The Changing Experience of Employment: Restructuring and Recession

241 Pages·1986·23.574 MB·English

by  Kate Purcell, Stephen Wood, Alan Waton, Sheila Allen (eds.)

THE CHANGING
EXPERIENCE OF
EMPLOYMENT
Restructuring and Recession
Edited by
Kate Purcell, Stephen Wood,
Alan Waton and Sheila Allen
M in association with
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
© British Sociological Association 1986
All rights reserved, No reproduction, copy or transmission
of this publication may be made without written permission.
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
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civil claims for damages.
First published 1986
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
The Changing experience of employment: restructuring
and recession.-(Explorations in sociology; 22)
1. Labour supply-Great Britain 2. Depressions
3. Great Britain-Economic conditions-1945-
I. Purcell, Kate II. British Sociological
Association III. Series
331.12'5'0941 HD5765.A6
ISBN 978-0-333-39696-4 ISBN 978-1-349-18465-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18465-1
Contents
List of Tables and Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on the Contributors viii
1 Restructuring and Recession 1
Kate Purcell and Stephen Wood
2 Contract Work in the Recession 18
Ralph Fevre
3 Re-dividing Labour: Factory Politics and Work
Reorganisation in the Current Industrial Transition 35
Bryn Jones and Michael Rose
4 Recruitment as a Means of Control 58
Michael Maguire
5 Female Workers in the First and Third Worlds: the
'Greening' of Women's Labour 75
Ruth Pearson
6 Work, Home and the Restructuring of Jobs 95
Harriet Bradley
7 Word Processing and the Secretarial Labour Process 114
Juliet Webster
8 New Technology and the Service Class 132
John Child
9 Rationalisation, Technical Change and
Employee Reactions 156
Wolfgang Littek
10 Women and Technology: Opportunity Is not Enough 173
Cynthia Cockburn
11 Gender, Consent and Exploitation among Sheltered
Housing Wardens 188
Sheila Cunnison
Bibliography 206
Author Index 224
Subject Index 228
v
List of Tables
4.1 Age of sample by production of department 67
4.2 Length of service by production department 69
4.3 Job source 70
4.4 Number of sample with relatives in the plant 71
List of Figures
8.1 A typology of higher-level white collar employees 135
8.2 A representation of the influences on the extent to
which information technology threatens the
employment and work content of white-collar
workers 149
vi
Acknowledgements
Earlier drafts of the chapters in this and its companion volume The
Experience of Unemployment (Allen et ai, 1986), with the exception
of the introductory chapters by the editors, were originally presented
at the British Sociological Association's Annual Conference on
'Work, Employment and Unemployment' held at the University of
Bradford in April 1984. The numbers who attended that event, the
quantity and variety of papers given and the quality of debate, all
testified to the importance with which social scientists treat these
issues. The material in this book and its sister volume was selected to
produce two thematic collections, representative of the conference
and of ongoing sociological research on work, employment and
unemployment. We regret that the constraint of thematic coherence
forced us to exclude several excellent contributions. The editors
would like to thank the contributing authors for the time and effort
that they have spent on revising their papers for publication. Finally,
we are grateful for the help, unfailing good humour and efficiency of
Win Healey and Judith Hammond of Bradford University, who
transformed successive, much-annotated drafts into elegant and ac
curate typescript.
vii
Notes on the Contributors
Sheila Allen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bradford.
She has published extensively in the areas of ethnic relations, gender
and work and is currently researching homeworking and social
change in coal-mining areas.
Harriet Bradley worked as an English teacher before making a
mid-career switch to sociology, and is currently lecturer at Sunder
land Polytechnic. She has carried out research on the hosiery indus
try, and is also working on a book on the sexual division of lab9ur in
the workplace.
John Child is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the University
of Aston, and was Director of the Work Organisation Research
Centre there from 1984 to 1985. His research interests are in the
social aspects of new technology, work organisation, and cross
national studies.
Cynthia Cockburn has carried out research on local government and
community action; on the impact of new technology on compositors
in the newspaper industry; and on gender and technology in the
context of technical change. She is currently a Senior Research
Fellow in the Department of Social Science and Humanities at The
City University, London, and is a member of the National Union of
Journalists.
Sheila Cunnison has carried out participant and observational re
search in industrial, service and professional work situations, and
into women's participation in trade unions. She is currently employed
by Humberside College of Higher Education in research work about
housing and care of the elderly.
Ralph Fevre is currently employed on the ESRC-funded 'Steel Pro
ject' at University College of Swansea and has recently published a
book on racial discrimination in employment.
viii
Notes on the Contributors ix
Bryn Jones has been a Research Fellow and then Lecturer in Soci
ology at the University of Bath since 1978. Research and publications
have been concerned with the relationships between new technology,
industrial relations and skills in British and American manufacturing
industry. He has recently completed a cross-national study of diver
gent patterns of factory automation and work in Italy, Japan and the
USA.
Wolfgang Littek is currently a Professor of Sociology of Work at the
University of Bremen and was formerly Assistant Professor at the
University of Munich. He has worked on theoretical concepts in
West Germany 'industrial and plant sociology' and researched on
white-collar workers in industry, with a special interest in the effects
of new technologies and reorganisation on working and employment
conditions, on employees' reactions, and also on international com
parative perspectives.
Michael Maguire has carried out research on the relationship be
tween social control and the labour process in the telecommunica
tions industry. He was a part-time tutor of Queen's and Open
University students and a Junior Research Fellow in the Institute of
Irish Studies, Queen's University, Belfast. He is currently a Research
Officer in the Social Technology and Policy Division of Aston Uni
versity.
Ruth Pearson is a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Develop
ment Studies, University of East Anglia and a part-time Tutor for the
Open University Third World Studies Course. She has carried out
research on women's employment and internationalisation of capital
in Latin America and Europe and is currently working on a research
project on the impact of service sector growth on local change in East
Anglia co-ordinated by the Faculty of Social Science, Open Univer
sity.
Kate Purcell has carried out research on manual workers' employ
ment experiences and attitudes to work, with a particular interest in
the sexual division of labour and the relationship between class and
gender. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute for
Employment Research at Warwick University.
Michael Rose is Reader in Socio-Cultural Change, University of
x Notes on the Contributors
Bath, where he is co-ordinating studies of the labour market in
'Sunrise City' for the ESRC research programme on social change
and economic life. His most recent book is Reworking the Work Ethic
(1985).
Alan Waton has been a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of
Bradford since 1973. He is particularly interested in problems of
analysing power in industrial societies, and is currently engaged in
research on ethnic minority use of the media.
Juliet Webster is completing a Ph.D. thesis which examines changes
in secretarial and typing labour processes associated with the move to
word processing, with special emphasis on existing divisions of labour
within the office. She is now employed as a research assistant at The
City University's Social Statistics Research Unit.
Stephen Wood has lectured in Industrial Relations at the London
School of Economics since 1974. He has written and edited several
studies of work and unemployment, and is currently engaged in
Anglo-American research on recent changes in the motor industry.
1 Restructuring and
Recession
KATE PURCELL AND
STEPHEN WOOD
The late 1970s and early 1980s have been a period of global recession
but there is considerable diversity of opinion about when it started
and how long it will last. Richard Brown, in discussing the implica
tions of this for sociologists, reflected that:
It is certainly plausible to suggest that we are living at a time when
the pattern of work with which we have been familiar for nearly
two centuries may be changing more rapidly than ever before, and
when the categories in terms of which we have been accustomed to
think about work are proving less and less appropriate ....T he
tasks of describing, understanding, explaining and criticising the
structure and experience of work and unemployment are as import
ant as they have ever been. We need to know the conditions of our
present plight, to develop alternative futures and to explore the
conditions necessary for their realisation. (Brown, 1984, p. 320)
As a contribution to that enterprise, this book represents the empiri
cal and theoretical findings of sociologists currently carrying out
research into employment and work organisations.
Economic recessions have two kinds of impact on the labour
market. On the one hand, large numbers of workers are removed
from paid employment by redundancy, early retirement, or, in the
case of school-Ieavers, fail to find such work at all. On the other,
those who remain in employment find their positions subject to
intensified pressures for restructuring and internal redefinition: the
1