Kim Mather

Reforming further education: the changing labour process for college lecturers

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to examine how the labour process of further education lecturers has changed as a result of legislative reforms introduced in the early 1990s.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on labour process theory and emergent perspectives on “the new public management” to provide theoretical frameworks. Evidence is derived from research carried out at three FE colleges in the English West Midlands involving interviews with managers and lecturing staff, documentary material and a survey of lecturing staff employed in the colleges.Findings – Market‐based reforms in this sector have resulted in the intensification and extensification of work effort for lecturers. This paper argues that these changes have been driven by the ideological underpinning of the reform process. Individual and collective acts of lecturer resistance have been insufficiently strong to prevent change from occurring and worker alienation has increased.Research limitations/implications – The case s...

Teacher, Lecturer or Labourer? Performance Management Issues in Education.

Education management has increasingly been dominated by the norms and requirements of general management ideologies that focus on performance controls and target achievements. Under this regime, solving the labour problem — relatively low productivity — has taken precedence over all other forms of management. In pursuit of this objective senior managers have employed more and more Taylor-like initiatives, including close supervision of task content and its execution. As a result the professionals have resisted collectively and formally through unions, informally in the common rooms and individually through grievance, absenteeism, increased instrumentalism and dull compliance in the job. The application of tighter controls over performance turns these workers into waged labour, displacing any notions of professional self-regulation and undermining collegial high trust relations and educational autonomy that these professionals might reasonably expect.

The close supervision of further education lecturers: 'You have been weighed, measured and found wanting'

This is an empirically based study of changes in the FE lecturer labour process driven by college managers under pressure from central state targets and funding controls. Two elements of labour management are considered: close observation and professional development. The dialectical dynamic of workplace employment relations is exposed as an endless struggle between managers seeking to degrade the staff through control over task and staff seeking to maintain professional standards to protect themselves and their vision of education. The findings are expressed in the words of the lecturers themselves and reveal the everyday pathology of ever more oppressive workplace labour management in the context of a particular organizational political economy.

Engineering compliance and worker resistance in UK further education

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore control and resistance in the UK further education (FE) sector by examining senior college managers’ attempts to engineer culture change and analysing lecturers’ resistance to such measures.Design/methodology/approach – Data were derived from interviews with managers and lecturers in two English FE colleges and the analysis of college documents. Interview data were analysed thematically using NVIVO software.Findings – It was found that college managers sought to build consent to change among lecturers based on values derived from “business‐like” views. Culture change initiatives were framed within the language of empowerment but lecturers’ experiences of change led them to feel disempowered and cynical as managers imposed their view of what lecturers should be doing and how they should behave. This attempt to gain control of the lecturers’ labour process invoked the “Stepford” lecturer metaphor used in the paper. Paradoxically, as managers sought to create...

Neo-Liberalism at Work

This paper examines changes in labor management of workers in UK emergency services under a regime of budget cuts and neoliberal state strategies. It takes an extreme case study, the emergency services, as an example of the limits of privatization and of the need, nonetheless, to re-assert management control over the labor process as part of the long-term strategy to solve the labor problem in public services.

Job insecurity, employee anxiety, and commitment: The moderating role of collective trust in management

ABSTRACT This article examines the moderating effect of collective trust in management on the relation between job insecurity (both objective and subjective) and employee outcomes (work-related anxiety and organisational commitment). This is contextualised in the modern British workplace which has seen increased employment insecurity and widespread cynicism. We use matched employer-employee data extracted from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, which includes over 16,000 employees from more than 1100 organisations. The multilevel analyses confirm that objective job insecurity (loss of important elements of a job such as cuts in pay, overtime, training, and working hours) are significantly correlated with high levels of work-related anxiety and lower levels of organisational commitment. These correlations are partially mediated by subjective job insecurity (perception of possible job loss). More importantly, collective trust in management (a consensus of management being reliable, honest and fair) significantly attenuates the negative impact of objective job insecurity on organisational commitment, and reduces the impact of subjective job insecurity on work-related anxiety. Theoretical and practical implications and limitations of these effects are discussed.

Heading for Disaster: Extreme Work and Skill Mix Changes in the Emergency Services of England

This article examines the impact on staff of state-imposed public sector reforms alongside austerity cuts since 2010 in the emergency services of England. We discuss the contextual imperatives for change in the police, fire and ambulance services while exploring their unique labour management and industrial relations’ structures and systems. As elsewhere, the burden of cuts and reforms has fallen on the workforce managed through skill mix changes. Such site-level management responses to austerity are being implemented despite staff concerns, increased dangers to the public, and their non-sustainable nature.

Police Pay - Contested and Contestable

This article provides an analysis of developments in the determination of police pay since 1919. It reveals the contested nature of public sector pay setting where the government of the day pursues short‐term economic goals rather than taking a long‐term approach to staffing issues in essential public services. In the case of the police, the Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW) has traditionally used both industrial and political methods to put pressure on key government decision makers. Developments reveal increasingly fraught relations between the police and the government, with the 2008 pay dispute in particular marking a new low point. Once it became clear after the 2010 general election that the government would ignore industrial pressure, then the Police Federation of England and Wales felt driven to increase the activities of its political arm. This ultimately backfired with the Plebgate scandal leaving them naked in the negotiating chamber.