work’ or ‘leisure’ or ‘drudgery’ or something else entirely does not depend upon the activities but how we read such activities through the appropriate lexicon. It is not that the activities remain the same but that our viewpoints are different: we can construct the activities only through the viewpoint. In effect, we do not ‘see’ the same activities.
Work, the economy and the state
The state often appears to have a definitive answer to the conundrum of meaning: the population is divided between those who are ‘economically active’ and those who ‘economically inactive’. But the definition of activity here relates very closely to the formality of employment: if people are paying tax and insurance, etc., they are working; if they are not they are not working. We might question whether such formality is the best way to define work when so many people, especially women with domestic responsibilities, appear by this definition to spend so long doing nothing. Equally significant, this model of work reflects the emergence of a viewpoint in which the economy gradually appears as the foundation stone of Western society and concomitantly the sphere of work assumes a discrete existence (Godelier, 1980). As Dumont has argued:
The modern era has witnessed the emergence of a new mode of consideration of human phenomena, and the carving out of a separate domain, which are currently evoked for us by the words economics, the economy … It is conventional, and not too arbitrary, to take the publication by Adam Smith in 1776 … as the birth registration of the new category … the mercantilists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century mingled the phenomena we classify into political and economic … in the Indian civilization, while the political had been distinguished from and subordinated to the religious, the economic was never conceptually detached from the political. (1977: 33–4)
This ‘triumph of economic ideology’ in eighteenth-century Western Europe not only attacked assumptions that citizens had social and political rights that stood outside and above the realm of the marketplace, it also embodies the state’s desire to classify citizens first and foremost as economic rather than political agents. The evaluative connotations of this relationship are nicely captured in the convention that political demonstrations and marches may be acceptable ‘providing they do not interfere with people’s legitimate business’. In effect, economic action qua ‘going to work’ is normal, political action qua participating in a protest march is abnormal.
Work as employment
But does this dismemberment of social activities help or hinder us in the quest for the meaning of work? Even if we try to escape the definitional problem of ‘work’ and nestle in the blanket security of ‘employment’, the barbs of ambiguity are wont to spring up through the cover: is the distinction between work and employment one of payment? – many activities can be subsumed under both labels. Is the distinction one based on formality? – a whole panoply of activities that are not conventionally considered as employment actually occur not so much ‘under’ the conventional economy but through it. In other words, although commentators like to categorize some activities as belonging to the informal or black economy rather than the official economy, it would appear that no clear-cut binary division exists. We have economically inspired activity that occurs along a continuum rather than being situated in either one or another clearly marked category: formal and informal (Harding and Jenkins, 1989; see also ILO, 2002).
In general, most sociological accounts of ‘work’ actually concern themselves with paid employment; hence most sociology of work has actually been industrial sociology or the sociology of employment or the sociology of occupations. Industrial sociology, the sociology of employment and the sociology of occupations are wide and important fields of interest in and of themselves, but employment qua full-time wage labour through an occupation within an industrial setting has been a common phenomenon only in a very restricted window of space and time; i.e., the last two centuries of a minority of nations (R. Brown, 1988: 33). In fact, one might go further to agree with Moorhouse (1987: 237) that paid work in car factories has been ‘elevated to an iconic status such that labour on the track or line became, somehow, the explicit or implicit model of what most modern work is like, or would soon be like’. This book, like the work of Moorhouse, is iconoclastic in intent; it does not reduce the sociology of work to industrial sociology or the sociology of occupations and employment but argues that they are all aspects of the sociology of work.
Work and non-work
In some senses work is the opposite of leisure: it is something we have to do, something we may prefer not to do and something we tend to get paid for. But we must also eat and drink without considering this as work; we usually have to go shopping but this is not conventionally recognized as work, though, as with much domestic labour for those undertaking it, such activities can be extremely arduous. Moreover, there are very few activities undertaken outside a pecuniary relationship which do not also occur inside one. Washing, ironing, breastfeeding, childminding, cooking and a myriad other such domestic activities all exist as unpaid and paid labour, though the correlation between paid labour and work normatively configured as ‘valuable’ or ‘real’ is not coincidental.
Nor can we distinguish between work and non-work on the basis of non-work being leisure: for some people playing sport is an occupation not a leisure activity while for others the enforced ‘leisure’ of unemployment turns the freedom of non-work into a nightmare of perceived worthlessness. Even for those who are employed it is not always clear how work and leisure can be separated. Loudon’s review of work on South African farms suggests that for white farmers the social system requires the conflation of activities: ‘Where sport and leisure activities are crucial factors in defining membership of a local community and also provide a setting for the informal exchange of ideas and information, farming as a way of life involves no clear separation between non-work and work’ (Loudon, 1979: 129). Nearly two centuries earlier, the Quaker business community also managed to combine work and non-work into a seamless web of people and processes, for this ‘group with the greatest overlap between kinship, friendship and religious community … often combined religious missions with commercial travelling’ (Davidoff and Hall, 1987: 216).
In different segments of space and time the activities we may refer to as relaxations from work have been the difference between life and death: in contemporary Britain a failed crop of vegetables in the kitchen garden is a waste of time and effort but the equivalent failure in different parts of the world now or at earlier times in British history would be the end of time for the responsible gardener. Not that poor economic returns necessarily dissuade people from continuing particular forms of work. Crofting can hardly ever have been a route to economic prosperity and the rise of commercial agriculture has long since made it a marginal form of employment. Yet crofting continues because it is of great symbolic significance for those involved in it: it ensures ‘the maintenance of a valued collective identity … through which men [sic] locate themselves in their cultural tradition’ (Cohen, 1979: 250–1). That farming on a small scale may be considered as economically ‘irrational’ yet continue to involve many people is another demonstration of the incomplete dominance of economic ideology.
It is noticeable that we often avoid the term ‘work’ to describe activities involving children: workers, doctors, farmers and hairdressers may ‘work’ but parents just ‘look after’ children. In short, it is not just that the linguistic terms we use have some degree of ambiguity inherent to them, so that we cannot always distinguish between work and non-work; as Schwimmer (1979) reveals, for some people (in this case artists) the division is absurd. The very same term may also carry contrary meanings. ‘Going to work’ is one thing, having to work when you get there is a separate matter altogether. Work, then, in its physical features and its linguistic descriptions is socially constructed: there is no permanent or objective thing called work, there are aspects of social activities which we construe as work and this embodies social organization. The difference between work and non-work seldom lies within the actual activity itself and more generally inheres in the social context that supports the activity. By implication, therefore, what counts as work cannot be severed from the context within which it exists, and that context necessarily changes through space and time. We explore contemporary debates around the blurring of the work/non-work boundary in more detail in chapter 10.
Working beyond the contemporary West
Clarification of what counts as work is often best achieved by pushing the boundaries of what we conventionally refer to as work to their most extreme forms. For example, Malinowski’s account of the Trobriand Islanders, first published in 1921, is important in emphasizing two features: first, the irrelevance of monetary incentives in a cashless economy where social obligations to kin are the primary motive to engage in labour; and second, the seamless web which knits what we might recognize as work and leisure activities together in a social network of practices. For the islanders there is no separation between the work of gardening and the associated rituals – they are one and the same process:
When the plants begin to grow a series of magical rites, parallel with the inaugural ones, is performed, in which the magician is supposed to give an impulse to the growth and development of the plant at each of its successive stages. Thus, one rite is performed to make the seed tuber sprout; another drives up the sprouting shoot; another lifts it out of the ground; yet another makes it twine around the support; then, with yet other rites, the leaves are made to bud, to open, to expand respectively. (Malinowski, 1985: 16)
Hunter-gatherers and work
Similarly, the work of Sahlins (1972) on some hunter-gatherer societies has demonstrated that the motivation to work, that is to fill up time with ‘productive activities’, is a distinctly contemporary Western idea, since for many hunter-gatherers ‘work’ ceases as soon as the minimum necessary activity has been achieved. More recently Woodburn (1980) has suggested that work-related activity is contingent on the nature of the subsistence system: most hunter-gatherers are indeed immediate consumers of the food obtained, though there are some, especially Australian Aborigines, where consumption is delayed and a consequentially more formal organizational system exists to distribute and control the food. The crucial point, though, is that abundance and scarcity of food and other resources do not appear to determine the form of social organization – whether hunter-gatherers are relatively sedentary and mobile, more or less formally organized, is ultimately the result of social constructions not environmental determination. One of the main problems with trying to assess the significance of work in hunter-gatherer societies is that many of them now exist only in the most marginal lands, pushed off the most productive land by the encroaching settlers. Thus although they may now have to work rather more hours than they would like in order to secure food supplies, it does seem that working hours are directly related to such concerns and not to any standardized hours of gainful activity.
Work in industrializing societies
Of course, many people in the so-called Third World today appear to have little option but to accommodate themselves to the newly industrializing order, and that means maximizing their potential income by extending the working day as long as possible. Just as many pre-industrial societies seem to have operated without a clear division between work and leisure, so too life in the huge ‘informal sectors’ of contemporary Third World cities often obliterates the division (ILO, 2002). However, the seamless web that knits work and non-work is more pervasive because of the absence of clear-cut non-pecuniary activities rather than the conflation of work and leisure. As Stalker argues:
Work in this case is not so much what gives a meaning to life, more what makes life possible: a means of gleaning something, however slight, from a hostile environment. It has no beginning and no end. Working and eating and sleeping and childcare and everything else blend into one organic whole. (1986: 8)
While the majority in Western industrial nations have or had fixed sites for employment and semi-permanent occupations and income, possibly between 20 and 70 per cent of the urban workforces in major Third World cities are informal, that is without fixed place of work, occupation or income (Rosenberg, 1986; ILO, 2002). Some of the most poignant images of people caught in the transition between nonindustrial and industrial societies are gleaned through the rhetoric of those without employment. Bourdieu’s (1979) study of Algeria in 1960 highlights the conflicts as ‘old-fashioned peasant’ becomes transformed into ‘urban sub-proletarian’ and, in the absence of employment, operates as a street trader. Given the relatively insignificant sums of money earned by such practices, Bourdieu argues that such practices
borrow their justifications from the peasant morality of the past … the outward appearances of being occupied are the last resort against the ultimate degradation of the man who gets others to feed him … activity is identified with social function and is not measured by the product in kind (still less in money)…. Those who find themselves in a position where it is impossible to get real work endeavour to fill the abyss between their unrealizable aspirations and the effective possibilities by performing work whose function is doubly symbolic in that it gives a fictitious satisfaction to the man who performs it while at the same time providing him with a justification in the eyes of others. (1979: 41–2)
Indeed, this concern for social obligation and the creation of self-respect, from what many might regard as the worst of all possible worlds, is also re-created in the rhetoric of the ‘untouchable’ road sweepers and lavatory cleaners of Benares (now Varanasi) for whom work provides both identity and material reward, and facilitates the reproduction of ritual and social obligations. Moreover:
Sweepers associate their work of sweeping with a toughness that they admire in both men and women; with drinking and eating of ‘hot’ substances, meat and strong liquor. Linked with this is their belief that they are hot-blooded and highly-sexed. Both men and women lay great emphasis on honour and will in defence of it fight without much provocation…. The sweepers’ sense of identity and self-esteem comes from their style of life rather than from their work … the meanings [they] attribute to that work are different from those attributed to it by the larger society. (Searle-Chatterjee, 1979: 284–5)
Images of Third World urban poverty are commonplace, but why do people move in from the countryside to risk this form of marginality? The major reason appears to be to improve one’s life chances: casual labourers in Delhi, for example, can work for 250 days a year – twice as many as are possible in a countryside already overcrowded (Stalker, 1986). Yet we should not assume that economic desire necessarily drives out all other issues of social life. As Lal (1989) has argued in the case of India, the explanation for problems related to limited economic growth may not be structural rigidities and labour market distortions derived from, among other things, the caste system, but may more simply be that even underemployed workers are not always willing to exchange leisure time for high money incomes. Similarly, Perlman’s (1976) analysis of informal workers in Rio de Janeiro and Bombay (now Mumbai) suggests that while almost half came to the city for financial reasons a similar proportion were driven by family or health reasons, though not by the attractions of the ‘city lights’. Even for those towards the bottom of the material ladder the sphere of necessity, then, does not automatically invade and replace the sphere of freedom.
If some of the difficulties facing the urban poor of the Third World can be related to Western ideas of economic rationality, where do these original interpretations stem from? Some of the most enduring are from ancient Greece and many have their origins in the practices not of those undertaking the work – the view from below – but of those attempting to legitimize the view of those not engaged in it – the view from above.
Historical rhetorics of work: views from above and below
The language of work
In ancient Greek society the sphere of freedom is conventionally seen as being the opposite of the sphere of necessity, the labour of slaves being automatically associated with the latter. This did not mean that all forms of manual labour were regarded as loathsome but it did mean, first, that anyone who had to work at an occupation all the time was ignoble, and, second, that the essence of ennoblement lay in the realm of politics, a realm based on, but untarnished by, the labour of other, lesser mortals (Held, 1987). In fact, while the Hebrew word for work, avodah, has the same root as eved, meaning slave, the Greeks had no general word for ‘work’ but three particular ones: ponos, meaning painful activity; ergon, meaning task (military or agricultural); and techne, meaning technique. The sphere of necessity was complemented by the nature of dependence: if, as a craft worker, you were dependent on the whims of the customer, you were not considered to be engaged in truly creative activity. In fact, the element of originality imputed to skilled crafts actually declined as Greek society became more consumerist: the craft worker became the medium of the labour process not the originator (Godelier, 1980).
It is worth reflecting here on the sources of these ideas: many stem from individuals like Aristotle and Plato, whose distrust of democracy was inseparable from their dislike of the labouring classes. For them, those who were dependent on others could not be free to engage in political debate, hence labour became conceived not as the foundation of the realm of politics, but as its underminer. Furthermore, Aristotle and Plato raged against democracy and labour because both individuals were unable to resist the democratic influence at the time. The pro-democratic forces were much more inclined to defend the status of labour – even if they left little in the way of literature to support their case (Wood, 1981). What the slaves would have had to say on the topic is even less certain. In Orwell’s words:
Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years [yet] the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose back civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two…. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. (1984: 232)
What passes for the Greek attitude to work, therefore, depends on which Greek you read and how you read the text.
The instability and metamorphosis in the nature of work represented in Greek literature is also contained in the couplets Labour/Work and Mühe/Werke, and captured in the development of the French words used to describe work. Indeed, it is striking how the words for work resonate with the twin images of forced labour and, to a lesser extent, free expression: gagner entered the language in the twelfth century from the Frankish word waidajan, meaning to pillage and search for food. Until the sixteenth century two words concerned work: oevrer was a work of art but derived from the Latin operarus meaning a man of pain or affliction; while labourer, to plough, came from the Latin labor or agricultural toil. These two words tended to be replaced by the single word travailler, to work, from the Latin tripaliare, meaning to torture using a tripalium, a threepronged instrument (Godelier, 1980). The connection between work, pain and the absence of freedom is hardly coincidental.
Work and power
The position of slaves highlights another significant aspect of the human condition, for this most debased form of labour still contains a quintessential aspect of social relations often ignored in contemporary debates about work: the significance of resistance. Giddens (1979: 145–50) has argued that too many conceptualizations of power take a position in which the default category is one of zero-sum: the more A gains the more B loses, to the extent that many work relationships can be considered as ones of powerlessness on one side. Yet ‘all power relations, or relations of autonomy and dependence, are reciprocal’ (1979: 149). That is to say, despite enormous variations in power resources, individuals can make a difference; they are not coerced into a specific form of behaviour except in a remarkably small number of situations. Even suicide can be taken as an act of defiance rather than submission to external forces. The suicides in Alicante of defeated Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, so chillingly described by Saturnino Carod, a Saragossa trade union leader, are a valuable reminder of the ultimate rebellion: ‘As he stood staring out to sea, the man next to him with a cigarette in his mouth slit his own throat and crumpled on the quay. Almost immediately, word came from the other end of the port that someone he knew had shot himself. Suicides spread like an epidemic’ (Fraser, 1979: 503).
But such extreme forms of consummate resistance should not divert attention away from the more mundane, yet probably more significant, forms of resistance enacted by those commonly regarded as powerless – slaves. Mary Prince, the first black slave to escape from slavery under British control and publish her memoirs, provides two distinct but important lessons for a study of work. First, her recognition of the situation of slavery as being socially constructed, and therefore subject to change as opposed to natural or inevitable, is one which she gradually comes to appreciate, not one she is born with. Thus for Mary her childhood as a slave ‘was the happiest period of my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave, and too thoughtless and full of spirits to look forward to the days of toil and sorrow’ (Ferguson, 1987: 47). Second, even as a slave she manages to construct strategies of resistance that serve to restrain her owners’ control and maintain her own dignity. Thus she manages to earn some money in the hope of buying her way to freedom: ‘When my master and mistress went from home … I took in washing and sold coffee and yams and other provisions to the captains of ships’ (p. 71). And she also utilizes her knowledge of the different legal systems then operating in the plantations; when her new owner in Bermuda begins to whip her just as her old owner in Turk’s Island had, she repudiates his action: ‘Sir, this is not Turk’s Island’ (p. 67). Her owner is typically abusive but appears to desist from the whipping. Ultimately, Mary’s quest for freedom is linked by her owner to her indoctrination by the Moravian church, associated with Lutheran beliefs, but Christianity has not always played the role of the liberator from slavery and often interpreted work in a wide variety of ways.
Work and Christianity
Christianity originally had a jaundiced view of work: it was imposed upon humanity as a direct result of original sin and was a means, therefore, to avoid the temptations of the devil and the flesh, as well as a penance.
