Recent ethnographic studies of workplace practices indicate that the ways people actually work usually differ fundamentally from the ways organizations describe that work in manuals, training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions. Nevertheless, organizations tend to rely on the latter in their attempts to understand and improve work practice. We examine one such study. We then relate its conclusions to compatible investigations of learning and of innovation to argue that conventional descriptions of jobs mask not only the ways people work, but also significant learning and innovation generated in the informal communities-of-practice in which they work. By reassessing work, learning, and innovation in the context of actual communities and actual practices, we suggest that the connections between these three become apparent. With a unified view of working, learning, and innovating, it should be possible to reconceive of and redesign organizations to improve all three.

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Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation

Postmodernism has been particularly important in acknowledging 'the multiple forms of otherness as they emerge from differences in subjectivity, gender and sexuality, race and class, temporal and spatial geographic locations and dislocations'. Postmodernism also ought to be looked at as mimetic of the social, economic, and political practices in society. The meta-narratives that the postmodernists decry were much more open, nuanced, and sophisticated than the critics admit. The rhetoric of postmodernism is dangerous for it avoids confronting the realities of political economy and the circumstances of global power. The sharp categorical distinction between modernism and postmodernism disappears, to be replaced by an examination of the flux of internal relations within capitalism as a whole. The reproduction of the social and symbolic order through the exploration of difference and 'otherness' is all too evident in the climate of postmodernism.

The condition of postmodernity

1. Introduction 2. The emergence of learning activity as a historical form of human learning 3. The zone of proximal development as the basic category of expansive research 4. The instruments of expansion 5. Toward an expansive methodology 6. Epilogue.

Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research

In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work. Abstract jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodie...

HIERARCHIES, JOBS, BODIES: A Theory of Gendered Organizations

https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?

This book first took shape in my mind as little more than a study of occupational shifts in the United States. I was interested in the structure of the working class, and the manner in which it had changed. That portion of the population employed in manufacturing and associated industries—the so-called industrial working class—had apparently been shrinking for some time, if not in absolute numbers at any rate in relative terms. Since the details of this process, especially its historical turning points and the shape of the new employment that was taking the place of the old, were not clear to me, I undertook to find out more about them. And since, as I soon discovered, these things had not yet been clarified in any comprehensive fashion, I decided that there was a need for a more substantial historical description and analysis of the process of occupational change than had yet been presented in print.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/index.php/mr/article/download/MR-026-03-1974-07_1/2125

Labor and Monopoly Capital

First published in 1974, this text is written in a direct way by Harry Braverman, whose years spent as an industrial worker gave him insight into the labour process and the conviction to reject the reigning wisdoms of academic sociology. Here, he analyzes the division of labour between the design and execution of industrial production, which underlies all our social arrangements. This new edition features a new introduction by John Bellamy Foster, setting the work in historical and theoretical context, as well as two more articles by Harry Braverman.

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

This article is a slightly edited version of a talk given by Harry Braverman in Spring 1975 at the West Virginia Institute of Technology. As far as we know this was his last recorded presentation. - The EditorsThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Die Arbeit im modernen Produktionsprozeß

The following interview appeared in Canadian Dimension in December 1979, with this introductory note: "Harry Braverman's work commonly has been criticized as infused with an element of utopianism: a rejection of the kind of division of labor that has so far been characteristic of industrial civilization and a kind of longing for a pre-monopoly-capitalism craftsmanship. In what may well have been [Braverman's] last interview before his death, Toronto broadcaster and film-maker Kelly Creighton put this criticism to him. Here is his reply. - THE EDITORSThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/index.php/mr/article/download/MR-031-10-1980-03_4/2459

Harry Braverman

Papers

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Die Arbeit im modernen Produktionsprozeß

The Last Interview