Paul A. Brook

In critical defence of 'emotional labour': refuting Bolton's critique of Hochschild's concept

Sharon Bolton’s comprehensive critique of Hochschild’s concept of ‘emotional labour’ is flawed by her misinterpretation of its primary form as an aspect of labour power. Consequently, she erroneously argues that emotional labour is commodified only when transformed into commercial service work. However, emotion workers experience commodification of their labour power as wage-labour, irrespective of the nature of their product. Bolton also argues that Hochschild’s notion of workers undergoing a ‘transmutation of feelings’ renders them ‘crippled actors’ in the grip of management control. Hochschild, however, theorizes transmutation as a contradictory and unstable condition albeit in an under-developed form. While Bolton correctly argues for a theory of emotion work that captures the complexity and contradictory nature of the emotional workplace, it is not necessary to reject the emotional labour concept. Rather, it needs to be more fully theorized and integrated within Labour Process Analysis.

Partisan, scholarly and active: arguments for an organic public sociology of work

Despite a thriving tradition of critical scholarship in United Kingdom-based sociology of work, Burawoy’s call for a partisan organic public sociology that is part of ‘a social movement beyond the academy’ and Bourdieu’s plea for committed scholarship in the service of the social movement against neo-liberalism have received scant attention. This article seeks to stimulate debate by presenting a framework for a left-radical organic public sociology of work based on Gramsci’s concept of the connected organic intellectual rather than Bourdieu’s expert committed scholar. The latter, it is argued, is ultimately incompatible with activist partisan scholarship based on democratized relations between researchers and researched. Participatory action research is offered as a methodological orientation that underpins and enables organic scholars of work to engage actively with the marginalized and labour in the co-creation of knowledge that aids their struggles for change.

Customer oriented militants? A critique of the `customer oriented bureaucracy' theory on front-line service worker collectivism

This critique challenges the Customer Oriented Bureaucracy (COB) theory’s argument that the experience of customer service is pivotal to the formation of front-line service worker collectivism. COB’s rejection of the major tenets of Marxist analysis, thereby denying the exploitative and class nature of service work, results in Korczynski theorising front-line worker collectivism as based only on the shared experience of doing customer service rather than as workers per se. As a neo-Weberian theory, COB argues ‘consumer capitalism’s’ ideology of ‘customer sovereignty’ is a contemporary ideological ‘iron cage’ of value rationalisation in a unified, contradictory relationship with bureaucratic rationalisation. COB theory, consequently, allows only for a trade unionism that is limited to contesting the terms of customer service rather than challenging the deepening commodification of social relations.

Home Shopping in the Single European Market — Foundering in the Wake of Neo-Liberalism

Retailing is a large and important element of the European economy, yet it continues to receive scant attention from the European Union (EU). This neglect suggests a disregard for the retail sector’s politico-economic significance vis-a-vis the ‘completion’ of the Single European Market (SEM). This chapter, preceded by a brief review of retailing and home shopping1 within the EU, takes a critical look at the European Commission’s policy for this sector, and in the process offers an explanation for the lack of substantive activity relating to the European integration of retailing.

Work, employment and society sans frontières: extending and deepening our reach

Work, employment and society (WES ) was launched in 1987 in a period in which a number of features of British society were changing rapidly. The vibrancy and the optimism of the 1960s looked increasingly remote and sociology and the study of work reflected the more straitened times that came with the social transformations wrought by Thatcherism. The early 1980s had seen savage deflation, a consequent sharp contraction of the manufacturing industry and a series of set piece confrontations with unions (in the print and steel industries and on the docks) culminating in the defeat of the miners’ union after a year-long strike (1984–5). A further result was rapid contraction of the numbers of trade union members and the demoralization of those that remained. One focus of industrial sociology, shopfloor trade unionism epitomized by Beynon’s (1984) study of Ford’s Halewood plant, became difficult if not impossible to repeat. The differences to and implications for the current sociology of work are discussed in the recent WES book review symposium of Beynon’s study. Richard Brown’s editorial introduction to the first issue drew upon these societal developments to explain the rationale for the journal. Reviewing the sociology of work he noted that it had traditionally focused on male, manual workers in manufacturing industries and to a lesser extent on those who supervised and managed them, exactly the constituency hit hardest by the ongoing changes. The limitations of the focus on one gender, in one predominantly UK-based sector, became obvious with the relative and absolute decline in UK manufacturing and the new international division of labour; the growth of unemployment; the increase in women’s employment; and employer attempts to establish more flexible patterns of employment. The limitations of more traditional approaches were also heightened by developments in other areas of social science with broader concerns. The persistence of unemployment and the increasing North–South divide, along with entrenched patterns of low pay, had expanded interest in labour markets; discrimination against women and minorities was made more visible; and, following the impact of Braverman’s Labor and 613747WES0010.1177/0950017015613747Work, employment and societyEditorial research-article2015

Thirty years after Hochschild's ‘Managed heart’: exploring the commodity frontier

If the length of a Wikipedia entry is any sort of twenty-first century measure of the contribution made by someone to contemporary thinking then the substantial entry on Arlie Hochschild marks her ...

Editorial - Thirty years after Hochschild's 'Managed Heart': Exploring the commodity frontier

If the length of a Wikipedia entry is any sort of twenty-first century measure of the contribution made by someone to contemporary thinking then the substantial entry on Arlie Hochschild marks her ...

The strange case of home shopping and the Single European Market

Abstract A critical examination of the Single European Market (SEM) projects neo-liberal foundations reveals a marginal role for the retail sector. Home shopping is the exception to the retail rule, seemingly conducive to the rapid construction of pan-European operations. A detailed analysis of European Union (EU) policy on distance selling and data protection, directly aimed at integrating home shopping into the SEM, reveals fundamental contradictions and tensions between the European Commissions rhetoric and the legislative outcomes. The SEM, as currently constituted, is unlikely to deliver adequate levels of consumer protection to facilitate large-scale cross-border shopping. Consequently, the widespread development of Euro-retailing will require far deeper levels of European integration.

The resistible rise of the temporary employment industry in France

This article is an historical account of the contested growth of the temporary employment agency sector in France. It utilises a variegated capitalism conceptual framework to explain the evolution of a distinctive temporary employment agency sector and regulatory environment under French politico-institutional conditions that was contingent upon global developments. The article charts the role of large agencies in constructing a market for agency labour despite wide-scale cultural, political and trade union opposition. In order to build legitimacy, agencies sought partners in the labour movement from the late 1960s onwards. By the late 1990s, the sector had grown significantly within a gradually more permissive regulatory framework, despite ongoing but fragmenting opposition. The article demonstrates that the growth of agency labour was not an inevitable outcome of global pressure for labour market deregulation. It also reveals how national regulatory institutions alone are not a sufficient bulwark against global labour market pressures.

Book Review: Alan McKinlay and Chris Smith (eds) Creative Labour: Working in the Creative Industries Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, £26.99 pbk (ISBN: 9780230222007), xi + 270 pp

discourse, tried to capture this development half a century ago in concepts such as ‘the forced unity’, ‘repressive desublimation’ and ‘positive thinking’. To Marcuse it was, however, just an ‘illusory unification’ and, unlike critical theorists of today, he was quite unscrupulous when it came to making distinctions between true and false versions of authenticity, resistance, and freedom. Fleming’s dissociation from dualisms of this sort makes his analysis obscure in places. Is it, for instance, really authenticity that is being extolled, or just a bohemian style corporate identity? If it is the latter, then why reproduce the corrupted meaning of the notion of authenticity? Although basic questions like this remain unanswered, one should not forget that the ambiguities are inherent in the object of study and therefore hard to avoid. Backed up by an impressive collection of examples, Fleming here makes a challenging contribution to critical management studies that undoubtedly will provoke much debate.