SOCIOLOGY OF WORK
4 ISSUES
The World of Work in Canada
ISSUES Tonight
•
TRENDS IN WORKFORCE
•
WOMEN AND WORK
•
Consumerism
•
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
PERSPECTIVES
• STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALconsensus, cooperation, function
• Conflict-power, domination
• Symbolic Interaction-status dynamics
• Feminist-patriarchy
• Post Modern-fragmentation
McCauley
• See…Theoretical Foundation for
Work and Professions in Jacobs
and Bosonac eds., The
Professionalization of Work
Current data:Canada
• Women in 2005 earned just 70½
cents
• Compare this to the 72 cents
women in the 1990s
WAGE GAP EXPLANATION
•
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
FIVE KEY:
Patriarchy,
Status Dynamics,
Power at work,
Interaction,
Glass ceiling, objectification..
Work in Canada
•
THREE PHASES:
1. EARLY INDUSTRIALISM
2. FACTORY INDUSTRIALISM
3. POST INDUSTRIALISM
A HISTORY OF WORK IN CANADA I
The first Industrial Revolution
began in Britain in late 18thc.
Turned peasants (serfs)into
wage-earning factory workers
(proletariats)..see K. Marx.
Trends in the Workforce:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
INFORMAL Work
UNDEREMPLOYMENT
TWO TIERED ECONOMY
Less Standardized work
DE-INDUSTRIALIZATION
:Women and Work
• From the expressive homemaker to
double day of labour. (I.e. Meg
• See Luxton’s, More than a Labour of
Love (1980)
Nancy Bonvillian• Women and Men: Cultural Constructs
of Gender (3rd ed).
• THESIS:Women and Workmodernization increases women’s
oppression
From Agriculture to
Manufacturing
• While in the early 1900’s most jobs were in
manufacturing and agriculture,
By the
th
20
century..
• Women’s work increasingly became
secondary supplement to man’s income.
• WOMEN WORK…is the invisible labour
in the home..
Social Development
1. Hunter and Gathering
2. Horticulture –
3. Agriculture –
4. Industrialism and capitalism-
Important material change:
The Type writer
• INCREASED WOMAN’s OPPRESSION
• W. F. Ogburn, Social Change (1933)
• -Material culture affects non- material
culture.
20th century stages in women’s
work
1. 1900-1914-Cult of Domesticity
2. 1946-Late 1950’s -Domesticity
returns
3. 1960’s- Second Wave Feminism
4. 1970s and 1980’s-women work still a
supplement to man’s income.
Women work • BECOMES LESS VALUED, MORE
INVISIBLE…but MORE CRUCIAL..
• Post World War Two and particularly
following economic booms and busts
•
Since 1960s :
1. More women in the labour force
2. Pill and the sexual revolution
3. Second Wave feminism
4. Third wave feminism
Dual Income Families Vital
• As fertility declines following the
introduction of the pill in 1963, we see a
corresponding rise in female labour force
participation
CONSUMERISM and
Capitalism
2. Consumerism
• A term used to describe the effects
of equating personal happiness
with purchasing material
possessions and consumption.
Commodity Fetishism
• It is often associated with criticisms of
consumption starting with Karl Marx and
Thorstein Veblen
• Karl Marx calls capitalistic consumptionCommodity Fetishism
Veblen.
Commodities as Veblen goods
• Consumerism can also refer to economic
policies that place an emphasis on
consumption.
• The value of a commodity increases with
its price…see `COOL THREADS’ VIDEO
Consumer Sovereignty?
• …should dictate the economic structure of a
society (cf. Producerism, especially in the
British sense of the term).
Theory of consumer choice
• In a liberal, democratic society, which is
the institutional framework of a market
or "capitalist" economic system,
• This translates into an ideology of
CONSUMER SOVEREIGNTY.
Consumerism, Conflict theory
and Hegemony
• Consumerism- is part of the general
process of social control and hegemony
• Consumerism is part of bourgeois `false
consciousness’
ECHO CONSUMERS
• Canadians under the age of twenty—the
"Echo Generation," as they're often
called—make up a quarter (26 per cent)
of the country's population.
ECHO GENERATION-Y
• Once an ignored demographic for
advertisers,
• ECHO GENERATION• Now the most marketed-to generation in
history
MENTAL LIFE
• Constant bombardment of marketing
messages that have become a ubiquitous
force in MENTAL LIFE
• SEE WOODSTOCK 1 vs. 2
Consumer culture
• There has been a rise in consumer culture
affecting all including children.
•
• THIS IS: The Branding of Culture
The Averages:
Two year old child can name products
I. By Four years, they can evaluate a product
II. By Six years old they can distinguish
products by brand.
Brands as Symbols
Expensive brands better,
• III. By age eleven has a child started to
perceive deceptive advertising,
• IV. By Sixteen years can/or not make a
reliable judgment about qualities of
product and truthfulness of sales pitches.
Consumerism=More Work
• Studies show that in 1992, UK labour force
survey
• 60% working-people spend more and
more of their lives at work…
ISSUE FOUR
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
3.
Morgan, 1994.
• By the late 1980s…
• The social welfare consensus that marked
the post-war period in North America was
beginning to come apart
• The end of Keynesian Economics…
Internet (1992)
• In G8 countries' a new political culture
there emerged:
• An ideology of information technology
(IT) that challenged the concept of universal
access –universality erodes..
Ideology of information
technology
• THE FREE MARKET:
• Gained hold of the IT sector by the early
1990s…
• FIRST PIZZA SOLD=1994.
Three IT Forces
1. Drew upon the conservative (right wing)
politics,
2. Classical liberal laissez-faire free market
values,
3. Technological determinism (Birdsall,
1996; Birdsall, 1997) See McLuhanism..
Neo-liberal Knowledge based
economy
• The raw material or basic commodity of
this society is information.
• KNOWLEDGE =POWER?
Knowledge-based economy
• Only the marketplace should determine
which goods and services are produced and
how they are generated; there are no
"public goods."
st
21
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
century ISSUES:
Increased competition
Attract capital
Generating employment
Find sources of tax revenues
Widening inequalities between
cities,
6. Discrepancies in the level of
essential services provided to
citizens
The Digital Divide
• The phrase "digital divide" has
emerged as a public policy issue
in Canada.
2. Communications Technology
• There is an increasing for need knowledge
• However, access and information available
to those who can afford computers and
time to understand how to extract
information
• DIGITAL DIVIDE
Statistics Canada
• Statistics Canada reported that in 1998,
about 36 per cent of Canadian households
were connected (Dickinson and Ellison,
1999).
• Private sector surveys put this figure over
50 per cent in 1999.
IDEOLOGY Question –conflict
theory vs. functionalism
• Does information technology
increase or decrease social
stratification?
Work and Identity see
Interactionism
•
Work and Identity the concern of this class.
1. Work defines: opportunities, incomes and
lifestyles.
2. Work believe it or not, still occupies half of our
waking hours..
3. In a lifetime, one spends one year having sex,
one year on the toilet…30 years working.
Summary
• WORK is a central part of post industrial
society
• Work has changed since the feudal age…
• Capitalism=early, mid and post modern
stages.
• Areas-women, consumerism, and
information..