Showing papers on "Deskilling published in 1998"

Computerization of the Workplace

Abstract: Divergent conceptualizations of the recent changes in work organization that have accompanied computerization include neo-Bravermanian analyses, postindustrial analyses, and contingency analyses. To make sense of these differing views, the paper surveys sociological research on computerization and its impact on three analytically separate dimensions of the workplace: organizational restructuring, changes in worker skill, and power and authority relationships. The review reveals that computerized work organizations typically have fewer hierarchical levels, a bifurcated workforce, frequently with race and sex segregation, a less formal structure, and diminished use of internal labor markets and reliance instead on external credentialing. Variable patterns of centralization and decentralization occur, and workplace power relationships interact with technological change to produce variable political outcomes. With regard to worker skills, recent evidence suggests aggregate upskilling with some deskilling and ...

The political ecology of bananas : contract farming, peasants, and agrarian change in the eastern Caribbean

Abstract: This study of banana contract farming in the Eastern Caribbean explores the forces that shape contract-farming enterprises everywhere--capital, the state, and the environment. Employing the increasingly popular framework of political ecology, which highlights the dynamic linkages between political-economic forces and human-environment relationships, Lawrence Grossman provides a new perspective on the history and contemporary trajectory of the Windward Islands banana industry. He reveals in rich detail the myriad impacts of banana production on the peasant laborers of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Grossman challenges the conventional wisdom on three interrelated issues central to contract farming and political ecology. First, he analyzes the process of deskilling and the associated significance of control by capital and the state over peasant labor. Second, he investigates the impacts of contract farming for export on domestic food production and food import dependency. And third, he examines the often misunderstoodproblem of pesticide misuse. Grossman's findings lead to a reconsideration of broader debates concerning the relevance of research on industrial restructuring and globalization for the analysis of agrarian change. Most important, his work emphasizes that we must pay greater attention to the fundamental significance of the "environmental rootedness" of agriculture in studies of political ecology and contract farming.

Flexibility models: a critical analysis

Abstract: Mass production structures have been criticised as being too rigid to respond to increased global competition and to increasingly sophisticated consumers demanding differentiated products. Additionally, the job designs associated with mass production have been criticised for: deskilling workers leading to high worker dissatisfaction; rendering workers unable to make decisions about how they perform their jobs; and for creating a workforce that is not able to respond to the requirements associated with the demands of new work practices. Thus calls for increased flexibility at the organisation level have been made by employer and employee groups. Flexibility promises to provide the competitive edge needed in an increasingly global market; and employees with increased participation, more interesting jobs, stable employment, and better wages and work conditions. However, there still appear to be many unresolved issues relating to the flexibility debate.

International Capital on “Silicon Plateau”: Work and Control in India's Computer Industry

Abstract: If workers in industrialized countries lose out when jobs go overseas, do workers in developing countries benefit when jobs come from overseas ? This article uses the recent influx of foreign capital into India's computer industry to show how newforms of control of labor can prevent workers in developing countries from capturing all the benefits that workers in industrialized countries lose as a result offoreign investment. In the Indian case the economic integration of markets - a feature of late capitalism - has recreated the Taylorist production dynamics associated with an earlier era, and a new kind of invisible deskilling has limited the potential of job growth in the industry

Consuming work: computers, subjectivity and appropriation in the university workplace

Abstract: The introduction of technologies has long been a central issue in the sociology of work. This has, however, largely been analysed in terms of worker displacement, deskilling and management control,...

Workplace reforms, managerial objectives and managerial outcomes: The perceptions of Canadian IR/HRM managers

Abstract: This paper relies on subjective data obtained from a survey of managers with primary responsibility for human resource management in 141 Canadian firms reporting a workplace reform programme. It explores the beliefs of respondents as to the objectives and outcomes of workplace reform programmes, and the extent to which these vary in accordance with the specific reforms adopted. It finds that, although a sizeable minority of respondents admit that the objectives and/or outcomes of reform programmes involve some deskilling or union avoidance, the primary objectives and outcomes which managers associate with these programmes have to do with improved flexibility, customer relations, quality and worker attitudes. It also finds that JIT and quality management appear to be consistent with a ‘control’ approach, while re-engineering appears to be consistent with a ‘commitment’ approach, that socio-technical reforms are of major importance to the perceived success of a workplace reform programme, and that neither ‘...

Raising Literacy Standards: The True Story.

Abstract: As the Literacy Hour becomes compulsory in primary schools across Britain it is important to consider its impact on the primary teaching profession and the factual basis on which its aims and structures are based. This article claims that the National Literacy Strategy is a deskilling initiative which itself is based on unsubstantiated claims that its proposals are more effective than previous methods. It enshrines a mythology that teachers do not teach literacy effectively and need to be retrained to do so. The article examines the evidence for this myth and finds there are no research findings of any validity whatsoever to support it. The article goes on to point to the real and inescapable correlation between literacy attainment and social and economic status, a finding which shows up in several different pieces of valid research. Working on the supposition that the Labour Government does genuinely care about the long tail of failure provided by the 20 per cent or so of children who come from the poorest socio-economic groups, the article goes on to discuss a reconceptualisation of this problem. Building on the work of social anthropologists, particularly that of Brian Street, it suggests the direction in which valid research-based policy and pedagogy should take to address it.

Class and the Changing Nature of Work: Testing Hypotheses of Deskilling and Convergence among Swedish Employees:

Abstract: The changing nature of work is often supposed to be of consequence for interest formation and political alliances between social classes. Three hypotheses are tested: classes converge due to the deskilling of white-collar work or the upskilling of blue-collar work; lower white-collar workers essentially share the conditions of manual workers; the gender dimension cross-cuts the class dimension. Empirical analyses are carried out on the Swedish Level of Living Surveys in 1968, 1974, 1981 and 1991. The major trend is towards an upskilling, though jobs have not become less monotonous. There are signs of class convergence, e.g., in wages and authority, but sharp differences remain. While class divisions exist for both men and women, gender differences within classes are substantial for physical working conditions and market capacity. For several indicators, lower white-collar workers are exposed to similar conditions as manual workers while men in the highest stratum stand out as the consistently most privileged.

[Women, Work & Place]

Abstract: The introduction to this collection of nine essays on women and work describes it as presenting "interdisciplinary and international perspectives on women's lives, focusing on their work and the diverse places in which the complexities of gender relations are worked out" (p. xi). Several of the articles are excellent, especially those by Bradbury, Parr and Christopherson, but I found the collection as a whole frustrating and problematic. I worry that the superb pieces in the book may get lost in a collection that lacks integration and does not live up to the editors' claims. While it is true that the authors come from different disciplines (history, sociology, geography, planning, education), the essays do not deal with interdisciplinarity. Similarly, while there are essays based on research in Britain, the USA and Canada, no international perspective is developed. Finally while the significance of place is stressed, the collection does not advance an analysis of what place means nor what it means to claim that "place matters." Seven case studies explore a range of issues from two centuries -- 19th and 20th -- and three countries -- Canada, Britain and the USA. Topics include: the impact of the technological changes associated with industrial capitalism on women's domestic and paid work in 19th-century Montreal (Bradbury); the changing practices of work and mothering as women migrated from agrarian Japanese to industrial Canadian society (Kobayashi); the way women strikers in a small Ontario textile town in the 1940s understood and acted on their issues differently than men with the result that the male-dominated union had difficulty understanding and supporting their efforts (Parr); gender inequality in the Canadian paid workforce and women's efforts to challenge it (Gold); the ways in which gender and race are central to definitions of skill such that immigrant women in the contemporary textile industry in East London, England, are among the lowest paid and insecure workers (Kaye); the link between the feminization of the labour force and the changing occupational divisions of employment, especially deskilling, reskilling and polarization, and how it varies within metropolitan space in contemporary Montreal (Rose and Villeneuve); and a comparison of women's employment in three non-metropolitan communities in Arizona, as part of household strategies in the context of structural adjustment in the US economy (Christopherson). Two review essays survey theoretical debates: one considers the relationship among changes in women's domestic and paid labour, household practices, housing choices and gentrification (Bondi); the other reviews the development of theories of urban social change and argues for the importance of feminist analyses of the structural connections between gender and production relations as a corrective, using the example of changes in women's work in Britain. The introductory essay by Audrey Kobayashi, Linda Peake, Hal Beneson and Katie Pickles, "Introduction: Placing Women and Work," lays out an analytical flamework and identifies a series of theoretical issues related to women's work and gender relations that the book is intended to address. Arguing that "place matters" (p. xxxv), they note that "these studies show the remarkable variety and contingency that characterize women's life and work in different places" (p. xxxiv), and identify their objective as recognizing "the ways in which abstract social processes, often international in scope, are always placed, lived, and given specific meaning by specific people in landscapes that are constructed in relation to the world at large" (p. xxxiv). Unfortunately, neither this essay, nor the collection as a whole develops an argument about what it means to claim that place matters. Other than a shared focus on women and work, there is little in the collection to link the different articles. The different time periods and various locations are sufficiently diverse that they do not complement or build on each other. …