Miriam Glucksmann

Shifting boundaries and interconnections: Extending the ‘total social organisation of labour’

This chapter attempts to refine and enhance my ‘total social organisation of labour’ (TSOL) approach and so contribute to a new sociology of work. It does so by developing and exploring a broad analytical theme – the differing modes of interconnection between work activities – for its investigative potential and explanatory relevance across a variety of fields of work and employment. A brief review of recent empirical and conceptual developments in relation to work is followed by discussion of the TSOL perspective and its uses. Although a focus on the connections linking work conducted in different socio-economic spaces is central to this perspective, the notion of interconnection itself and the character and range of possible interconnection has not been addressed in detail. The main part of the chapter takes on this task and is devoted to analytically thinking through and separating out different sorts of interconnection between work activities. Four dimensions are schematically distinguished:

Call configurations: Varieties of call centre and divisions of labour

all centres represent not only one of the most rapidly expanding forms of work and of business organization but also one of the most researched. A wealth of empirical data detailing the internal workings of call centres, managerial strategies and labour process, the gender, age and national profile of call workers and their conditions of employment provides material for debates about ‘surveillance versus resistance’, work degradation and the relevance of an electronic panopticon analogy that are familiar to readers of Work, Employment and Society. This article suggests that a shift of prism could provide other distinctive insights into the transformations of work and divisions of labour implicated in the development of call centres. Exploring call centres in the wider overall process of which they are part brings a perspective different from that which considers them as self-standing sites of work. The frame of analysis expands conceptually and empirically, so contributing to an economic sociology of call centres. An analytical framework focusing on process, relationality and division of labour reinterprets what is already known about call centres in terms of a broader sociology of work. The following discussion is intended as suggestive: an opening up of the area and way of thinking about call centres, building on recent writing in a complementary but different direction. The article has three sections. The first reviews the dominant academic and media depiction of call centres and key findings from UK research. The second proposes an analytical perspective towards the interconnections of call centre activity informed by recent writing in economic sociology and cultural economy. The third develops this approach heuristically, contrasting five stylized ‘call configurations’ based on different transaction processes. C

Formations, Connections and Divisions of Labour

The division of labour, an enduring concept of the sociology of work, has yet to receive fundamental critical re-evaluation. The need for this is exposed especially by developments in global work and employment, and the ensuing complexity and variety of contemporary connections and divisions of labour. The aim of this article is to initiate a process of conceptual renewal. Having reviewed classical and 20th-century formulations of the concept, I propose a broader and multidimensional framework. Here, overall socio-economic formations of labour are viewed as constituted through the interplay between three forms of integration and differentiation: the technical division and allocation of labour, interdependencies between work across socio-economic modes, and across overall instituted processes of labour in production, distribution, exchange and consumption. The framework may be used to explore connections and divisions of labour at different scales and levels of generality.

Configurations of Care Work: Paid and Unpaid Elder Care in Italy and the Netherlands

Most current sociological approaches to work recognise that the same activity may be undertaken within a variety of socio-economic forms - formal or informal, linked with the private market, public state or not-for-profit sectors. This article takes care of the elderly as an exemplary case for probing some of the linkages between paid and unpaid work. We attempt to unravel the interconnections between forms of care work undertaken in different socio-economic conditions in two settings, the Netherlands and Italy. The research is part of a broader programme concerned with differing interconnections and overlaps between work activities. In this article, we are concerned with: 1) how paid and unpaid care work map on to four ‘institutional’ modes of provision - by the state, family, market, and voluntary sector; and 2) with the configurations that emerge from the combination of different forms of paid and unpaid work undertaken through the different institutions. Despite the centrality of family-based informal care by women in both countries, we argue that the overall configurations of care are in fact quite distinct. In the Netherlands, state-funded care services operate to shape and anchor the centrality of family as the main provider. In this configuration, unpaid familial labour is sustained by voluntary sector state-funded provision. In Italy, by contrast, there is significant recourse to informal market-based services in the form of individual migrant carers, in a context of limited public provision. In this configuration, the state indirectly supports market solutions, sustaining the continuity of family care as an ideal and as a practice.

New technologies and the transformations of women's labour at home and work

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the linked series of changes connecting unpaid and paid labour in the household economy and the market sector, which may be associated with the implementation of new technologies of production and the proliferation of new consumer products.Design/methodology/approach – One historical and one contemporary example, mass production during the inter‐war period, and ready‐made meals today, are used as exemplary cases for probing changes in womens labour.Findings – New technologies of home and work alter the relationships between work not only across the processes of production, distribution, exchange and consumption, but also across the boundaries between paid and unpaid labour and between market and non‐market work.Originality/value – The conceptual schema of the “total social organisation of labour” is used to focus on dynamic interdependence and interaction across and between work undertaken in different socio‐economic modes.

Economies of Recycling, 'Consumption Work' and Divisions of Labour in Sweden and England

The recycling of domestic waste has become increasingly significant over recent years with governments across the world pledging increases in their recycling rates. But success in reaching targets relies on the input and effort of the household and consumer. This article argues that the work consumers regularly perform in sorting their recyclable waste into different fractions and, in some cases, transporting this to communal sites, plays an integral role in the overall division of labour within waste management processes. We develop the concept of ‘consumption work’ drawing on comparative research in Sweden and England to show how the consumer is both at the end and starting point of a circular global economy of materials re-use. The work that consumers do has not been systematically explored as a distinctive form of labour, and we argue that treating it seriously requires revision of the conventional approach to the division of labour.

‘It's kind of saving them a job isn't it?’ The consumption work of household recycling

Consumers play an integral role in societal divisions of labour. Rather than simply consume, they frequently perform labour. Incorporating consumers into the division of labour poses a challenge to this foundational and enduring concept, given its traditional focus on the technical division of tasks/skills within a labour process. Yet, insofar as completion of a circuit of production, distribution, exchange and consumption is predicated on consumers undertaking work in order to/after they consume, analysis of the division of labour would be incomplete without their inclusion. This paper uses the case of household recycling to demonstrate the importance of ‘consumption work’ for the organization of the waste management industry in England. By sorting their waste, consumers initiate a new economic process, providing feedstock (such as metals, plastics and paper) which in turn creates jobs/profits within the recycling, processing and manufacturing industries. Consumers also reconfigure public and private sector responsibilities when they sort their recyclable materials from general household waste, revealing the interdependency of consumption work with labour conducted under different socio-economic relations and across differing socio-economic domains. This paper makes the case for a renewed conception of division of labour to account for transformations and interconnections between work of different forms within contemporary society.

Completing and Complementing: The Work of Consumers in the Division of Labour

Few goods are delivered ‘complete’ to consumers as ready for use without further processing. The operation of markets and capitalist production presuppose the work of consumers in searching for, completing and coordinating between goods and services. Yet the critical contribution of consumers in finalising and complementing a division of labour is rarely acknowledged in theories of either work/production or consumption. The article argues for a radical extension of the division of labour, a central and classical concept of sociology, in order to overcome this limitation. Consumption work is defined as ‘all work undertaken by consumers necessary for the purchase, use, re-use and disposal of consumption goods’ and its distinguishing characteristics are delineated. Building on a relational socio-economic perspective, which emphasises the connections between different forms of work (paid/unpaid, formal/informal, production/consumption), an analytical framework for consumption work is developed and then elaborated by reference to comparative empirical research.

V. Airbrushing the History of Feminism: `Race' and Ethnicity:

In the now received history of feminism, a much repeated criticism is that second wave feminists did not pay any attention to race or class. For a good decade now, countless student essays rehearse what has almost become a mantra, that feminist theory divided into the three ‘strands’ of liberal, socialist/Marxist, and radical/separatist, and that the young white middle-class feminists who peopled the 1970s and early 1980s women’s liberation movement in the USA and UK ignored and excluded black, Asian, ethnic minority and migrant women. It was only in the late 1980s and 1990s, the story goes, that a new focus on identity and difference facilitated recognition of differences between women, including those associated with race and ethnicity. Post-structuralism and postmodernism are presented as contemporaneous and often as linked with this recognition, since both developments emphasize heterogeneity in contrast to the presumed earlier monolithic homogeneity. A trawl of introductory texts (e.g. Beasley, 1999; Freedman, 2001; Tong, 1992) undertaken for this article confirms the prevalence of this received interpretation. Of course, history is always written from the standpoint of the present. At a distance of 30 years, it is entirely understandable that the emergence of ideas over a half or even a whole decade can no longer be appreciated and instead become assimilitated into a static position or strand of thought. The view of successive, if not progressive, ‘waves’ is now being effectively challenged (Hemmings, 2005). A metaphor of multiple skeins and twisting threads may be more appropriate. In writing the history of thought, each new generation is prone to stress its difference (‘advance’) from the one immediately preceding it, while relying on it for information about the one before. Reconstructing the past is hence a continuing dialectic of erasure and recuperation, and it is to recuperation and recovery that I now turn.

The Three Stages of Recycling Consumption Work

This chapter explores how recycling consumption work is practically accomplished by consumers in both our comparator countries, England and Sweden, drawing attention to what the work actually comprises and the implications of its successful accomplishment for the labour processes that follow. As already highlighted in chapters 3 and 4, we distinguish three distinct stages of work that consumers perform when preparing their household waste for recycling: first, waste has to be sorted into different categories (e.g. plastic, paper, glass, food, metal) and cleaned or readied for its onward journey; second, the different kinds of waste have to be collected together and stored in appropriate containers; and finally, consumers must leave their recycling outside their house or transport it to a bring-station/collection centre. This work varies according to the type of collection system in operation, as too does the propensity to carry out this work amongst household members, sometimes on the basis of gender and age. In terms of the socio-economic formations of labour (SEFL), these three tasks — supply, warehouse, distribution — can be considered the ‘technical division of labour’, whose performance is shaped by and influences both modal and processual divisions of labour.