Lean thinking has recently re-emerged as a fashionable management philosophy, especially in public services. A prescriptive or mainstream literature suggests that lean is rapidly diffusing into ...public sector environments, providing a much-needed rethink of traditional ways of working and stimulating performance improvements. Our study of the introduction of lean in a large UK public sector hospital challenges this argument. Based on a three-year ethnographic study of how employees make sense of lean ‘adoption’, we describe a process in which lean ideas were initially championed, later diluted and ultimately eroded. While initially functioning as a ‘mechanism of hope’ (Brunsson, 2006) around which legitimacy could be generated for tackling longstanding work problems, over time both ‘sellers’ and ‘buyers’ of the concept mobilized lean in ambiguous ways, to the extent that the notion was rendered somewhat meaningless. Ultimately, our analysis rejects current prescriptive or managerialist discourses on lean while offering support for prior positions that would explain such management fashions in terms of the ‘life cycle of a fad’.
University governance is becoming increasingly autocratic as marketization intensifies. Far from the classical ideal of a professional collegium run according to academic norms, today’s universities ...feature corporate cultures and senior leadership teams disconnected from both staff and students, and intolerant of dissenting views. This is not a completely new phenomenon. In 1960s America, senior leaders developed a technocratic and managerialist model of the university, in keeping with theories around the ‘convergence’ of socio-economic systems towards a pluralist ‘industrial society’. This administrative-managerial vision was opposed by radical students, triggering punitive responses that reflected how universities’ control measures were at the time mostly aimed at students. Today, their primary target is academics. Informed by Critical Theory and based on an autoethnographic account of a university restructuring programme, we argue that the direction of convergence in universities has not been towards liberal, pluralist, democracy but towards neo-Stalinist organizing principles. Performance measurements – ‘targets and terror’ – are powerful mechanisms for the expansion of managerial power or, in Marcuse’s words, ‘total administration’. Total administration in the contemporary university damages teaching, learning, workplace democracy and freedom of speech on campus, suggesting that the critique of university autocracy by 1960s students and scholars remains highly relevant.
Multiple dimensions of work intensity Granter, Edward; Wankhade, Paresh; McCann, Leo ...
Work, employment and society,
04/2019, Letnik:
33, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Working life in public sector professions is undergoing significant change and becoming increasingly demanding. This article explores work intensity in NHS ambulance services in England, describing ...four distinct but interrelated dimensions of intensity: temporal; physical; emotional; and organizational. We use the concept of edgework to explore the complexities involved in how emergency workers attempt to negotiate the rewards and risks associated with multidimensional work intensity. Although certain parts of ambulance work may be intrinsically intense and can provide an important source of validation, organizational elements have the potential to push work intensity to unnecessary extremes. Ambulance services are ‘professionalizing’, but as work in ambulance trusts continues to intensify, issues over dignity, staff retention and the meaning of work are becoming ever more challenging, just as they are in other public service professions.
In this paper, we are concerned with the role of André Gorz in the development of the concept of the end of work. We draw from Gorz’s stance on automation, utopia, capitalism and labour to reflect on ...the directions of the end of work debate, leaning towards Gorz’s invitation to repoliticize the end of work. While Gorz’s writings predate the rise of the gig economy, he presaged many of the developments we are currently witnessing. Even if the end of work is not in sight, we argue that it remains nonetheless a useful concept to help us cultivate possibilities and a sense of difference. Finally, it is our intention to highlight that while Gorz’s work received less attention than other scholars broadly associated with critical examinations of capitalism, his scholarship holds the potential to reinvigorate, or rejuvenate, debates pertaining to the end of work as well as the future of work.
In this introduction, we thank those who supported and contributed to our special issue of Classical Sociology, on the work and life of André Gorz. We then provide a sketch of Gorz’s place in ...intellectual history. Along the way, we explain some of our motivations for editing the special issue, then move on to a discussion of our contributors’ papers. We end with a reiteration of our goals for the issue, and with thanks once more to those who helped make it happen.
This article explores the parallels between organized crime – specifically racketeering – and the behaviour of corporate and political actors. It reviews the key literature which has developed around ...the concept of organized crime as business, and business as organized crime, and discusses the nature of rackets in historical and organizational context. The paper takes as its theoretical inspiration the Frankfurt School’s notion of a racket society, which Writers such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Kirchheimer developed as part of their Critical Theory of society. As such, it builds on a small but developing field of literature which applies theories of the racket society to contemporary contexts. In this case, the paper provides contemporary examples of racket like behaviour at the corporate/political nexus, and highlights the social harms associated with this.
The label ‘extreme’ has traditionally been used to describe out-of-the-ordinary and quasi-deviant leisure subcultures which aim at an escape from commercialized and over-rationalized modernity or for ...occupations involving high risk, exposure to ‘dirty work’ and a threat to life (such as military, healthcare or policing). In recent years, however, the notion of ‘extreme’ is starting to define more ‘normal’ and mainstream realms of work and organization. Even in occupations not known for intense, dirty or risky work tasks, there is a growing sense in which ‘normal’ workplaces are becoming ‘extreme’, especially in relation to work intensity, long-hours cultures and the normalizing of extreme work behaviours and cultures. This article explores extreme work via a broader discussion of related notions of ‘edgework’ and ‘extreme jobs’ and suggests two main reasons why extremity is moving into everyday organizational domains; the first relates to the acceleration and intensification of work conditions and the second to the hypermediation of, and increased appetite for, extreme storytelling. Definitions of extreme and normal remain socially constructed and widely contested, but as social and organizational realities take on ever more extreme features, we argue that theoretical and scholarly engagement with the extreme is both relevant and timely.
Abstract Though it is widely understood that the past can be an important resource for organizations, less is known about the micro‐level skills and choices that help to materialize different ...representations of the past. We understand these micro‐level skills and choices as a practice: ‘memory work’ – a banner term gathering various activities that provide the scaffolding for a shared past. Seeking to learn from a context where memory work is central, we share insights from a quasi‐longitudinal study of UK museum employees. We theorize three ideal‐typic regimes of memory work, namely representing, re‐presenting and producing the past, and detail the micro‐practices through which these regimes are enacted. Through explaining the key features of memory work in this context, our paper offers novel, broader insights into the relationship between occupations and memory work, showing how occupations differ in their understanding of memory and how this shapes their memory work.
This paper explores the professionalization project of paramedics, based on an ethnographic study of UK National Health Service (NHS) ambulance personnel. Drawing on concepts derived from ...institutional theory and the sociology of professions, we argue that the project is enacted at two levels, namely a formal, structural and senior level reflecting changing legitimation demands made on NHS practitioners and pursued through institutional entrepreneurship, and an informal, agentic, ‘street level’ enacted by the practitioners themselves via ‘institutional work’. Focusing on this latter, front‐line level, our ethnographic data demonstrate that the overall impact of the senior level professionalization project on the working lives of paramedics has been somewhat muted, mostly because it has had limited power over the organizations that employ paramedics. Given the slow progress of the senior level professionalization project, paramedics at street level continue to enact subtle forms of institutional work which serve to maintain ‘blue‐collar professionalism’ – a form originally identified in Donald Metz's ethnography of ambulance work. Our analysis draws attention to the complex and contested nature of professionalization projects, in that their enactment at senior and street levels can be somewhat misaligned and possibly contradictory.
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