Richard K. Brown

The Changing Practices of Work

Over the past ten years, I have spent a lot of time talking with people about their work: more precisely about their jobs and their employers. What has been striking about these discussions is the force with which people identify significant changes that have taken place in their working lives. Repeatedly I have listened to people recounting how ‘things have changed completely these last ten years’; ‘compared with how things were ten or fifteen years ago I would say the situation is completely different’; some have spoken with dramatic effect about how they ‘wouldn’t have believed possible’ the kind of changes that have taken place. In this, of course, there is some exaggeration and there has been further distortion as sociologists and business commentators have occasionally amplified these accounts. Many things have changed only slightly and within change there is always continuity, but it does seem that at this moment the social organization of western economies is going through a period of quite significant disturbance.

Flexibility and Security: Contradictions in the Contemporary Labour Market

We live in a society where the vast majority of us depend directly or indirectly on the labour market for our livelihood. The income which supports us comes from our ability to sell our labour power, to secure paid employment or to have done so in the past, or the ability to do so of those on whom we are dependent. The proper operation of the labour market, the institutions which allocate people to jobs and jobs to people, is therefore crucially important for our well-being. Yet throughout the past 15 to 20 years the labour market in Britain has been characterized by too little effective demand for labour to provide employment for all those who would like or need to have a job. There have also been difficulties arising from mismatches between the jobs which are vacant and the qualifications, skills and experience of available workers. These difficulties, however, cannot account for the levels of unemployment experienced since the 1970s.1

What is Work for? The Right to Work and the Right to be Idle

While working on this paper I remembered that in the late 1970s an elderly neighbour gave me a pamphlet with the title, The Right to be Idle (La Fargue, 1937) which she explained had sustained her throughout her working life in the textile mills of West Yorkshire. The arguments in it are relevant to much of my chapter, providing a salutary reminder that work and idleness are both part of life. ‘What is Work for?’ is not a question that is often asked, possibly because the answer seems so obvious. It is to make life possible, to produce things to eat, to wear, to provide shelter, to sustain not only ourselves, but those too young, too old or too ill or disabled to provide for themselves. Human beings have devised divisions of labour with the aim of fulfilling these needs. In some societies these divisions are relatively simple, between men and women and between age groups, for instance, while in others they are extremely complex, encompassing age and gender, but also between classes and ethnic groups with fine gradations within them. Theories of divisions of labour seek to explain not just what work is done by whom, but the kind and degree of social integration this produces.

Introduction: Work and Employment in the 1990s

This is a book about work. Thus it is about those activities which are ‘central to our material existence, to our place in the world and in fact to every aspect of human life’ as Sheila Allen puts it in Chapter 3. In a world in which the changing patterns of employment in Europe and beyond, and the continuing recalcitrant high levels of unemployment, are matters of everyday comment by politicians, in the media and elsewhere, it may seem unnecessary to make this point. Yet among sociologists the study of work and employment has become much less fashionable than it was twenty to thirty years ago. Consumption (admittedly previously greatly neglected) is claimed to be more important than production as a source of identity. Questions of cultural change, or the ways in which the social world is constituted through discourse, are seen as more interesting than the operation of labour markets or the nature of the labour process. However, the availability of opportunities for employment, and the conditions under which people are employed, still have more impact on most individuals’ life chances than many other more fashionable concerns.

Informal Working, Survival Strategies and the Idea of an ‘Underclass’

Teesside — famous world-wide in the 1950s for its success in steel and chemical production — has in the 1980s and 1990s become notorious for its persistently high levels of unemployment and the socio-cultural problems which accompany mass joblessness. The locality is now probably better known as the ‘Car Crime Capital of Europe’ than for its proud industrial heritage. The securities of full employment just thirty years ago have given way to the uncertainties of massive economic collapse and the social changes have been so deep and farreaching that commentators such as Charles Murray now single out the place as home of what he calls the ‘New Rabble’ underclass (1994).

The Culture of Ownership and the Ownership of Culture

Over the past decade the rate of innovation of managerial theory has apparently been enormous. Buzz words and key phrases have proliferated, we have seen organizations adopt the tenets of flexibility, quality, human resource management, whilst structurally changes have variously involved: outsourcing, downsizing, delayering, strategic partnerships, and lean production. All of these changes are usually related in one way or another to a view of increasing competition in national and international product markets. The stress upon competitive efficiency has effectively rendered the division between private and public organizations redundant, with internal markets and market testing driving changes in the public sector at least as far and fast as, and arguably more so than, in private industry. We are all encouraged to see ourselves as shareholders in Great Britain PLC, where the permanent revolution of managerially inspired change is seen as in no way a process of conflict. Rather the final triumph of private ownership, the apparent collapse of socialism and the perceived irrelevance of trade unionism are seen to bear witness to the culture of ownership.

Economic Change and Domestic Life

This chapter reports upon research in Hartlepool, a town located on the North East coast of England, which stands as a case study of the impact of heavy manufacturing decline affecting Britain throughout the 1980s. Hartlepool had become established as a port for the export of coal by the midnineteenth century, and soon developed a thriving shipyard and associated metal industry. Decline began with the rundown of shipbuilding in the late 1950s, followed by the restructuring and gradual elimination of steel production, which by the early sixties had resulted in an unemployment rate of 15 per cent. The subsequent recession in the late seventies brought a 19 per cent reduction in job numbers and an overall restructuring of employment.

Gender and Change in Employment: Feminization and Its Effects

During the 1980s and 1990s there have been major shifts in the structure of the labour market, in employment practices and policies, and in the sectoral make-up of the British economy. Such changes have been variously interpreted in terms of a switch to a ‘post-industrial’ or ‘post-Fordist’ economy or to a ‘post-modern’ phase in social development. Such changes are often considered to involve major challenges to existing gender relations, both at home and within the workplace.

‘Empowerment’ or ‘Degradation’? Total Quality Management and the Service Sector

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the introduction of Total Quality Management (TQM) to paid employment within the service sector of the British economy. Following a brief review of existing literature on, and research into, the phenomenon of service sector TQM, the paper will draw upon original ethnographic research carried out by the author within the service sector of north-eastern England. An analysis will be undertaken of the nature and experience of work within two service sector organizations, where TQM had been introduced prior to the research process.