This is a study in industrial sociology; it a partial report, to be followed by another, of an investigation of singel factory seen in the light of Max Weber's theory of bureacracy.

Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy.

ed summaries and general concepts can be formulated, which may, upon further investigation, be found to be germane to a wider variety of settings. Case studies, therefore are not necessarily restricted

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Qualitative research methods in health technology assessment: a review of the literature.

Regardless of the specific tools and methods a firm adopts or what quality experts an organization follows, managing for quality and competitive advantage means a firm must become customer oriented. Unfortunately, many quality-management programs and efforts to enhance competitiveness take a rather limited view of potential customer involvement in the process. This article first examines familiar roles that customers play in both manufacturing and service organizations. Then, insights from organization theory, services marketing. strategic management, and total quality concepts are integrated to develop both a conceptual model and 10 propositions based on a more complex view of potential customer contributions to competitive quality. Both a research agenda and ideas for improved organizational practice are discussed.

Customer Contributions to Quality: A Different View of the Customer-Oriented Firm

The formula‘care = organisation + physical labour + emotional labour' identifies component parts of ‘carework’ as they were observed at a hospice. A comparison between women's domestic carework and that of the hospice nurses is made firstly to clarify the component elements of care and secondly to show how the interrelation and balance of the components differs in the two settings. It is argued that family care has been a model for hospice care but that division of labour in hospices, which replicates hospital labour-divisions, results in an inflexibility in hospice care which is incompatible with the ‘family’ model. In the final section it is suggested that emotional labour is likely to be increasingly recognised as part of health care but that the concept of ‘total care’ needs to be questioned.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-9566.ep10493127

Care = organisation + physical labour + emotional labour

As Everett Hughes noted, there is an “underside” to all work. Each job includes ways of doing things that would be inappropriate for those outside the guild to know. Illusions are essential for maintaining occupational reputation, but in the process they create a set of moral dilemmas. So it is with ethnographic work. This article describes the underside of ethnographic work: compromises that one frequently makes with idealized ethical standards. It argues that images of ethnographers—personal and public—are based on partial truths or self-deceptions. The focus is on three clusters of dilemmas: the classical virtues (the kindly ethnographer, the friendly ethnographer, and the honest ethnographer), technical skills (the precise ethnographer, the observant ethnographer, and the unobtrusive ethnographer), and the ethnographic self (the candid ethnographer, the chaste ethnographer, the fair ethnographer, and the literary ethnographer). Changes in ethnographic styles and traditions alter the balance of these d...

TEN LIES OF ETHNOGRAPHY: Moral Dilemmas of Field Research

Professionalism: The Sociologist's Decoy

Comments on “Secret Observation”

Staff and Client Control Strategies in Urban Hospital Emergency Services

This report is a review of the recent literature (mostly since the mid 60s) of the sociology of occupations. The notion of measuring professionalism, especially as represented by the attribute appr...

Current State of the Sociology of Occupations

Any reader with research experience can probably recall one or more cases in which he observed, suspected, or participated in some form of cheating, carelessness, distortion, or cutting of corners in the collection or processing of research data. Almost all the systematic research on "restriction of output" and deviation from assigned duties has been done on factory workers, office clerks, and other low prestige work groups. Many of the actions of hired hand researchers are strikingly analogous to restrictive practices of factory operatives. Interviewers who limit probing and observers who limit interaction recording are behaving like workers applying "quota restriction," and with interacting hired hands informal agreements may be reached on the extent of such restrictions. A hired hand is a person who feels that he has no stake in the research that he is working on, that he is simply expected to carry out assigned tasks and turn in results which will "pass inspection.".

Julius A. Roth

Papers

Professionalism: The Sociologist's Decoy

Comments on “Secret Observation”

Staff and Client Control Strategies in Urban Hospital Emergency Services

Current State of the Sociology of Occupations

Hired Hand Research