Lecture 5:
Work and Employment
General sociology:
LO:
● define the concept of work and list its main characteristics;
● identify the main historical transformations in the nature of work;
● Theorize connections between gender, family life and work;
● describe the causes and consequences of the knowledge economy;
What is work?
● Definition of work: the carrying out of tasks requiring the expenditure of
mental and physical effort, which has as its objective the production of goods
and services that cater to human needs
● This could also refer to household work, voluntary work, etc.
● Work is an occupation when it is done in exchange for a regular wage or salary
Aspects of work:
● Money
○ A wage is the main resource on which people depend to meet their needs
● Activity level
○ Work provides a basis for the acquisition and exercise of skills
● Variety
○ Work provides access to new contexts
● Temporal structure
○ People engaged in regular employment normally have more organized day
● Social contact
○ Work environment provides friendship and opportunity of shared activities
● Personal identity
○ Work is usually valued for the sense of stable social identity it offers
Diverse nature of work:
● Historical change: from hunting/gathering and pastoral/horticultural →
agricultural (specialization!) → industrial (more specialization!) →
post-industrial (still more....)
● But also global differences: Global North versus Global South is linked to:
○ (post-)industrial versus more agrarian
○ Employment laws/trade unions versus exploitation is sweatshops
○ Formal versus informal economy
How is work organized?
● Durkheim (1893): The Division of Labor in Society
20
, ● Pre-industrial craftsmanship:
○ Making a product from start to finish
○ Complex skills learned through extensive training (apprenticeship)
● Industrialization:
○ specialization into great number of different occupations
○ Workers each only engaged with tiny part of production process
○ Extensive machinery required factories: workplace away from home
○ Mass production / Fordism
○ Durkheim: Growing economic interdependence (organic solidarity)
○ Marx: alienation of workers
○ Weber: rationalization, bureaucratization
Changing labor market → social mobility
● When classes shrink or grow, people are squeezed out of declining classes and
pulled into expanding ones
● Such mobility due to structural change in class
composition is called structural mobility
● Mobility that is not caused by structural change is
called exchange mobility
● If people don’t have the skills to move ‘up’ in case
of structural change, this may lead to structural
unemployment
Power relations in the labor market:
● Trade unions developed to support workers’ rights
● After WWII, many (blue-collar) workers were members
● But power of these unions diminished when:
○ Fewer people came to hold blue-collar jobs
○ Rising unemployment in the 1980 weakened
workers’ bargaining positions
○ So did the competition with workers from the
Global South
○ Right-wing governments (in the 1980s: Thatcher in UK, Reagan in US) saw
unions as antagonistic with neoliberalism
○ Today, companies like Amazon actively discourage unionization of their
workers in the US
● Workers’ power is also diminished by the vast increase in flexible contracts and
semi-self-employed work relations
● Independent contractors as in food and package delivery, Uber drivers, etc.
● There is an increasing gap between those with secure steady jobs and those in
flexible/temporary/part-time/self-employed jobs
21
, ● The precarious part of the workforce delivers packages, food and services to the
more secure and wealthy other part?
● Ever more precarious work that benefits employersand impairs ‘employees’
○ Marx all over again? Proletariat is now precariat?
New types of labor:
● Gig economy is quite typical of cultural sector:
○ But also e.g. day laborers gathering every morning to find a day’s job
● Freelancing, self-employed, zero-hour contracts
● Short assignments, temporary, unpredictable
● Platform business model: no sick pay, no holidays, no pension...
● Employment opportunities based on reputation
○ This often means accepting offers that are less interesting for lower pay
than would be reasonable
Historical transformations of work:
● Industrialization was efficient because it cut up complex production processes
into small, specialized bits
● Taylorism: time-and-motion studies were conducted to define these smaller
worker tasks (scientific management)
● Henry Ford’s car factory first used Taylorism
○ Moving assembly line or conveyor belt
○ Mass production and less price
● But discovered thatIf productivity increased, consumption should keep up in
order to sell Henry’s T Fords
○ → Ford raised wages to enable his workers to be consumers
but , After 1970s Fordism was in decline because:
● International competition (from low(er)-wage countries)
● Its means of mass-production were too inflexible for rapidly changing and
diversifying consumer demands
● Offering very little autonomy to workers leads to a low-trust system as workers
have little job satisfaction and decisions are made top-down
● Consumers wanted more (mass-)customized products
● Constant innovation was required (at some point everyone had their own car and
fridge, so new stuff was needed to keep consumption levels high in order to
enable profitable production)
● Just-in-time production guarantees quick response to market demand
● Manufacturing is being cut-up, made more flexible, and often spread out across
the globe
● Most clothing brands don’t have their own factories where they produce clothes
they sell in their own shops
○ Production, distribution, and retail are increasingly disentangled
22
Work and Employment
General sociology:
LO:
● define the concept of work and list its main characteristics;
● identify the main historical transformations in the nature of work;
● Theorize connections between gender, family life and work;
● describe the causes and consequences of the knowledge economy;
What is work?
● Definition of work: the carrying out of tasks requiring the expenditure of
mental and physical effort, which has as its objective the production of goods
and services that cater to human needs
● This could also refer to household work, voluntary work, etc.
● Work is an occupation when it is done in exchange for a regular wage or salary
Aspects of work:
● Money
○ A wage is the main resource on which people depend to meet their needs
● Activity level
○ Work provides a basis for the acquisition and exercise of skills
● Variety
○ Work provides access to new contexts
● Temporal structure
○ People engaged in regular employment normally have more organized day
● Social contact
○ Work environment provides friendship and opportunity of shared activities
● Personal identity
○ Work is usually valued for the sense of stable social identity it offers
Diverse nature of work:
● Historical change: from hunting/gathering and pastoral/horticultural →
agricultural (specialization!) → industrial (more specialization!) →
post-industrial (still more....)
● But also global differences: Global North versus Global South is linked to:
○ (post-)industrial versus more agrarian
○ Employment laws/trade unions versus exploitation is sweatshops
○ Formal versus informal economy
How is work organized?
● Durkheim (1893): The Division of Labor in Society
20
, ● Pre-industrial craftsmanship:
○ Making a product from start to finish
○ Complex skills learned through extensive training (apprenticeship)
● Industrialization:
○ specialization into great number of different occupations
○ Workers each only engaged with tiny part of production process
○ Extensive machinery required factories: workplace away from home
○ Mass production / Fordism
○ Durkheim: Growing economic interdependence (organic solidarity)
○ Marx: alienation of workers
○ Weber: rationalization, bureaucratization
Changing labor market → social mobility
● When classes shrink or grow, people are squeezed out of declining classes and
pulled into expanding ones
● Such mobility due to structural change in class
composition is called structural mobility
● Mobility that is not caused by structural change is
called exchange mobility
● If people don’t have the skills to move ‘up’ in case
of structural change, this may lead to structural
unemployment
Power relations in the labor market:
● Trade unions developed to support workers’ rights
● After WWII, many (blue-collar) workers were members
● But power of these unions diminished when:
○ Fewer people came to hold blue-collar jobs
○ Rising unemployment in the 1980 weakened
workers’ bargaining positions
○ So did the competition with workers from the
Global South
○ Right-wing governments (in the 1980s: Thatcher in UK, Reagan in US) saw
unions as antagonistic with neoliberalism
○ Today, companies like Amazon actively discourage unionization of their
workers in the US
● Workers’ power is also diminished by the vast increase in flexible contracts and
semi-self-employed work relations
● Independent contractors as in food and package delivery, Uber drivers, etc.
● There is an increasing gap between those with secure steady jobs and those in
flexible/temporary/part-time/self-employed jobs
21
, ● The precarious part of the workforce delivers packages, food and services to the
more secure and wealthy other part?
● Ever more precarious work that benefits employersand impairs ‘employees’
○ Marx all over again? Proletariat is now precariat?
New types of labor:
● Gig economy is quite typical of cultural sector:
○ But also e.g. day laborers gathering every morning to find a day’s job
● Freelancing, self-employed, zero-hour contracts
● Short assignments, temporary, unpredictable
● Platform business model: no sick pay, no holidays, no pension...
● Employment opportunities based on reputation
○ This often means accepting offers that are less interesting for lower pay
than would be reasonable
Historical transformations of work:
● Industrialization was efficient because it cut up complex production processes
into small, specialized bits
● Taylorism: time-and-motion studies were conducted to define these smaller
worker tasks (scientific management)
● Henry Ford’s car factory first used Taylorism
○ Moving assembly line or conveyor belt
○ Mass production and less price
● But discovered thatIf productivity increased, consumption should keep up in
order to sell Henry’s T Fords
○ → Ford raised wages to enable his workers to be consumers
but , After 1970s Fordism was in decline because:
● International competition (from low(er)-wage countries)
● Its means of mass-production were too inflexible for rapidly changing and
diversifying consumer demands
● Offering very little autonomy to workers leads to a low-trust system as workers
have little job satisfaction and decisions are made top-down
● Consumers wanted more (mass-)customized products
● Constant innovation was required (at some point everyone had their own car and
fridge, so new stuff was needed to keep consumption levels high in order to
enable profitable production)
● Just-in-time production guarantees quick response to market demand
● Manufacturing is being cut-up, made more flexible, and often spread out across
the globe
● Most clothing brands don’t have their own factories where they produce clothes
they sell in their own shops
○ Production, distribution, and retail are increasingly disentangled
22
