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

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

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

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

This paper develops a new theoretical model with which to examine the interaction between technology and organizations. Early research studies assumed technology to be an objective, external force that would have deterministic impacts on organizational properties such as structure. Later researchers focused on the human aspect of technology, seeing it as the outcome of strategic choice and social action. This paper suggests that either view is incomplete, and proposes a reconceptualization of technology that takes both perspectives into account. A theoretical model—the structurational model of technology—is built on the basis of this new conceptualization, and its workings explored through discussion of a field study of information technology. The paper suggests that the reformulation of the technology concept and the structurational model of technology allow a deeper and more dialectical understanding of the interaction between technology and organizations. This understanding provides insight into the li...

The duality of technology: rethinking the concept of technology in organizations

As both technologies and organizations undergo dramatic changes in form and function, organizational researchers are increasingly turning to concepts of innovation, emergence, and improvisation to help explain the new ways of organizing and using technology evident in practice. With a similar intent, I propose an extension to the structurational perspective on technology that develops a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the ongoing use and change of technologies in the workplace. After developing this lens, I offer an example of its use in research, and then suggest some implications for the study of technology in organizations.

Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations

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.

A Classic of Its Time@@@Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.

This landmark text by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy is a classic of twentieth-century radical thought, a hugely influential book that continues to shape our understanding of modern capitalism.

Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order

labor which is represented in the value of commodities is a concept which has an important place in Marx's thinking. It must be admitted, however, that it is not an easy concept to comprehend; and for this reason it seems wise to consider the matter in further detail. It may be well to remove at once any misunderstandings of a purely verbal character. To many the expression 'abstract labor' suggests something slightly mysterious, perhaps not a little metaphysical and unreal. As should be clear from the last section, however, nothing of the sort was intended by Marx. Abstract labor is abstract only in the quite straightforward sense that all special characteristics which differentiate one kind of labor from another are ignored. Abstract labor, in short, is, as Marx's own usage clearly attests, equivalent to 'labor in general'; it is what is common to all productive human activity. Marx did not think he was the first to introduce the idea of labor in general into political economy. For example, in speaking of Benjamin Franklin, whom he regarded as 'one of the first economists, after Wm. Petty, who saw through the nature of value,' he had the following to say: Franklin is unconscious that by estimating the value ?f everything in labor, he makes abstraction from any difference in the sorts of labor exchanged, and thus reduces them all to equal human labor. But although ignoran' of this, yet he says it. He speaks first of 'the one labor,' then of 'the other labor,' and finally of 'labor,' without further qualification, as the substance of the value of everything.16 And in another connection, he remarks that 'it was a tremendous advance on the part of Adam Smith to throw aside all limitations which mark wealth-producing activity and to define it as labor in general, neither industrial, nor commercial, nor agricultural, or one as much as the other.' 17 Ricardo, as Marx was well aware. adopted the same point of view and followed it out with ABSTRACT LABOR 31 greater consistency than Smith. In this, as in many other cases, Marx started from a basic idea of the classical school, gave it precise and explicit expression, developed it, and utilized it in the analysis of social relations in his own original and penetrating fashion. It is important to realize that the reduction of all labor to a common denominator, so that units of labor can be compared with and substituted for one another, added and subtracted, and finally totalled up to form a social aggregate, is not an arbitrary abstraction, dictated in some way by the whim of the investigator. It is rather, as Lukacs correctly observes, an abstraction 'which belongs to the essence of capitalism.' 18 Let us examine this more closely. Capitalist society is characterized by a degree of labor mobility much greater than prevailed in any previous form of society. Not only do workers change their jobs relatively frequently, but also the stream of new' workers enterin~ the labor market is quickly diverted from declining to rising occupations. As Marx expressed it, 'We see at a glance that, in our capitalist society, a given portion of human labor is, in accordance with the varying demand, at one time supplied in the form of tailoring, at another in the form of weaving. This change may possibly not take place without friction, but take place it must.' 19 Under these circumstances, the various specific kinds of labor in existence at any given time and the relative quantities of each become matters of secondary importance in any general view of the economic system. Much more significant is the total size of the social labor force and its general level of development. On these depend the productive potentialities of society, whether the latter be manifested in the production of consumer's goods or in the production of implements of war. This is a conclusion which commands universal assent in the modern world; it flows from such common facts of experience that no one would think of denying it. It is important to observe, however, that in arriving at this conclusion we were obliged to abstract from the differences between specific forms of labor, an abstraction which is inevitably implied in the very notion of a total labor force available to society. We are likely to forget or overlook this JZ THE QUALITATIVE-VALUE PROBLEM only because the differences are practically of secondary importance. In the course of a methodological discussion, Marx emphasizes this point in the following terms: . . . This abstraction of labor is but the result of a concrete aggregate of different kinds of labor. The indifference to the par~icul~r ~dpd of labor ~orresponds to a form of society in which md1v1duals pass With ease from one kind of work to another, which makes it immaterial to them what particular kind of work may fall to their share. Labor has become here, not only categor~cally but really, a means of creating wealth in general and IS no longer grown together with the individual into one particular destination. This state of affairs has found its highest development in the most modern of bourgeois societies, the United States. It is only here that the abstraction of the category 'labor,' 'labor in general,' labor sans phrase, the starting ~oint of modern political economy, becomes realized in practice.20 To sum up, we may say that the reduction of all labor to abstract labor enables us to see clearly, behind the special forms 1 which labor may assume at any given time, l}n aggregate social · labor force which is capable of transference from one usc to another in accordance with social need, and on the magnitude and development of which society's wealth-producing capacity in the last resort depends. The adoption of this point of view, moreover, is conditioned by the very nature of capitalist production which promotes a degree of labor mobility never before approached in earlier forms of society. 6. THE RELATION oF THE QuANTITATIVE To THE QuALITATIVE IN

The Theory of Capitalist Development

T IS pretty well agreed among economists that the ordinary concept of a demand curve is inapplicable to the study of oligopoly. What would be sold at various prices if everything else remained unchanged does not concern an entrepreneur when he knows that everything else, and in particular the prices charged by his rivals, is most unlikely to remain unchanged. What does concern him is his own estimate of what can be sold at various prices, making the best allowance he can for the probable reactions of his rivals. These estimates can conveniently be arranged in the form of a demand schedule, but the result must not, of course, be confused with the type of demand schedule which is commonly used in economic discussion. Mr. Nicholas Kaldor has suggested the name "imagined demand curve" for the concept which is applicable to the oligopoly case, and in this article I propose to follow this usage.I So far as I know no attempt has yet been made to investigate the characteristics of imagined demand curves, though it should be obvious that such an investigation is desirable. Oligopoly is probably the typical case throughout a large part of the modern economy, and yet the theory of oligopoly can scarcely be said to be in a very advanced state, consisting as it does of a number of special cases which allow of little generalization. My purpose in this note is to show that a very considerable degree of clarification might be introduced into the study of this subject by a systematic inquiry into the nature of imagined demand curves. The most important consideration in this connection seems to me to be the obvious fact that rivals react differently according to whether a price change is upward or downward. If producer A raises his price, his rival producer B will acquire new customers. If, on the other hand, A lowers his price, B will lose customers. Ordinarily the reaction to a gain in business is a pleasurable feeling calling for no particular action; the reaction to a loss in business, however, is likely to be some viewing with

Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly

Since its first publication in 1942, this book has become the classic analytical study of Marxist economics. Written by an economist who was a master of modern academic theory as well as Marxist literature, it has been recognized as the ideal textbook in its subject. Comprehensive, lucid, authoritative, it has not been challenged or even approached by any later study.

Paul M. Sweezy

Papers

A Classic of Its Time@@@Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.

Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order

The Theory of Capitalist Development

Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly

The theory of capitalist development : principles of Marxian political economy