• Work is the single activity that most of us will spend most of our lives doing.
• It is of overriding importance to us as individuals and to society in general.
• For individuals, work or, more precisely, paid work is the basis of livelihood.
• Work also provides a measure of worth well beyond wages and the lifestyles they allow.
• Individuals are so categorised, assessed, ranked and rewarded because of their work status.
• The work ethic retains a powerful legacy. This is visible in the ways that people who are not in paid employment may be stigmatised with disapproving epithets.

• Work is central to society because it is the mechanism by which the overwhelming majority of things are produced.
• Work and production are inextricably interlinked.
• Work also infiltrates non-work:
• When we are at leisure, we are consuming and gaining pleasure from someone else’s work;
• Work links production and consumption in at least three other ways: a)Profits b) Classes c) Aspirations

Marx and Engels focused on paid work as a main driver of capitalist societies. Unpaid work or labour was regarded by these founding fathers as a residual category that takes place in the domestic sphere. Such marginalisation has raised the ire of feminists since at least the late nineteenth century, who have argued that capitalist societies are sustained as much by the realm of unpaid work such as domestic labour as by paid work.

At the same time, the domestic sphere is increasingly penetrated by forms of paid work
(for example, take-away meals, house cleaning services, child care facilities, legalised prostitution, couples counselling) and the significance of unpaid work is arguably in decline.

The fundamental driver of capitalist society is the accumulation of capital. The origin of all capital is profit. Profit is the sum of money capitalists gain when the costs of production (raw materials, rents, plant and premises, etc.) and wages are subtracted from the value of the commodities produced at work. One of the great contradictions of capitalism is that while workers produce all the value of society, they receive only a portion of this value as wages from the sale of commodities.

Work is also the place where the two great classes of capitalism are forged: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The term bourgeoisie describes the class of modern capitalists who are owners of the means of production and employers of wage labour. Proletariat is the name given to the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.

Work is the place where aspirations are generated. Production /work is where all the possible things the people might find useful are given physical form (as commodities).
Because capitalists rather than workers determine what is to be produced, the range of commodities available always reflects what capitalists consider to be proper and useful.

Thus, paid work (which in Marx and
Friederich Engels’ terminology is called production) is also the source of innovation in society.

‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.’
(Marx and Engels, 2004, p. 7)

Marx and Engels offer commentary on a world where the two great classes of capitalism confront each other; bourgeoisie and proletariat .
They are convinced that the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalism will result in the impoverishment of the toiling masses and realization that their interest can only be served by communist revolution.

• The sociology of work reflects the fact that work, and the ‘relations of production’ found in work situations, only very rarely involve a direct confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat.
• The owners of businesses employ agents or managers to manage work and workers.

• Subjective factors lead people to define situations and to take action.
• The majority of the proletariat do not readily define themselves as such. This gives rise to the socalled ‘embourgeoisement thesis’ as an explanation for declining working class solidarity and adoption of middle class values.

The focus of the sociology of work is the
‘recalcitrant worker’. The core of this sociology can be said to be about issues of control and resistance (that is, efforts at managerial control and worker resistance). Worker resistance returns after each new managerial initiative.

Control represents managerial efforts to get the most out of workers across a number of dimensions that operate in both the formal and informal spheres of work. The formal aspects include:
• Documented contracts and collective agreements;
• Rates of pay;
• Bonus schedules;
• Procedures and protocols.
The informal aspects include everything else at work:
• Tricks;
• Shortcuts;
• Oversights;
• Illegal practices;
• Restrictions, etc.
Typically, but by no means always, the informal sphere of work tends to undermine the formal.

• Managerial control and managerial effort focuses on five dimensions. These centre on constraining workers and securing the process of production for management.
• First, is a focus on productivity.
• Second, is a focus on efficiency, which has as its goal minimising wastage by workers in the process of production.
• Third, is compliance, or ensuring that workers comply with the rules of management.
• Fourth, is subordination. This relates to all the efforts by management to ensure workers are passive in work and, in particular, not resistant to change.
• Fifth, is the goal of flexibility or ensuring that workers are accommodating to change.

• Workers resist managerial control across all of the above five dimensions and in each case formal and informal measures are adopted.
Formal and informal examples of worker resistance are countless but are clustered around three main areas:
•
involves the collective or individual negotiation of awards and contracts which cover work. The effort bargain is the often informal practices determining how much work is actually done.
•
(withdrawal from work) ;
•
(the disruption of work).

Taylor was a champion of what he called
‘scientific management’. Scientific management aimed to eliminate workers’ efforts to restrict output through innovations in the design of work. The approach used stopwatches, detailed observation and documentation to break work down into its smallest component parts and to reassemble the design of work to the greatest benefit of management.

• Scientific management had ideological aspects:
• Firstly, its claims to science. By claiming that his management techniques were scientific, Taylor sought to legitimate his approach as objectively true.
• Secondly, scientific management privileged the managerial view of work and the worker. Thus, work was regarded as useful only insofar as it generates profits.
• Thirdly, workers were regarded as inherently opposed to management and at the same time as incapable of operating efficiently without management.
• These ideological aspects are found in all

Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital: The
Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century drew attention to the labour process; that is, the process of production in which labour power is applied to raw materials and machinery to produce commodities.

• Braverman was concerned with the loss of craft skills in the modern/industrial organisation of work. He identified the process of de-skilling as central to control:
• First, de-skilling involves the separation of mental work and manual work (the separation of hand and brain, of conception and execution, of direct and indirect labour).
• Second, de-skilling is the objective of scientific management. It is a means of securing managerial control over the labour process.
• Third, de-skilling removes the skills, knowledge and science of the labour process and transfers these to management. At the same time deskilling pits manual and mental workers against each other.
• Fourth, de-skilling facilitates the dispersal of the labour process across sites and time (its decomposition across place and time).
• Fifth, de-skilling increases the capacity of capitalists to exploit workers and simultaneously reduces the capacity of workers to resist managerial control.

• Named after Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor
Company. Ford was the greatest practitioner of scientific management as it was then understood, and is famous for his mass production of the Model T car.
• He achieved this phenomenal output by transforming the ways in which cars were made. The key to this re-design of work was the introduction of the assembly-line into his factories.
• The assembly-line allowed Ford to determine the pace and order of work, to drastically de-skill the work involved in making cars and to hire the cheapest labour needed to complete the range of tasks. Arguably he put machines in charge of the process.
• Lewis Mumford describes this ‘technic’ of mass production as: ‘The tendency in mass production is to transfer initiative and significance from the worker who once operated the

• Littler argues that mass production or Fordism includes four main aspects:
• First is the assembly line. The assembly line is continuous as well as paced and ordered by management.
• Second is the use of highly specialised machine tools. These replaced the general purpose tools
(lathes, etc) which dominated earlier workshops and required highly skilled workers.
• Third is standardized products. The assembly line could make only one or very few products without retooling by management. Henry Ford used to joke that buyers could have any colour car, as long as it was black.
• Fourth, the use of scientific management in the surveillance of work and job design.

George Ritzer suggests that the success of the fastfood company McDonalds is the result of the dissemination of Fordist principles and de-skilling. In this sense, a McDonald outlet is one big assembly-line, used to deliver a range of pre-assembled food. The workers at McDonalds are de-skilled to the extreme and rely on highly specialised machines (grillers, warmers, electronic tills, etc.) to complete each order in a minimum of time. So successful is this advance in managerial control that Ritzer has coined the term
‘McDonaldization’: ‘the process by which the principle of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world.’ (Ritzer, 1996, p. 1).

Ritzer’s thesis is interesting for two reasons:
• Firstly, because it identifies the process of McJobs.
McJobs are the low-paid, low-interest, dead-end positions into which increasingly large numbers of young people are channeled. They epitomize de-skilling and the exercise of managerial control. They are predicated on the implementation of scientific management
(Fordism, McDonaldization) and on the use of new technologies of control.
• Second, McDonaldization is particularly reliant on new technologies of surveillance that transform places of work into a ‘Panopticon’. Originally proposed by Jeremy
Bentham, the Panopticon was a design for prison, created to allow permanent observation of inmates.

• ‘The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see every thing constantly.’ (Michel Foucault, 1979).
• The Panopticon provides a physical superstructure of control based on visibility. Meanwhile, compliance of the subject population is achieved via economic, coercive or normative sanctions
(Sewell and Wilkinson, 1979, p. 274).

• Sewell and Wilkinson (1992) suggest that new technologies now decisively favour management in the struggle for control at work. These technologies include:
• Tracking individuals (CCTV, face recognition software, swipe cards, computer logins and passwords);
• Tracking things, including inventory and stock
(barcodes, integrated alarms);
• Recording activity (sales, monitoring of phone calls);
• The redesign of entire organizations to eliminate the need of inventories and warehouse full of stock (these are typically called Just-In-Time systems).
Such surveillance encourages self-discipline rather than rule-breaking or resistance.

• Gabriel lists the new managerial controls that putatively eliminate resistance. This includes:
• changes to organisations;
• flatter hierarchies (less middle managers);
• flexible working practices (often teamwork);
• continuous measurement and scrutiny in bench-marking and comparison of work.
• Alongside these organisational shifts are new management systems, which operate to eliminate all slack from the production process by removing inventories, spare parts, warehousing, etc.
• This approach to work design is coupled with electronic surveillance, including cameras, performance monitoring; electronic tagging, and the resulting individualisation of performance.
• Perhaps more insidious is the new managerial / corporatist ethos.
This pervasive managerial / corporate culture stresses loyalty, teamwork, and confession over all forms of collectivity and

• Hochschild argues in The Managed Heart: The
Commercialization of Human Feeling that management is now able to demand forms of emotional labour from their employees;
• Emotional labour is now a central element of much work;
• Staff are required to learn and to adhere to predetermined scripts in their dealings with customers (how to answer a phone, how to offer an upsized portion, how to refuse a legal request for a refund).

The key to such emotional labour is that the employee is expected to offer much more than just the form of words. The employee is expected to simulate the appropriate emotions which are those predetermined by management.

• Buraway contends in Manufacturing Consent:
Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly
Capitalism (1979) that Braverman overstates deskilling in securing control.
• Buraway argues that Braverman (like Marx and
Engels before him) ignores the subjective realm and definition of the situation in identifying the separation of conception and execution, the expropriation of skill, or narrowing of the scope of discretion, as the broad tendency in the development of the capitalist labour process.

• ‘Making out’ is the process of defining the situation and finding meaning in work. Buraway’s main contribution to the control and resistance debate was to re-imagine the labour process as a game in which the struggle for control takes unexpected turns. Making out operates almost exclusively in the informal sphere, is frequently individualistic and offers the threat of subversion of managerial control.

• Du Gay suggests that new tactics of resistance are in play. Interestingly, these challenges to managerial norms are played out as tactics of consumption at work.
• They include challenging forms and styles of uniforms and all efforts at enforced uniformity at work.
• They also involve being cynical in the face of managerial/corporate enforced cheeriness, thus challenging manufactured egalitarianism at work, being resigned in the acceptance of policies and change, the subversion of meetings, and the inappropriate use of space and time wherever possible.

• Yiannis Gabriel (1999) suggests that ‘recalcitrant identities can also be pursued in other ways. For example researchers do not seriously look at ‘material and symbolic contests over the physical spaces of organizations’.
• They could explore contests over size, location, and quality of physical premises, equipment, and furniture, the personalization of individual and group workspaces
(and the countertendency to reappropriate this space from employees through hotdesking and teleworking), and the creation of no-go areas for superiors through a variety of subordinate strategies (Gabriel, 1999, p.
200).

• Recalcitrant identities could also be explored through contrasting employees' consumption patterns within their organizations with consumption in their private lives.
• This might include how they spend their ‘lunch hour’, use (and abuse) of ‘company accounts, corporate hospitality and business travel’, and kinds of clothing worn to work. (Gabriel. 1999, p. 200).

• Zygmunt Bauman (1998) suggests that developments in the contemporary world constitute a shift from producer society to consumer society.
• This is associated with the rise of service work, as well as new technologies of production and consumption. It involves the abandonment of the norms of a work ethic for those of an aesthetic of consumption.

• The majority of members of a consumer society are primarily consumers. This society is shaped by the needs of its members to play the role of consumers. Norms are consumerist: there is an aesthetic of consumption.
• The ideal citizen of a consumer society is the near opposite of the citizen of a producer society.

Table 1: Ideal Citizens in Producer and Consumer Societies
Ideal Citizen in Producer Society Ideal Citizen in
Consumer Society
Endures monotony
Is habituated to routine
Defers gratification
Is deliberate
Seeks pleasure
Looks for difference
Advances gratification
Is compulsive
Respects tradition
Is loyal
Is readily satisfied
Is eager for experience
Is fickle
Is insatiable

• In producer society, surveillance and discipline are the foundations of control.
• In consumer society different technologies of control are required. These are emergent and not readily documented. Clearly, surveillance and discipline are not abandoned: rather they become a necessary component for seduction (Bogard,
1996).
• Accordingly, consumers – especially youthful consumers – are urged to construct lifestyles from high-end commodities.

• A shift from a producer to consumer society involves much more than a simple break.
• It generates problems for the articulation of work and leisure, production and consumption.
• There is a new tension between the demands of production (and work) and of consumption (and leisure).

• In the realm of leisure, shopping is increasingly central and implicated in the values of consumer society.
• Thus work is no longer the only place where aspirations are generated and fulfilled.
• In the realm of work – and again, especially for young people – hyper de-skilled McJobs are increasingly the norm.

• Du Gay (1996) emphasizes how the creation of the enterprising customer (consumer) has contradictory and negative results for workers.
• Self-service is the mechanism of this transference.
• Hence, expertise, skill and esteem are transferred from worker to the customer. As a result workers are compromised by the demands of customers and the protocols of management.

• Bogard suggests that the blurring of the work and leisure divide is one possible way forward for production in consumer society. He introduces the concept of cyborg work (see also Haraway, 1992). Cyborg work is the assemblage of human-machine in information-rich work.
• It involves the use of electronic prosthetics at work.
Examples of these include cell phones, laptops, personal pagers, wireless internet, and headphones.
• Bogard argues that cyborg work allows the intensification of work at the same time as it blurs the boundaries between work and leisure. As a result, the cyborg worker is simultaneously more productive than their counterparts, more interested in work and what it offers, and less concerned with bargaining and other forms of resistance.

Contemporary consumers appear decidedly atomized compared to their productivist precursors. Shields (1992) suggests an episodic tribalism will displace the earlier certainties of class and community.

• This tribalism of consumption involves:
• The cross-cutting of class and community by lifestyles based on consumption alone;
• The recognition that lifestyle forms the basis of a tribalism that is institutionally unfixed, intense, and unstable (the old certainties of community are supposedly rejected);
• Whereas class and community are ascribed and passive, tribalism is achieved, active, reliant on self monitoring, and, as a result, intrinsically short-lived.

• Part of the problem is what prosperity might look like in the future. Seduction, simulation, cyborgwork and lifestyle-based associations, even when coupled with McJobs, seem likely to be limited to a privileged strata of the most advanced societies.
What befalls the rest of society?
• Certainly, any benefits from ‘consumer society’ are unlikely to be distributed evenly; as are the costs of resourcing this new aesthetic.
• At the same time, there is little doubt that monopoly capitalists (McDonalds, Microsoft,
Sony, Westinghouse) are still firmly in control of what commodities are to be produced and consumed, and hence what ‘lifestyles’ are sanctioned.

• Two entwined responses may offer a reconfiguration of the control and resistance debate.
• First, resistance may itself become an object of pleasure. Thus, the recalcitrant worker becomes a subversive agent, stealing pleasure in the form of
‘textual poaching’ (de Certeau, 1984) from their ironic self-implication in corporate culture.
• Second, re-enchantment is made possible by the techniques of seduction that are the new basis for control. While at no stage becoming a dupe to corporate culture and consumerism, the new worker-consumer may take full advantage of the illusions and simulations on offer.

• In what ways do new technologies contribute to a generation gap?
• Is the future for young people for them to become cyborg workers and insatiable consumers?
• Are the old fashioned concerns about ‘industrial relations’ of any relevance today?

• How important is work going to be to people in the next couple of decades?
• Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism?
• What might the end of capitalism involve and what would be the role of work?