Beverly H. Burris

The Human Effects of Underemployment

More and more workers in the United States are unable to use their educational background on the job. Such underemployment has been documented but not fully explored or analyzed. This paper examines the effects of underemployment on 32 low-level clerical workers, comparing their educational backgrounds with their attitudes and behaviors. Higher education produces increased job dissatisfaction, higher turnover rates, reduced job involvement, impaired co-worker relations, and more emphasis on future aspirations. However, clerical workers of all educational backgrounds are prone to feelings of overqualification and complaints about the nature of workplace control. I relate these findings to existing theories on underemployment.

Technocracy and management control systems

Abstract There is a pervasive, and persuasive, call for “new” management control systems commensurate with the applications of advanced technologies within modern organizations. Unfortunately, there is little consideration given to the possible consequences and alternative trajectories of the changes. Our purpose is to initiate a discourse directed toward better understanding the changes occurring in organizational structure and management control systems fostered by advanced technology applications. We propose that advanced technology coupled with the dynamic market environment is precipitating a new organizational form, technocracy, that is replacing the traditional bureaucratic form. Technocracy is the organizational manifestation of the technocratic restructuring taking place as technical remedies are administered to the current economic and management crises. This new organizational form is related to a technocratic ideology that alleges objectivity, meritocracy, and an apolitical perspective. We argue that the proposals for revitalizing management accounting and control systems are unquestioningly grounded in technocratic ideology, embodying, and perpetuating, the characteristics of technocracy.

Technocracy and Gender in the Workplace

Technocracy, the most recent in a series of different types of workplace control, is analyzed, particularly with regard to its gender implications. Technocratic organization is characterized by: (I) polarization into expert and non-expert sectors and the erosion of internal labor markets in favor of external credentialing, (2) flexible configurations of centralization/ decentralization, (3) skill restructuring, (4) increased importance of expertise rather than rank authority as the primary basis of organizational authority, and (5) technocratic ideology of apolitical decision making based on technical imperatives and system maintenance. These changes have particular implications for women because they structure economic opportunity in new and yet still gendered ways.

Technocratic organization and gender

Abstract Technocratic control is the most recent in a series of different types of workplace control: precapitalist craft/guild control, simple control, technical control, bureaucratic control, and professionalism. In recent years, as organizations have been socially and politically transformed around advanced technological systems, observable changes in structure have occured. Technocracies are characterized by a polarization into expert and nonexpert sectors, the declining importance of internal job ladders in favor of external credentialing barriers, the increased importance of technical expertise as a central basis of organizational authority, the transformation of professionals and managers into specialized experts concerned with administration and efficiency, and the emergence of a world-wide technocratic system. Technocratic reorganization is parallelling and reinforcing sex segregation, with women disproportionately found in the “nonexpert” sector, where mobility prospects are minimal or nonexistent and working conditions poor. Even women in the “expert” sector of technocratic organizations are disadvantaged, as stereotypes persist which define women as antithetical to technocratic norms of scientific rationality.

Technocracy and the transformation of organizational control

Abstract Organizational control (both the structures and the ideology) subordinates workers. Modern technocracy has called forth new control structures and ideology. These are characterized by (1) polarization into expert and non-expert sectors and the erosion of internal labor markets in favor of external credentialing, (2) flexible configurations of the level of centralization, (3) skill restructuring, (4) the growing importance of expertise rather than rank authority, and (5) technocratic ideology of apolitical decision making. Technocratic control, although highly sophisticated and legitimated, has its own contradictions.