Steven P. Vallas

Organizational participation : myth and reality

Introduction 1. An Overview 2. Organizational Participation: A View from Psychology 3. Organization Theory and Participation 4. Collective Bargaining, Unions, and Participation 5. Playing the Devils Advocate: Limits to Influence Sharing in Theory and Practice 6. Participation Works - If Conditions are Appropriate 7. Myth and Reality: Valediction

Rethinking Post-Fordism: The Meaning of Workplace Flexibility*

Social scientists increasingly claim that work structures based on the mass production or “Fordist” paradigm have grown obsolete, giving way to a more flexible, “post-Fordist” structure of work. These claims have been much disputed, however, giving rise to a sharply polarized debate over the outcome of workplace restructuring. I seek to reorient the debate by subjecting the post-Fordist approach to theoretical and empirical critique. Several theoretical weaknesses internal to the post-Fordist approach are identified, including its uncertain handling of “power” and “efficiency” as factors that shape work organizations; its failure to acknowledge multiple responses to the crisis of Fordism, several of which seem at odds with the post-Fordist paradigm; and its tendency to neglect the resurgence of economic dualism and disparity within organizations and industries. Review of the empirical literature suggests that, despite scattered support for the post-Fordist approach, important anomalies exist (such as the growing authority of “mental” over manual labor) that post-Fordism seems powerless to explain. In spite of its ample contributions, post-Fordist theory provides a seriously distorted guide to the nature of workplace change in the United States. Two alternative perspectives toward the restructuring of work organizations are sketched—neoinstitutionalist and “flexible accumulation” models—which seem likely to inspire more fruitful lines of research on the disparate patterns currently unfolding within American work organizations.

Why teamwork fails: Obstacles to workplace change in four manufacturing plants

Using data from a comparative, multisite ethnography, this paper identifies some of the social and organizational conditions that limited the impact of workplace transformation at four manufacturing plants during the 1990s. Although these plants adopted an array of new work practices, most achieved only limited gains and were generally unable to transcend the traditional boundary between salaried and hourly employees. A key reason lay in the managerial orientation toward production that was brought to bear on the process of workplace change. This orientation, which placed substantial emphasis on scientific and technical rationality, limited the firms ability to provide an overarching normative or moral framework within which workplace change might unfold, leaving team systems vulnerable to anomic tendencies, to status distinctions among hourly employees, and to other sources of instability. The predominance of a technical, expert-centered orientation toward production also introduced salient contradictions into the new work regimes, pitting a logic of standardization against managerial efforts to cultivate a logic of participation. These findings suggest that successful implementation of workplace change may depend on the ability of corporate executives to demonstrate the very capacity for flexibility that they often demand of their hourly employees.

The Concept of Skill: A Critical Review.

The concept of “skill” provides the linchpin for many debates on work. Yet occupational sociologists have seldom thought to ask what the concept means. This article reviews the literature and develops critical observations on skill research. Although recent theorists have tended to dismiss deskilling theory, the research findings remain equivocal. Despite their inability to measure compositional shifts in skill, case studies continue to play an important function. New lines of inquiry have emerged, indicating a growing consciousness of the limitations of the dominant theories of skill. Absent greater rigor in the study of skill, policy debates will proceed without a sociological contribution.

Empowerment Redux: Structure, Agency, and the Remaking of Managerial Authority1

Research on the new managerial regimes has been hampered by its neglect of the question of human agency—specifically, the nature of workers’ responses to the advent of the new forms of work organization. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in five manufacturing plants, the author seeks to overcome this limitation by exploring the nature and effects of workers’ responses to the changes they confront in their work situations. Although the data suggest ways in which outcomes rested on structural attributes, they also reveal that worker agency shaped the fate of workplace transformation in subtle yet decisive ways. Developing a fourfold typology of workers’ responses, the author shows how each type affected the path down which workplace change evolved. These findings suggest that workplace transformation should be approached as a relational phenomenon whose outcome hinges on the orientations and practices that workers themselves adopt when confronting the restructuring of their jobs.

Rediscovering the Color Line within Work Organizations The `Knitting of Racial Groups' Revisited

Although American sociology has long been concerned with racial and ethnic inequality within work organizations, this traditional strength has languished in recent years. Few ethnographic studies have managed to capture what E. C. Hughes once called “the knitting of racial groups” at work. This article critically reviews the literature on race and work organizations and offers a set of propositions that target neglected aspects of racial boundaries at work. These center on the spatial dimension of race and organizations, the relevance of racial boundaries for the acquisition of skill and expertise, the bearing of status hierarchies on the reproduction of racial boundaries, and the character of corporate and judicial responses to racial inequalities at work. This article offers a tentative strategy for research in the field that might reclaim the lost tradition of E. C. Hughes.

Personal Branding and Identity Norms in the Popular Business Press: Enterprise Culture in an Age of Precarity

The theory of enterprise culture (du Gay, 1996) has provoked one of the more enduring strands of research on organizations and identities. Yet, after a decade and half of debate, the validity of this theory remains mired in ambiguity. In this article we revisit the theory of enterprise culture by exploring shifts in the popular business press and employee responses to them, in an effort to track the identity norms that have impinged on job seekers over time. Scrutinizing career-advice texts published between 1980 and 2010, we do indeed find partial support for the theory of enterprise culture, as the most popular renderings of work and employment have exhibited a marked yet complex turn toward entrepreneurial rhetoric. Interviews with 53 employees and job seekers suggest that a discourse of personal branding is indeed pervasive, and is often uncritically incorporated into the conceptions that job seekers bring to bear on their career horizons. Yet we also find that enterprise discourse has evolved beyond the notion of the “sovereign consumer” on which enterprise theory was initially based. Employees today are advised not merely to be responsive to the wants of customers; now, they must actively shape those wants, emulating corporate marketing techniques in an effort to establish the value of their own personal brands. Homo economicus is alive and well but has elided existing representations.

Symbolic boundaries and the new division of labor: Engineers, workers and the restructuring of factory life

Abstract The past decade has witnessed an outpouring of theory and research on the relation among status distinctions, symbolic boundaries and the structure of social inequality. Yet remarkably little of this discussion has been brought to bear on the workplace as an arena in which symbolic boundaries are established and maintained. I seek to fill this gap by applying theories of symbolic boundaries to the restructuring of work within a small sample of manufacturing plants located in disparate regions of the United States. Using qualitative methods, the study explores how the boundary work of high-status employees has shaped the division of labor within plants undergoing the introduction of automated production systems. Contrary to claims advanced by some theorists, my analysis suggests that specifically “cultural” boundaries, based on the deployment of refined or high-status knowledge, do indeed play a salient role at work, exerting a powerful effect on the outcome of workplace change in ways that skilled production workers find difficult to contest. These findings suggest that much more attention should be paid to the varied forms that cultural boundaries can assume at work, especially in an era in which formal knowledge operates as a powerful axis of class differentiation.

Dualism, Job Polarization, and the Social Construction of Precarious Work

Publication of Arne Kalleberg’s Good Jobs, Bad Jobs provides a welcome opportunity to re-examine the theoretical and conceptual frameworks that scholars bring to bear on precarious employment. An exemplar of what was once called the “new structuralism,” Kalleberg’s book provides a rigorous, multidimensional analysis of the changes impinging on job stability and security. Although it identifies a vitally important trend toward a growing polarization in the distribution of job rewards, it does so in ways that illustrate the limits of the genre of research to which it belongs. Constrained to view the subjective experience of work as merely dependent variables, the book cannot explore how social, political, and cultural processes have both shaped and legitimated the rise of precarious employment. Drawing on recent studies of the popular business press and other media representations, we document the rise of a culture of enterprise that has idealized the uncertainties that have come to grip the labor market, defining the latter as a site on which individual agency can freely unfold. Only by addressing the interplay between job structures and such discursive and political developments can we hope to understand the rise of labor market precarity, let alone expand workers’ rights to protection against market uncertainty.

Relational Models of Organizational Inequalities Emerging Approaches and Conceptual Dilemmas

In recent years, theorists of social inequality have increasingly rejected analytic models using the individual as the unit of analysis, favoring “relational” models centered on the dynamic, group-level interactions that can account for disparities in the distribution of job rewards. In this article we scrutinize three distinct strands of relational thinking: categorical theories, analysis of symbolic boundaries, and theories of intersectionality. Our goals are twofold: first, to identify some of the major conceptual and methodological limitations in this field and, second, to begin the task of conjoining insights from each strand of thinking, fostering conceptually richer and more powerful theoretical formulations of organizational inequalities. The article sketches some potential avenues for empirical analysis that seem likely to advance relational models and highlight their advantages—advantages that provide rich sociological guideposts—compared to more individually centered or even aggregate descriptive models that have governed the field since World War II.